While the impacts of burning coal in power station on our climate receives some attention the human and local ecological consequences are almost always overlooked. But the consequences are dire:

“I wish that people became more aware of where their coal comes from. And about the consequences” says Luz Angela Uriana Epiayu, mother of Moisés Daniel, a young child who is seriously ill with lung disease living next to the Cerrejón coal mine, owned by foreign interests.

The giant open-pit Cerrejón coal mine in La Guajira, northern Colombia. The mine is the biggest of its kind in the world and is jointly owned by Anglo American, BHP and Glencore. The Cerrejón mine is in Wayúu indigenous territory and when mining began over 30 years ago, local people were not consulted. Instead their lands were seized, and communities were forcibly displaced, violating their constitutional land rights. The Colombian government has failed to adequately compensate any of the affected communities. Pollution and dust from the coal mine has caused the contamination of water supplies and the air.

Narlis Guzmán Angulo a human rights defender from Cesar in Colombia living near the Drummond coal mine says, “In La Sierra we have always been able to feed ourselves with our agriculture, but that is over... Opencast coal mining ruined everything. It has brought us all this: the collapse of the social fabric, unemployment, death, missing persons, displaced persons, political corruption, the loss of the vocation of our ancestors, the loss of our roots, environmental pollution, disease, prostitution, the sexual commercialisation of children, drug addiction, and poisoned water...”.

The answer to these problems is not to open more coal mines in Europe. True solidarity with people at the front-lines of coal extraction means closing all coal mines globally and to move rapidly away from technology which relies on coal and produces vast emissions.

Read the full report https://stillburning.net/book/ and also see films about these issues by Still Burning here.