Eden Project: Regaining hope for human and ecological communities from disused mining pits

What makes a 60-meter deep, 15-hectare, 170-year-old china clay open pit one of the most popular and profitable tourist destinations in England at par with the Tower of London? Considering that it is 300 kilometers west of London in Cornwall, southwest England, 12.8 million visitors have come to the Eden Project over the last 10 years. I was invited to meet their team during the English summer. It is a model which can be emulated here in the Philippines for reinventing and renewing post-mining communities. Georgina Pearman, of Eden-based Post-Mining Alliance, described the typical scenario of major job losses and displacement of large mining communities once resources are exhausted. She explained how “old mines can be transformed into new futures and tangibly demonstrate how mining legacy can be converted from a liability to opportunity to benefit local communities.” This could be a way forward in addressing the future directions of major mining communities in places like the Cordilleras and Caraga.

Firstly let’s put things into context. Cornwall is a place steeped in mining history which started during the Bronze Age, 3,000 years ago until the Roman times. During the industrial revolution 200 years ago, Cornwall’s mines were the richest source of copper, tin and zinc minerals, which built the English empire but also significantly degraded the landscape, aesthetically and ecologically. When the metal mining industry collapsed, it forced the major migration of Cornish miners to the mineral resources of the new world in the Americas, Africa and Australia. In the mid-1980s, the local china clay mining industry, the world’s largest producer, collapsed due to global competition.  The loss of approximately 18,000 jobs created one of England’s most socially and economically depressed regions.

Enter Tim Smit, a former rock and opera composer-producer, who made a life-changing decision in 1987. He and his young family transferred to Cornwall “away from London and the frenetic lifestyle of the modern music industry with its cutthroat demands.” The germination of this seed came to him in a Cornish inn in 1994. With co-founder, Cornish architect Jonathan Ball, he made the dream into a millennium reality by 2000. Smit states, “We came up with the name Eden as it made sense as a symbol of Mankind in harmony with bounteous Nature.” Moreover, he stated, “I enjoyed the conceit that we had been thrown out of paradise for eating from the tree of knowledge (of good and evil) and perhaps only now through gathering of greater knowledge could we return.” He infected people with his vision and formed a talented team to make the impossible happen. They were able to raise 140 million GBP necessary to build Eden.

I was welcomed with a view of two stunning futuristic domes “biomes.” How was it built? Challenging temperate weather, which can bring very cold and wet conditions, and the fact of building in a disused clay pit created many problems. A soil mix (83,000 tons) was created by scientists from the University of Reading using compost and local recycled materials. The biomes were assembled with 813 hexagonal frames supporting UV penetrating sheets of a space age synthetic fabric. The largest glasshouse was 50 meters high, 100 meters wide and 200 meters long. Inside the glasshouses are two fully functioning eco-systems. The humid tropics “biome,” the world’s largest tropical rainforest in captivity, has plants from Amazonia, West Africa, Malaysia and the Oceanic islands. Another biome contains a cooler, “temperate” landscape of Mediterranean, South African, and Californian plants. An outdoor biome was also created from the steep barren walls of the former pit, which housed seasonal or cold tolerant flora. These contain more than a million plants representing 5,000 species from around the world.

Here is the pearl of the Eden experience. It is not just a botanical garden. It is all about the link between plants, people and places. We appreciate very quickly how plants are essential to animal and human life in a world where there is increasing ignorance about the origins of our food and many natural products. For example, there were displays of products as varied as tires and denim jeans which simply could not exist without plants.  Species present have been chosen not for their novelty but for their ability to tell a story, “for example, how a plant finds its way to our dinner tables.” There are exhibits of food plants such as rice, wheat, and corn, medicinal and pretty and perfumed plants. We see the wildflowers of the North American prairie, well-known herbs from the Mediterranean and the lushness of tropical forests. But there’s also a humble vegetable garden, which was a display of simple elegance. Other areas deliver an environmental and social message, including how to re-grow rainforests, the effects of unsustainable land use in tropical countries, and the use of sugar cane as renewable biofuel.

Many commissioned artworks also complement the plant life to “help create signposts to new attitudes and ways of thinking.” The largest of all is called Seed, a 70-ton sculpture carved from a single piece of Cornish granite. It is housed in the Core, the educational center.

It was indeed an inspiring and empowering day and I asked myself, “Could something of this magnitude and impact be done in the Philippines in order to alleviate the problems of hunger, lack of jobs, poverty, ecosystem degradation?” I would like to think so. In closing, the words of Tim Smit in his recently released book entitled Eden – 10th anniversary edition, capture the essence of their journey, “Eden began as a project of regeneration of land and of people. It is the story of how the hope and energy of many people transformed a thrilling idea into the breathtaking reality of one of the world’s great gardens. But Eden is more: it has mutated into an organization with projects and partnerships all over the world concerned with rehabilitation (physical and social), community education, biodiversity, town planning, sustainable construction and green employment.”

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Augustine Doronila, Ph.D., a “Balikscientist,” is a research fellow at the School of Chemistry of University of Melbourne, Australia. His expertise is phytoremediation, restoration ecology, post-mining reclamation and biogeochemistry. You can learn more about his work through a recent webcast: http://upclose.unimelb.edu.au/episode/216-tailings-tidy-up-how-bioremediation-can-repair-damage-done-mining. His e-mail is [email protected].