Germany saves forest from mining, US opens land to drilling
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Locals and environmentalists have been fighting for 50 years to keep the woodland — which sits between the western German towns of Aachen and Cologne — from becoming an open-pit coal mine.
At times, protesters occupied the area, living in treehouses among the towering canopies to protect against the threat of chainsaws. Now the fight is finally coming to a close, with about 14% of the original forest still intact. In June, the local government announced the remaining woods will be protected permanently and turned into a nature conservation area.
"The climate movement has won the battle," said Dirk Jansen, of BUND, the German branch of the Friends of the Earth environmental group. He spent decades fighting for the forest. Hambach is one chapter in a much bigger story, as similar clashes between governments, private developers and citizens are playing out around the world — including in the US. There, public lands are being clawed back at an unprecedented rate for oil and gas extraction.
"We seem to be moving aggressively in the opposite direction," Lincoln Larsen, who studies outdoor recreation and public lands at North Carolina State University, told DW. The fight over Hambach began in the mid-1970s when German energy company RWE initiated the permitting process for open-pit lignite mining near the forest. More than 5,200 people were slated for resettlement from adjacent villages, igniting early local resistance over land rights.
Environmentalists took up the cause in subsequent years. The first treehouse occupiers set up camp in 2012, beginning a standoff in which they were intermittently evicted by the authorities. The conflict reached a turning point in October 2018, when more than 50,000 protesters flooded the forest.
That same month, Friends of the Earth Germany won a court order halting the clearing. The following year, Germany's Coal Commission, made up of energy companies, unions, NGOs, and citizens recommended that Hambach be protected and that Germany begin phasing out coal by 2038. The Hambach mine is scheduled to stop extracting coal by 2029.
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