TODAY's Power and the Passion instalments look at rehabilitation options, and potential future uses, for the patchwork of open-cut mines stretching from the Hunter coast to Narrabri. Two concerns dominate.
One is the general restoration of a churned-over landscape. The other concerns the final voids, left behind by design when mining ends.
Dr Cherie McCullough, director and principal environmental scientist with Perth company Mine Lakes Consulting, says mine voids should be viewed as "opportunities" rather than "risks".
This, she says, opens the region to a future already realised in Germany.
Closer to home, the exemplar is the former Stockton coalmine, inland from Bunbury, south of Perth.
Lake Stockton, filled after mining ended in 1960, is now a popular attraction for swimming, boating and water-skiing, with mountain-bike and walking trails in the surrounding forest.
An entrepreneurial firm, Hunter Valley Lakes Corporation, cites Germany in its push to transform the Hunter's "industrial wasteland" into a "sustainable showpiece" with a range of economic potential.
The voids, however, are only part of a disturbed footprint left by the open-cut era. Environmentalists say the coal industry is not doing enough to repair its damage, and that governments are not doing enough to hold the mining companies to account.
Rehabilitation techniques have improved, and the industry is well aware of the pressure it faces to maintain a clearly dwindling social licence.
Profit, however, will always be a defensible prime motive, and the private sector will generally only do what it's required to.
For public companies, especially, to spend more than necessary on any aspect of a business is to risk being accused of fiduciary mismanagement.
Ultimately, however, mine rehabilitation is something we can influence at the local level.
The big decisions on fossil fuel use come from the highest international levels, even if we feel ourselves part of the debate.
The post-coal shape of our own backyard, by contrast, is something that we can, and must, take control of.
There is more to environmentalism than simply locking people out and hoping the landscape returns to some sort of pre-industrial Eden.
Dr McCullough is right.
This can be a time of opportunity.
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