The "banality of evil" environmental and social in the literature and history of the coal industry in Santa Catarina (Brazil): accidents, suffering and death in the second half of the twentieth century

Abstract

This article discusses and problematizes the place of fatal accidents in the history of the coal industry in Santa Catarina. We launched a reflective light on the accidents in coal mines with the primary purpose of demonstrating the irrationality and radicalism of the "banality of environmental evil" present in the "progress" of the coal economy. We describe the peculiar characteristics of the work in the coal mines explaining some representations recorded in classical works of the Western literature. We collected data and information on documentary and bibliographical sources, but we did not seek to organize a quantitative overview of the accidents in the historical evolution of Santa Catarina coal sector. Based on the management of conceptual tools from Hannah Arendt and Bertrand Russell, we established an analogy between "concentration camp" and "mining camp." We organized the results of our research in four fields of observation/reflection: the coal economy as a war economy; coal culture in Western literature; the "banality of evil" behind the statistics of accidents; and contemporary news of accidents in coal.