A dying industry is displacing entire communities
Norbert Winzen remembers the winter they laid the cobblestones in the courtyard of his family’s farmhouse here in this small village. He was 12 years old, maybe 13. He and his brothers and sister scrubbed each and every one of the hundreds of heavy stones so their father could lay them in tidy rows. It was the kind of drudgery he despised as a kid but that he looks back on fondly as an adult, especially now that his family’s courtyard is going to be ripped up, the farmhouse torn down and his family unwillingly uprooted.
The Winzen farm and every house and field in Keyenberg sit atop a rich vein of lignite, a soft brown coal widely used to generate electricity in Germany and around the world.… Seguir leyendo »