The 12,000-year-old Hambach forest has lived through many eras, but perhaps none as consequential as the last half-century.
Locals and environmentalists have been fighting for 50 years to keep the woodland — which sits between the western German towns of Aachen and Cologne — from becoming an open-pit coal mine. At times, protesters occupied the area, living in treehouses among the towering canopies to protect against the threat of chainsaws.
Now the fight is finally coming to a close, with about 14% of the original forest still intact. In June, the local government announced the remaining woods will be protected permanently and turned into a nature conservation area.
“The climate movement has won the battle,” said Dirk Jansen, of BUND, the German branch of the Friends of the Earth environmental group. He spent decades fighting for the forest.
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Hambach is one chapter in a much bigger story, as similar clashes between governments, private developers and citizens are playing out around the world — including in the US. There, public lands are being clawed back at an unprecedented rate for oil and gas extraction.
“We seem to be moving aggressively in the opposite direction,” Lincoln Larsen, who studies outdoor recreation and public lands at North Carolina State University, told DW.
How Hambach became a battleground
The fight over Hambach began in the mid-1970s when German energy company RWE initiated the permitting process for open-pit lignite mining near the forest. More than 5,200 people were slated for resettlement from adjacent villages, igniting early local resistance over land rights.
Environmentalists took up the cause in subsequent years. The first treehouse occupiers set up camp in 2012, beginning a standoff in which they were intermittently evicted by the authorities.
The conflict reached a turning point in October 2018, when more than 50,000 protesters flooded the forest. That same month, Friends of the Earth Germany won a court order halting the clearing.
The following year, Germany’s Coal Commission, made up of energy companies, unions, NGOs, and citizens recommended that Hambach be protected and that Germany begin phasing out coal by 2038. The Hambach mine is scheduled to stop extracting coal by 2029.
And just recently, the government and RWE finalized their agreement to protect what is left of the forest.
Public lands under threat in the US
In the US, these types of fights over public land are commonplace, from copper-nickel mining in Boundary Waters, Minnesota, to oil and gas drilling in New Mexico near sacred Pueblo and Navajo lands.
Public lands make up about 30% of the country, roughly 640 million acres (259 million hectares) in total. These range from America’s most popular national parks — like Yosemite and Yellowstone — to forests and wildlife refuges.
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They came under the control of the federal government gnate lands for protection. But US president Donald Trump has been attempting to reverse that legacy, shrinking the government’s public land portfolio and moving to open protected lands to drilling, mining and private development.
“For 100 years, presidents have only been using that to add land to our protected area portfolio. Trump is the first who’s actively tried to do the opposite,” Larsen said. “So that is unprecedented.”
In June, Trump opened 500,000 square miles (1.3 million square kilometers) of protected Pacific Ocean waters for commercial fishing.
The president’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill created an expedited calendar for the Department of Interior to sell leases of public land for oil and gas development. And he has called for expanded timber production with the US Forest Service pledging to increase timber sales by 25% over the next four to five years.
Losing public lands is more than just nature
Selling off public lands for development sends ripples far beyond any single ecosystem. The most clear impact is to the climate. RWE was clearing Hambach to harvest lignite or brown coal, the dirtiest kind.
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It’s not just that fossil fuel extraction is causing a rise in global temperatures, leading to increasingly intense storms, drought, flooding and extreme weather all over the world. Public lands are also critical for watershed management.
In the US, many public lands sit at higher elevations and capture the water that communities downstream rely on for their drinking supply.
National forests in the west of America comprise about 20% of total land area, but contributed 46% of surface water supply, a 2022 study from the US Forest Service found.
Then there’s biodiversity. Forests, wetlands and protected marine areas are ecosystems that exist in a delicate balance. Felling trees or overfishing can unravel the entire system.
Biodiversity loss can disrupt food supply chains that billions of people depend on and create the kind of reom acknowledged this year that vanishing global biodiversity has major national security implications
Why communities fight to keep public lands public
In addition, people often report feeling an intrinsic connection to the nature around them. That’s especially true for Native communities who have often led the fight to protect the natural world from oil and gas extraction.
One of the biggest public lands battles has been in Alaska, the state with the highest proportion of Indigenous peoples. Local communities there are largely opposed to drilling, as many still rely on traditional hunting and fishing for subsistence.
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That personal stake cuts across party lines. Surveys show around three-quarters of those asked oppose the closure of national public lands and their sale to the highest bidder.
The country’s national parks, often called “America’s best idea,” welcomed a record 331.9 million visitors in 2024.
“Attachment to these unique places is what inspires people to fight to protect them,” Larsen said.
The economic stakes are just as high. Outdoor recreation supports a $1.2 trillion industry and five million jobs. In many communities, public lands draw tourists, sustain small businesses and keep local economies afloat.
In Hambach, the remaining forest will become a publicly-managed wilderness development area from 2035. Two new corridors will connect it to neighboring woodland in an attempt to restore the landscape’s ecology and biodiversity. A cycle and pedestrian path will also be created so residents can visit the forest safely.
“Not a single tree will be felled, not a single road will be paved through it, and the remaining forests will also be designated as nature reserves,” said Jansen of Friends of the Earth, adding that the entire region now has an ecological future. “It’s time for peace and time that the forest will be a forest and nothing more.”
Edited by: Tamsin Walker
