I think mining is a really primitive way of making a living. You gouge it out of the earth and you ship it away. It can never be sustainable: unlike a forest, where you can say “Well, we plant two trees for every one cut and we leave behind the nests and the habitats, we use the forest for eco-tours and to teach about local Indigenous culture.” Once it’s mined it’s gone, it can never grow back: the uranium, ore, oil or copper and the mountaintop as well. We call them ‘mines’ when really they are ‘ourses’ or even ‘earth’s’. Australian Conservation Foundation point out the mines in Western Australia make close to a billion dollars profit a week taking minerals “they didn’t make, out of land they don’t own.” Mining turns irreplaceable materials into disposable products; it fuels industries which have not caught up with the parlous state of the poisoned world; it’s a primitive, dangerous occupation and I think it attracts primitive, dangerous people.
Tag: income
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dentist, draftmaker, drill seargeant
Whenever people ask, So do you make a living from your writing, I feel obscurely coal-hauled, if not outright keel-hauled. Does anyone ask this question of an architect, a dentist? It’s so personal and somehow lip-smackingly censorious. I hear behind it two subtext questions: 2: “So. Is your writing any good?” and 3: “And am I subsidizing it?”
The hundreds of times I have been asked, “So: do you make a living from it?” the question has never once been accompanied by, “Ah! Is your writing for sale? Where can I buy some?” But I answer the spoken and the unspoken questions either to myself or, if asked rudely enough, out loud: 1: No. 2: Yes. 3: No, so you’re not my employer, so you can put those eyebrows down.