Peter-Vincent Schuld

At the time, it was only a limited number of years ago that the communist Eastern Bloc had fallen apart and the countries that were once part of the Warsaw Pact became accessible to Westerners. Old worlds that had remained closed for decades were reopened and more easily accessible. I could not have imagined at the time that the Czech Republic, the country I was in, would become a proud and liberal member of the European Union years later and that I witnessed that moment at the enlargement ceremony in Dublin, Ireland.

Sometime at the end of winter in the beginning of 1994, journalistic life brought me to this country and the surroundings of a town located in the South Bohemian region of the Czech Republic called Ceski Krumlov. I was there for exercises of the Dutch Marine Corps.

The evening became fuller and my stomach emptier, living and working on an empty stomach is just pretty bad for me. I got out of the car and the biting winter cold was softened by the smell of the burning lignite that warmed the houses of the inhabitants of this picturesque village. Walking along the path of boulders, under the carved city gate with a gigantic castle above me, passing a bridge with a flowing river underneath, the smell of the burning lignite became more and more intense.

It’s a cocktail of a romantic medieval town, the winter cold and that smell. That so homely warm smell of that burning lignite. I felt like I was in a period I had never experienced. I felt like I was in times I’ve never experienced.
Maybe I over-romanticized it. Not a hundredth of a second in my brain that even made me think about the potentially harmful consequences of burning fossil fuels like that specifically deliciously smelling smoldering lignite.

I consciously lived through the time of the Cold War and the opening up of a new world was a revelation to me.
In those days, the early nineties, you didn’t quickly go on Google to find out where you would end up.

You made a decision to travel somewhere and you went. How bleu ! At that time, I was even more amazed by all the new things I took in than I am now, although that hasn’t really changed much to this day. You just know a little more.

In my experience, environmental activists at that time were mainly job-shy whiners who had something to complain about about everything.
Yes…. I was and am vehemently against whaling and against the clubbing of seals to death, in which the environmental movement found me on their side. But air quality?

At the time, we didn’t realize that decades later, air quality, CO2 emissions and the fight against particulate matter would become spearheads in our daily activities.

You had learned about the Industrial Revolution in school, or at least learned…. Something was told about it and often in a totally uninteresting way. So I went to the library to read books about those bygone times. The lack of enthusiasm with which my teachers at school talked about times gone by, I didn’t let it stop me.

So it happened that everything that had to do with school did not interest me at all and that I turned to other sources to learn about the history that fascinated me.

All under the perhaps adolescent motto “I learn for myself” and not for school. For example, it could happen that I simply ignored tests and tests because they were often about things that I really didn’t find interesting and if I had slept really badly, I handed in my test with only my name above it, without having filled in a single wood. For many reasons, I already had an innate distrust of teachers at the time. Often thinking “you can tell me everything in a boring way, but I’ll do my own research”.

I was told about how people used to light kitchen fires on wood and coke. About the coal farmer who came by. About the peel farmer who came to collect the kitchen waste. I let myself be told about the dirty air in densely populated cities where industry and living once coexisted. It has been an evolution that heavy industry has moved to industrial estates outside the city. That zoning plans gave a different function to the inner cities.

What must it have ever been like? Continuous steaming chimneys in the densely populated inner cities, steam boilers that were fed by the black gold. How many people would have ever gotten sick from the polluted air in those times? OK, in those days car traffic was virtually non-existent. Whereas at the time the air was only wiped out by the mantelpiece, today countless cars have taken the place of the wood and coal stoves.

Knowledge about air quality is subject to evolution. Every day we learn how to keep our living environment cleaner.

Years ago, when I was a guest, I was photographing with my camera on the grounds of Antwerp Bulk Terminal. Thousands of tonnes of coal and ore arrive in the port of Antwerp by ship and are loaded on an immense quay. Life-size machines excavate the supplied mountains of coal and ore and then transport them back to the coal-fired power stations and blast furnaces.

I remember very well that the director of the port terminal complained that he was being the object of being the object of environmental activists who would prefer to see his terminal closed today rather than tomorrow. I could understand his irritation very well and I understand the man to this day. The sullen-looking West-Fleming had had enough. But I also understand the people who want to stop C02 emissions. Where is the bridge? Large sprinkler systems deposit the particulate matter as far as possible on the enormous port area. During the day you can see the huge cranes and grabs moving almost rhythmically. The coal is graciously removed from the ship’s cargo areas and neatly deposited at the terminal. The mechanical operations are repeated indefinitely. At night, it looks like an otherworldly moonscape, illuminated by lamps, made impressive by moving shadows and traps.

But how relative is “infinite”. How much longer will coal be burned in our power stations? The coalition agreement of the incoming new Dutch cabinet talks about closing all coal-fired power plants by 2030, in order to meet the CO2 reduction agreements. But is it feasible? Is it really necessary? Who is to say that advancing technology in the period between now and 2030 does not have a solution to carry out coal combustion and coal gasification CO2 neutrally without causing some damage to the living environment? Are they not political choices based on dogma? Nothing is impossible. The earth revolves around the sun, but is politics about science, or is science about politics, who is going to answer this existential question?

The smell of burning lignite has almost disappeared from society and with it this warm and almost uterine feeling. It seems that at some point the cranes and grabs will stop to take the coal out of the bellies of the incoming ships. Is nostalgia only what we are left with, with perhaps a cleaner living environment as a future? But who’s to say that in a decade’s time there won’t be new insights? Whatever they may be. We are closing periods and making our way through trial and error into the next age. Always through fleeting times.