Underburden
Spaces
Infrastructures
Concepts
Strategies
Jona Möller (he/him) graduated in Landscape Architecture at Technical University Berlin, where he is currently working in the intersections between the fields of political ecology, STS and urbanism. For his Master’s thesis work in Urban Design, he is investigating how water infrastructures connected to lignite mining are being transitioned into ‘sustainable futures’ through multispecies environing work. He gets excited when interdisciplinarity is at work, especially between the arts, design and the humanities. Jona co-founded the multidisciplinary research group Kontaminiert Werden, which collaboratively explores human-plant relationships in urban contexts.
Karolina Žižková (she/her) is a PhD student at the Department of Environmental Studies, Masaryk University, and a junior researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. As an environmental anthropologist, she is interested in mining and land use topics from ecological economics and political ecology perspectives. She collaborates with the Hraničář Gallery on projects connecting artistic research and environmental issues, such as lithium mining and land recultivation.
un|der|bur|den
/ˈʌndə(r)bɜːdn/
↔ overburden
noun
1 mining: The material that lies below an area that lends itself to economical exploitation.
- Geological surveys revealed that the underburden of the lignite deposit consists partly of pyrite sands.
- The underburden was influenced by lowering the groundwater table on a regional scale since the late 1950’s.
2 geology: Something that gets mobilized due to the relocation of another material, relational concept that links resources with the surrounding materialities.
- By removing the material above the coal deposits (→ overburden), the minerals of the underburden are exposed to oxygen, releasing acid mine drainage after the mining operation.
- The underburden, together with the overburden and sideburden, defines the boundary conditions for the production of a ‘natural resource’.
3 materiality: Insufficient burden of rock in relation to external inputs (e.g. explosive charge, groundwater rise).
- Due to the underburden of the explosives, the rock has blown-out prematurely, yielding less than expected.
- The underburden consists of unstable layers of sands that repeatedly cause landslides in areas affected by changing groundwater levels.
4 environmental economics: Externalized costs that allow a resource deposit to become economically viable.
- Lusatia’s lignite mines present an economically viable ratio of coal vs. overburden of around 1:6, only by excluding the underburden ‘X’: 1:6:X.
5 the supernatural: Underground object of value assigned by the currently dominant economic and political paradigm.
- The Sorbian saying “Gott hat die Lausitz geschaffen, aber der Teufel die Kohle darunter”, which translates to “God created Lusatia, but the devil put the coal underneath it”, addresses the local underburden by referring to the trope of a ‘resource curse’.
6 ontology: (Implicit) assumption leading to further perpetuation.
- The underburden of the area’s past makes this the perfect spot for a vast lake with an energy park on top.
- Underburden is sometimes used to highlight the notion of a doomed post-mining landscape, irrelevant to other uses or actors, which perpetuates extractive relationships with land and is often driven by restoration efforts focused on accumulation.
verb
1 labor: To assign less work than someone or something is capable of.
- The boss has underburdened the team with responsibilities, leaving it feeling unfulfilled, as they wanted to devote themselves to more significant tasks.
- My job does not underburden me at all, I feel busy and constantly overloaded.
2 justice: To carry unequal shares of responsibility both on local as well as global level.
- Relocating business to Cyprus or Luxemburg underburdens companies from the windfall taxes.