Originally published in Catalan in Solidaridad Obrera as Krasnyi Collective | 3/06/17
The milky light vaguely illuminates the room through the big piece of glass that is set as a window. Fox stretches out and stares at the crowns of the trees outlined on the weak winter sky, filling it all out. The young naked branches sway discreetly, and the entire room sways slowly along. Fox, whose actual name isn’t Fox, picks from the floor the books that kept him reading last night by the light of a lantern and gets dressed. Military pants, mountain boots, harness, carabiners, balaclava. Seated at the edge of the pallet structure stuffed with straws that holds his cabin, with his legs hanging over twenty meters over the ground, he passes a thick rope through the metal piece shaped like a number eight that is tied up to his harness. And he jumps. And he slides down with the ease and normalcy of someone who has been living for years in a house on a tree.
Same way as Fox, neither Hodei nor Siao nor Fledermaus possess such funny names for real. But everyone who comes to live in the Hambach forest is confined to some security measures. Many of them have spent days in jail. Repression against the forest defenders is a daily thing: nightly raids, surveillance from helicopters and police patrolling the paths at dawn or silently waiting at night under the tree houses. The activists have been gassed, violently arrested and seriously ill-treated in prison. Bruises, broken wrists. Many of them have legal proceedings underway and some have been obliged to swear that they would never set foot in the forest again. Thus nicknames, and often balaclavas, become security measures. Those who approach from Buir train station are often identified on the way and honked at by the white cargo vans of the mining company's security, who lately dare to enter the forest roads to release their dogs for chasing activists. They ran over one of the defenders last January, who ended up in the hospital and then in jail.
Before, when you still couldn't see the emptiness behind the branches, when you still had to walk and walk among trees to be able to spy on the machines, the forest paths were only trodden by the deer and other animals that live here, and by the occupants who walk them silently even in the dark because they have learned them by heart. Before the start of the last logging season, which this autumn swallowed up forest and spat out dead wood, the rats didn't come to the camp kitchen to feed.
The kitchen is vegan, and it’s built with adobe and wood. Also built this way, there stand a common room, a guest hotel, a library, a theater and the cabin where Coriander lives. And there are also several mobile caravans installed in the camp, many of them colorful old trailers from the German countryside that remind of some mysterious circus from another century. Others are full of painted messages for the visitor: 'Solidarity with the freedom fighters of Rojava', 'Il faut l'esprit dur et le coeur tendre'. They call this campsite the Meadow, it is located at the edge of the forest and it serves as a place for support, coordination and community life for inhabitants, supporters and visitors. This land was ceded by the owner, who bought it with the aim to give it to the first occupants of the forest by April 2012. The solar panels and the windmill that turns on the top of the entrance tower serve to charge batteries, flashlights and cell phones. The free-shop, the information room, the bathroom, the technology caravan, the greenhouse, the composting and the dry toilets complete the facilities for a day-to-day as self-sufficient as possible.
Coriander explains with his sweet, slow talk how easy it seems to build these eco-friendly cabins with the help of a handful of people in spring or fall: a hole in the ground, plastic sheeting to protect it from moisture, a pallet structure, and wooden roof beams is all they need. The adobe is then mixed with water and trampled until it has the right texture and firmness for the walls, adding sand to combat cracks when it dries and straw to join the pieces together. He arrived for a Skills Sharing workshop but decided to stay, because this space inspired him the urge to take care of it. Now he spends no more than four days outside the Meadow. He visits friends and family, takes in the stress of constant repression and then returns, because here he learns from others in the communal living, and because for him "it seems the healthiest place to live for now". Many people visit the occupation and stay, others return seasonally. Almost all of them come back, says Garlic, because "when you come to Hambi, something of you gets trapped in the forest and something of the forest stays inside you. An invisible bond, difficult to break”. This woman from Barcelona got to know the project more than three years ago and since then she can't let too much time go by before escaping from the city: "Here many emotions are mixed and many experiences enter inside you, creating the obligation to keep coming back, to not to leave the forest alone... because of an explosive love feeling that is born when you see the forest, when you sleep in the Meadow, when you live a life above the trees and feel the fight for nature in your daily life".
The void extends as far as the eye can see while the horizon becomes blurred, gray, sickly. Against it, a monstrously large, metallic, cold structure: the excavator. With its gigantic shovels full of hooks, and its relentless, persistent, hammering turning and turning. In front of the last barricades erected in the forest, a deserted and desolate land where only piles of scattered and aseptically stacked logs can be seen. This is the mine, the deepest man-made hole on the European continent. Energy mega-corporation RWE has caused the deforestation of 93% of the forest in the Rhineland region, where Hambach is located. Here it lies the largest of the three open-cast mines that RWE operates in Germany. Its lignite coal mining activity makes it the largest CO 2 emitter in Europe and, in turn, the number one climate change agent in the continent. For every tonne of lignite mined, one tonne of CO 2 is produced, up to a total of 100 million per year. This is released together with fine dust and other radioactive pollutants through the stacks of five combustion plants. The trains carrying the fossil material never stops, and the light pollution is such that the night never completely falls over Hambach.
There is, very close to the camp, a town that is pretty much a ghost town. Nobody walks around the deserted streets anymore, the shops are closed and the mailboxes of many houses are covered with adhesive tape. Most of the inhabitants have left, because the place where they were born will soon be swallowed up by the mine. One inhabitant tells how the story they heard as children turns into reality: “The mine is coming”, their parents told them forty years ago. The same is true for more than 55,000 people whom RWE has paid money to be relocated in other villages built outside their territory. Resigned, she believes that the occupiers of the forest are already late and that their resistance serves no purpose.
Back in the Meadow, as the sun goes down, a car arrives with fetched water from a communally bought house in Düren, a nearby town, where the inhabitants of the forest can rest, take a shower or wash their clothes. In the common room of the campsite the fireplace has been lit and some activists are eating dinner by the light of the lanterns. Others carry the full jugs to the camp and in the calm of the evening their footsteps sound wet on the muddy road. It is somehow mind-blowing that they always walk so immaculate. Those who will sleep on top of the trees take everything they need: food, water, blankets, walkie-talkies and plenty of batteries. They must not forget that the cabins are key positions of resistance and they must always be prepared for an eviction attempt. The first one, in November 2012, lasted four days and became the longest resistance ever occurred in Germany. Several activists had chained themselves to cement drums, one of them inside a tunnel dug a few meters under the ground. Since then, there have been three more evictions, but each time the forest was reoccupied soon after and the trees were re-inhabited. The tree houses, grouped in small bunches hidden in the forest's deepest lush greenery, also have their own names. Nest and Mona are up to two stories high, others are simple platforms on which a tent is erected. Chillum is the only one that has electric light - and even wifi - and that's why they call it the lighthouse of the forest.
Sabotaging pumps that lower the water level in the ground so that the mine does not flood. Causing material damage to company vehicles and facilities. Blocking the passage of trains or coal conveyors. These and other forms of direct action are part of the resistance in Hambach. The aim is to waste time and money for RWE and its workers, hindering the operation of the mine and slowing down its expansion. And this is why barricades of all kinds are being built again and again to make it more difficult for cranes to access the still standing forest.
The cranes often enter the forest on roads escorted by the police to cut down the trees that support the huts. In the bark rings left uncovered, one can read the age of the forest, which had remained for 12,000 years before coal was discovered under its fertile soil.
