好文精选66篇之65——矿井废料的奇异之美
发表时间：2021-09-08 22:07:46
See the grotesque beauty of mining waste
多道尚知声明：本文选自网络，仅用于学习，如有侵权请告知，立即删除。
In images that could be mistaken for paintings, a photographer records how mine waste has ruined a valley near his Romanian hometown.
Since first visiting the copper mine’s polluted lake, Gheorghe Popa has returned many times. The scene, he says, “keeps drawing me to it like a forbidden fruit.”
BYHICKS WOGANPHOTOGRAPHS BYGHEORGHE POPA
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 7, 2021
• 4 MIN READ
The Roșia Poieni copper mine appears like a wound on Romania’s Apuseni Mountains. An open-pit mine operated by a state-owned company, it draws from the largest copper deposit in the country. In 1978, needing somewhere to discard the mine’s waste, President Nicolae Ceaușescu initiated the removal of residents from the neighboring village of Geamăna. Water and the mine’s sludge were then released into the village and the Şesii Valley, forming an artificial, partly viscous lake.
Gheorghe Popa grew up about two hours away by car, in the town of Aiud, at the base of the Apuseni Mountains. A pharmacist and nature photographer, Popa first encountered the dumping site in 2014. “To this day,” he wrote in the Romanian edition of National Geographic, “I can’t forget that chemical smell that even filled my mouth.” The unearthly scene mesmerized him: amid an otherwise picturesque mountain range, a lake tie-dyed in swirls of yellow, red, orange, and turquoise.
Waste from the Roșia Poieni mine is filling the Șesii Valley, in western Romania, with a colorful brew. The watery mix includes tailings—material left after the separation of valuable raw ore—which can be hazardous if not properly contained.
Popa sees a duality in his drone photographs of the contaminated site: The lake’s bright colors, he writes, are both “surreally beautiful” and “repulsive by their nature.”
For some 20 years after mining began in the late 1970s, the Romanian government evacuated hundreds of residents of the village of Geamăna. Villagers say that officials promised to relocate their cemetery but never did. Buildings in Geamăna were also left in place...Read More
During subsequent visits, Popa deployed a drone to capture bird’s-eye views. The polluted valley has been fertile ground for his work: The visage of the lake and the possibilities for photographing it are always changing, depending on the substances poured into it, the time of year or day, and the quality of the light.
A small number of residents remain near the lake, hanging on in homes above the rising waterline. Some living in the area work at the mine. Popa also has witnessed ducks gliding across the lake’s multicolored surface. He hopes his photographs—though they may be inviting at first glance—will prove cautionary to viewers. In his words, “I wish the ‘beauty’ of this disaster could forever remind us that we must never let something like this happen again.”
One day it may disappear, but for now the spire of Geamăna’s early 19th-century church remains visible, poking out of the lake at the center of this image.
This story appears in the October 2021 issue of National Geographicmagazine.
