Overview
The landscape around the twin town Bitterfeld-Wolfen in eastern Germany is composed of lakes, forests, and floodplains, sandy beaches, sailboat marinas, land art and bike lanes weaving through rare ecosystems. If unfamiliar with its history, it is not obvious that until fairly recently, this region has been dominated by open-cast coal mining, chemical industry, heavy pollution and environmental destruction. After extensive restoration, an idyllic Lakeland has emerged, as have new contentions over the governance of land use, most prominently with regard to the construction of wind farms and solar parks. This project attends to these emerging controversies and their socio-political significance in the present.
Local partners and communities
The HAUS AM SEE is a non‑profit institution founded in 1993-94 under the auspices of the state environmental agency and dedicated to environmental education about local ecologies, including the impacts of large‑scale lignite mining in the area. My collaboration with the HAUS AM SEE will be mutually beneficial, as I will learn about their work, expertise, and practitioner‑based experience in environmental education, and also gain access to their network of regional collaborators and experts.
I, in turn, seek to contribute my skills, informational resources and research material to lead the production of a digitally guided tour of the historical and natural landscape around the lakeland Muldestausee.
Extended description
Today, the visitor to Bitterfeld–Wolfen in eastern Germany encounters an idyllic landscape of lakes, forests, floodplains, sandy beaches, marinas, land art and bike lanes threading through niche ecosystems that host endangered species. What is not immediately visible is the region’s recent past: more than hundred years of open‑cast coal mining and chemical industry transformed the alluvial floodplain into scarred, polluted terrain. Under the German Democratic Republic, the massive expansion of these industries produced severe environmental destruction but also afforded secure livelihoods, state welfare, and social cohesion.
Extensive mine reclamation and clean‑up of contaminated sites began after German reunification in 1990-91 and thus amid profound socio-political rupture, economic insecurity and structural devaluation many East Germans experienced. In this regard, I have argued that the (so-perceived) successful restoration of Bitterfeld–Wolfen came to mean more than ecological recovery: for local residents the remade landscape was experienced as a form of social and symbolic rehabilitation after dislocation and loss.
Yet the restored landscape is not simply a triumph. On the one hand, heavy contamination persists, while the restored landscape has become intensely political. Debates over land use – restricted access to protected areas, the conversion of forests or farmland to solar parks and wind farms, and land privatisation in the name of development – have produced new local conflicts. Besides, the contemporary chemical park complicates easy binaries between natural processes and human presence, destruction and restoration, and even contamination and ecological health, where ecological niches supporting wildlife and human uses have developed in precisely those sites that were not (yet) restored.
Starting from the environmental, social, and political contradictions inscribed into Bitterfeld–Wolfen’s restored yet still contaminated landscape, I investigate the ambivalent potentials that destruction and recovery generate for people and ecosystems.
Keywords
Environmental destruction, restoration, political ecology, more-than-human, Eastern Germany