The Demonic "Gift" of Cobalt and Seeking Adequate Imagery
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The Demonic “Gift” of Cobalt
Cobalt is a necessary component in the “green” transition: a key ingredient for electric batteries. The word cobalt comes from the German kobald, or “goblin,” which in German folklore is a mischievous spirit who may give gifts that are demonic or evil. Kobalds of mines are tricksters that miners parlay with on the chance that great riches may come from their gifts — but legends often paint them as underground evildoers.
Cobalt is rapidly becoming one of the most valuable minerals in the world, but you wouldn’t know that it was prized at all by how poor the most cobalt-rich country is. “The Democratic Republic of Congo, or the DRC,” says Somali reporter Jamal Osman, “is sitting on nearly 20 trillion pounds of natural resources. It should be one of the richest countries in the world.” Instead, poverty is rampant, and people live on only $1 a day — many being forced to work in horribly dangerous conditions in small artisanal mines. 70% of the world’s cobalt comes from the DRC, and most industrial scale mines in the country are majority-owned by foreign investors. This plundering of resources is known as the Second Scramble for Africa.
Beyond the economic pillaging, the people of the DRC are incurring another cost — heavy metal pollution in their food, water, and air. This has been associated with a rise in birth defects among the children of people living near-to or downstream from the mines, and those who formerly worked in the mines. The parents of children with birth defects were found to have cobalt levels four times that of people living in Western Europe, the main beneficiaries of this cobalt.
In this video, a young mother wonders aloud if her child’s disability was caused by sorcerers, and in a sense, it was. Industrialization has created a sort of human-made “magic” — electric vehicles are a sort of technological wizardry. Cell phones and computers are machines that allow us to be magicians, communicating with people all over the world through an invisible thread of connectivity, like telekinesis. But this magic requires fuel and resources to come into being — it doesn’t just happen. And unfortunately for the people of Kolwezi, in order for us in the West to have our demented magic, they pay the price in cursed children and suffocation.
It wasn’t hard to find this sort of information when we first started this project. What we realized was that there was a level of rationalization and justification for these crimes that was inherent in the quest to electrify our energy system. In order to combat climate change, we’d just have to accept a certain amount of underreported negative externalities. Never mind the fact that there is no evidence that our green technologies are actually eliminating fossil fuel use, or that Westerners are consuming resources at an unprecedented rate in spite of our supposed “climate awareness” — if we don’t all have electric cars and the latest consumer technology, the world will literally burn, because we can’t imagine a world without industrial civilization. The sacrifice of humans and nature in the quest to save the world is a bizarre irony that I haven’t been able to reconcile over the past four years.
Perhaps we’ll learn in time that this goblin whose gifts we so greedily accepted would come at a demonic cost. While the people in the DRC suffer profoundly today from this bargain with malevolent forces, we in the West will soon see the folly in our decision to try to lower GHG-emissions at all costs.
At the end of the video, Jamal Osman asks, “Can a sustainable green revolution be built without the exploitation of others?” If the answer is no, what does that mean? What does that look like? What sacrifices do we make so that others don’t sacrifice for us? Entangled as we are in this current system of industrial civilization, what can we do to decouple ourselves from systems that exploit others, and the living world?
On Seeking Adequate Imagery
“Give us adequate images. We lack adequate images: our civilization doesn't have adequate images. And I think our civilization is doomed… is gonna die out like dinosaurs if it does not develop an adequate language or adequate images.” — Werner Herzog
I am constantly looking for “adequate imagery” in my work — a philosophy coined by filmmaker Werner Herzog. Always looking for an elegant and effective way of communicating something — whether beauty or absurdity. We catalogue quotes and figures or practice the perfect phrases that encapsulate our understanding of the world. This is our pursuit to adequate language and imagery. As a visual artist, adequate imagery is what I seek.
Take this video recently released by NASA.
Upon seeing this, I knew I had stumbled upon some adequate imagery. Now adequate imagery should speak for itself on it’s own, but I do have somethings I want to explain.
While this is not actual imagery of carbon dioxide, this video depicts modeling data of our present available data for carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere with high enough resolution that we can pinpoint the locations that are producing the most GHG emissions.
This model can help us see city centers, energy plants, and manufacturing regions spewing out CO2, to then be swept away into the atmosphere like smoke from a campfire wafting around camp. I encourage you to read the original NASA brief as there are other angles of the rest of the planet and more info on how the models are created.
If you have been following us for a while, you would know our opinions on carbon fixation and individual reductionistic measurements as a method of understanding the converging environmental catastrophes. In this sense, sharing this imagery isn’t meant to encourage you to fixate more on CO2, but rather to view the super-organism of our culture. This image expresses to me something much larger than anthropogenic release of carbon dioxide. To me, it evokes something else: a culture literally belching its way to progress, throwing caution (our carbon sins) to the wind, hell bent on enacting a story regardless of the insanity of the consequences. It’s the pulsing heartbeat of a civilization that needs Martian anthropologists1 to be able to pull back far enough in order to understand.
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A term coined by Daniel Quinn in When They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways.
"Entangled as we are in this current system of industrial civilization, what can we do to decouple ourselves from systems that exploit others, and the living world?"
This is one of my favorite questions to ask. And I have a lot of optimism that it is possible. Maybe not entirely, but far more than what I am currently doing. Working outside has given me a lot of hope. I realized I am not actually broken, just don't work the way our system wants me to. I know so many people recognizing that, but also struggling to escape. Hopefully we can find some accessible escape plans soon.
And I meet a lot of people also wondering the same, especially as the industrialized dream is becoming more of a prison / nightmare to most people, even for those at the top of the industrial pyramid.
I think the birth rate declining in the industrialized world is a powerful example of people not wanting to invest in this future. It's poetic, we would rather go extinct than keep living this way. Such a great collective fuck you to those trying to push this techno-humanist hellscape on everyone else.
The industrial system's roof will eventually cave in from the previous generation's gluttony and we just gotta enjoy the ride while we can. The transition will probably be horrific and there will be immense suffering, but there is hope on the other side.