Lignite Snake

“Wie eine Schlange” – like a snake. This is how our tour guide at the open pit mine Welzow Süd describes the pattern in the landscape left behind by the F60, a conveyor bridge used for strip mining in conjunction with excavators that (re-)moves the overburden to unearth the lignite. It is the longest and largest vehicle in the lignite mine and defines the horizon as we gaze across the open pit. I can’t help but picture it slithering across Lusatia. Right before excavators take deadly bites into lignite and its colossal body leaves massive traces.

But the comparison is flawed: Snakes digest, lignite snakes displace. Snakes inhabit, lignite snakes extract. Snakes leave traces, lignite snakes transform entire landscapes. Snakes metabolize, lignite snakes devastate. The dissonance shines light on what feels so wrong about the zoomorphic image in my head: Thinking of the constructions surrounding the F60 as a snake somehow naturalizes and trivializes what’s going on. I see a machine with desires, language, and volition (on the verge of) becoming a living being. No companies, no engineers, no consumers. Looking at a lignite snake rather than a mechanic conveyer belt obscured the way I saw the F60. An undulation that swallows everything in the way. Wavelike tracks where once were entire villages. The defining shape of post-mining areas. The F60 and its movement appeared to be part of the ecosystem of the mine and I need to remind myself that there was an ecosystem before the mine and that there will be one after the mine.

As the tour guide led me to think about the landscape in terms of the sentient beings it inhabits, my mind wanders from animated machines to migrating species. Swallows whose habitat was displaced, falcons who nest in the F60’s structure out of necessity, wolfs who are reappearing in the area after years of absence, and the many species whose existence is inherently shaped by and entangled with mining. During our days in Lower Lusatia, thinking about energy transition, their stories were few and not as present as those of humans, machines, and transforming technology.

Thinking the energy transition in more than-human terms is what the image of the lignite snake did for me. It confronted me with the imposing presence of gigantic machines, whose magnitude eludes human scale and whose operations reorder worlds. It made me aware of the silences—of those who cannot speak, of ecologies erased before they could be documented, of futures imagined without them. The lignite snake is not alive, but it animates destruction; it does not think, yet it reshapes the conditions of thought. And while it may mimic movement, gesture, even form, it does so in the service of an extractive logic that recognizes no life other than capital. In this image, I encountered both the seductive allure of metaphor and its dangers—the ease with which it can slip from critique into complicity. To see the snake is to glimpse the uncanny vitality of the machine, but also to be reminded that true vitality resists displacement, metabolizes loss, and insists on cohabitation. Perhaps the challenge is not to rid ourselves of the image, but to hold it accountable—to return to the more-than-human entanglements it evokes and obscures, and to ask what kinds of energy transitions might emerge if we began, not with machines, but with the lives that persist despite them.