Renaturation

Lusatia’s lakeside district is supposedly the largest group of inland lakes in Europe. This landscape is entirely artificial. The lakes are produced through the flooding of former mining areas. The result is a vast deliberately produced landscape touted as a future economic and recreational zone. The plans include fisheries, floating solar parks, windmill farms, recreational sites for swimming and boating, and forests and biodiverse ecosystems. This abundance will emerge from the destroyed and depleted landscapes of coal mining that pervaded the region under the former GDR. From desert to diversity. From scarcity to abundance. From carbon extraction to prosperous sustainability. These are the rhetorics, and imaginaries that infuse contemporary reclamation, or as the German’s label it: “renaturation” practices.

These zones thus appear the very apotheosis of a new post-scarcity and post-natural economy. They are also the zones of negotiating structural (post-socialist) and technological (post-industrial economies and post-carbon imaginaries) changes. This landscape thus promoted, for me, a series of ruminations upon how this place mirrors other places in the world, and this zone as a site for remediating and negotiating both geo-political and socio-technical challenges ideas of territory, economy, and nation.

Renaturation arguably could be said to be a new planetary governing logic. I say this because so many of the landscapes we now occupy are clearly human engineered, and many of them must negotiate histories of extraction, contamination, and threats from climate and biodiversity crises. Renaturation appears to be one response. Renaturation, I argue, comes replete with new forms of space, territory, economy, and time. While the landscape appears desolate, the discourse is abundantly positive in the master plans and future images of these former mining sites. The process of renaturation in Lusatia thus provides an interesting mirror image of other techniques and sites— for example Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Smart Infrastructures, and financial instruments—that all provide more from less. This new vision of plenty, comes with its spatial forms most often identified by smart and green cities like Singapore (also built on reclaimed and renaturated landscapes), Dubai (now being ‘greened’), and Hudson Yard, New York (optimized for water, energy, and information management). Closely identified with this new terraforming scale of technological habitats are new types of territories—such as Cottbuser Ostsee, and other mega-infrastructures such as Katwijk, Netherlands and the Great Garuda, Indonesia, to name a few. There are also endless new mega structures, airports, and sea walls all constructed on the remnants of environmental degradation through industrial practice scattered throughout the world. This practice follows the global logic of continued extraction of minerals and carbon-based resources. Intense use of data and AI in geological modelling, better forms of recycling and a cyclical economy of waste materials, and increased optimization of material and chemical processes, will allow mines formerly imagined as exhausted to continue to produce growth and wealth indefinitely.¹

Renaturation also has its own temporality. Cyclical but statistical. Things will change, but in recursive cycles. The circular economy grounded in the use of waste materials and heat emissions for new landscapes, energy sources, and architectures as well as fantasies of geoengineering and carbon capture technologies to offset carbon emissions, are imagined to make extraction a resource. To move extraction from simply the removal of materials and taking from a landscape, into a benefit, a productive capacity, a new geoengineering ecology. Carbon energy extraction becomes an additive force rather than a subtractive one for economy and ecology. Ecology and economy are also linked through the Latin and Greek words “oeco” and “oikos”, which means household or home, and has now come to mean habitat or environment. Renaturation thus suggests a longer process by which economic and political questions become naturalized or normative through the literal collapse of the “natural” world with that of economy and technology (if we consider the built environment a technical project).

This brings us back to another term very proximate to renaturation, but not exactly— renaturalization. According to the German government² naturalization and renaturalization are the processes of being granted citizenship or re-granted citizenship in the case of dispossession (primarily for victims of National Socialism who were forcibly stripped of citizenship). This dual language—both renaturalizing and naturalizing people and landscapes—poses some final interesting questions therefore for what other possibilities renaturation as a process might denote. Would adding a “z” help us view these practices of terraforming and artificiality as also deeply political acts of making place for people and more than human life forms, and would it open the discussion away from normative assumptions about what is the best or nicest waterfront, to what types of life are welcomed and made at “home” so to speak? Could the remaking of environments in the wake of economies of extraction also perform new types of naturalization and citizenship making? And for whom? How might the emerging economies of addition and extension be re-imagined into other modes of envisioning cyborg forms of life, and new relations, not only between us and more than human species, but for nations. These are questions that such processes engender, particularly in zones such as Lusatia where histories of post-socialism and German nation building intersect with emerging information and energy economies.

1. Orit Halpern, Planetary Intelligence, 2021 ↩︎
2. https://www.bva.bund.de/EN/Services/Citizens/ID-Documents-Law/Citizenship/citizenship_node.html, accessed March 2024 ↩︎