cop24

Whilst the international community is struggling to make meaningful progress that might avert the destruction and consummation of civilisation as we know it by committing to being less garbage tenets of this planet, the United States has not just backed out of global compacts that nudge in the right direction but has now assumed the mantle of profligate troll by counter-messaging the United Nations sponsored conference in Katowice (coat of arms pictured, the region known historically for its industry and coal reserves) with a pavilion extolling fossil fuels.
The US, despite the fact that antiquated oil barons can curry favour with the Trump administration and embarrassingly promote dirty fuel as a means to curb climate change, is certainly not alone in not upholding their end of the bargain and affecting real and saving change will require dramatic transitions away from not only traditional means of powering society but the ways in which society consumes resources itself. Activists chanting “keep in the ground” disrupted the start of the event with the remaining audience looking noticeably thinner after the protest.

all would be well if, if, if—say the green bells of cardiff

By touching coincidence, we are acquainted through the help of the always brilliant Nag on the Lake to the haunting lyrics of the American folksinger and political activist Pete Seeger’s ballad “The Bells of Rhymney,” sourced to Welsh miner turned poet Idris Davies on the same day that the worse mining accident in the history of the UK occurred one hundred and five years prior, the Senghenydd colliery disaster (1913).
Following the structure of the English nursery rhyme “Oranges and Lemons (Say the bells of Saint Clement’s),” Davies and Seeger count off the communities visited by hardship and loss throughout resource-rich but exploited land. In Glamorgan, Wales, the coal mines referenced above near Caerphilly have their own stanza in the original verse:

They will plunder willy-nilly,
Say the bells of Caerphilly.

After Seeger’s introduction of the sad lament, several other artists produced cover versions of the song—most famously The Byrds but also John Denver, Bob Dylan, Murray Head, The Band, Robyn Hitchcock and Sonny and Cher in 1965.

bürgewald

It’s bad enough that the majority of human history is myopic and making a public declaration of it seems even worse—one shouldn’t be rewarded for being “self-aware” indiscriminately.
Consigning a small remnant of a primeval wood outside of Köln to axe to expand a lignite extraction operation seems incredibly short-sighted—saying that Germany’s immediate energy needs outweigh the patch of twelve thousand year old Hambacher Forest, home to a unique ecosystem and archaeological sites that have never been properly assessed. Protesters have occupied the forest in tree houses in order to protect it for the past six years but have recently been evicted by police, and activists and some panel members on the coal company’s board of directors (which own the land) believe any decision should be deferred until the terms of Germany’s strategy for withdrawing from the mining business altogether are finalised.

kunst und kohle

A consortium of museums in Germany’s post-industrial heartland, das Ruhrgebiet (previously), is bidding a conflicted adieu to its withering coal-powered past.  Still the world’s largest producer of the particularly dirty variety of lignite (a very dubious honour) and amid ongoing protests to retire extraction and burning of coal altogether, the museums curate a fascinating, nostalgic reflection on the culture informed by coal towns and mining communities through a variety of artefacts that attest to working conditions and the relationships forged by the families whose daily routines included confronting mortality—either through accident or backbreaking labour. Read more about the retrospective of exhibits at Hyperallergic at the link above.

comet and cupid

NASA intends to make good on a 2014 proposal and launch a pair of missions within the six years to two very exotic locations.
One destination is the massive metallic asteroid 16 Psyche (named for the mythological tale of Cupid and Psyche, which astronomers believe to be the nickel-iron core of a proto-planet that was destroyed in the early stages of the formation of the Solar System. The other mission, Lucy—named after the hominid female discovered in Africa and recognised as the missing-link (herself named after “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”), will explore the so called Trojan asteroids, pulled away from the main belt by Jupiter’s gravity. While not much is not known about the nature of the Trojans, researchers believe that they represent the fossil remnants of planet formation. Aside from the pure exploratory value, the projects also will look at the feasibility of conducting mining operations, whose wealth make the notion of scarcity seem ridiculous.

borealis or miner forty-niner

One of the latest entries on BLDGBlog covers a fascinating and mysterious phenomena made visible by aerial surveying in the form of boreal rings of lighter pigmented, less thriving foliage that occur in the thousands throughout the forest landscape of Ontario.
Unlike crop-circles and similar occurrences that have either very mundane or other-worldly explanations, researchers are discovering a surprising and wholly unexpected account where ancient glaciation has pockmarked the woodlands with electromagnetic fields and the entire area is like a subtle circuit board. I just how that this exploration stays a geological and botanical one, rather than a tool for prospectors, though I suppose the latter could inform the former too.

dig dug

Spotted on the ever-excellent BLDGBlog, here is beautifully crafted nineteenth century German boardgame from the collections of the British Museum called Der Bergbau. This precursor to Minecraft (which also does not have rules, per se) looks like a version of 'Chutes and Ladders' but there are unfortunately no instructions on how to play.

saargebiet oder neutral moresnet

Prior to the treaties and terms that were drawn up at the conclusion of the World Wars, the German state of Saarland had no cohesive identity and did not exist as an administrative division, until after WWI, French forces governed the area as a protectorate, the resource-rich region having historic connections to both countries and, like neighbouring Alsace, dominated by each power at different times over the centuries. The goal of long term occupation was that France could recover from the industrial ravages of the Great War and prevent Germany's rearmament through the coal and mineral deposits in this land. With the end of the following war, Saarland once again became a French protectorate with the surrender and when German territory was divided amongst the Allied Forces, which was not reunited with the rest of Western Germany until 1957 with what is referred to as die Kleine Wiedervereinigung. The French also had designs on another region, to the north, the heavily industrial and more resource-rich lands of the Ruhr Valley (Ruhrgebiet) of North-Rhine Westphalia.
French negotiators felt that the Ruhrgebiet should either be managed like the Saar Protectorate or be created as a separate condominium state—like the singular case of Andorra, ruled by two co-princes, the president of France and the Spanish bishop of Urgell, or the strange compromise reached a century earlier in the sliver of land called Neutral Moresnet (Esperanto was also the official language of this tiny country), which was a shared responsibility between the Kingdoms of Prussia and Belgium. A zinc mine, the region's only significant source, was located here and the committee that redrew the map after the last spate of warring wanted to ensure that no one country could monopolise the supply. American and British representatives, however, felt that France's demands went too far and taking away the country's industrial-base would make rebuilding the war-torn land impossible. Concessions were arrived at, however, and in exchange for being able to re-establish itself as an independent federal republic, West Germany agreed to pool its coal and steel resources with the rest of Europe and impose quotas on how much it could use domestically.

geisterstädte

Der Spiegel’s English-language stories section reports on an exhibition in Berlin about contemporary ghost-towns and the deliberate choices and accidents of history that are creating the phenomenon.

One nearly abandoned town featured in the museum’s profiles is Centralia in Pennsylvania, which became depopulated due to trash burning on this day in 1962 that got out of control and spread to a network of underground shafts of a disused coal mine. The area became unlivable (and restricted due to concerns over health and safety) and the fire is still smoldering. The coincidence of the timing between the anniversary and the opening of the exhibit caught my attention initially, and I found that although authentic ghost towns are relatively rare and Centralia unique, eternal coal dust fires are not, and there is one to visit just outside of Dudweiler (DE/EN) in the Saarland that has been stoked since early Baroque times. The town’s fate inspired the horror film Silent Hill and has held attention and the imagination over the past half a century. The exhibition explores what piques this fascination for the recently abandoned, decommissioned and maybe these mementos mori forces one to contemplate how long our presence can linger in a place without us.

lend-lease or ostalgie

Possibly in anticipation of a disgruntled electorate for regional voting in May, a very polarizing and divisive idea has been offered up for public consumption by some cash-strapped communities in North-Rhine Westphalia: civic leaders argue that the Solidarity Pact tariff (DE/EN) for helping integrate the former East Germany has become redundant and they can ill-afford to make further financial contributions.

The industrial region of the state in question is called the Ruhrgebiet and has seen some struggles, contemporary and on-going since some mining and manufacturing operations have been curtailed, but is hardly a Rust-Belt. The cities and towns there on the verge of insolvency were prey and prone to the same mechanisms that have distributed this economic crisis globally. Perhaps it is the press coverage that is most politically-charged, igniting much comment and discussion. These assistance payments, scheduled to expire in 2019, helped the former East (the so-called Neue Länder—which is in fact true since under the East German regime, there were no states but rather districts that were restored to their former boundaries with reunification but when it’s said in the news, it sounds a little back-handed to me) to rebuild and thrive. No one, I think, is begrudging past payments or doubts it was necessary but are merely suggesting that perhaps its time has come—that East Germany is on equal footing with the West, however, the media has exploded the debate into greater dimensions.

Old prejudices come out—though they are never much restrained, like the small comments about having, for the first time in history (which spans a little more than two decades, just), both Chancellor and President from East Germany—and I think maybe people forget that the Solidarity Pact is not a tax solely levied on the people of the Ruhrgebiet but rather something paid by all citizens, East and West alike, and the fact that razing the border, along with added government support, also significantly increased the opportunity for commerce for Western firms and made quite a few businesses extraordinary wealth over night and fueled the German Wirtschaftswünder. It seems almost, in the realm of politicking, that the suggestion is a swipe against the economic rescue packages of the European Union, which are something held at arm’s length from a plebiscite.

pumpspeicherkraftwerke and urban-cozy

Apparently there is an offensive on, as Spiegel International (in English) reports, of radical knitters bent on outfitting their environs with yarn. Though now is not quite the season to dress a utility pole with a comfy and hand-made sweater, this creative expression of graffiti artists is pretty enchanting.

Additionally there was news of plans to capture the kinetic energy of fair-weather sources, solar and wind, and store it as potential energy. This project (auch auf englisch) is being studied in the abandoned mines of the Harz region, where we recently saw some of the expansive feats of engineering designed to harness nature. This idea, which has been applied elsewhere, allows excess power generated by the sun or turbines to be stored by transferring it to a pump system that fills a reservoir at a higher elevation, then acting on the same principle as a turbine spun by the onslaught of water at a dam.
Anscheinend gibt es eine Kampagne der radikalen Strickerin-Begabung beim Ausstatten ihrer Umgebung mit dem Garn, als Spiegel Internationale Berichte (auf englisch). Jetzt ist nicht das Wetter, um eine Straßenlampe in einen Wolle-Pullover anzukleiden, aber diese Graffitikunst ist sehr bestechend.

Zusätzlich es gab Nachrichten über Pläne, die kinetische Energie von Schönwetterquellen, Sonnen- und Wind zu gewinnen, und es als potenzielle Energie zu erhalten. Diese Projekt (auch berichtete auf englisch), wird in den aufgegebenen Bergwerke des Harz studiert, wo wir kürzlich besuchten. Die Idee, im betrieb anderweitig, erlaubt Überschussmacht erzeugt durch die Sonne oder Windturbinen, versorgt zu werden, es einem Pumpe-System übertragend, das ein Reservoir an einer höheren Erhebung füllt, dann demselben Grundsatz wie eine Turbine gesponnen durch den Fluss von Wasser an einem Damm oder Stausee folgend.