In Germany at the moment, there is a big sturggle with the electricity provider RWE and various environmental groups.
The company uses Tagebau (opencast pits) to mine for brown coal to fuel its power stations. This is very environmentally unfriendly, destroying vaste swathes of land, using huge mining machines, some of the biggest man-made, land based, vehicles. Whole communities have been resettled as villages and small towns are swallowed by the mining work. Parts of the Autobahn network have been diverted around the huge pits - I went to a customer site and my navigation device sent me along a stretch of road that just suddenly ended about 50M before a huge (100M deep) hole, where the road used to be. The customer itself had received compensation, because the excavation work about 50KM away had caused such immense structural damage to the building that there was a deep crack in the building and every time it rained, the people on the ground floor needed an umbrella at their desks!
For the last couple of years a fight has been going on over clearing the remnants of the Hambacher Forst (Forest). The last 200 hectares of which have been squatted by activists. A couple of weeks ago a reporter climbed into the trees to talkt to the activists and fell to his death as he tried to walk between two trees 6M in the air using an unsecured rope bridge. The police action to clear the forest was paused for a week at that point.
This week, the court agreed to postpone the clearance of the forest until 2020, while a debate over brown coal and whether the forest should be destroyed was cleared up.
Now the "green" search engine Ecosia has stepped in, offering RWE 1,000,000€ for the remnants of Hambacher Forst.
Ecosia is a search engine that uses its own algorithms and also results from Bing. It contributes 80% of its profits to re-populating forests around the world.
Story in German: http://www.neuepresse.de/Nachrichten/Me ... uer-Baeume
