Panel
Knowledge Stuck at the Border? Transnational Cooperation versus National Conflicts over (the Future of) Coal Mining in the ‘Black Triangle’

Since the end of the Cold War the Czech-German-Polish borderlands – as an important site of local coal mining – are experiencing environmental, political and social reconfigurations. As one of Europe’s most polluted and most environmentally damaged regions before 1989, the fall of communism triggered urgent calls for the environmental transformation and recovery of this border zone. New environmental policies alongside cross-border cooperation between the three nations played an important role in the restoration of the region’s ecology. This border region has indeed made progress, albeit slowly, in transitioning towards the environment’s rehabilitation. However, in recent years these borderlands also witnessed major conflicts in the field of energy politics, which simultaneously mirror larger European struggles over appropriate responses to the climate and energy crises. On this basis, this interdisciplinary panel seeks to explore both the transnational circulation of knowledge about the necessary environmental transformation and protection of the borderlands while also identifying the different developmental trajectories of the neighboring countries and local communities. Instead of just focusing on recent discourses, the panel aims to also incorporate historical perspectives that explore the postsocialist experiences in and of this border region.

Advisors and abstracts: 

• Dr. Torsten Meyer (Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum, Leibniz Research Museum for Geo-resources)

'Mining (...) creates new cultural values' - 'Making nature' in the Lusatian lignite mining district (1922-2010)'

“Lunar landscape”, or “battlefield” - these are the terms often used to describe the legacy of open-cast lignite mining. These terms characterise the landscape wounds that formed the starting point for “making nature” in the Lusatian lignite-mining district. The mining district is thematically highly relevant from many perspectives: The forester Rudolf Heusohn, who had been working in the district since 1922, published the first scientific book on recultivation in 1929. In the 1950s, forestry scientist Wilhelm Knabe developed the scientific basis for the reclamation of lignite mining landscapes in the mining district. Landscape architect Otto Rindt designed and realised Lake Senftenberg, the flooded residual hole of the Niemtsch open-cast mine, which was partially put into operation in 1973. The lake was to form the starting point of a chain of lakes; an idea of Rindt's that the IBA Fürst-Pückler-Land took up in its projects between 2000 and 2010. In short: “Making nature” in the Lusatian mining district provided numerous innovative impulses in the fields of landscape architecture, forestry and recultivation research in the 20th and 21st centuries.

• Kamil Bembnista, M.A. (Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research)

Multispecies Borders: Rethinking Territoriality through Justice and Transition

My contribution explores the conceptual and practical implications of reimagining borders through the lens of multispecies justice and more-than-human interdependence in art-based research. It argues that embracing uncertainty—ontological, ecological, and epistemological—is crucial to expanding border research beyond human-centric imaginaries. While inequalities have long been recognized in terms of income, status, or access to resources, these must also be understood through the unequal distribution of agency and livability across species and environments (Torkington, 2012). Drawing on literature in multispecies justice, this contribution considers how extending representation and ethical consideration to animals, plants, and ecosystems reshapes how we understand borders—not only as geopolitical constructs, but as porous, co-constituted, and ecologically entangled zones of negotiation and resistance. I engage with examples from energy transition processes in the region around the Turow Coal Mine by mobilizing participatory filmmaking with local actors. These cases of art-based research show the ways in which nonhuman actors—rivers, fish, algae, and chemical compounds—become entangled in governance failures and reveal the limits of anthropocentric frameworks in responding to cross-border environmental crises. Recognizing the role of biophysical characteristics in shaping place, and the co-creation of space by nonhuman actors, the presentation contributes to a growing body of work that foregrounds multispecies interdependence in environmental governance. Ultimately, it argues for a border studies approach attuned to the complex entanglements of life across species and systems—where borders are not simply lines between nation-states, but thresholds of multispecies space-making.

• Matej Moravansky, M.A. (Charles University Prague)

The Anatomy of Failure: State Socialist Decoupling in East Germany and Czechoslovakia

Today, the central vision of climate and energy policies within the European Union is to decouple economic growth from ecological consequences. However, a similar attempt at decoupling also took place within the state socialist regimes of the GDR and Czechoslovakia. Both regimes perceived the environmental crisis in the "Black Triangle" and, under the pressure of ecological harms and oil shocks, considered the energetic model based on coal and fossil fuels from the Soviet Union as unsustainable. Thus, they tried to implement several modernisation policies in the 1970s and 1980s to decouple the economy's growth from its consequences, whereas they collaborated across the border to do so. The paper will examine ideological sources and guidelines on the top level of the hierarchy, characterise the central tendency of the regime's politics, and briefly discuss why the attempt failed and its consequences for the socialist period.

Chaired by PD Dr. habil. Friederike Kind-Kovács and Dr. Maren Hachmeister, Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies, TU Dresden

This panel is part of the conference Transformation knowledge as a challenge for societal change: theory and regional practice in Zittau.

Conference program