2Here we suggest that even in Germany, that is, in the heart of European industrial capitalism, it is possible to identify groups who experience their world to be ending. To local villagers in the Rhineland lignite region this is a result of forced resettlement, demolition of homes and undermining of past village life. To activists, who have occupied a forest to curb the expansion of the Hambach mine since 2012, an approaching eviction and clearcutting of the forest is an imminent catastrophic event that marks the beginning of a new period. Activists are unsure of what the future has in store for them, but to prepare themselves some look to indigenous peoples and strive to learn from them how to make a new, feral life in a destroyed landscape.

Digging to the end of the world

4The region became the powerhouse of early northern European industrialization. Placed near the border to France, Belgium and the Netherlands, these resource-rich lands were a recurring reason for acts of war, but after World War II, a shared concern for the smooth distribution of raw materials played an important role in the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community, the precursor of the European Union. The urban areas in the Ruhr District underwent rapid economic development based on mining, but still today the area is the home of some of Germany’s largest open-cast lignite mines, mainly owned and operated by the electric utility company RWE (Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk AG). The Garzweiler mine alone covers an area of an area of almost 100 km², and is the largest of the three mines in the area, which, it is planned, will keep being expanded until 2045.

5The Hambach mine is the largest hole in the ground in Europe, and the bucket-wheel excavator (BWE) – constructed for open-pit mining on this scale—is the largest vehicle on earth. In the vicinity of this man-made hole, human beings paradoxically appear both extremely powerful, yet small and absolutely impotent. The excavator is used to remove the top soil to reach the layers below that contain lignite, which is carried by rail to one of the several power plants located in the area. The “overburden” or removed top soil is transported to various sites within the area previously mined, where various artificial Höhen (hills) are constructed. In this way the excavation fundamentally alters, disfigures and transforms the landscape. The sheer scale of destruction subdues any expectation of being able to continue life as usual in the area.

Being disappeared

6The gently rolling landscape surrounding the Garzweiler mine is fertile agricultural land scattered with little villages and towns established over a time span of 7,000 years. In 2015 the main street of the little village of Borschemich ended in the mining pit. The street was a row of empty, dark houses where windows had been shuttered as their inhabitants moved away. A black plastic bag covered the timetable on the bus stop, to draw attention to the fact that the local bus was no longer running. Most inhabitants had already left Borschemich, but a few houses were still inhabited by families refusing to leave. What was left of resistance was endurance; a stern opposition to giving up the place and form of life associated with it. Court cases have been lost and calls from NGOs to halt the expansion of the mine ignored by the government of the region. In a statement made by Gelbe Band, the association of affected Grubenrand communities, local inhabitants explained, “We have lost our Heimat [homeland],” with its “familiar paths, playmates next door, first lovers, and the protective homes of our parents. […] They are digging it all away under our feet.”

7Now, the village of Borschemich has disappeared. Since the mid-1950s in Rhineland as a whole 40,000 people have lost their homes and faced compulsory expropriation and relocation. Today, the neighbouring village of Immerath, once the home of some 1,200 people, is deserted and reduced to rubble. The Immerath dome, as the local church was called, was first constructed in the 12th century, but demolished in 2018. Mertens, a local inhabitant of the village, has returned on various occasions to watch the inevitable demolition of his home where he lived with his wife and their two daughters. RWE offers compensation and reparation to the villagers through, among other means, the construction of new towns bearing the same names as the ones demolished. Thus, in Immerath Neu, new houses have been constructed, a new church in a more contemporary architectural style, and the churchyard from the old village has been relocated. But even though villagers have been offered a brand-new and refurbished life, they are full of longing for their past, more authentic world. The demolition of their home entails the annihilation of (the possibility of) a way of life in accordance with the German Romantic tradition, where the (idyllic) rural village and Heimat represented closeness and communality as well as existential security and a sense of reliability.

8In the forest at Sophienhöhe, a reforestation project started by the RWE on a 330-metre-tall hill of overburden from the Hambach mine, we encounter a middle-aged man out walking his dog. He conveys a feeling of powerlessness and impotence produced by the disfigured landscape: “If something should have been done, it should have been done 20 years ago,” he says, shrugging his shoulders, “now everything is too late.” The man is from Elsdorf, a larger village squeezed between the edges of Garzweiler and Hambacher mines, and the forest where he is now walking his dog was planted some 20 years back as a compensation for the old-growth Hambacher forest. It used to be a 5,500-hectare primeval forest, considered by many to be among the last Central European forests of high ecological value. Now only a fraction is left, and the reforested area at Sophienhöhe does not really make up for the loss. The new forest does not “feel real”, he explains. This unreal quality is not so much caused by the religious connotations in RWE’s district planning, which has led to the reconstruction of Jesus Christ's via dolorosa up the hill of the overburden, but is ascribed to the fact that the forest is same-aged and said to be “artificially” biodiverse. Local villagers’ experience of having their form of life undermined was not made up for by shiny new things, homes and forests; the all-encompassing scale of local change generated a sense of an ending, which involved references to “everything” being destroyed.

Preparing for Day X

9Six years ago a group of environmental activists took up life in the remainder of Hambacher forest, determined to curb the expansion of the mine by stopping the advancing logging machines. In the face of the destructiveness of mining and its likely climate effects, the group constructed a number of tree-sits in tall beech and oak trees, which were supported by a local base camp, set up on the land of a local farmer, who was also resentful about losing his land to the diggers. Not unlike the local villagers, activists awaited a future date when their forest occupation would be evicted and the forest cut, Day X, but their waiting time was filled with activities and actions, including a search for a more feral lifestyle. Tree-sitting is a political tactic which has been in use during the past 30 years by activists favouring direct action, organized internationally in the Earth First! network. Activists take up residence on treetop platforms, some 30 metres above ground, and the tactic rests on the presumption that logging companies are reluctant to cut down a tree with a human being dwelling among the top branches. Apart from being considered a form of direct action in and of itself, tree-sitting is also a means to create public attention in environmental campaigning.

13In the search for a more feral lifestyle and a new beginning, activists project anti-civilizational sentiments onto indigenous peoples, who are generally cast as both closer to nature, living more authentically and with few means and as unwilling to sell off the natural resources on which their life depends. To some activists in the Hambacher forest, such as Wrench, the common denominator between themselves and indigenous peoples was this dedication to “care for the land”. With explicit reference to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s work, one activist commented that “we also have the right to ontological self-determination”, thus suggesting not only that Europeans might have a lot to learn from indigenous people, but also that some radical environmental activists have already begun to identify with them in light of the impending catastrophe.

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14Lignite mining in the Rhineland is causing multiple ends of worlds: the life and history of local villagers in an area is destroyed when small villages are expropriated and demolished to allow for the expansion of lignite mining, and young activists see the end of their project of resistance, consisting in alternative life-making in the occupied Hambacher forest. In this situation, indigenous peoples of the Americas already serve as model for different life-projects after the apocalypse. According to activists, Day X arrived on 6 September 2018 when police arrived in large numbers to evict the treehouses. Two weeks later the process of eviction already had a very concrete and unfortunate end, as an activist-journalist died owing to a fall from a rope ladder during an encounter with the police in a tree 20 metres above the ground. In the narratives of these events, the destruction of the forest, the area and its different forms of life reverberate with each other, and the singular Day X comes to entail and stand as synecdoche for the ultimate destruction of the whole world.