Tim McDonnell on the German town that was almost swallowed by a coal mine: Holzweiler, Germany, just escaped impending death. A tidy village of stone houses clustered around an aging cathedral, its only 40 minutes up the Autobahn from the modernist bustle of Cologne, the countrys fourth-largest city. The drive winds past farms spiked with towering wind turbines, standard-bearers of Germanys nationwide green energy overhaul. But Holzweilers quiet sidewalks are also precariously close to one of Europes largest open-pit coal mines. When I visited last fall, residents of Holzweiler and a cluster of neighboring villages had been living on borrowed time. The villages were in the way of the expanding mine, and locals had been told by the government that within a matter of years their homes would be bulldozed to get at the coal—the worlds dirtiest kind, known as lignite—buried underneath. Gisela Irving, a 78-year-old Holzweiler resident, keeps a small garden and a few chickens here that she raises with the help of a big, shaggy mutt named Butch. Gisela told me the regions threatened destruction was hard to reconcile with its bucolic present. Its a peaceful world, Gisela said, stooping to pluck a green pepper. I very often say its a little bit of a paradise. Paradise peters out just a few blocks from this yard, where the cobblestone street turns to mud and the houses—many already vacated—yield to prairie. Since the early 1980s, Gisela has watched the coal mine—called Garzweiler after the first town cleared away to make room for it—inch closer to her door. In her yard, we could hear the low, not-so-distant churning of massive digging machines. Gisela and her neighbors had spent years pleading with the regional government to block the machines steady march; yellow ribbons adorned the gates of many houses here, signs of solidarity against the encroaching mine. In December, Germanys top court ruled that Garzweiler was important enough to the national power system for the company operating it, RWE, to proceed with plans to pay for the demolition and relocation of these towns. Last month, the government decided to spare Holzweiler, but nearby towns havent been so lucky. -Erika
Posted on: Thu, 24 Apr 2014 20:30:00 +0000
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