Bioenergy and Sustainable Living in Rural Karnataka

A big part of my focus back in Appalachia has been sustainable distributed bioenergy systems, and I've been hoping to make that a focus of my time in India as well. I was finally able to make a solid contact with BERI (BioEnergy for Rural India), and after leaving Gudalur I was on my way to the Tumkur district of Karnataka, about a 3 hour bus ride away from the software megacity of Bangalore. BERI has received some big grants from the UN, the state of Karnataka, and a few others to show what a model distributed renewable energy system could look like for the rural parts of India, and I wanted to see how this framework could be relevant for back home. I could tell from their website that the technology (gasification of locally harvested wood) and scale (0.25-1MW) was roughly inline with my past research, and soon I was being greeted at the bus stand by a fellow who would give me a ride on the back of a motorbike to the area where I'd be staying for a few days.

This was the first of what has now become a trend of being treated to tours of rural sustainability projects on the backs of motorbikes through windy roads that range from falling apart pavement, dirt roads, or foot/animal paths. Needless to say it is a very awesome way to travel and the photo opportunities are endless. I did in fact get to see a few biomass gasification plants which were way lower-tech than the places I saw in Austria but also much more affordable and better suited to local conditions and feedstocks. Also this technology results in about 10-15% leftover biochar as a co-product after gasification, which to me is a big advantage over the Austrian model that completely gasifies the biomass and therefore release all of the CO2 to the atmosphere. The biochar here was apparently being used by local blacksmiths, but it could just as easily be used for improving agricultural land and sequestering carbon.

The BERI project had a few other facets that I wasn't initially aware of and which definitely worthwhile components of an overall rural sustainability model. First, several dozen bore wells have been drilled and connected to the power supplied by these plants; the water is then pumped into holding tanks that supply drip irrigation lines for small-scale organic farming. In a country where rainfall only really occurs from June-September, this has enabled very poor villagers to produce nutritious vegetables for their families and local markets at times that wouldn't have been possible before. Second, several multi-family cooperatively run biogas digesters have been established, wherein the families put cow manure into the system and then get clean gas for cooking (displacing traditional indoor wood-fired cooking which is terrible for respiratory health and depletes nearby forests) and organic fertilizer for their fields. Finally, many of these villages now have vermicomposting systems and composting toilets to better process waste and give nutrients back to the lands that they depend on for survival.

I definitely appreciated the time they took to show me around, and all of this without charging me a single rupee. But for the sake of balance I should include some critique. The main problem I saw was that the feedstock for the bioenergy plants is coming from non-native eucalyptus and acacia trees. They're growing short-rotation "energy forests" on land which is too rocky, uneven, or distant from villages to b used for farming, which in theory can be a good model if using native and ideally multipurpose trees. Also, I have to wonder how replicable this model would be without inputs from agencies like the UN and state government. But the counterpoint to that would be the massive expenditures the Indian government is already making on huge centralized coal and nuclear fired power plants, and in my opinion it would be much more cost-effective, reliable, and environmentally friendly to have a network of small-scale renewable energy power plants than to rely on megalithic installations that displace thousands of people and put this rapidly developing country on a fast track to ecological destruction and which provide only about 2-4 hours of electricity per day to the rural poor. In short I think this could be an excellent model for the entire country if the feedstock was from native species and if the government had the best interest of the people at heart, which I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

A friend in Wales had told me about a place called Navadarshanam, just a few kilometers past the Karnataka border into Tamil Nadu near Bangalore. They had a very nice website and I decided to pay them a visit as it was apparently an "intentional community" dedicated to sustainable living and Ghandian (as in the Ghandi that led the movement for independence from the British) philosophy and spirituality. I only spent a couple of days there, and while it wasn't exactly a groundbreaking experience, they did have a nice collection of good ideas. They had some solar panels, a wind turbine, a biogas digester, a couple acres of organic gardens, buildings mostly made from compressed earth blocks (CEBs), and a value-added food processing center that employed about 35 local villagers. The latter two were of the most interest to me as I had never seen these CEB buildings before and they were very, very nice. Cool and comfortable in the heat of the afternoon sun, and they had an attractive and conventional appearance (as opposed to many of the hobbit-looking natural buildings found in the US). There was one building dedicated solely to making chutneys, pickles, peanut butter, jams, and other nice things from organic and mostly local ingredients, and it ran on a cooperative management model employing mostly women from nearby villages.

I ended up my time in Karnataka by meeting with the head gasification scientist at the Indian Institute of Science, a world-renowned technology development university. I still don't know why top guys like him are willing to meet with my uncredentialed self. As I've been thinking about getting projects going in Appalachia, I'm always on the lookout for potential partners and I was mainly interested to make a connection on the chance that it might make sense to work with these folks to do a pilot installation back home in the case that I can't find anyone with suitable expertise or in the right price range in the US. Of course there's the logic that it's always better to use domestic resources than outsourcing, but to be honest I think there's a good chance that US companies will be far too expensive for an initial small-scale installation and the Indian technology seemed much more simple and adjustable than the highly automated systems typically found in Western countries.

Next stop will be Auroville, arguably one of the weirdest places in India and somewhere I definitely wouldn't go if not for its reputation for innovative renewable energy, organic farming, and reforestation projects.

PS for more pictures click here

Biochar in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu

Mumbai wasn't nearly as much of a shock to the senses as I'd expected, but the sleeper class train (basically the lowest class and cheapest trains where you can lay down) I took to Hyderabad was a bit more of an experience than I thought it would be. I guess I had gotten used to the relative comfort of the AC trains with their cleaner berths, fairly sane comings and goings of passengers, and controlled environment, so the wide-open windows, tons of people squeezing onto one seat, and unkempt nature of the ride was yet another adjustment in this country of constant assaults on the senses. It really wasn't so bad and despite being constantly stared at by the youths crowded together I really enjoyed being able to see the scenery so clearly, as well as the random conversations with folks happy to practice their English skills.

The next stop was Hyderabad, a mostly uninteresting city which is now becoming one of India's fast growing IT outsourcing hubs. I was there to meet with Dr. Saibaskar Reddy, a fellow trained in geology but now one of the country's main proponents of biochar as a means to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide in charcoal and use it for improving agricultural land. The approach his group, GEO, has taken is to build and distribute low-cost small cookstoves to rural villages which enable people to remove the charcoal before it completely turns to ash and which also create much less smoke than traditional wood-fired cooking methods. I spent a couple of days out in the countryside with him visiting places where the stoves are made from completely recycled materials, seeing their biochar training center, and also villages where the stoves are being used.

This was definitely one of the poorer areas I'd visited so far, and it's been strange to see the limited means people have to work with yet how they generally seem to be in better spirits than people from more "developed" places. They were also uniformly friendly and happy to share with outsiders like myself. I was also a bit surprised to see a couple of monuments adorned with communist flags; apparently this region produces some of the leaders of the Maoist Naxalite movement from time to time. Through Dr. Reddy I made a contact with a group in Tamil Nadu that was just starting to work on a biochar project, and after receiving a positive response from them I made plans to travel to the Nilgiris area of the Western Ghats mountains as my next stop. After checking out Golconda Fort and a nice museum, I boarded a bus headed to Bangalore where I would get another bus to Gudalur.

One of my favorite aspects of this trip is watching the countryside change from a bus or train window, and this time I got to see the arid plains of Andhra Pradesh turn into the tropical farmlands of Karnataka and then into the forested hills of NW Tamil Nadu. I was lucky enough to see a wild elephant as I passed through the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, and soon I was finding my way to the office of the Shola Trust where I would be collaborating on their biochar project for a couple of weeks. The Shola Trust has a few different focus areas (biological conservation, tribal livelihood development, etc), and this biochar project touched on a few of these. There is an invasive shrub known as lantana camara which has taken over large areas of the ecologically sensitive Mudumalai Tiger reserve, and it's particularly nasty because the leaves are inedible to wildlife, the roots exude chemicals which prevent other plants from growing nearby, and it resprouts more vigorously when cut or burned. Therefore Shola is working with the Forest Service and nearby tribal communities to uproot lantana, remove it from the forest (open burning in the forest leads to forest fires and actually encourages lantana), use the nicer branches for tribal-made furniture, and convert the rest into biochar to be mixed with manure/compost and applied to agricultural land.

My task was to design and build a portable, efficient biochar kiln that could be taken to villages to utilize the nearby lantana and also use the excess heat to remove the bark from the lantana branches that they would be using for furniture making. After some hours of internet searching I had a basic design, and the next day I started working with a local metalworker to cut, weld, and put everything into place. This was a growing experience in a few ways. First, this fellow spoke almost no English, and I had to communicate only through drawing, gestures, and moving pieces of metal around. Second, I was amazed at their working methods, as they use hammer and chisel to cut thick pieces of angle iron and there was no welding mask in sight, despite quite a bit of high voltage arc welding. Finally, this fellow and his family were devout Christians, and they were the first I'd met in those mostly Hindu country. I came to find out that South India and Tamil Nadu in particular has a much more even mix of Christian/Muslim/Hindu peoples, and that here they coexist very peacefully.

After a few days it was time to test this oil barrel + galvanized pipe + angle iron contraption, and thank the Lord it worked as it was supposed. It always ended up being a bit of a party when we would do a test firing as everybody wanted to come and help with building the containment walls, getting the wood ready, starting the initial fire, and watching the flames roar out of the gasification pipe. As far as I know they're using the unit out in the field now, but unfortunately I felt like my time was too limited to stick around for more than 2 1/2 weeks.

I'll just say a quick note about some other people and projects in the area that are definitely worth mentioning. Many parts of India have serious problems with the exploitation of the indigenous tribal peoples (known as Adivasis), and this mountainous area is no different. Back in the 1980s a very inspiring fellow named Stan Thaekaera started an organization called Accord, and they have had many important victories which have forced the government and non-tribal Indians to recognize Adivasi land rights even when they don't have a formal document asserting their ownership. There is a hospital and school in Gudalur dedicated to Advasis, and both were excellent models of non-condescending ways to help locals. From Accord, a side group known as Just Change developed in the 1990s with the aim of empowering Adivasis through community owned sustainable enterprises and an international marketing framework that takes "Fair Trade" a step farther. The Shola Trust was started by the Stan's son Tarsh, and they share an office with Just Change. Finally, there's this awesome guy Madhu who rescues snakes (including lots of cobras) who have come into contact with humans as Shola's wildlife conservation fellow and releases them into safe habitats, and sometime soon I'll try to post a youtube video of one of his capers.

India: The First Month or so

I have to admit that I was experiencing a fair amount of anxiety and trepidation as the flight from Germany to India finally got into the air. I had never been to a “developing” country before (unless you count Appalachia), and most people I had talked to had given me more to worry about than to look forward to. However, I had chosen this destination for good reasons, and I was determined to at least spend a few solid weeks in the country before giving up.

Upon arriving in Delhi, my first day went about as wrong as it could have. Air India lost several people's checked baggage (including mine) in Germany, and we had to wait for hours only to find that they would take our information and deliver the baggage when and if they found it. I had been planning to stay with someone that I had contacted on www.couchsurfing.org, but I couldn't access the internet anywhere to look up their number so I got a taxi ride to a part of town that I heard had cheapish hotels.

To make a long story short, the taxi driver drove me through some very sketchy looking streets to arrive at a relatively opulent hotel which was way more expensive than I was looking for. My senses were overwhelmed on the ride there by the completely new sights, sounds, and smells of one of the biggest and fastest growing cities in the world, including traffic with no rules whatsoever, random cattle all over the place, lots of tiny three-wheeled cargo vehicles, horse carts right next to huge trucks, and the most intense haze of smog I've ever seen. Basically he pulled a tried-and-true scam where a shell-shocked foreigner who has just arrived in super crazy Delhi is shown some of the “rougher” parts of town and then delivered to a cushy hotel, and the driver gets a fat commission if the tourist stays there. It was getting dark and I didn't have the energy or guts to go searching for somewhere cheaper in this overwhelming place, so I paid my 1800 rupees and got some sleep.

I spent the night wondering if I would be able to handle this place for any length of time, although I had barely seen anything at all. Thankfully everything started to change almost immediately the next day. I finally did hook up with the fellow I had found on couchsurfing.org, and I eventually made it over to his flat after visiting the Qutb Minar monuments. Abhinav and his flatmates were all young professional Indians (mostly with MBAs) living in the area of town known as Mehrauli, technically the oldest part of Delhi as it existed as an independent town even before the actual city. I spent some time wandering through the amazingly congested and chaotic narrow streets filled with cows, motorcycles, bicycles carrying amazing loads, little kids, trash, and every kind of shop you could imagine. I definitely felt like I was in a different world, and I don't think words can describe the intense sensory onslaught. Somehow I felt relatively comfortable walking through these streets where I was the only white person around, and I no longer felt overwhelmed as when I had first arrived.

I quickly came to be familiar with the public transport system in Delhi as I was mainly there to have meetings and make contacts that would ideally help pave the way for the rest of my time in India. I was reasonably able to get around town on my own only using the metro and my feet, which I felt proud about considering how chaotic this place can be. I met up with people at the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), The Energy Research Institute (TERI), Indian Institute of Technology's Centre for Energy Studies, and someone associated with Navdanya. In the end I wasn't sure how useful it was overall, as I came out of the week with only a few additional contacts and no more set places to go. I missed out on most of the more “touristy” attractions in and around Delhi (like the Taj Mahal), but this didn't concern me so much as I was pretty determined to not be a typical India tourist.

Before heading to my next “official” engagement, I made a four-day detour up to McLeod Ganj, AKA the home of the Dalai Lama and a Tibetan refugee settlement. I mainly went to go see some Himalayan foothills and interesting cultural stuff, but I ended up being very affected by the situations that the Tibetans are in. I've always been vaguely aware of the issue of Tibet having been violently taken over by China in the late 1950s with most of their ancient monasteries destroyed and many peaceful monks tortured and/or killed, but it never really hit home til I was in their capitol-in-refuge. Through documentaries and hanging out with young Tibetans who spoke broken English, I came to learn about the ongoing systematic undermining of their culture by the Chinese authority and the persecution of any dissidents within the country. Unfortunately this left me feeling mostly frustrated and powerless, but it did plant the idea of possibly going to Tibet to see things there with my own eyes if I end up going to China later. Otherwise I got to see some very beautiful mountains and waterfalls and such, and then onto an extremely uncomfortable overnight bus ride to my next destination.

I had planned for some time to go to the Bija Vidyapeeth organic training farm outside of Dehradun in Uttarakhand. This was originally set up by world-infamous author, speaker, activist etc Vandana Shiva along with a couple of other people back in the 1980s. Not only does it contain about 25 acres of organic fruit, vegetable, herb, and grain production, they also have a diversified seed bank and they host research, development, and regional farmer trainings. Bija Vidyapeeth is the demonstration farm for Navdanya, a nationwide organization that sets up seed banks, trains farmers to grow organically, and which also helps them with marketing and branding with many branches and operatives working in several regions. This is significant considering that at least 60% of this country of 1.2 billion people still makes a primary living from agriculture, and since the 1960s they have become quite dependent on synthetic chemical inputs that they can scarcely afford and which contribute to further degradation of already damaged lands.

I was excited to arrive and jump straight into hands-on work alongside the Indians who work there full time, but this was thwarted on the first day by a crippling stomach illness. I had been told that I would probably get sick at some point in India, and so I had attempted to inoculate myself in the first week by eating samosas from street vendors. I still don't know what triggered it, but after two weeks into the trip I found myself struggling with the most unpleasant night of vileness that I can remember. For the next several days I was much weaker than usual with a very limited appetite. Eventually I got violently ill again, and finally decided to go to the doctor for antibiotics. I was cured within a day or so and have not had any such episode again.

Although I was at less than full capacity for about half of my time at Navdanya, it was at least good to see and spend time with an organization that is doing activities all over the country that are similar to what I would like to do with organic farming in Appalachia. I can't say that I really learned anything new about farming as I didn't notice anything particularly innovative about their methods, and it was surprisingly expensive to stay and volunteer there. In fact I have the feeling that the financial side of the organization is significantly propped up by the high prices foreigners pay (about $14 per day, which is a ton of money here) to come have an authentic Indian farming experience, as well as the very high prices they charge for their products in fancy markets in Delhi and Dehradun. I certainly could have spent my money on worse causes, and while I wonder about the overall financial sustainability of a model that depends on constant input from foreigners I do think they are doing good work that deserves to be supported.

I had planned to go from Navdanya back to Delhi for a week and then over to the mining regions of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, but this was not to be the case. I met an Indian visitor at Navdanya who's family lives in Rajasthan, and soon I found myself pulled in an unexpected direction. Rajasthan is known as a mostly arid desert state which is home to some of India's most impressive ancient structures (built by the old-time kings known as Rajputs) and also beautiful folk art and music. I ended up spending about 2 weeks traveling through Jodhpur, Jaipur, and Jaisalmer, and while it wasn't all completely relevant to my project it was definitely an unforgettable experience in many ways.

Without going into too much detail, I received the most luxurious treatment of my life due to my friend's father being very high-ranking in the Indian railway system (the largest employer in the world apparently), I got to see massive old forts built on top of sandstone mountains, I spent New Year's Eve camping on a sand dune after riding for awhile on camelback, and I rode a motorcycle for the first time with a Rajasthani village native into his home area and then spent the night in a mud hut there after trying their version of moonshine. Actually this fellow is trying to set up an organic farm in his village that visitors can come to and spend time, and I would highly recommend hooking up with Shivnath if you have the chance (http://dumpalorganicfarm.blogspot.com/). I could easily write an entire entry about those two weeks only, but it would end up being too much in the way of personal details and little of project relevancy.

Finally I got back on track and ended up in Mumbai (Bombay) for a few days to have some meetings, again with the intention of making contacts that could help pave the way for my next steps. That did happen to some extent (i.e. coordinator for Biochar India and a fellow running Oikos, an ecological design business), and also I can now say that I have spent time in and successfully navigated around the world's 2^nd largest city. Highlights include the Elephanta island caves where massive thousand-year-old Hindu carvings adorn the walls, seeing the sunset from the beach, catching the extremely crowded local trains, driving around the city in a top-down jeep with one of my “contacts,” and touring the Dharavi slum (2^nd biggest slum in the world) with someone I randomly met at a dental appointment. Just like with Delhi, I experienced anxiety and trepidation on the train ride in, and within a day I felt strangely safe and comfortable moving around a ridiculously huge city on my own.

This covers the first month and a half or so of my time in India, and from here I end up heading south to spend time in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu. Hopefully I'll have the next entry finished in much less time than it took to put this one out, so stay tuned.

PS I know I'm being very sparse on details so as always feel free to ask me more about specific people, places, and/or projects at nathandavidhall@gmail.com.

Austria - Slovakia - Poland - Czech Republic

This is a very long entry as it covers a month and a half and four countries. It's also long overdue. As always email me at nathandavidhall@gmail.com with any further questions/comments etc, and click here to see more pictures.

The Gussing bioenergy plant in southeast Austria was one of the first places that I proposed to go when I decided to apply for the Watson Fellowship. I had discovered this place while doing research at Berea College, and had used it as an example of sustainable community-scale renewable energy in several presentations (one of my professors even started to use it as an example in his lectures). I was pleasantly surprised when one of the main scientists at the plant quickly responded to an email to let me know that I would be welcome to come spend some time there on my travels. We kept in touch over the months after I first submitted my proposal, and based on his suggestion I planned the first leg of my Watson trip around being there from mid-October til mid-November to avoid a planned maintenance shutdown period in September.

When I finally arrived to start my internship I found that they had changed the maintenance shutdown period to mid-October til mid-Novermber; in other words the exact time I had planned to be there. No one bothered to let me know about this change and I definitely could have set up my travels a little better, but oh well. I will spare the readers the boring details and complaining I could do, but basically I spent about two weeks doing absolutely nothing whereas I thought I would do a month-long internship learning about the inner workings of a state-of-the-art community scale biomass energy system. For posterity's sake, I will at least explain what I already knew about the plant before coming.

Gussing is a small town (around 5,000 people) in the southeast Austrian region of Burgenland, which until World War I was part of Hungary. It is considered to be the "poorest" part of Austria, but to be fair Austria is nowhere close to a "poor" country and this area looked to be quite well off to me. It's mostly a rolling landscape with a few hills and lots of small to medium sized farms and tracts of forest. The town of Gussing is of interest because over the past 15 years they have successfully implemented a number of renewable energy projects, especially around biomass which is a main interest of mine because of its potential for Appalachia. They have one of the only fully functional biomass gasification plants in Europe, meaning that instead of just burning wood or whatever else for energy, it is cooked under limited oxygen to release gases which are then used to fire an engine. This gas can also be used for other purposes, such as to create liquid fuels or to be reformed into chemicals like methanol or propane. Nearby there are also a couple of traditional biomass combustion energy systems, as well as a biogas system (anaerobic digestion, like the ones I visited in Germany). Finally, a solar panel manufacturing company has located here in recent years and the European Center for Renewable Energy is headquartered here.

I originally wanted to come and get involved in whatever work was available, but a serious language barrier prevented me from helping with the maintenance team and no other operations were happening. Instead, I spent time trying to figure out how the initial planning and funding for this project had come about. From what I could gather, a fellow named Reinhard Koch originally came up with the majority of the idea for the whole bioenergy concept for this town. He is a native of this area, made quite a bit of money in the construction business, and then worked with local officials to secure lots of grants and matching funding from the European Union to make this into a model region for small-scale renewable energy. Almost by chance he met with a research scientist at the University of Vienna who had been developing a unique approach to biomass gasification, and they decided to use Gussing as a place to test this design on a real-world scale. After some initial tweaking, the plant has been in nearly constant operation (except for occasional maintenance periods) for the past 10 years, and a couple of others have been built in nearby towns based on the same model. Besides producing quite a bit of electricity, they also supply most of the heat needed for the town via a network of underground hot water pipes.

I still think that this is a very good example of how a rural area can achieve energy independence and sustainability, and there are plenty of aspects of this place that could be applied to development in Appalachia. I spoke about how Europe has a bit of an advantage in terms of political will for implementing community renewable energy projects in my Germany blog post, and the same issues apply here as well. Beyond this there isn't a great deal to say about my time in Austria without starting to sound negative and I don't think anyone wants to read that. I visited some interesting places in the mountains (like Eisenerz, where metals have been mined for the past 1,000 years, and the city of Graz) and I was hosted by some really nice people (thanks Peter and Honzo!), but overall I was disappointed in my time here. After getting a ride to Vienna to apply for my visa to India, I suddenly decided to take a bus to nearby Slovakia and see what might happen.

I spent a couple of days in the capital city of Bratislava wandering the narrow, winding, crumbling cobblestone streets of the old city center and eating bryndzové halušky with no clear plan for the coming days. I made a random trip to the nearby town of Svaty Jur to go hiking, and met an older Slovak couple in the woods who were well-travelled and spoke excellent English. They spent a couple of hours telling me about the places worth checking out in their country; suddenly I had something of a plan for the most unplanned part of this trip so far.

My next stop would be Banska Stiavnica, a very old silver and gold mining town in central Slovakia. Once again I navigated a tricky rural bus system into non-English speaking territory to find one of the most endearing places I've been on this trip. Nestled amongst Appalachian-looking hills, this town was once the heart of the mineral wealth for the Hapsburg dynasty in the Middle Ages, surpassing even Vienna in importance at one time. Now it's a pale shadow of about 10,000 people (versus 60,000 in the 1600s) with a beautiful but somewhat falling apart town center that looks like it hasn't been touched in a few hundred years. Silver mining only recently stopped in the past 20 years, but now a Canadian company wants to restart operations with a method that would use some potent chemicals. From what I could tell the locals were very much against this idea because of the pollution it would cause, despite the jobs it might bring to this otherwise low-opportunity area.

I stayed with a very nice family who took me around to several interesting places, like a mountain that overlooked the whole area, a tour of an old silver mine, and my first view of a Slovak Gypsy ghetto. The latter was especially surprising; several gray nondescript apartment buildings were all crowded together and completely isolated from everything else. The only nearby landmark was an abandoned mine shaft structure that loomed over one of the buildings. Many of the windows were missing and had black stains all around the outside; I was told this was because the inhabitants would often sell the radiator for scrap metal and then make fires in the middle of the living room with the former window used as a chimney.

From B. Stiavnica I went on to Novaky, where one of the largest coal mines in Slovakia is still operating. There was a mine explosion accident in nearby Hanlova last year that killed 29 people, much like the Massey explosion that killed 29 in West Virginia in the same year. I got a tour of the abandoned part of the mine, and it wasn't really worth the 8 euros but at least I can say I've been in a Slovak coal mine. Then on over to Poprad where I had hoped to go hiking in the High Tatra mountains, AKA the Slovakian Alps but a thick fog that lasted for days made this less feasible. I decided instead to try to hike in the "Slovak Paradise," which I think would have resembled the Red River Gorge in Kentucky if I would have made it. Unfortunately this was thwarted by my first real Gypsy encounter.

I wrote a personal journal entry about this event (email me if you want to read it), but to make a long story short I got very sketched out when attempting to pass by a Gypsy community that looked like a total slum out of a movie. Two teenagers approached me demanding money, and when the little bit I gave wasn't enough I decided to turn back toward the town. It was a bit of a challenge to lose them, and I ended up paying some local with a car to take me back to Poprad since it would be a 2 hour wait for the next train which was on the edge of town by the Gypsy village.

I started this trip being very interested in Gypsy culture, especially in Eastern Europe. When I've met people who are from Eastern countries (especially Romania), I always ask about Gypsy culture with complete naivete and curiosity. Time and again I'm told that they are not nice people, they will rob you, it's not unheard of to be murdered, but that their music and stories are very interesting. Of course I am never one to listen to such advice so I wasn't too worried about trying to pass by the remote, isolated village on the edge of the "Slovak Paradise" national park. After this sketchy situation where I honestly felt like I could have been robbed, I am now much more wary and likely to listen to people's warnings but I'm also still determined to not let stereotypes influence how I perceive cultural groups which I know very little about.

When it seemed like the weather just wasn't going to clear in Slovakia, I found a bus north through the Tatras over to the Polish town of Zakopane. I really didn't know what to expect of Poland, and I have to admit that as an ignorant American I thought that it would be quite poor and fairly undeveloped. Zakopane was an annoyingly over-developed tourist town, and apparently a major destination of winter sports enthusiasts from all over Central and Eastern Europe. I only spent a couple of nights there and luckily was able to finally get up into some real mountains. It had been strangely warm for the past couple of weeks; I really didn't expect a Polish November to be in the 40s snd 50s. The temperature dropped very quickly as I went up to the nearly 5,500 ft. peak of Mount Giewont, where it was quite a bit below freezing and extremely windy. I didn't exactly dress for the occasion and felt pretty lucky to make it back down without freezing to death.

Krakow was the next stop as several people had told me that it's a very attractive city and definitely worth visiting. I was lucky enough to be taken on a couple of tours of different parts of the city from some nice locals. The old city center was very nice, but to be honest I've started to get used to the old European city look and feel. I ended up making it over to Nova Huta, which was not very visually attractive but for some reason I found it a bit more interesting than the picturesque center. This area is reputed to be the "ghetto" of the city, and it's basically a series of huge, identical looking "communist bloc flats" for as far as you can see in any direction. These were all built with the single purpose of housing workers for the nearby ultra-massive steel factory known as Huta im. T. Sendzimira now, and formerly known as Huta im. T. Lenin.

I started out not knowing very much about Polish history or communism in general, and while I wouldn't call myself an expert now I definitely learned quite a bit by walking around this eerie but weirdly endearing collection of massive identical looking buildings and abandoned factories with a born-and-raised local. For instance, I had no idea that the effort to end communistic control of Europe began in Poland with the Solidarność labor union movement in the 1980s. Also I didn't know that Soviet repression of the Church had been so severe; apparently police had used high-pressure water on people trying to go to Sunday service. Americans are familiar with the idea of the former Soviet Bloc countries from growing up hearing about the Cold War, but it was quite something else to be right in the middle of one of the defining communist neighborhoods.

A couple of days later I found myself in the midst of a series of unexpected and intense experiences. I woke up in Krakow worried about not having any clear direction for the next few days when I suddenly got an invitation from a native of the Silesian coalfields to go meet her retired coal miner dad and see some mines. This region was especially interesting to me because it's the heart of Polish coal mining country, and every country I've visited that used to have mining is now importing Polish coal. I wanted to see what the mines here actually look like since former miners in these other countries claim that Poland is using cheap and unsafe labor to undercut their mines. Before I would get a chance to see these places, my host had another experience in mind for me.

Silesia has another international claim to fame: Auschwitz. This was the heart of the Nazi death machine, and the entire concentration camp network was coordinated from the headquarters at the infamous Auschwitz I camp. It is now home to a memorial and museum which is owned and operated by a Jewish family, and this was our afternoon destination. Words cannot describe the feeling in the pit of my stomach as we walked through rooms of unbelievable photographs, piles of inmates' shoes, eyeglasses, and suitcases, and recreations of their living conditions in the very buildings where they were kept. My brain has trouble processing the fact that this all actually happened, that humans are mentally and physically capable of doing this to other humans in such a systematic, deliberate, organized, and ruthless fashion. It's one thing to learn about this in school and even to see film of the actual places; it's quite another to physically be there and sense the unimaginable suffering that went on for several years.

We then got a bus to her parents' place in Beirun, and I remember the strange feeling of seeing rail cars loaded with coal right underneath the "Auschwitz" sign at the main train station. After a nice dinner her dad took us around to several operating coal mines (including the one where he used to work), and I was able to ask many questions about the realities of Polish coal mining. These mines looked nicer and more professional than any mine I've ever seen in Appalachia. The buildings were sleek and sturdy with nicely paved parking lots and full showering and storage facilities for the miners. I wasn't able to actually go into any of the mines since I showed up on such short notice, but I was assured that I could go into a working mine if I could give a week or so notice.

The following day I also interviewed the former director of Piast, one of the largest single underground mines in the world, so I'll combine his information with that from my host's dad for a quick impression of what they had to say about coal mining in Poland. To my surprise, Polish coal miners get the same retirement deal as Spanish miners, meaning that every year worked equals 1 1/2 years of retirement benefits. The retired miner I spoke with was in his mid 40s and had started a roofing business with another couple of retired miners. The mines in this area were an integral part of the union organizing that eventually helped to bring about the end of communism, but it came at a serious cost with 1,500 striking miners staying underground for 2 weeks in 1981 and 9 miners being shot by police in that same year. 5,000 people work in the Piast mine, and another 4,500 work in a nearby mine that joins up with it underground. The average pay for a miner is about $1,000 per month, which doesn't sound like so much by American standards but the cost of living is much lower than in the States. In fact, all of the houses that I saw in this region looked quite decent and while the communist-era apartment buildings lacked visual appeal they are perfectly nice and livable inside. About 60,000 miners work in the small district that Beirun is in, and many many more work in the whole area of Silesia. Almost all of the mines are government owned and operated, with the one remaining private mine about to shutting down. About 25 miners die in Polish coal miners per year.

This all combined to present a very different picture of coal mining in Poland than I had come to expect. I thought that I would see a very poor place that mirrored the more run-down parts of Appalachia that I know, but even the small houses were sturdy and well-kempt. I also assumed that the mines would be rag-tag with poor working conditions, and while I didn't actually get to go underground the outside impression was quite the opposite. Both of the people I talked to had no connection to the industry anymore and as far as I could tell didn't have an agenda. Of course this should only be taken at face value since my time and investigation here was so limited. What really struck me was that even though this area employs far more miners and produces much more coal than Appalachia, I couldn't detect anything like the kind of "coal culture" we have back home. Even those who had made a good living and retired from it just thought of it as a job. There was no tradition of strong identity based on being a miner, nor was there any fierce defense of the continued extraction and use of coal. Both of the guys I interviewed had no qualms with the transition to greater use of renewable energy, and both acknowledged that mining would no longer be part of this area's reality in 30 to 50 years.

I visited a few more small towns in southwest Poland on my way toward the Czech Republic. One of these had a small organic farm that I spent a couple of days working on, and it was very good to finally get my hands dirty again. I learned about an organization that's creating a network of traditional small Polish farms that emphasizes organic practices and sustainable living, but unfortunately I didn't have the time to really dig into this since I was feeling the need to hurry up and finish my time in Europe and head to India ASAP. After passing through Bielsko-Biala and Cieszyn, I met up with some locals from the Czech Republic who gave me a ride across the border and into the Czech mining town of Orlova.

I spent the next couple of days waiting for an intense fog to clear and then set about exploring the area. The eastern Czech coalfields seemed a bit more depressed and dilapidated overall than what I saw in Poland. I learned that this area has some serious issues with subsidence (when underground mining causes the surface to shift downward, making buildings and roads crack and sometimes break apart), and entire neighborhoods have been abandoned in some cases. While this area wasn't as hilly as Eastern Kentucky, the overall look and feel of the place had a strange familiarity. This only really applies to the countryside, because the bigger towns like Orlova are mostly filled with huge apartment buildings form the communist era.

I was lucky enough to meet and talk with one current and one former coal miner from this area (indirectly through an English-speaking daughter), and the feedback I got from them was a bit different than from the folks in Poland. Their opinion was that no one works in the mines unless they absolutely have to, and everyone leaves as soon as they can. The pay is quite low and the safety conditions poor, with many younger people already showing signs of black lung. The former miner has early-stage black lung and now works a low-level desk job making more than he did in the mines. Much of the work is still manual with pneumatic hammers and handloading of coal, though many mines are transitioning to longwall miner sections. Neither of these guys was very supportive of the coal industry; for them it was just one of the only options in a depressed area. Miners were once held up as the epitome of working class heroes by the communist Bolshevik regime, but after the fall of communism mining came to be considered one of the lowliest jobs in the land. To be clear, I didn't go looking for people who might be anti-coal; these were just two completely random guys I happened to meet.

The eastern Czech coalfield area kind of sucked me in and I spent about a week hanging around here with the friends I'd made and also hiking in the nearby hills which definitely looked like Appalachia. I also visited a town which used to have a huge mine operating there that was imposed by the communist government, but which was now defunct due to local opposition. The modern government is now trying to reopen the mine and possibly expand to surface mining in the hills just behind the town, but there's a very strong local movement to prevent this from happening which includes the mayor of the town. The website for the group organizing these efforts can be found here.

If you're in the Czech Republic, it's almost imperative that you see Prague. I was able to justify my visit to this beautiful and historic city because there was also a Czech biomass energy conference happening, so I spent my first day there sitting through a series of presentations that I mostly couldn't understand inside a university building. I did make some contacts that could be useful, but for the most part it was material that I was well familiar with. From there I spent another day just wandering around the entire city. I'm definitely not a city person (especially when they're filled with tourist types), but Prague had a certain unique charm that took a few hours to set in. It was good to take in all of the history and gorgeous architecture, but a day and a half was good enough for me.

I next passed through the town of Trebic to visit a biomass energy installation that I had learned about at the conference a few days earlier. TTS Bioenergy supplies nearly all of the heat and a portion of the electricity for this town of about 10,000 people through direct combustion of locally-sourced wood and straw. They also design and manufacture boilers and plants for clients around the world. The size and feedstock for this planet is similar to what I would like to do in the future, but I'm not such a fan of direct combustion since it's more difficult to efficiently make use of all of the potential energy and since there's no carbon-storing charcoal left over from the process. Still I was very grateful for the time they took to show me around the plant, complete with my own personal translator.

The next few days were spent in Brno, the second biggest city in Czech. There was nothing too interesting here, as I was mainly using it as a base to explore a nearby village self-sufficiency project on my way back to Austria to fly to India. The village of Hostetin has several worthwhile projects happening to make it a model of sustainable rural development. Organic farming around the town, a fruit juice processing plant, fruit drying ovens, wastewater treatment through natural wetlands, lots of solar power, and a biomass heating system were the main points of interest. It appeared that someone had been quite successful in securing grant funding judging by the nicely-packaged promotional materials and the small staff of non-profit workers housed in the town. I would certainly like to be part of helping something similar to happen in East KY, but I always wonder about the long-term viability of projects that depend on constant grant funding to stay afloat.

By this point my Indian visa was finally ready, so I made my way back down to Vienna to pick it up and get on a plane headed toward the great subcontinent. I honestly had no idea what to expect; many people had tried to instill in me great caution and even fear about going to this "developing" nation of 1.1 billion people, so I was carrying some of that with me through the myriad of annoying delays and lines at the airports in Vienna and then Frankfurt, Germany. As soon as I can find the time to write the next blog post, I'll relay the craziness involved in landing and finding my way around in New Delhi and where I've been since then.

Germany: Renewable Energy, Post-Coal Artsiness, and Huge Surface Mines

PREFACE: I wanted to start this entry with a note to say that I'm mainly only posting to the blog about my experiences that are relevant to my Watson Fellowship Project. Many other things happen on a regular basis, a lot of which might even be more interesting than the "official" things I post about on here. I am keeping a personal journal about everything else, and at some point I might decide to publish that material too. As always, if anyone is really interested in something, just email me at nathandavidhall@gmail.com.

I originally decided to go to Germany almost as an afterthought, somewhere to pass through on my way to an internship in southeast Austria. I found a couple of things that might be interesting to see from some random internet searches, but for some reason I never felt the need to spend a great deal of time here. Now I know that was a mistake, and at some point I will probably need to come back and more thoroughly explore all of the model projects happening here.

I rode a bus for 25 hours from Madrid, Spain to Freiburg, Germany, and as you might expect it wasn't the most comfortable journey of my life. Freiburg was simply the closest town of any size to the "bioenergy village" of Freiamt that I had found on the internet and wanted to visit. I hadn't looked into Freiburg very much at all before I got there, but it turns out this is quite an interesting place on its own. I spent a sleep-deprived day of seeing the old part of the city and learning about the place before finally getting some real rest and a better plan for how to go about this part of the trip.

Freiburg was heavily bombed during World War II, but in the post-war reconstruction it has established itself as "Europe's Greenest City" with more solar panels, better public transport, and more energy-efficient buildings than anywhere else on the continent. As a fairly small city of about 220,000 people, its economy is based much more on universities and research than manufacturing or heavy industry. It's on the edge of the Black Forest, and you can easily walk from the town center into a network of trails that go up through forested hills. To be honest, it was almost too nice, and definitely something of a shock to go from the informality and mild chaos of Spain to this very organized, clean, and efficient German town.

The real reason I came was to visit Freiamt, a network of very small villages in the hills of the Black Forest about 13 miles north of Freiburg that generate all of their energy (and some extra) from renewable resources. I was mainly interested in the biomass aspects, and I knew that at least one small farm was producing energy from anaerobic digestion of agricultral residues. Luckily I was able to borrow a bike from my couchsurfing host and pedal my way up there instead of navigating the countryside bus system. I kept noticing one old barn after another that had something I had never seen on buildings like this: a huge array of solar panels. After asking a small-town local that could speak English where to find one of the biomass energy projects, I was on my way to Reinbold Bioenergie.

When I emerged at the edge of the woods, I could smell a hint of organic things decomposing, but it really wasn't too bad. Soon I was walking around on the Reinbold property trying to find someone that spoke English, and before long I found Harald Reinbold working on a tractor. Luckily he was willing to spend a few minutes showing this unexpected random American guy around on their farm and energy operation. I had assumed they were a normal farm that happened to have an energy system as part of their operation, but I discovered that while this used to be the case they are now solely focused on producing energy and have dropped all of their livestock and food crop efforts.

Harald showed me around to the digesters where the mix of silage corn, hay, and cattle manure is processed by bacteria to give off methane gas that is then fed into engines that produce electricity and heat. The electricity goes into the main grid where they receive a premium kWh rate for small-scale biomass, and the heat from the engines' radiators is used to heat buildings and hot water systems for the nearby school, soccer club, and several houses. The nutrient-rich sludge left over after the energy production is then spread back onto the same fields that the crops came from. All of the feedstock for the system comes from a 6 mile radius around their farm, mostly from other small farmers in the area as well as their own farm. It seemed very strange to me that it could be more profitable to grow corn and hay to feed into a bioenergy system than to feed into an animal, but apparently with Germany's favorable feed-in tariff program it's more reliable for the farmers to grow crops for energy since the market doesn't fluctuate as much as the livestock market.

Of course this immediately brings up the "food vs. fuel" issue since a food crop is being used only for energy purposes. I couldn't help but also wonder how much chemical fertilizer, pesticide, and herbicide they have to use for the corn and how it all works out in terms of energy input versus the amount of energy produced. Harald said that they use much less fertilizer because of applying the leftover sludge, and that they don't have to use very much chemicals at all since it's just for energy and the whole plant can be used in a chopped-up form. I'm definitely a fan of small-scale community energy systems, but in the future I would like to find ways to produce energy in this way from plants that require much less input than corn. I thanked Harald for his time, then returned to the bike to find that it had a flat tire. After walking a few miles back toward Freiburg, I was helped by a very nice guy who lived by the road and happened to have an extra inner tube and pump.

The next day in Freiburg I met up with Craig Morris, a German to English translator from the US who has been living in Germany for about 20 years now. He mainly does translating for renewable energy companies and projects, and even wrote a book about how the U.S. would be much better off if we could learn some lessons about how Germany has pursued renewable energy development over the past couple of decades. We had some good conversation over lunch, and he then took me on a tour of Vauban, the greenest part of Europe's greenest city. This neighborhood was built in the past 20 years on cutting-edge sustainable design principles, employing everything from passive solar, passive heating/cooling, pedestrian friendly design, ultra-insulation, and sustainable building materials. Apparently you have to pay $20,000 a year for a parking space in the nearby garage, and you're not allowed to park for more than 15 minutes next to your flat. There's a small woodchip-fired heat and power plant nearby that supplies everything that the solar panels on the roofs can't, and every block has its own weird avant-garde looking playground.

Once again, I agree in theory with all of the principles in place at Vaubaun, but for me it's almost too nice. Maybe being from Eastern Kentucky means that I can never really feel comfortable in a place that's so neatly organized, clean, and efficient, since this is very different from what I experienced growing up. But, I did appreciate being able to see it, and it was good to make the connection with Craig. From here I headed up to the Ruhr Valley, European Culture Capital 2010, to see what was going on.

The Ruhr Valley (Ruhrgebiet in German) was once the industrial capital of the country, home to most of the coal mining and steel production that made Germany a powerhouse before World War II and enabled the rapid reconstruction after the place had been bombed to smithereens after the war. Until very recently, there was still a lot of coal mining here but it's pretty much nonexistent at this point. I didn't really know what to expect, so I just went straight for the middle of the whole area and thought I would explore from there. Essen was way blander than I expected; when I first got there I could not possibly figure out how this was the culture capital of Europe. There were practically no old buildings since the entire place had been more or less destroyed in the war, just uninteresting identical 5-story apartment buildings with some typical shops at the bottom.

My couchsurfing host let me borrow a bike to explore the area, so I went to a few of the places that were touted to be the key spots to visit. There was the mining and geology museum at Bergbau, the huge crazy futuristic Zollverein mining complex, the big weird glass-facade building with posters about renewable energy projects, the "Landscape Park" in Gelsen Kirchen, the home and estate property of the steel baron Krupp family, and finally the massive coal slag tip with a giant creepy metal slab in the middle of it (apparently this was cutting-edge art). Overall it seemed like the strategy for "economic reconversion" and the basis for the whole "European Culture Capital" status was centered around turning former industrial landscapes and structures into centers of education and post-modern artsiness. There has been some shift to high-tech and sustainable industry from the old heavy and fossil-fuel industries, but it doesn't seem to be very focused on the people who have now been made redundant by the recent end of coal mining in Germany. It would take forever for me to describe each of these places I visited; just email me if you're really interested and I'll send excerpts of my journal.

I came here largely because of reading articles about how the Ruhr Valley should be a model for Appalachia's economic reconversion away from coal. Once again (see the entry on South Wales), I can't help but think that these authors have no idea what they're talking about and have definitely not been to both Ruhrgebeit and Appalachia. This was a huge, sprawling urban area where one city flows into another with a total population of around 5 million. It's much easier to have "economic reconversion" if you already have lots of high-tech infrastructure available, a plentiful and well-educated workforce, and loads of money from the European Union to move from fossil resource industry to high-tech and some renewables. It was an interesting place to see in some ways, but overall it didn't feel very relevant. I met and stayed with some really great people, however I am just not a city person and it felt a bit overdue when I got on the road to Juhnde and Gottingen.

Juhnde is the original bioenergy village that Freiamt was based on and has a bigger biogas system. I managed to navigate a tricky bus network to this small and beautiful old town in the middle of Germany after spending the night in Kassel. I met up with Jonas, the 18 year old son of one of the original farmers who helped to get this bioenergy project off the ground. Jonas was very friendly and helpful, and actually knew much more about the inner workings of the system than he originally claimed to. I really liked this town and appreciated their willingness to meet with me and show me around for free, especially considering that they usually charge a good bit of money to groups of tourists from all over the world. The same food-vs-fuel and chemical input arguments apply here as in Freiamt, but I still think it's pretty awesome that a small rural area can become self-sufficient in heat and power from local resources. I have more details about this installation from my notes if anyone is interested, otherwise the website has a decent amount of info (it's better to use google translate to look at the German version of the site instead of the English version since it has much more info).

In Goettingen I made contact with one of the main people behind the whole bioenergy village movement in Germany, but I would have to wait a couple of days to meet up with him. In the meantime I spent a day hiking in the nearby Harz mountains with Andi, my couchsurfing host. This area looked a lot like the Appalachian mountains and used to be a major mining area, but the only thing left now is a constant stream of metal-contaminated water runoff. To be clear, the mining here was for minerals (copper, gold, etc) and took place mostly in the Middle Ages up till about 100 years ago. The other aspect I liked about this area was that while the forests contained a lot of evidence of logging, it seemed like it was nearly all being done on a more sustainable scale so that the forest was left standing while only a portion of the trees were removed. Overall it was very nice to be up in some hills after being stuck in the sprawling metropolis of the Ruhrgebiet.

I met Dr. Ruppert at Goettingen University the next day to talk about how this whole bioenergy concept came about and how it has been economically possible in Germany. It was quite a long process to find funding to do the first model bioenergy village (Juhnde), conduct feasibility studies, educate and involve the local citizens and farmers about the process, and finally get a working system in place. For me, it really comes down to two things: a strong incentive program for the energy produced and strong support from the European Union for the initial funding for model community-scale energy projects. Germany provides around $0.16 per kWh of energy produced from biomass systems smaller than 5 MW, and the EU was willing to provide significant matching grants to get this project off the ground. In the US we lack these feed-in tariffs that allow renewables to compete with (currently) cheaper fossil energy sources, and most of the grant funding seems to go to large-scale projects that could never fit within a community-owned framework. This seems to be a fundamental difference to me, that parts of Europe recognize the value of local self-sufficiency and are willing to provide at least some initial funding to show that this sort of system can work. Juhnde certainly proves that it can; this area has been operating profitably for 10 years in this way.

My last stop in Germany was in the former Eastern Bloc town of Cottbus, just a few miles away from the border with Poland. I had used some research papers while at Berea College that came from Brandenburg Technical University (BTU) in Cottbus for my work on agroforestry approaches to remediating surface mined land, so it seemed to make sense to go to the place where those papers were produced. East Germany is home to some massive brown coal fields which almost exclusively use surface mining, and reclamation of these areas carries a lot of the same issues as mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. The only difference is that there are no beautiful biodiverse hills in East Germany, just expanses of farmland and small villages. To be fair, this mining has completely erased or dramatically changed entire communities against their will, but for me it's not quite the same if it's happening on flat ground.

After some hit-and-miss communication (and a random night of partying where I met a bunch of students who are working on agroforestry reclamation!), I eventually met up with some of the faculty at BTU who are in charge of the work around bionergy plantings on strip mined areas. To my surprise, the chair of the department asked me to give them a powerpoint presentation on reclamation/reforestation work in Appalachia, and gave me about 45 minutes to put something together before we would all meet back up. I think it went surprisingly well, and luckily I already had some presentations from classes at Berea that I was able to splice together into something decent. They had plenty of questions and I was able to answer all but the most data-intensive (i.e. how many millimeters of rainfall per year, average temperatures, etc). I made plans to check out their project area the next day and went home to a crazy couchsurfing experience.

I met with a representative of Gruene Liga the next morning in the very strange looking and ultra-tight security university library. Gruene Liga has been working on issues around brown coal mining for quite some time, and I was interested to hear the perspective of someone who has been dealing with the ins and outs of community protection work on the other side of the planet. There were many parallels with Appalachia, but also some very strange differences. For example, there's only one company that does surface mining in East Germany, and it's actually a Swedish state-owned company called Vattenfall. This company is trying to branch out to do more renewables, and they harvest all the biomass on the areas they're about to mine and use it for bioenergy (definitely not a justification for surface mining in my opinion!). Also, the region of Brandenburg is pushing the development of renewables at the same time that they're pushing for more large-scale surface mining. Massive amounts of land has been dramatically reshaped by this practice, and while a bit of it has been successfully reconverted to farm land, huge expanses have become lakes that are leaching pollutants into nearby streams (including some that feed into the protected Spreewald area).

After my meeting, I got a ride from my couchsurfing host out to the university's agroforestry research site which is located on a huge strip mined area directly adjavcent to an active mine site. Christian, a PhD researcher, was willing to meet with me for awhile to show me their work. I was surprised at how much area they had covered with a combination of black locust trees and an alfalfa/grass mix; it must have been several dozen acres. It was a bit surreal to stroll around on a site that has been the basis for much of my proposed method for redeveloping Appalachian strip mined areas, and with one of the researchers responsible for writing papers that I have used thousands of miles away. Although there were no mountains around, the soil conditions (or lack thereof) were very familiar to me. The fact that these plantings are several years old and doing quite well is good news for the plantings I hope to do when I get back at the end of this year.

From there we drove over to the active mining area which had official viewing areas set up with information billboards (all in German of course). This was by far the most massive continuous surface mining operation I have ever seen; maybe there are MTR mines back home that are just as big, but if so I've never been in a position to look out over them like this. The machinery was also ridiculously massive, maybe bigger than the huge draglines used in Appalachia. The strange thing about this place was that just beyond the complete destruction to the west, you could see several wind turbines spinning in the distance and in the east, there was a huge coal-fired power plant which also had wind turbines beside it. This stands in stark contrast to the mentality we seem to have back home where you're either for coal or against coal with no middle ground; I would be pretty surprised to see these turbines go up beside the AEP power plant near Ashland, Kentucky.

I spent a couple more days in Cottbus before catching a ride down to Vienna, Austria through the Czech Republic, but didn't do anything really worth writing about. Overall my time in Germany was definitely worthwhile and surprising in many ways. One aspect that I have neglected to mention is the fact that I constantly found World War II on my mind as I traveled through this country. I hadn't even thought about this before I got here, but I couldn't help but wonder what all of these places looked and felt like just 65-70 years ago. To my surprise I was told by a few people that "Hitler is still everywhere," meaning that the atrocities of that time are still on people's minds and only very recently have people been able to start feeling some kind of national pride again. It also seemed odd that so much wealth and progressive activity has arisen from these ashes whereas countries that weren't so destroyed are lagging behind (i.e. US and UK).

It was certainly a trip to bike around in the countryside and see old barns completely covered in solar panels. I have to admit that I assumed that people would be very formal and fairly unfriendly. Luckily this was not so much the case; I found everyone to be quite accommodating and Germany has a quirky sense of humor that pops up fairly often. I definitely think that the US has plenty of lessons to learn from the developments here, but the real lesson might be the most difficult one to turn into reality: political support and will on both the local and national level.