Orwell's Roses

The title of Part 2, “Going Underground,” is a double entendre, referring to both the workers Orwell described literally descending into the mines and the metaphorical invisibility of such workers as others enjoy the comforts they make possible. Orwell himself goes into the mines as a kind of secret agent, embedding himself as an eyewitness to the difficult experiences of these usually unseen workers. This provides Solnit with an entry into discussing the Industrial Revolution and class war, the ecological impacts of coal mining and the burning of fossil fuels in general, and the importance of plants to the entire human enterprise.

As Solnit repeatedly emphasizes, plants “made the world” and “are anything but passive” (51). She begins Part 2 with a reminder that this is a book reflecting on a man, Orwell, who once planted roses. However, to stop at that would be to miss Solnit’s larger point: “To write it that way makes the man the protagonist, but the roses were protagonists as well” (51). Indeed, without the plants at the center of this section, there would be no coal—and thus no workers enduring harsh conditions in the mines.

In Orwell’s view, the town of Wigan in the Manchester area was “‘a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, mud, ashes, and foul water’” (53). This world represents the polar opposite, in Solnit’s telling, of the natural one Orwell admired, and it’s a place marred by injustice and exploitation. The workers are expendable, and their struggles literally mark their faces: Orwell noted that their faces were scarred because “they often banged their heads on the low ceilings of the mines,” and “these workplace cuts were turned into blue tattoos by the coal dust embedded in them” (54). Orwell’s book The Road to Wigan Pier exposed the human rights abuses and brought to light the marginalized workers who literally toiled in the dark. Both Orwell and Solnit convincingly argue that the political is personal.

Solnit then explores the larger impacts of the mining and burning of coal and other fossil fuels. The ecological effects of the Industrial Revolution over the 200 years since are akin to war, one that humans are waging against the environment and, ironically, themselves. Solnit comments on the smog of London: “It’s a formula a little like some of the poison gases of the First World War, and like chemical warfare it produced casualties” (69). She points out that, since Orwell’s time, the environmental destruction has been even more pronounced, and she notes that, ironically, his book 1984—which predicted the end of individual autonomy and cultural flourishing—was “the last good year, in terms of climate” (72). Like the “zombie movie” to which Solnit compares the Soviet propaganda, she personifies the continuing extraction and burning of fossil fuels as an encroaching army, “the dead come back to haunt us, in this case with their carbon” (61).

In addition, Solnit’s interest in the juxtaposition of opposites continues in Part 2. She notes the paradox inherent in the creation of coal: “The black stuff that lay underground in darkness for hundreds of millions of years began with the photosynthesis of light” (59). Out of light comes darkness—unprecedented environmental destruction and the exploitation of vulnerable laborers. Some men, as Orwell reported, even worked the mines without clothing, which some inspectors saw as “immodesty” but actually revealed, according to Solnit’s reading, “the terrible vulnerability of these people with little or nothing to protect them from the rough, foul underworld” (65). The title of Chapter 3, “In Darkness,” is again both literal and metaphorical: These exploited workers, including young children, often worked in total darkness; metaphorically speaking, they were kept in darkness too, often illiterate and disenfranchised—and, symbolically, kept invisible (as if hidden away in darkness) given that most middle-class British people were in the dark about “the lurid misery” (65) upon which their wealth was built.

All of this—much of it reported by Orwell back in the 1930s—starkly contrasts Orwell’s love of nature, his encouragement to plant trees, and his insistence on maintaining a garden even as the world broke down. Solnit acknowledges, “No one was thinking about carbon sequestration in 1936, of course, but even without that consciousness, you could choose to be on the side of plants, and [...] the man who planted those roses knew that this also meant being on the side of the future” (73). Thus, after giving a grim assessment of the human toll and environmental degradation wrought by the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, Solnit ends this part of the book with a striking note of hope—just as Orwell’s roses represent.