Germany: Hambach Forest Defenders Occupy Four Bucket Wheel Excavators for July 4th Climate Games

July 14th, 2015

At the Cli­mate Games in Ams­ter­dam today count­less play­groups make their moves. Team Blue (the police) and the team of indus­tri­al com­pa­nies play their usu­al strat­e­gy: In Ams­ter­dam they want to expand the West port for coal trans­ship­ment and in the res­i­dent com­pa­nies they strong­ly con­tribute to the fact that the world’s cli­mate pass­es sev­er­al points of no return. There­after, the fur­ther warm­ing would get unpre­dictable and irre­versible. Our teams ham­per them, as far as pos­si­ble with­out being beat­en by Team Blue. Their game objec­tive is to enable a smooth flow of the work of destruc­tion.

This year, a team in the Rhineland has stum­bled over the fact that the play­ing field is not lim­it­ed to the Ams­ter­dam West Port. While it is fold­ed by all sorts of bound­aries togeth­er, but we can unfold and make our move at any time, any­where – after all, the oth­er side also works as good as any­where in the world.

Our “new” expan­sion pack is the Rhen­ish lig­nite min­ing area between Aachen and Cologne. This indus­tri­al-scale clock­work (con­sist­ing of five pow­er sta­tions, three mines, a net­work of coal rail­ways, tens of kilo­me­ters of con­vey­or belts and pipelines for pumped off ground­wa­ter) is the largest sin­gle source of green­house gas emis­sions in Europe – and in many places it is damn easy to attack for sab­o­tage! A good man on this game board is the occu­pa­tion of exca­va­tors: In the largest machines in the world, that [destroy] land­scape around the clock here and pro­duce coal, a lot of cap­i­tal is at work – until we stop them! On the occa­sion of the last occu­pa­tion, a spokesper­son of the group pub­licly con­firmed, that RWE can not stop actions of this kind in the future just because of the huge dimen­sions of the open pits.

The mot­to of this year’s Cli­mate Games is “BIGGER, BOLDER, STRONGER”, and so we want to do things in style. There­fore, this time since 2:55 h we are occu­py­ing four exca­va­tors : The first as usu­al at the rim of the open pit, where now it can not swal­low any more land­scape for a while. The three oth­er occu­pied exca­va­tors are at the bot­tom of the open pit: This means that in the Ham­bach mine, for the first time in the Rhen­ish min­ing area, among oth­er things, the two coal dig­gers them­selves are occu­pied! At least one per­son did not reach her/his des­ti­na­tion and now sup­ports oth­ers by bug­ging her/his warders of Team Blue. He/she will cer­tain­ly not be alone a very long time …

The game goes on – also in the Rhen­ish lig­nite min­ing area. From august 14 to 16, our friends of the Cam­paign “Ende Gelände“ (“end of the area”) mobi­lize to a mass block­ade action in the Rhineland, and we are very keen to see what is about to hap­pen around there. In octo­ber, a Skills Shar­ing Camp will be held again on the occu­pat­ed mead­ow at the rim of the Ham­bach­er Forst, which is acute­ly threat­ened by defor­esta­tion. And in Decem­ber del­e­ga­tions of the Unit­ed Nations gath­er in Paris on the ques­tion of how to talk cli­mate change away, with­out chang­ing any­thing in their exploita­tive eco­nom­ic sys­tems – and, of course, many oth­er teams are also there to play to unmask the lies. Make Your Move!

If you have got time and desire, we would be glad if you look in on the mead­ow to sup­port the occu­pa­tions and retain the tick­er track of when sol­i­dar­i­ty is need­ed out­side the police sta­tion!
Here you will find pic­tures of the most recent sim­i­lar occu­pa­tion of a sin­gle exca­va­tor. (Click in thumb­nails to enlarge.) Pic­tures of the cur­rent action will fol­low here.

Please spread out the Action State­ment (above) and also the press release and com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

Dear Sir or Madam!

We here­by send you a press release enti­tled “Four buck­et wheel exca­va­tors occu­pied in open-cast mine Ham­bach”.
You can reach us at the fol­low­ing phone num­ber:

+49 1573 7181446

You are also invit­ed to vis­it us for more infor­ma­tion or sound bites at the mead­ow occu­pa­tion in Morschenich. On our blog

www.hambacherforst.blogsport.de

incom­ing news are switched in a live tick­er.

Best Regards,

Kathrin Schnei­der
Tino Sturm

Four buck­et wheel exca­va­tors occu­pied in open-cast mine Ham­bach

Düren – Last night 2:55h cli­mate activists start­ed again to occu­pie buck­et wheel exca­va­tors of RWE. This time it were four exca­va­tors in the open pit mine near Ham­bach. Two of them are locat­ed on the bot­tom of the mine in depth 450 m, where the coal lay­er is. For the first time, the declared aim is to stop coal pro­duc­tion. With the action they are protest­ing against the min­ing and burn­ing (elec­tric­i­ty pro­duc­tion) of lig­nite and this way they offer direct resis­tance.

As with pre­vi­ous exca­va­tors occu­pa­tions, the activists climbed up the stairs, lad­ders and walk­ways on the machines to the top.
At 70 meters high they installed them­selves, with tar­pau­lins for sun pro­tec­tion, and they rolled out ban­ners on which they demand­ed once more an imme­di­ate with­draw­al from coal min­ing and a clear­ing stop in the Ham­bach for­est. “It has long been known that the hab­it­abil­i­ty of the plan­et is at stake. Is just as clear that there are alter­na­tives to inef­fi­cient elec­tric­i­ty pro­duc­tion out of coal,” said an activist who wants to remain anony­mous, and added: “An eco­nom­ic sys­tem that is depen­dent on con­stant growth, can­not do any­thing else than exploit the envi­ron­ment at the expense of us all.”
The action state­ment puts these occu­pa­tions in the con­text of the “Cli­mate Games” in Ams­ter­dam. There, the West Port will be expand­ed, which is an impor­tant coal trad­ing cen­ter. Via Ams­ter­dam among oth­ers coal from South Amer­i­ca is trans­port­ed to the Rhineland to be incin­er­at­ed togeth­er with lig­nite.

The action end­ed at 9 pm, July 4th, when the last arrest­ed activists left the police sta­tion.