On 9 June 2026, the state government of North Rhine-Westfalia announced its intention to extend environmental protections to a forested area near Aachen. This administrative act, in itself unremarkable, marks the end of one of the more memorable battles over environmental policy in recent German history – the occupation of the Hambacher Forst (unrelated to the other Hambach). Between 2012 and 2020, this confrontation between mining giant RWE and a disparate band of environmentalists had captured the headlines, embarrassed state politicians, and turned ‘Hambi’ into a living legend well beyond the borders of the state.
To understand how this standoff could take on so much symbolic significance, we need to look to German history and culture. First, Germany’s industrial development largely depended on the country’s rich coal deposits. The Ruhr area especially was shaped by the culture of coal mining with tens of thousands of men employed in the pits at its height. Their mines went deep into the rock, following seams more than a kilometre underground. The coal for which the Hambacher Forst was to be destroyed is a different kind – lignite. It is soft, sulphurous, crumbly stuff known as Braunkohle (brown coal) in German, its seams lying close to the soil, and burning it creates acrid smoke.
Lignite is mined in open-cast pits, and from an engineering perspective, the process is very impressive. Enormous digging machines on tracks chew their way through thick layers, literally remaking the landscape. The process is also enormously destructive, removing the topsoil, leaving deep scars in its wake. East Germany depended on lignite because there was no other coal on its territory. West Germany mined it because it was cheap. Because of its centrality to the country’s economy, mining long enjoyed state protections. Lignite mines displaced entire village communities through forced purchase and relocation. Ignoring the objections of the local people had a long tradition in the business.
That is not to say it was ever easy. At the risk of sounding cynical, Germany has no indigenous people to displace. The people who lived in the villages chewed up by the diggers spoke the same language and looked the same as everyone else. Neither does it have a lot of space to spare. At 233 people per square kilometre, it is less densely populated than the Netherlands or Belgium, but still comparable to Massachusetts, and unlike many other European countries, it has no capital city forming a centre of gravity. Most of the population is distributed across the country in small and medium-sized cities. While there are some relatively empty regions, there is almost nowhere where nobody lives.
Thirdly, the people who live there tend to be very attached to their landscape. Germans love trees. This is so stereotypical that it is almost a joke, but it is true. Forests have had deep symbolic significance since at least the Romantic era, and they still draw millions of people out on walks and bike rides every weekend. German law requires even private woodlands to be accessible to the public for recreation. Foraging for berries and mushrooms is a popular hobby. It was never easy for people who had grown up in that culture to just move somewhere else, leaving behind all their familiar spaces.
By the 2010s, the power to make them move was no longer at the mining companies’ command without question. After an unconscionably long time, Germany had decided releasing unlimited carbon and toxic smoke into the atmosphere was not a good idea. Winding down the coal industry was a long and expensive process, and for reasons that are not entirely logical, lignite mining remained the last kind operational. At the same time, Germany’s environmental movement was galvanised by concern over climate change, leading to some of the largest demonstrations in the history of the country. You could not expect these people to stand by as a coal mining conglomerate set about obliterating a forest that had been in municipal management since the middle ages to produce the dirtiest, most polluting fuel you could legally burn.
Resistance started, as it usually does, locally, with a church community whose service was promptly invaded by miners. However, coal mining had long been on the radar of environmental activist groups and they were ready to join the fight. With legal avenues exhausted, the best way of protecting the forest from destruction was to start living there. This approach has a long local tradition, and activists knew how to make themselves hard to remove. In the end, they had constructed an entire Ewok village of treehouses accessible only via rope ladders to be difficult for the police to reach. For a while, the Hambacher Forst became a destination for young activists from all over Europe. There were different levels of risk, from participating in legal demonstrations and protest camps outside the forest to becoming part of the treehouse community. Some even ran sabotage missions against mining equipment.
Feeding such heterogenous groups of often very committed environmentalists is a challenge, but there are actually dedicated groups of volunteers who do exactly that. Many of them come from the Volxküche movement. Named after the 19th-century Volksküchen catering to the urban working class, these organisations are a fascinating example of mutual aid in practice. They use cheap ingredients, often rescued from destruction as food waste, to make cheap or free food they distribute to homeless and poor, fellow activists, and anyone else who is interested. They often make vegan foods both for ethical reasons and to ensure everyone can share. One of the older ones, the Hannebambel in Aschaffenburg, actually published its Volxküche de luxe bulk cooking cookbook in 2011. The recipes are organised into vegan, vegetarian, and meat dishes to minimise environmental footprint. One favourite is spinach lasagna:
Lasagna: 2 kg lasagna sheets, 5 kg chopped frozen spinach, 2-3 litres cream, 500g ricotta, 1 kg grated gouda, 1 kg parmesan, 3 usuallylarge onions (Metzgerzwiebeln), 2 cloves garlic, salt, pepper, nutmeg, starch to bind the sauce, cooking oil.
Preheat oven to 180°C. Peel and finely cube onions and garlic, sautée in a pot with oil. Add spinach and briefly sautée along with the onions. Add the cream and ricotta and bring to a boil while stirring continually. Season assertively, and bind lightly with starch. Layer the spinach sauce with the lasagna sheets on baking sheets three layers deep, sprinkle with cheese and bake for about 40 minutes.
Tomato sauce: 850g tomato paste, 2650g pureed peeled tomatoes, 2 cloves garlic, 2 large onions (Metzgerzwiebeln), oregano, basil, sugar, salt, pepper, olive oil.
Peel and finely chop the garlic and onions and sautée in a pot with oil until they turn glassy. Add peeled tomatoes, tomato paste, and a little water. Season and simmer for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Serve separately along with the lasagna.
Making it vegan: Omit gouda and parmesan on the lasagna. Replace cream and ricotta with 4 litres unsweetened soy milk or cream from the Reformhaus. Cover the top layer of lasagna sheets with an extra laver of soy cream to prevent it from hardening as it bakes.
This is actually delicious and adapts to even larger larger quantities easily. There are two interesting points to it. The first is the Metzgerzwiebel, literally a butcher’s onion. These are large onions that, u8nlike the more common large Gemüsezwiebel, are intensely flavourful. They used to be mainly added to sausages and meatballs, which is where they get their name from, and are sadly more widespread in South Germany than where I live. The second is the Reformhaus, in 2011 the most plausible source of soy milk. These are a loose association of shops dedicated to conscious, healthy, environmentally attuned living in the tradition of the Lebensreform movement. Along with organic, vegetarian and vegan foods and nutritional supplements, they typically carry cosmetics, household products, and often also various esoteric nostrums. Of course, by now soy milk is a supermarket staple which just goes to show that the crunchier kind of counterculture often has a pretty good handle on solutions for the future that take the mainstream much longer to embrace.
The Hambacher Forst did not have an easy resolution. By 2017, the rhetoric on both sides was heating up and violent confrontations with police increased. Mining executives called the occupants terrorists, and the police made exaggerated claims about explosives and plans for deadly traps, and some activists stepped up sabotage and violent confrontations. In 2018, a court seized on one of those clever legal wheezes that authorities like to resort to when they cannot simply use force: Instead of deciding on the legality of the occupation, they declared the treehouses buildings. This meant that, regardless of the legality of their presence, they were subject to the building code which they, of course, violated in all kinds of ways. They were condemned and their demolition ordered. The police and fire services thus moved into the forest not for an eviction, which still had not been permitted, but on an extended rescue mission to evacuate the occupiers from their unsafe environment.
It did not reduce the violence of the following confrontations. Over weeks, one treehouse after another was invaded, emptied, and destroyed. In the course of these operations, a journalist fell to his death from a rope bridge, but this was not directly due to police action. The authorities were genuinely trying to avoid injuries and largely succeeded. By October, the forest camps had been destroyed. It was just in time for a court order stopping the intended clear-cutting over environmental concerns. Shares in RWE plummeted, and the company effectively gave up its plans for the Hambacher Forst. The woodlands remained accessible to the public and on 6 October, about 50,000 protesters gathered to listen to speeches and see bands perform.
The confrontation did not end so much as peter out. RWE organised a demonstration of miners that threatened known local activists in their homes on 17 October. Environmentalists occupied some empty houses in a nearby evacuated village to set up a new protest camp. In the end, RWE quietly shelved the idea of eradicating the forest and announced this to the public in early 2019.
The story of the Hambacher Forst has a strong sense of inevitability about it in retrospect. Everybody must have known that coal simply had no future. On the ground at the time, though, there was no such feeling. The activists in their tents and treehouses were facing an overwhelming force of police and corporate security ready to do violence whenever the courts would permit it. RWE had far greater resources both to litigate and campaign. Much of the conservative press was eager to see the forest go, even as polls showed 70% of conservative voters opposed the destruction. When victory came, it was unexpected. This often happens; Powerful opponents dominate the playing field until, suddenly, they don’t. Certainties evaporate, new rules apply almost overnight, and what seemed the terrifying anger of giants looks more like the tantrum of a living fossil.