-- The village of Mühlrose in Germany’s far east has stood since the 13th century through wars, fires, unscrupulous lords, the division of the country and its reunification. Now its 200 people are packing up and leaving because of an industry they thought was also being consigned to history. Mühlrose will be wiped off the map to make way for a coal mine.
The result is that a giant, opencast coal mine is closing in on Mühlrose as power generation company Lausitz Energie Bergbau AG, or LEAG, expands. It will excavate lignite, low-grade so-called brown coal.Demolition work was in full swing in late June. The digging has eliminated more than two-thirds of the buildings. Only a few houses remain amid “no trespassing” signs. The steam from the cooling towers of the power plant that the coal feeds rises on the horizon.
The issue is timing, especially when far-right parties are gaining ground by amplifying popular fear over the cost of the EU’s package of green initiatives. Instead, Habeck announced an aid package for LEAG in line with an earlier agreement: at least €1.2 billion to cover the cost of job losses and the restoration of the land after mining ends, but by the original target year of 2038.
Mühlrose, which once housed 600, will be the last village to be swept away. It was a long time coming. After World War II, the communist government in the former East Germany decided to build almost its entire energy program on lignite. First, Mühlrose’s cemetery had to make way for mining in the 1960s, then more of the village succumbed to it.
LEAG expects to take ownership of all the land by the end of this year and start digging in 2029. Should the mining authority approve the destruction plans, the forest owners will lodge a legal complaint, says René Schuster, an activist with the environmental group Green League. Villagers are now resigned to the loss of Mühlrose, a stronghold of the ethnic Sorb minority in Germany. Numbering only 60,000, Sorbs are descendants of Slavic tribes that lived in this region of Lusatia, sometimes called Sorbia.
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