Wounded Landscape: Toxicity and Coal Extractivism in Wonorejo, Indonesia

The Adaro coal company’s 30-kilometer open pit occupies villages and rubber plantations in two towns, Balangan and Tanjung, in Indonesia. Despite the needs of Indonesia’s upstream energy industry, Adaro’s coal-based infrastructure operations have provoked toxic relations, rendering hundreds of displacements, a series of land grabbing, and numerous types of bodily harm. Within mining infrastructures, local people get entangled with the company in various stages of mining, such as coal removal, hauling, blasting, and disposal within adjacent pit. What constitutes ‘toxic’ in the context of the coal-based infrastructure in coal mining zone and what are the environmental stakes embedded in efforts to extract underground landscapes? While it engages with the diversity of livelihood practices that populate the embankments of the Adaro, this article also looks at how a polluted landscape paradoxically sustains ‘life’. This involves tracing how farmers, who depend on the rubber land and are most exposed to its harm, think and respond to toxicity. This article, set within concerns of environmental humanities, addresses this inquiry in a community of rubber farmers affected by toxic coal in Wonorejo, Indonesia. This writing builds on a month’s ethnographic fieldwork in 2023 which I investigated the everyday interactions of coal and coal-based infrastructures with Wonorejo’s social, cultural, and environmental context. Drawing on participant observation and qualitative interviews, the article explores how the local people made sense of the toxicity of coal in their lives. These complex relationships are expressed in myriad ways and particularly emanated in conflicts over livelihoods, displacement, and air pollution. I demonstrate a landscape of uncertainty as a result of people’s bodily interaction with the toxic substances produced by the combustion and circulation of coal-related materials. These forms of toxicity are informed by the literature on sociotechnical approaches to energy infrastructures which are reflected in the aforementioned set of paradoxes.