Wind of Change.

I'm thinking back to the town of Lauchhammer, Germany in August of 1991.

Socio-politically speaking, the greatest hit by Scorpions was still on regular rotation in the former "East Bloc." As we know by now, the physical environment there took a beating, seldom as badly as in locales where strip farm-near-me/">mining for dirty brown coal forced ancient towns out of existence and denuded entire regions.

This is being rectified at considerable expense, and you can read about it here.

farm-near-me/">mining-vacation">From Mining Hellscape to Holiday Paradise, by Megan Gannon (Atlas Obscura)

How Germany’s Lusatian Lakes District is remaking an entire region through broad-scale landscape re-engineering.

Over two centuries, coal farm-near-me/">mining completely changed the face of Lusatia, which straddles the states of Brandenburg and Saxony southeast of Berlin. The region was once largely rural, dotted with villages dating back to the Middle Ages and known for its population of Slavic-speaking Sorbs, an ethnic minority in Germany. But then strip mines consumed about 60 percent of the land. As the region became a moonscape, it supplied 90 percent of East Germany’s electricity and heated the country’s homes. Now, more than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Lusatia is in the midst of another radical transformation. The coal-farm-near-me/">mining industry is on the path to extinction—not without controversy—and tourism is being touted as one of its hopeful economic replacements. Inside the biggest exhausted Lusatian strip mines, there are now more than 20 new artificial lakes like Großräschen Lake, many of them connected by canals, covering around 60 square miles. Surrounding those waterways are a variety of new biomes—wet heaths, sandy grasslands, pine forests—as well as new cycling trails, hotels, campsites, harbors, dive shops, and all the other trappings of a German holiday hotspot. The Lausitzer Seenland bears the weight of a lot of superlatives—Germany’s largest lakes district, Europe’s largest artificial waterscape, the biggest landscape-construction site in Europe.

It transpires that I saw these moonscapes up close and personal in 1991, the town of Lauchhammer being the home of my friend Suzanne's parents, whom we visited as I made my way toward Dresden, Prague and the beginning of my teaching assignment in Košice.

My 1991 trip files remain in a banker's box downstairs, but the Atlas Obscura essay tells the tale. Suzanne's dad drove us around, and we viewed farmland, wasteland and reclaimed land.

I was told at the time that the restored strip mine pictured below was the GDR's showpiece reclamation project. That's good, but unfortunately it also was about the only reclamation project.

I didn't take photos of the actual mine we viewed, although I recall being told that the railroads ran on specially-designed movable track, a reality aptly depicted in the photo below at the web site of World Coal, which explains the challenges of keeping a scraper like this one, built in GDR times, working 28 years after the country ceased to exist (the article was written in 2018).

When Suzanne's father drove us around the countryside near Lauchhammer, landscapes like this were painfully common. I'm elated to learn that Germany has prioritized the creation of the waterscape.

However, I do not recall seeing these.

If we did, it has been forgotten. Then again, the towers probably were still working in 1991.

designboom.com/architecture/bio-towers-in-lauchhammer-germany/">bio towers in lauchhammer, germany (designboom)

the bio towers in lauchhammer, germany were built around a central staircase in sets of four. originally the towers were used to purify wastewater from the town’s coking plant by way of internal trickling filters. the IBA and the country’s monument preservation authorities believed that demolishing the bio-towers would represent a huge and irreplaceable loss to lauchhammer’s identity and to the memory of the first lignite coking plant in germany.

Photos of Meteora in Greece, 1985, reclaimed from slides via a nifty scanner.

From 1985 through 1994, a period comprising six trips to Europe, some of them quite lengthy, most of the 2,500-plus photos I took while on the road were committed to slide film.

This seemed like a good idea at the time.

The 1970s-vintage slide projector that sufficed for viewing into the 1990s ceased functioning two decades ago, so after all these years of not being able to see these images, I finally purchased a decent quality scanner for Saturnalia.

The process of digitizing these images (and a few thousand more non-slide photos) probably will last the remainder of my life. Short term goals are more modest, as it has come time to write the narrative of the 1987 trip, something currently existing in fragments only. Being able to see the photos will be of tremendous value when it comes to collating memories.

The photos here are of Meteora, monasteries and rock formations.

The first was Kalambaka, itself a nondescript modern town, but the functional gateway to the spectacular, otherworldly monasteries of Meteora, which are man-made complexes of Orthodox holiness and isolation perched like Technicolor mushrooms atop tall shafts of sheer volcanic rock – accessible by local bus thanks to the wonders of 20th-century roadway engineering, but previously reached exclusively by rope and basket conveyances, pulleys and profuse prayers.

I'm a dismal photographer. Here's the lowdown about the up-high.

The Metéora (Greek: Μετέωρα, pronounced [mɛˈtɛoɾɐ], literally "middle of the sky", "suspended in the air" or "in the heavens above" — etymologically related to meteorology) - is a formation of immense monolithic pillars and hills like huge rounded boulders which dominate the local area.

It is also associated with one of the largest and most precipitously built complexes of Eastern Orthodox monasteries in Greece, second in importance only to Mount Athos.^[1] The six monasteries are built on natural conglomerate pillars, at the northwestern edge of the Plain of Thessaly near the Pineios river and Pindus Mountains, in central Greece.

Metéora is included on the UNESCO World Heritage List under criteria^[2] I, II, IV, V and VII.^[3]

The nearest town is Kalambaka.

"How millions of trees brought a broken landscape back to life."

Because what's a GREENway without lumbering?

Just imagine the potential benefits of such a mode of thought, scaled to New Albany proportions. Bizarrely, we've committed millions to a notion of built park environments, when the essence of the genre is greenery -- though not in the storm water grates.

How millions of trees brought a broken landscape back to life, by John Vidal (The Guardian/The Observer)

After 25 years, the decision to site the National Forest amid derelict coal and quarry workings has borne spectacular fruit

Twenty-five years ago, the Midlands villages of Moira, Donisthorpe and Overseal overlooked a gruesome landscape. The communities were surrounded by opencast mines, old clay quarries, spoil heaps, derelict coal workings, polluted waterways and all the other ecological wreckage of heavy industry.

The air smelt and tasted unpleasant and the land was poisoned. There were next to no trees, not many jobs and little wildlife. Following the closure of the pits, people were deserting the area for Midlands cities such as Birmingham, Derby and Leicester. The future looked bleak.

Today, a pastoral renaissance is taking place. Around dozens of former mining and industrial communities, in what was the broken heart of the old Midlands coalfield, a vast, splendid forest of native oak, ash and birch trees is emerging, attracting cyclists, walkers, birdwatchers, canoeists, campers and horse-riders.

Britain’s trees have come under increasing attack from exotic diseases, and the grants for planting woodland are drying up, so the 200 sq miles of the National Forest come as a welcome good news story. The new woodland in the Midlands is proving that large-scale tree planting is not just good value for money, but can also have immense social, economic and ecological benefits ...