Western Germany’s Hambach Forest is under siege from the largest power company that wants to clear the 12,000year-old natural resource for its coal mining expeditions. There is just 10 percent of the original 13,500 acres left.
Environmental activists have been living in the forest since 2012 in the hopes of stopping the destruction.
One activist, going by his forest name of Tricky, commented on the situation, saying nobody was going to save them, so they had to save themselves. He said people who stand up for themselves in the oppressive societies tend to meet either violence or death for speaking out. He said it was his duty to take some type of action.
Neha Hirve, a photographer, first learned of the forest community while in India for a separate project. When headlines mentioned the destruction of Hambach Forest, Hirve felt she needed to see the forest before there wasn’t one.
Hirve traveled to Germany that next week and began a photo story about the community protecting the Hambach forest. She was given a phone number to meet with one of the activists but was told that she might not make it past a police barricade. This did not stop her.
She was able to enter the forest at night, walking until she found a structure the squatters built. Knocking on the door, the activists welcomed her in. Hirve said the home was damp and cold, and she thought to herself that she would not last a week.
For almost a year, she visited the area multiple times, and even though she expected some clashes between the activists and police, it never happened… at least not while she was there.
Hirve said the activists were like protectors of the forest, and she was drawn in by the stories of people who wanted to live beyond today’s society. She said she tried to understand why they wanted to do it.
Her work has allowed others to get into the world of people who take up a cause, risking their lives to save something. In some of her pictures, people are wearing animal masks or using trash to build barricades.
With her pictures, Hirve was able to capture the state of mind the activists have, conveying it in a lighthearted way but still raising questions as to the decay of society.
Hirve never expected what activists were worried about. But police and special forces arrived in September 2018 to start evicting people from the area, which included destroying treehouses and placing activists under arrest. All this was stopped after a journalist fell out of a tree and died.
For the moment, the forest is safe with RWE telling the government it won’t resume anything until late 2020. Its future, it seems, is still uncertain.