… We park our car inconspicuously in a small clearing along the windy road that connects the German town of Zittau with the mediaeval mining town of Bogatynia in Poland. We quickly scurry out of sight through the thickets that obscure the mine from common view. After a brisk walk uphill, the shrubbery gradually gives way and we find ourselves positioned at the outermost southern rim of the Turów open cast mining pit. It is bowl-shaped and several kilometres in diameter and roughly 200 metres deep. From our position we can clearly make out the palette of colour delineating the ambiguous outpost of life and nonlife—between what is commonly perceived as ‘lively’, as opposed to ‘inert’ matter.
It was during the Tertiary period 45 to 15 million years ago that the upper Lusatian and most of Central Europe’s reserves of lignite formed out of a then sub-tropical rainforest flora. Wet, acidic and nutrient-poor conditions in the ‘wetlands’—as the Sorbian name for Lusatia translates—combined vast quantities of organic matter and decomposed it, yet, not fully, into the liminal organic material that is peat. Underground and in the dark, a ‘subterranean forest’ (referring to book titles by Büntning, 1693, and Sieferle, 1982, cited by Turnbull, 2022) waited, constituted by the metabolised rays of the sun. Through the pressure caused by tectonic processes and under the exclusion of air, and over many millions of years, the peaty sediments gradually became the moist, porous, dark combustible rock lignite—literally woody rock—more commonly known as brown coal. Geologists classify lignite as coal even though it is technically peat that never fully mineralized. When burned, it produces less heat, more carbon dioxide, and four times as much sulphur as its superior cousin: black coal. Where deposits of lignite occur, such as in the Turów basin, it does so in abundance and close to the surface. The discovery of the cheap, dirty energy source thus provoked a rapid industrialisation of the Lusatia region based on power plants that bolstered local industry to grow and concentrate, along with its associated pollution.
By the second half of the twentieth century, mines, power plants and factories had contributed to making the borderland region between Poland, Czech Republic and Germany one of the most polluted in Europe. It was consequently dubbed the ‘Black Triangle’ on account of its extremely high levels of industrial pollution and the concomitant effects on human and environmental health. The intensity and concentration of soot and dust spewed out from the power plants turned the sky a dreary grey—but the problem was never fully contained there. Sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides combined with the clouds and winds and migrated across Europe, discharging as acid rain. The phenomena spurred media headlines and stimulated a growing environmental consciousness, contributing to reforming environmental protection legislation across the continent.1
… activity in the pit is minimal. We curiously inspect its expanse using binoculars that we pass around. Eventually we locate sluggish activity in the pit's western corner—a giant digging machine moving at a pace indiscernible at this distance. The screeching sound of the digger and the scraping of the coal from the subsurface is inaudible from where we stand. Instead, we focus on the repetitive clatter of the conveyor belt that encircles the pit and transports the freshly extracted coal to feed the power plant. Day in, day out, dozens of kilometres of rattling conveyor belt connect the Turów lignite pit with the Turów power station consuming coal and discharging white clouds that seamlessly blend into the summer skies…
Not unlike the media coverage of the Black Triangle and the spread of acid rain in the 70s and 80s, the media landscape reporting on the struggles surrounding the Turów mine operations is complex and contradictory and requires an investigation of its own.2 As a coal region at the "margins of [national and EU-wide] consciousness" (Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat, 2023), the conflict between Poland, Czech Republic, and later Germany has set a precedent of an inner-European conflict around unfolding energy transitions. The conflict inflamed in 2021, when the Czech Republic first sued the Polish state at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) demanding them to stop operations of the Turów mine for its harming effects on the environment. The former Polish PiS government rejected the claims and prolonged the mining licence, arguing the importance of the operations for the local and national economy and its connected social situation. In September 2021, the CJEU fined Poland with penalties for issuing the mining licence without having carried out an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) before. In 2022, the Polish and Czech government came to a bilateral agreement, which did not resolve the situation, with groundwater levels continuing to sink due to insufficient environmental measures taken. As of March 2024, after several contradictory court rulings, the mine is kept in operation and the situation of the region remains uncertain.
In the clashing of human and geological time scales that marks the Anthropocene (Chakrabarty, 2009), pockets of ancestral sunlight in the form of nonliving coal, formed over many millions of years, are pried open and consumed in the glimpse of an eye in what Povinelli refers to as the ‘Carbon Bomb’—the liberation of vast reserves of carbon into the atmosphere, setting off an unprecedented chain of events. Heat. Instability. Uncertainty, where “... life is merely another internal organ of a planet that will still be here when it is not, when we are not, undergoing its unfolding, creating who knows what.” (Povinelli, 2016, p. 176). In just about two decades, the vast deposit of energy bound up in the remaining 760 million tonnes of coal in the Turów basin will be consumed and metabolised by the local power plant. The yield will feed into the Polish regional energy supply of the Polish industries and population, covering as of today about 7% of their overall energy needs. The deeper the digging, the greater the need for groundwater management, as groundwater has become scarce in nearby Czech communities. The ground has also become porous, causing cracks in the buildings and afflicting even more communities on the German side. Indistinct, long term effects are however hard to measure up against short-term gains and highlights the need for more ways to mediate the entangled conditions that create patchy distributions of harm around sites of extraction and give perspective on the uneven and situated exposure and experience of them.
… on our way down the hill to the car we stop to collect stinging nettles from a small forest clearing. Urtica dioica, stinging nettle, a plant with many healing capacities, is often heralded for its resilience. At home on damp, nitrogen-rich grounds, it can make a habitat in all sorts of places. While getting stung, we remember nettle can metabolise heavy metals from the soil, such as arsenic and lead and store them in their roots and leaves, helping to remediate the soils over time. We harvest only a small bag, mindful of the proximity to the mine and the nearby road and chatter amongst ourselves about the multitude of imperceptible industrial residues that have been materially caught up in the region's fossil regime—all the heavy metals discharged into ground water through the violent scraping of the earth’s crust, Zn, Pb, Cu, Hg, Cd, Cr, and As set free; all the wayward particles released by the heat of the firing kiln and dispersed through towering coal chimneys. These residues, although imperceptible to the naked eye, never truly disappeared. They eventually settled back into the ground and continue to recompose, some merging with the tissue of the very plants we are picking…
The trouble at hand is that the toxicities associated with energy metabolism shapeshift in environmental media over time; smoggy skies and scarred earth transform into contaminated and mismanaged groundwater and altered vegetation. The winds and rains recompose the conditions for ongoingness and accentuate already deeply rooted injustices. Time solidifies them. Characteristic of toxicity is its propensity to disappear—out of sight, and out of mind—as it challenges dominant western, ocularcentric and cartesian assumptions about the world. At the same time, the indistinct contamination of life continually interconnects us in new and unknown ways, and forces linkages between supposedly separate beings in ever expanding toxic commons (Mueller, 2021). Bodies however remain inseparable from the ongoing and recomposing flows of matter around us, through our breath, our guts and as well as our imagination.
“The stomach is the greatest alchemist” (Böhme & Böhme, 1996, p.127, translation by the authors)—so one can recapitulate the core of Paracelsus’ bodily cosmology. When imagining the human organs functioning as microcosms in relation to the macrosphere of the planets, the human being is inevitably captured in planetary processes and their arhythmic cycles of life and non-life. The issue at hand is always the uneven distribution of harm, depending from where we stand, and what we see and sense. In her reflections on the ancestral catastrophe of late liberalism, Povinelli asserts that “... the common body is still not acknowledged to be common” (Povinelli 2021, p. 31) and continues to ask if it is not “... ethically sensible for those who produced and benefited from the distribution of commodities and waste to be the first in line to begin spooning it up?” Her words are salient food for those reflecting on the long term—a practice and a privilege that very few can afford.
… We heat water on a small cooking plate and mix it with the young stinging nettle leaves. The air grows damp and fills with a familiar grassy scentWe pass around cups of tea as a way to connect our displaced guts with the peripheral mining conflict. Nettle becomes a medium in which to trace metabolic pathways of transcorporal exchange. We let the warm liquid wash down our throats and warm our bellies as a way to conjure the faint interconnections that knit together sites and senses and bring analysis back to the body. While the cooking plate sucks electrical currents out of a socket to heat the tea water for our communal consumption, the ethical implications of living with a human hunger for energy come to the fore. As do the bodies and lands that remain disproportionately burdened by it. Strong scented horseradish from the Polish side circulates too, as does Bohemian beer, in remembrance of the miners’ diets. A steaming pot next to an open window helps to summon a collectively porous state…
Rooted in the ancient Greek, μεταβολή “a change”, metabolism is a concept equipping us to recognise the continuously dissolving and nourishing flows, exchanges and interactions, around us, and within us - the very processes that enable and sustain life. As an approach in artistic or aesthetic practice, metabolism is an invitation to develop and train embodied methods and modes of experience. It provides strategies for living into the unstable realities that are the present. Recognising the metabolic processes within us, gives us access to perceiving the transformations around us. As internal to our bodies, they reveal “our interrelationships with the world [as] continuously configured through material and affective processes” (Förster, 2021, p. 169), allowing us to “adapt [...] and keep the organism capable of acting” (Förster, p. 13) in shifting planetary climates. Through our thinking and sensing, we recognize the two kinds of metabolic pathways within and around us: We go through phases of catabolically picking apart and analysing and anabolically re-assembling and making sense anew.
While the conceptual turn of elemental media destabilised the boundaries between human and environment and emphasises the human entanglement within the elements as particulate (Starosielski, 2019), metabolic media are literally transgressing our bodies as porous and in flux. Metabolic media, so is our suggestion, might be understood as a set of practices that equip us with new sensorial means to perceive our embeddedness in the transmutations of matter and energy. We inhabit these metabolic media as they dis- and re-assemble: from the deep-time metamorphoses of plants into peat and peat into coal, that combusts and shapeshifts into particles of fly ash contaminating atmosphere, water bodies, soil and vegetation. We ingest sunlight and the nitrate-enriched soils of the mining site by drinking stinging nettle and continue to process them in our own bodies. Through the intimacy with these metabolisms, we become aware of our embeddedness in contradictory and disturbed cycles of life and the accelerated flows of energy. Becoming sensitive to our own energetic entanglement makes us aware that we are enveloped in the accelerations of the Anthropocene with our every cell.
… lined up on the table are sterilised jars alongside a colourful assortment of local produce bought at the border crossing between Poland and the Czech republic: beetroot, celery, parsnips, cucumbers and horseradish. Next to them, a neat pile of white, crystalline salt from Halle where it once bore the name of white gold. In contrast to pickling which involves adding acidic, vinegar-based brine, fermenting only makes use of salt and the natural bacteria present in the air and crops. The salt suppresses the ‘bad’ bacteria from perpetuating the inevitable cycle of death and decay, and instead supports the ‘good’ bacteria that converts carbs and sugars into an acid that can preserve food over longer periods of time. Life’s ongoingness slowly grinds to a halt and waits for us in a jar, just like those sublime ancient sun-rays stored in the darkness of lignite…
In the adjacent lignite basin in the flat lands of Lower Lusatia in former East Germany, new, post-fossil energy regimes are unfolding, perpetuating undead patterns of extraction. The former lignite mines for which dozens of villages and their inhabitants have been devastated and relocated, are now called ‘low conflict zones’ in the name of propagating a ‘green’ transition. Here, exploited mines have either transformed into water-scarce lake landscapes, vast solar parks or wind farms. These uncertain transitions turn their attention from the subterranean to the skies, seduced by the endless, yet volatile powers of the winds and the sun and fuelled by the impending heating of the atmosphere. Securing and storing the yield of the elements however requires digging for rare earth minerals and metals, such as Lithium, elsewhere—a process that inevitably composes new shadow places (Plumwood 2008). The sun becomes “exploited or even enslaved [...] as [...] every natural resource in what we call the age of Anthropocene, when planets and stars are no longer considered gods” (Timofeeva, 2022, p. 14).
Unless recalibrated, imaginaries of energy and power remain narrow and stubbornly linear. As do the conditions required to perpetuate a certain type of life capable of obscuring other logics and sense-abilities. The alluring rays of the sun can however form both prisms and penumbras when diffracted through the right medium. We therefore propose fermenting and communal consumption as a metabolic aesthetic practice that can open sensitivities to energy circulating in- and through us and situate us in proximity to it. Conserving, observing and ingesting matter creates embodied understandings for the uneven relations that bundle together to compose energy and power.
Black Triangle Pickles for ≈ 2475 ml
(a tiny bit of local produce sourced close to a mine)
(a few) Beetroot, leaf and root
(one) Celery
(two) Horseradish
(a few) Cucumber
(½ hand full per litre) Salt
(a couple) Laurel leaf
(one jar) Horseradish paste with cranberries
(one) Dark bread
(one bag) Handpicked stinging nettle
Clean the vegetables. Chop them, orienting yourself towards the shape of the glass jars you have. Bring the water with salt and laurel leaf to boil. While the water is boiling, serve your commrads small pieces of bread with a bit of horseradish paste and warm nettle tea as the pickling takes a few weeks, at least. Arrange the veggies in the glass jar thinking of colours and levels of sugar in everything. Poor the hot water over them. After you close them, turn them around to rest. Wait for everything to settle and then distribute them, generously.
Think of the diet of the miners and call your elders. Don’t be afraid of salt.
Bibliography:
Böhme, Gernot, Böhme, Hartmut (1996) Feuer Wasser Luft. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Elemente. C.H. Beck.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2009) The Climate of History. Four Theses. Critical Inquiry 35/2.
Förster, Desirée (2021) Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes. Meson Press.
Margulis, Lynn, Sagan, Dorion (2000) What is Life? University of California Press.
Müller, Simone M. (2021) Toxic Commons: Toxic Global Inequality in the Age of the Anthropocene. Environmental History 26/3.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. (2021) Between Gaia and Ground. Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism. Duke University Press.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. (2016) Geontologies. A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Duke University Press.
Plumwood, Val (2008) Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling. Australian Humanities Review.
Starosielski, Nicole (2019) The Elements of Media Studies. States of Media+Environment 1/1.
Timofeeva, Oxana (2022) Solar Politics. Polity Press.
Turnbull, Thomas (2022) Tellurische Revolutionen. In Andreas L. Hofbauer, Alexander Klose, Ivo Gurschler (eds.) Erden. Naturphilosophische Brocken. Schriften zur Verkehrswissenschaft, 45. Sonderzahl Verlagsgesellschaft Wien.
Footnotes:
1. The forum for the international cooperation on air pollution is the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’s (UNECE) Convention on long-range transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP) that was agreed upon in 1979.
2. This project article only displays a condensed version of the complex and contested situation around the Turów mine. In our research process, we took into account many articles on the Turów conflict in international media, often distributing conflicting information about the precise course of events, as well as opinionated arguments. Conversations with Czech and Polish colleagues confirmed how polarised the media coverage around this highly politicised the case is, and how fractured the perception of local populations at different sides of the border are. What further complicated overlooking the situation was the fact that the case kept on unfolding parallel to our reserach. The situation and its media reception thus demands for a thorough investigation and in depth evaluation in its own right, which is neither the focus of this article, nor could it possibly be achieved within this format. We decided to use the historical and current reporting by Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat, Veronika Sušová-Salminen as our main reference, with support in preparation of the project from Piotr Lewandowski, Iwona Lewandowska and Czesław Kulesza, published in ten parts between September to December 2023, on the journalism platform Cross-Border-Talk, titled Lost Opportunity for a Just Transition: the Case of Turów Lignite Mine, latest with an update in March 2024, The Turów Case comes back to court. The reason for this decision is that the journalistic research behind these articles were pursued collaboratively across borders and across sources, with explicit awareness that no comprehensive and objective picture on the situation is possible but rather explicitly acknowledging the complexity of the situation and potential limits of knowledge. In the English speaking realm of academic research, no attempts of a systematic account could be found when this article was being finalised.
3. Press release by the CJEU on the penalties, Sept 2021: Poland is ordered to pay the European Commission a daily penalty payment of €500 000 because it has not ceased lignite extraction activities at Turów mine.
4. See for the detailed information on the topography of Turów and the environmental effects of the mine a report by Ralf E. Krupp commissioned by Greenpeace, from 2020: Gutachten zu den grenzüberschreitenden Auswirkungen einer Fortführung des Abbaus der Braunkohlelagerstätte Turów (Polen) auf die Gewässer in Deutschland.