Brown Spree

Between flourishing landscapes and feral dynamics in Lusatian post-mining landscapes

Abstract

The Lusatian coal mining area is to become an attractive holiday region for city dwellers. Former open-cast mines are being flooded with water to create the Lusatian Lakeland. At the same time, a complex interplay of hydrochemical, geological and technical processes is causing waters in the region to turn brown decades after the closure of a large part of the opencast mines - the phenomenon is called the Brown Spree. In this article, I take a look on these post-mining landscapes as anthropocene landscapes. In doing so, I highlight frictions between the supposedly 'flourishing landscapes' of the future tourism region and the unintended effects of coal mining - which I define with Tsing et al. as feral dynamics. By looking at these frictions, it becomes clear how a narrative of progress seems to be perpetuated in the staging of the design of the Lusatian Lakeland, which in turn is unsettled by the phenomenon of the Brown Spree.