Over the past month or two, if you follow German news....almost every night has some 'update' to this ongoing saga.
So, let me introduce you to the Hambacher Forest story. The region is up in the northwest of Germany, in the North Rhineland Westphalia region (near Aachen). It is adjacent to an area rich in coal.
About six years ago, this idea came up with the owner of the adjacent property (used for coal mining) to do an open-pit type situation with the Hambach Forest (said to be 120,000 years old). The company? RWE.
As you can imagine....environmentalists lined up and opposed the expansion. It would have been an open pit area over roughly 30 square miles. Tree-cutting was supposed to start up two months ago (courts gave the go-ahead). But then these environmentalists came in....set up camps....tree-sitting spots, and the tree-cutting came to a halt.
Cops got called in. Different tactics were deployed. At some point.....journalists were hyped up to come in and tell this story (mostly from the prospective of the environmentalists). For whatever reason, this one journalist felt the need to climb up on a tree (at least 30 feet up)....without any safety gear. He slipped, and fell....dying there at the scene.
The court now stepped in.....partly because of the hyped up atmosphere, and partly because of a science report that some endangered bat species lives in the local area....ordering the whole tree-cutting episode to halt for the time being.
Worth getting into the top ten articles of the nightly news on public TV (ARD or ZDF)? Well....most Germans would say no. For a period there (probably two weeks straight before the journalist fell)....there were nightly updates, some done live from the scene.
What usually occurs in cases like this....the environmentalists make a big enough fuss to halt the Germany project. So the company wises up....goes off to some third-world country and signs a deal to haul coal from there (at ridiculous rates, which the German consumer has to pay) and marginally cleans the site after they finish the coal project. On the other side of this story.....this open-pit method shocks a lot of Germans when they look at the image later.
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