This article was originally published in issue #129 of Tubelight, 'Maak Niks Met Opzet', in March 2025.
This piece is a reflection on Rocks, Roots, Unearth, a project exploring the complex relationship between miners and the land at a copper mine in China. Through field visits and personal encounters, I witnessed how miners, deeply tied to an industry that both sustains and harms them, engaged in gardening amidst a degraded landscape. This gardening—done with no expectation, for almost nothing—raises questions about how deliberate non-production and reflection can offer alternative ways to think about labor, precarity, and environmental exhaustion.
Last December and March, I found myself traveling through the same dusty roads that have connected over half a century of mining activity. Nestled deep within the mountains and far from cities, the Dexing Copper Mine in China feels like a world apart. Despite its remoteness, the mine is a bustling place where thousands of people work and live. It’s a place I've always known through stories—stories of my grandparents who helped build the town and my uncle, who has worked at the mine since he was eighteen. But it wasn't until I visited that I began to understand the subtle, quiet ways in which this place—its land, its people, and its history—is shaped by labor, extraction, and resignation.
The most surprising discovery wasn't the mining pits, but the gardens. Miles of small plots cluster behind the mining town, hidden in the valley’s belly. Here, miners—retired or back from long shifts—tend to small patches of land, working soil that decades of industrial activity have rendered infertile. When I ask about their motivation, they all give me the same answer: "We do it for leisure, for exercise. There's nothing to be gained from it, but it's something to do." The soil is too poor to yield anything significant, yet they garden anyway.
On my first visit to the gardening field, I approached a retired miner working on his plots. I was too direct—I asked how he thought the mining business had affected his gardening. He immediately became alert, asking whether I was an undercover journalist. But when I told him about my uncle, his attitude shifted. He didn’t want to discuss mining, but he could talk about his garden for hours. He showed me all around his plots, explaining how he'd tried to make something grow. He knows the land well—he recognizes its infertility due to sulfur and minerals, and he knows where to source water that doesn’t flow from the mine’s direction. He’s made friends with old farmers and learned from them how to work with this land. Now, I see a miner who understands the land by heart. But even so, he still refuses to call himself a gardener. "It’s just a hobby," he insists, bending over his plots in his old company uniform.
Most of the miners I met in the gardening fields are in their 50s, part of the mine's second generation. Some migrated with their parents who built the mine, while others were assigned to the mine after finishing school. After years of living in this isolated town, they’ve become deeply rooted in both the community and the industry. This generation is the only one to see themselves as belonging to the mine—proud of their work, proud of the community they’ve built, yet struggling with the environmental consequences of their labor. Their children, like most others, are moving to the cities for better opportunities. The miners, however, remain bound by a deep attachment to the life the mine has given them, despite its costs.
This is what makes the miners’ relationship with the land so complex. They are both complicit and victims of the mining process. And their seemingly purposeless gardening is a recognition that they can’t restore the land, yet they still choose to engage with it in a small, personal way. They are reclaiming something—however small—that entrenches them to the land. This act of gardening reflects both an acknowledgment of environmental harm and an acceptance of their dependency on the mine for their livelihood. Their struggle is not just about the resulting pollution; it’s also about their identity as miners.
One retired miner explained that while his plants struggle to grow, it’s the act of caring for them that gives him satisfaction. He’s not looking for a harvest—he’s seeking peace in the labor itself. “The land is poor, but I like to spend time here,” he said. It’s a way to pass the time, to connect to the land in a way that feels far removed from the extraction-driven work they do.
The miners' resignation in their gardening without expectation calls to mind the notion of mei ban fa (没办法, literally "there is no way"), discussed by anthropologist Anna Lora-Wainwright in her research on communities affected by industrial pollution in rural China.* Lora-Wainwright observes that in villages facing severe pollution, the phrase mei ban fa is often repeated by villagers in response to their condition. “As uncompromisingly defeatist as mei ban fa sounds, it should not be taken at face value,” she writes. Rather, it reflects a complex relationship with a deeply embedded sense of powerlessness—one rooted not just in the immediate context of pollution but in the broader lived experience of modern China.
I realised that for the miners, gardening wasn’t just a personal choice—it was part of a larger narrative of adaptation and survival within systems of harm. It serves as both acknowledgment of and adaptation to industrialization and pollution, while offering a subtle form of agency. It’s a way to gently resist the productivity-driven mindset that governs their work in the mines. In a society where labor is strongly framed in terms of productivity, the act of doing something without expecting anything in return is inherently subversive.
This subtle form of agency is shaped not only by the miners’ economic dependency on the mine but also by the broader societal and political conditions. Their avoidance of environmental politics and their internalized sense of powerlessness inform how they understand and respond to environmental harm. They are acutely aware of the damage caused by mining, yet this awareness is tempered by a lack of viable options to contest the system. As they engage with the land through their gardening, they do not seek to fight the larger forces that govern their lives. Instead, they find this quiet form of resistance as resignation, a refusal to be fully defined by the very system that harms them.
Spending time at the mine shifted the way I approach this project. I arrived with the intention of using art to critique the consequences of mining, but the miners’ gardens revealed deeper complexities that couldn’t be distilled into simple criticism. I began to see that environmental damage isn’t just an external issue to address—it’s a deeply layered, lived experience that urges a more empathetic and open-ended form of field research, one that acknowledges the resilience and everyday negotiations of those living in the shadows of industrialization. The gardens showed me something I hadn’t expected—not just about the land or the mine, but about how people find ways to live with damage they cannot undo. The uncertainty I encountered in their lives, and their resilience amid powerlessness, challenged me to rethink the assumptions behind environmental art. Rather than offer prescribed solutions or occupy an overtly political stance, these gardens remind me that embracing complexity and uncertainty can open pathways to deeper understanding and reflection.
* Anna Lora-Wainwright, Resigned Activism, Revised Edition: Living with Pollution in Rural China. The MIT Press, 2021. ↩