Northern Bohemia no longer reveals at first glance what it once was. Although the characteristic yellow-grey haze of toxic emissions from surrounding industrial plants has disappeared, the region continues to live with the consequences of extraction. The area formally known as the “Black Triangle”, located along the borders of the Czech Republic, Germany, and Poland, was once considered one of the most polluted regions in Europe. Today, this past can seem almost redeemed. It is easy to move through the Ústí and Most regions without seeing the mining infrastructure that shaped them. In the Liberec region, former military land has been remade into a paradise for cyclists, and mushroom pickers need no longer fear poisoning near the former uranium mines. From a distance, it is easy to say the region has recovered. But has this landscape truly been reclaimed?
Coal mining in the North Bohemian brown coal basin has a long and deeply rooted history. But the mass transformation came after the Second World War: the mines were nationalized, and extraction intensified dramatically. Underground mining gradually declined, replaced by vast open-cast pits. This industrial expansion came at immense cost: entire villages disappeared, including old Most. The relocation of the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in 1975 became the enduring symbol of that era. New Most was presented as embodying the promise of a modern socialist future. Northern Bohemia, and the Most region in particular, was conceived as a laboratory of socialist modernity. Within the state socialist vision, mining was portrayed as a force that would help build a socialist society; official state planning promised that the extractive industry would eventually be succeeded by universities, microchip research centres, and, more broadly, hubs of knowledge and innovation. This future was expressed in visualizations showing mines replaced by sleek university buildings. But extraction lasted longer than the promises attached to it, and today, Most ranks among the lowest-rated places to live in Czechia, alongside other post-industrial cities such as Orlová and Karviná.
In recent years, the concept of the “just transition” has become the dominant framework for promises, imagining the move away from coal-based energy toward cleaner sources. On the ground, however, “justice” remains uncertain. When I took part in a public hearing in Sokolov, local resident, posed the following query with a wry smile: “The mining company destroyed the villages around us, will justice at least mean our village has a chance to develop?” In reality, regarding funding distribution, one might say that the developers will get a chance to develop even if the village doesn’t, as such schemes are criticized for filling the pockets of fossil oligarchs or of foreign companies. This phenomenon is illustrated by a project planning lithium mining in Cínovec by the company Geomet, which is a subsidiary of the Australian firm European Metals Holdings (EMH). The Sokolov resident’s words express a deeper worry embedded in everyday life in the area—not only concerning health or jobs, but about what comes next. This question cannot be understood solely through the language of policy. In regions like Northern Bohemia, people see that the burdens of pollution, extraction, and economic restructuring have never been distributed equally. Precarity layers on earlier precarity: long-term financial insecurity, the need to hold down multiple jobs, inflation, and chronic stress. Exhaustion feels pervasive among both the people and the land. It manifests through understaffed clinics, underfunded schools, and polluted land, including by uranium, which I think about often when I eat local mushrooms. The exhaustion is also shaped by longer histories of exclusion, including the relocation of Roma communities into disused miners’ housing under false promises of support, creating what later became known as “excluded localities”. Extraction not only transforms landscapes; it also reorganizes social vulnerability.
I believe the term “sacrifice zone” remains useful here. The term was originally used to describe areas severely polluted by the mining and processing of uranium for nuclear weapons during the Cold War, but it refers not simply to a polluted place, but rather places and populations treated as expendable, who are exposed to long-term damage so that other places may prosper, remain protected, or imagine themselves to be sustainable. The issue is not only that some places suffer more than others, but that their suffering is normalized as necessary. When we speak about energy transition, we usually speak about kilowatts, infrastructure, and power grids. But there is another kind of energy at stake in these processes: the energy required to live under conditions that demand more from you than they return, social entropy. If energy is the capacity to transform matter, then living in a sacrifice zone means constantly transforming neglect into endurance, scarcity into improvisation, exclusion into survival.
To illustrate, I offer a personal anecdote: I once went to buy butter at a small shop under our house. As we chatted, the woman behind the counter told me, almost casually, that she had broken two ribs while skiing, but she was working anyway. She had two jobs and a grandson to support. The conversation was ordinary, almost absurd in its matter-of-factness. But that, too, was part of the landscape: pain normalized, work continuing, bodies carrying more than they should have to. Northern Bohemia, therefore, is not simply a post-coal landscape. It is a place where extraction has left behind exhausted land, exhausted infrastructures, and exhausted social worlds. The consequences are no longer easily visible in smokestacks or open pits. They appear instead as what Marx might call a metabolic rift: a place from which much has been extracted, but to which little has been returned. The question of transition, then, is not only how to replace one source of energy with another. Regional inequalities do not endure because too little money trickles out to the periphery, but because peripheries are systematically organized as places from which value is extracted. Where promises of renewal are repeatedly deferred, depletion turns into anger, and anger hardens into distrust. In this sense, the political problem is not external to the ecological one: when transition arrives without repair, representation, or tangible improvement in everyday life, it is easily experienced as yet another broken promise and becomes likely to feed the rejection of pro-climate measures and the turn to populist parties.
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