Lazer Sandford, an environmental activist who spent 12 days under Euston Station in protest of the HS2 railway, stated this morning that the Euston tunnel is just the start of the subterranean protest tactics against the rail link. Last week, protesters occupied a tunnel in Highbury Corner to protect trees scheduled for felling. These protests are unlikely to be successful, there hasn't been a large transport project that's already underway which has sucessfully been stopped by campaigners in Britain (think M11, Heathrow expansion, Newbury Bypass) HS2 is the largest infrastructure project since WW2, and won't be carbon neutral in it's lifetime, but the tunnellers are impacting on public opinion. They are shifting the Overton Window; the space of ideas considered politically acceptable by the mainstream public at a given time. Many will look at the Euston tunnellers in dismay, but there will be some who agree with their tactics. The greater audience they reach, the more the Overton Window will shift.
Often, political and economic narratives focus heavily on activities taking place on the surface, and above it, rather than those enacted below the surface. Geographer Stephen Graham calls this 'surface bias'- “stemming from the dominant use of flat cartography as the key means of illustration, visualisation and imagination.” The greater visibility of surface activity contributes heavily as to why this is the case, leading to the prioritisation of above-ground activity and it's subsequent legislation. In regards to the subterranean, often it is the case of out of sight, out of mind. The below-ground is also ideologically connected to notions of evil underworlds and hellscapes, they are claustrophobic spaces where waste travels through and horrors are buried. Those who work underground are often subject to poor working conditions as seen in the plight of mining communities across the globe. Basement flats are less attractive than penthouse suites.
The illegibility of the ground beneath our feet breeds speculation, intrigue, and thus hypothesising, in an attempt to grasp the enormity of the spaces so difficult to access physically. Perhaps the most penetrative hypothesis is that of the Hollow Earth Theory, the 17th Century idea that there are worlds and atmospheres within the Earth, that are accessed through the north and south poles. So encapsulating is the prospect of underground worlds that the Hollow Earth theory perseveres today. In some friction with the increasingly popular Flat Earth theory (one disproves the other) modern Hollow Earth theorists maintain the existence of a (or a series of) subterranean worlds beneath our own, as helpfully demonstrated by a Twitter poll conducted by Elon Musk in November 2018. He asks his followers; is the Earth 'flat', 'hollow', or 'flat and hollow'. The resulting votes for each from around 400,000 respondents were 18%, 25% and 57% respectively. In March 2019, Musk responds to a tweet which asks "@elonmusk have you considered finding a way to use the Earth's core for energy?' with the answer; "Everyone knows the Earth is hollow".
Elon Musk's tunnelling company; The Boring Company (TBC), is forging a new age of tunnelling. Not dark, or muddy, but sleek and bright with SpaceX's trademark futuristic sexy aesthetic. TBC is a venture to evolve the tunnelling industry from the ground up; improving the infrastructure of underground tunnels in order to "solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic" and build "the fastest and safest system ever." A trio of boring machines are TBC's crown jewels, and they burrow into the earth up to ten times faster than the industry standard machines. TBC's current projects include a tunnel beneath Hawthorne, California; Las Vegas; Los Angles; and Washington to Baltimore. In typical Musk style, the launches of the new ventures were bro-grammer, celebrity events. At the opening of the Hyperloop in California, guests could test TBC's Flamethrower. Yes, their Flamethrower. 20,000 of which have been sold and shipped.
TBC's available 'products' are; a Loop Transportation System, for accommodating traffic or pedestrians; a Conduit Tunnel, for utilities such as water or fiberoptic cables; and a Water Tunnel, a single tube that does not exclusively have to carry water. For this final option, TBC states "We bore the tunnel, and you do what you want with it!" A "Tunnel Price Calculator" is coming soon to TBC's site "where the user can enter product line, location, geology type, and length, and the calculator will return a project price range maximum and minimum." As of yet, these new technical tunnels and their machines are not regulated as chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
I guess what I am getting at here is the stark imbalance between perception of environmental activism tunnelling as 'domestic terrorism', and the glorification of private entrepreneurship in the same activity, even if that company sells sophisticated weaponry alongside it's tunnels. Similar to when anticipating an approaching train; I'll be keeping an ear to the ground on issues of subterranean manoeuvres.
