Carbon Care
Ostrava (Czech Republic), August 2034
Scenarios of the near future have unintentionally become one of the genres I keep returning to over my career as a writer. This one was commissioned back in 2021 with a very specific setting in mind: the post-industrial future of Ostrava, a city in Czechia’s northeast, historically one of the region’s largest coal mines. The commissioner was curator Edith Jeřábková in collaboration with Ostrava’s major contemporary art gallery, PLATO.
The original version of the text can be found on the PLATO’s publishing platform Octops Press.
Translated from Czech by Tomáš Pivoda.
I
The year is 2034, and you are waking up to a late August morning. You might be 35, maybe 50, maybe more, in any case you still remember the last pandemic and the meandering twenties. There is a procession passing under your balcony, which resembles Passion processions on Palm Sunday – people carrying branchlets, with a group of children in uniforms upfront, looking like nursery miners. They shout something like “Hosanna”, but you cannot tell for sure. Older people cry. Your daughter wants to join her friends at the front of the procession, and you promise her that next time she will be allowed to, for sure.
II
„Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe,” said Blaise Pascal, and Louis Althusser repeated it after him in the 20th century. His point was that the reasons and causes of human behaviour lie in an invisible cobweb of commands and instructions, and that faith in the values that underlie them usually comes later. Sometimes, this cobweb might not be so invisible – it materialises in the form of crystallised, sedimented layers of politics that we call infrastructures. Infrastructures of the coal industry, for example. Nobody has ever asked you if you approve of a coal mine or a coal-burning power plant in your town. No questionnaires were necessary to determine whether your community assents to the risks of coal mining – physical and mental health risks, social risks, environmental risks, and economic risks. The readings of PM2.5 particles in the air didn’t run in the last local elections. The infrastructure just landed here, shaped like a landing module of some huge, quite ugly spaceship, pulling the strings and rank on the whole region.
III
The head of the Passion procession is crawling towards the shaft. The crowd is pouring into the space fenced off by a worn-out barbed wire. If you wonder whether this is a performance with elements of land art, the answer is “No, it isn’t.” The television drone hum suggests we might be dealing with a significant event here. The children in the uniforms are reciting something now. An old man with a crutch is yelling something about the Red Guards, then leaving the crowd, not many people pay attention. Then the curtain falls, the children line up in a regiment. Now a huge black cube expands ahead of them. It seems as if some platonic body just crashed into it, stuck in its construction. It looks like a box with a button. “The platonic body” is an ornamental description of that button.
IV
The culture is carried by technical objects, infrastructures. The first cultural infrastructure in history was the cave. There is a cave called Blombos on the shore of the Indian Ocean in South Africa, known as the site where a 77,000-year-old piece of engraved ochre with geometrical markings was found. It is probably the oldest evidence of human communication by means of an external medium on which information had been recorded. We will never learn what the two horizontal lines and one vertical line were supposed to mean, but it is exactly this site that the Jamaican writer and thinker Sylvia Wynter identifies as the birthplace of the human as a being able to use symbols to create stories that carry the whole culture and society. The question “Who carries the carriers?” has been best answered by the anonymous artistic group that 36,000 years ago left a mark of their work on the walls of the Altamira cave, located in today’s Spain. From the cave, through the amphitheatre and the camera obscura up to servers in a data centre, culture and architecture have always walked hand in hand. And that’s how it is supposed to be in the age of the environmental media, too.
V
The regiment of children in overalls bury their fingers into the harsh material of the button that lazily recedes deeper into the cube. Stray dogs around the shaft remind us that there once was an entrance to the Greek underworld here. And it is still the case – we just decided at one point to use it not as a source of an eternal flame but as its burial site. Yes, we. I don’t know if thirteen years is a long or short time, but it does seem pretty long to contemplate the cultural impact of these infrastructures. When the end of coal mining was set, after long negotiations, to 2033, a question arose about what to do with all that equipment that should have lain fallow. The owners of private capital haven’t expressed any interest in the non-functional machinery; the state considered the ownership of this kind of infrastructure a burden as well (and it was the time when people started to think that perhaps being a state is kinda a burden for the state, too). That is how the steel cities came to be owned by local administrations and communities, which everyone considered, at best, a dubious arrangement. Luckily, at that time, ideas already circulated about curbing emissions by retroactively capturing them from the air. That is how the field called “carbon care” came to be, once derogatorily called “geoengineering”.
VI
Historical record from Wikipedia, the open encyclopedia, timestamp 20210326090345:
“Carbon capture and storage (CCS) or carbon capture and sequestration, is the process of capturing waste carbon dioxide (CO2), transporting it to a storage site, and depositing it where it will not enter the atmosphere. Usually the CO2 is captured from large point sources, such as a cement factory or biomass power plant, and normally it is stored in an underground geological formation. The aim is to prevent the release of large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere from heavy industry, and so help to limit climate change. Although CO2 has been injected into geological formations for several decades for various purposes, including enhanced oil recovery, the long-term storage of CO2 is a relatively new concept.”
Long ago, people said that climate change was the biggest uncontrolled experiment in the history of humankind. And, in addition, a kind of unintended geoengineering – the technological modification of our planet. For a handful of people, it has been a completely intended and controlled experiment since the 1970s, when oil exploration and production companies commissioned initial studies suggesting a link between carbon dioxide emissions and rising global average temperatures. Early suggestions of this link proved true, and what used to be an ordinary industrial sector has become a planetary apparatus with a stranglehold over the rest of humankind. It has also been said that the retroactive capture of carbon serves as an alibi for these corporations, allowing their stranglehold over humankind to continue. What they release can also be captured, and by the time corporations will really have to curb the emissions, they will be in possession of technologies that will basically put them in the role of green saviours. Reversing the course of the whole infrastructure should be sufficient; air-to-ground instead of ground-to-air. It is hard to imagine a greater injustice than to turn the main antagonists into heroes. What is not hard to imagine are other ways to bury coal underground.
VII
Carbon care sounded to some people perverse at first. How can an impersonal technological infrastructure based on mining companies’ know-how be an instrument of care? Isn’t care rather intimate, personal? Wouldn’t the technically mediated care be cold and inauthentic? The answer to this question depends on how convinced you are that culture (including the culture of care) and technology are opposed, and that nothing good ever comes out of their connection. Today, there are places that have adopted Pascal’s principle, transforming carbon capture infrastructure into sites of cultural life. New stories and rituals emerged: for instance, the August Passion plays to remember the month in which humankind used to celebrate the “Overshoot Day” – the day humankind used up more from nature than our planet could renew, thus remaining in debt with our planet for the rest of the year.
Meanwhile, as I am explaining all of this to you, the regiment of children is trying to press the giant activation button of the carbon capture system, triggering the annual burial of the past in former mining shafts, where the ancient history of life on this planet has been resting; the planet which, at last, the human community has decided to acknowledge and conform to.