WITHERED weeds, deserted farms and exposed rocks — this sums up the landscape around Wuchenggong Village in Shenmu County, Shaanxi Province, where trees used to provide ample shade for villagers.

The discovery of China’s largest coal field, in the country’s biggest coal-mining county, directly under the village 30 years ago changed the destiny of Wuchenggong and its inhabitants.

The county of Shenmu ­— which literally means “magic wood” — was transformed from an assemblage of poor, isolated villages in northwest China into the country’s main coal supplier and biggest thermal power producer.

And many local mine owners made vast fortunes virtually overnight.

But the same boom robbed thousands of villagers of their homes, and wrecked havoc on the local environment. The earth has collapsed in many places, rivers have been diverted and forests have withered.

Wei Zhengfa, a 60-year-old villager whose family had been living in the area for generations, had no choice but to relocate seven years ago.

His house was ruined by land subsidence caused by excavation. Now all that remains are two walls and part of a cracked roof.

Outside the ruined house is a seam in the earth the width of a fist, and the well in the courtyard has been constricted to a quarter of its original size.

Wei’s home is just one of many destroyed houses in the area, where the ground has sunk by about 4-5 meters.

According to a Xinhua news agency report in 2008, coal mining in Shenmu County had led to the subsidence of 56.1 square kilometers of earth and ruined over 1,500 hectares of farmland. In the process, some 6,700 residents were affected.

Together with some neighbors, Wei was moved to a resettlement area in the nearby village of Lijiapan.

Yet still Wei takes the risk of returning to his land every spring and summer to plant corn and soybeans. Farming is the only livelihood he knows, even though his corps can only bring him about 2,000-3,000 yuan (US$288-432) annually.

He also gets an additional subsidy of 10,000 yuan each year from a major coal mining company in the region.

Rows of factories stand on the upper reach of the nearby Kuye River, where machines rumble and chimney smokes. The Kuye, as a primary tributary of the Yellow River, was once more than 100 meters wide. As Wei recalls, the river used to surge decades ago and even washed away a major local bridge one summer. But now all that remains of the once-raging river are a few fine trickles, while most of the riverbed is covered with weeds.

The change started in 1982, when a prospecting team discovered a deposit of 87.7 billion tons of coal underneath Shenmu and other nearby counties in Shaanxi Province.

The “magic wood” was soon transformed into a coal county. As local statistics show, about 86 million tons of coals were mined in Shenmu in 2005. This surged to 160 million tons in 2010, and 229 million tons in 2014.

There were more than 300 mines operating in Shenmu County at the peak of the local coal boom, according to Liu Jianqiang, vice director of Shenmu County Environmental Protection Bureau. Many small mines were forced to close down over the past two years due to security concerns, though more than 100 mines still operate in the area.

Dwindling water resource

Water scarcity is also a pressing issue in the area. With large amounts of water from the Kuye being diverted for various coal mining processes, the river started to dry seasonally.

The volume of the Kuye River’s natural runoff in 2001-2010 was down by 54 percent compared with the period between 1956 and 2000, according to a report by the Science Academy of Yellow River Water Resource Protection on conditions in the Kuye River basin in 2014. The report identified human activity, including coal mining, as the major reason for the drop in runoff volume.

The rapidly dwindling water resources have made villagers’ lives even more challenging. Even though a 400-million-yuan water-supply project was constructed in 2005 to bolster the local water supply, getting water is still often a difficult task for locals who did not move.

Though given two apartments for resettlement by the local government, 60-year-old Wei Zizhen and her husband chose to live in their original house, while giving the new apartments to their son and daughters.

Though not affected by major ground subsidence, Wei’s house has suffered cracks in the roof and walls. The water pipes also freeze between December and March, forcing her to collect water from a water tower about 2.5 kilometers away.

“Two buckets of water weighs more than 50 kilograms, I can hardly stand up without someone’s help,” says Wei.

Hidden costs

The development of coal mining and related industries helped expand Shenmu’s economy from 2.3 billion yuan in 2000 to 82 billion yuan in 2015. Yet the ecological and human costs of such development remain unknown, as does the price of cleaning up damage that’s been done to the area.

“Different numbers were given by different experts; nobody knows how much exactly,” said a grassroots official in Shenmu County.

According to one such estimate, every ton of coal production creates 260 yuan worth of damage to the environment and human health. This figure was provided by Teng Fei, an associate professor at the Institute of Energy Environment and Economy in Tsinghua University, in a joint report. Yet, damage to the environment and health has never been properly represented in the pricing of energy, which is a major reason for the over-consumption of coal, Teng believes.

“The environmental cost only accounts for a very small portion of the overall cost considered in the industry chain,” says Wang Xiaojun, mayor of Daliuta Town of Shenmu County, which also suffers from collapsing earth, ruined vegetation, water and soil loss, and polluted air due to coal mining.

Wang admits that there is currently no easy solution to the ecological problems in Daliuta Town, which has neither the funds nor the capability to change the status quo. “I am not sure how much it would exactly cost for a complete remedy, but it must be huge,” says Wang.