Welcome To Lake Como Lakoma
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Bethany Copsey is an MA student in Planetary Poetics at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. With a background in soil science, she takes an interdisciplinary approach to ecological questions, particularly around soils and wetlands. She is a co-founder and member of RE-PEAT, which works to bring more awareness and appreciation to peatlands, with the understanding that this lays the foundation for greater restoration and conservation of peatlands in a way that centers ecological and social justice.
An alternate universe where there was a desire for a lake so strong that an entire industry was built around removing the coal layers, which was determined to be the simplest way to create a depression in the land big enough to accommodate the new lake and all of the numerous recreation activities that come along with it (kite surfing, bathing, cycling, surfing).
What do you do
when you want to
create a huge lake?
Simply remove all of the coal under the surface of the earth and put it somewhere else big enough to contain it (e.g., the atmosphere).
This idea is a response to the way the future visions are laid out in the brochure. The Cottbuser Ostsee project is projected in such a positive and idyllic manner that it seems as though it couldn‘t just be the back up plan, the clean-up job, the remediation strategy, or one of very limited options available to land that has borne such immense extraction. Instead, the plans describe a project that appears to be the fulfilment of a long-desired wish to have a recreational lake on this site. In this alternate world, the mining of coal is not the cause of the depression in the land but rather the means.