Towards care-full landscape justice in the Lusatian coalfield, Germany

Abstract The remediation of post-mining landscapes is a neglected aspect of coal transitions. Beyond the mere ‘cleaning up’ of degraded sites, concerns of humans and non-humans who have been affected by the mine must be addressed across multiple dimensions. The region of Lusatia ( Lausitz ) in eastern Germany has a 100 year history of lignite (brown coal) mining and an almost equally long history of regional transformation. Coal used to be a cornerstone of energy and job security, instating energy as a pillar of place attachment until today. At the same time, open-cast mining has left a legacy of perpetual burdens on humans and non-human nature, with the historical remnants of resettlement and the previous deindustrialisation after the German reunification persisting even as the coal phase-out is set into law. We argue that in addition to the justice principles of fairness and equity, a care-ethical view is necessary as it draws attention to the contextual, situated, embedded, and relational nature of landscape. Based on Williams’s concept of ‘care-full justice in the city’ we analyse a series of semi-structured interviews with local actors to reconcile an ethic of landscape justice and care, arriving at an understanding of care-full landscape justice in the context of the post-mining transition. Care-full distributional landscape justice requires recognising the relationality, the interdependency and the power dynamics between humans, non-humans as well as between regions. Care-full procedural landscape justice seeks non-paternalistic answers towards an understanding of democratic caring with nature/s. Finally, care-full recognitional landscape justice embraces plurality to develop new place-based identities.