Author: Cara Giaimo / Source: Atlas Obscura
In early September, police in Germany began evicting and dismantling a treehouse protest camp in what remains of Hambach Forest, an ancient forest in the country’s west. Protestors have occupied the site continuously since 2014, when they moved in to protest clearcutting and mining in the woods.
Since then, they’ve built dozens of connected “treehouse villages” there, accessible by rope and ladder, to prevent said trees from being cut down. The eviction was halted this past Wednesday, September 19, following the death of a journalist, Steffen Meyn, who fell from a suspension bridge. It is unclear whether the camp will survive.Hambach Forest is located near Germany’s Belgian border, approximately 23 miles west of Cologne. It’s about 12,000 years old, and once covered 13,590 acres, roughly the size of Manhattan. Most of the trees are oak and hornbeam. While we’ve learned a certain amount about the animals who live there—for example, it is home to the endangered Bechstein’s bat, known for its long, curl-tipped ears—very little research has been done on the forest as a whole. As National Geographic put it earlier this year, “Hambach itself seems to have never been the focus of its own bottom-up ecological assessment.”
Whatever else this ecosystem contains, we do know that it sits on top of a huge deposit of lignite, a low-grade coal usually used to generate electricity. In the late 1970s, the German energy company RWE bought the forest, and began chopping down trees and digging an open-pit lignite mine.
In the years since, about 90 percent of the forest has been cleared in order to expand the mine, which is the largest in Germany.
RWE has undertaken measures to mitigate the mining’s impact—as a representative detailed to National Geographic, they build bat houses, relocate endangered species, and replant a nearby area with seeds and shoots sourced from Hambach. When mining is finished in a few years, the pit will become a recreational lake, a strategy often used at former extraction sites in Germany.
Critics think this is too little, too late, and that the forest should not be cut and dug up in the first place. They cite the climate impact of lignite—which, when burned, releases more carbon dioxide per ton than any other fuel source—as well as the history, scientific knowledge, and wildlife that are being lost along with the land. When protestors first moved…
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