by  Mark Kernan, via Maptia.com

In 1937 George Orwell said that coal mining was the ‘metabolism’ of western civilisation. What he meant by this striking metaphor was that coal was the catalyst for an earlier industrial revolution, just as enzymes act as the life-sustaining catalyst within the cells of living organisms to maintain life. If he were alive today though he would have good cause to reformulate his perceptive observation. For modern mining-the extraction of oil, gas and rich minerals, and including, again, coal-is now the alchemic catalyst driving the metabolism of 21st century economic globalization.