I Don’t Dig Mines (or Stop the World I Want to Get Off)

I’d always thought slow food was a description of the often poor service one receives in many British restaurants. But Harry Eyres writing in the Financial Times believes that to aid our ‘over exploited planet’ we need not just slow food, but a slow movement, Truly, madly, slowly (www.ft.com). Eyres, believes we should all be spending more time reading poetry, playing and listening to music and being with friends. Well that’s ok when you are in the rich West. But behind this plea lies the idea that humanity is consuming too much of the planet’s scarce resources in a futile attempt to gain material happiness. Eyres believe we need to “allow both the planet and humanity to recover from two-hundred-years wars of Industrial Revolution”. Stop the world I want to get off.

Eyres, had always struck me as a laptop environmentalist. I first came across him when researching for Goldenmyths. Eyres piece on Rosia Montana Gold is not Enough (financial times) was typical of much lazy journalism on the conflict over the proposed mine, - regurgitating press releases from partisan NGOs – with little intellectual scrutiny or honesty. His description of this desperately poor, de-populating and deprived village, “ Here though we are talking about a well-populated region of wooded hills and green valleys, an idyllic landscape which would not look out of place in one of those paintings where Claude Lorraine imagined the bucolic beauty of the classical world”, was a flight of fantasy. It could only have been written by someone too lazy (or just keeping his air miles and carbon footprint low) to investigate the reality for himself. But now it makes sense. Eyres’ search for slow food, slow shopping, slow travel and slow cities, (probably made on his slow internet connection) accurately describes the future facing the people of Rosia Montana if Eyres gets his way and the mine doesn’t open. A slow death should be added to the slow list. 

Eyres, has the luxury of being able to slow down his life, the people of Rosia Montana, are not in that comfortable economic position. As my good friend Mark says, anyone who writes in praise of the slow life should be banned from making pronouncements on people who are forced to live a slow life.