The flowing water is seepage from the landfill in Kjerdal at Sandbekk. Every autumn for the past five years, I have, together with the students on the master's program in change management at the University of Stavanger, walked in the strange mining landscape here of rock and stone, soil and minerals. In some places, the traces the water leaves in the landscape have become clear enough that the flowing water can be called a rivulet or small stream. The traces that the water has carved are rusty brown. The ground under the flowing water is colored brown. Against the moss-covered and dark green forest floor, the traces shine towards us. But what do we see? The rusty brown traces are compounds of heavy metals such as iron, nickel, chromium and manganese. When rainwater seeps into a landfill like this and comes into contact with the tailings, it dissolves heavy metals. Then the water searches further, through the terrain and the forest floor in both streams and even smaller seeps, towards the river that flows past the old mining site and down towards Hauge. A few kilometers below, the water finally flows into the sea at Sogndalstrand.

As long as the landfill is here, the leachate charged with heavy metal ions will continue to flow and affect the landscape.

The rusty-brown tracks against the moss-covered, dark-green forest floor are an image that can never be painted over. In the mining industry, they call the waste – the crushed rock, the deposited residue – that is left over after the valuable minerals have been separated by crushing and separation, tailings . But the crushed rock is not leftovers that are lost through disposal, through what they call “controlled final processing”. The waste is traces [i] that still have an effect on the landscape. This is what we see at Sandbekk. The crushed and processed rock is traces that remain, and that both exist and do something in the landscape. Experiencing these traces concretely and physically provides a contact with reality [ii] that abstract words can rarely provide, which moves, but which also in a way obliges and triggers an urge to act. Because we also see ourselves in the image of the rusty-brown tracks. Behind the image that appears to us concretely, we see the way of life that binds us to the traces. The traces can therefore also be signs of what we came from[iii], of the way of life that we are giving up.

With Jon Fosse, we can perhaps say that by walking in this strange mining landscape we have understood something we have not understood before, that we see something in a way we have not seen it before, yes, that we see something for the first time, but not only that. We both see it and understand it, in one and the same way[iv].

The rusty brown tracks against the dark green, moss-covered forest floor are an image that can never be painted over. But the rusty brown tracks are also signs that, through their concrete and physical presence, inspire us to seek a way of life together with others where we take care of what we have. And where we can do something ourselves, with our hands, at home, with the earth, in the kitchen, by the hearth[v], with our imagination. So that we rebuild both community and landscape. The rusty brown tracks are therefore as much a sign of what lies ahead of us, of what we are about to discover, as of what we must let go of, of renunciation.