THE OBJECT – THE WANDERING

The migration of a strip mine through the landscape is quite special. The mining area of a strip mine does not become larger, RWE calls the migration through the landscape ‘wandering’. The diggers steadily excavate brown coal, so that the surrounding power plants have an uninterrupted supply of brown coal. The Garzweiler strip mine is active 24 hours a day, every day of the year. At a speed of 2.282 cm per hour, the pit moves steadily through NRW. Nothing can withstand the diggers. Everything is dissolved, just like eventually the brown coal. An emptiness forms, a void compared to what used to be where there currently is the pit. The overburden that gets dug up at the front is being tipped into the back, where all the coal has already been removed. The tipping mostly happens as a mixture, which means that geological rock strata have been irrevocably destroyed. After that, reconstruction and revegetation follows :

« Through the mining, only the history of the cultivated land is lost. after the mine, a new beginning starts at zero hours. according to cur- rent knowledge, every functional aspect of the landscape can be fully restored. [...] additionally, we get given the chance to protect, with the support of RWE, landscape and animal species »,
says U. Dworschak, biologist at the land reclamation department.