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In Norilsk, a Russian city above the Arctic Circle, snow sometimes falls black. The colour comes from decades of nickel production polluting the air. Each year, the city’s industrial activities produce more sulfur dioxide, a toxic gas, than entire countries such as France. This polluted environment has caused severe health issues for residents for years and has damaged the ecosystem.
Thousands of kilometres away, in the Indian city of Dhanbad, underground fires have burned continuously for over 100 years, releasing toxic fumes. By provoking explosions for exploitive purposes, extraction companies have increased air pollution and made the ground unstable. For residents, toxic smokes and sinking ground slowly destroying their houses have become part of daily life.
Yet, neither of these situations catches mainstream media attention: the unfolding health and environmental crises seem to be invisible in international debates. This invisibility reveals a map of pollution and power, where economic growth justifies the sacrifice borne by entire communities.
“This Land is Not For the Living”
In both territories, long-term exposure to industrial pollution is associated with respiratory diseases, reduced life expectancy, and severely damaged environments.
In Dhanbad, the ground has been slowly sinking because of the underground fires, ignited over decades of coal mining activities and exposure to oxygen, causing houses to crack and collapse. Families live in fear of their house falling over their heads. Exposure to air pollution also leads to abnormally high counts of tuberculosis cases in the region, while coal deposits contaminate groundwater. Dr Barnwal, working in the Dhanbad hospital, noted “the entire population is constantly exposed to high levels of dust and other pollutants. […] Respiratory issues have also become more common here, like lung cancer or asthma.”
Meanwhile, Norilsk residents’ “life expectancy is ten years shorter than Russia’s average,” while “the risk of cancer is two times higher.” In their documentary Black Snow, filmmakers James Newton and Edward Edwards portrayed Norilsk inhabitants. One of them described the anxiety caused by the toxic air, before concluding, “this land is not for the living.”
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The city has also experienced visible environmental disasters that briefly captured international attention. In 2016, the Daldykan River turned red after a metallurgical plant overflowed. In 2020, a huge amount of diesel poured out of a fuel tank into Arctic rivers near the city, leading President Putin to declare a state of emergency. Both accidents have permanently contaminated waterways and the ecosystem.
Slow Violence: Pollution Becoming Ordinary
In both locations, air pollution and water contamination are diffuse and thus difficult to confront. Pollution spreads quietly through lungs, rivers, and soil, accumulating over years and generations. Scholar Rob Nixon described this phenomenon as “slow violence:” a form of destruction that “occurs gradually and out of sight, […] dispersed across time and space” and is “typically not viewed as violence at all.”
Slow violence struggles to attract sustained political attention. The absence of a clear beginning or end makes environmental harm easier to ignore than sudden disasters, which make the headlines. The invisible and gradual nature of pollution allows governments and companies to look away, at least initially. Yet, as environmental harm becomes routine, so does the suffering it produces.
Children often bear the burden of slow violence, suffering from environmental damage they did not create. In the Jahria coalfield near Dhanbad, some children continue to participate in informal coal work despite legal prohibitions. Savitri, a 17-year-old girl who has been working around the mine for several years to provide for her family’s needs, is fully aware of the hazardous nature of her tasks. “Burning coal causes air and water pollution. The smoke is very harmful, especially for the lungs,” she explains.
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In the documentary Black Snow, one Norilsk resident recalls how his father would return home and “spit metal” after twenty years working in the mines. Pollution is a condition of everyday life, unfolding across generations and shaping how children live.
The Politics of Visibility
The invisibility of environmental harm in Norilsk and Dhanbad is not accidental. Both regions share political and economic characteristics that explain why their environmental crises struggle to catch attention.
First, both cities are far from the national capitals and media centres. As the Jharia Member of Parliament Purnima Singh observed, “people are only talking about climate change in India’s large, metro cities, like Delhi. It is something that isn’t spoken about in smaller cities and towns like Dhanbad, even though they are most vulnerable.”
It is also worth noting that the Soviet authorities sent prisoners to Norilsk mines between 1935 and 1956, because of the harsh living conditions above the Arctic Circle and the lack of willing manpower. To this day, Russian authorities still require special authorizations to go to Norilsk, and there is little transport infrastructure to get there. Both cases underline the isolation factor playing into general political disinterest.
This remoteness enables limited public scrutiny of environmental disasters in zones that are crucial for the Russian and Indian economies. Norilsk alone represents 2% of Russia’s gross domestic product, and the extractive industry employs around half of the city’s population. In Dhanbad, the Jahria coal mines represent 52% of all national reserves. Coal extraction remains a critical source of employment and contributes to India’s position as the world’s second-largest consumer of coal.
In both locations, many residents cannot separate environmental and health concerns from economic survival. As a result, these regions provide energy, raw materials, and industrial wealth to the wider national economy while absorbing a disproportionate share of the environmental costs. The pollution of these sites is known and even visible. Yet, politicians treat the issue as an acceptable consequence of economic development.
Transition Without Justice
Environmental degradation in places like Norilsk and Dhanbad raises questions of responsibility: who should pay for the reparation of territories that have powered national economies for decades? Should the burden fall on the companies that generated profit from the extraction, or on the national governments that prioritized industrial growth over the health of their population?
In both Norilsk and Dhanbad, local residents have increasingly mobilized around environmental and health concerns, showing they are not passive victims of these crises. Community clean-up initiatives and awareness campaigns have emerged to address pollution and public health risks. In Dhanbad, the NGO Coalfield Children Classes offers access to education for children supporting their family’s needs. These efforts aim at mitigating the effects of environmental harm, but local action reveals its limits in the face of decades of damage.
This challenge is particularly visible in the region around the Jharia mine. In 2009, the Indian government launched the Master Plan, a program of relocation for nearly 79,000 families affected by the consequences of coal fires and landslides by 2020. Yet, by 2020, only 3,000 families had been relocated while the number of people at risk continues to grow. Many residents criticize inadequate compensation upon relocation, poor housing conditions, or concerns regarding access to employment.
In Norilsk, following the 2020 diesel spill, Russian authorities fined Norilsk Nickel while the company promised clean-up operations. Yet, environmental groups and Indigenous representatives continue to raise concerns about transparency and long-term remediation. Moreover, restrictions and threats against journalists and civil society organizations have complicated efforts for scrutiny. For instance, in 2023, the Russian government criminalized cooperation with Bellona, an organization that has documented environmental risks for decades.
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The Cost of Looking Away
A just transition cannot only be about decarbonization, but also the fair distribution of social and environmental costs of climate policies. Thus, it requires reducing pollution and confronting the environmental debts of these industrial regions. Both governments should invest in remediation, public health and economic diversification with mechanisms to compensate for the costs of past industrial development.
However, the geography of sacrifice zones also emerged from global patterns of consumption. The energy, steel, and technologies produced in places like Norilsk and Dhanbad benefit distant consumers reliant on the environmental burdens borne locally. In this context, questions of responsibility extend beyond states and companies to the broader consumption system that sustains extractive economies.
Ultimately, Norilsk and Dhanbad reveal that slow violence is not exceptional but structural. Wherever the benefits of development are separated from environmental costs, sacrifice zones emerge. Governments, companies and consumers must stop treating the communities living there as hidden costs of economic progress by bringing their realities into public debates and political action.
Edited by Chelsea Bean
