Turning mined lands into beautiful places: the aesthetics of ecological restoration
What happens to surface mining areas when mining activities are finished? How can these strongly inaccessible places turn into landscapes that actually appeal to people and contribute to their wellbeing? Ecological restoration may be a valuable option.
Growing demands in global commodity markets are increasing mining activities and will have profound societal and environmental consequences. This growth is accelerated by the continuous increase in society’s material requirements following the global population growth as well as new trends such as urbanization and climate change mitigation.
Worldwide, around 1000 mines and quarries are reported to be facing closure within the next 10 years (S&P Global); that is one in six mines. In mining regions where imminent closures are clustered, their impact presents significant social and environmental risks. Historically, the closure of a mine was often an uncontrolled process. Impacts on land and communities were considered part of the economic boom and bust cycles. The global history of abandoned mines and their social and environmental consequences has resulted in the rise of regulations with the aim to guide mining companies on how to close a mine site and reclaim it in a safe and sustainable manner.
Reclamation of mine sites is a complex type of landscape planning in which the impacts of surface mining on the environment and communities are reduced, and mined lands are returned to beneficial end uses. Through mine reclamation, ecological, economic and social functions, as well as the aesthetic and recreational potential of sites disrupted by mining activities, should be restored.
Mining should not destroy anything more valuable than it can create.
When it comes to restoring mined land, there are basically two options: First, to rely on nature (‘ecological restoration’), and second, to adopt technical measures (‘technical reclamation’). Technical reclamation usually involves the contouring of land, the allocation of topsoil or an approved substitute on the graded area, reseeding with native vegetation, crops and trees in regular rows, and years of careful monitoring and management to assure success. Ecological restoration, on the other hand, mainly makes use of natural processes with no or only slight interventions to direct landscape change towards certain target ecosystems.
Although many European mines are located in densely populated regions, there is no requirement in place to involve people’s needs and perceptions in the reclamation of post-mining sites. This is despite scientific knowledge emphasizing the importance of aesthetics and the visual quality of our environment for our health and wellbeing.
In this story, I will talk about the role of environmental aesthetics in our everyday lives — in connection with ecological restoration after surface mining. I will discuss the potential of this type of restoration to foster aesthetic values and thus to contribute to the wellbeing of local communities suffering from mining’s immediate impacts.
Why do beautiful places matter?
From an evolutionary perspective, humans are primarily adapted to the perception of visual stimuli. Through sight, we learn, react and evaluate our surroundings. We are even able to remember the smallest detail of what we see.
Aesthetic values of landscapes are among the values that are harder to understand, describe and measure, yet they play very important roles in our relationship to a place.
The beauty of our environment is among the basic values that we naturally look for in our lives. At every level of human experience, we are looking for beauty. The need for beauty — or let’s say for being in a beautiful environment, seeing beautiful things — is one of our basic human needs. It is the aesthetics of a place that is often the reason why we subconsciously return to some places to simply feel happier. Researchers and psychologists confirm that people are happier in more beautiful environments. Being or living in a place that we find beautiful can influence our actions; we care more about beautiful places; and the joy felt in certain surroundings might even influence our neighbours to care as well.
Due to our evolutionary basis as humans, beauty can make us happy because attractiveness implies health.
These needs and drivers become even more important in areas that undergo a dramatic transformation such as surface mining. After mine restoration, mined lands, which have been a burden for local communities and inaccessible for many years or decades, return back to life and are opened up to people. But how can these ‘new landscapes’ be planned and restored to be perceived as beautiful and to contribute to people’s wellbeing?
Preservation and restoration of beauty in mine reclamation
In the literature, we often encounter two basic approaches to preserving and restoring the beauty of the landscape as part of its planning and management. First, it is important to carefully handle the traditional landscape horizon and avoid significant changes in its contour. Second, natural curves should be prioritized over long and monotonous structures.
In technical mine reclamation, by removing elevations and filling depressions, large flat areas are created, and slopes are significantly reduced through the building of terraces with drainage canals to reduce erosion and potential landslides. The result of this approach is a terrain aligned to uniform shapes. In contrast, areas under ecological restoration are usually morphologically diverse, and this goes hand in hand with habitat and biological diversity, which, as shown, provides health and well-being benefits to people through the diverse factors of nature-relatedness. In terms of landscape beauty, terrain and habitat diversity better support aesthetically valuable natural curves than the monotonous curves of technical reclamation. They therefore seem simply more likable to people.
Several studies such as Braun Kohlová et al. (2021), Svobodova et al. (2012) and Sklenicka and Molnarova (2010) measured the aesthetic potential of forests that developed out of reclamation processes in coal mining regions of the Czech Republic. The results show that both locals and tourists considered wild deciduous forests that had been growing under conditions of ecological restoration to be more beautiful than technically planted deciduous forests. This preference for wild forests seems to even increase with people’s age.
In order for designers to properly understand a landscape, they must look at it the way its inhabitants perceive it and live in it — even more so when it comes to creating a post-mining landscape. The reclamation planning, if done well, has huge potential to create landscapes that appeal to people. Through mining, these landscapes, on the one hand, irreversibly loose many layers of historical and cultural memory, their traditional land uses, as well as natural curves and terrain. On the other hand, they become completely new landscapes: their character and place identity are re-created and cultural layers are rebuilt in the process of reclamation.
If we have to destroy places and build new ones, why not do it in an environmentally and socially friendly manner?
Unless we humans do not decrease our life standards and material requirements, mining as an environmentally and socially disruptive activity is inevitable. In the long term and if mine reclamation planning is done well, a mine — in particular a stone quarry or sand pit — has the potential to enrich the post-mining landscape, its residents’ wellbeing and nature itself. Although the origin of the new landscape is initially purely artificial and human-made, the post-mining landscape may become richer in many respects than the landscape prior to mining.
Conclusions
Aesthetic values of landscapes are among the values that are harder to understand, describe or measure, yet they play very important roles in our relationships to surroundings. After all, each of us wants to live or spend time in visually appealing places. Aesthetic qualities strongly affect our identification with places or landscapes, our emotional relationships and attachment to them. Surely, the relationship is different if we live in a new housing area, in a historic town, in the mountains or next to a restored mined land.
“Aesthetic and emotional experiences are the most important benefits realized by many recreationists in the natural environment.” (Rossman & Ulehla, 1977)
In order to turn mined lands into healthy landscapes, biological quality and aesthetic values should be considered in reclamation planning. These factors can play important roles in defining people’s relationships with the new sites. A diverse new landscape created through ecological restoration can appeal not only to humans, but also to plants and animals. People will reconnect to it without depriving it of their natural components. As part of this reconnection, people will develop bonds with these places and gradually take them as their own.
The perspective of environmental aesthetics in mine reclamation is studied in our CESMINE project. In CESMINE, we analyse the roles of people-places interactions in the successful transition from mining to post-mining environments, and how different planning and land use management practices contribute to this transition. Read more about CESMINE in our story here.
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