Nordstern - part of the Emscher Landschaft Park - looking for wilderness among the cracks of civilization

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I took my first walk along the Emscher on Friday. Work took me up to Gelsenkirchen to some offices in the middle of, or maybe right next door to, Nordsternpark - yet another former mining site turned outdoor recreation space*.

The Emscher is one of three rivers that, along with the A40 autobahn, make up the skeleton of the Ruhr area. The other two rivers, the Ruhr and the Lippe were used for drinking water and the Emscher got the short, or dirty end, of the straw: it has been used as a sewer and industrial waste water canal since the late 1800s.

They began fixing it up - renaturalizing it - in the 1990s - that project has gone forward in spurts and spats but is now going full steam ahead and they expect to have all 80km of the river pristine and clean by 2014. We'll see - it was a little stinky Friday but not bad.

These parks represent a different approach to nature and wilderness - different than Im used to - opposite to Thoreau's ideas of preserving nature - this is finding nature among the crack's of "civilization", this is squeezing it into the empty spaces, this is re-engineering nature after we've stripped it all away.

Still it works. I can relax a little here and find some breathing space. There is natural beauty and life. Okay, it doesnt compare with sitting on the shore of the Atlantic, or swimming in some hidden waterfall two days back in the woods. But on some small scale it works.

Today's walk was in some small way inspired by Alf Wight (better known as James Herriot), the vet from Yorkshire. He wrote about stopping off on his way home from calls to walk the dogs where ever he happened to be. Ill be back in Gelsenkirchen every week for a while now - and Ill be taking full advantage...

 

*Here are some other renaturalized industrial sites Ive visited in the Ruhr area: Industrial Ruins in the Ruhrgebiet, Zollverein Fotos, Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord, Fun on a Coal Dump, Astronomical Coal Dump.

And here's blurb from the Nordstern Park's home page:

The coal mine "Nordstern" (North Star) used to divide Horst and Heßler, two city parts of Gelsenkirchen. Today "Nordsternpark" not only links the two districts, but also business, culture and landscape. Shut down in 1993, site of the "Bundesgartenschau - BUGA" (National Garden Show) in 1997; thats the short version of the history of "Nordsternpark".