Anthropology of Global Climate Urgency
Doctoral Network
Climate Urgency and Just Transition:
Temporalities of Post-Carbon Democracy
Pödelwitz, Germany
Fieldwork Updates by Jonny Grünsch
The focal location of my research is Pödelwitz, a 750 year old village in the Central German mining district south of Leipzig. The village neighbors the active open-pit lignite mine, Vereinigtes Schleenhain, which threatened its existence due to a planned expansion by the mining company (MIBRAG) until recently. But because local residents and climate activist resisted these plans, Pödelwitz was saved in the course of Germany’s exit from coal. From this resistance, emerged a civil society association, Pödelwitz hat Zukunft which aims to transform Pödelwitz into a social-ecological model village in line with the values of climate justice and democracy. However the ecological, economic and social after-effects of mining as well as diverging futures of the energy transition obstruct such transformation. For example, most of the real-estate in the village still belongs to MIBRAG, which has their owns plans for the area around Pödelwitz in the course of the exit from coal. The village will be surrounded by an emerging ‘green’ economy consisting of large-scale solar parks, hydrogen and biofuel industry, and postmining lakes with luxury lakeside apartments. Moreover, with the raise of fascism, the political support for Pödelwitz in particular and the energy transition in general is dwindling.
My project is set around the persisting political problems Pödelwitz faces a midst the energy transition after. I collaborate with civil society association Pödelwitz hat Zukunft to investigate these problems and make practical as well as conceptual contributions. This coupling of practical and conceptual problems is premised on the insights from the energy humanities that rapid climate or energy transition not only urgently require values such as democracy or justice to guide practical decisions, but these critical political concepts themselves must be transformed (Chakrabarty 2009; Boyer 2014). Together with the association, I intend to identify, reflect upon, and overcome the obstacles to a just transformation of Pödelwitz. These obstacles include unjust property relations, antidemocratic political structures based on participation without decision-making power, the rise of fascism and a reductive view of nature which hampers ecological restoration. The overarching goal of the collaborative research project is to devise a concept of climate justice which identifies and responds to these distributive, procedural, and recognitional injustices and thereby reflects the current political struggle in Pödelwitz and beyond.
I approach the conceptual and practical double-bind of the energy transition through the transdisciplinary methodology of field-philosophy. Field-philosophy is located in between the disciplines of anthropology and philosophy and conjoins empirical fieldwork with normative theorizing (Briggle et al 2012; Buchanan et al. 2019; Diamanti 2023). Unlike an ethnographic approach, it does not study people but what I call concepts in, from and for the field, building on recent methodological discussion in anthropology (Rabinow and Marcus 2008; Ingold 2014, Boyer et al 2016; Boyer and Marcus 2021). By locating concepts in the field, field-philosophy blurs the boundary between the empirical and theoretical. Contrary to applied philosophy, theoretical concepts are also developed develop bottom-up from fieldwork and not only applied top-down to an empirical case. As a transdisicplinary methodology, field-philosophy is a collaborative and engaged form of research. It is based on working together with stakeholder on practical problems while aiming at more-than-academic contributions for the field. In my case, I work with the civil society association Pödelwitz hat Zukunft on democracy, climate justice, and social-ecological transformation in, from and for Pödelwitz.
Besides participating in the regular association activities, I initially planned to organize dedicated field-philosophy workshops about climate justice in, from and for Pödelwitz. The first workshop was a valuable opportunity to share some of my research results with the association and discuss the relation between climate justice and our work. We concluded the urgency to think about justice not only in relation to climate mitigation, but also adaption. In a warming world and collapsing climate system, the creation of resilient and just structures of solidarity is paramount. Moreover, instead of fighting against abstract planetary concerns, such as the atmosphere or global injustice, climate justice must be made more concrete and local. Who owns which property, how decisions for solar energy are made, and what water is used for and why emerged as tangible questions of injustice. However, the workshop also pointed to a challenge of transdisciplinary research: the difference between scholarly requirements and practical concerns. While academia requires an analytic separation of concepts, practical concerns are always entangled with each other. Instead of organizing several designated workshops, I now intend to collaborate with existing discussion or reflection formats. Rather than providing an external structure, transdisciplinary methodologies such field-philosophy should be shaped by the internal requirements of the field.
Moreover, throughout the fieldwork I realized what is special about Pödelwitz is how evocative the village is; it make abstract concerns, such as climate justice, palpable. You can see the destructive continuity of private property acquired for mining through the cracks in the crumbling walls of the traditional truss houses, which MIBRAG leaves empty speculating on higher profits in the future. Sometimes it is possible to taste the democracy deficit. For instance, the sweet and sour blackberries which overgrow gardens are allowed to stay because they are on private property. Yet, the municipality required the removal of tomato plants that were part of a concept for a climate resilient and edible village from the side-walks, because it does not want private property of public space. For the same reason, it rejected plans for a small, sufficiency-oriented PV system on the roof of the community house, while the humming of the large scale solar parks build by MIBRAG and other fossil companies around Pödelwitz is surprisingly noisy. Ecological devastation is audible too. When the rhythmic swooshing of the conveyor belt stops, the village brook will go quiet too, because its source has been dug out and it is only running on water drained from the mine.
In response to this palpable injustice, we could celebrate several tangible successes, but also the scope of challenges became apparent to me. Through collective financing, we bought a farm, which not only serves as a stronghold for the association but also a model how to socialize and fight the property relations in Pödelwitz. In response to the lack of democratic decision making on a municipal level, we got one of the association members elected to the local city council. Yet during the same time, the billionaire who owns the mining company and the houses in Pödelwitz has doubled his wealth. Not only will he be compensated for the exit from coal, and benefits from the emerging renewable energy economy, but most likely also succeed in letting the mining business go bankrupt and further externalize the cost for ecological restoration to the public.
Conferences
June 2024, “Field-Philosophy: Climate Justice and Social-Ecological Transformation in, for, and from Pödelwitz”. At GSGAS Summer School: Multi-crisis around the World: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, Environmental Sciences, and the Humanities, University of Leipzig,.
March 2025, “Concepts in Action / Actions in Concepts: Lessons on Field-philosophy in, from and for Pödelwitz”, at STS Hub 2025: Diffracting the Critical, HU Berlin.
April 2025, “Climate justice in, from, and for Pödelwitz” ASA 2025: Critical Juncture Anthropology on the move, University of Birmingham.