Tree Time

“This is a 17-million-year old tree!”, says the guide at the lignite mine, handing us a small darkened piece of bark that he had disentangled from a large chunk of brown coal, found in a pit at the Welzow Süd open-cast mine. Lignite or brown coal is essentially the product of millions of years of accumulated peat. In Lusatia, lignite was formed between 5 and 25 million years ago along the geological line of an ice age glacier that melted down and compressed decaying organic matter. Back then, mushrooms hadn’t yet evolved to decompose organic materials as efficiently as they do now. In this geological timeframe lignite was formed.¹

I am moved by the deep temporality implied in what was once a tree and is now in my hand. The guide tells me I can take it home and hands me a plastic bag. “Leave it in this bag or put it in a glass jar, otherwise you will get dust everywhere”, he tells us, his face already showing dark spots of dust. How long will that piece of wood resist the workings of time? Will it succeed the decomposition of the plastic bag that wraps it, estimated to 1000 years? And what did that tree look like?

With the plastic bag in my hand, I watch how the machines—tractors and a monstrously huge excavator—prepare the ground for the lignite extraction. It eats and spits out large chunks of overburden, breaking it in sand and stones that are then further processed and distributed by the two tractors. One of the tractors piles up slices of a grey, hard-looking material. I ask of what kind of stone that is. “Pieces of a house”, the guide tells me quietly. They will be removed later. What decades ago was a village and housed a community, is now a pile of bothersome material, revealing the not-so deep history of the giant hole.

The large beech tree offers a shade that makes a popular picnic spot, Edith Penk tells us. The impressive size of its trunk indicates that it might be 500 yeas old. In a documentary about the displacement of sorbian communities and devastation of Lusatian landscapes because of the mining industry,² the Sorbian activist picks up the so called ‘tree-guestbook’ that is kept in a glass jar placed by the roots. Picnickers, passers-by, wanderers, and dwellers leave a message—sometimes an ode to the tree or a small description of their joyful day, and sometimes an angry plea against its death sentence. After hugging the beech (her open arms not even covering one side of the large tree trunk), Edith places a new, blank guestbook inside the glass and takes the filled guestbook home, where she stores several other older guestbooks with messages to the beech.

“The beech tree is gone. They must have done it overnight, next day there was nothing there”, she leaves an audio message to the film directors. 500 years gone overnight. That tree was symbol for Edith’s and her comrades’ activism against the expansion of lignite mines in Lusatia. Trees—these immobile, tall, and vigorous living beings—give a sense of memory and temporal stability to a place that is threatened to be rapidly and radically transformed, made into to a space of and for machines that dig. In the resettlement of Neu Mühlrose/Miłoraz—the latest of 137 villages swallowed by the lignie mine, and perhaps the final one before the coal phase-out—a large, dry tree-trunk was placed onto the new main square. Perhaps it reminds the dwellers of a once-living tree in their old home-village just 7km away. Or perhaps its deadness—visible and incontestable—reminds them of their displacement, a reminent of a long history of coal extractivism that will soon be in the past.

1. David Bielo, White Rot Fungi Slowed Coal Formation, Scientific American, 2012; However, this hypothesis has been debated, see Matthew P. Nielsen et al., Delayed fungal evolution did not cause the Paleozoic peak in coal production, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2016 ↩︎
2. Blaubeeren – cerne jagody, short film by Maja Nagel and Julius Günzel, 2013 ↩︎