Vattenfall, a Swedish energy company, hopes to relocate the village and its residents in order to strip-mine the ground underneath for lignite, or "brown coal."
"They would tear everything down, dig up the cemetery, blow up the church and cut down all the trees," said Christian Huschga, a screenwriter and father of two who has lived in Atterwasch for more than 30 years.
Billions of tons of brown coal lie buried underneath the Lausitz region, a gently rolling landscape of pine forests, farm fields, and rural villages about 100 miles (161 kilometers) south of Berlin, in what was once East Germany. In the past century, the landscape has been scarred and pitted by strip mines hundreds of feet deep that sprawl over dozens of square miles.
In all, 136 villages in the Lausitz region have been destroyed to make way for massive strip mines since 1934. Most of the destruction took place after World War II, when the communist government depended on brown coal to power its cities and factories. Pollution from the mines and from primitive, dirty, coal-fired power plants was a major issue for the democracy activists whose efforts eventually helped topple the Berlin Wall. When Germany was reunified in 1989, many of the outdated plants were shut down, and locals thought the era of forced resettlement was over.
But brown coal is making an unexpected return. The development has environmentalists worried. Germany is often seen as a model, thanks to its strong push for renewable energy. Politicians here have committed to 80 percent renewable power by 2050, and strong public support and generous subsidies have seen solar and wind power grow dramatically in the past decade. Roughly a quarter of Germany's electricity today comes from renewable sources; in the United States, just 12 percent does.
With this commitment to the "Energiewende," or energy revolution, it's a mystery to many why villages like Atterwasch are still at risk. ...
