From military base to solar park: rewilding, remediation, and renewable energy at Lieberoser Heide

This essay examines the transformation of Lieberoser Heide, a former Soviet military base in eastern Germany, into one of the country’s largest solar parks. Framed as a model of sustainable redevelopment, the project exemplifies how the energy transition repurposes landscapes marked by contamination, militarisation, and abandonment. Drawing on fieldwork and visual ethnography, the essay traces how economic rationalities of productivity and efficiency overwrite ecological and historical complexities, turning damaged terrains into assets. It argues that conversion simultaneously performs acts of reclamation and erasure, recasting toxic legacies as opportunities for progress while obscuring the uneven material and temporal residues of destruction. By employing infra-red imaging, I show how spectral visualisation techniques render visible the persistence of ecological life within the landscape, revealing the entangled afterlives of violence, repair, and renewal in the making of sustainability.