In a forest at the Garzweiler opencast mine, RWE has the caves in tree trunks taped up. Apparently there will be clearing there soon
When he took office two days ago, Hendrik Wüst (CDU), the new Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, declared “climate protection and preservation of creation” to be his “most important future tasks”. Here and now, however, people in the Rhenish lignite mining district are still asking, unchanged, in two places how the energy company RWE will proceed there.
“A small, fine forest”
Construction site one: the Bochheim forest near Kerpen-Manheim. For Dirk Jansen, the manager of the nature conservation organization BUND in North Rhine-Westphalia, the small forest parcel east of the Hambach forest is “an intact ecological stepping stone” that could link the remaining, valuable part of the Hambach forest with the surrounding forests to form a spatially significant network of biotopes . Local actors such as the “Civil Society Coordination Group Structural Change” (ZKS) headed by ex-coal commission member Antje Grothus have also presented such a networking concept.
For RWE, the forest is part of an area where brown coal is no longer to be extracted, but the surface of which is to be dredged to extract overburden in order to stabilize the slopes of the Hambach opencast mine. According to Dirk Jansen, the question is still unanswered as to whether this overburden cannot be extracted elsewhere. A relevant report by the lignite committee is still in progress, a complaint by the BUND against the main operating plan is still pending, and a written request to the district government to confirm that it will fulfill its duty of supervision towards the mine operator has not yet been answered.
Just like Jansen, the ZKS also sees the necessary waste volumes on the Sophienhöhe heap, which has only been partially renatured. In a letter from the ZKS it is stated that on RWE graphics “yellow fields and green forests are suggested as existing, where actually large areas of ‘bare’ debris pile up to well over 150 meters above ground level”. And further: “It would be more than nonsensical to plan this amount of overburden for the final deposit on the elevated inner dump, during which an area of 600 hectares of predominantly fertile arable land in the so-called eastern open-cast mining apron (large corridor Manheim) is to be destroyed almost simultaneously.” And that loud too Dirk Jansen “small but fine” Bochheim forest.
In this mixed situation with many question marks, biologists have now started to close off the winter quarters of the bats on behalf of RWE in order to scare them off. “In doing so, the group correctly circumvents the legal prohibition of killing, but deprives the animals of their habitat, which is equivalent to passive killing.” For Dirk Jansen, this approach is an unmistakable sign of an imminent clearing, which in view of the many unanswered questions and the ongoing climate crisis is at an inopportune time would come. “We have the impression that the group wants to try to secretly create facts here in the shadow of Lützerath.”
Construction site two: Lützerath. In the middle of the week, RWE announced that it had given the Münster Higher Administrative Court a standstill. This means that the group will not take action as long as the court has not decided whether the early transfer of ownership of the last private property in the small town at the Garzweiler opencast mine is enforced by the general good and therefore lawful. The court wants to have reached its verdict by January 7, 2022, and until then RWE will not touch the court that the lawsuit is about. In addition, according to corporate spokesman Guido Steffen, RWE will “not carry out any evacuation or tree felling or demolition work in the local area until the date mentioned”.
Which is no reason for the climate protectors who have set up a camp on this farm to stop inviting them to their real-life laboratory based on solidarity: “Every board you nail down here, every soup you cook, every relationship you build , is an obstacle to the destruction of all of our livelihoods, “says her statement on the latest developments. At least this sentence does not contain question marks.
