Now We Have a Future, People Can Also Speak of the Past — Living Next to an Opencast Mine

Abstract

Everyday life on the edge of an opencast mine means witnessing how landscapes are ravaged on an enormous scale. Huge pieces of equipment such as excavators, spreaders and conveyor bridges are used to dig over entire tracts of land and remove overburden in order to mine the lignite underneath. A high toll is paid for this extraction of raw materials. Entire landscapes full of unique characteristics disappear, the natural balance is impaired, and not even human settlements are safe from destruction. In the central German coalfield alone, by the late 1980s mining had swallowed up some 470 km² of the landscape, of which only half had been made reusable. In 1989, 21 opencast mines were still in operation here.