FREAK ANIMALS // article

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i rest my face against the rough bark of the poplar tree. fifteen meters up in its branches, trying not to look down, i look out over the landscape through the last leaves of summer. the sun is rising on a cold autumn morning. to the east i can hear the clanking of caterpiller treads. bulldozers in the opencast lignite mines, starting to move though it is not yet light.

from my high vantage point, if i look to the west, i can see a scar running through the trees and across the fields: a service road being built for the new opencast mines. it snakes across the landscape and then, as if making up its mind, comes straight across the field towards our small copse of trees. the march of progress: through the trunk of the tree i can feel the vibrations of its wheels closing in on us from both sides.
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the tree sit will be evicted today. work on the new mine can’t continue until this road is built, and there was a call to say seven police vans were heading our way. the bulldozers have reached the bottom of the squatted trees, ripping up the undergrowth and burying it in road stone. we sit and we wait.

the hours went by in that strange combination of boredom and fear that comes before an eviction. the trunk of this tree is so wide in places that i cannot put my arms around it, and i wonder how long it has been growing here. if time is measured as fractions of a life then these hours of tense calm must be flashing by like the closing scenes of a timelapse movie. i rest my face against the rough bark of the tree and i can feel the chainsaw begin to cut into the lower branches coming closer and closer to where i am sitting: sickening cracks followed by deep thuds as the cut wood hits the ground, shaking the roots of the tree.

i know this tree will die today. maybe i will die today too. the men evicting us don’t seem to know what they are doing. they are cutting branches too close, they cut safety lines too. i pushed the images of breaking bones out of my head and held tighter to the branch. but fear is an addiction. in a world where you try to think in colour and you get lost in shades of grey, or blinded and bombarded by neon light, this kind of last stand is an addiction. our bodies standing in the way, breaking the line of the service road, stopping the insane destruction: for a fraction of a life the lines and the colours are clear.

opencast mining (or strip mining as it is also known) is one of the most ecologically destructive mining methods in use today. to gain access to the raw material they dig up and destroy huge quantities of the surface eco-system and the earth below. local people have to endure noise, vibration and severe dust pollution. a whole village was evicted to make way for this mine. ground water is being drained from a massive area to stop the opencast from flooding, so the trees begin to die of thirst. villages are torn apart by heavy trucks. when the mine is exhausted and the operators have left with their profits, the problems for the people that live near the site, and beyond, will remain. and east german lignite (also called brown or “dirty” coal) is one of the most polluting fossil fuels there is. the destruction only begins with the opencast mine. we don’t yet know where it will end.

the police eventually came: three green uniforms in a “cherry-picker” bucket, faces covered by black masks. they dragged me from the tree and took me away, locked me in a van, a tiny cell, fifty centimeters squared, my muscles aching from the climbing, my mind aching too, and no space to stretch or move. i heard creaking, cracking, and crashing as the tree finally fell. and as we were driven away, through the tiny barred window i saw the desolate moonscape of the opencast mine. broken trees, bulldozers and then nothing but empty earth: stripped, tortured and hollowed for $19 per tonne.

we were released six hours later, accused of some criminal offence (made more meaningless than usual as i spoke no german and the police spoke no english.) i refused to answer questions, refused to sign the forms, and then we were free, standing among the fallen trees. the sap was still bubbling from the stumps and the branch where i had sat looked strange from this angle, lying on the ground. sad.

but powerful too. we lost, and you can ask "what is the point?": so many evictions, and most often we lose in the end. the point is, everyday we are losing: beautiful places and more, smashed, broken extracted and turned into money.

“money perfectly manifests the desires of our culture. it is safe. it neither lives nor dies nor rots. it is exempt from experience. it is meaningless and abstract. by valuing this abstraction over living beings we seal not only our own fate but the fates of all those we encounter.” .(derek jensen)

and in contrast to this there are these moments. “senseless acts of beauty”: acts of albeit futile resistance, valuing life over abstraction; meaning over money; presence over politics. our bodies standing in the way for a fraction of a life. i had forgotten how good it feels.
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