Free Thinking - Holes in the Ground
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 20 January 2016
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rana Mitter goes underground to discover a world which long fed the human imagination and which fulfils all humanity's practical needs outside of food and yet which has become something we like to ignore, hide, conceal and forget. Counting the potential costs for all our futures, three enthusiasts for all that lies beneath, the engineer Professor Paul Younger from Glasgow University ; Ted Nield editor of the bi-monthly magazine Geoscientist and MIT's Rosalind Williams.
Professor Paul Younger from Glasgow University is the author of Water: All That Matters and Energy: All That Matters Ted Nield is the author of Underlands: A Journey Through Britain's Lost Landscape Rosalind Williams is the author of Notes on the Underground' and 'The Triumph of the Human Empire'.
Producer: Jacqueline Smith.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps |
| 0:21.2 | it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
| 0:26.1 | van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | Hello, on the 18th of December last year, Britain's last deep mine, Kellingly, closed down for good. With that |
| 0:39.0 | event, a three-century-long tradition of men going deep into a hole in the ground for a |
| 0:43.4 | core social and economic purpose came to an end. George Orwell probably wasn't exaggerating |
| 0:48.6 | when he said, back in the 1930s, in the metabolism of the Western world, the coal miner is second in importance only to the man who plows the soil. |
| 0:57.0 | But over the past half century, mines have faded in the popular imagination, and they're not the only holes in the ground to have disappeared in that fashion. |
| 1:05.0 | Yet many of today's most pressing concerns, from the recent winter flooding, to the drive for fracking, to climate change, |
| 1:11.6 | centre on us surface dwellers and our deep but often forgotten relationship with what happens deep under the Earth. |
| 1:18.6 | Tonight on free thinking, we're asking, should we be thinking more about what's under our feet? |
| 1:23.6 | With me today to sing a song of the Earth, or at least at the very least, interpret the |
| 1:28.7 | sounds of the underground, I have three excavators of knowledge. Ted Neald, author of Underlands, |
| 1:34.5 | a journey through Britain's lost landscape. Rosalind Williams, who's Professor of History of Science |
| 1:38.9 | and Technology at MIT, an author of Notes from the Underground, as well as a new book, |
| 1:43.5 | The Triumph of Human Empire, |
| 1:45.2 | and Paul Younger, who's ranking professor of engineering at Glasgow University and the author |
| 1:49.7 | of Energy, All That Matters. |
| 1:52.1 | Now, I know that all of you think that we should be looking down on the ground a lot more |
| 1:56.4 | than we actually do. |
| 1:57.5 | So I want you all to tell me about your favourite holds in the ground. |
| 2:00.3 | And Paul, you made your name working about your favourite holds in the ground. And Paul, |
... |
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