Lausitz lignite strip mining areas

Lignite strip-mining pits, Lausitz to - darkometer rating : 3 - The story of mining lignite (or 'brown coal', "Braunkohle" in German) in open-cast strip mines in Germany is that of a double disappearance. The first occurs when mining is taking place. The second happens when the former strip-mining pits are "re-naturalized", esp. by filling them with water to form artificial lakes. Strip mining is the most brutally destructive form of extracting raw materials from the Earth's crust. It means that whole landscapes get "eaten" away, chewed up and spat out again by gigantic machines. What's left behind is an utter wasteland – man-made canyons, craters, hills, forming a lifeless moonscape ... or rather "Mars-scape", given the often red hue of the soil where lignite is mined. The whole process is particularly tragic for the people who live in settlements that have to be evacuated before being erased from the map by the expanding strip-mining pits. Many a heroic resistance fight has been put up against being forcibly moved … but in the end the state or the big mining/energy corporations tend to win. Meanwhile doomed villages become temporary ghost towns . After an area/pit has been exhausted and mining moves elsewhere (or ceases to continue altogether), the question arises of what to do with the wastelands left behind. Left alone they'd slowly be reclaimed by nature, with the possible exception of places where pollution levels are too high (always a problem with mining). By law, the mining companies are required to provide for some sort of reclaiming of the destroyed lands. Generally, and especially in the Lausitz area of eastern Germany , the approach is to reclaim the exhausted pits simply by filling them with water. Thus the largest artificial lake land in the world is currently being created there.