Rewild, Reset, Restore: Abandonment and Reinstating of Post-Mining Landscapes

Abstract

Post-mining landscapes are legally specific in Germany as they are considered non-landscapes, which are created as part of the mining activities and need to be restored. By law, mining companies are obliged to transform the area back into “landscapes” that have a “use” after the extraction is completed. These regulations are heavily influenced by “culture-nature” dichotomies and normative ideas of what counts as landscape and what counts as “useful”. Against the background of ethnographic research, this paper engages with decommissioned mining landscapes in East Germany. Engaging with a landscape requires expanding our understanding of social relationships to go beyond the mere visual description of post-mining landscapes and instead to explore them through a deep understanding of ecological systems to contextualize and understand interactions between different species and materials. In the presentation, I first question underlying notions of nature in the management of post-mining landscapes. In a second step, I use a case study in the Central German Mining District to show how “nature”, “abandonment” and “landscape” are differently constructed, imagined and created by various actors.