AA - VV. (Astrid Mignon Kirchhof & J. R. McNeill (Eds.) ) (2019) Nature and The Iron Curtain - Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and Capitalist Countries, 1945-1990. (En) PDF

NATURE AND THE IRON CURTAIN
NATURE AND THE

IRON CURTAIN
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Environmental Policy and Social Movements

in Communist and Capitalist Countries
1945–1990
Edited by ASTRID MIGNON KIRCHHOF and J. R. MCNEILL
\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright © 2019, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4545-1

ISBN 10: 0-8229-4545-2
Cover art: Soviet-era enviromentalism poster, by Igor Markovich Maystrovsky, c. 1989

Cover design: Joel W. Coggins
CONTENTS
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Acknowledgments \ \ \ vii
Introduction
Environmentalism, Environmental Policy, Capitalism, and Communism
Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and J. R. McNeill \ \ \ 3
PART I
Communist and Capitalist Systems Revisited
A Comparison of Their Environmental Politics
1 Building a Soviet Eco-Power while Looking at the Capitalist World
The Rise of Technocratic Environmentalism in Russian Water Controversies, 1957–1989
Laurent Coumel \ \ \ 17
2 Water Pollution and Protection in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic

Anolda Cetkauskaite and Simo Laakkonen \ \ \ 36
3 The Fallout of Chernobyl

The Emergence of an Environmental Movement in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist
Republic
Tetiana Perga \ \ \ 55
4 Keeping the Air Clean?

Environmental Policy, Utility Companies, and Social Movements in West Germany
since the 1970s
Hendrik Ehrhardt \ \ \ 73
5 From Anti-Nuke to Ökopax
1970s Anti-Reactor Activism and the Emergence of West Germany’s Mass
Movement for Peace
Stephen Milder \ \ \ 87
6 An Unguided Boom
Environmental Policies of Cold War Italy
Wilko Graf von Hardenberg \ \ \ 102
7 Nuclear-Free Montana
Grassroots Environmentalism and Montana’s Antinuclear Initiatives
Brian James Leech \ \ \ 116
PART II
The Porous Iron Curtain
8 Building a Socialist Environment
Czechoslovak Environmental Policy from the 1960s to the 1980s
Eagle Glassheim \ \ \ 137
9 Protesting Pollution
Environmental Activism in East Germany and Poland, 1980–1990
Julia E. Ault \ \ \ 151
10 About Environmental Policy in Socialist Yugoslavia

Hrvoje Petrić \ \ \ 169
11 “It Makes No Sense to Work against Nature”

Cold War Modernization in West German Agriculture
Scott Moranda \ \ \ 183
PART III
Environmentalism and Détente?
12 An American Miracle in the Desert
Environmental Crisis and Nuclear-Powered Desalination in the Middle East
Jacob Darwin Hamblin \ \ \ 205
13 East Germany’s Fight for Recognition as a Sovereign State

Environmental Diplomacy as Strategy in Cold War Politics
Astrid Mignon Kirchhof \ \ \ 219
Notes \ \ \ 233
Contributors \ \ \ 299
Index \ \ \ 303
vi Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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The editors thank the German Historical Institute in Washington for its support
in making possible a workshop, at which most of the chapters in this book made
their debut. They also wish to thank Dr. Catherine J. McKenna, whose line-by-line
editing and command of Slavic languages made all the chapters better.
NATURE AND THE IRON CURTAIN
INTRODUCTION
Environmentalism, Environmental Policy,

Capitalism, and Communism
Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and J. R . McNeill
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The rise of environmentalism as a social movement, and the formation of envi-

ronmental policy as a state initiative coincided with the Cold War (c. 1946–1991).
However, this is not coincidental. The following thirteen chapters illuminate sev-
eral connections between the Cold War and modern environmentalism and envi-
ronmental policy.1 Taken together, these chapters show two things above all. First,
that the so-called Iron Curtain was particularly porous when it came to environ-
mental matters. Second, that broad conclusions about differences in environmen-
tal policy on the two sides of the Iron Curtain are slippery and often unreliable.
The capitalist and Communist camps shared many priorities. And variation within
those two camps was often as great as variation between them.
Our aim is to contribute to current debates about the implications for nature of
the two foremost political and economic orders of the twentieth century. Thus we
use the terms Communism and capitalism in order to refer to systems of economy,
politics, and ideology. This of course subsumes variations among systems and eco-
nomic orders under these two terms. Communism we use in reference to countries
governed by a Communist Party, meaning both countries conventionally called
Communist, such as the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and
those often called Socialist, such as the former East Germany, Czechoslovakia,
and Poland. The term capitalism refers to countries with either a liberal market
economy, such as the United States, or a social market economy, such as the for-
mer West Germany. Both terms thus embrace a broad spectrum of systems.
This book deal with several different national and transnational contexts, draw-
ing on the length and breadth of the Cold War years, and, in some cases beyond.
In the decades after 1945, as the Cold War developed, the societal, civic, and gov-
ernmental contexts of what we can call East and West showed some divergences
3
but also some commonalities that allow us to examine important questions in the
arenas of environmental policy formation and environmental movements. The
thread that runs through the book is inspired by the following questions: Is the
concept of the East-West divide still a useful tool? To what extent did Cold War–
era environmentalisms represent Cold War phenomena? Were they spurred by
nuclear buildups or military production? Or were they provoked by Cold War
competition to be, or to appear, more “green” than one’s political or economic
rivals? Or were they indeed inspired by a quest for a safe political space in which
East and West could cooperate? Were environmental issues equally important as
a venue for competition as for international cooperation?
The Cold War and Environmentalism: Historical Contexts

This book links the Cold War and environmentalism, but each had its own course
and context. The Cold War was a long struggle mainly between the United States
and the Soviet Union that developed quickly after the end of World War II.2 The
contest was primarily political, economic, cultural, and ideological—rather than
military—in character. Its main theaters of competition were those of World War
II: Europe and East Asia. But with the decolonization of overseas empires and the
creation of more than one hundred new countries, Cold War competition after
1960 came to envelop much of the world.
Each of the superpowers enlisted a roster of allies. In the Soviet case, these con-
sisted primarily of Eastern European countries occupied by the Red Army in 1945
as it completed its conquest of the German Wehrmacht in World War II. One way
or another, leaders came to power in Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslo-
vakia, Romania, and Bulgaria who were—on major questions at least—obedient
to Moscow. The people in these countries often chafed under this arrangement
and, on several occasions, rose up in rebellion, only to be crushed by Soviet mili-
tary power. The most significant of these uprisings took place in Poland and East
Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Yugoslavia re-
mained a special case because it, in effect, liberated itself from German wartime
occupation and did not come under Soviet control. Its unquestioned leader un-
til his death in 1980, Josip Broz Tito, although himself a committed Communist,
broke decisively with Moscow in the late 1940s and guided Yugoslavia on an inde-
pendent course, allied with neither the USSR nor the United States. Yugoslavia’s
environmental policy, developed in the 1970s and 1980s, also followed an idio-
syncratic course, not least because of its federal structure, as Hrvoje Petrić shows
in chapter 10.
The USSR’s allies elsewhere were much harder to manage than those of East-
ern Europe, which were hard enough. China, after Communists won its civil war
4 Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and J. R. McNeill

in 1949, became a loyal ally for a decade, but by 1959 had begun to repudiate
Soviet direction. By 1969 Chinese and Soviet soldiers were shooting at one anoth-
er across their long border, and each government regarded the other more as an
enemy than a friend.
For its part, the United States’ most important Cold War allies were the United
Kingdom, West Germany, and Japan. The United States built a liberal, capitalist in-
ternational economy that over decades proved far more adaptable and productive
than that organized by the USSR. Although heavy-handed American leadership
often provoked resentments, the material and security benefits of acquiescing to
the American-dominated economic order were hard for leaders and their citizens
to resist. None of its important allies rejected the American embrace.
Within Europe, a political division emerged between East and West, famously
called by Winston Churchill in 1946 the “Iron Curtain.” That division had crys-
tallized by 1948, and a year later the United States had organized its European
partners into a military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),
and the Soviets responded by forming the Warsaw Pact. 3 For reasons connected
to real or imagined advantages in Cold War competition, the two coalitions, but
especially Moscow’s, sought to limit contacts and interactions between Eastern
and Western Europe. Ordinary citizens found it difficult, if not impossible, to
travel through the Iron Curtain. Propaganda, often of dubious reliability, replaced
more disinterested forms of information available about the other side of the Iron
Curtain.4
The Cold War lasted, with many twists and turns, until the Soviet Union’s de-
mise in 1991. Its first decades featured hardening of positions, evermore restric-
tions on interaction, and frequent crises that threated to boil up into combat or
even nuclear Armageddon.5 In the early 1970s, thanks mainly to the rift between
China and the USSR, the Cold War architecture shifted. Both China and the
USSR found it prudent to ratchet down their hostility against the United States.
The U.S. government welcomed relaxed tensions for its own reasons. It was eager
to get Chinese and Soviet help in its effort to negotiate an exit from the increasing-
ly unpopular Vietnam War. Thus Cold War historians speak of détente beginning
in 1972–1973.
But tensions ratcheted up again thanks to Middle East crises and especially
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. That led Moscow into an unwinnable
guerrilla war which, combined with an increasingly disappointing economy, put
Soviet leaders in a desperate position by 1985, made all the harder by brewing
rebellion in Poland and emboldened dissent elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Led by
Mikhail Gorbachev, they tried to rejuvenate the Communist system by liberaliz-
ing the flow of information, softening repression, and reducing the centralization
Environmentalism, Environmental Policy, Capitalism, and Communism 5

of power. These gambles had the unintended effect of encouraging dissent and
disobedience throughout the Soviet sphere. When Eastern Europeans began to
defy restrictions and escape through holes they tore in the Iron Curtain in 1989,
Gorbachev declined to unleash Soviet tanks to stop them. That restraint in effect
ended the Cold War, and in short order led to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
Environmentalism and environmental policy both have long histories—but
by other names.6 People rarely used either term before 1950, although one can
find environmental values of one sort or another in virtually every society for
millennia.
A surge of environmentalism arose slowly after 1945 and more quickly after
1965. The advent of nuclear weapons and atomic power brought new worries
about radiation exposure, providing a particular flavor to environmentalism in
those places where governments considered nuclear installations. This included
the state of Montana, rarely considered a bastion of environmentalism but, as
Brian Leech shows in chapter 7, the prospect of nuclear power plants and their
association in the popular mind with nuclear weapons made many Montanans (at
least temporarily) into “greens” in the 1970s. The linkages between environmen-
talism and antinuclear movements were especially strong in West Germany in the
1970s and 1980s, as Stephen Milder demonstrates in chapter 5. In Ukraine, thanks
to the Chernobyl disaster, after the spring of 1986 antinuclear environmentalism
acquired a special momentum that helped to discredit the USSR in the eyes of its
citizens—Ukrainians first and foremost—as Tetiana Perga explains in chapter 3.7
The surge in environmentalism after 1945 included heightened concerns about
overpopulation, food supply, and famine, focused at first on Asia but by the 1970s
mainly on Africa. Such Malthusian fears resonated with technocrats familiar with
the history of German discourse on population and food that had contributed to
the ideology of the Third Reich. Thus postwar planners responsible for agriculture
in West Germany, both Germans and Americans, embraced high-input chemical-
ized farming for fear of the possible political consequences of food shortfalls. In
chapter 11 Scott Moranda reflects on the debates involved, showing how even in
West Germany (and not just in Asia and Africa), agricultural policy was bound up
with Cold War concerns.8
Malthusian worries and nuclear technology came together in the “Water for
Peace” scheme briefly championed by the United States in Israel. As Jacob Dar-
win Hamblin illustrates in chapter 12, anxiety about food and population inspired
the idea of atomic-powered desalinization to create irrigation water in the Middle
East in the early 1960s, just as the United States and USSR were ratcheting up
their competition for influence in that region.

Industrial pollution also intensified after 1945, and by the 1960s had become
a central environmental issue throughout the industrial world. That included
Communist-ruled countries such as Czechoslovakia, as Eagle Glassheim shows
in chapter 8. Czech authorities permitted considerable public discussion of indus-
trial pollution and its health implications, especially during the liberalization of
1966–1968. But even after the crackdown following the Prague Spring in 1968,
Czechs found ways to keep environmental health concerns alive in public debates,
and authorities took seriously the possibility of restricting pollution, although
their deep dependence on sulfurous coal limited their success.
By the 1960s anxieties about nuclear risks, overpopulation, pollution, and
other related concerns coalesced into a social and cultural movement commonly
called environmentalism. In many countries, at more or less the same time, these
concerns worried people of all social classes and environmentalism became a gen-
uinely popular movement for the first time around 1965–1975.9 With some ups
and downs, it has remained a popular movement ever since.
Wherever it became a popular social movement, environmentalism provoked
political responses.10 Those might include suppression of environmentalists, but
in most cases tended in the opposite direction, toward accommodation. Govern-
ments found it prudent to create departments or ministries devoted to environ-
mental protection and remediation. They gradually sorted through their priorities,
depending on the issues in a given country, and formulated environmental poli-
cies—as chapters 1, 4, 8, and 10 show. By and large, these emphasized issues relat-
ed to human health, rather than, say, the integrity of ecosystems, the maintenance
of biodiversity, or other possible goals for environmental policy.
Nonetheless, it is fair to say that despite the modern surge of environmental-
ism and the creation of deliberate environmental policy, everywhere and always
environmental issues stood well down the list of human and governmental pri-
orities. To be sure, for some few individuals and policymakers, environmental
concerns might outrank all others. But for national populations and the policy
apparatus as a whole, this was never the case. Economic and security issues always
took precedence, and so at most times did a host of others. This was true on both
sides of the Iron Curtain, as everywhere else in the world.11
The fact that environmental issues were never in the forefront gave environ-
mentalists and environmental policymakers a certain freedom. Although they felt
their concerns were always unjustly ignored and their efforts underfunded, they
often escaped the close scrutiny and supervision of the highest organs of the state.
Irrelevance, or near-irrelevance, had its benefits as well as its costs.

Environmentalism, Environmental Policy, and Connections across the
Iron Curtain
Despite the resonance of Churchill’s phrase, the Iron Curtain was never watertight.
People, goods, and ideas seeped through. Ideas need mediators such as activists,
politicians, experts, social organizations, and the media.12 All act as transmitting
agents for relevant information, ideas, and values. But the successful transmission
of ideas needs more than a mere placing of ideas into a different context. A will-
ingness to accept new ideas and values, absorb them, and adjust them to the spe-
cific circumstances is also needed.13 One of the arenas in which ideas seeped, and
eventually flowed, through cracks in the Iron Curtain was environmentalism and
environmental policy.
Information about environmental problems in the West flowed eastward
through the Iron Curtain because it did not normally bother authorities respon-
sible for controlling what people could know. U.S. and Western European author-
ities generally did not regard the environmental problems in their countries as
sufficiently embarrassing to be worth the cost of suppressing information about
them. They concentrated their efforts at secrecy on what they judged to be more
important matters. The chief exception to this rule came when environmental
disasters arose from nuclear accidents at plutonium-making plants. These were
treated as matters of urgent national security.14
Although authorities throughout the West generally chose to permit environ-
mental information to flow fairly freely, tremendous differences existed among
Communist states on this question. The USSR was a much more restricted system
than Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, both in terms of what information was per-
mitted from the outside world and what was allowed to circulate within society.
Soviet authorities worked hard to prevent serious Western influence on Soviet
environmentalists, especially before détente. Breakthroughs occurred after the
1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, and
then with glasnost information flows loosened considerably in the second half of
the 1980s. Otherwise, information on environmental issues, mostly on pollution,
was kept secret in the USSR. This was not the case in the German Democratic
Republic (GDR, East Germany). Here, environmental data was available for most
of the existence of the country, although that changed in the early 1980s when the
environmental situation went downhill.15
Environmentalists, for their part, often showed strong interest in what was hap-
pening on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Those in the West may typically have
felt there was little of value they could learn from the East, with some exceptions.
One example is the symbol for nature reserves in the Federal Republic of Ger-

many (West Germany), an owl, which was developed in East Germany and was
taken over by the reunited country.16 Eastern European countries were generally
keen to know about new pollution-control technologies being implemented in
the United States or Western Europe. Chapter 1, for example, shows how Soviet
technocrats studied Western examples as they sought to modernize their clean
water infrastructure. They took it as a matter of pride that Soviet water should be
as good as that of, say, Denmark. Chapter 2 reveals how successful such efforts
were in Soviet Lithuania.
Environmentalists often sought to subvert the Iron Curtain by combatting
secrecy and sharing information. For linguistic reasons, this was easiest among
East and West Germans.17 A further example is the fascination with U.S. national
parks shown by Soviet environmentalists after Stalin’s death Stalin in 1953. They
agitated, within the bounds of the Soviet system, for national parks in the USSR.
In their appeals to higher authorities they took care to phrase their suggestions as
matters of national honor and to present the creation of Soviet national parks as a
way that the USSR could show it was not inferior to the United States.18
Indeed, the extent of environmentalism in Eastern Europe owed something to
the examples in Western Europe. Eastern European environmental movements
(as explored in this book in chapters 3, 8, and 9) were homegrown and arose in
response to domestic concerns. The same was true in Yugoslavia (as Petrić sug-
gests in chapter 10). But their contacts with and knowledge of environmentalists
in Western Europe helped them to make their case, recruit members, and organize
more efficiently. By the 1980s these contacts among environmentalists across the
Iron Curtain had become routine, and contributed significantly to the success of
dissident environmentalism in Poland and East Germany, as Julia E. Ault explains
in chapter 9.
In any case, a significant fraction of environmental problems invited coopera-
tion across the Iron Curtain. Air and water pollution formed the largest part of this
fraction. Cleaning up the Baltic Sea, for example, was a hopeless prospect without
international collaboration that included countries in both camps. Détente in the
mid-1970s provided an opening for such collaboration (as, in time, did the end of
the Cold War).19 The same was true of the Danube River, which rises in Bavaria
and flows through lands that lay on both sides of the Iron Curtain on its way to the
Black Sea.20 The conservation of migratory birds and the limitation of regional air
pollution were also impractical if not approached internationally in Europe. Thus
the commuting habits of the white stork and the sulfur content of coal encouraged
cooperation across borders among environmental policymakers, including those
on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Détente after 1972 provided the best opportu-
nity for such cooperation during the Cold War.

Environmentalism, Environmental Policy, and Comparisons across the
Iron Curtain
The priority attached to environmental concerns on both sides of the Iron Cur-
tain was low before the 1960s and the rise of modern environmental movements.
States and societies elevated economic growth and national security concerns
above all else. In this respect, there was no difference between capitalism and
Communism.21
Of course, even before the 1960s people had environmental concerns, even if
they were well down their list of priorities. Some of these concerns were common
to both sides of the Iron Curtain. Perhaps the single issue that resonated most
loudly was water quality. Contaminated water made people sick quickly, and by
the mid-twentieth century no doubts remained about why: almost everyone
in Europe or the United States accepted the validity of bacteriology. Efforts to
provide clean water had strong constituencies in both capitalist and Communist
systems. The technical engineering challenges of supplying clean water had been
largely overcome by 1930, and the ratio of expense (to the public purse) to reward
(to public health) was clearly extremely favorable—in Lithuania as much as in
Lancashire or Louisiana. Thus on both sides of the Iron Curtain, citizens cared
about clean water and, by and large, got clean water, as chapter 2 shows.
The same logic did not apply to air pollution. Even though people need to
breathe much more frequently than they need to drink, contaminated air makes
most people sick slowly. The evidence for its deleterious impact on human health
was slower in coming and less convincing than that for dirty water. On top of that,
the ratio of expense to reward was less favorable for countries with limited energy
options and lots of brown coal (e.g., East Germany, Poland, or Czechoslovakia).
For societies in which heavy industry held a talismanic quality as a symbol of
power and modernity, air pollution could become innocent by association. Newly
industrialized societies especially fell prone to the tendency to idolize belching
smokestacks and fetishize industrial air pollution in photography and in political
rhetoric. The comparatively late industrialization of most of Eastern Europe and
the USSR meant that the honeymoon of citizens and industrial pollution was still
in full bloom a generation or two after it had worn thin in most of Western Eu-
rope. On top of that, in the official culture of Communist societies, heavy industry
occupied a near sacred place, as without it there could be no classic proletariat.
Thus for several reasons ranging from the geology of coal to the vagaries of culture,
there were differences between Eastern and Western Europe (and, for that matter,
between the United States and the USSR as well) in the social and official accep-
tance of air pollution and the strength—or weakness—of efforts to deal with it.22

Ehrhardt’s examination of the West German utility industry (chapter 4) of-
fers a useful illustration here. In the 1950s air pollution in West Germany seemed
an acceptable cost of doing business, but by the 1970s it was not. Even business
leaders in the industry most responsible for air pollution, electricity generation,
conceded that regulations were appropriate. The contrast with Czechoslovakia is
instructive. There, officials recognized the costs of air pollution in the 1960s but
could not, in the end, justify the investments in new technologies or cleaner fuels
that West German utility companies embraced.
Ideological orientations played a role in shaping environmental priorities in
other ways as well. Environmental policy could be put to use in international po-
litical struggles. As Astrid Mignon Kirchhof demonstrates in chapter 13, East Ger-
man officials saw an opportunity in the negotiations leading up to 1972 United
Nations Conference on the Human Environment to promote their goal of recog-
nition of East Germany by West Germany.
Ideological orientations also showed in economic respects. Capitalist societies,
especially the United States, but West Germany, the United Kingdom, and also
Italy—as Wilko Graf von Hardenberg illustrates in chapter 6—embraced the au-
tomobile to varying degrees, but in every case more so than Communist societies.
A key component of economic development in postwar Italy was motorization,
which was eagerly promoted by the steel, automobile, petrol, and construction
industries. The Italian parliament supported motorization with equal vigor, even
launching a group called Friends of the Car, with members of virtually all parties
except the Socialist-Communist opposition.
As a consequence, Italy and other capitalist countries built up infrastructure
around auto transport, including roads, parking lots, gas stations, oil refineries,
and so forth to an extent never approached in Eastern Europe during the Cold
War. Eastern European cities usually built good subway, bus, and train networks,
far superior to what American or Canadian cities chose to build. Western Europe-
an cities, however, usually constructed (or, in many cases, reconstructed) public
transit networks on a par with those of Eastern Europe. The embrace of the auto-
mobile in capitalist countries was symptomatic of an ideologically driven empha-
sis on the individual—a sharp contrast to the focus on communities in Socialist
and Communist countries. That difference had multiple impacts on environmen-
tal priorities. Some of these may seem counterintuitive. Postwar Italy enjoyed re-
markable economic growth and a multiparty democratic political system. In some
parts of Europe—Scandinavia, West Germany, France, and the United Kingdom
for example—similar experiences permitted robust environmental policy by the
1970s and considerable reduction in environmental ills. However, in Italy the pe-
culiarities of politics, especially the importance of patronage networks, proved

incompatible with prudent urban planning in many cities, resulting in significant
environmental problems that resisted remediation for decades.23
The classic statement about environmental politics on both sides of the Iron
Curtain is that of Raymond Dominick.24 He took the cases of East and West
Germany and influentially argued that democracy as practiced in West Germany
obliged authorities to respond to citizen concerns in a way that East German au-
thorities did not need to. Chapters 4 and 5 lend some support to the idea that West
German democracy did open space for environmentalism to flourish and become
politically effective (within limits). However, it is unwise to extend Dominick’s
argument broadly to both sides of the Iron Curtain. It may serve as a first approxi-
mation, but no more. As this book shows on the basis of detailed archival work, by
the 1980s environmentalism thrived in both the East and West, and enjoyed some
successes even in repressive and undemocratic societies.
The Structure of the Book

This book is divided into three sections. In section 1, “Communist and Capital-
ist Systems Revisited: A Comparison of Their Environmental Politics,” Laurent
Coumel, Anolda Cetkauskaite, Simo Laakkonen, Tetiana Perga, Hendrik Eh-
rhardt, Stephen Milder, Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, and Brian James Leech look
at specific nation-states in chapters 1–7. They consider political and economic
ideologies as they concern the formation and execution of nature protection and
environmental policies. These chapters take up questions such as: Did pollution
regimes differ, and if so, in what ways? What role did planned economies or pri-
vately owned means of production play? Was the question of freedom of expres-
sion important for environmentalism? How did security concerns and the empha-
ses placed on economic growth, on conformity, on (re)industrialization limit both
expressions of environmentalism and environmental regulation?
Section 2, “The Porous Iron Curtain,” focuses on cross-border interactions and
cooperation in the field of environmental politics. In addition to seizing oppor-
tunities for comparative analysis, Eagle Glassheim, Julia Ault, Hrvoje Petrić, and
Scott Moranda explore connections between East and West in chapters 8–11. To
what extent did ideas, information, technologies, even policy frameworks travel
through the—often permeable—Iron Curtain?
Section 3, “Environmentalism and Détente?,” explores the relationship be-
tween détente and environmentalism. In chapters 12 and 13 Jacob Darwin Ham-
blin and Astrid Mignon Kirchhof explore whether détente simply represents
the context within which environmental policy changes occurred or if perhaps
détente itself was a motor of change. They also consider whether politicians used

environmental issues as a tool for their Cold War aims (including détente), or
whether environmentalists used international politics as one of their tools.
In this book we contrast Communist and capitalist countries with respect to
their environmental politics. We hope that these chapters, and the various ap-
proaches they take, will help to illuminate the complex, and sometimes counter-
intuitive, relationships among modern environmentalism, the environmental pol-
icies it inspired, and the Cold War. The detailed archival work performed by our
authors shows the peril of easy generalizations about the divide between East and
West, the character of environmentalism, the context of environmental policy—
and about the Cold War itself.
Closing Thoughts
Among the motivations for this comparison was the observation that in recent
years citizens worldwide started thinking of a third way beyond the twentieth cen-
tury’s two dominant political-ideological systems. Although the Socialist world
lost its relevance for many years after the Berlin Wall fell, many critiques lately
offer eco-socialist claims to improve the quality of life for everyone. They ask for
life in harmony with nature and environmental justice, and connect these ideas
with eco-socialist stances against global capitalism.25 They demand a Socialist
(not Communist) theory of nature-society relations, because on that score the
economic system of Communist states hardly differed from that of capitalist
states—both systems promoted economic accumulation, Taylorist work organi-
zation, and an exploitative understanding of nature.26
We offer three concluding thoughts, which we hope will trigger further re-
search in terms of environmentalism beyond the two dominating systems of the
twentieth century. First, society needs to empower itself. The chapters in this vol-
ume show that while capitalism expanded the power of capital, Communism em-
powered the state. In the power triangle of capital-state-society, it is society that
needs empowerment.27 Freedom of speech seems to be a necessary condition for
the protection of environment. Even though environmental movements are not
always successful, they seem to be a precondition to effective critique of environ-
mental exploitation and the necessary changes in politics that any reduction in
environmental exploitation requires.
Second, the value and practicality of common goods needs rethinking. A tradi-
tional liberal critique claims that economies built on common property will suffer
because public goods will not be maintained. Research on common property has
shown that collective properties have been maintained over long periods of time
and can be the base of innovative technological processes. Traditional commons

such as pastures and forests, fish stocks, irrigation systems, roads, buildings, and
so forth over centuries were collectively used and sustainably maintained by com-
munities. Where communities have agreed upon rules for regulating common
property use and access, they have found it feasible to maintain common property
and prevent environmental overexploitation.28
Third, both planned and liberal economies have shown strong tendencies to-
ward the exploitation of nature and the prioritization of economic growth over
ecological stability. Both systems have major demonstrated defects when it comes
to the exploitation of both nature and human beings. The world needs answers—
and therefore questions and research—concerning strategies for both greater
global equality and nature protection. Is it possible to create an economy that re-
spects society, democracy, and nature?

PART I
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COMMUNIST AND CAPITALIST SYSTEMS REVISITED
A Comparison of Their Environmental Politics

1
Building a Soviet Eco-Power while

Looking at the Capitalist World
The Rise of Technocratic Environmentalism
in Russian Water Controversies, 1957–1989
Laurent Coumel
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A convergence between the two adversary systems of the Cold War has been ad-
dressed in recent works on the environmental history of the former Soviet Union
focusing on water issues. Klaus Gestwa studied the building of giant dams after
World War II, comparing the powerful Soviet Gidroproekt (Hydro Project) Insti-
tute for the planning of hydraulic works, which has existed since the 1930s, with
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.1 Writing on a shorter period of time, Donald
Filtzer showed the limits of the sanitary concerns in urban water-supply policies
under Stalin, while Christopher Burton exposed the harshness of debates on the
measures for improving water quality in the second half of the 1950s.2 For the
following decades of the East-West conflict, generally speaking, Marc Elie states
that: “Historians have proposed that socialist countries entered into a ‘green’ com-
petition with their capitalist rivals with the rise of political ecology in the 1970s:
unwilling to enforce stringent environmental legislation, East European countries
and the Soviet Union competed with words exchanged at international forums.”3
But Elie adds that things may have been more complicated and the international-
ization of environmental knowledge was, in fact, more important between both
sides of the Iron Curtain even before the creation of the United Nations Environ-
ment Programme in 1972.
The challenge of the current chapter is to help understand the way environment
became an issue in the policy-making agenda of the Soviet Union, linking this to
the story of contacts with, or discourses and practices appealing to, the capitalist
countries. Thus the role played by various stakeholders, including the “scientific
public opinion” identified by Douglas Weiner in Russia’s nature-protection move-
ment, will be reconsidered concerning the government of inland waters.4 How
effective was the shift toward a conservationist approach, as Stephen Brain defines
17
it: “the belief that natural resources should be treated carefully so as to produce
the greatest benefit”?5 I focus on the echoes of Western concerns regarding Soviet
water management and protection organizations from the early 1960s to the mid-
1980s in order to explore the entanglement of two discourses: Cold War com-
petition and “nature protection,” combining in my methodology an institutional
and a cultural approach. Ultimately, I contend that the rise of a technocratic envi-
ronmentalism on water issues in the Soviet Union is clearly connected to similar
processes in the West, where scholars identified the making of an eco-power: here
I draw on the French sociologist Pierre Lascoumes to characterize a way of gov-
erning nature legitimated by “scientific and technical rationality,” and thus giving
experts an “uncontested mastery.”6 In this regard, eco-power is an elaborated stage
of technocracy as “rule by an elite of scientists and technologists.”7 This attempt
at a “rational government of nature” in the French case, as Lascoumes defines it,
stands at odds with the initial project of the ecologist movements that emerged
in the 1970s.
This chapter aims to reinterpret the tensions inside the Soviet scientific and
administrative systems concerning water-resource control by relating them to the
international context of East-West competition. I argue that the latter played a
decisive role in both the rise of an environmental awareness and the appeal to
institutionalize an expertise clearly designed to limit the harm caused by major
economic projects to the state of inland waters. How closely was the fight for an in-
dependent body to control water resources connected to the Cold War? To what
extent was it the result of the circulation of ideas, knowledge, discourses, and prac-
tices across the Iron Curtain?
“Between East and West”: The Emergence of an Epistemic Community

on Water Issues
“We may surpass America and send people into outer space, but concerning the
cleanliness of rivers, the USSR can’t compete with a small country like Denmark,
where you can find trout close to metallurgical plants.” So wrote a citizen to the
first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party (and prime minister of the USSR)
Nikita Khrushchev in the summer of 1961.8 The statement shows how, at that time,
Western capitalist countries had become a reference point in Soviet debates on
ecological issues, though the mention of the Danish case is not explained by any
explicit source in the archive file. A few months earlier, a major reorganization of
the water-management institutions occurred with the adoption of a special decree
on April 22, 1960, by the Council of Ministers and the creation, four months later,
of the State Committee for Water Management of the Russian Republic—not of
the whole Soviet Union—and the difference is relevant.9 Due to its brief existence
18 Laurent Coumel
(1960–1964), recent surveys of Russian environmental history make no mention
of the committee, known by its acronym, Gosvodkhoz.10 Its role needs to be reas-
sessed as the first attempt at an independent body responsible for water quality
and use control, an attempt reclaimed by some scholars and officials over a period
of almost three decades until the end of the 1980s. Here we can see the efforts of a
group of scholars and engineers to set up a new approach to water resources, tak-
ing into account uses other than industrial ones—first and foremost energy use,
and thus paying attention to water quality and cleanliness.
Initially, there was no kind of organization responsible for water control, al-
though a special decree had been issued on water quality in May 1947.11 The main
administration dealing with water issues at this time was the Ministry of Internal
Affairs, with a special branch in charge of the Main Administration of Labor Camps
(GULAG): one of its economic functions was the construction of huge dams all
over the Soviet Union.12 According to Ronald Oechsler, a U.S. scholar who, at the
end of the 1980s, wrote a very informed report on the USSR’s water-pollution
policies, the creation of the Gosvodkhoz mostly resulted from the lobbying efforts
of one man, Vasilii Zvonkov.13 An engineer and specialist in river transportation
trained in late tsarist times, he had a brilliant scientific and administrative career
and became a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1939.
A member of a Soviet delegation to London in 1944, Zvonkov was recognized
abroad as an expert in transportation. In 1956 he was appointed as the USSR’s
representative on an international panel on “the integrated management of wa-
ter resources” for the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC),
“to examine the administrative, economic and social dimensions of multipurpose
river basin development, and to prepare recommendations for international sci-
entific exchanges.” This was a turning point in his vision of water-resource man-
agement. As Oechsler notes, this participation “apparently had a major impact on
Zvonkov, for upon his return from the January 1957 ECOSOC session, he became
the country’s leading advocate of multipurpose water management systems.”14
Here the words multipurpose and integrated are interchangeable—they carry the
idea of developing water systems (dams and reservoirs especially), taking into ac-
count activities other than energy—agriculture, navigation, and fishing. The result
of this expertise was a joint report finalized in November 1957 by seven authors
(from Pakistan, France, England, Colombia, the Netherlands, the United States,
and the USSR).15 A few days after the report was finalized, the American geogra-
pher Gilbert White, another member of the expert panel, invited Zvonkov to give
a lecture at the University of Chicago, which was soon published in English.16 This
circulation of a Soviet scholar in the early years of the Khrushchev Thaw is worth
noting, for it precedes the official establishment of an academic exchange between
Building a Soviet Eco-Power while Looking at the Capitalist World 19

the United States and the USSR in 1958.17 A global community of international ex-
perts was taking shape during this period. In 1959 Zvonkov finished his 482-page
memoir, Between East and West.18
Actually, the circulation of the term integrated seems to have been more com-
plicated than a single West-East transfer. With regard to water resources, it made
its first appearance in Soviet scientific literature at the end of the 1930s: Zvonkov
edited a collection of papers on the “integrated use” of small rivers in 1940.19 At
the same time, integrated was used in specialized literature on the mining industry.
Although with quite a different meaning, it was still linked to a better manage-
ment of resources, following the Russian-Soviet geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky’s
views.20 At the international level, the term integrated appeared in a panel titled
“The Integrated Development of River Basins: The Experience of the Tennessee
Valley Authority” at the United Nations Scientific Conference on the Conserva-
tion and Utilization of Resources held in Lake Success, New York, in 1949, the first
UN conference on the global environment, where there was no Soviet representa-
tive.21 As Richard P. Tucker suggests, U.S. New Deal engineers and senior officials
such as David Lilienthal promoted the Tennessee Valley Authority example as
a model for combining democracy and economic development in decolonized
countries, especially India and Pakistan.22 Clearly, this was the beginning of a long
transnational career for the adjective: more precisely, its use in the United States
and the USSR began to coincide more closely, and the two uses started to influ-
ence each other toward the end of the 1950s—the time of the Thaw and of “Peace-
ful Coexistence,” the official slogan used by Khrushchev to qualify the new direc-
tion taken at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956. Zvonkov’s
book, The Integrated Use of Water Resources in the USSR’s River Drainage Basins,
was published in Russian in 1957, parallel to the UN report, and concurrently with
a 1958 issued volume by the U.S. organization Resources for the Future, “Multiple
Purpose River Development.”23
In 1960 the American Geographical Society launched the monthly journal So-
viet Geography, which published translations of academic articles from the other
side of the Iron Curtain. The sixth issue included an article by two Soviet geog-
raphers on the independent monitoring of water resources with a clear protec-
tion aim: “In hydrology, as in other branches of science concerned by the study
of the geographic environment, there is a growing need not only for integrated
and complete utilization, but also for a conservationist attitude toward natural re-
sources, even in areas where economic utilization is still far from being intensive
and where the density of population is still low.”24 Thus an epistemic community
was emerging in the sense defined by Peter Haas: “a network of professionals with
recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative
20 Laurent Coumel
claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area.”25 At this
stage, Zvonkov and his colleagues, although members of such a community, could
not meet and converse directly in order to organize a unified strategy of influence
on policy-making—the community was virtual. However, it was efficient enough
to gain influence on water-management institutions in the USSR. In 1960, after
two years of lobbying from his position at the head of the Academy of Sciences’
Council for Water Problems, Zvonkov and his allies, including the main planning
administration (Gosplan), managed to get a governmental decree adopted that
provided for the establishment of Republican State Committees on the use and
protection of water resources.26 Looking at the outline of this new agency, one
may have thought about the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ model. Another or-
igin of this decision may have been the controversy surrounding sanitary issues
of water quality studied by Christopher Burton: second-rank scientists contest-
ed the official positions of so-called communal hygiene, the branch of medicine
devoted to this issue in the Soviet Union, appealing for stricter measures of de-
toxification for watersheds.27 Even though they did not succeed in abolishing the
two key concepts of self-cleansing and the maximum allowable concentrations of
toxins, they managed to create a strong debate within professional publications
and institutions. While one, the ichthyologist V. P. Orlov, seems to have defended
the interests of fisheries, another scholar, Mikhail Grushko, figures among those
who signed the first collective open letter in defense of Lake Baikal in the autumn
of 1958: the two of them could easily have identified with those promoting the
“integrated use” principle.28
The appearance of Lake Baikal in our story is no coincidence: as the first big
environmental public controversy started in the Soviet Union, the appeal to inte-
grated use of water resources not only led to institutional building of a new type. It
now faced real adversarial forces inside the top party-state apparatus.
“Proven by the U.S. Experience”: Internal Lobbying for an Independent

Body of Expertise
In this context, references to Western countries were seen as a way of justifying
a shift in protection policy in the Soviet Union. Beginning in the late 1950s, this
flow grew in the early 1960s, when the fate of Russian Gosvodkhoz entered a zone
of uncertainty.
At its creation in the summer of 1960, the main goal of the latter was the insti-
tutional “ordering of integrated use and strengthening of protection.” In October
1960 the Russian law on nature protection was adopted, after four years of lobby-
ing of party and state institutions by authoritative scholars, including biologists
and geographers.29 While the movement was not influential enough to achieve

its main goal, an independent nature-protection body at the union or republican
level, the Gosvodkhoz was at least able to respond to such a demand for water
resources. Significantly, Nikolai Ovsyannikov was appointed first chair of the
Gosvodkhoz. First, he was a former official of the river transportation scientific
and administrative organization, the field with which Zvonkov was familiar, and
second, he was one of the top officials of the All-Russian Society for Nature Pro-
tection (VOOP).30 One of his subordinates was the geographer Semen Vendrov,
the other coauthor of the 1960 article published in Soviet Geography. As head of
the Direction of Study and Accounting of Water Resources, Vendrov defined the
main task of the Gosvodkhoz in one of his first letters addressed to the vice chair
of the USSR Gosplan as the “regulation of water consumption and the coordina-
tion of the integrated use of water resources . . . for the interest of the population
and all branches of the economy”—a view in clear opposition to the one that riv-
ers were primarily dedicated to the production of electricity and irrigation.31 For
unclear reasons, Ovsyannikov was replaced in April 1961 by Konstantin Kornev,
another engineer and official who had worked in Uzbek local irrigation systems
before World War II. Despite his strong agricultural profile, Kornev, who had
also been chair of the newly created Department of Water Problems at the USSR
Gosplan (another institutional innovation resulting from the 1960 law), tried to
convince his hierarchy to adopt an “integrated” paradigm, drawing on Western
realities. Thus, in early 1961, he sent a series of suggestions to the Central Com-
mittee of the Communist Party for the text of the fifth section of the new Program
of the Party on the scientific goals of the construction of Communism, stressing
the importance of issues “of the integrated use and protection of water resources”
in “highly developed industrialized countries such as the Czechoslovak Socialist
Republic, the USA, the GDR, the FRG, England and others.”32 Moreover, he add-
ed that “national and foreign experience” show[ed] that the sole construction of
effluent treatment facilities [did] not solve the problem of the purification of water
used for industrial and domestic purposes.”33
One of the concrete proposals that followed this criticism of water policy in
the Russian Republic was the development of clean technologies and the reuse of
waste—the installation of closed-cycle water systems had already been suggested
by Zvonkov in the late 1950s.34 The same idea was expressed by Semen Vendrov
at a meeting dedicated to the study of reservoir shores held near Lake Baikal. The
choice of location for this scientific event was significant—it was organized by
Grigorii Galazii, then quite a young director of the Baikal Limnological Station,
but already a major figure in the campaign against the building of a cellulose plant
in the new city of Baikalsk, located on the lake’s southern tip. Although this was
not the subject of the workshop, Vendrov appealed for a new approach to the coun-
22 Laurent Coumel
try’s water-pollution issue: “There is a widespread view that maintaining the prop-
er water quality of surface and groundwater sources is possible only through the
construction of treatment facilities. The fact that this view is mistaken is well prov-
en by the U.S. experience, where the number of newly built post-war treatment
facilities is thousands, but the country still faces the unsolved problem of cleaning
water.”35 Vendrov and Kornev were indirectly advocating for a transnational ap-
proach to the issue they were dealing with, although their first goal was to coun-
terbalance, in the long term, the influence of economic forces that had become
accustomed to using water without taking into account the other needs of the
population—especially for energy, heavy industry, and irrigation purposes. Other
Gosvodkhoz reports explicitly attacked the All-Union Institute for Water Supply
Engineering and Hydrogeology (VODGEO), which was set up in 1934 and was,
according to Ronald Oechsler, “the leading institution for the design of large-scale
waste treatment installations.”36 To succeed in their enterprise, however, their au-
thors still lacked sufficient backup from the top of the state-party apparatus.
This firm orientation did not last long, for a new decree issued in April 1961
remerged the Gosvodkhoz with the functions of land reclamation and irrigation
management at the republic level. Therefore, the control of water quality and its
use was relegated to a lower priority after productive tasks. From this point on,
water management became an economic sector closely connected to agriculture,
in an atmosphere of euphoria toward the huge possibilities of irrigation. Moreover,
a new body emerged in late 1963: a union-level committee for the USSR that took
some of the functions of the Russian one. In 1965 the creation of a union-level
(Soviet-level) Ministry of Land Reclamation and Water Management (Minvodk-
hoz) can thus be seen as a retreat in terms of environmental concerns, for it led to
a “fragmentation of policy authority,” as a recent study argues, with about twenty-
six different institutions responsible for water quality.37 Archival material suggests
that these changes occurred in a conflictual context that lasted until the end of the
1960s and beyond.
Evidence of an internal struggle around the creation of the Ministry of Land
Reclamation and Water Management and its functions may be found in the pa-
pers of the Soviet Council of Ministers. The latter tried to play the role of arbiter,
but its authority was apparently short-circuited by the country’s supreme organ
of power: the Central Committee of the Communist Party apparatus. The first
organization to oppose the USSR Minvodkhoz (Ministry of Water Management)
was the Hydrological and Meteorological Service under the Council of Ministers
of the USSR (Gidrometsluzhba), which had gained increasing importance with
the Cold War as a result of the military implications of its work. Among its stake-
holders were the Academy of Sciences and the State Committee for Science and

Technology (GKNT), an institution reshaped in 1965 in order to enforce the links
between science and economic development in the country. The rivalry between
the Gidrometsluzhba and the Minvodkhoz in 1965 extended to the monitoring
and control of the use of water resources (that is, not only their scientific consid-
eration but also the ability to negotiate with the ministries concerned in order to
take decisions). In March 1965 the academician Evgenii Fedorov, a geophysicist
and chairman of the Gidrometsluzhba, where he had worked from the early 1930s,
asked the Soviet government to reorganize the “survey and protection” of water
resources by transferring all of the functions and related bodies from other insti-
tutions to the Gidrometsluzhba. The point was clear: to take away the functions of
the USSR Ministry. The main argument was also clear—“The fact that the Gidrom-
etsluzhba itself does not use or pollute water resources is crucial”—contrary to the
Minvodkhoz. 38 The response from the minister Evgenii Alekseevskii, an official in
water-management administration who had worked in Central Asia, Russia, and
the Ukraine, came a few months later. He gained the support of a member of the
Presidium of the Central Committee (the supreme level of the party organization),
Andrei Kirilenko.39 In the first instance, however, the first vice chairman of the
GKNT was pragmatically in favor of the Gidrometsluzhba solution.40 After a new
exchange of letters, however, his boss, Vladimir Kirillin, declared that Gidromet-
sluzhba’s request should be pulled off the agenda.41 The fact that Kirillin, Prime
Minister Aleksey Kosygin’s protégé, refused to confront the Minvodkhoz showed
the limits of the reformist-technocratic current in Moscow.
In June 1966 Zosima Shashkov, a former minister of River Navigation who
had worked with Zvonkov in the late 1930s, wrote directly to Kosygin with the
request of establishing an independent body for water protection (and nature in
general).42 He was followed by Minister of Agriculture Vladimir Mackevich: the
latter proposed the organization of a state committee, but in its own structure, by
taking all the departments and staff dealing with nature protection from other
ministries. The prime minister took the proposal seriously, and sent copies of the
letter to the USSR Gosplan and all concerned ministries in August 1966.43 The
initiative for a new decree was due to the Ministry of Agriculture’s Laboratory
of Nature Protection, a structure that was partly inherited from the Academy of
Sciences’ Commission for Nature Protection, created in 1955.44 There, the possi-
bility of taking into account Western experience was still alive: “The laboratory
gathered information on the state of the country’s water resources . . . compared
with the world’s resources and the resources of some countries, particularly the
USA. . . . In addition, there is evidence of the contamination of water bodies, of
treatment facilities construction and of different sewage methods in our country
and abroad.”45 To study rather than condemn Western experiments and policies in
24 Laurent Coumel
water management—this could have been the unofficial line of such departments.
Still, the censorship remained strong: a monograph prepared between 1962 and
1965 on “Nature Protection Abroad” for Nauka, the main publisher of the Soviet
Academy of Sciences, was never published. Nevertheless, the age-old dream of
scientific monitoring and governance of the environment, reactualized in the de-
bates of the late 1950s, could again reemerge at the top of the scientific, and even
the state, apparatus.
The outcome of the six-year process of examining the Ministry of Agriculture’s
proposals on nature protection already mentioned was the joint Council of Minis-
ters and Central Committee Decree of December 1972, “on measures to strength-
en environmental protection and the rational use of natural resources.” For the
first time, this text suggested concrete ways to improve the situation: the Soviet
Union was entering the “Age of Ecology,” a new environmental awareness.46 Water
resources in Russia were concerned, but it remained difficult to report openly on
their degradation: here the capitalist countries could help too.
Proxy Awareness: Comparisons in Soviet Discourses on Environmental

Crisis
A new way of mentioning environmental damage had emerged in the Soviet
Union during the Thaw: a disguised one that could be called proxy awareness. The
denunciation of Western ecological crisis instead of referring to national issues
allowed writers to partially bypass censorship in the general and specialized press
and literature. Between 1968 and 1972, and in following years, a turning point in
the evolution of global environmentalism on the world scene, this device became
a frequent one in conservationist discourses.47
Referring to the West was part of a discursive strategy: to mention the coun-
try’s ecological problems without being suspected of anti-Soviet propaganda.
Published a few months before Khrushchev’s dismissal, the geographer David Ar-
mand’s book, For Us and Our Grandchildren (1964), is one of the first global sur-
veys of environmental problems published for a large audience in the postwar era.
Systematically, it looked at the situation in the United States before giving exam-
ples of damage and pollution in the Soviet Union.48 It mentioned the ability of U.S.
technology to sharply reduce the amount of water needed for the pulp and paper
industry. The emphasis of the chapter devoted to water was placed on the progress
of Soviet legislation, with the creation of Gosvodkhoz. But, it was added in the
book’s second edition in 1966, the latter had been since deprived of most of its
functions in resource monitoring.49 Such sentences were crucial—they expressed
a criticism of official policies. Proxy awareness could thus be mixed with fake
self-satisfaction or even dissatisfaction. And it was not only used by publicists-

scholars like Armand, the author of many geographical books for children: some
second-rank or provincial officials also started drawing on capitalist experience to
legitimate their recriminations against the inertia of the center in water-protection
issues.
In August 1968 the Directorate of Water Resources Protection of the Russian
Ministry of Water Management sent a report to the state inspectorate of the Soviet
Minvodkhoz with a list of demands emanating from regional (basin) branches.
Among them, one stated that, “it should be more objectively looked at the . . . ques-
tion concerning the creation of special All-Union and Republican organs for inte-
grated use and protection of water resources,” regretting that “not a single word”
about it appeared in the project under consideration.50 Two months earlier, at a
meeting of all the heads of the basin inspectorates in the country, the ministry’s
central apparatus received several criticisms regarding the lack of attention paid
to the issue of “integrated use and protection.” An official in Kharkov, Ukraine,
compared the policies of the United States and the Soviet Union to emphasize
the differences in terms of the number of institutes and scientists devoted to the
issue following the U.S. Water Resources Research Act of 1964 (see table 1.1).51
Not only was the comparison clearly in favor of the capitalist superpower but, the
speaker added, $100 billion was to be spent for this purpose annually.52
A coalition including Gosplan asked the government to create a state commit-
tee for water resources and atmospheric air protection (another important issue
with regard to the sanitary and economic effects of pollution)53. However, the
joint reaction of the economic departments of the Central Committee in support
of Minvodkhoz led to this project being rejected as “artificial,” for such a state com-
mittee would have weakened the attention of other ministries and agencies.54 In
the summer of 1970, the Gidrometsluzhba and the GKNT launched a new at-
tempt: they proposed a joint project for a state body responsible for the monitor-
ing, control, protection, and distribution of water resources. In the explanatory
note, they referred to similar institutions in Western countries: “the USA, Japan,
Sweden, India and others.”55 The president of the special commission on this is-
sue, Gosplan chairman Nikolai Baibakov, supported the initiative—according to
his report, the Minvodkhoz should abandon its water protection and monitoring
functions, for it was not “objective” enough in their implementation, and become
the “Ministry of Land Reclamation.”56 Alekseevskii immediately launched a coun-
terattack. In a “specific opinion” sent in the name of his ministry, he wrote: “The
attempt to rely on foreign experience in the issue of the organization of water re-
sources protection is untenable. One can understand that we take from abroad the
best examples of technology, but what can be taken from foreign experience in the
protection of water resources, if all the major waterways of Europe and America
26 Laurent Coumel
Table 1.1. A comparison of U.S. and Soviet inland water pollution research at the
federal level, according to Minvodkhoz official Vladimir Lozanskij in June 1968
United States Soviet Union

(since 1964)
Number of One in each state (fifty) One institute (Minsk)
research institutes & a dozen laboratories or
laboratory departments
Amount of staff Around twenty thousand Around four hundred
(scientific and technical) (including forty with
scientific training)
Source: GARF, R-436/2/726, 199–200.
are in a disastrous state? The cause of it: private enterprise.”57 No matter how con-
vincing this argument was, the ministry ultimately remained all-powerful in water
control, combining both the productive management and protection of resources.
In 1971 another attempt by Baibakov to create a state committee for water protec-
tion was unsuccessful.58
The discourse emphasizing the damage in capitalist countries and partly mask-
ing the reality of the Soviet environment was predominant in the public sphere.
It made the Soviet Union and the Socialist camp in general the best place to live
compared with the capitalist world. It was dominant in newspapers, journals, and
documentary films on the state of the environment. One of these, Nature and So-
ciety, released in 1976 on behalf of the Ministry of Higher Education, presumably
for Soviet students, points to the “capitalist form of scientific-technical revolution”
as being responsible for the “ecological crisis” of the world.59 Besides a shot of
the Rhine River (probably taken in the 1950s or 1960s, but the black-and-white
format could deceive viewers), the documentary shows Lake Erie with an apoca-
lyptic voice-over: “Inhabitants of the area say the water is too thick to swim in, and
too liquid to till.” This statement echoed the words of a prominent Time article:
“Some River! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rath-
er than flows. ‘Anyone who falls into the Cuyahoga does not drown,’ Cleveland’s
citizens joke grimly. ‘He decays.’”60
Naturally, the Soviet voice-over kept quiet about the work of the joint com-
mission, as it did about the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, signed by the
United States and Canada in April 1972 to reduce pollution.61 The second part
of Nature and Society, devoted to the Soviet Union, painted an idyllic picture of
the country’s environmental protection—the Volga River was supposedly being
depolluted, and the Moskva River cleaned.

This context was also favorable for environmentalists/academics. As Ronald
Oechsler puts it, “the growing international concern over the environment in the
late 1960s and early 1970s may also have spurred agenda change in the USSR.”62
In 1968, the year of the Paris Biosphere Conference, a Council on Water Resourc-
es and Water Balance was established within the GKNT, which also included a
special joint commission on environmental issues with the Academy of Sciences,
headed by the geographer Inokentii Gerasimov from 1966.63 The coincidence in
timing between the Soviet decrees and the Clean Water Act, passed by Congress
in October 1972 over President Richard Nixon’s veto, is significant.64 In fact, the
latter may have been in response to the adoption of the Principles of Water Legis-
lation by the USSR Supreme Soviet in December 1970.65 During these years, the
Gidrometsluzhba continued to try to develop its functions in order to become a
state environmental protection agency.66 It was mentioned in a new decree issued
in 1978 as the main agency for environmental monitoring.
Although the issue of inland water pollution had only an indirect importance
for transboundary environmental concerns, the USSR had an interest in respond-
ing positively to Western calls for environmental cooperation.67 The Soviet sci-
entific elites continued their lobbying in favor of a new form of decision making
on environmental issues. The academician and physicist Pyotr Kapitsa, an inter-
nationally recognized figure in Soviet science, had already mentioned the Great
Lakes in a column published by Pravda (the party’s central organ and the most
famous newspaper in the USSR).68 Under the title “Our Home, Planet Earth,”
Kapitsa called for the challenge of combining economic development and nature
protection to be met, since the resources on Earth were partly limited. For the first
time in the Soviet press, Kapitsa referred to the U.S. systems scientist Jay W. For-
rester and his colleagues’ 1972 book, The Limits to Growth.69 A paragraph was de-
voted to water pollution in North America: “A clear example of the fate of lakes as
a result of poor management of their waters and neglect of the biological processes
which take place in them can be found in the Great Lakes of the United States and
Canada. . . . The US government has therefore decided to restore normal life in
these lakes. . . . For this purpose the US government will spend $5 billion over the
next three years. . . . Many experts believe that about $25 billion will be needed.”70
Kapitsa therefore advocated for better foresight of the environmental impact of
technologies. In an unsent letter to Brezhnev written in June 1972, he suggested
that the existence of public controversies on water issues was a sign of the supe-
riority of the Soviet regime in comparison with others: “At present, the issue of
the purity of fresh water stands very badly in the world economy and it is not
good enough. There is a particularly acute problem now in the US and in most
industrialized countries in Europe: Germany, England et al., where the pollution
28 Laurent Coumel
of rivers and lakes with different types of waste production has reached a very high
level.”71 Without departing from his faith in technical progress, Kapitsa argued
that the problem would be solved “in the next 10–20 years” both in the West and
in the Soviet Union. But, he added, the so-called “Baikal problem . . . has captured
the whole country” and “this is good, because . . . it is evidence of the vitality of
our country and its desire to develop and move forward. This is healthy democra-
cy.” Although Kapitsa probably knew about the existence of a public debate in the
other superpower, he stated: “The weakness of capitalism is that people are not
interested in the general development of the country. . . . In America, the fate of
the Great Lakes region cannot become a national issue.” Such a white lie aimed
at defending the possibility of “free debates” in the press for the Baikal and other
similar issues is a leitmotif of Kapitsa’s position from the early 1950s.72 But the
authorities didn’t open the press to this kind of issue, and it remained an internal
question for scholars—only now, of a growing number and variety of disciplines.
Actually, this was maybe precisely the meaning of the term democracy in Kapitsa’s
view—shared by many other scholars.
“How Is This Problem Solved Abroad?” Strategies of Opposition to the

Siberian River Diversion Project
Under Brezhnev, other scientists referred to the United States more positively at
internal meetings. One of the major scientific and ecological controversies of the
twentieth century gave them occasions to compare not the state of the environ-
ment, an exercise quite risky and hazardous as seen before, but the institutional
means to deal with environmental issues.
In February 1973 at the Academy of Sciences’ Commission on the Study of
Natural Water Protection Issues, Vice President Aleksandr Vinogradov, a geoche-
mist, declared: “The president of the Washington Academy of Sciences [sic] was
recently here. When asked how they have solved such problems, he replied: ‘I’ll
give you an example of a problem that our Academy undertook to resolve. It was
necessary to expand Kennedy Airport without destroying the surrounding forests.
The Academy of Sciences took up the challenge and solved it.’ The Washington
Academy takes on such problems and solves them thanks to the joint efforts of the
entire staff of the academy.”73 The fact that Vinogradov was giving a speech on the
Siberian River Diversion Project (Sibaral) is significant. The latter had begun un-
der sole control of the Minvodkhoz and its institutes.74 In 1974 a joint meeting was
held on the topic between two Academy of Sciences departments—the Bureau
of the Department of Oceanology, Atmospheric Physics, and Geography, and the
Scientific Council for Biosphere Problems (created in the summer of 1973 from
an existing department within the academy, with a clear reference to Vernadsky’s

work that was just revived in the late 1960s). Answering to the project’s engineer-
in-chief, several scientists appealed for a leaf to be taken out of the United States’
book—for example, metals specialist Boris Laskorin: “You always start from the
fact that the only source of fresh water is the northern flow. Have you considered
other sources? How is this problem solved abroad? Does the problem exist on the
American continent, and what sort of approach is taken there?”75 Another scholar
interested in the implementation of the Sibaral replied that the problems of the
United States and the USSR were completely different: “For Americans it is a mat-
ter of pollution, but for us—of water regime.”76 The idea was that U.S. industry and
agriculture spoiled the rivers, whereas the Soviet economy only had the problem
of the natural distribution of rivers. This view was not shared by other scholars,
however. The physicist and oceanographer Leonid Brekhovskikh asked: “In order
to come to a conclusion about the necessity of [river transfer], somewhere, I do
not know in what forum it should be done, but all the evaluations must be reported.
In America, for example, company managers only provide alternative options and
the policymakers make the choice. We also need to put forward alternative solu-
tions and let the policymakers choose. . . . For one unit of production, we use four
times more water than in the United States.”77 Such a statement would have per-
haps sounded ironic to many American ecologists at that time, but the idea was to
convince the political authorities that U.S. water policy was the result of a consen-
sus decision-making process led by scientists: a true, efficient, and eco-responsible
technocracy in today’s words. At the same meeting Mark L’vovich, director of the
hydrological department of the Academy’s Institute of Geography from 1962 to
1986, criticized the project for its enormous costs and proposed to introduce new
methods as “two way” land reclamation—that is, by providing both drainage and
irrigation as in the Netherlands, a country he referred to.78 His colleague Vendrov
also expressed doubts about the technical possibility of building a system invol-
ving thousands of kilometers of connecting canals without huge infiltration, and
asked for a scientific committee to be set up to provide expertise on the project79.
Other similar proposals kept being formulated for larger-scale expertise building:
at age eighty, Vinogradov wrote to the Gosplan in August 1975 to advocate for the
creation of republic-level state committees for nature protection and the unifica-
tion of air and water control by Gidrometsluzhba. He stressed the need “to acti-
vate participation in international programs on the study of nature and its compo-
nents to not only increase the USSR’s contribution, but to make a more complete
use of the data provided by other countries, especially for short-and long-term
forecasts of changes in the state and level of pollution.”80 Seven days before he
died, Vinogradov wrote another long, programmatic letter in favor of the creation
of such an authoritative organ.81
30 Laurent Coumel
But no state body was created. Instead, the government and the Communist
Party’s Central Committee issued a joint decree on December 21, 1978, planning
the Technical-Economic Justifications (TEO) for the Volga basin diversions to be
completed by 1979, and those for Central Asia and Siberia by 1980. The Minvodk-
hoz and its institutes would prepare the documents, while the Academy of Scienc-
es’ Institute of Water Problems would provide “scientific justification.”82 This was
not the kind of “forum” expected by scholars involved in resource protection at
the top level of the Academy of Sciences. The only public discussion on this issue
took place in the Literary Journal in March 1982, concerning the economic cost
of the project.83 Things changed radically with Gorbachev’s reforms, also known
under the catchwords perestroika and glasnost.
Epilogue: The Apex of Western Legitimization for Building a Soviet

Eco-Power, 1986–1989
At the beginning of the 1980s, a group of scholars, led by the vice president of
the Academy of Sciences, Aleksandr Yanshin organized a real war machine against
Sibaral within research institutes. Yanshin, an activist of the nature protection move-
ment from the early 1950s and the head of the above mentioned Scientific Council
for Biosphere Problems, was joined, among others, by two young mathematicians
at the Central Economic Mathematics Institute in Moscow, Lûbov and Mikhail Ze-
likin.84 Over several years they managed to access, copy, and verify some of the 140
volumes of TEO in order to prove that the project was not mathematically sound.
Here the intrusion of Western technologies played a small but decisive role ac-
cording to Zelikin’s memoirs: a German student who spent a year in Moscow
brought a pocket calculator and helped them to check some of the previsions with
regard to the level of the Caspian Sea—an issue closely related to the argument
that the diversion project was necessary. Thanks to this technical device, accord-
ing to Zelikin, the institute that authored the TEO did not receive the state prize
for this work. Finally, in August 1986, a Communist Party and Soviet government
decree ordered that the planning and construction of the project be stopped. In
early April the Minvodkhoz had already been severely criticized for the excessive
funding of its projects, especially Sibaral, and for the environmental impact of the
latter. Central Committee secretary Viktor Nikonov, a former minister of agricul-
ture, sharply denounced the lack of preparation of the water-management plans,
citing the examples of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the United States, and Canada,
where land reclamation was “far more effective.”85 Five months later the geogra-
pher Nikolai Koronkevich made a significant remark on the issue of improving
Moscow’s freshwater supply with regard to another much-criticized project in-
volving the construction of a dam near the city of Rzhev on the Upper Volga—it

was necessary, he said, to study West Berlin’s experience in terms of a closed wa-
ter circle, before building a new dam there.86 The positive perception of Western
techno-scientific practices was a key argument in these controversies now becom-
ing public, in the glasnost context. Fighting these big hydraulic projects meant
openly drawing on the capitalist world in this field. Not very far from traditional
industrial espionage, diplomats also became aware of this need for information
on water-management issues and the solutions being developed by the capitalist
superpowers. In November 1986 the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, sent a
digest of the U.S. press regarding the struggle with water pollution to the GKNT’s
Department of Low-Waste Technologies and Nature Protection “for possible use
and information.” An official in Moscow warmly thanked the Soviet attaché for
his initiative and asked him to continue sending materials, especially on “federal
and other environmental legislation (including water), and also methods for its
implementation.”87 In other words, rather than compromising the enemy with ev-
idence of ecological disasters as a result of the capitalist system, the Soviet Union
was more interested in acquiring a deeper knowledge of how the West was dealing
with such environmental issues.
In 1988 the Minvodkhoz was liquidated as a unified ministry and the State
Committee for Nature Protection was created at the All-Union (Soviet) level.88
At last, the uncontrolled and dispersed management that the so-called planned
economy had offered to sectorial ministries was replaced by the technocratic con-
servationist management of natural resources that scholars had been advocating
for since the end of the Stalin era.
Defending the new system in 1989, the major players in the previous decade’s
water controversies referred to the U.S. model as the one to follow in order to
avoid the return of “monster projects.” In an interview published in July by the
monthly literary journal Zvezda, Yanshin expressed his concerns about other
“monster projects” like the Volga-Chograi Canal, a relic of the Sibaral that had been
protested against, with demonstrations taking place in one hundred of Russia’s
big cities in February.89 Ironically, he criticizes the famous sentence attributed
to the Russian-Soviet agronomist Ivan Michurin—“We must not wait for favors
from Nature; our task is to wrest them from her”—as “the slogan of technocracy,”
but in the same interview he states: “Unfortunately, the opinion of scientists and
scholars is still rarely listened to, and it is only when the issue under consideration
reaches a high level such as the Presidium of the Council of Ministers that the
correct solution is usually approved.”90
Ironically, this could be considered as a definition of scientist-led technocracy,
but a better one than existed in the Soviet Union: “ruled by engineers with more
narrow educations than nowhere else in the world” as the historian of Soviet sci-
32 Laurent Coumel
ence and technology Loren Graham wrote a few years after.91 Yanshin’s concept
of a correct decision-making process was already obvious in June 1987, when he
opposed the Ministry of Energy’s proposal to establish a specialized commission
“on the study of the role of hydropower” designed to validate the publication of
articles on these issues in the press—in a time of growing dam controversies. He
called for a special expert scientific committee to be created at the top of his insti-
tution.92 In October 1987 both the writer Sergey Zalygin and the biologist Alek-
sey Yablokov, two major characters of the environmental movement, expressed
their regret that water resources had actually stayed under the control of the
water-management administration, no matter that the Minvodkhoz did not ex-
ist anymore. According to Zalygin, “in the USA, the state exercises control over
enterprises and firms it does not own,” while the USSR exercises control “over
itself . . . But self-monitoring, self-planning, and self-knowledge—this is the hard-
est thing to do, the most unreliable.”93 Yablokov, a recently elected people’s deputy
and chairman of the first Committee on Ecology and the Rational Use of Natural
Resources of the Supreme Soviet, the highest legislative body in the country, ar-
gued in a popular scientific review: “The USA’s rivers have become cleaner and
two of the three Great Lakes that had been completely ruined have already been
cleaned up.”94
Thus this was a time of complete idealization of the state of the environment
in the United States and in the West in general—and also for building new expert
mechanisms at the country’s highest level.
Soviet Technocratic Environmentalism as a By-Product of the East-West

Rapprochement and Internal Changes Rather Than of the Cold War
At least two conclusions remain after the previous exploration: a historiographical
and a heuristic one. In a recent, thought-provoking article, Stephen Brain argues,
“the ideological contest between the United States and the Soviet Union . . . trans-
formed the global environment into a space where environmental virtue was more
attractive and thus environmental accomplishments more likely.” 95 In the case of
Soviet inland water resources, it is true that echoes of capitalist experiences served
as examples of both good and bad resource-management practices, as discursive
arguments that helped the groups of actors involved in the controversies, shaping
virtual epistemic communities. But in the end, environmentalism grew in power
as a result of the warming of international relations rather than East-West com-
petition and tension: Khrushchev’s Thaw in the late 1950s and early 1960s and
the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s were the two most important moments
for the institutionalization of water protection in the USSR or, more precisely, re-
spectively a failed and a successful attempt at a scientist-led technocracy. This is

not to say that knowledge and expertise circulated more in these periods (further
research is necessary to make such a statement), but it is clear that in the lapse of
time between them, conservationist ideas had only a weak impact, despite the
official “green” discourses addressed to national and international publics. Robert
Darst’s argument still remains relevant, at least for the first part of his assumption:
“the conjunction of the Cold War and the centralized, authoritarian domestic
structure of the Soviet system opened a window of opportunity for those interest-
ed in environmental problems, but for most of the period under consideration this
window was narrow, and the USSR’s environmental policies steadily fell behind
those of the West.”96
Indeed, the Lake Baikal and Sibaral controversies were also, for twenty years
(1966–1986), two defeats of nature protection activists. East-West competition
did not help the conservationist cause in the USSR; rather, it was used as a tool by
the environmental movement, especially for what we called proxy (or disguised)
environmental awareness. But, and this is the second, heuristic conclusion to draw
here, the controversies offer a fruitful observation post for Soviet environmen-
talism. In letters and specialized commissions or departments, scholars prepared
plans for institutional action and waited patiently for a positive response from the
top leaders: for a strong shift in nature policies. To be sure, the scientist-led envi-
ronmental movement, as Douglas Weiner argues, “was not terribly influential or
efficient,” but it did have an impact on the regulation and institutionalization of
water-resource protection—here too, as with the soil experts studied by Marc Elie,
a “silent ecologization” occurred.97 One could add that it was a strongly nonlinear
one, for already in the late 1950s, stakeholders were trying to organize specific
institutions within the state to control and protect water resources, before the all-
powerful Minvodkhoz destroyed these isolated constructions. In the 1960s and
1970s, scientists and some officials, notably in Gosplan, continued trying to im-
prove the independent monitoring of nature, and their discourse reached a pro-
gressively broader public audience. However, they didn’t succeed until the crisis
of Soviet power accelerated in the late 1980s.
Thus, Soviet environmentalism was a by-product of the East-West rapproche-
ment more than of the Cold War competition, as well as of the “age of ecology”
described by Joachim Radkau, drawing on the work of the sociologist Ulrich
Beck on “reflexive modernity” in liberal democratic societies. 98 In the context of
a centralized and—supposedly—planned economy and firmly controlled public
sphere, this environmentalism can be defined as technocratic quite in the sense
that the American political scientist Frank Fischer uses it: as a model of decision-
making “embedded in the technocratic languages of environmental impact assess-
ment, cost-benefit analysis, technology assessment, and risk-benefit analysis.”99
34 Laurent Coumel
Such economic tools were lacking in the Soviet Union, but regarding the history
of internal disputes over the control and protection of water resources, and their
outcome during the Gorbachev years, the term fits pretty well. Some Soviet schol-
ars truly advocated for the establishment of environmental management separate
from social and economic spheres: a reign of experts with green awareness. A So-
viet–style eco-power.

2
Water Pollution and Protection in

the Lithuanian Soviet Republic
Anolda Cetkauskaite and Simo Laakkonen
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
In the summer of 2011 Simo Laakkonen helped organize a workshop in Stock-

holm on environmental issues facing the Baltic region.1 The discussions among
twenty or so environmental social scientists were highly fruitful.2 At a certain
point, however, participants started to compare the state of environmental pol-
lution and protection on the western and eastern sides of the Baltic Sea Region
(BSR).3 While participants tended to be highly positive about the state of environ-
mental protection in the western half of the region (Finland, Sweden, Denmark,
and Germany), they were utterly negative concerning conditions in the eastern
half of the region (Poland, the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania,
and the Russian Federation).
When asked on what empirical grounds these experts based their rather black-
and-white assessment, they pointed to some notorious examples from the region,
such as the failure of the Russian city of Kaliningrad to build an efficient wastewa-
ter treatment plant. However, they were unable to point to any research findings
to support their views. Instead, they referred to the generally destructive environ-
mental heritage of the Soviet occupation of the eastern part of the Baltic Sea Re-
gion. When asked what this destructive heritage meant in practice, the answer was
that the Soviet Union did virtually nothing to promote environmental protection
in the BSR.
Because the main problem facing the Baltic Sea in the latter part of the twenti-
eth century was water pollution, the participants of the session were asked the fol-
lowing question: How many wastewater treatment plants were built in the three
Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) under Soviet rule? Most said that
there were “none” or only “some wastewater treatment plants.”4
The Nordic experts’ ignorance of Soviet–era environmental policy is not sur-
36
prising. Even though wastewater treatment plants are the most important tools
in the protection of water in the Baltic Sea Region and all over the world, there is
no readily available study of the number of urban, industrial, or rural wastewater
treatment plants in the BSR. Only two Baltic countries have conducted national
studies on the environmental history of water pollution and protection.5 General
lack of knowledge is a wider problem as no such national, long-term study has ever
been completed about the situation in Europe, the Soviet Union, or the United
States.6 The history of water protection, which is arguably the oldest, largest and,
in some cases, most effective sector of environmental protection, is surprisingly
poorly studied and understood.
The overwhelming majority of the available studies on the environmental pol-
icy of the Communist states was made during the Cold War when there was no
access to Soviet archives, and hence was based largely on secondary sources. Most
volumes focus on the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, while very few address the ear-
ly postwar decades, the late 1940s and 1950s, not to mention the prewar decades.7
Methodologically, these studies have been limited, focusing on policy issues or
political rhetoric.8 But what was the reality behind the grandiose speeches? How
many of the numerous proposed plans were actually carried out? It is time to ex-
plore what was actually done in terms of environmental protection in the Soviet
Union.
The work presented in this chapter is the result of an ongoing international
collaboration that aims to improve the understanding of the water quality history
in Lithuania.9 So far we have located only one Soviet Lithuanian publication deal-
ing with water conservation: a three-page review.10 The present chapter offers a
synthesis of several earlier studies of the Lithuanian case with additional archival
materials and an updated bibliography.11
Here we focus on three neglected aspects regarding the Lithuanian SSR. Our
first theme was the development of the Soviet administration concerning water
pollution and protection from 1945 to 1990. Because water protection is difficult
and costly, it was primarily an undertaking of the state in the Soviet Union, as it
is in many industrialized nations. What kind of institutions did the Soviet Union
establish to manage water pollution and protection in the new Soviet Republics?
The second part of our inquiry explores the history of Soviet environmental
sciences. What type of environmental research about water pollution was con-
ducted in the Soviet Union?12 What was known about water pollution in Soviet
Lithuania? How did scientific research about the condition of the waterways be-
gin? When did the occasional and local study of water systems transform into the
regular and nationwide tracking of the condition of watercourses?
This chapter’s most important focus, and the third part of our inquiry, is the
Water Pollution and Protection in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic 37

history of wastewater treatment technology. Typically, wastewater treatment
technology is divided into mechanical, biological, and chemical methods. There
are, however, no generally applied technical solutions for every problem because
the quantity and quality of wastewaters varies considerably among different geo-
graphic and economic areas (rural, urban, and industrial), among different func-
tions in those sectors, and different branches of industry. Planning, funding, and
building such plants has not been easy for any industrialized country. It is usually
difficult to find places for large and often unpleasant facilities, and building effi-
cient treatment plants with the necessary collector sewers has been, as a rule, the
most expensive component of environmental protection around the world. Thus
a purely empirical but nonetheless important question is: what was the extent and
capability of wastewater treatment facilities in Soviet Lithuania?
Materials and Methodology

We studied the administrative development of Soviet Lithuanian water-quality
regulation with the aid of interviews and archival material. For our environmen-
tal science research, we compiled and interpreted natural science monitoring
data about the condition of Lithuanian surface waters. One particularly valuable
source of information was the classification charts of the condition of Lithuania’s
rivers, prepared for official use by water experts. These classification charts were
intended as research aids for internal government use, not for public consumption.
A crucial source for the history of environmental technology was the 546-page of-
ficial register from the Department of Environmental Protection of the Republic
of Lithuania, Water Management Department, which outlined basic information
about the construction of wastewater treatment plants in the republic.13 Unfortu-
nately, as we discovered in archival materials, the register does not include infor-
mation about all wastewater treatment plants in Lithuania.
In order to fill in some of the gaps identified during the course of our research,
and in order to check the veracity of various points, we interviewed three Lithua-
nian water-protection experts. Their research subjects are administration (Bronius
Vertelka), water-system studies (Aurelija Ceponiene), and treatment technology
( Juozas Krisciunas).14
Lithuania’s Geography and History

Lithuania is a small country with a long history dating to the Middle Ages.15 Lith-
uanians became a part of Tsarist Russia in 1795, and only regained independence
during World War I. This independence ended with World War II, when it was oc-
cupied by the Soviet Union (1939), Nazi Germany (1941), and once again by the
Soviet Union (1944). In Soviet times (1944–1990), thousands were killed, tens
38 Anolda Cetkauskaite and Simo Laakkonen

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Figure 2.1. Lithuania is a country of rivers. The Baltic Sea coast is short and there
are only small lakes.
of thousands were deported to Siberia, most agriculture was collectivized, and a

censorship and intelligence-gathering system was established.16 However, Lithua-
nia was the first Baltic and Soviet country to return to independence following the
dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Lithuania joined the European Union as
well as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 2004.17
The Republic of Lithuania is the largest of the three Baltic States. The country
covers approximately sixty-five thousand square kilometers, and its population is
currently about three million people. The majority of its citizens speak Lithuanian,
and only a small minority speaks Polish or Russian. Two-thirds of Lithuania’s pop-
ulation lives in cities, with more than half of the urban population living in the five
largest cities: the capital, Vilnius; and Kaunas; Šiauliai; Panevezys; and Klaipeda,
the country’s only coastal city.18
We focused on the environmental protection and pollution of rivers and lakes
because Lithuania has a short coastline (only 99 kilometers). There are over 2,800
lakes larger than 0.5 hectares. Lithuania has 758 rivers over 10 kilometers long and
18 that are over 100 kilometers (figure 2.1). The catchment area of the Nemunas,
the country’s largest river, covers 71 percent of the country. The majority of Lith-
uanian rivers and lakes are small and therefore easily polluted. Consequently, the
largest environmental problem for Lithuanians since World War II has been the
pollution of the country’s surface waters.19

Water Protection and Management in the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist
Republic
Immediately after Lithuania’s incorporation into the Soviet Union, the State San-
itary Inspectorate was founded in order to monitor, with the assistance of local
institutions, activities related to watercourses and wastewater emissions.20 The
Hydrometeorological Board, founded in 1946, was responsible for the wider ob-
servation of air quality and surface waters. A regulatory body (whose title trans-
lates as Economy of Waters of Fishery of Lithuania—or, roughly—Lithuanian
Fisheries Board) was created in order to oversee fisheries.21 Thus, the first water-
protection institutions were created within two years of the dawn of Soviet rule.
Despite shortages of professionally skilled staff, equipment, and other resourc-
es, these new institutions raised questions about water pollution and protection in
industrial plants and cities.22 In 1945 the Council of People’s Commissars of the
Lithuanian SSR made it possible to fine municipalities and industrial enterprises
that discharged their wastewaters without purification.23 Consequently, the au-
thorities collected information and conducted consultations and, where needed,
imposed penalties.24 By repeatedly fining those responsible, the State Sanitary In-
spectorate was able to enact water-protection measures as early as the late 1940s.25
Soviet environmental management was not as toothless as is generally supposed.26
The water-protection administration of the Lithuanian SSR was overhauled in
the 1960s. The Board of Use and Protection of Water Resources, which oversaw
the use of industrial waters, was responsible for the protection of surface waters
and groundwaters, as well as for the construction and updating of wastewater
treatment plants.27 The monitoring of wastewater was then transferred to the Hy-
drochemical Laboratory. The Inspectorate of Water Economy oversaw the emis-
sion limits for industry and levied penalties on polluters. The use and protection
of water resources was assigned to the Ministry of Water Economy and Land
Reclamation until 1988, when it was transferred to the State Committee for Na-
ture Protection. In 1990 this committee became the Ministry of Environmental
Protection, which later became the Ministry of Environment of the Lithuanian
Republic after independence in 1991.28 Figure 2.2 presents the key administrative
reforms and tasks.
The Development of Soviet Lithuanian Surface-Water Monitoring and

Classification
Despite the overall shortage of resources, several studies on the pollution of wa-
tercourses were conducted in the years immediately after World War II. The first
permanent monitoring stations for the condition of rivers were founded in Soviet

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Figure 2.2. Administrative structures of water protection in the Lithuanian SSR.
Lithuania in 1950. Six stations began to monitor water color, levels of ammonia,
nitrites, nitrates, chlorides, oxygen, oxidation, biological oxygen demand, and bac-
teria counts at regular intervals.29
One of these monitoring stations was situated in Lithuania’s second largest city,

Kaunas. In the early 1950s authorities carried out analyses of river water pollu-
tion in five points four times a year, assessing the smell, water color, transparency,
turbidity, sludge, pH, hardness, ammonia, and sulphate levels, in addition to the
aforementioned parameters.30 From the outset, water pollution studies includ-
ed physical, chemical, and bacteriological analysis. In principle such a broad ap-
proach provided a good picture of the overall situation of pollution in any given
body of water.
Research was expanded in the 1960s from twelve to fifteen rivers. Each was
examined four times a year. In addition, harmful substances, such as oil, heavy
metals, and phenol concentrations, were also monitored.31 Nordic countries start-
ed to employ a similar approach in the 1960s.
The monitoring of Lithuanian surface water was expanded to include thirty
new stations after 1976. Surface waters continued to be evaluated with hydro-
biological methods. This approach focused on the evaluation of the toxicity of
water for aquatic insects, as well as the examination of the composition of the
species and the quantity of microorganisms (macrozoobenthos and periphyton).
A new ten-year monitoring program was approved in 1985, which targeted sixty
Lithuanian rivers. It is worth noting that the data collected by the monitoring pro-
gram about water pollution were not classified as secret, in contrast to the situa-
tion in many parts of the Soviet bloc. In fact, the results were published beginning
in 1960.32
Because Baltic fisheries played a significant role in the Soviet economy, the
classification of surface waters in Lithuania was based on fishery quality require-
ments. The same classification system was in use throughout the Soviet Union
and was based on chemical parameters and certain components within maxi-
mum allowable concentrations (MAC) or, as it is known by its Russian acronym,
PDK (predel’no dopustimye kontsentratsii).33 In the Soviet Union in 1944 there
were thirteen parameters determining maximum permitted levels, but by the
1970s, the list contained 250 parameters. However, not all of these were moni-
tored. In practice, regarding the essential characteristics of water temperature,
transparency, and acidity, monitoring was carried out primarily of biological and
chemical oxygen demand, the oxidation of permanganate, microbial plankton,
heterotrophic microflora, substances dissolved by oil-oxidizing bacteria, sulphate-
reducing bacteria, and Escherichia coli (E. coli) and enterococci originating from
human waste.34
Beginning in 1966, Lithuanian rivers were classified into four categories: clean,
medium clean, polluted, and highly polluted.35 When, for example, certain hydro-
biological methods became a part of the monitoring program in 1968, the waters
began to be classified on the basis of saprobic zones (a system of classification

emphasizing the quantity of dissolved oxygen in water). As water quality was then
estimated with the aid of more specific biological, chemical, or biological parame-
ters and with larger data sets, the transition to a new six-tiered classification system
was proposed in 1971, and officially launched in 1976.36 From 1968 to 1990 the
water quality of Lithuanian rivers was classified on the basis of a five-day biolog-
ical oxygen demand (BOD5), total phosphorus or total phosphorus or nitrogen
content, or into five categories based on the quantity of bacteria.37
Generally speaking, in its studies of water, the Soviet Union used fundamen-
tally the same basic hygienic, physical, chemical, and biological methods and clas-
sification criteria as did the rest of the world. For example, the analysis of biolog-
ical oxygen consumption has been perhaps the most common method by which
bodies of water have been monitored and classified in all industrialized countries.
This method provides a measure of how much organic material is present in water,
which is necessary for sustaining life therein. However, when an organic compo-
nent decomposes it may consume all the oxygen in the water ecosystem, which in
turn kills fish, something that began to happen in Lithuania at the beginning of
the 1950s.38
With the aid of systematic study of biological oxygen consumption and other
methods, the Lithuanian SSR mapped the conditions of its rivers and classified
the results, which we will present in more detail toward the end of this chapter.
Monitoring Wastewater Emissions

In the Lithuanian SSR, wastewater pollution monitoring began early on. The ob-
jective of these endeavors was to study, on a local level, the state of the sewerage
system, the sources of emissions, the quantity of emissions, their composition,
whether or not they posed health or environmental threats, as well as to draft
guidelines for reducing emissions, and to create an overview of the amount of un-
treated and treated wastewater on a national level.
The Lithuanian authorities already had a relatively clear picture of the volume
and type of wastewater in the main rivers in the early 1950s.39 Their studies were
used to prioritize water-protection measures. The first emission standards in the
Soviet Union came into force in 1957.40 In 1966 these technical instructions were
compiled and published in Lithuanian. Threshold limits for biological oxygen
consumption were imposed on biological wastewater treatment plants. With re-
gard to the assessment of acceptable limits to pollution, the new, more detailed
instructions released in 1996 do not significantly differ from the Soviet–era
standards.41
The collection of data about the quality and quantity of wastewater emissions
began in Lithuania around 1950. The Hydro Chemical Laboratory began the sta-

tistical monitoring of wastewater discharges on a larger scale in 1962. After 1972
each industrial plant with a consumption of over ten cubic meters of water per day
was obliged to provide information on water consumption, wastewater quantities,
emissions into waterways, and the concentrations of harmful substances.42 Small
enterprises were required to carry out chemical analyses of water every three
months, and large-scale plants, with daily wastewater emissions of more than five
hundred cubic meters, were required to analyze their emissions on a monthly ba-
sis.43 However, the reliability of the information provided on the industrial plants
was often questionable. What exactly was done in order to reduce the observed
emissions will be discussed in the following section.
The Development of Wastewater Treatment in Soviet Lithuania

Inspections conducted in 1945 noted that in Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipeda, and Ši-
auliai there were no pumping stations, wastewater treatment plants, or hygienic
chlorination for discharged wastewater.44 Despite financial, material, and labor
shortages, the first wastewater treatment plants were built in Soviet Lithuania in
1950.45 After some early trials, the treatment process consisted of the neutraliza-
tion of alkaline water, sedimentation of suspended solids in settling tanks, biologi-
cal treatment in biofilters, and the chlorination of effluent in contact tanks.46
The first wastewater treatment plants were designed as biofilters and were built
from the late 1940s to the 1960s, primarily in rural areas and small towns, or at
industrial plants.47 The treatment process was based on the pouring of wastewa-
ters onto a bed consisting of layers of rocks and gravel, where living microbiota
removed organic waste materials. These kinds of biofilters were built in Western
Europe from the 1890s onward. Some of the advantages of biofilters were their
low energy consumption and low maintenance costs. It is noteworthy, though,
that when the Dow Chemical Company began to use plastic for filtration in the
United States, this new method spread to the USSR as well. In this, as in some
other respects, technical knowledge of anti-pollution methods seeped through
the Iron Curtain.48
The first official instructions for the construction of biofiltration facilities ap-
peared in Russian in 1961 and in Lithuanian in 1966. Translations were necessary
in the early decades of the Soviet era, when few members of the older generation
in Lithuania could, or wanted, to speak or read Russian. A total of thirty-six biofil-
tration facilities were built in Lithuania before 1990.49
In the 1970s and 1980s almost one hundred filtration fields were built in Lith-
uania’s main population centers. Domestic wastewater, after initial treatment,
soaked into sandy soil on these fields. The technical guidelines and standards for
the construction of the filtration fields, published in Russian in the mid-1960s,

recommended construction in conjunction with municipal wastewater treatment
plants, mainly for the final treatment of wastewater.50
Between 1975 and 1980, the state also built 163 plants with oxidation ditch-
es, which were, in practice, ring-shaped oxidation baths. This is a method that
is mainly employed to supplement the work of biological wastewater treatment
plants. This method was first developed in the Netherlands in 1959. With the aid
of such oxidization equipment, facilities using these methods could treat nearly
one thousand cubic meters of wastewater a day. Guidelines for water treatment
using oxidation baths were published in the Soviet Union by the Moscow-based
Institute of Water Geology (VodGeo).51 This is another example of the early trans-
fer of environmental technologies from the West to the Soviet Bloc.52
In the early 1970s, medium-sized cities began to build large activated sludge
plants. These are the most common type of water-treatment facilities in contem-
porary Lithuania. The activated sludge process was developed by the English en-
gineers Edward Arden and W. T. Lockett in 1913. Their method was based on the
simple realization that one could, during the treatment process, pump the already
separated sludge back into the current of the wastewater, which sped up the micro-
bial treatment process. The treatment became even more effective when supple-
mental oxygen was pumped in.53 Activated sludge treatment quickly became the
most common biological treatment of wastewater all over the world, and remains
so to this day.
The activated sludge process also became a popular solution in the Soviet
Union as the technical structure of the plants was relatively simple and it proved
an effective method for the removal of organic matter and pathogens. In addi-
tion, the electricity needed by the Soviet plants was affordable in Lithuania and
throughout most of the USSR. By 1990 the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic
had built a total of 396 activated sludge plants.54
At first, only small activated sludge plants were built in Lithuania. The first
large one was built in Šiauliai in 1967. The wastewaters from the city’s weapons
factories and leather industry contained heavy metals, which hampered the bi-
ological treatment processes. An activated sludge plant began its operations in
Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest city, in 1978, although its treatment capacity
could not keep pace with the growth of the city. An efficient, activated sludge plant
began operations in Panevezys in 1989, and its activities were well in accordance
with emission criteria. In general, the construction of large-scale activated sludge
plants only became routine in the 1980s.55
The development of water protection in the capital, Vilnius, however, differs
significantly from the generally positive developments seen elsewhere, even
though the initial plan for repairing the city’s sewers and the construction of a

wastewater treatment plant was proposed as early as 1946.56 The decision to build
a mechanical treatment plant was made in 1966, but for unknown reasons, the
plant was not completed until twenty years later, in 1986, after which it reduced
the amount of organic material in domestic wastewater by about three times. This
does not mean, however, that there were no wastewater treatment facilities in Vil-
nius before 1986. The city’s Department of Industry began constructing treatment
plants after World War II, and by 1990 thirty-three types of plants were built in
order to deal with the specific needs of wastewater treatment in Vilnius.57
The Board on the Use and Protection of Water Resources was responsible for
the construction of wastewater treatment plants in Lithuania from 1960 to 1988.
During this time, the agency published more than fifty guidelines for the construc-
tion of treatment plants, their renewal, and operation. There were various types of
wastewater treatment plants built in Soviet Lithuania after 1950, with more and
more built every year. Construction peaked in the early 1980s; after that, con-
struction slowed because so many treatment plants had already been built. In Fin-
land the municipal construction of wastewater treatment plants reached its peak
in the mid-1970s.58 Therefore, judging by the rate of construction of wastewater
treatment plants, water protection proceeded on the eastern side of the Baltic Sea
about a decade behind what was happening on the western side.
Between 1950 and 1990 a total of 928 wastewater treatment plants, most of
which were biological treatment plants (712), were built in Lithuania.59 Figure 2.3
shows, in aggregate form, what types of wastewater treatment plants were built
and where. As described earlier, during the first phase of the construction of treat-
ment plants in the Soviet Union, only small plants were built in rural areas and
at industrial plants. During the second phase, construction gradually shifted to
medium-sized towns and treatment plants, while plants in large cities were left
until the final phase of the construction program. This type of three-phase model,
in which complex scientific and technical solutions are first tested on a small, then
a midsized, and eventually on a large scale, can be considered a logical strategy
for implementing new measures. Larger projects were only undertaken when it
became clear how to manage issues with the aid of what was learned during the
completion of small and midsized projects. The strategy in question, whose ex-
istence is strongly supported by the available data, also largely explains why the
most significant local failures in water protection in Soviet Lithuania were specifi-
cally found in its major cities, and particularly in its capital, Vilnius.
A significant problem with wastewater treatment in many cities was that the
treatment plants of Soviet Lithuania did not remove phosphorus, which is nec-
essary in order to reduce the eutrophication of waters. This was the case in the
whole of the Soviet Union and Communist Eastern Europe. Nitrogen was not re-

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Figure 2.3. A map showing the volume and type of wastewater treatment plants
erected during the Soviet era in Lithuania.
moved from wastewater in Soviet Lithuania either, though this shortcoming was
not unique to the Soviet realm; the removal of nitrogen only became common
throughout the Baltic Sea Region in the early 2000s.
A Change in the Condition of Rivers in Soviet Lithuania

What effect did the extensive construction of wastewater treatment plants have
on the condition of watercourses in Soviet Lithuania? What kind of information
did researchers have about the conditions of the watercourses during the Soviet
period? Between 1968 and 1990 the Department of Environmental Protection’s
information division was responsible for preparing manuscripts and charts about
river-water quality, which were classified for internal use only. The charts repre-
sented the annual average flows and classified water quality according to sampling
data on biological oxygen demand, and total nitrogen and phosphorus content.60
The results appear here in reconstructed maps from 1970 and 1990 (figures 2.4

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Figure 2.4. A chart showing classification of pollution of surface waters in the

Lithuanian SSR in 1970.
and 2.5), where the river-water quality is classified on the basis of measurements
and five-day biological oxygen demand (BOD5). BOD5 maps allow a twenty-year
picture of the state of rivers in Soviet Lithuania.
The largest sources of wastewater discharge in Lithuania after World War II
were its growing cities: Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipeda, Šiauliai, and Panevezys. Vilnius’
population increased from its postwar level of 120,000 inhabitants to 550,000 by
1986. Growing population led to the gradual pollution of the Neris River. Howev-
er, the worst river contamination took place in the early 1950s, when conspicuous
inflows of industrial and sewage water into the Nevėžis River reportedly caused
the death of livestock along the river plain.61
According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s information division, the
most polluted Lithuanian rivers at the end of the 1960s were located in the north.
The River Kulpe was defined as “extremely polluted.” It has a low flow rate, and is
thus particularly vulnerable to pollution. As a result of the considerable emissions
from Šiauliai and its industries, it was also heavily burdened. Figure 2.4 shows that
several small rivers in northern Lithuania were heavily polluted. In addition to the

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Figure 2.5. Twenty years later. A chart showing classification of pollution of surface
waters in the Lithuanian SSR in 1990.
aforementioned points, a little further south on the banks of the Nevėžis and close
to Klaipeda, the Akmena and Danė Rivers were also classified as badly polluted.
The largest rivers, the Neman and the Neris, were classified as moderately and
slightly polluted in 1970.62
The large investments in water protection in Soviet Lithuania were not, how-
ever, without results. Although the economic output of the republic and the con-
sequent stress on watercourses continually grew between 1970 and 1990, the
water quality improved noticeably in the following rivers: the Nevėžis, Akmena,
Danė, Daugava, Saltuona, and the Šešupė. On the other hand, due to the growth
of Kaunas and Vilnius and the insufficient treatment of wastewater there, the
Neman and Neris Rivers became classified as moderately polluted. Additionally,
the increase in agricultural runoff ruined some of the previously relatively clean,
preserved river deltas, even though a number of small-capacity treatment plants
were built in their catchment areas (figures 2.3 and 2.4).63
Generally speaking, the ecological quality of several of Lithuania’s rivers began
to improve after the construction of large-scale biological wastewater treatment

plants, particularly in the late Soviet era. This is a remarkable achievement in light
of the Soviet regime’s fervent emphasis on industrial production.
Conclusions
The Baltic Sea Region was deeply divided during the Cold War. Countries in the
West, such as Finland, Sweden, and Denmark, faced more favorable circumstanc-
es for the development of a strong water-protection regime. At the end of World
War II, they retained their sovereignty and a democratic political system, which
allowed them to develop prosperous welfare states in the postwar decades. Those
states gradually incorporated robust environmental protection into their informal
social contracts and into their legal systems, and this extended to water protection
and wastewater management. Finland and Sweden could afford even expensive
investments to limit water pollution.
In contrast, Lithuania suffered violent repression and a long Soviet occupation.
Rule by agents of Moscow deprived the country of its independence and subject-
ed it to Soviet priorities, such as maximization of heavy industry. These circum-
stances were far less favorable for the establishment of a water-protection regime
than those enjoyed by the countries of the western Baltic.
While the Soviet security organs mercilessly silenced political opposition, the
Soviet state also erected scientific and technical organizations that paid serious
attention to pollution, which to some extent legitimated the new Soviet order af-
ter 1945. It established management of water protection in Lithuania immediately
after the war. Studies of water pollution, which led to regular follow-up with stan-
dardized methods, also began to take place at an early stage. The research data
were not generally classified as secret, but instead were published in professional
journals.
This scientific work was more than academic—it informed policy. The Lith-
uanian SSR immediately began to undertake practical measures to reduce water-
pollution emissions. As a result of the long-term water-protection policy in Lithu-
ania during the Soviet era, a significant processing system for residential, industrial,
and agricultural wastewater was constructed, which was comprised of sewage
networks, collection pipes, pumping plants, and the maintenance and monitoring
systems in over nine hundred treatment plants of various types. With the aid of
these large-scale investments the ecological status of rivers improved during the
period of Soviet occupation. Despite its shortcomings, the Soviet Union’s envi-
ronmental policy was relatively successful when it comes to Lithuania’s waters.
This conclusion runs counter to the typical narrative of Soviet environmental
history. How can we explain the relatively rapid development of water protection
in Soviet Lithuania?

Table 2.1. No wastewater treatment plants were built during the Soviet period? A table shows the chronology of wastewater treatment plant
building in Lithuania from 1950 to 1990.
Other types Physico- Total number of

Activated Oxidation Biological Filtration of biological Mechanical chemical WWTPs
Year sludge ditches Biofilters ponds fields treatment treatment treatment Biological All Types
1950 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1
1955 0 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 3 3
1960 1 0 4 0 3 0 3 3 8 14
1965 8 2 12 0 8 0 14 5 30 49
1970 20 23 12 0 12 6 15 7 73 95
1975* 92 28 4 0 12 6 15 7 162 206
1980 133 67 1 3 32 30 16 23 263 302
1985 94 38 0 3 18 14 11 13 170 194
1990 48 3 0 7 3 1 0 2 62 64
Total 396 162 36 13 97 68 88 68 772 928
Note: * In 1975 small plants, such as septic tanks, were removed from the list of treatment plants.
We consider three hypotheses. The first potential explanation is the nature
of Lithuania’s rivers. Due to their small size, they were exceptionally sensitive to
pollution, which is why the country needed extraordinary water-protection mea-
sures. Indications of discussions along these lines did not, however, come up in
this study. In fact, the character of Lithuanian hydrology could also explain slow
development of water protection. This is because Lithuania has an exceptional
abundance of excellent groundwater resources, and in practice most of the pop-
ulation’s drinking water was derived from groundwater sources. Consequently, in
Soviet Lithuania, the motive was not the conservation of drinking water sources,
which was an important health argument for the development of water protection
policies in many other countries. So the geography of Lithuania’s rivers does not
provide an adequate explanation for the history of Lithuanian water quality and
water protection.
A second potential explanation could be historical continuity. Conceivably,
postwar developments in Soviet Lithuania were based on water-protection tra-
ditions that began before World War II. Such continuity, temporarily interrupted
by the war, can be seen in other parts of the Baltic Sea Region, particularly in its
cities.64 However, no indication of prewar developments or their continuation ap-
peared in the documentation from Soviet Lithuania. Unfortunately, no published
studies exist of water pollution in Lithuania before the war. So some uncertainty
remains on this matter.
However, no uncertainty exists with respect to one significant aspect of histor-
ical continuity, which is nationalism. National identities and interests, although
discouraged, hardly disappeared in Soviet Lithuania. Native-born Lithuanian ex-
perts and decision-makers were responsible for studies about rivers and their pro-
tection, and their clear intention was to protect their own national watercourses
from pollution as best they could. Experts from Lithuania actively took advantage
of all of the opportunities offered by the Soviet Union. So, conceivably, Lithuanian
nationalism can account, or help to account, for the outcome.
A third possible explanation for the development of Soviet Lithuanian water
protection lies in Soviet centralization. Measures for the promotion of water pro-
tection began in Soviet Lithuania immediately after World War II, which strongly
suggests that they were based on the water protection model that the Soviet Union
brought to Lithuania. Therefore, according to this hypothesis, small, agrarian Lith-
uania was led or forced into water protection and development by the imposition
of Soviet power. By the late 1930s, the Soviet Union had developed rules and pro-
cedures for water-quality management in its heavy industry zones and large cities.
Beginning in 1945, it extended these to Lithuania.
After World War II, the Soviet Union continued to develop research methods

for water-quality measurement and wastewater-treatment technology based on
Western science and practice. The Soviet Union was a major international power
with the resources to collect knowledge from all around the world and apply it to
its own circumstances. After 1950 the Soviet Union carried out a slow, but massive,
transfer of Western environmental science and technology that provided particu-
lar benefits for small Soviet Republics such as the Lithuanian SSR.
In addition, when we look at the issue from the point of view of the Soviet cen-
tralization, we see clearly a top-down approach to water-quality management in
Lithuania that contrasts with the evolution of water pollution control in neighbor-
ing Nordic countries. While at the end of the war, water protection in the Nordic
countries expanded gradually, first from the local level then to the regional level,
and finally to the national level, water protection in the Soviet Union was under-
taken directly by the federal government. As the aim of the Soviet authorities was
to gather comparable data and to create an integrated approach for all watercours-
es throughout the USSR, the approach the state took was the only method for
attaining these objectives in the newly absorbed territories as well. This central-
ized, top-down approach explains the rapid initiation of coordinated action in the
Lithuanian SSR immediately after the war. It seems that while Soviet Socialism
caused water pollution problems, it also provided tools, including administration,
science, technology, and investments, for water protection.
Raymond Dominick is one of the few scholars who, on the basis of his own
research, has been able to compare the development of environmental protection
between Socialist and capitalist countries during the Cold War era. If we examine
Soviet Lithuania’s water-protection regime, water-pollution studies, as well as its
sewer networks, wastewater treatment plants, and their construction as a whole,
these results can be compared, on a general level, to the conclusions Raymond
Dominick reached about developments in East and West Germany.65 Our results
harmonize with Dominick’s. When compared to capitalist countries, Soviet Lith-
uania developed comprehensive administrative and technical entities for dealing
with water conservation relatively quickly in the 1950s and 1960s, but efforts
slowed in the 1970s and 1980s. At the time, wastewater treatment, both mechan-
ical and biological, in Lithuania was about a decade behind developments on the
western side of the Baltic Sea.
So was the development of water protection in the Lithuanian SSR an excep-
tion to the rule in the Soviet Union? We maintain it was not. At the end of Soviet
rule in 1990, 78.3 percent of wastewater in Lithuania was treated. This did not
differ much from the general level of water treatment in the Soviet Union. In 1990
about 77 percent of urban, industrial, and rural wastewaters requiring purification
were treated in the Soviet Union. Of this 77 percent, about 30 percent, on average,

was treated sufficiently to meet official Soviet standards. The rate of efficient treat-
ment was 21 percent for the Baltic Sea basin area, while the rate was 25 percent for
the Sea of Azov, and 52 percent for the Black Sea basin. The rate was only lower
in the Caspian Sea basin.66 Hence, the Baltic Sea Region was not a priority area in
terms of water protection in the Soviet Union.
In our research, we were able, for the first time, to describe, using qualitative
and quantitative methods, the history of water pollution and protection in one So-
viet republic throughout the Cold War era. It is only on the basis of close empirical
study that it may become possible to build a comparative environmental history
study of water pollution and protection on both national and international levels,
extending to both Eastern and Western Europe, and get beyond blanket gener-
alizations about environmental quality and environmental protection during the
Cold War.

3
The Fallout of Chernobyl

The Emergence of an Environmental Movement
in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
Tetiana Perga
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
The 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant continues to attract wide
attention from scholars and scientists. It destroyed the myth that environmental
waste, abuse, and mismanagement could not exist in the USSR, and also inspired
powerful environmental movements in Soviet republics that quickly undermined
the Soviet Union’s foundations. Among its most significant consequences was
contributing to the social transformation of Soviet society in late 1980s, which ac-
celerated the end of the Cold War. From today’s perspective, the Chernobyl acci-
dent offers a unique opportunity to assess the effects on the environment of a lack
of democracy and an exclusion of civil society from decision-making. Those ef-
fects reverberated widely within the USSR. However, this chapter focuses on the
example of the emergence and development of the environmental movement in
the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which until 1991 was a part of the USSR.
As yet there is no careful investigation of the implications of the Chernobyl
accident on Ukraine’s environmental politics. Some scattered data exist in work
devoted to civil society,1 environmental legislation,2 eco-nationalism,3 and the im-
mediate aftermath of the accident.4 This chapter relies on primary sources hitherto
unused in this context, such as newspapers of the Ukrainian diaspora in the Unit-
ed States, central newspapers of the Soviet Union, central and local newspapers
of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and documents from newly opened
Ukrainian archives.
The Environmental Consequences of Ambitious Soviet Economic Plans

After the Soviet Union’s foundation in 1922, the Communist Party set out to catch
up to and surpass the capitalist West in order to demonstrate the advantages of
their Socialist system. This drive accelerated during the Cold War. To achieve
55
its goal the USSR began to build a military-industrial complex, which resulted
in many activities that proved destructive to the environment. The visible gap in
economic development between the East and the West drove Soviet leadership
to ruthlessly exploit natural resources. Nature became the victim of Soviet–style
economic modernization.
Because the Ukrainian SSR served as the Soviet Union’s industrial core, a dis-
proportionate number of mining, chemical, and metallurgical enterprises were
located in its territory. Between 1953 and 1964, while Nikita Khrushchev was
chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR, 35 new industrial en-
terprises and 250 large chemical industrial enterprises were built in the Ukrainian
SSR. These industrial areas covered about 3.7 percent of the former Soviet Union’s
territory but produced almost 25 percent of all industrial pollution. The ecological
situation in the Ukraine quickly deteriorated, and the republic began to experi-
ence complex environmental problems. Forty-one of the 45 major cities experi-
enced concentrations of pollutants above acceptable norms. In general, pollution
in Ukraine was ten times higher than the national average in the Soviet Union.5
Expanding industrial enterprises required increasing electricity production.
The Soviet government prioritized hydroelectric and nuclear power. A great num-
ber of hydroelectric plants were built from 1950 through the 1970s. In the process
over 709,000 hectares of forests and pastures were flooded. This obviously caused
significant changes in the hydrological and hydrobiological regimes of Ukraine’s
main waterway, the Dnieper River.6 In the 1970s the Soviet Union shifted its en-
ergy strategy to nuclear power, and between 1977 and 1989 sixteen nuclear power
reactors were built in Ukraine. These reactors were built at five different facilities
and had a total capacity of 14,800 MW. These reactors represented 40 percent
of all nuclear power plants in the Soviet Union and were designed to operate for
only thirty years.7 The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was part of this program
to rapidly expand nuclear energy production in the Soviet Union. The location of
the plant in the middle of Ukraine, just 130 km from the capital city, Kiev, was jus-
tified by available water supplies. Environmental and social risks were not taken
into account. One of the biggest risks was the flow of contaminated water into the
Dnieper River that divides Ukraine virtually down the middle of the country and
supplied in 1986 a total of thirty-six million people, or approximately 72 percent
of the republic’s population.8
Centralism in the economy in the Soviet Union led to the complete subordi-
nation of all enterprises located in Ukraine to the authorities in Moscow. Authori-
tarian decisions made in Moscow were carried out by local functionaries and con-
tributed to the continual deterioration of the ecological situation in the Ukrainian
SSR. This was exacerbated by the political dictates of the Communist Party, which
56 Tetiana Perga
engaged in strict censorship, suppressed democracy, repressed and persecuted dis-
sidents—meaning that environmental destruction went largely unchecked.
The Immediate Aftermath of the Chernobyl Accident

On April 26, 1986, a sudden power surge during a reactor systems test destroyed
Unit 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. As a result of this accident, 2,218
Ukrainian communities with a combined population of approximately 2.4 million
people were contaminated by radioactive fallout.9
The Chernobyl accident was a direct consequence of Cold War isolation and
the lack of a safety culture in the Soviet Union. Due to the extraordinary secre-
cy that surrounded the Soviet nuclear industry, scientists were unable to take
advantage of relevant technologies developed in Western countries or to use the
experience of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in the United States. Over the
years the politicization of nuclear science and technology had created a sense of
exclusivity and infallibility. It was believed that accidents like those that occurred
in the West could not happen at a Soviet nuclear power plant. This faith resulted
in minimal accident preparation, as evidenced by the lack of protective clothing
and Geiger counters to monitor radiation at Chernobyl, as well as by inadequate
emergency protocols for workers and also for neighboring civilians.
In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, officials and members of the Soviet
and Ukrainian governments did not understand the scale of the danger. This was
later acknowledged by the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Sovi-
et Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.10 Fire crews and military units responding to the
accident often worked without protective clothing and received high doses of ra-
diation. Of the 203 people who were hospitalized immediately after the accident,
31 died. About 200,000 people received high doses of radiation, averaging around
100 millisieverts (mSv).11 Some 20,000 of them received about 250 mSv, and a
few received 500 mSv.12 No warning was given to the public about the threat, and
many people received dangerous doses of radiation, including children, whose
health is especially vulnerable.13
Kiev promptly informed Moscow about the accident, but there was no imme-
diate reaction from the central authorities. The Ukrainian government did not
want to take the initiative in response to the accident. Only on April 27, after re-
ceiving the order from Moscow (forty hours after the accident), did the first phase
of the evacuation begin (29,360 people were resettled). People were told that they
would be leaving their homes for only three days. Due to high radiation levels,
they have yet to return home. By the end of 1986, 116,000 residents had been
evacuated, but many people continued to live in contaminated areas.14
Declassified KGB documents clearly show that the Soviet government’s goal
The Fallout of Chernobyl 57

in the early hours and days after the accident was not to rescue people, but to stop
the spread of information about the accident across the country and abroad.15 At
first, it tried to cover-up the disaster. This reaction was in keeping with typically
distrustful Cold War–era relations with the West. Pressure from the international
community forced the USSR to finally acknowledge the accident several days later.
On April 29, Moscow made a formal televised announcement of the disaster,
but only two newspapers printed brief stories.16 After a few days, authorities re-
ported the establishment of a government commission to “liquidate the conse-
quences of the accident” led by the deputy prime minister of the USSR, Boris
Scherbina.17 The first government delegation to the Chernobyl region finally ar-
rived on May 2. It included the chairman of the Council of Ministers of Ukraine,
Aleksander Lyashko, and the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine,
Volodymyr Shcherbytsky.18 This was Shcherbytsky’s first visit to the Chernobyl
zone, one of the three he took during his tenure, which lasted until 1989. At the
time, he issued no statement. The muted official reaction to the disaster showed
typical Soviet indifference to damage done to human life as well as to the envi-
ronment. Soviet authorities feared losing control over society and revealing the
hollowness of propaganda claims of global nuclear leadership in the face of this
terrible accident. They feared that the truth would further undermine faith in the
Communist Party and in Communism in general.
Analysis of the official response to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster
allows us to identify some strategies the state employed to minimize the event in
the public’s eyes. As usual, these efforts were justified by security concerns. The
first tactic was to downplay the scale of the tragedy by describing it as “a serious ac-
cident, but a local accident . . . an event, that some try to turn into a global nuclear
disaster, but . . . that pales in comparison to the threat of an arms race and nuclear
war.” 19 The added fact that “only two people were killed” was meant to emphasize
the insignificance of the accident while shifting the readers’ focus to the dangers
of the arms race and nuclear weapons. The second tactic drew attention to the sta-
ble development of the country and the rarity of such events. Newspapers wrote
about preparations for the celebration of the major holidays of May 1 and May 9.20
Public events were not cancelled in Kiev. Meanwhile, documents of the Commit-
tee for State Security show that radiation levels peaked in Kiev between 11:00 a.m.
and 12:00 p.m. on May 1, just in time for the big May Day parade on the capital’s
main street.21 The annual international Cycling for Peace “Chestnut Run” was held
in Kiev on May 6–9.
Soviet authorities’ third tactic was to spread misinformation to both West-
ern countries and the inhabitants of the Ukrainian SSR and the rest of the Soviet
58 Tetiana Perga
Union. To reassure the international community, a press conference for Soviet
and foreign journalists was organized in Moscow on May 6. Soviet officials ad-
mitted that a disaster had happened, but reminded their audience that “lessons
are learned not only by successes but also by tragedies.” They further pointed out
that such accidents had occurred in other countries, including the United States
(in 1979), and that nuclear weapons posed a much greater threat to humanity than
nuclear power.22 Chairman of the USSR State Committee for Hydrometeorology
and Control of the Environment, Yuri Izrael, reported that radiation levels near
the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant had fallen by one hundred times, and that
in the near future Pripyat (the city adjacent to the plant) would be a safe place to
live. He assured his audience, “The radiation in some cases has increased, but nev-
er, I repeat, never has the radiation level reached high enough to threaten human
health.”23 Similar ideas appear in the report given by Mikhail Gorbachev on May
15. He repeated that the situation had been stabilized, called on the internation-
al community to deepen cooperation within the framework of the International
Atomic Energy Agency, and warned against the further use of nuclear weapons.24
The often-repeated mantra of government statements was: “the situation has
been stabilized, all is under the control.”25 This was first announced on April 30.26
The evacuation of the population was presented as a temporary measure under-
taken only because “people could not be put at risk.”27 The cynicism of these state-
ments is underlined by the actions of the minister of health care of the Ukrainian
Republic, Anatoliy Romanenko. Although he knew about the dangerous radiation
levels and should have ordered people to remain indoors, prohibited the sale of
food outside, closed wells, and imposed government control of food crops, Ro-
manenko repeatedly misinformed the public in TV interviews on May 6, 8, and 12.
He claimed that the radiation level in Kiev and the surrounding region was within
limits recommended by national and international authorities and that there was
no danger to human health that would require neither medical treatment nor any
type of preventative measures. The only recommendation he made was to limit
the ventilation of enclosed spaces and to clean one’s feet before entering one’s
home.28 Iodine prophylaxis in contaminated areas was carried out spontaneously
but not thoroughly—and it was not carried out in Kiev at all. Still, Romanenko
reported to Moscow that more than three million people had received it.29 He,
along with other party leaders, appears to have been concerned only about their
personal safety and the safety of their families.
In 1990 a Ukrainian parliamentary commission described the behavior of So-
viet authorities during the April 1986 crisis as “a total lie, falsehoods, cover-up and
concealment; that is a crime of the Communist system.”30

Post–Chernobyl Mobilization: The First Informal Groups
The role of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster in the development of the
Ukrainian environmental movement is impossible to understand without a brief
discussion of environmentalism in the Ukrainian SSR prior to the disaster. As in
all Soviet republics, the environmental movement in Ukraine was institutional-
ized and put under the control of the Communist Party. In the Soviet Union, inde-
pendent social movements were prohibited and dissent was brutally suppressed.
People who aired their dissatisfaction with the denial of rights and freedoms in
light of the Helsinki Declaration of Human Rights (1975) risked arrest, imprison-
ment, or exile.31
The Soviet Union purported to support nature conservation and citizen par-
ticipation in the protection of the environment. All the Soviet Union republics,
including Ukraine, had Societies for Nature Protection, organized and controlled
by the state. The only refuge for liberal-minded intellectuals, especially young peo-
ple who sought the possibility to serve society outside state structures, became
the informal movement of youth associations called Nature Protection Brigades
(Druzhinnoe dvizhenie) that appeared in the late 1960s in many Soviet republics.
However, participants generally supported the regime and were engaged only in
activities sanctioned by the party.32 To survive, they worked under the motto “No
politics, only ecology,” and undertook small, local projects that limited their activ-
ities and horizons.33
Only a few Ukrainian scientists and writers dared criticize economic projects
that had a negative environmental impact. Much attention was focused on the
construction of dams for hydropower plants on the Dnieper River, but these pro-
tests were weak and soon suppressed. The author Oles’ Honchar, who from 1959
to 1971 was the head of the Writers Union of Ukraine, was dismissed from this
post after the publication of his novel The Cathedral, which portrayed popular at-
titudes to nature and criticized the negative environmental, social, and cultural
impact of the construction of the Kakhovka Reservoir on the Dnieper River.
Beginning in 1986 these groups provided the foundation for the development
of a significant environmental movement in the Ukrainian SSR. The Chernobyl
Nuclear Power Plant accident provided the impetus for this by catalyzing dissent
among many people in Soviet Ukraine (and indeed throughout the USSR and
beyond). The disaster laid bare the Soviet authorities’ unwillingness and inability
to respond adequately to the disaster and to ensure the population’s safety. The
lack of accurate information sparked a sense of resentment and stimulated col-
lective action aimed at receiving reliable information and a demand for transpar-
ent decision-making and communication with authorities. This popular demand
60 Tetiana Perga
for reliable information combined with “dramatic changes that happen to peo-
ple” provided the conditions for the emergence of the first public protests that
took place across the Soviet Union in 1987.34 According to information from the
London-based Ukrainian Peace Committee, demonstrators in Yerevan, Armenia,
held placards that said, “Save Armenia from Chemical and Radioactive Genocide.”
In Riga, Latvia, a protest against the ecological situation in the Latvian Republic
was organized on October 25 by the Ecological Club.35 According to the Ukrainian
Weekly, in April 1988 demonstrations dedicated to the second anniversary of the
Chernobyl accident similar to those held in Kiev were held in Moscow, Leningrad,
Riga, and several other cities.”36
Changing socioeconomic conditions (economic stagnation and decline, in-
creasing poverty, the failure of state financing) inspired people to action. Howev-
er, perhaps more important was the moral impetus to action. People’s very lives
and their children’s lives were at risk. Concerns about the consequences of the
disaster globalized popular thinking. It generated an interest in the Soviet Union’s
environment and a desire to do something “here and now” instead of waiting
for a long-promised future. Values of self-identification, self-realization, and self-
determination, which for many years had been suppressed by Soviet ideology and
the totalitarian state, reappeared, and sped the mobilization of many Ukrainians.
Favorable conditions created by perestroika and glasnost—the mid-1980s re-
forms associated with Gorbachev—gave leaders the opportunity to cover various
environmental issues in newspapers and magazines and to increase popular aware-
ness of these issues.
The initial stages of the environmental movement were characterized by an
increasing wave of civic initiatives. Across the Ukrainian SSR citizens began to
band together to protest nuclear reactors and many kinds of environmental deg-
radation. A special feature of the Ukrainian environmental movement through-
out 1986–1987 was the formation of informal groups around specific ecological
issues, such as industrial pollution or nuclear power plants (single-issue inter-
est groups). Almost every local environmental problem was being discussed by
some citizen group that was trying to work out a solution. In 1989 some 47,000
informal groups (clubs, political and cultural associations) existed in Ukraine, of
which 1,946 engaged in environmental activity.37 Some of the first groups were
Green Charity (Kiev), Ecology (Cherkasy), Noosphere (Ternopl), For Ecological
Restructuring (Zaporozhye), and Not Indifferent (Krivoy Rog).38 These groups
conducted numerous spontaneous environmental actions in reaction to the sharp
deterioration of their environment. In Kremenchuk the Environment Committee
argued against building industrial facilities that would harm the environment; in
Dnepropetrovsk Ecological Initiative organized demonstrations against the air

pollution from the city’s metallurgical plants; in Lviv the environmental section of
the Lion Society fought the pollution of the Dniester River and advocated for the
Carpathian forests. From 1987 to 1989 the group Ecology and Peace in Simfero-
pol gathered 350,000 signatures against the construction of the Crimean Nuclear
Power Station and organized many rallies and protests in the region and directly
on the construction site.39 In 1987 a nationwide society called Union Chernobyl
launched what became known as the Chernobyl Movement. The first official
nongovernmental environmental organization in the Ukrainian SSR, the Green
World Association, was established this same year by the Peace Committee of the
Ukrainian Republic, an event made possible due to the personal position of the
head of the committee, the writer Oles’ Honchar. The Green World Association
became the most influential organization in opposition to the official body, the
Ukrainian State Committee for the Protection of the Environment.
Participants of the environmental movement exchanged information at de-
bates, conferences, and forums; they gathered signatures, and attended rallies.
They even inspired new sections in newspapers, magazines, and other print media
entitled “Ecology.” Personal contacts among many members of the Ukrainian en-
vironmental movement arose from participation in Nature Protection Brigades
and the Young Communist League (all inhabitants of the Soviet Union between
the ages of twelve and twenty-eight were required to be members of this political
organization).
Members of the first environmental groups shared the common goal of en-
suring their own personal security through the protection and restoration of the
environment in Ukraine and through the establishment of new forms of legal, ad-
ministrative, and other mechanisms for solving ecological problems. In the early
post–Chernobyl years, environmental activity in the Ukrainian SSR was segment-
ed and scattered due to the size of the territory, the numerous local environmental
problems, and a generally weak environmental awareness. Organized environ-
mental protests only began in 1989, when the Green World Association finally as-
sumed a nationwide presence, after its constituent congress on October 28, 1989.
Intellectual Drivers of Ukrainian Environmental Activism

Scientists and writers played an important role in inspiring the environmental
movement in the Ukrainian SSR and served as intellectual drivers of the move-
ment. Using their celebrity and credibility, they influenced popular views on envi-
ronmental issues. After the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident, the repub-
lic’s writers, and scientific and technical intelligentsia, joined forces to lead public
opposition to the expansion of nuclear energy planned for Ukraine.
Ukrainian writers soon took the lead in voicing anxiety about the threat of nu-
62 Tetiana Perga
clear power. Writers in Ukraine were considered the conscience of the nation.40
Many of them felt a personal, moral responsibility for the accident and this in-
spired their activism. They demonstrated their concern within weeks of the ac-
cident at the Ukrainian Writers’ Congress held in Kiev in early June 1986. In July
one of the Ukrainian representatives at the Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow,
the poet Borys Oliynyk, spoke openly about the lessons of the Chernobyl disaster.
He declared, “Chernobyl has forced us to rethink a great deal, including the fact
that the common metaphor of ‘the peaceful atom’ is only a metaphor.”41
Under public pressure calling for the closure of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power
Plant, it was announced on May 27, 1987, that construction on additional reactors
at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant would not continue. Following that deci-
sion, the environmental movement focused its attention on the construction of
the Chyhyryn, Rivne, Khmelnitsky, and Southern Ukraine Nuclear Power Plants.
Writers singled out the Chyhyryn Nuclear Power Plant. Oles’ Honchar called
it “another Chernobyl.” His protest appeared in a letter signed by seven Ukrainian
writers dated August 6, 1987. They pointed out that the Chyhyryn Nuclear Power
Plant was situated in a densely populated region on the banks of a river that was
the republic’s main water supply, in the middle of an area with special historical
significance for Ukrainians. The authors appealed to the USSR’s Council of Min-
isters to “take public opinion into account” in this matter.42 This letter was the be-
ginning of a broad public debate in Ukraine about the idea of “the peaceful atom,”
proposed by President Eisenhower in 1953.43
Oles’ Honchar shared his views with the Soviet intelligentsia during various
high-level events. For example, at a national conference of creative intelligentsia
held in Leningrad on October 1, 1987, he pointed out the proliferation of nucle-
ar power plants in Ukraine and protested the construction of new nuclear plants
near Chyhyryn and in Crimea. He stressed the environmental threat posed by the
Danube-Dnieper Project, a giant interbasin water transfer and irrigation scheme,
which had the potential to block the Dnieper-Bug Estuary and transform the
Dnieper into a huge, fetid swamp. His speech, which first appeared in the newspa-
per Literaturna Ukraina on October 7, 1987, was subsequently excerpted by Radio
Moscow on October 22, and then published in a somewhat sanitized version in
Literaturnaya Gazeta on December 9, 1987.44
Scientists supported the writers’ efforts to stop the building of certain nucle-
ar power stations by organizing activities in response to the government’s ambi-
tious program to expand electricity production in Ukraine. Historically, scientists
played a decisive role in the Soviet economy’s development. Enjoying great pres-
tige in Soviet society and privileged access to information, they formed effective
antinuclear lobbies. Scientists opposed government plans to build an additional

six thousand megawatts (MW) of electrical capacity at stations in the republic.
They insisted that the maximum productive capacity of Ukrainian nuclear power
plants should not exceed four thousand megawatts (MW). The scientists of the
Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR opposed the implementation of the
plan proposed by Moscow by pointing out the lack of a compelling need for it.
The president of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, Dr. Boris Pa-
ton, expressed alarm about the ecological situation in Ukraine at a session of the
Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR in 1988, and even called for a fundamental
review of the way in which the republic’s economic development was planned to
ensure that ecological concerns were taken into account.45
In the Soviet Union problems of development, particularly those related to
nuclear energy, had long been a forbidden topic for public analysis and discus-
sion in media. The Ukrainian environmental movement achieved great success in
the late 1980s by simply voicing their opposition to the authorities and opening
this issue for public debate. On January 21, 1988, Literaturna Ukraina published
a letter from thirteen leading Ukrainian scientists, including Hero of Socialist La-
bor Mykola Amosov, an academic from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and
a corresponding member of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR, two
economists, two biologists, and two geologists, all of whom opposed the expan-
sion of nuclear energy in Ukraine. This was the first public critique of the nuclear
power program to come from academics. The article criticized the entire nuclear
program from a variety of perspectives—ecological, geological, and agricultural—
and also from the viewpoint of the psychological impact of the Chernobyl disaster
on Ukrainians.46 The main idea was the danger posed by nuclear power. In mid-
March 1988, two additional groups of Ukrainian scientists, mathematicians and
cyberneticists, registered their opposition to Moscow’s proposals for increasing
the number of nuclear reactors.47
Ukrainian scientists and cultural figures addressed an appeal to the nineteenth
All-Union Conference of the Soviet Communist Party, held in June 1988, to freeze
construction of all nuclear power plants in Ukraine for the next ten to fifteen years.
The document, titled “Concerning a Review of the Program for the Development
of Nuclear Energy in Ukraine,” was signed by more than four thousand people
and appeared in the June 23, 1988, issue of Literaturna Ukraina. Rather than fur-
ther develop nuclear energy, scientists proposed concentrating on energy-saving
measures, the reconstruction and modernization of existing thermal power plants,
the exploitation of natural gas, and the development of so-called nontraditional
renewable energy sources.48 Under the influence of this appeal and increasing en-
vironmental protests, Mikhail Gorbachev addressed the Party Congress about the
necessity of “drastically improving” the ecological situation in the country.
64 Tetiana Perga
Local scientists, under the leadership of the physicist Anatoliy Svidzinsky and
the writer Volodymyr Terehov, started a public campaign called “A Nuclear Plant
in Crimea: For and Against.”49 The Crimean peninsula was the premiere seaside
recreational region for Ukraine and the entire Soviet Union. It is also prone to
seismic activity. The fear of a possible nuclear accident in the region drove many
local representatives of the Soviet government to take an interest in this issue and
to support the antinuclear activists. As a result, in 1989 Moscow decided to halt
construction of the nuclear plant there. In April 1990 Svidzinsky published anoth-
er article in Literaturna Ukraina, “Moral Aspects of Nuclear Energy.”50
A wave of protests in the Ukrainian SSR put an end to the construction of the
Crimean Nuclear Power Plant as well as proposed nuclear plants in Chyhyryn
and Odessa. They also caused the suspension of the construction of additional
reactors at the Southern Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plant and the Khmelnitsky Nu-
clear Power Plant. Late in the perestroika period, in 1990, the Verkhovna Rada
(Supreme Council) of Ukraine passed a five-year moratorium on building nuclear
power plants in Ukraine.
Polarization in the Ukrainian Republic

The environmental movement in the Ukrainian SSR gained momentum after the
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident as various informal cultural and polit-
ical groups began to take up environmental issues. This allowed the movement
to spring up from a variety of sources all at once. In July 1985 there were twenty-
five active social associations in the republic, including the Ukrainian Cultural
Club, the Lion Society, the Heritage Club, the Student Union Community, the
Ukrainian Helsinki Group, the Ukrainian Democratic Union, and the Ukrainian
Association of Independent Intellectuals.51 They played the role of interest groups
that often discussed not only issues of Ukrainian language and culture but also the
vital issues of local environmental conditions and environmental security. For ex-
ample, the Ukrainian Culture Club organized the first demonstration in Ukraine
to mark the second anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. On April 26, 1988, five
hundred people marched down Kiev’s central street, Khreshchatyk, carrying plac-
ards with slogans like: “Nuclear Power Plants out of Ukraine,” and “Openness and
Democracy to the End.” Twenty people, including the three organizers, were later
arrested by the police.52
Dissidents who began to return from prisons and exile also influenced the po-
liticization of Ukrainian society at this time. They contributed to the developing
environmental movement from the perspective of human rights, including the
right to live in a healthy and safe environment, to have access to accurate infor-
mation, and to participate in decision-making.53 Some of the dissidents, such as

the famous national figure V’yacheslav Chernovol, one of the cofounders of the
RUKH Party, had personal experience with Soviet environmental policymaking.54
In 1971 he worked in the Lviv department of the Ukrainian Society for Nature
Protection and thus understood the essence of Soviet environmental policy.55
Confrontations with the authorities began to increase in 1988 when protestors
shifted from relatively soft tactics, such as letter-writing campaigns, speeches, and
meetings, to harder tactics, such as mass rallies. The first such rally sanctioned
by Soviet authorities during perestroika was dedicated to environmental issues.
According to the Ukrainian Weekly, it took place in Kiev on November 13, 1988, at
the National Stadium and was attended by about twenty thousand participants.56
The KGB reported the number of protestors to be around three thousand.57 The
rally’s organizers were not only informal ecological groups but also groups of a
sociopolitical nature, such as the Ukrainian Helsinki Union, the Ukrainian Dem-
ocratic Union, and the Ukrainian Cultural Club, whose leaders, according to KGB
agents, “advocated with demagogical and nationalist slogans and in some cases
held extremist positions.”58
Speakers at the rally demanded drastic measures to improve the ecological sit-
uation and even called for the elimination of existing nuclear power plants, as well
as the chemical industry. The dire environmental situation was blamed on Soviet
authorities’ ignorance about the needs of the Ukrainian SSR, particularly in the
areas of construction and operation of environmentally friendly enterprises, and
also on the inability of ministries and deputies of the Verkhovna Rada to moni-
tor the environmental situation in Ukraine and accurately inform the population.
These complaints and accusations formed the basis of the final document of the
meeting, entitled “Appeal” to the existing government.
The combination of environmental and political demands was highlighted by
the dissident Oleksadr Shevchenko, a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union.
He called for a referendum, “in which the Ukrainian people will declare their will
to live.” Protestors discussed a petition to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and
demanded that the proposed bill about elections of people’s deputies be removed
from the agenda of the forthcoming session of the Supreme Soviet, because the
bill was seen to “limit the rights of all the Soviet republics and nations.” At this
meeting, the Ukrainian writers Dmitriy Pavlichko, Ivan Drach, Sergey Plachinda,
and activists of the Heritage Club put forth a proposal to create RUKH.59
Throughout 1988 and 1989 a wave of protests spread to many Ukrainian towns
and cities. Green slogans were very popular in the aftermath of the Chernobyl
accident, so many pro-democracy leaders used them to promote their political
activities. The Soviet legal system did not allow citizen participation in environ-
mental decision-making or in the enforcement of environmental laws. Therefore,
66 Tetiana Perga
ecologically oriented groups that were attempting to resolve specific issues, such
as the closure of a polluting enterprise or the protection of some natural site, had
to gather political support from the local population. They applied direct political
pressure on different state authorities using demonstrations, meetings, or other
(sometimes illegal) methods.60 This explains the politicization of the environmen-
tal movement in Ukraine during the last years of the Soviet Union and the wide-
spread use of environmental issues not only by democratic but also nationalist
movements.
The popularity of environmental issues meant they were included in the plat-
forms of different political groups and parties. For example, at the Constitutional
Congress of the RUKH Party held on September 8–10, 1989, in Kiev, alongside
resolutions “On the forthcoming elections Ukraine” and “On national symbols”
were adopted resolutions, such as “On Narodychi”61 and “On the environmental
situation.”62 In the late 1980s environmental issues occupied an important place in
the activities of the democratic and nationalist movements. The fight to solve en-
vironmental problems was an integral part of the struggle for democratization and
self-determination, the larger movement to give Ukraine the right to independent
development outside the USSR. Leaders of this movement argued that the Cher-
nobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident, as well as many other environmental prob-
lems, was the result of criminal policies executed by Soviet authorities. National
independence offered the promise of a new course of development that could help
solve environmental problems and ensure the health and welfare of Ukrainian
citizens. This dynamic explains the centrality of environmental activism in the
Ukrainian independence movement. In fact, almost all contemporary Ukrainian
nationalist movements trace their origins to early environmental protests.63
Jane Dawson, director of the Goodwin-Niering Center for the Environment at
Connecticut College, observes that some consider Ukrainian antinuclear activism
a substitute for Ukrainian nationalism and opposition to Moscow’s domination of
the country at a time when overt nationalism was dangerous.64 Antinuclear and
environmental issues were some of the most urgent and were raised not only by
national but also by various democratic movements. The Chernobyl disaster con-
cretized and clarified the negative consequences of the Communist Party’s domi-
nance and led many to support changing the political regime.
Green Network Building

Beginning in the late 1980s, informal environmental groups in the Ukrainian
SSR tried to make contact with similar groups in other republics to coordinate
activities and share experience. This was the beginning of a national green net-
work across the Soviet Union that outlasted the Soviet Union itself. Because these

groups were informal, lacked official sanction, and involved a small number of
participants engaging in semi-legal activities, it is extremely difficult to find in-
formation about their activities. However, using the recollections and personal
archives of members of these informal groups, it is possible to make some general
observations. Ukrainian environmental groups were most closely integrated with
similar groups in the Russian Federation due to proximity and their participation
in many common events.
According to information given by Alexander Shubin, a participant in some in-
formal groups, in December 1988 fourteen Ukrainian organizations from Kharkov,
Mariupol, Nikolayev, Sumy, Ternopl, Odessa, Kiev, and other cities helped estab-
lish in Moscow the nationwide Socio-Ecological Union.65 In April 1990 this orga-
nization, together with the U.S. Council for the Protection of Natural Resources,
organized independent international experts to oversee a joint Soviet-American
factory in Kalush (in the Ivanovo-Frankovsk region of Ukraine).
Along with groups from Belarus and Kazakhstan, Ukrainian representatives
participated in the constituent conference of the Russian Green Party in Mos-
cow in 1990. A year later organizations from Kiev, Odessa, and Illichivsk partic-
ipated in the creation of the League of Green Parties in Russia. Odessa resident
Taras Bulat was elected to the organization’s coordination council. In August 1991
Ukrainian activists, along with members of the league from the Russian towns
of Nizhny Novgorod, Kaliningrad, and Saratov, participated in the blockade of
an ecologically damaging industrial enterprise, a Coca-Cola plant, in Zaporozhye.
Some Crimean environmental groups from Simferopol and Kerch were members
of a nationwide organization called Ekologia i mir (Ecology and Peace).66
The first contacts with green activists from Western countries were estab-
lished in 1988–1989. New political thinking, proclaimed by Mikhail Gorbachev in
1987, promised the normalization of relations with Western countries (first of all
with the United States).67 That opening encouraged the organization of marches
known as Peace Walks. During the first march, from Odessa to Kiev, Sviatoslav
Dudko, the leader of a Ukrainian group of thirty-five participants and a member
of the Green World Association, got acquainted with members of a group called
Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine (AHRU); namely, Bozhena Olshaniws-
ky and Vasyl Kychun. During the following marches, contacts solidified, which
resulted in an invitation to the leaders of Green World to visit the United States
in 1990. In July 1990 AHRU president Bozhena Olshaniwsky was nominated to
serve as a one of eight directors on the board of ECOFOND, newly created by the
Green World Association.68
In November 1990 Yuriy Mishchenko and Anatoly Panov, members of Green
World association, began a two-month tour of Canada and the United States, and
68 Tetiana Perga
even met with New Jersey governor Jim Florio and his commissioners. They had
an opportunity to visit with and speak to representatives at all levels of the U.S.
government and to many governmental and nongovernmental environmental
agencies and groups, including a Toronto-based diaspora ecological group created
specifically to assist Ukraine—ECOLOS.69 This resulted in the development of a
project in Ukraine called “Green to Greens.” Its participants collected vitamins, or
money for vitamins, and sent them to well-known greens in Ukraine for distribu-
tion to people in areas that needed help most. This project involved Green World
in Ukraine, Greens of the United States of America, Clamshell Alliance (USA),
Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine (AHRU), and Children of Chernobyl
Relief Fund (CCRF).70
The Collapse of the Soviet Union

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident caused everyone in the Soviet Union
to take a new look at their own environment. Even official Soviet government doc-
uments characterized the environmental situation in the country as “disturbing
and sometimes critical.” The Aral Sea region was recognized as a zone of ecolog-
ical disaster—Kalmykia, Dniepr, Transnistria, Donbass, the Urals, Kuzbass, the
Volga basin, Sevan, Issyk-Kul, Balkhash, and Lake Ladoga, the Black Sea, the Sea
of Azov, the Caspian Sea, the Baltic Sea, and a number of other rivers, lakes, or re-
gions were declared “on the verge of an ecological crisis.” In 103 cities with a total
population of about fifty million people, the concentrations of harmful substances
in the air exceeded maximum permissible limits by ten times or more. More than
six hundred cities did not provide high-quality wastewater treatment. Millions of
hectares of once-fertile land had been taken out of agricultural use as a result of
mining operations, erosion, flooding, salinization, and desertification.71 Officials
noted a growing incidence of allergies, cancers, and other diseases, as well as dan-
gerous levels of pesticides, nitrates, hormones, and radionuclides in some foods.72
This situation was caused not only by the command and control economic
policy of the Soviet Union (i.e., the intensive development of heavy industry)
but also by ecological illiteracy, corrupt bureaucrats, mismanagement, a lack of
information access, the exclusion of citizens from decision-making processes, the
politicization of environmental protection, and a prevailing disregard for the en-
vironment. The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident demonstrated that the
totalitarian system could not provide good environmental governance and de-
mocracy, which Ukrainians demanded. This failure further undermined the au-
thority of the Communist Party and its leaders, and led to disillusionment with
the Socialist system and a loss of faith in its productive potential.
The reasons behind environmental degradation in the USSR were so deep that

superficial attempts by the central authorities to reform environmental policy and
make it more efficient, particularly the foundation in 1988 of the State Committee
for Nature Protection of the U.S.S.R. (Goskompriroda) and the adoption the De-
cree of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union on November 27, 1989, on emer-
gency measures for the environmental rehabilitation, could not stop the protests
that were spreading across the Ukrainian SSR. In light of the environmental con-
ditions in the Ukraine, the ruling regime was seen as unable to ensure the health
and safety of their citizens.73
Environmental groups in the USSR primarily sought to close polluting facto-
ries and nuclear power plants. The threat posed by such enterprises was obvious
to all. In the wake of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident a lot of infor-
mation about the connection between the dire ecological situation and cancer and
other diseases began to appear in the media, and people began to speak up. In reac-
tion to fierce public discussions and the recommendations of independent ecolog-
ical experts, the Council of Ministers of the Chechnya-Ingushetia Autonomous
Republic decided to suspend construction of a biochemical plant.74 In Yerevan
local officials agreed to close a chemical plant in response to public expressions of
concern over its harmful effects on the health of the local population.75 In Tash-
kent people protested Moscow’s order to build an electronics factory in a nearby
mountain recreation area.76 These first victories increased activists’ confidence in
their chosen path of struggle against authorities.
Without a doubt, the Chernobyl accident contributed to the development of
antinuclear activism outside Ukraine, too. It spread to all the other republics where
nuclear power plants were built: Armenia, Lithuania, and Russia. After massive
public protests in 1989, a nuclear power plant in the Armenian town of Medzamor
closed. In Lithuania attention was focused on the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant,
which was perceived as a “genocidal” threat to the Lithuanian people perpetrated
by Moscow. An antinuclear association called Zhemina organized protests against
the building of another reactor that exceeded the plant’s capacity. In September
1988 the newly created national liberation movement called Sąjūdis (Movement)
initiated a mass protest around the power plant (encircling the complex with a
“live ring” of people holding hands). As a result, the construction of this project
was suspended, although the plant was not closed.77
In the late 1980s, across the USSR, local protests grew into a powerful green
movement, which became a part of the struggle for democratic reforms and na-
tional liberation. In a society where the state once attempted to organize and con-
trol virtually all social activities, the rapid mobilization of independent nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) is remarkable, and indicates the rise of a civil
70 Tetiana Perga
society in the former Soviet Union. In 1989 in Belarus, where contamination by
the radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was most severe,
the first mass rally of political opposition, called the Chernobyl Way, was organized.
It has since become an annual protest held by the Belarusian political opposition.
In 1988 the Lithuanian Green Movement and the Estonian Green Movement-FoE
were established. In 1990 the Latvian Green Party, the Russian Green Party, and
the Ecological Movement of Moldova were formed.78 In 1990 the first Ukrainian
environmental political party, the Green Party of Ukraine, was established. At the
founding congress party leader Yuri Shcherbak noted, “this party was generated
by Chernobyl, that harbinger of global environmental catastrophe, however the
party was not born of fear, but of a courageous determination to fight against nu-
clear death.”79
A distinctive feature of environmentalism in the Soviet republics was that
green movements actively cooperated with Popular Fronts that fought for inde-
pendence from the Soviet Union. In the late 1980s the Popular Front of Latvia,
Popular Front of Estonia, the Sąjūdis movement in Lithuania, the Moldavian Pop-
ular Front, the Ukrainian RUKH, and the Popular Front of Azerbaijan all appeared.
At that time, their activities were inextricably linked to environmental themes that
were used to mobilize publics in their struggles for democracy and independence.
Political crisis in the Soviet Union was compounded by economic crisis. The
triumph of the environmental movement in some Soviet republics contributed
to the economic disintegration of the USSR. The closing of nuclear power plants
and factories inflicted great damage on the Soviet economy. Given the close re-
lationship many enterprises had to the Soviet military-industrial complex, these
closures caused a domino effect that caused social and economic problems in oth-
er parts of the country. We should also mention the enormous material resources
that the Soviet Union spent to clean up the Chernobyl accident. In all, some six
hundred thousand people took part in this effort, equivalent in size to a military
campaign. All this damaged the Soviet economy and shattered the financial foun-
dation of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union could no longer afford the arms
race, and the Cold War came to a close. From this perspective, the environmental
movement could be said to have had contributed to the end of the confrontation
between the USSR and the West.
In 1990 many Soviet republics began to declare sovereignty. The dissolution
of the Soviet Union was formalized on December 26, 1991, when it disintegrat-
ed into fifteen independent countries. A new chapter opened for environmental
movements in the post–Soviet reality.
\\\

The development of the ecological movement in Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Re-
public in the late 1980s demonstrates the result of the attitude of the totalitarian
state to the environment. Restriction of democracy and barriers to civil society
input into public policy decision-making led to the escalation of discontent with
the existing system. The catalyst for this discontent became the Chernobyl Nucle-
ar Power Plant accident—in particular, the lack of access to truthful information
about the environmental situation in the republic. This led to the emergence of a
broad movement for democratization, in which nationalist organizations partic-
ipated as well. Perestroika and glasnost liberalized life in the USSR and created
new space for the idea that only an independent path of development would help
solve Ukraine’s environmental problems. The use of environmental issues by pro-
democracy and nationalistic leaders became the driver for democratization and
struggle for independence from the Soviet Union.
The Soviet experience shows that the main problem with nuclear energy was
not its direct impact on the environment (in comparison with other energy sourc-
es, it is quite clean), but the reckless exploitation and administration of nuclear
power by the authorities. Subpar operation standards and the lack of a safety cul-
ture, the concentration of nuclear power plants in specific locations, the exclusion
of the public from the decision-making process and monitoring, and the absence
of frank discussions with independent experts were the main causes of a powerful
antinuclear movement in Ukraine and the other Soviet republics. Any conversa-
tion about the potential of nuclear energy as part of the future of clean energy in
light of global climate change should involve careful research into and a critical
reassessment of the Soviet Union’s experience.
72 Tetiana Perga
4
Keeping the Air Clean?

Environmental Policy, Utility Companies, and
Social Movements in West Germany since the 1970s
Hendrik Ehrhardt
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Air pollution has been a central environmental issue since the end of the nine-
teenth century—in both Germany and throughout the industrial world. Emis-
sions, especially from factories and power stations, have been a major problem
since that time and have been hard to get under control. In the early twentieth
century jurists and engineers dominated the discussion about the best ways to
keep the air clean, by factory inspections or by making technical or legal adjust-
ments.1 At the time various technical associations, which united homogeneous ac-
tors, were the only ones addressing air pollution. The Committee for Air Pollution
Prevention, a working group of the German Association of Engineers, was the
predominant spokesman on this topic for a long period of time.2 Mainly for that
reason, the historian Joachim Radkau identified air pollution prevention as one
of the origins of the modern environmental movement.3 To fight for clean air was
a political issue for environmental movements throughout the industrial world.4
Since the 1970s environmental policy in general has attracted more public and
political interest. Nonetheless, in the early 1970s sulfur emissions from power
plants were widely ignored by the West German government, including the min-
ister of the interior, Hans-Dietrich Genscher.5 Instead it was the Division for En-
vironmental Protection (Abteilung Umweltschutz), which was part of Genscher’s
ministry, that provided important impetus to discuss environmental questions. It
was not an easy task for the West German government to formulate and present
a coherent law for the protection of the environment. Furthermore, the law was
hard to implement because it was part of the concurrent legislation, prior to the
amendment to the West German constitution on April 12, 1972. Thereby the fed-
eral government obtained more responsibilities and was able to initiate its own
laws dealing with questions of air quality, noise control, and waste disposal.6 On
73
these issues West German environmental policy was strongly influenced by the
American model, but West German politicians set their own tone.7
This chapter focuses on political measures to protect the environment, and
the activities of utility companies and social movements in West Germany in the
1970s and 1980s. It analyzes the stances and actions taken on emerging environ-
mental questions, especially on clean air. Even though it had a huge impact on
the formation of air pollution legislation, the role utility companies and private
industry in general played in this process has been rarely analyzed in historical
studies before now.8
This chapter contends that in West Germany, utility companies fundamen-
tally shaped air pollution politics and policy, and that one can see an evolution
in their approach to the issues from the 1950s to the 1990s. In their approach
to air pollution, utility companies passed through different stages. After ignoring
the issue in the 1950s, company managers began to develop their own strategy
for how companies should view and conceptualize environmental policy. Their
changing stance had a lot to do with companies’ evolving self-image. Throughout
the twentieth century utility companies were one of the most important and pow-
erful stakeholders in questions of clean air. It is thus worthwhile to examine them
as actors in the debate over air pollution and its regulation.
Legislation and Measures against Air Pollution

Basically from 1950 until 1973 in West Germany, air pollution policy was the do-
main of administrative and political action.9 This means that so-called success has
not been only the result of technical evolution but also of political and economic
decisions.10 The most important environmental legislation of the era was the Fed-
eral Pollution Control Act (Bundes-Immissionsschutzgesetz, BImSchG), which
took effect on March 22, 1974. The thirteenth provision of this law, the Regulation
on Large Combustion Plants (Großfeuerungsanlagenverordnung, GfAVO), was
decisive in this context. This specific act, which was initiated by the Social-Liberal
coalition under Chancellor Willy Brandt, defined exactly which kinds of emis-
sions were allowed for what kind of power plants. Table 4.1 charts the evolving
rules for sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions.
TA-Luft was the most unwelcome to utility companies because it formulated
concrete boundary values for sulfur and nitrogen oxide emissions. The law applied
to new power stations, and stipulated that older stations would be allowed to emit
higher levels of pollutants for a certain transitional period until they could meet
the new standards set by the law. This was bad news for utility-owned power sta-
tions, because if they failed to meet the critical thresholds of the law they would
be forced to shut down their coal-fired power stations.11 The law also made per-
74 Hendrik Ehrhardt
Table 4.1. Development of legal limits for SO2 emissions from coal power plants, West
Germany, 1974–1983
Minimum size
of plants to which
SO2 critical limit applied
Year value (in megawatts) Comments
1974 1.150 mg/m 3
ca. 1.100 TA-Luft from August 28, 1974;
Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW) decree on hard
coal, dated June 11, 1974
1977 850 mg/m3 ca. 1.100 NRW decree on hard coal, dated August 2,
1977
1980 650 mg/m3 ca. 470 Resolution by the Special Committee of the
Environment Ministry (UMK), dated Febru-
ary 11–12, 1980
1982 400 mg/m3 400 Resolution by the federal government, dated
September 1, 1982; Resolution by the UMK,
dated November 12, 1982
1983 400 mg/m3 >400 Resolution by the federal government, dated
February 23, 1983 (draft GfAVO), Thresholds
for Old and New Facilities
2.000 mg/m3 200–400
Source: Peter Davids and Michael Lange, Die Großfeuerungsanlagen-Verordnung (Düsseldorf:

VDI-Verlag, 1984), 8.
mission to build new plants subject to the utility’s ability to meet certain emission
standards.12
One old environmental problem was put to rest in the general debate over en-
vironmental policy of the 1970s: sulfur dioxide emissions. Its polluting potential
had been more or less known since the beginning of industrialization in the nine-
teenth century. Yet the alarming discussion about Waldsterben (forest dieback),
partially caused by sulfur dioxide emissions and acid rain, at the beginning of the
1980s, opened a window of opportunity for a political solution.13 TA-Luft specified
limits for more than 150 organic and inorganic harmful substances, including sul-
fur dioxide, which pollutes the air in different ways. The enactment distinguished
between short-and long-term effects of a pollutant. The effort to keep the air clean
was a huge success. It decreased emissions from public utilities immensely within
a short period of time (see table 4.2).14
Keeping the Air Clean? 75

Table 4.2. Sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions from public
power plants in West Germany, 1982–1990
1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990

1.000 t
SO2 1.550 1.500 1.390 1.240 1.150 980 380 180 200
NOx 740 750 750 700 650 580 510 380 240
Source: German Association of Utility Companies (Statistischer Jahresbericht des Referats Elek-
trizitätswirtschaft im Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft), Elektrizitätswirtschaft, several volumes.
Utility Companies and Politics: Costs, Pollution Limits, and the Need
for Filters
Utility companies played an important role in the political debate on pollution
limits taking place in different political arenas in the 1970s. This happened for
one simple reason: most electricity was being generated in power plants fueled
by different sorts of coal that produced large amounts of emissions. Different util-
ity companies felt the impact of air pollution legislation differently because they
generated electric power differently. For instance, the North Rhine-Westphalian
Company (Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk, RWE) was affected by the
legislation to a higher degree than the second largest utility company in Germany,
Preußenelektra, because most electricity production at RWE relied on brown coal
until the late 1960s. By contrast, Preußenelektra, which was strongly supported
by subsidies from the government, had primarily used nuclear energy to generate
electricity since the beginning of the 1970s.15 As a result, Preußenelektra emitted
less air pollution than its historical rival RWE. However, Preußenelektra owned
the power plant Buschhaus, which became a symbol in the environmental discus-
sion of the 1970s and 1980s because of its huge emissions. The media and environ-
mental movements called Buschhaus “the nation’s filth slinger” (“Dreckschleuder
der Nation”).16 Even though Buschhaus was one of the catalysts for country-wide
protests against air pollution, the power plant received judicial permission to gen-
erate electricity without a flue gas-purification device until 1987.
New environmental legislation meant two things to utility companies—first,
that their public image was cast in a new light, and second, that they would have
to make huge investments in emission-reducing filters. Air pollution politics cen-
tered around the kind of pollution limits to be applied to different kinds of power
plants. Utility companies and environmental organizations both took vigorous
part in the discussion. Companies questioned the feasibility of emissions limits
and argued that they were much too low.17 Furthermore, they fought against the
76 Hendrik Ehrhardt
financial aspects of the legislation, which required expenditure on retrofitting. On
the other hand, several environmental organizations considered the GfAVO reg-
ulation insufficient. In their opinion, the legislation did not take the “state of tech-
nology” sufficiently into account,18 and had too many loopholes that would allow
the utilities to acquire exceptional permits.19
Utility companies claimed that new environmental laws were full of imprecise
legal terms, and from the mid-1970s on worked intensely to relax pollution limits
and to present existing data in a more friendly light. Quite often utility companies
presented the reduced efficiency of their power plants as their core argument. This
point of view was often presented and used to convince politicians that power
plants modified or closed to meet new environmental standards would not able to
produce enough electricity to meet demand. Utility companies were particular-
ly afraid that older power plants would be affected by stricter legislation because
they could not meet environmental requirements. Many also feared that environ-
mental legislation would get stricter in the future.20
In 1983 the utility companies’ greatest fear became legal reality. The GfAVO was
expanded to include regulations on older power plants. Legislators forced power
plant operators to implement the requirements within five years, by July 1, 1988.
For most stations the law meant extensive and expensive retrofitting to install flue-
gas desulfurization (Rauchgasentschwefelungsanlage, REAs). Environmental mea-
sures now consumed a considerable portion of many power plants’ budgets. For
instance, in 1988 the Berlin-based utility Berliner Städtische Elektrizitätswerke
(BEWAG) built a new power plant unit fueled with stone coal. Twenty-eight per-
cent of the project’s budget was spent on air-protection measures.21
Preußenelektra estimated that the 1983 legislation required an expenditure of
500–700 million deutschmarks for their generation system’s flue gas-purification
plant. Including operation costs, the price for electricity would increase by 0.5
pfennigs per kWh. Taking this into account, the company argued, those additional
costs could only be offset by a high percentage of cheap nuclear-generated elec-
tricity.22 Conveniently, Preußenelektra left out the fact that federal and state gov-
ernments generously subsidized utility companies’ construction of nuclear power
stations and flue gas-purification plants. For instance, in 1986 the costs for the
flue gas filter of a power plant operated by Braunschweigsche Kohlen Bergwerke
(BKB), a whole-owned subsidiary of Preußenelektra, amounted to 313 million
deutschmarks, which was reduced to 240 million deutschmarks by subsidies from
federal and state governments.23 One of the extraordinary and quite unknown ex-
amples of government subsidies was the strong political support given to the coal-
fired power station in Borken, a traditional coal site, by the Department of the
Environment of the German state of Hesse. The ministry—specifically its head,

Joschka Fischer—did not want the utility company to build a nuclear power sta-
tion there. In the negotiations with the ministry Preußenelektra received financial
subsidies for installing a filter and rejecting the nuclear option.24 Overall, the addi-
tional costs for environmental protection could be limited, because of the strongly
regulated energy market and good ties between utility companies and political
decision-makers. Almost every time the cost of generating electricity increased, it
could easily be recovered by increasing the price of electricity, granted by permis-
sion of the state authorities.
Overall, environmental protection legislation can be characterized as a long-
lasting dispute between federal and state governments and ministries. Since the
mid-1960s air quality protection policy was clearly influenced by patronage and
lobbying.25 Individual federal states, notably Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW), with
its interests in the survival of the coal industry and its mining jobs, played a major
role in this process.26 The arguments were typical. State politicians asserted that
higher air-quality standards would cause job losses in the mining and coal indus-
tries. Those concerns were partly justified and used by the utilities as a strategic
argument against higher air-quality standards.27
Utility Companies as Victims of Environmental Air-Quality Control?

Until the mid-1970s utility companies deemed the public discussion of environ-
mental problems beyond, for example, the probability of energy shortfalls, as
inappropriate.28 This attitude continued despite the fact that environmental con-
ferences had been raising public awareness about environmental issues since the
beginning of that decade.29 Particularly on the European level, transnationally
linked grassroots initiatives founded an environmental office with the support of
the European Union, which institutionalized the movement over the long term.30
Until the mid-1970s utility companies were quite confident they could prevent
or water down environmental legislation. Utility companies criticized the emis-
sion levels claimed by the World Health Organization and pointed to the technical
problems with flue gas-purification plants, which ultimately made the law difficult
to implement. Despite the fact that TA-Luft set quite rigorous standards, from a
technical point of view achieving those pollution limits was absolutely possible.
Although technical problems with the flue gas filters existed until the end of the
1980s and caused rising costs, engineers were able to fix certain issues and solve
some problems. Until the technical problems were solved, utility companies were
constantly suspicious of the flue gas-purification-plant equipment, fearing it could
decrease the energy efficiency of their power plants.31 The energy efficiency did
decrease after the flue gas filters were installed, because their operation was quite
78 Hendrik Ehrhardt
energy intensive. On the other hand, this affected the optimal operation mode of
power plants and thereby produced an economical result. In the end, legislated
pollution limits were not decisive for utility companies.32
From a technical point of view, the utility companies’ claim that retrofitting
sulfur-and nitrogen oxide-scrubbing technologies had a negative effect on the
economic performance of their power plants was only partially true. Even the link
between the internal energy consumption of the filters and the optimal operation
mode of power plants—the most obvious argument made by utility companies—
seems to have been exaggerated. Noting that one of the by-products of the filter
process was gypsum, the CEO of Preussenelektra argued in 1978 that the retro-
fitting law would transform their power stations into half chemical plants and half
power plants.33 While this statement overstated the concern about by-products,
some tensions between economy and ecology remained to be reconciled. The
limited economy and finite availability of power plants changed the strategy of the
utility companies in a considerable way because if pollution limits were exceeded,
power plants would shut down by an automatic technical mechanism and cease
to supply electricity. Flue gas filters reduced power plants’ efficiency by 6 percent.
However, given the overcapacity of power plants in general, the power capacity
reduction did not harm the energy system or any single company. The new rules
actually helped decrease overproduction.
The financial impact of the environmental protection measures could not be
ignored by politicians, because it meant huge capital investments for utility com-
panies.34 In 1983 the federal government estimated that the GfAVO would cost
companies between 6 and 12 billion deutschmarks.35 In terms of economic im-
pact the regulation of old power plants was the most important part of the GfA-
VO. Public utilities invested 21 billion deutschmarks in retrofitting older power
plants—about 15 billion for desulfurization and about seven billion for nitrogen
oxide (NOx) removal. However, only 5 percent of all costs were financed directly
by the companies while the remaining 95 percent was offset by a 2.9 pf./kWh
increase in the electricity tariff.36 This example shows clearly the relationship be-
tween utility companies and politicians on different levels.
In short—flue gas desulfurization plants were unpopular in the utility sector
but necessary by law. Utility companies held the view that politicians should not
interfere in their business with new laws and regulations. This rather static view
on politics had to do with the of the companies’ almost nonexistent concept of
public relations at the beginning of the 1970s. Many engineers and technicians on
the management boards thought that their decisions only had to be explained in a
rational and sensible way to be understood by politicians and the majority of citi-

zens. According to this strategy, an emphasis on public relations was not necessary.
It was the persuasion of the technically minded management that those employ-
ees would be missed in the core business operations. This perception of politics
and social pressures changed considerably over time, and utility companies recog-
nized that in future they should communicate problems in a different way.
In the late 1960s belief in experts and technical solutions began to wane.37 Pop-
ular trust in their expertise decreased especially in the energy sector. Overall, soci-
ety began to believe that different fields of knowledge, ranging from economic to
legal to technical expertise, were necessary to make complex decisions. Further-
more, politicians began to trust in expert knowledge less.38 At the same time other
societal actors, which started as nongovernmental organizations or social move-
ments like the Öko-Institute, gradually gained acceptance and finally became rec-
ognized as experts in traditional arenas.39 This development can be described as a
process of democratization of expertise which contributed to the larger process of
democratization of West Germany.40
By 1981, at internal company meetings, politicians advised the utility manage-
ment boards to heed changing popular opinion and suggested improving commu-
nications with the public—for example, by not portraying environmental protec-
tion only as an expense. Furthermore, they suggested that it might be politically
disadvantageous to cut costs on environmental protection.41 This advice was, at
first, ignored by the utilities. They maintained their fundamental focus on costs.
For instance, Preußenelektra asserted that while the company was not opposed
environmental protection, it believed protection had to be economically justifi-
able and efficient.42 Utility companies asserted that support for more rigorous en-
vironmental protection legislation was limited to a few environmentally minded
politicians. Preußenelektra CEO Ulrich Segatz stated that, “it is not the public or
the electricity customer who is demanding intensified environmental protection
legislation. The pressure is coming clearly from environmentalist officials who are
strongly engaged in environmental protection. The amendment to TA-Luft, which
failed in the Bundesrat in 1978 against the resistance of the federal states, suggests
the effectiveness of this argument. Nevertheless a new attempt to strengthen the
act was initiated in 1981.”43
The opinion of Preußenelektra’s CEO was representative of the utilities sector,
where prejudices against critics, environmental activists, and nuclear energy op-
ponents were quite common. Factually, though, Ulrich Segatz was not as wrong
about initial support for environmental regulation, as Joachim Radkau and sev-
eral other environmental historians have shown.44 It is easy to forget that envi-
ronmental movements entered the political sphere slowly and from the outside.
80 Hendrik Ehrhardt
Beginning in 1970 a plurality of educational programs were initiated in the envi-
ronmental sector, along with various activities in forest management, the Trade
Supervisory Office, and municipal administrations in general. In this atmosphere
of ecological awareness, the environmental movement gradually developed into a
social and political factor.45 In the process, environmental movements developed
a huge affinity for government institutionalization.46 Until the early 1980s, when
the movement began to gain power, utility companies basically ignored environ-
mental organizations and tried to discredit their opinions as irrelevant.
Given the heated debate over nuclear energy and the general lack of trust in
experts, the situation at the end of the 1970s was not easy. The situation for util-
ity companies became more complex. They struggled to explain complicated le-
gal and technical issues, such as, the TA-Luft instructions, to a distrustful public.
Discussions were complicated by disciplinary boundaries (e.g., between experts
and the public) because energy supply was—and still is—an issue drawing upon
different fields of knowledge and opinions. Furthermore, utility companies under-
estimated the emotional component of environmental protection and continued
to explain itself in rational cost-benefit terms. This rather old-fashioned approach
failed to sway public opinions on energy. Utility companies seem to have miscal-
culated the challenges of democracy in West Germany in which, since the end of
the 1960s, public opinion played a larger role. It was chiefly this misperception
that made it difficult for utility companies to achieve their goals in questions of
environmental policy.
New Considerations by the Utility Companies? Pilot Plants and

Lobbying
It would be simplistic to argue that utility companies were unwilling to consid-
er environmental protection as part of their policies. In fact, the example of the
North Rhine-Westphalian Company (RWE) shows that environmental actions
were, to a certain extent, triggered by political pressure. The company’s home state
of North Rhine-Westphalia had been one of the pioneer states in the fight against
air pollution since the 1950s, perhaps because of all states it absorbed the largest
share of harmful emissions.47 It was also where the first success was achieved in
reducing those emissions. RWE was one of the most active companies in the area
of environmental protection, although the primary impetus came from the pro-
vincial government. In the early 1970s RWE started to test different techniques
for flue gas desulfurization using its pilot plant built in the Goldenbergwerk sta-
tion.48 However, the first test run failed, so the pilot operated for only seven days.
Although this attempt failed, RWE continued to work on desulfurization of flue

gases. This effort was made not for altruistic reasons, but rather to meet certain
pollution limits for stone coal and brown coal power stations, with the help of the
responsible ministry.49 The ministry aimed to adjust the critical value standards
as well as to regularize emission levels, which varied considerably across differ-
ent RWE power stations. The ministry thus took the initiative by formulating an
emissions-control act.50
For RWE, it was obvious that it had to react to this new regulation. The existing
technology (water-based desulfurization) did not meet certain expectations, and
the political pressure to find a better solution was high. Therefore, the company
developed its own method: dry additive desulfurization. This method was ideal
for processing brown coal, since unlike the “wet version,” the chemical reaction
occurred within a low temperature range.51 The first small-scale test of this method
at the Fortuna Power Station, and a little later in the six-hundred-megawatt Neur-
ath Power Station, was quite successful.52 In 1978 the eleventh act of the emissions-
control law obligated all operators of large-scale combustion plants with a power
capacity above 350 megawatts to submit a so-called emissions statement. RWE
realized in advance that the Neurath, Frimmersdorf, and Niederaußen Power Sta-
tions would exceed the pollution limits. Due to the existing legislation, the com-
pany expected the imposition of obligations and monetary fines.
An internal memorandum recommended following the guidelines of the Fed-
eration of German Industries (Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie, BDI) to
avoid violating the act and incurring fines. As a sign of good will it was decided
that the Neurath Power Station would be used as a pilot plant for dry additive de-
sulfurization in order to reduce emissions. This commitment was to have the pos-
itive side effect that a “moratorium with the public authorities could be achieved
for at least a couple of years.”53 In 1979 RWE informed the federal environmental
agency that this project was under way and the details would be discussed with
several ministries in the near future. The federal environmental agency had already
promised financial support for this project. By building a pilot plant and applying
the dry additive desulfurization method, RWE felt its job was done. The company
never intended to expand the program to its other power stations. Moreover, they
stated that a retrofit on all company-owned stations “is not necessary, neither for
environmental protection reasons, nor by implication is it technically possible.”54
Operation of the pilot plant in Neurath finally began at the end of 1982.
Like Preußenelektra, RWE received funding from the state government to ren-
ovate its power stations to satisfy environmental regulations. Until 1983, when the
GfAVO came into effect, RWE altered its tactics to address a couple of regulations
that applied to the brown coal fields of North Rhine-Westphalia.55 Along with
other companies, RWE took advantage of a loophole in the law and requested
82 Hendrik Ehrhardt
exceptional permits for some of its more polluting power stations. The GfAVO
allowed a critical value of 650 mg/m³ for older power stations like the ones oper-
ated by RWE. This was higher than for every other fossil-fuel power station and
was nicknamed by its critics “lex RWE.”56 Without going into further details here,
RWE managed this exemption by working through the Association of German
Utility Companies and using its connections in the state government of North
Rhine-Westphalia.57
Utility companies’ influence on political decision-making was quite strong,
specifically on questions of environmental protection. The companies aimed to
achieve flexible time frames for compliance and to broaden their options in invest-
ing in pollution-abatement measures. If the costs of these new measures proved
inevitable, the companies lobbied to pass them on to electricity consumers. How-
ever, they observed some limits to their self-interested lobbying. For example,
Preußenelektra privately criticized RWE because, in its view, RWE was seeking
exemptions too aggressively. Preußenelektra feared that companies would lose
credit concerning environmental questions in the political arena as a result of such
behavior.58 Despite these conflicts within the branch, all utility companies used
the exemptions to environmental regulations in the same way. By the beginning
of the 1980s utility companies realized that certain constraints and political guide-
lines for environmental protection existed and could not be ignored.
Waldsterben, Public Relations, and a Green Image

Utility companies always justified their negative stance toward air-quality regula-
tions with scientific arguments. They rejected the cause-and-effect chain of pol-
lutant substances and their impact as unproven. In particular, Waldsterben (forest
dieback) and acid rain were the focus of the utility companies’ campaign against
regulations.59 Statements made by the utility industry during the hearing of a
German parliamentary committee in October 1983 shed light on their approach.
Petitions by the Social Democrats and the Greens in Parliament called for urgent
measures against forest dieback and air pollution.60 Together with other associa-
tions of the power industry, utility companies explained their position by stating
that a cause-and-effect relationship between SO2 emissions and forest damage did
not exist.61 Frank Uekötter has shown that the public debate about Waldsterben
was surrounded by media hype and supported by unproven assumptions about
the sources of forest decline.62 However, the debate reveals the limits of environ-
mental politics of the time. The government would not consider doing anything
revolutionary, and confined itself to existing routines, seeking technical fixes to
tackle the problem. On the other hand, the debate represented the limits of en-
vironmental politics at that time, because the government did not do anything

revolutionary, and instead continued to follow existing routines and habits, be-
tween technical and economic possibilities, to tackle the problem. A special report
by the Advisory Council on the Environment (Der Rat von Sachverständigen für
Umweltfragen) shared this opinion in 1983.63 Individual companies in the elec-
tricity sector did not become concerned with the causes of Waldsterben until the
mid-1980s.64 These efforts by utility companies had only one purpose: to prevent
limits from becoming more stringent.
Utility companies accepted that the discussion of Waldsterben dominated envi-
ronmental discourse in West Germany at the beginning of the 1980s. This led the
companies to make a major change in tactics beginning in 1983. They seized their
chance to make environmental protection a component of their business policy
and launched a new form of public relations. Joachim Radkau has characterized
the approach by RWE in questions of flue gas desulfurization as a “process of re-
thinking.”65 This rethinking was strongly motivated by strategic considerations. As
one of the biggest flue gas polluters, RWE was aware of the advantages of pre-
senting the innovative technique as a new form of corporate ecological awareness.
Someone unfamiliar with the details of the debate could have easily gotten the
impression that RWE was voluntarily doing something quite innovative when it
was actually complying with new environmental protection legislation.
In the early 1980s utility companies’ public image varied greatly—some
viewed them as technologically innovative, others saw them as victims of political
decisions, while many environmentalists assumed they were the biggest pollut-
ers on Earth—however, the tide of public opinion was turning. Public as well as
privately owned utilities retrofitted their power plants with expensive filters. This
development was less the result of a new corporate environmental consciousness
than a reaction to public and political pressure. By the end of the 1980s most pow-
er plants were equipped with filters that significantly improved air quality. This
process was accompanied by public relations campaigns initiated by the com-
panies. RWE was a leader in this process. It recognized that the environmental
question, in general, and air protection, in particular, was being taken seriously
by various societal actors, and that strategic public relations could influence these
same actors. Plans to influence public opinion in this way were hardly invented
by the utility companies—similar ideas can be found in the journals of different
industrial sectors beginning in the 1940s.66
Beginning in 1984 RWE reconceptualized its public relations in new ways, be-
ginning with a major campaign that printed a kind of environmental audit. The
heart of this successful campaign consisted of huge newspaper advertisements
and several television spots. The company also printed a kind of green-image
brochure in which their environmental activities were explained. RWE presented
84 Hendrik Ehrhardt
itself as a leader in environmental issues, specifically in air-quality protection. To
quote directly from this brochure, henceforth RWE would give the same impor-
tance to the issue of environmental protection “as to the security and profitability
of the energy supply.”67 This self-assessment did not match the company’s strategy
throughout the previous decade. The brochure also outlined the company’s con-
troversial attitude toward environmental issues by making well-known arguments
that environmental air-quality technology was still in its infancy; that it was too
expensive and based on highly controversial science.68 As of 2015, according to
the company’s home page, RWE still takes pride in its “historical” accomplish-
ment of twenty-five years of environmental protection.69
\\\
With the emergence of environmental problems and the environmental move-

ment, utility companies were forced to deal with this topic. The production of
electricity could no longer be conceptualized in exclusively technical and eco-
nomic terms, but also in terms of societal costs. Through this process, utility com-
panies had to tolerate and respond to intervention by various actors.
Since the 1970s public debate centered around the topic of clean air. This
changed the scene and moved discussions of air-quality protection, which had
once been the exclusive terrain of experts, away from the concept of building
“higher chimneys” toward considering public health. Once air quality was seen to
have its own intrinsic value, utility companies could no longer claim it was too
expensive to protect. Still, utility companies continued to fight new air-quality leg-
islation and to temper the regulations’ effects on their own sector for a long time.
As explained earlier, West German historiography indicates that the effort to
keep the air clean was one of the main roots of environmental politics in the 1970s
and 1980s.70 Pressure from social movements, environmental groups, and espe-
cially from “environmental bureaucracy” resulted in government efforts to reduce
emissions, especially by power stations, by having them install filters as soon as
possible. This political demand meant huge investments for utility companies.
Utility companies developed and tested different techniques and finally installed
expensive filters. However, the criticism of utility companies about their arrange-
ments with the government and the installation of REAs continued.
From the mid-1980s, utility companies complained much less about environ-
mental air-quality controls. This happened because they received concessions
from the government, such as enormous subsidies for their air-purification plants,
and a stable regulation framework. As utility companies realized that they could
not prevent the implementation of air-protection laws, they tried to present
themselves as green companies through different public relations strategies. This

change in strategy was described by one of the leading RWE managers responsible
for the implementation of air-quality improvements, Werner Hlubek, “As we real-
ized that we couldn’t prevent this development, we put ourselves at the forefront
of the movement.”71 Behind this development stands the companies’ conviction
that times had changed because “green consciousness” was not limited to street
demonstrators or political minorities—it had become an integral part of adminis-
tration and decision-making.
By the end of 1980s a significant reduction in emissions had been achieved,
leading to cleaner air. From 1982 to 1990 the sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen ox-
ide (NOx) emissions caused by power plants decreased by 87 percent and 68 per-
cent, respectively.72 At the beginning of 1990 a massive reduction in emissions by
power plants was described by electricity trade magazines as an emphatic success
that could not have been achieved without utility companies.73 A final judgment
on utility companies’ actions is hard to make. In the mid-1970s they criticized and
tried to prevent environmental regulations on clean air, but over time they began
to accept their legal obligations. While they have maintained their general attitude
to a certain extent and tried to acquire special permits for their old and polluting
power plants, utility companies certainly seem more aware of environmental is-
sues, such as clean air, and claim to understand that their environmental policies
contribute significantly to the legitimacy of their business and their public image.
86 Hendrik Ehrhardt
5
From Anti-N uke to Ökopax

1970s Anti-R eactor Activism and the Emergence
of West Germany’s Mass Movement for Peace
Stephen Milder
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
On October 22, 1983, half a million West Germans gathered in Bonn’s Hofgarten
to protest against the deployment of NATO’s Euromissiles. This was easily the
largest single demonstration in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany
(West Germany), but the protest was much larger than one demonstration in a
Bonn park. The protesters in the capital were joined by hundreds of thousands
more in West Berlin and Hamburg. Still others formed a ninety-kilometer-long
human chain between Ulm and Stuttgart. In all, some 1.3 million West Germans
were in the streets. The demonstrations marked the culmination of a four-year
struggle against NATO’s dual-track decision, which ordered the stationing of new
midrange nuclear missiles in Europe at the same time as it called for new arms-
reduction talks with the Warsaw Pact. Its organizers had mobilized hundreds of
thousands of protesters and convinced more than four million citizens to sign the
Krefeld Appeal, calling for a unilateral halt to nuclear arms proliferation. The po-
litical scientist Peter Graf Kielmansegg has written—with good reason—that the
peace movement of the early 1980s was a “mass movement the likes of which the
Federal Republic had never seen before.”1
There is, nonetheless, something counterintuitive about Kielmansegg’s claim
that the 1980s peace movement was unprecedented. Peace protests—and pro-
tests against nuclear weapons in particular—had a long history in West Germany.
In the early 1950s the Ohne mich (without me) movement protested plans for Ger-
man rearmament. In 1958 Kampf dem Atomtod (Fight the Atomic Death, KdA)
organized mass rallies against nuclear weapons in numerous West German cities.
Beginning in 1960 participants in the annual Easter March walked from major
cities to military bases where NATO nuclear weapons were based. Despite this
rich history of peace protest, the movement of the 1980s really was different. Not
87
only were the crowds significantly larger, they were also more diverse and includ-
ed many newcomers to protest politics.2
Such a sizable transformation requires an explanation. Frequently, the ex-
pansion and diversification of peace protests in the early 1980s are attributed to
fear—the infamous “German angst”—caused by NATO’s dual-track decision to
base new Pershing and Cruise missiles on West German soil.3 However, plans to
station nuclear missiles in West Germany and concerns about nuclear war were
hardly new by the 1980s. Honest John rockets, the first surface-to-surface nuclear
missiles in the American arsenal, had been installed at the Bergen-Hohne military
base near Hanover early in the 1950s. Survey data in the 1950s showed that the
vast majority of West Germans were strongly opposed to war—in part because
widely read reports on NATO’s Battle Royale and Carte Blanche exercises sug-
gested that in a nuclear war, hundreds of thousands would die and thousands of
square miles of German territory would be contaminated by nuclear weapons.4 So,
German angst and the 1980s peace movement cannot be seen simply as a knee-
jerk reaction to the dual-track decision.
This chapter proposes that the 1980s peace movement received such broad
support not because Germans had suddenly become more concerned about nu-
clear weapons, but rather because Germans’ attitudes toward protest and extra-
parliamentary participation in public affairs had changed since the 1950s. This
shift in attitudes is well-known, and frequently linked to the student protests and
generational change typified by the experiences of 1968.5 But it was not only the
sixty-eighter generation that participated in the mass demonstrations against
missile deployment in the 1980s. Older West Germans, including many who had
previously looked down on street protests, were far more willing to speak their
minds in public in the 1980s than they had been in the early 1960s. The mass
peace movement of the 1980s relied on this transformation of older and more
conservative West Germans, as well as younger social activists’ willingness to find
common cause with them in the antinuclear struggle.6
Germans’ experiences in grassroots environmentalism—and especially in the
movement against nuclear energy—were key to this multifaceted social transfor-
mation. As Silke Mende and Birgit Metzger have put it, the 1970s environmental
movement served as an “experiential space” for the 1980s peace movement.7 En-
vironmentalism was so important because environmentalists approached politics
differently than the peace protesters of the 1950s and 1960s had. Environmen-
talists were focused first and foremost on immediate, local dangers—such as in-
dividual nuclear reactors—which had the potential to ruin their livelihoods and
destroy their hometowns, rather than the mass annihilation of nuclear war. This
localism distanced anti-reactor protests from high politics, attracting newcomers
88 Stephen Milder
to an environmental issue that seemed outside the Cold War framework, and had
immediate local consequences.8 Though it seems paradoxical, Susanne Schre-
gel has shown that the mass peace demonstrations of the early 1980s brought
together the largest crowds of protesters in West Germany’s forty-year history
by appealing to the sorts of individual interests emphasized by locally focused
environmentalists.9
This chapter shows how, during the Cold War, grassroots environmentalism
reshaped West Germans’ attitudes toward protest and thus made possible the
mass peace movement of the early 1980s. First, it briefly describes the movement
against nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s, revealing its limitations in recruit-
ing West Germans. Second, it looks at the very different techniques that organiz-
ers used to recruit West Germans to anti-reactor protests in the mid-1970s. Third,
it considers why veterans of earlier peace protests became interested in localized
actions against nuclear reactors, despite reactor opponents’ careful avoidance of
the subject of nuclear war. Finally, it shows how “limited” grassroots anti-reactor
protests paradoxically inspired mass actions that referenced local concerns and
relied on the rhetoric of “survival” previously deployed in protests against nucle-
ar energy. Finally, it considers why environmental themes so profoundly affected
West German citizens’ willingness to engage in public protest amidst the Cold
War and thus helped push the boundaries of politics by forging a new option be-
yond Left and Right.
The Challenge of Public Protest between the Cold War Poles

On April 17, 1958, Hamburg labor unions called on workers to put down their
tools an hour early and assemble in the city’s central Rathausmarkt for a rally
against nuclear energy. The public transit employees’ union went a step further—
it went on strike from 2:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m.—thus shutting down Hamburg’s
commuter railways and preventing workers from leaving the urban center.10 As a
result of the strike, a roster of noteworthy politicians, including Hamburg’s Social
Democratic mayor, Max Bauer, and the leader of the liberal Free Democratic Party
(FDP), Wolfgang Döring, addressed a captive audience of more than one hundred
thousand people.11 The protest, which was organized by the Social Democratic
Party of Germany (SPD) as part of its KdA campaign, was the largest in West Ger-
many’s nine-year history, but it ended with little fanfare. When the public transit
system reopened in the evening, the tens of thousands who had assembled for the
afternoon rally went home to their families. Only a tiny group of protesters, who
called themselves the Action Group for Nonviolence (AG), stayed behind to con-
tinue protesting. Organized independently from the KdA, let alone the SPD or
the trade unions, the AG organized a two-week-long, round-the-clock vigil on the
From Anti-Nuke to Ökopax 89

Rathausmarkt, intended to emphasize the omnipresence of the nuclear threat.12
Despite the activists’ earnest efforts, the vigil did not change NATO’s nuclear
weapons policy, or lead to the immediate growth of the antinuclear movement
in West Germany. By July, even the larger KdA movement was foundering. The
SPD reacted to KdA protests’ lack of resonance by deemphasizing its antinuclear
weapons platform and discontinuing the street protests.13 Though these two ac-
tions were quite different, both evidenced organizers’ problems in recruiting West
Germans to antinuclear protest at the height of the so-called first Cold War in the
late 1950s.
Initially, the mass KdA campaign, organized by the SPD with the strong sup-
port of the trade unions, briefly captured the attention of the majority of West
German citizens, but it soon struggled on account of its ties to partisan politics.
In an effort to redirect the SPD’s state-level support toward the federal level, So-
cial Democratic politicians at KdA rallies called for a national referendum about
whether or not the Bundeswehr, the West German armed forces, should have
nuclear weapons.14 The SPD had no problem admitting that the movement was
part of its national electoral strategy. The governing Christian Democratic Union
(CDU) attacked the explicitly partisan KdA on two fronts. Not only did Christian
Democrats argue that the achievement of the KdA’s objectives would diminish
West Germany’s ability to defend itself from Warsaw Pact aggression—they also
claimed that the movement itself threatened German democracy. By pushing par-
tisan politics beyond the realm of parliament, they contended, the KdA invoked
a dangerous, populist model. By advocating a national referendum on the crucial
issue of nuclear armament, the campaign challenged West Germany’s Basic Law,
which did not allow for referenda. Defense against Soviet nuclear weapons and
the preservation of parliamentary democracy were of the utmost importance in a
country that had so recently been liberated from fascism and now considered it-
self on the frontline of a potential Third World War. Such concerns, in short, were
effective criticisms of the KdA. They made it difficult to expand the movement
beyond trade unionists and other longstanding supporters of the SPD.
The SPD, of course, never intended the KdA campaign to subvert electoral
politics or lead West Germany back to fascism. It considered the campaign part
of a larger effort to rally support for Social Democratic politics and bolster the
party’s chances in upcoming elections. The strategy apparently backfired because
the SPD fared badly in the July 1958 state elections in the most populous state of
North Rhine-Westphalia. As a result, the Social Democrats began to downplay
the KdA and stopped emphasizing the nuclear issue in parliamentary debates. The
KdA’s failure to achieve immediate results in the electoral arena ended the SPD’s
support for extra-parliamentary protest rather suddenly. Since the CDU favored
90 Stephen Milder
nuclear armament, and FDP leaders were moving closer to the Christian Demo-
crats in an effort to improve their chances in the 1961 election, citizens who were
concerned about the nuclear issue found that they had run out of options to voice
their opinions within the framework of electoral politics once the SPD dropped
the issue.15
The AG’s vigil, on the other hand, struggled to recruit West Germans because it
was such a clear attempt to break from the establishment politics of the late 1950s.
Instead of aligning themselves with the trade unions, the SPD, or any other estab-
lished political party, AG activists sought to create a political space for unaffiliated
Germans to voice their concerns directly. The movement’s lead organizers proudly
proclaimed their political independence and described the vigil itself as an effort
“to show that ordinary people, without the support of a national campaign, were
willing and able to show persistence and speak out against government nuclear
policy.”16 Though ostensibly directed toward the same goal as the KdA—that is,
nuclear disarmament—the AG’s vigil took the opposite approach to realizing
that goal. The vigil was directed by independent grassroots activists and sought to
make nuclear war a subject beyond parliamentary politics.
Building an extra-parliamentary movement was a much longer-term project
than organizing for the next election, however. Activists continued working to-
ward that goal throughout the 1960s with few outward signs of success. It took
activist groups such as the AG the better part of the decade to build their move-
ment from a two-person vigil to the point where it could mobilize one hundred
thousand West Germans on a single day. The instrument of their progress was the
annual Easter March. In the spring of 1960, the same core group that had planned
and carried out the 1958 vigil played the lead role in planning a 140-kilometer
march from Hamburg to the Bergen-Hohne military base, where NATO had re-
cently stationed Honest John nuclear missiles. Modeled on the British antinuclear
activists’ Aldermaston March, in which protesters marched from London to the
Aldermaston nuclear weapons facility, the march to Bergen-Hohne was scheduled
for the four-day Easter weekend.17 To bring more West Germans into the move-
ment, organizers continued to plan Easter marches year after year. They added
feeder marches to link other nearby cities with the Bergen-Hohne Garrison, and
eventually targeted nuclear facilities elsewhere in West Germany, as well. Slowly,
between 1960 and 1967, the annual event grew to include hundreds of marches
connecting cities all over West Germany to nuclear sites, which tended to be in
remote rural areas. Over Easter weekend 1967, some 150,000 West Germans par-
ticipated in 800 events.18
Like the 1958 vigil, the Easter marches were disconnected from the world of
partisan politics. Indeed, the historian Holger Nehring has argued that the march-

es were conceived by their organizers as an attempt to prefigure a third way be-
tween the two poles of Cold War politics in West Germany.19 Such an objective
was difficult to accomplish within the Cold War framework, which left little room
for alternatives. Since the marchers were critical of both NATO and Warsaw Pact
nuclear weapons, the Easter March movement was denounced by establishment
politicians and the mainstream press as Communist-infiltrated and therefore dan-
gerous to West Germany’s young democracy. The fact that nuclear weapons were
so essential to the Cold War made it particularly difficult to dissociate the Easter
marches from the bipolar political order, which helped the denunciations stick,
regardless of their veracity.20 Nonetheless, the Easter marches’ organizers did suc-
ceed in building coalitions that transcended the Left-Right divide. The marchers’
ranks included a broad cross-section of the population from white-collar workers
to academics, self-employed people, civil servants, workers, and students.21
Despite this internal diversity, the small cohort of marchers remained divid-
ed from mainstream society, and the Easter marches never quite became a mass
movement. “Very few people turned up” for the public meetings that the Easter
marchers organized “in all larger towns” that they passed through on their routes
from major cities to remote nuclear facilities. Even promised accommodations in
farmers’ barns, or prearranged meals at small-town restaurants, were sometimes
cancelled without notice just before the marchers arrived. The primary reason for
locals’ reluctance to aid the marchers, Nehring argues, was “frequent accusations . .
. of communist subversion.”22 Though there was no evidence that the Easter march-
es were controlled from Moscow or East Berlin, the movement failed to create
a “third way” that was attractive to the majority of the West German population.
In a divided country on the frontline of the Cold War, anti-Communist rhetoric
was particularly powerful. The Easter marches never overcame this red-baiting in
order to successfully break out of the bipolar Cold War order.
Even though they did not build a mass movement, the antinuclear protesters
of the early 1960s modeled the new sort of political order they hoped to create.
The Easter marches’ internal diversity proved that cooperation across social and
political divisions was possible, even if organizers failed to connect with many
rural people or to recruit millions of Germans to the project. The marches also
created the first significant opening for public protest beyond the establishment
parties in West Germany. Accordingly, the Easter marches became the gathering
place for West Germany’s Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (Außerparlamenta-
rische Opposition, APO), which blossomed during the years 1966–1969, when
the country was governed by a grand coalition of Social Democrats and Christian
Democrats that made up 95 percent of parliament. Indeed, the argument that the
APO was the successor of the Easter marches makes sense in another way. Though
92 Stephen Milder
much bigger than the initial Easter marches, which mobilized only a few thousand
activists, the APO was also marginalized as a project outside the established po-
litical order, and denounced as a Communist-infiltrated threat to parliamentary
democracy. The idea that extra-parliamentary protest could be organized beyond
Left and Right had been broached in the late 1950s and 1960s, but red-baiting
prevented organizers from attracting widespread support from “ordinary” West
Germans, who were reluctant to challenge the anti-Communist consensus. Only
in the mid-1970s, with the expansion of grassroots protests against nuclear ener-
gy, did a broader swathe of West German society become open to participation
in public protest. They did so by expanding the political realm beyond essential
questions of the Cold War order.
Apolitical Initiative: Citizens Respond to Antinuclear Protest

In contrast to nuclear weapons, which remained a hot political topic throughout
the Cold War, nuclear energy only became a significant subject of political debate
in West Germany in the mid-1970s. In fact, the initial debates about nuclear ener-
gy were not held in parliament, but rather in public meeting halls in towns and vil-
lages where reactors were to be built. Grassroots protests were organized at several
proposed nuclear reactor sites in the early 1970s. These provincial protests were
exemplified by the February 1975 occupation of the Wyhl reactor construction
site in rural southern Baden. These protests have frequently been described as the
beginning of the West German movement against nuclear energy.23 The Wyhl oc-
cupation made a splash in the news after several hundred police officers attacked
the occupiers with water cannons, forcibly removing them from the construction
site. Video footage of the brutal police intervention, which was broadcast across
the country, revealed that many of the Wyhl occupiers were middle-aged farmers
and vintners. The German public was outraged. Sympathy for the occupation’s
protagonists, coupled with the action’s obvious departure from politics as usu-
al made it easier for ordinary Germans to identify with the reactor’s opponents
and to accept their illegal, extra-parliamentary occupation as a legitimate form of
protest.
Unlike nuclear weapons, which were essential to the Cold War order, govern-
ment officials treated grassroots opposition to nuclear reactor projects as a paro-
chial matter with no bearing on national politics. Even though opponents to the
Wyhl reactor spent years patiently gathering signatures and discussing the nuclear
danger at information sessions, politicians simply refused to view the local anti-
reactor movement as anything more than self-centered griping by farmers and
vintners. By refusing to treat rural concerns as serious political matters, however,
government officials both helped to radicalize reactor opponents and to convince

the West German population that such apolitical concerns were legitimate. Their
realization that elected officials did not care about their concerns pushed grass-
roots reactor opponents to go beyond the parliamentary order in a last-ditch effort
to save their crops and hometowns. Already in August 1974, in a “Declaration to
the Badensian and Alsatian Population,” opponents to the Wyhl reactor recount-
ed the many ways that government officials had mistreated them and pledged to
occupy the site as soon as construction began in order to prevent the reactor from
being built.
When the occupation began in February 1975, it was accepted by broad swathes
of the West German population precisely because its protagonists seemed inter-
ested only in protecting their villages and their livelihoods. This widespread accep-
tance became readily apparent after Baden-Württemberg’s premier, Hans Filbinger,
attempted to belittle the occupation by branding its protagonists as Communists.
Though Filbinger’s attribution of the Wyhl occupation to “nationally organized
manipulators,” echoed successful earlier attacks against the Easter marches, his
allegations fell flat.24 Critical reactions to Filbinger’s attempted red-baiting came
from across the political spectrum. Even the staunchly conservative World Feder-
ation for the Protection of Life (Weltbund zum Schutze des Lebens, WSL), noted
that the “disappointment in the eyes of the protesters in the representatives that
they themselves had elected, proved that the Premier of Baden-Württemberg’s
claim that these people were all ‘extremists’ was a bald-faced lie.”25 Walter Moss-
mann, a Freiburg singer-songwriter who participated in the Wyhl protests, turned
the premier’s comments on their head by asserting that the protest’s local roots
were so strong that in many villages “a common front exists against the nuclear
industry and the government like that against a foreign enemy.”26
Grassroots occupations like the one at Wyhl evidenced the flowering of a long-
developing antinuclear energy movement that had won the deep support of the
local population. While locals saw their protest as a last-ditch effort to preserve
their livelihoods and their hometowns from the dangers of nuclear energy, after
nationally broadcast footage of protesters clashing with police brought the strug-
gle into West Germans’ living rooms, their actions came to be seen elsewhere as a
challenge to the political order. Its apparent provincialism made the Wyhl struggle
seem far afield from “high politics,” particularly to the government officials who
sought to push the reactor project through the licensing process. But the clash
between middle-aged protesters and police shocked the general population and
excited social activists. As a result, the previously unknown struggle became a po-
tent means of forging a third way within the Cold War political order precisely
because it seemed to stand outside of politics.
94 Stephen Milder
Environmentalism as Political Activism
Interested West Germans had ample time to familiarize themselves with the Wyhl
protests because local reactor opponents occupied the construction site for nine
months. The clearing in the Wyhl forest where the occupiers built a tent city, a
field kitchen, and even a “friendship house” that could seat several hundred activ-
ists, gave the farmers’ and vintners’ struggle to protect their interests from govern-
ment officials a physical address. The site became a meeting place that attracted
veteran reactor opponents, curious locals, and excited visitors from throughout
West Germany and all over Western Europe. Professor Theodor Ebert, an expert
on social movements and nonviolence at the Free University of Berlin’s Otto Suhr
Institute, was one of the first outside activists to engage closely with the Wyhl
protests. Weeks after local protesters first occupied the construction site, Ebert
traveled from Berlin to meet with the occupiers.
Ebert had known about the fight against the Wyhl reactor since at least the
previous fall, when he turned down a request from rural reactor opponents to sign
a petition against the project. At that time, he argued that though local people
thought otherwise, they were not existentially threatened by the proposed reactor.
He also pointed out that nuclear energy was essential to overcoming West Germa-
ny’s dependence on foreign oil.27 Despite his original misgivings about the anti-
reactor cause, Ebert was impressed by what he learned of the movement after the
occupation began. By the time he visited Wyhl in March 1975, he hailed the ongo-
ing struggle there as “surely the most significant explicitly non-violent campaign
since the founding of the Federal Republic.” Though he remained ambivalent
about the threat posed by the Wyhl reactor, Ebert was captivated by “the number
of protesters, the significance of the controversy, the scope of the civil disobedi-
ence, and the transnational character” of the movement.28 The occupation caused
a radical shift in this expert’s perception of the movement against nuclear energy.
Ebert’s infatuation with the Wyhl protest, despite his lingering doubts about
the validity of the protesters’ concerns about nuclear energy, which seemed to him
not to take into account Cold War realities, caused him to seek ways to connect
his own activism with this shining example. Roland Vogt, one of Ebert’s junior
colleagues at the Otto Suhr Institute, wrote to grassroots activists in the region in
order to explain that he and Ebert wanted to know how they, “as outsiders,” could
help the cause.29 Regardless of this initial note of deference, the Berlin “outsiders”
were quite happy to tell the people of the Upper Rhine Valley how they could be
helped. Vogt’s letter proposed Easter weekend as an opportune moment for the
necessary “de-provincialization” of the protests at Wyhl. In another communica-
tion, Ebert explained that he and Vogt had been inspired, “as old Easter Marchers,”

to seize an opportunity to link the Wyhl struggle with an important West German
activist tradition.30
In his efforts to reinvigorate the Easter March tradition at Wyhl, Vogt argued
that the two protest movements’ focus on nuclear technology meant that “the idea
of an Easter March could easily be associated with the topic of a nuclear reac-
tor.” Yet, as Vogt himself readily admitted, the Easter marches had been dismissed
by the political mainstream during the 1960s because they were allegedly “infil-
trated by Communists.”31 Vogt maintained that there was little substance to this
allegation, but the Berlin academics’ plan to bring outsiders to Wyhl and to de-
provincialize the grassroots anti-reactor struggle clearly relied on ideas hatched in
West Berlin, and traditions of protest that had little resonance in the rural Upper
Rhine Valley. Even the thematic link was questionable, because civil and military
uses of nuclear technology had been painstakingly decoupled during the 1950s
by both sides of the nuclear weapons debate.32 Nevertheless, Vogt was convinced
that in order for his proposal to be successful, “the citizens’ initiatives [would have
to be the ones to] call for an Easter March.” For Vogt, then, connecting the Wyhl
fight to the Easter March tradition and linking nuclear weapons with nuclear en-
ergy would require both the consent—and, more importantly, the cachet—of
the Rhenish activists themselves.33 Bringing together the tradition of the Easter
marches with the authenticity of the anti-reactor struggle at Wyhl appeared es-
sential to building a nonviolent mass movement in West Germany, because doing
so would allow veteran activists like Vogt to harness the popular support enjoyed
by Rhenish antinuclear protesters, a level of support that the Easter marches had
never achieved.34
Despite the links perceived by Vogt and Ebert, the gulf between the Easter
marches of the 1960s and the anti-reactor protests of the 1970s was wide. The
Wyhl occupation was the product of a longstanding grassroots anti-reactor cam-
paign, which had attracted widespread support throughout the region. The Easter
marches had never approached this level of popular support. When grassroots ac-
tivists in the Upper Rhine Valley eventually accepted Vogt and Ebert’s suggestion
(they turned the Berlin activists’ proposed Easter march into a one-day rally on the
occupied site), they connected the legacy of the Easter marches with broad public
support and helped to prefigure a new sort of third way. The Wyhl Easter Monday
rally attracted no more than twenty thousand protesters. Still, it was a powerful
model for a new sort of political event—one that featured local cuisine and wine,
activities for children, and an impressive roster of speakers and musicians. As the
Dernières nouvelles d’Alsace put it, the Easter Monday rally was an “anti-nuclear
rally, mini-Woodstock, family outing, and Volksfest” all rolled into one.35 For the
grassroots opponents of the Wyhl reactor, such an inclusive approach to activism
96 Stephen Milder
that linked protest with daily life was a matter of course. For veterans of the Easter
marches, it was a departure.
Due in part to this festive and family-friendly atmosphere, the Easter Mon-
day rally attracted a remarkably diverse crowd. The Kommunistische Volkszeitung
reported the presence of Swiss, Dutch, Austrians, Luxembourgers, and French.36
The Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace emphasized that “the mixture of age groups, which
has been denounced as impossible, the city and country people, the hippies and
the ‘bourgeoisie’ seems suddenly possible here.” It summed up its article on the
Easter Monday rally by explaining that the protests taking place in Wyhl were
“perhaps the fleeting, embryonic, and sometimes fumbling search for a new way of
living.”37 This high-flying rhetoric may have been overstated, but it articulated the
sort of hopes for social transformation that outside activists placed in the struggle
against a single nuclear reactor in a rural southwest German village.
The reactions of Petra Kelly and Jo Leinen, two young politicians who would
devote much of their careers to fighting nuclear energy, exemplified the way out-
side activists conceived of the Wyhl protests as a battle over something far bigger
than a single reactor project—or even the proposed nuclearization of a particular
region. Leinen recalled that the Easter Monday rally had an aha moment because
it caused him and Kelly to realize that “atomic energy would divide society.”38 In
essence, the grassroots protests at Wyhl offered a new way of thinking about poli-
tics in general. Indeed, flyers promoting the Easter Monday gathering and speak-
ers who addressed the crowd there emphasized the fact that the struggle at Wyhl
mattered elsewhere. “Wherever you live,” a flyer produced by the Bundesverband
Bürgerinitiativen Umweltschutz (Federal Association of Citizens’ Initiatives for
Environmental Protection, BBU) explained, “whatever particular problems con-
cern you, come to Wyhl this Easter.” The BBU supported this plea for participa-
tion with its own analysis of the geographically broad effects of the grassroots site
occupation currently taking place in the Wyhl forest. “Whatever happens in Wyhl
will affect all future developments,” the advertisement explained, “Our struggle
is your struggle. ‘Wyhl’ is all of our cause!”39 This emphasis on the power of lo-
cal protest was key to activists’ attempts to move beyond the limiting Cold War
framework.
After returning home from Wyhl, Kelly pushed ahead with the effort to expand
on the local campaign by drafting a strategy to harness grassroots anti-reactor pro-
tests to broader European politics. In a letter she sent to the West European Social-
ists, a left-leaning European integrationist group of which she was a member, Kelly
suggested three new “possibilities for action.” The excited heading of her proposal
read: “Europe and Nuclear fission centers: GRASSROOTS RESISTANCE!!!!!”
In it, she called on the transnationally minded West European Socialists to devote

themselves to building and promoting links between disparate grassroots anti-
reactor actions in order to turn these localized protests into a nonviolent move-
ment for the future of Europe.40
Kelly was far from alone in seeing individual anti-reactor protests as pieces of a
greater struggle to fundamentally change society. The Communist League of West
Germany’s weekly newspaper, Die Kommunistische Volkszeitung, put the Wyhl oc-
cupation into particularly grand and universal terms. This action, the paper report-
ed, “has inspired the masses throughout the country to take part in the struggle
against the decisions of the state bureaucracy, which are directed against the peo-
ple’s will.”41 Another Communist publication described the new grouping that had
emerged at Wyhl as the vanguard of a “coalition of the millions of oppressed and
exploited in our country,” who were engaged, “in a self-conscious struggle against
the capitalists and their state apparatus.”42 As this soaring prose indicated, Com-
munists attributed a key role in the world proletarian struggle to the fight over a
single, small clearing in the Wyhl forest.
Connecting the Dots: The Challenge of Linking Anti-R eactor Protest

with the Struggle against Nuclear Weapons
Given the growing sense that protests against nuclear energy had transformative
potential, it is not surprising that Petra Kelly saw the anti-reactor struggle as a po-
tent theme for the newly formed Green Party’s 1979 campaign for the European
Parliament.43 In an ebullient March 1979 letter she informed friends and political
colleagues in many countries that she had been elected to the “number one” po-
sition on the German Greens’ list of candidates for the European Parliament. She
sought “help and ideas and financial support” from these disparate activists so
that she could “speak up for a decentralized, non-nuclear, non-military and gentle
Europe—a Europe of the regions and of the people.”44 The campaign itself, which
Kelly had previously called a “decisive battle against atomic power plants,” did not
succeed in stopping the proliferation of nuclear technology.45 It did, however, sig-
nificantly affect West German politics. Having received nearly nine hundred thou-
sand votes in the June 1979 election, the Green Party was the first new party in
decades to come close to West Germany’s 5 percent threshold for parliamentary
representation in a nationally contested election.
This near breakthrough built on the struggle against nuclear energy, incorpo-
rating it more clearly than ever before into “high politics.” But the Greens’ cam-
paign stopped short of linking together nuclear energy and nuclear weapons—
the latter remained too difficult to address within the Cold War framework. The
Greens’ campaign was carried out by a patchwork of state and local Green lists,
many of which had been organized as a result of the failures of grassroots anti-
98 Stephen Milder
reactor struggles to prevent nuclear development. Their candidates, including
Petra Kelly, had become known on account of their participation in the struggle
against nuclear reactors. As the political scientist Saskia Richter has shown, these
roots in the anti-reactor struggles of the 1970s were separate from the movement
against the dual-track decision, even if some of the activists—like Kelly—were
involved in both. Though the Greens’ 1979 campaign took place after the idea of
a new intermediate-range missile deployment had been broached by West Ger-
man Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in 1977, it was not devoted primarily to the
anti-missile cause.46 The dual-track decision itself was not even reached until six
months after the European election.47 In fact, the two mass protests that occurred
in 1979, each of which drew upward of 100,000 demonstrators, matching the
largest mobilizations of the Easter March era, stayed true to anti-reactor struggles
by focusing solely on the civilian uses of nuclear energy. Following closely after
the Three Mile Island accident on March 28, 1979, a protest against plans to con-
struct a nuclear waste storage facility in the village of Gorleben in Lower Saxony
attracted 100,000 protesters to the state’s capital, Hanover. That fall, a rally against
the federal government’s nuclear energy policy in Bonn attracted 150,000 partic-
ipants, many of whom arrived on specially chartered trains from regions where
nuclear reactors were proposed or under construction. A peace protest, held at the
same site a month earlier, had attracted only 40,000 participants.48
Though the reactor opponents rallied in Bonn in October 1979, just six weeks
before the announcement of the dual-track decision (when discussions of the new
missiles were already becoming widespread), Jo Leinen later wrote that talk of
including the military uses of nuclear energy in the Bonn demonstration “nearly
exploded it.”49 Even amongst dedicated opponents of nuclear energy, and even
immediately before the emergence of the mass peace movement of the early
1980s, the issue of nuclear weapons remained divisive. Though the activists who
organized the mass demonstrations against nuclear energy in 1979 had worked in
increasingly heterogeneous anti-reactor coalitions for half a decade, they were at
pains to expand their struggle to include the “explosive” subject of nuclear arms
proliferation because of its obvious geopolitical significance, and clear distinction
from the localized environmental threats posed by nuclear reactors. The fact that
nuclear reactor opponents became increasingly concerned about nuclear weap-
ons in the early 1980s is not evidence that the decision changed everything, but
rather that the anti-reactor struggles of the 1970s laid the groundwork for the
expansion of the movement against military uses of nuclear technology by using
local, grassroots language to discuss it.
The mass peace movement of the early 1980s drew heavily on several aspects of
the anti-reactor protests of the 1970s, but its adoption of local frameworks proved

most important. Leading anti-missile activists like Petra Kelly had risen to prom-
inence within the movement against nuclear energy. Kelly, in fact, had based her
approach to politics on lessons she took from anti-reactor protests, seeking to net-
work localized actions in order to create a widespread, transnational antinuclear
movement. Much like rural people’s efforts to preserve themselves, their home-
towns, and their livelihoods from the threat of nuclear reactors, the peace move-
ment of the early 1980s used local frameworks in order to differentiate itself from
the stalemated politics of the Cold War. As Susanne Schregel has shown, peace
protesters emphasized how national policies and even the global dimensions of
a potential nuclear war would hit home using grassroots environmental rhetoric
about the protection of local spaces.50 The German Peace Society—United War
Resisters (Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft—Vereinigte Kriegsdienstgegner, DFG-
VK), West Germany’s largest peace organization, specifically instructed activists
to discuss nuclear concerns with their neighbors, providing clear opportunities
to think about the immediate effects of nuclear war.51 The peace activists of the
1980s worked hard to reinvigorate the sort of local focus that had proven so effec-
tive for activists at Wyhl. They also blockaded missile sites, which was tactically
reminiscent of reactor site occupations, emphasized the struggle’s rootedness, and
connected nuclear war with places where West Germans lived. By drawing on the
legacy of the anti-reactor protests, the peace movement of the 1980s was able to
bill itself as a part of a broader “survival” movement that identified both civilian
and military uses of nuclear energy as dire threats to personal safety, not matters
of abstract political debate.
Local, rooted actions seem quite distinct from the best-known peace protests
of the early 1980s—especially the Bonn mass rallies, which attracted hundreds
of thousands of participants. It seems rather unlikely, after all, that the same in-
fluences that led to small, local protests could also promote mass mobilizations
that brought together hundreds of thousands of West Germans from across the
country. In fact, this combination of local focus and mass action reveals precisely
how anti-reactor protest reshaped and brought together preexisting protest tra-
ditions, building diverse coalitions on the basis of disparate individual concerns.
Adhering to the supposedly personal and localized concerns of the anti-reactor
movement enabled citizens, who knew their own livelihoods and communities
far better than decision-makers in Bonn, to feel empowered and ready to speak
up on their own account. Local concerns, in other words, motivated activists to
travel to Bonn. An apolitical rhetoric, therefore, was essential to the expansion of
protest politics. Environmentalists’ emphasis on local action made the mass peace
movement possible.
\\\
100 Stephen Milder

The anti-reactor movement provided a powerful wedge that activists used to cre-
ate a third way between the two poles of Cold War politics, but it also provided
necessary material to bridge the divide between dedicated social activists and or-
dinary citizens. These tools allowed West Germans to respond to NATO’s dual-
track decision very differently than they had responded to the threat of nuclear
war in the past. The result was an unprecedented mass peace movement, with mo-
bilizations far larger and much more diverse than those of the 1950s and 1960s,
but one that relied on the personalized and localized rhetoric of 1970s anti-reactor
protests. The idea that a movement focused on a particular environmental matter
like nuclear energy could underpin the broad and inclusive peace protests of the
early 1980s is at odds with leading scholarly treatments of late twentieth-century
politics. According to these interpretations, the final third of the twentieth cen-
tury was an “age of fracture,” when mass parties that had previously united vast
swathes of society lost support as citizens withdrew from politics in order to pur-
sue individual interests. These interpretations cast “single-issue” movements, in-
cluding anti-reactor campaigns as, at best, a symptom—and, at worst, a cause—of
the very “disaggregation” of society that they lament.52
Such conclusions are not necessarily at odds with the idea that antinuclear ac-
tivism and other grassroots-based environmental movements altered the frame-
works of Cold War politics. But they overlook the fact that anti-reactor protest
underpinned inclusive coalition-building projects and helped form a productive
politics. It was precisely this perspective, that individual people and particular plac-
es are affected by a distant and abstract threat—like nuclear war—was required to
engage the mass of society in a protest movement. Early protests against nuclear
arms proliferation, like the SPD-backed KdA, but also the fiercely independent
Easter marches, lacked resonance because they were considered too tainted by
politics. The 1980s survival movement focused on individuals’ particular fears and
concerns, which were, by definition, more important to them than politics. The
sort of activism that emerged, akin to what Belinda Davis has described as “anti-
ideological” politics, lacked the superficial clarity of purpose that accompanied
the bipolar, ideological politics underpinning the struggle between the Cold War
superpowers. It also appeared harder to inflect with meaning beyond a single issue,
or a set of specific issues.53 But it is surely evidence of a real third way between
the traditional poles and capable of attracting broad cross-sections of the popu-
lation to engage in debates about pressing political matters—and, hence, in self-
government. The size and diversity of European peace demonstrations in the early
1980s, therefore, are also measures of the extent to which 1970s environmentalism
expanded the political sphere and helped activists escape the limitations of the
Cold War order.

6
An Unguided Boom
Environmental Policies of Cold War Italy
Wilko Graf von Hardenberg
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
The rapid industrialization of the 1950s contributed significantly to Italy’s strong

economic growth and positively affected people’s nutrition, health, and life expec-
tancy. However, it undeniably worsened environmental conditions, particularly
pollution, and Italy’s acclaimed vulnerability to floods and earthquakes.1 Italy’s
postwar development condensed into a few years “a transformation that took
decades in other countries.”2 The Great Acceleration of those years led to what
environmental historians have called “the 1950s syndrome,” which was charac-
terized by the growth of production and consumption rates, as well as the rise
of environmental issues throughout Western Europe.3 A triumphant optimism
regarding the future, as well as the need to rebuild a war-torn continent, cloaked
the problems caused by what the historian Paul Ginsborg has defined “the twin
deities of the era,” Fordism and consumerism.4 The 1950s were also a crucial peri-
od in the formation of Italy’s political, industrial, and economic structures. These
processes unfolded within the broader international framework of the Cold War.
Opposition between the Christian Democratic Party and their bourgeois allies on
the one hand, and the Socialist and Communist Parties on the other shaped the
political debate and had a significant impact on urban planning and infrastructure
development and, ultimately, on the landscape itself.5
After the demise of broad national unity coalitions in 1947, the governments
led by the Christian Democratic Party (Democrazia Cristiana, DC) adopted lib-
eral economic policies characterized by a laissez-faire philosophy. The historian
Pietro Scoppola writes that the ensuing development was thus enacted “without
guidance,” or in other words, without much, if any, governmental steering.6 Italy’s
lack of a planning culture worsened problems in the long term and increased re-
liance on emergency legislation as a solution to environmental crises and issues.7
102
Cold War politics were reflected in the competition between the new Christian
Democratic, pro-American, and the Socialist-Communist, pro-Soviet, mass par-
ties and the increasing inability of these two political blocs to cooperate. They thus
played a pivotal role in political decision-making regarding development and land
use in post–World War II Italy, since they limited options and created a setting in
which all proposals of the opposing bloc were dismissed straightaway for reasons
of ideology and international allegiances.
This chapter focuses on the complex relationship between government direc-
tives, legislation, and the economy that affected the environmental conditions of
Italy’s postwar era, during which the country went from being mostly agrarian and
poor to become one of the most industrialized and richest countries in the world.
In particular, my goal is to contribute to the study of the intersections between
politics and the environment, while drawing attention to the peculiar role played
by patronage in Italy at that time. Existing case studies on the links among politics,
patronage, and urban planning have not yet fully considered the environmental di-
mension of the problem. Scholarship approaching the issue of the environmental
impact of the postwar boom from a national perspective has instead, at times ex-
plicitly, left aside any reflection about how development policies were determined
and the broader social and political conditions that influenced these decisions.8
Models of Reconstruction
Overall damage from World War II in Italy was rather limited—10–20 percent of
production capacity was destroyed, but there were major differences among eco-
nomic sectors. While many industries (such as the mechanical, energy, and tex-
tile ones) suffered minimal damage, those that were the primary targets of Allied
bombings (like iron and steel, chemistry, ship-building) were devastated. War-
time damage to agriculture and housing was also significant.9 However, the main
issue of postwar reconstruction in Italy was infrastructure. Wartime destruction
disrupted flows of commodities and raw materials and created new bottlenecks,
hindering the reactivation of industrial productivity. Half of the main roads and
a third of the secondary ones had been damaged to the point of being impassable,
80 percent of the merchant marine was destroyed, and 40 percent of train tracks
and bridges were unusable.10
The two decades considered in this chapter, 1945–1965, were characterized
not only by the need to rebuild the economy but also by “the shift from an indus-
trial to a mass consumer society.” As was the case elsewhere, notably in Germany,
in Italy there was a desire to catch up to other advanced economies.11 Reconstruc-
tion, in and of itself, was accomplished by 1951, when production returned to
prewar levels. However, it took until the end of the so-called miracolo economico
An Unguided Boom 103

(economic miracle) in 1964 before Italy’s delayed industrialization process could
be considered complete.12 Moreover, the drive for the “construction of a different
economy” in the form of intentional design or Keynesian measures, which was
led by the Christian Democratic technocrat Pasquale Saraceno, took off only after
1967. Up until then reconstruction was characterized more by “contingencies and
lucky circumstances.”13
The lack of economic planning and of environmental management policies re-
sulted in the surrender of development processes to the spontaneous activities
of various private stakeholders and flourishing patronage politics. The failure of
the few attempts made to enforce economic planning, such as an investment plan
devised by prime minister Alcide De Gasperi’s finance minister Ezio Vanoni in
1954, led, according to the historian Paul Ginsborg, to major structural and terri-
torial imbalances, such as an increase of private consumption to the detriment of
public expenditure (on education, health, transportation, and housing programs)
and the splitting of the country into macroregions with hugely different devel-
opment rates. An unbounded market economy characterized the Italian system,
leaving only the burgeoning patronage system to act as an intermediary between
individuals, interest groups, and the political system. A broad spectrum of policies
and developments that impacted the environment were affected by this lack of
guidance by the state—for example, urban and industrial planning, the develop-
ment of motorization, the growth of the building sector, the management of water
resources, and the rise of atmospheric pollution.14
One of the main elements of economic development in the postwar period
was the rapid growth of motorization, which was strongly supported by the steel,
automobile, petrol, and construction industries. Members of parliament repre-
senting virtually all parties except the Socialist-Communist opposition even set
up a Friends of the Car group. Immediately after the war, Italy was however still
modestly motorized compared to other Western European countries. The num-
ber of cars on the roads reached prewar levels only in 1950, rising thereafter by an
order of magnitude by 1964, when it surpassed, for the first time, the number of
motorcycles.15 This steady motorization process caused an increase in atmospher-
ic pollution, an almost uncontrollable growth of the road and motorway system,
and reduced the efficiency of railroads, and use of urban tram networks. On the
other hand, it cemented the widespread symbolic linkage between motorization
and modernity, and caused a perceived increase in personal comfort, freedom,
and quality of life.16 Already in 1949 the quantity of goods transported by road
surpassed that moved by train, which enhanced the perceived need to promote
further development of roads.
The construction of roads, especially highways, was possibly the only sector
104 Wilko Graf von Hardenberg

the state influenced in a coherent way, but little to no concern was evinced for the
environmental consequences of this effort. In 1951 and 1952 the Italian govern-
ment launched a major program of roadbuilding that favored the construction of
toll highways rather than the maintenance and repair of existing roads. The exten-
sion of the new network steadily increased in those years. By 1964 the Autostrada
del Sole reached from Milan to Naples. It extended over 1,656 kilometers, more
than three times the length of all motorways built by the Fascist regime before
World War II.17 Even this ambitious effort soon proved to be insufficient for the
ever-growing traffic, though, and its environmental effects were as severe as those
in sectors characterized instead by a lack of state planning.
The Italian nature conservation movement, which adopted completely new
ideological and organizational directions in the 1950s, strongly criticized the im-
pact of the new highways on the environment and landscapes, as well as the inher-
ent disregard for the long-term ecological and geophysical consequences shown
by their planners and builders.18 The removal of gravel from riverbeds to build the
Autostrada del Sole, for instance, played a pivotal role in causing the destructive
effects of the 1966 flood of the Arno River in Florence.19
Rapid and uncontrolled urbanization was another major aspect of Italy’s post-
war development that the state hardly influenced. Between 1951 and 1971 the
urban population of Italy, as well as the number of cities with over one hundred
thousand inhabitants, almost doubled. The population of Italy’s major towns
(Rome, Milan, Turin, and Naples) grew by two million between 1951 and 1961.
The net increase in population was concentrated in about a quarter of the nation’s
land area, along the coasts, transportation hubs, and urban agglomerations. Due
to the rush of development and absence of strict rules and guidance, Italian cit-
ies experienced an unprecedented boom in construction that started intensive
exploitation of the land and rapidly led to the degradation of landscapes.20 This
boom also contributed significantly to what the novelists Carlo Fruttero and
Franco Lucentini have dubbed urban “horizontal archeology,” in which architec-
tural elements of different eras were gradually incorporated into the expanding
city: “the dilapidated Baroque farmhouse, then the Esso [gas station], then the
nineteenth-century smokestack, then the early century workers’ house, then the
1920s cottage with a garden and goldfishes, then again a farmhouse, a Chevron
station, an abandoned customs house, and so on in ever-widening circles.”21 As the
Italian historian Federico Paolini explains, local administrations refused to make
choices “capable of adapting urban planning to the increased demand for urban
mobility.”22 Consequently, an increasing number of new neighborhoods were left
without quality public services. Similarly, in the 1950s the creation of new indus-
trial areas also followed chaotic patterns, which were determined by local condi-

tions, generally without any sort of urban planning. This absence of planning led
to disorderly accretions of population that put further strains on transportation
networks.23 The geographer Giuseppe Dematteis argues that the huge population
growth and occupation of space around these urban centers completely disrupted
the networks of ecological relationships that had determined the geographies of
development in rural Italy before World War II.24
Legislation and its Enactment

Italian legislators had expressed concern for some aspects of the environment
since unification in the 1860s. For example, forestry laws had been quite effective
since that time. Furthermore, Italy had four national parks by 1935, and certain as-
pects of prewar Fascist town planning and landscape-management legislation had
been relatively advanced. In theory, the new republican constitution of 1948 pro-
vided for the protection of the landscape and the rational use of resources. Howev-
er, Italy lacked specific legislation with which to face the incipient environmental
crisis caused by the postwar boom.
After the war Christian Democrat-led governments, continuing an old tradi-
tion of the Italian state, dedicated a major part of state resources to addressing
emergencies, neglecting the development of long-term solutions that could pre-
vent such crises. A few special plans intended to foster reconstruction and soil-
conservation policies in areas that had suffered natural disasters were launched,
but more often than not such plans proved to be insufficient and rather badly im-
plemented.25 The postwar constitution delegated land management to the region-
al administrative level. However, because the ruling parties feared that regional
administrations could end up in the hands of opposition parties, most regions
were instituted only in 1970.26 No state agency was thus explicitly charged with
landscape management, and planning was a task taken over by individual munici-
palities or consortia of cities.27 Therefore, it is easy to understand why, in the early
postwar years, little attention was given to central legislation regarding land-use
issues.
Although the Italian constitution of 1947 declared public health a fundamen-
tal right and a primary interest of the community, legislation regarding pollution
was practically absent. The constitution, by nature a compromise among all par-
liamentary parties, committed the state to promote a framework of general condi-
tions, both in terms of prevention and care, able to foster the health of all citizens.
In the following years interpretation of that constitutional provision allowed the
concepts of environmental preservation and public health to interact, and eventu-
ally every citizen gained the right, formally defensible in court, to a healthy envi-
ronment.28 Nonetheless, the first law explicitly about air pollution was not passed

until 1966, and legislative acts regarding water and soil pollution and the actual ex-
ecution of environmental planning were introduced only in the 1970s and 1980s.29
Before this time planning legislation was essentially limited to two laws—on
the protection of natural monuments and landscapes and on urban planning—
passed by the Fascist regime in 1939 and 1942, respectively. As sophisticated as
they were from a legal standpoint, with their attention to broad territorial pres-
ervation and their grand programmatic directives, neither of these laws was
amended, updated, nor, most importantly, enacted during the first twenty years
of democratic government.30 Furthermore, postwar Italy lacked not only detailed
environmental or land-use legislation but also political sensitivity to the issue of
land-use management. Not surprisingly, the authorities responsible for the en-
forcement of the laws were usually more interested in fostering a fast economic
recovery, and therefore slowed down any attempt at urban and land planning.31
For example, as early as 1951 the city of Milan, whose surroundings were experi-
encing widespread uncontrolled urbanization, started drafting a promising inter-
municipal plan on housing and urban services, which, however, was never imple-
mented. In Turin, where urban development was concentrated mainly in the city,
close to the Fiat automobile factories, such a plan was not even proposed. Instead,
the existing town plan of Turin widely favored private interests.32 This political
choice—disastrous from the point of view of the protection of common goods
and environmental assets—benefited landowners, while blocking urban planning
policies, preventing effective coordination between municipalities, and reducing
the land available for public use. In this way territorial politics of the 1950s led, as
the Dematteis puts it, to the “systematic transformation of the common goods
offered by the territory—from infrastructure to natural resources—into values
appropriable by rentiers and intermediaries.”33
The inadequacy of soil conservation legislation enacted by the Italian govern-
ment in the early postwar years also reveals the lack of political will to solve such
a major problem. The legislation that was passed was cloaked in generic and am-
biguous promises, designed in most cases only to satisfy the needs of patronage,
especially at the local level.34 Fascist legislation, which also in this case remained
unchanged during the first twenty-five years of democratic rule, provided for the
transfer of control over water from the state to private enterprises, causing the
state to gradually abandon projects that would have guaranteed protection of
the waters from soil erosion.35 Law 184 of 1952 was the republic’s first coherent
intervention in soil conservation and water regulation. It provided for the draft-
ing, within six months, of a master plan defining the projects needed to solve the
structural problems of watercourses due to erosion and floods. A plan that called
for a rather scarce capital investment was finally prepared in 1954. Moreover, by

1965 only part of the funds allocated for urgent works to be done by 1963 had
been used. The plan’s logic—to focus attention on the solution of the most urgent
issues without forgetting the need for long-term planning—was valid, but in prac-
tice it contributed to the deteriorating situation by not offering enough funds to
cover ordinary maintenance. The reclamation of mountain regions and emergency
projects for the recovery of disaster areas were also legislated in the same years—
both proving to be insufficient and badly executed.36 The poor implementation
of these provisions of law caused the gradual increase of hydrological instabilities
and disasters—as claimed by the historian Walter Palmieri the combination of
poor disaster management and abysmal planning led to heightened risk exposure
even when faced with small and medium events. Two topical examples of this
state of things were the Salerno flooding and mudslide of 1954 and the Agrigento
landslide of 1966, which both occurred in areas well-known to be vulnerable.37
Essentially, in the years following Law 184, interventions were still limited to the
authorization of expenditures necessary to execute emergency works, without any
attempt at formulating a long-term preemptive program.38
The government’s efforts to foster industrial and agrarian development also
left much to be desired. Only rarely were government policies able to substantial-
ly change the status quo and limit the greatest distortions of the postwar recon-
struction process. Land-reclamation efforts were concentrated in already rich and
relatively developed lowland areas, leaving most hills and mountains untouched.
The industrial location policy introduced in 1957 focused instead on a strategy
attentive to the needs of large industry and inspired by the theory of development
poles. A few large industrial plants, concentrated in specific areas, were deemed
to have the potential to promote the overall development of whole regions. This
preference for industries like iron and steel or petrochemical refineries failed to
stimulate regional development by creating productive relationships with the sur-
roundings. In the end most of these plants turned out to be white elephants. Es-
sentially, the state supported an “era of industrialization without development” in
which large industrial plants were located wherever it suited the private interests
of great capital without any concern for the territories’ previous conditions, their
improvement, or the risks of pollution in densely settled areas. The Celene and
Augusta Petrolchimica factories built in the Sicilian province of Siracusa in 1956
provide an excellent example of this. The area chosen was rich in citrus orchards
and vineyards, and had a highly developed crafts sector, all of which were wiped
away by the choice to build factories with destructive environmental impact. The
era’s modernist faith in industrial development caused decision-makers to neglect
local economic culture and traditions in the name of an abstract idea of progress.39

The Christian Democrats, the Patronage System, and the Environment
The Christian Democrats, the moderate, pro-NATO majority party whose activi-
ties characterized the politics of the entire period, followed a tactic of winning con-
sent based on small, low-level, short-term projects, designed to gain the support of
the electorate through the constant, targeted redistribution of state resources. The
party’s primary interest was not in reforming the system, but rather to defend a
variety of very different special interests. Thus the Christian Democratic Party was
essentially a specialized patronage agency, focused on eliciting electoral consent
through the distribution of resources to specific interest groups and the tactical
use of inequalities as a means to attract new voters.40
This interest-and client-based strategy of resource allocation, as long as it fo-
cused on minimal amounts of resources, did not impose any great cost on the
system. It was actually conducive to a rapid reconstruction, which might have
been hampered by a rigid and formal bureaucracy.41 Thus, the Italian political sys-
tem allowed social and regional contradictions to interact positively and coexist
peacefully during the period of postwar industrialization. Under the auspices of
the Christian Democratic Party the art of political mediation between varied and
divergent interests evolved as never before. The party managed to connect and
reconcile social groups and geographic areas with widely conflicting interests.42
However, at the same time, despite some immediate benefits, their approach led
to an increase in the overall inefficiency of the system. Due to the ruling party’s
reliance on what Paolini calls “micro-sectorial interventions,” it became increas-
ingly difficult to devise long-term projects, since they would have interfered with
the flexibility required by the patronage policy.43 Moreover, concern for collective
goods, such as the quality of the environment, declined steadily in favor of the
defense of individual and special interests. The mechanisms governing national
politics ended up creating a system that extracted resources from the state and
distributed them among private interests.
Over the years, to maintain power, the Christian Democratic Party found itself
practically forced to extend the patronage system to a growing number of actors
across class lines. This process increased the amount of resources mobilized and
in turn imposed greater costs upon the system.44 The expanding access and influ-
ence of various lobbies on the ruling power group made it ever more difficult to
eliminate patronage politics. Special and vested interests and the pressure of local
elites and notables, who, especially in southern Italy, had maintained their power
through the Fascist regime, became increasingly influential in national decision-
making processes, at the expense of collective interests.45 In the end ever more
specific legislation, haphazard allocation of funds, and special provisions became

the trademark of the postwar political system, and hindered the implementation
of any coherent, nationwide planning policy.46
The increase in the number of channels of access to national decision-making
processes, combined with the government’s inability to create clear legislation
free of special interests, favored the proliferation of local economic actors who
depended on subventions granted by the patronage system instead of innovation
or improvements in their own efficiency. For example, in the 1950s, the Veneto
region, because of the selective provision of aid characteristic of Christian Dem-
ocratic patronage politics, saw the development of a mixed agricultural-industrial
economy and a concentration of microbusinesses in the less technologically ad-
vanced sectors. This process, which caused radical changes to both the landscape
and ecological networks, exclusively favored the economic interests of new busi-
ness sectors. In short, the region lacked a real culture of innovation and planning,
and was unable to look beyond mere immediate self-interest. The results were
widespread urbanization, chaotic industrialization, and disorderly development.47
The Socialist-Communist opposition, on the other hand, had neither the po-
litical will nor power to collaborate with the minority statist and technocratic
sectors within the majority party to press for more economic and environmental
planning within an alternative, reformist program. In addition to the Cold War
political context that made the inclusion of the Communist Party (Partito Comu-
nista Italiano—PCI) in decision-making difficult, the priorities of the Left (be-
sides an ideological inclination for state planning) essentially concurred with the
government in that they prioritized the rebuilding of production and the end of
unemployment.48 Initially, trade unions did not realize the impact of industrializa-
tion on the environment—factories appeared to them essentially as a resource, a
promise of a better, richer future.49 Moreover, the grand plan devised by the tech-
nocratic minority within the Christian Democrats was not compatible with the
requests of the workers’ movement for an immediate rise in production, wages,
employment, and consumption. The technocrats’ plan instead aimed to focus in-
vestment on infrastructure development and would have improved the welfare of
the population only in the long-term.
As suggested earlier, another major factor in the impact of Christian Democrat-
ic politics on the postwar environment was the practice of using residential hous-
ing as a means of wealth distribution—idle capital was disproportionately favored
at the expense of productive investments, thus fostering the misuse of the land. In
an increasingly urbanized country the building sector, left almost without rules,
soon became “the first—and most voracious—consumer of natural resources.”50
Families and businesses were actively encouraged to invest in real estate, which
caused a worsening of environmental conditions and ruined the landscapes that

made the land valuable in the first place. The resulting unchecked growth of resi-
dential areas led to a state of affairs in which, even when urban infrastructures were
built up, their “function and location responded mainly to particular private inter-
ests.”51 By donating a minimal part of their land to the municipality, speculators
were able to orient urban development. To make use of the new lots municipal ad-
ministrations would have to rezone an area and build all infrastructure necessary
to urbanize it: roads, sewage, gas, electricity, water. By doing so they also brought
the same infrastructure to the lots still owned by the speculators. This caused a
sharp increase in the land’s value and encouraged an uncontrolled development
of housing projects. Postwar urbanization was consequently characterized by un-
realistic forecasts of housing needs, increases in individual motorized transport,
inadequate public services, the degradation of areas of environmental value, and
the increasing instability of soils and drainage basins.52
Unregulated real estate development in the postwar era was shaped by this
entrenched system that resisted all reform.53 Until the end of the 1960s any law
preventing the privatization of collective resources in favor of more rational devel-
opment and land-use patterns was basically considered subversive in Italy. Among
the exceptionally rare examples that countered the general trend, the experience
of the urban planner Giuseppe Campos Venuti in the Communist-led municipal-
ity of Bologna in the early 1960s must be mentioned. Foreshadowing much later
trends, he promoted the socially and environmentally sustainable urbanization of
the suburbs by increasing the municipality’s direction of such processes, including
even expropriation. The Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica (National Urban Plan-
ning Institute) organized by the social reformer Adriano Olivetti tried to stimulate
public debate about the creation of an environmentally sound building sector. This
campaign fell on deaf ears among politicians. An attempt made by the Christian
Democrat minister of public works Fiorentino Sullo in 1963 to introduce at the
national level policies similar to those promoted by Giuseppe Campos Venuti in
Bologna through a radical reform of planning legislation was stymied by his own
party, an event which marked for the time being the end of any hope to save Italy’s
towns from the worst effects of real estate speculation. Other actors in the struggle
against the growing disorganization of cities and the irrationality of development
were a few representatives of the social-liberal elites, involved in the new environ-
mentalist association Italia Nostra and the magazine Il Mondo.54 Protests against
the so-called looting of cities had, however, very little impact on public opinion,
because beyond the speculative interests of builders and contractors, their tenden-
cy to privately appropriate goods of collective interest, and the lack of planning
by the Christian Democratic governments, the construction business responded
to a real popular need for new housing and infrastructure.55 It should also be re-

membered that those who dared to advocate planning, including trade-unionists,
conservationists, and urban planners, had regularly been accused in postwar Italy
by economic liberals and government officials of continuing the practices of Fas-
cist state interventionism or of attempting to introduce policies resembling those
of Soviet Russia. These critiques show how ideological convictions shaped by the
rhetoric of Resistance and Cold War politics served to limit the government’s abil-
ity to direct postwar urban planning in a rational, environmentally sound way.56
Humans and Disasters

During the years of the economic miracle a series of disastrous floods and land-
slides occurred, underlining the limits of a development model that had over-
looked collective interests, notably environmental protection, and the public
good.57 At the time politicians and engineers often attributed disasters to what
they termed natural causes, such as exceptional rainfall, and ignored the role played
by inadequate policies and planning that could have taken into account the long-
term effects of particular developments in specific enviro-technical settings.58 One
politician, though, Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti, did understand the
importance of government interventions already in the postwar era: “It is clear
that when it rains it is not the government’s fault, whatever a witty popular saying
states. But when one night or a few days of stormy rains repeatedly, every year,
every second year, every few months, after just three weeks, cause boundless di-
sasters, then it is also clear that you need to look for the root causes, that are not
exclusively natural, but also due to human actions and the social order.”59
The great age of reconstruction and transformation ended with a disaster of
major symbolic meaning. The Vajont Dam landslide on October 9, 1963, in north-
eastern Italy was considered unforeseeable at the time by those in charge and by
Italian courts of law. But in reality, given the hydrogeological conditions of the
area and the hints offered by the mountain itself, the disaster could have been pre-
vented. The dam was built without the necessary geological report, and the possi-
ble issues caused by tectonic activity and the inherent instability of the mountain
were never taken into account. Beginning in 1960, when the dam was completed,
multiple small landslides were recorded in the area, but no action was taken to
prevent ensuing disaster. Furthermore, embarrassingly little attention was paid to
soil erosion. The logic of technology and finance, and exuberant confidence in
modern engineering prevailed over precaution.
Cold War politics also played a major role, particularly in the aftermath of the
landslide. The Communist Party immediately accused the governing Christian
Democrats of having induced the disaster through their policies and support for
the energy sector. The historian Marco Armiero argues that the Communist Party

used the disaster to discuss the effects of capitalism on the environment. Accord-
ing to him, the party “was indeed politicizing the Vajont disaster; it claimed the
landslide was not the result of a miscalculation, corrupt public servants and acqui-
escent experts, but actually the failure of a system based on private profit.”60
Communists in Italy thus anticipated in their discourses the claim, formally
made only in 1972 at a meeting of Communist Parties in Prague, that at the core
of environmental deterioration lay an intrinsic feature of capitalism: the lack of a
social dimension of development. This claim and the attention the Italian Com-
munist Party paid to environmental disasters and the human causes behind them
may appear counterintuitive, when the appalling environmental record of the So-
viet Union is recalled. However, it is worth noting how being a Communist in Italy
was, even in the highly fractured Cold War political setting and notwithstanding
the party’s prioritization of the needs of reconstruction, a much different thing
than being one in the Eastern Bloc. For instance, being in the opposition at most
political levels allowed Italian Communists to take on some issues that would
possibly have been off-limits had they been in charge of defining Italy’s postwar
development policies. In any case, from the point of view of the Communist Party
all opportunities to criticize how the Christian Democrats handled the country’s
reconstruction had to be grabbed as soon as they surfaced.61
The consequences of the Italian development model and the lack of consis-
tent land protections were felt more gravely as the years of reconstruction wore
on, and led to a burgeoning of emergency legislation. Natural disasters were the
outcome of a process in which bad choices accumulated and produced an almost
continuous series of critical events. A combination of inattention, carelessness,
and lack of accountability for the natural component of disasters was typical of
Italian politicians and technocrats of the time.62 The floods that hit the province
of Asti in 1948, Campania in 1949, and Calabria in 1951 were all attributed at the
time to exclusively natural causes, which is to the intensity of rain, even though in
all cases more attention to drainage basins, soil erosion, and forest cover would
have prevented their most damaging effects.63 Another example of the inefficacy
of the state in preventing such problems were the floods and mudslides that hit the
mountains of Aspromonte, in Calabria, in 1953 and, as already noted, Salerno, in
Campania, in 1954. The mountainsides, stripped of their vegetation and used for
intense excavation activity, were unstable and vulnerable to landslides. For years,
plans had been drafted for the reclamation of these areas but, as was typical in
those years, none was implemented.64
The 1951 flood of Polesine, a strip of flat land between the Po and Adige Riv-
ers, is probably the most famous rainfall-related disaster that occurred during re-
construction. The rising waters of the Po accelerated due to the narrowing of the

banks near the mouth of the river. Detritus accumulated on the river bottom and
land saturated by previous rainfall gave the waters less room to disperse. In these
conditions, even the breaking of numerous levees along the river’s course failed
to reduce the water level. The flood wave reached the Polesine at maximum force,
submerging hundreds of acres of land and leaving 180,000 people homeless. The
root cause of this disaster was the lack of a comprehensive plan for hydraulic de-
fense works in the drainage basin of the Po, including the mountain valleys where
the tributaries originate, and the inadequacy of relevant legislation and public
investments in the sector. Even though the measures necessary to prevent a po-
tentially explosive situation appeared to be clear, the state responded too late and
ineffectively. As the Communist president of the province of Rovigo, De Polzer,
wrote in 1952: “Nothing was done, not even in the last six years—since the war—
that could avert the terrible danger.”65 The attempts made by opposition forces
to explain the human culpability behind the disaster were painted as subversive
and inhumane by the government and its supporters. The government refused to
accept any liability for damage caused by what they depicted as natural disasters.
Instead, they used the events to continue the political demonization of the Com-
munist opposition, which was actively accusing the government of being respon-
sible for the disaster. As would happen later after the Vajont disaster, a witch-hunt
took the place of any real commitment to soil conservation.66
Some disasters that struck Italy in the years following the economic miracle
also give an idea of the disastrous effects of the process of unplanned urbanization
and the neglect of land management. The Agrigento landslide, caused by exces-
sive building, and the flood of the Arno in Florence, exacerbated by the excava-
tion of riverbeds and the elimination of riverside areas, both occurred in 1966.67
These events, as well as the flood of Biella of 1968 and that of Genoa in 1970, were
caused or exacerbated by the lack of sound urban planning policies and by limited
legislation on the maintenance of drainage basins, soil conservation, and the geo-
logical suitability of land for construction.68 More recently, the floods that have hit
Genoa repeatedly in the 2010s demonstrate how the disregard and disrespect for
planning and careful management of the water basins that became entrenched in
the postwar years has had long-term consequences. Such consequences become
more difficult to solve with every passing year.
Socio-Environmental Impacts of Policy Choices

The adoption of strictly laissez-faire economic policies by the ruling Christian
Democrats in the first twenty years of the postwar era in Italy thus led to a lack
of serious and consequential planning legislation in a variety of environmentally
relevant fields. This tended to favor the interests of both individual capitalists and

ground rentiers at the expense of the whole of society. This added up with old and
new patronage politics and localisms to structure a system in which private and
lobby-specific concerns appeared to have a fast track to governmental approval
and support. A broadly felt public need for better infrastructure was usually met
by private actors, but the lack of coordination and the push towards financial gain
led to an incremental worsening of socio-environmental conditions.
A conscious management of the environment in the postwar years of recon-
struction would have required the creation of shared values and collective rules
that could lead to the primacy of common interest on local and particular demands.
It would have been necessary not to focus the race for wealth and welfare exclu-
sively on individual choices and strategies, but look as well for public responses to
collective needs.69 A less fractured political landscape would also have helped—
unfortunately Cold War political polarization made it exceedingly difficult, until
the 1960s, for politicians to work across party lines, even when aiming for similar
goals. Because of the favorable economic situation, public opinion did not show
a great interest in environmental protection, which was instead considered to be
an obstacle to what was broadly perceived as progress. Instead, in a country facing
reconstruction, in which both the quality and the quantity of consumption were
rapidly increasing, positions critical of the development model were unpopular.
Italia Nostra, for example, was accused of being an elitist organization and an ene-
my of progress, intent on ensuring clean seas and air to its affluent members, with
no respect for the new needs of motorization or the jobs that polluting refineries
and factories guaranteed.70
The absence in Italian history of calculations of the environmental costs of
private land use and other nonrenewable public goods explains how use led to a
continuous impoverishment of the land. The social benefits of the great transfor-
mation were thus seen as inseparable from their heavy environmental costs. Al-
ready by the end of the 1950s the dream cultivated by some intellectuals to create
the conditions for environmental conservation amidst the great transformation
and to achieve progress without destroying environmental assets had shown all its
limits.71 The lack of political will and the intelligent use by lobbyists of the patron-
age system of the Christian Democrats made it increasingly difficult over the years
to enact a planning policy that could keep environmental degradation in check. In
brief, Italy’s long-standing issues regarding the environmental quality of its devel-
opment and the maintenance of its landscapes in the years of the boom were re-
cursively informed by a set of sociopolitical conditions determined, in equal parts,
by Cold War politics, the compelling needs of postwar reconstruction, and the
peculiarities of the country’s patronage and lobbying systems.

7
Nuclear-Free Montana
Grassroots Environmentalism and
Montana’s Antinuclear Initiatives
Brian James Leech
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
In November 1978, four months before the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating
Station meltdown made nuclear power anathema in the United States, Montana
residents had already put firm restrictions on it by voting to approve Initiative
80 (I-80). I-80 barred all nuclear facilities and reactors from the state unless they
both were ratified by popular referendum and met strict, state-enforced regulato-
ry standards. In that same election, one Montana county declared itself the first
“nuclear-free zone” in the nation. While many nuclear-free zone votes happened
later in the United States, Missoula County’s decision was not only the earliest,
but also, unlike most of the others, as associated with concerns about nuclear pow-
er as nuclear war. Cold War fears, safety concerns, environmentalist values, and
backlash toward 1970s energy development had whittled away at the American
West’s dedication to nuclear power. By deciding to place restrictions on nuclear
development, Montana voters reversed their stance from just two years before.
Perhaps most surprisingly, Montanans’ initiatives emerged in the absence of a ma-
jor nuclear facility or even firm plans to build one.
The topic of nuclear weapons and power in the American West has become an
important subject of study in recent years. The leading book on the atomic West
explains that the federal government located important nuclear facilities across the
West, partly because so many saw its undeveloped land as empty space. Plutonium
manufacturing in Washington State allowed the government to make bombs, then
blow them up at testing sites in the southwestern desert. Pollution often resulted.1
Another important branch of historical research on the nuclear West focuses on
communities near uranium mines. Miners faced significant, yet purposefully hid-
den, health risks, including cancer and death. Many Native Americans, whether as
116
mine workers or as members of nearby communities, shared these horrible risks.
So did crops and animals living downwind of radioactive work.2
All of these stories are worth telling, but they have overshadowed the history
of the antinuclear activists in the American West who primarily fought against
nuclear power. Only a few historians, such as Thomas Wellock, have paid the topic
close attention, despite the fact that, as Kyle Harvey has recently argued, the anti-
nuclear movement in the United States was primarily an antinuclear power move-
ment during the 1970s. The visibility of power plants made them more immediate
targets than nuclear weapons, which only reemerged as a major concern later in
the decade.3
Embedding nuclear power protests not only in Cold War narratives but also
in the history of regional energy development provides historians with a new per-
spective on the environmental movement. Most studies of the U.S. environmental
movement tend to ignore regional differences and focus instead on other societal
divisions, like race, class, and gender, or on place divisions, like urban, suburban,
and rural.4 Yet James Morton Turner has shown the advantages of looking through
a regional lens. According to his book The American Wilderness, U.S. fights over
environmental reform, which became prominent during the late 1970s and early
1980s, were driven more by western residents’ anger about public lands protection
than others’ concern for public health threats, which had previously been the ma-
jor rallying issue.5 This chapter shows that additional elements of 1970s environ-
mental politics, particularly when it comes to energy debates, look different from
the vantage point of the U.S. West.
Some scholars have examined elements of the West’s 1970s energy boom,
but they often overlook how paradoxical it seemed during an era in which the
conservation of both natural landscapes and energy became paramount national
concerns. Lee Scamehorn, one of the few to examine environmentalism and the
western energy boom, explains that “there is no evidence to suggest that environ-
mental controls of the 1970s prevented, or even perceptibly slowed, the expan-
sion of energy production in the West.” He even implies that environmentalists
failed to ask for more than companies were willing to give, an argument that is not
supported by Montana’s nuclear story.6 Indeed, Thomas Wellock has shown that
the American West’s “populist and progressive heritage continued to empower
Western citizens in a way that few Eastern states could match.”7 This heritage in-
cludes direct democracy: local referenda and state initiatives about nuclear power
became common across the West, including in Montana.
By examining Montana’s fight over nuclear power, this chapter argues that
1970s energy debates in the U.S. West, compounded by Cold War fears, encour-
Nuclear-Free Montana 117

aged a truly grassroots-driven environmental movement. Protests against nuclear
energy in Montana in the 1970s were not driven primarily by economic concerns,
as Daniel Pope suggests was the case in Washington State. The situation in Mon-
tana looks more similar to the diverse attitudes Thomas Wellock described in Cal-
ifornia, including anti-materialist concerns and populism amongst farmers and
ranchers.8 A discourse analysis suggests that Montana activists succeeded in 1978
because of two big ideas, one of which was common across the world, and the
other of which was more particular to western states like Montana.9 First, the Cold
War stoked long-standing fears about environmental and human health. J. Samuel
Walker has stated that for much of the American public, “the key issue was the
connection between nuclear power and nuclear bombs.”10 The same held true in
Montana. Second, anger about outside companies and federal interference galva-
nized regional and state pride. In sparsely populated western states like Montana,
the scale of politics was so small and yet the potential for energy development so
big, that awareness of and resentment toward outsiders’ influence could be mobi-
lized with great speed and force. Montana in particular had a history of corporate
domination in the areas of natural resource extraction and energy. For decades,
both the Anaconda Company and the Montana Power Company had tremendous
influence in the state. Activists were able to use potent anti-corporate resentment
to their advantage.
Nuclear Excitement and Fear in Montana

Few would include Montana on a list of western states affected by nuclear de-
velopment, nor as a hotbed of grassroots environmentalism. Yet during the first
decades of the Cold War, Montana experienced a minor boom in uranium explo-
ration, its citizens fought for (and against) nuclear research, and a number of its
local activists became important figures in the national debate about radioactivity.
Montana’s initial encounters with the nuclear age, however, are perhaps best
seen as near misses. A federally subsidized uranium boom in the 1950s encouraged
Americans to head for the West’s open spaces. Accompanying this excitement was
a pop culture explosion of atomic-themed toys, music, and movies.11 A branch of-
fice for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) operated in Butte, Montana,
during the early 1950s. The office served as a base to investigate uranium deposits
in Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Uranium mining commenced, with
the first Montana mine opening in 1949. Excitement about uranium meant that,
even toward the end of Montana’s prospecting boom, one Helena resident had
opened a “uranium prospector’s supply center” and sold “27 Geiger counters in
the last two weeks.”12 Little uranium was found in the area, though, so the field
office shifted to Spokane, Washington, in 1955.
118 Brian James Leech

There were also a few failed attempts to place a major nuclear research facility
in the state’s open spaces. One came in 1948, when a federal energy commission
committee listed Fort Peck, a Missouri River dam site on the northeastern Mon-
tana plains, as one of two finalists for an experimental breeder reactor. Despite
meeting the conditions that the head of the commission had set out, including
the site’s remoteness, abundant water, and undeveloped land, Fort Peck lost out
to a spot near Idaho Falls, Idaho, where the government already owned land.13
Another attempt came in 1965, when the AEC placed the Jocko Valley, a beautiful
mountain valley in northwest Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation, on a list of
contenders for a $280 million National Accelerator Laboratory.14 Support came
from the nearby city of Missoula’s chamber of commerce and the state’s senators,
but nearby ranchers and Natives on the reservation gave mixed responses.15 The
valley failed to make the list of the final six candidates, perhaps partly due to resi-
dents’ caution toward the laboratory.16
Montanans’ mixed responses to nuclear development became driven by a
group of University of Montana academics, including Meyer Chessin and Burt
Pfeiffer, who formed the Western Montana Scientists’ Committee for Radiation
Information (WMSCRI) in 1960. They had joined the science information move-
ment, whose advocates believed scientists had a social obligation to provide cit-
izens with accessible information so that they could engage in public policy de-
bates.17 They distributed information about radioactive by-products in milk and
the ineffectiveness of fallout shelters. Because of groups like the WMSCRI, more
people in the United States began to fear nuclear weapons and to distrust federal
regulators. The movement thus influenced the October 1963 Limited Test Ban
Treaty, which prohibited atomic weapons testing by the Cold War superpowers in
every environment but underground, thereby shielding much of the world from
radiation’s effects.18
The AEC worked hard to promote nuclear energy’s brand. It sponsored trav-
eling lectures about the “peaceful applications of nuclear energy,” but a growing
undercurrent of unease greeted new attempts at development.19 A 1969 AEC pro-
posal centered on eastern Montana’s supposedly empty plains. The AEC was look-
ing for testing sites for Operation Plowshare. This program sought to identify and
refine peaceful uses of nuclear power. In this case, Carter County, in southwestern
Montana, became a candidate for nuclear earthmoving experiments.20
The targeting of Carter County reactivated Montanans’ Cold War fears. Farm-
ers worried about losing productive land; environmentalists cited wildlife and wa-
ter concerns.21 An anti-government attitude was not hard to detect. Resident Carl
Jansky asked his senators about the “plan to blow up Eastern Montana,” noting
that the AEC was bigger than the Montana Power Company, a very powerful cor-

poration, and “twice as tough to break.”22 Peacetime construction, in his view, was
not a reason to “pollute, bust and otherwise rape Carter County.”23
The AEC eventually cancelled this earthmoving program, but the prospect
reinforced nuclear worries.24 Throughout the early 1970s, Montana residents
wrote to their senators, expressing concern about radiation standards, cancer, and
the environment.25 The national press had similarly begun to worry. One author
pointed to the “hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive mill wastes” used
as fill in western town construction as well as the radium contamination of Lake
Mead, the Colorado River, and the Great Salt Lake. He questioned the AEC’s reg-
ulation of western nuclear sites because it “finances, licenses, regulates, and polices
itself.”26 As the historian Eric Mogren notes, “popular media often sensationalized
the pollution,” but the contamination of towns like Grand Junction, Colorado,
due to mill tailings signaled “rapidly eroding public faith in the AEC” across the
Rocky Mountains by the early 1970s.27
The American West as Energy Savior

An oil shortage convinced many to put aside these concerns, albeit briefly. In the
decades leading up to 1973, a colonial system that had kept Middle Eastern oil
under the control of Western powers had broken apart. Suddenly these nations
became oil powers and many of them decided to protest against Israel and its ma-
jor allies, including the United States. The resulting protest became the Organiza-
tion of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) embargo. The resulting
oil shortage in 1973–1974 hit Americans particularly hard, especially because oil
imports had grown tremendously since World War II. Although the oil shortage
itself had political origins, it seemed to represent a bigger problem to many Amer-
icans. Lines at gas stations stretched around city blocks.28 As a result, President
Nixon enacted Project Independence, which called for further exploration of na-
tive energy sources as a way to replace foreign oil.29
Because domestic resource exploration had long centered on the American
West, the 1970s crisis meant a concerted search for new energy out West.30 Al-
though hydroelectric power had been significant to mid-century development,
the search for energy no longer centered on water.31 The U.S. Department of the
Interior offered massive tracts of land in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming for the
production of an unconventional form of oil, called oil shale.32 A corporate mis-
sion also began digging for low-sulfur coal under both the Colorado Plateau and
the Northern Plains of Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana.33 Even the AEC
became involved in coal-extraction research, looking at new possibilities for gassi-
fication and reclamation.34
Districts in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona became the

center of a renewed uranium boom. The AEC initially held a monopoly on urani-
um procurement, but in 1964 President Lyndon Johnson signed a law that gave
private companies the right to own fissionable material. The AEC had also grad-
ually declassified its literature on reactor technology. These two events helped to
touch off a fierce battle between Westinghouse and General Electric to build new
reactors. Others soon jumped on the free market bandwagon.35 Uranium mining
communities, which the historian Michael Amundson calls “Yellowcake Towns,”
after the industry term for unprocessed uranium ore, therefore experienced pop-
ulation growth and an economic boom.36 A 1973 Atomic Energy Commission re-
port showed that the Colorado Plateau and the Wyoming Basin housed a full 81
percent of known U.S. uranium ore reserves, with another 14 percent elsewhere
in the West. The industry planned to use this ore at new nuclear plants across the
region.37
The historian Andrew Gulliford makes clear the importance of and excitement
around this energy boom. “Of all the mining booms that built and shaped the
American West,” he writes, “beginning with the California and Nevada ‘rushes’ of
the nineteenth century and progressing through the booms in Idaho, Montana,
Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico, none can compare in intensity to the energy
boom of the 1970s.”38 With the boom came 40 percent population growth across
the West during that decade.39
Many westerners feared, in the words of Jack Barnett, executive director of the
Western States Water Council, that “high priority national energy development
plans” might reduce the rights of western states and their residents.40 As Gary J.
Wicks, Montana’s director of the Department of Natural Resources and Conser-
vation, put it, “the conflict between a goal of energy self-sufficiency and the future
of this state’s resources is of paramount concern to Montana’s citizens.”41 Members
of western communities therefore turned to environmental activism. Many plains
and mountains residents had not yet joined the environmental movement; yet by
the mid-1970s, a number of unlikely parties banded together against major energy
projects.
Grassroots environmentalism grew in the 1970s due to a set of movements in
Western Europe, the United States, and Canada that sought increased participa-
tory democracy. Young people involved in movements for college campus reform,
civil rights, women’s rights, and environmental action had at least one thing in
common—a belief in the expansion of free speech. Their demands soon became
inscribed into law.42 New federal and state laws, like the National Environmental
Policy Act of 1970, provided citizen activists with a greater ability to affect govern-
ment decisions. Acts like these required public notice of, and public participation
in, the review process for new developments. Citizens could even appeal agency

decisions. Testifying at hearings became environmental action. As more citizens
participated, they began to expect more say in all environmental matters. For the
historian Cody Ferguson, the Northern Plains Resource Council’s (NPRC) fight
against coal development in eastern Montana is a perfect example of this kind of
democratic action.43
Seeking to protect their property from coal development, ranchers and farm-
ers joined with young members of the burgeoning environmental movement.
Both groups worried about the effects of outside coal companies on plains ecolo-
gy, with many seeing the challenge as a continuation of the state’s long history of
corporate exploitation.44 The NPRC’s first director was a twenty-three-year-old
urbanite named Kit Muller. Longtime ranchers and farmers filled the other lead-
ership positions. As the rancher John Redding explained, “I’m not a radical and
I’m not an environmentalist. Two years ago I wouldn’t have talked to a guy with
long hair. Then we got in trouble, and nobody would help us except our close
neighbors and kids working for the Council that everybody else said were hip-
pies.”45 Under pressure from the NPRC, the 1973 legislature voted in a number of
landmark laws, including one that required the reclamation of lands after the strip
mining of coal. That law later served as the model for the national Surface Mining
Control and Reclamation Act of 1977.
The 1976 Nuclear Safeguards Initiative

The story of NPRC’s success is not an outlier. The suddenness and scale of en-
ergy development at this time triggered a sizeable resistance. Unlike residents of
other regions, many western states’ residents had a particularly powerful protest
tool: the direct ballot process. They could use ballot initiatives or referendums in
addition to direct action. Critical Mass, a Ralph Nader–led organization, encour-
aged the placement of ballot measures about nuclear power before the public and
they targeted western states. In 1976 Ohio joined six western states with ballot
referendums, which were dubbed the Nuclear Safeguards Initiatives.46 Each ini-
tiative placed a number of restrictions on the location and construction of new
nuclear power plants. These initiatives infuriated the chairman of the U.S. House
Subcommittee on Energy Research and Development, Mike McCormack. Call-
ing antinuclear campaigns across the American West “totally fraudulent,” McCor-
mack publicly defended nuclear power’s safety, employment numbers, and utility
in light of the energy crisis.47
The first and most vigorous opposition to nuclear plants in the American West
came from environmentalists.48 In 1976, after activists gathered almost sixteen
thousand signatures, the Montana referendum, known as Initiative 71 (I-71) ap-
peared on the ballot. I-71 would have required state legislative approval of any

nuclear facility and it asked for additional safeguards beyond the federal limits.49
Although Montana faced no immediate plans for a plant, an “11th hour” battle
still ensued.50 A relatively small environmental group, known as the Montanans
for Safe Power, was the only organized proponent of the measure. It was led by
a “newcomer” to the state, Ed Dobson, a student at Eastern Montana College.51
Despite the group’s address in eastern Montana, the initiative found its sup-
port base in western Montana, particularly Missoula.52 One decade removed from
a central role in the fight for nuclear research in the Jocko Valley, Missoula now
played an increasingly important role in the fight against nuclear power. One rea-
son for this shift was the work of Meyer Chessin and Burt Pfeiffer, University of
Montana academics who had led the WMSCRI. They continued to push against
Cold War weaponry, sometimes under the umbrella name of the Committee on
Nuclear Strategy.53 Chessin’s mission gained the support of the People’s Voice, a
weekly pro-labor publication produced in Helena. The publisher’s leftist skepti-
cism of government and industry made him receptive to Chessin’s worries about
nuclear power reactors and lax federal regulation.54
The Missoula area had also experienced a well-publicized nuclear materials fire
on the Burlington-Northern Railway in 1971. On March 31, 1971, natural and low-
ly enriched uranium rods arrived in the Missoula yards from the Hanford, Wash-
ington, nuclear facility. During a routine boxcar check, railroad employees discov-
ered a fire. The emergency response was comprehensive, but slow. Hanford’s AEC
office sent a health physicist, Idaho Falls’ nuclear reactor testing center sent an
emergency team, the Montana State Department of Health sent a representative,
and the air force base in Great Falls, Montana, sent a decontamination team; yet
all of them arrived many hours after the Missoula Fire Department had extin-
guished the fire. Fearing that the uranium had vaporized, thereby contaminating
the entire area, the AEC conducted scans of everyone and every place involved.55
News coverage was dramatic, but it also repeated the safety assurances given by
AEC representatives.56 Memories of this event and the increased participation of
University of Montana students and academics made Missoula the home base for
antinuclear activism, as represented by the grassroots group Montanans for Safe
Power.
Opposition to Montanans for Safe Power came from the Montanans Against
71 Committee, led by a prominent lawyer and the Western Environmental Trade
Association (WETA). One newspaper labeled the WETA “a highly organized
coalition of almost every industrial labor, business, professional, banking, and
economic power structure in the state.”57 Members of the group had long hosted
out-of-state speakers, who promoted nuclear energy as important to the region’s
future needs.58

Montanans Against 71 ran an efficient, well-financed campaign that focused on
two key arguments. The first was that new safeguards on atomic power amounted
to an outright ban. Such safeguards included extensive, expensive comprehensive
testing, which would require additional state expenditures, and a repeal of federal
no-fault insurance, which relieved each company operating a plant of responsi-
bility for most accidents. In the view of Montanans Against 71, a ban was unwise
in light of the 1974 energy shortage, a shortage the group labeled “simply a dress
rehearsal for a very real and inescapable crisis.”59
The group assured residents that both the federal and state governments had
already placed adequate regulations on nuclear plants. The existing 1973 Montana
Major Facilities Siting Act required the State Board of Natural Resources to ap-
prove new energy development, and this board included environmental and hu-
man safety in its considerations. The group also noted that the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission continually monitored already functioning, safe plants.60
To promote these arguments, the group’s out-of-state backers sent letters to
their Montana stockholders. Backers included many electric utilities, like Consol-
idated Edison, Philadelphia Electric Company, and Middle South Utilities. Each
letter emphasized how safe, economic, and necessary nuclear power was during
an energy crisis. 61 During the 1960s and 1970s, such arguments were common
among nuclear advocates, who believed strongly in the power of technology and
management to solve the world’s energy problems.62 One company’s letter even
played on Montanans’ concerns about the environmental impact of coal mining.
It warned, “if citizens in other states abandon their nuclear options—which adop-
tion of Initiative #71 would do in Montana—pressures will be brought to bear to
accelerate coal production in your state.”63
I-71’s opponents financially dominated their competition. Montanans for
State Power, the primary organization in favor of I-71, recorded receipts that bare-
ly made it into the hundreds of dollars every few weeks. Indeed, the group took
in only $517.03 during the fall campaign. Contributions came from organizations
like the Montana Public Interest Research Group, a student activist group at the
University of Montana, and a few individuals, who donated in the tens of dollars
and listed jobs such as “student,” “chef,” “cocktail waitress,” and “unemployed.”64
In comparison, the Montanans Against 71 Committee took in $145,047 over
the same period. Many donors were utilities, like the Bechtel Power Corpora-
tion, which donated $10,000; natural resource companies, like the Weyerhaeuser
Company, which gave $2,500; and big industrial energy users, like Boeing, which
contributed $2,000.65
Initiative 71 failed. So did all of the similar 1976 “Nuclear Safeguards” initiatives
in other states. The margins of victory, however, were relatively narrow—about

30 percent of voters in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Washington wanted
more say in nuclear plant construction. Montana and Oregon best showcased the
region’s ambivalence. Oregonians registered 42 percent in favor of nuclear safe-
guards, while Montanans stood at 41 percent.66
The 1978 Battle of the Bans

Despite their disappointment in 1976, Montana’s antinuclear activists rebound-
ed in 1977. A bill that year prohibited the dumping of large amounts of nuclear
waste from other states in Montana. Environmentalists drove the bill to passage,
but they benefitted from the continued perception that the West’s recent energy
development had benefitted those from outside of the region, while leaving the re-
fuse behind. The bill’s supporters agreed with Montana senator Lee Metcalf, who
stood “strongly opposed to the use of Montana as a dumping ground.”67
Environmental groups used this success as a springboard for a new initiative,
which went before the voters in 1978. I-80 empowered voters to approve pro-
posed nuclear facilities directly, while also placing five major restrictions on their
construction. This time the battle was more even. As in 1976, opponents primarily
tried to label the initiative as a ban. They repeatedly listed some of the supposedly
unreasonable safeguards to be placed on a new nuclear facility to prove how dif-
ficult it would be for a company to meet them. Such safeguards included a “costly
bond” equal to 30 percent of the capital cost of a facility, which was to be placed
on companies to pay for the later decommissioning of defunct plants. In their view
such a ban was unconscionable because both the nation and region still faced an
energy shortage. Taking any energy source off the table would leave the United
States vulnerable.68 They even appealed to the Montana Supreme Court, claiming
the initiative was improperly named, as it was so strict that first, it amounted to
a ban (and hence, it deserved that title), and second, it took radiation regulation
out of federal hands where it belonged.69 Many of their newspaper ads featured
simple proclamations like “Vote Against 80,” with “Ban” written multiple times in
the background.70
The Montana Supreme Court rejected their plea, so opponents turned to eco-
nomic arguments. Replicating the federal regulatory bodies with state ones would
prove costly, they said, as would the costs associated with the bond, which would
be passed on to consumers through higher utility rates.71 As in 1976, the initiative’s
opponents were well-funded and propelled by power companies and out-of-state
corporations, who feared a hit to their bottom line, especially if a successful fight
against nuclear power in Montana spread to other states. Hence, as in 1976, letters
to stockholders flooded into Montana from companies like Pacific Power & Light.
Each letter tended to make the same set of claims. The preemption of federal reg-

ulatory authority and new insurance requirements would be costly and perhaps
illegal. The possibility of Montana-based uranium mining would end. Even if pow-
er companies maintained extensive coal reserves, wrote Pacific Power & Light’s
chairman, “nuclear is an essential part of the Western regional energy mix.”72
I-80’s proponents focused particularly on safety, liability, and environmental
issues, tying them together with anti-government rhetoric, Cold War fears, and
regional pride in a beautiful environment. They had clearly become savvier since
1976. Activists pointed to fears about long-running Cold War tensions between
the United States and Western Europe’s capitalist nations on the one side versus
Communist powers, particularly the Soviet Union, on the other. Because of the
atomic weaponry at these superpowers’ disposal, many still worried this “cold”
war would lead to a “hot,” deadly, war.
Antinuclear activists also knew that Montanans were particularly susceptible to
anti-corporate language. The 1970s rush to exploit Montana’s coal had put many
residents on edge, turning a number of locals concerned about their backyards
into environmentalists. The state had also long suffered under domination by the
twin powers of the Anaconda Company, which controlled southwest Montana’s
mines, and the Montana Power Company, which had begun as an Anaconda off-
shoot and had recently been building coal-generating plants in eastern Montana.
Both companies had long had their way with the state legislature. Anaconda had
even owned all but one of the state’s major daily newspapers until 1959.73 Once
the state’s press was truly freed, though, newspapers became an increasingly im-
portant medium for transmitting scientific expertise and protest practices.74
So did college campuses. Students at the University of Montana effectively
combined different strains of antinuclear thought. In October 1978 the Progres-
sive Student Union joined with the student government to host Nuclear Aware-
ness Week. During the event, talks about the broader history of energy develop-
ment in Montana were paired with presentations about radiation and nuclear war.
Organizers made some attempt at balance by including a speaker who covered the
positive economic impact of nuclear development, but the bulk of activities were
clearly antinuclear. Students organized a march, a workshop on grassroots orga-
nizing, and showed films such as the popular satire of Cold War nuclear enthusi-
asm, Dr. Strangelove.75 The scientist-activist Meyer Chessin gave a talk in which he
explained that Montana was facing what much of the West already had: uranium
mining, nuclear power plants, and weapons build-up. Like Nuclear Awareness
Week itself, Chessin paired his discussion of the dangers of nuclear power with
the dangers of a possible nuclear war with the Soviet Union, wrapping them to-
gether as a major environmental health crisis.76 Such talks brought awareness to
the student body, only a month before the November election.

The student body had also become energized because Missoula had a local
initiative of its own. The Missoula County Ban Petition came in the form of a
land-use ordinance. It sought to zone the entire county as a nuclear-free district,
effectively banning nuclear power plants and other facilities. The Headwaters Alli-
ance Political Action Committee, based in Missoula, became a leading supporter
of both the local zoning ordinance and the statewide initiative. Its campaign liter-
ature included a number of fact sheets, which it began to distribute in the summer
of 1978. One handout began by simply arguing that “nuclear power is NOT clean,
safe, or cheap.” It proceeded to list environmental health concerns, including that
“radioactive wastes from nuclear powerplants remain lethal to all living things for
thousands of years.” Radioactive materials, whether from mines or waste, could
lead to cancer, the sheet claimed, and they were nearly impossible to store safe-
ly. The sheet does mention some economic factors, but mostly to emphasize the
“health and pollution costs that will be eventually be paid by tax dollars.” One sec-
tion connects nuclear power to Cold War political battles by suggesting that “the
worst by-product of nuclear fission is plutonium”—a product that “can be split
by neutrons so it can be used to make atomic bombs.” The given example is India,
which “built its bomb with fuel from a commercial reactor.” The handout pointed
to alternative energy sources, like solar and wind, and energy conservation as safer
solutions to the energy crisis.77
Additional campaign literature distributed by the Headwaters’ Alliance con-
tinued the practice of anti-corporate and anti-federal government rhetoric. One
fact sheet expressed fears that “we are about to entrust the very habitability of the
earth to the energy industry—the same industry which brought us unnecessary
pollution from coal and cars, oil spills, and strip mining.” In their view, energy
companies and the federal government were colluding to hide the true conse-
quences of nuclear power. Such literature also continued to connect the nuclear
power industry to nuclear weapons. That same sheet reminds the reader that “plu-
tonium is equally ‘useful’ as a fuel (like uranium) for nuclear power plants, and
as a material to make atomic bombs.”78 In an attempt to make the issue feel more
immediate to Montana voters, the Headwaters’ Alliance claimed that one unpub-
licized federal study had suggested six Montana rivers as possible sites for a nucle-
ar power plant.79
The local organization focused solely on Missoula’s initiative, Nuclear Free
Missoula, distributed buttons and shirts across the city. Its campaign materials
fought opponents by first attempting to rebut their economic arguments. It at-
tacked taxpayer-funded subsidies given to companies for capital-intensive plants,
then it claimed that other means of energy production required more labor and
hence more permanent jobs. The emphasis, however, lay on unsafe plant waste

and the “normal, low-level radiation,” that endangered both Montana’s “agricul-
tural and water resources” and the region’s residents.80 To highlight environmental
health, the group used the image of a trout jumping out of a mountain river as its
logo. The trout is reaching to devour a small, fly-sized atomic symbol (an atom
surrounded by orbiting electrons).
To showcase radioactive risks, a Nuclear Free Missoula pamphlet mentions a
number of leaks from a temporary waste storage facility at the Hanford Works
in Washington State. It then cites an internal federal memo, alleging high cancer
rates among Hanford’s workers. Nuclear power was thus linked to Cold War issues
through a discussion of the Hanford Works, where most of the plutonium used in
U.S. nuclear weapons had been produced.81 Nuclear Free Missoula continued a
pattern of focusing on environmental health while communicating their concerns
with a healthy dose of anti-corporate, anti-federal rhetoric.
In mid-October Missoula hosted a “Nuclear Power Debate,” which featured
foes and supporters of the two nuclear ballot issues. The pronuclear representa-
tives were two engineers from the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which the
Missoulian described as “a corporate energy giant.” The Missoula environmen-
talist Jean Curry spoke alongside a nuclear economist from New York, Charles
Komanoff. The newspaper labeled the pronuclear side as representing “out of state
interests.”82
The engineers, Anne Pauley and John Kaufmann, attempted to frame the de-
bate as being about nuclear versus coal development, pointing out that, under I-80,
nuclear power plants would face stricter guidelines than coal-fired plants, despite
the fact that coal, they claimed, had contributed to far more deaths through air
pollution than nuclear power. Despite not being a great supporter of coal, Koma-
noff explained that at least its dangers were well-known, while researchers were
only now uncovering the long-lasting effects of atomic waste. Put in the uncom-
fortable position of defending coal, even if briefly, Curry and Komanoff suggested
that the transition to renewable fuels, not coal or nuclear, was necessary.83
The debate then turned to healthy people and landscapes. Curry and Koma-
noff suggested that nuclear safety should be questioned due to the deaths of three
workers at the Idaho Falls complex in 1961 and the many reported leaks at the
Hanford facility. The engineers’ rebuttal was that the accidents had occurred at
federal facilities, not at commercial plants. In the wake of the recent Watergate
scandal, their implication that government operations might be prone to secrecy
and bungling surely added to their case.84 Still, the link between federal and com-
mercial facilities continued to be strong in antinuclear rhetoric.
After the debate, an editorial in the Missoulian written by Sam Reynolds came

out in favor of I-80, suggesting that the nuclear industry’s “out-of-state drumbeat-
ers” should not be given the pleasure of victory. It reiterated points from the de-
bate, underlining how expensive and dangerous both waste storage and cleanup
had become. Accompanying the editorial was a cartoon that featured what one
reader called “a dragon-like freak” in a lab coat. An atomic symbol haloed the mon-
ster’s head and its gaping mouth. The beast, labeled “Mr. Clean,” asked the viewer
to “Set Me Free” from an Initiative 80 ball and chain. The point was clear—Mon-
tanans had to keep the nuclear monster under control.85
The I-80 fight made for odd bedfellows. Environmental groups like the Head-
waters Alliance led the way, joined by a number of prominent Democrats and the
Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, Larry Williams, who was breaking with
the traditional alliance between his party and energy development, especially in
the guise of the Montana Power Company.86 By late October I-80 proponents,
who up to that time had only pointed to alternative energies like solar, were in-
creasingly willing to promote conventional energy sources as a way to gain votes.
Following the Missoula debate, the Headwaters Alliance brought Charles Koma-
noff to the state capital. He explained to both the Public Service Commission and
the Montana Energy Office that coal plants were much cheaper to build and main-
tain than nuclear ones. Komanoff concluded, “Montana is the least economical
place in the country for a nuclear plant because coal is so readily available.”87
Supporting coal must have been a bitter pill for many I-80 advocates to swallow,
but Komanoff ’s speech shows that Headwaters Alliance members were aware of
new federal energy research. Montana was a central testing station for magneto-
hydrodynamics (MHD), which was a form of energy production that worked by
burning coal at high temperatures to interact with a magnetic field. Researchers
thought the process could turn dirty coal “clean” by converting coal energy to
electricity more efficiently. Montana senator John Melcher thought that MHD, a
locally resourced and researched technology, had such positive prospects that it
inspired Montanans to reject I-80.88 MHD likely had little influence, though, judg-
ing by the rhetoric surrounding the nuclear debate.
A more convincing reason for voters’ growing support of I-80 came one week
before the vote. An anti-I-80 group known as Montanans for Jobs and Energy
brought four speakers to Helena. The team included a Washington, DC, publisher,
the director of the University of Texas Nuclear Engineering Program, the leader
of an energy research group in Massachusetts, and a public relations specialist for
North Carolina’s Duke Power Company. The speakers warned of the initiative’s
possible effects on international relations, but the journalists present were more
interested in the speakers themselves. A spokesman for Montanans for Jobs and

Energy had to defend the group’s continued reliance on out-of-state speakers.
Spokesman Joe Duffy claimed that Montana simply didn’t have many people with
nuclear expertise.89
When asked about the group’s reliance on out-of-state money as well, Duffy
faltered a bit, claiming that nuclear power was a national issue, so many people
had a stake in the outcome. In fact, his group of I-80 opponents had received more
than $200,000 in campaign contributions by early November, a full 90 percent
of which had come from out of state.90 As in 1976, the final totals starkly differed:
anti-initiative forces had collected $216,000 in contributions, while pro-initiative
groups had raised only $11,700.91 Duffy shot back that the other side’s “primary
organizers” also came from out of state, but he failed to name anyone other than
Mike Males, who had helped organize the grassroots group Nuclear Vote. Fellow
Nuclear Vote organizer, Jim Barngrover, quickly responded, asserting that third-
generation Montanans made up most of his group.92
Of course, anti-initiative forces also included Montanans—just a few days
later Duffy organized a demonstration against I-80 “radicals” that featured sixty
local union workers—but the pronuclear faction looked increasingly like inter-
lopers, similar to the outsiders running new coal, oil, and gas operations across
the West.93 Citizens Against the Nuclear Ban and Montanans for Jobs and Energy
committed a serious faux pas that same day. The pronuclear forces placed a large
advertisement featuring the names of sixty-nine Montanans “who have worked
long and hard to tell you the truth about I-80.” When the Missoulian reached out
to two locals on the list, it found that neither of them had given the groups per-
mission to have their names published. They sounded bemused when contacted,
as they both actually supported I-80. McCarthy Coyle of the Headwaters Alliance
jumped on the opportunity, decrying his opponents’ “lies and deception.” Nine
Democratic state lawmakers joined Coyle in protest. They issued a joint statement
against the “out-of-state interests” who had funded “hundreds of television, radio,
and newspaper ads intended to misrepresent the measure and mislead voters.”94
During the immediate run-up to the vote, I-80 opponents had run four to five
radio and television ads per hour.95
Rather amazingly, the I-80 vote on November 7, 1978, produced an outcome
opposite of the vote held just two years before. In 1978, 65 percent of Montanans
voted for I-80, whereas only 41 percent had voted for I-71 two years before. Mis-
soula County’s nuclear ban also passed, 15,991–10,560. “We’re first in the nation,”
McCarthy Coyle celebrated.96 I-80’s opponents claimed that voters were confused
by the wording or simply in “emotional upheaval.” Proponents thought that “the
attempts by out-of-state corporations to buy the election backfired,” in the words
of Matthew Jordan, a leader of the Headwaters Alliance.97

Post-election analysis in the Great Falls Tribune suggests that Jordan was onto
something. According to the Tribune, I-80 opponents had relied on big events and
an enormous number of ads, but they “were not geared up to work on a more local
level.” I-80 opponents had simply become “too heavy handed” in attempting to in-
timidate voters with scientific experts and big-name, out-of-state promoters. They
hadn’t gone door-to-door, like the unpaid citizen activists in antinuclear environ-
mental groups. The public availability of campaign finance information meant
everyone knew that the Westinghouse Electric Corporation continually flew in
speakers and engineers, while out-of-state nuclear power firms joined General
Electric as the biggest donors.98
Such donors clearly contributed to some citizens’ sense of powerlessness. This
feeling could quickly rebound when I-80 proponents suggested to Montanans
that the initiative could give them a say in future energy development.99 As one
letter writer explained, “we dare not let ‘leaders’ make choices for us . . . vote for
your right to choose. Support Initiative 80.”100 Another letter in the newspaper
put the issue even more starkly; “Who should you believe on election day? Those
who buy deceptive advertising with money provided by out-of-state corporations
seeking to protect their profits at Montana’s expense? Or Montanans who are try-
ing to retain the power to protect their state?”101 Similar arguments appealed to
anti-big-government sympathies. A group of Montana State University students,
for instance, explained they supported I-80 because “Montanans need the pow-
er to choose among promising energy alternatives, rather than having any one
choice imposed on us by federal or regional agencies.”102
This kind of populist rhetoric was particularly effective in Montana. The state
had faced recent outside energy development as well as a history of corporate
domination. As one article argued, the Anaconda Mining Company had essential-
ly ruled Montana as a corporate colony for decades. As the author noted, “citizens
are still reacting to that domination” through their antinuclear votes.103
County voting data suggests that the state’s growing urban areas were one
key factor in the victory. Sizeable majorities for the initiative typically came from
Montana’s cities, but agricultural areas often showed support, too, which suggests
that the issue, and activists for the issue, managed to cross an often stark urban-
rural divide.104 Indeed, I-80 had gained the endorsement of the Montana Farmer’s
Union, which appreciated the protections from radiation that it offered to their
landscapes and livelihoods. They also worried about federally sponsored corpo-
rate raiders, as many had faced off against coal developers on the Plains. The Mon-
tana Farmer’s Union gave the measure a 2–1 margin.105
Montanans’ victory joined a higher-profile, yet also surprising, success against
nuclear power in 1978—one that similarly crossed the urban-rural divide. Earli-

er that year citizens of Wasco, California, voted against the San Joaquin Nuclear
Project, a nuclear power plant already in development. Urban dwellers worried
about radioactivity, while others feared that Los Angeles would rob Central Val-
ley farmers of their water. As in Montana, disparate groups thus joined together.
The critique of nuclear power, according to the historian Thomas Wellock, was
“moored” in environmentalists’ values, which focused on physical and spiritual
amenities but, parallel to Montana, the protest later spread to “populist elements”
who appreciated the “anti-authoritarian, anti-federal government rhetoric.”106
West Germany had similarly built its 1970s environmental movement through an
urban-rural partnership, one partly created to protest a nuclear power plant, the
Wyhl in southern Baden. Claims for greater participatory democracy followed.107
The 1980s and Crises Averted

The frantic search for energy resources came to an end in the 1980s. The spigot of
foreign oil had been turned back on, and so, to most Americans, the 1970s crisis
felt like an anomaly in a long history of oil abundance. The Reagan administration
backed some alternative sources of energy at first, but withdrew from those ef-
forts as oil regained its promise.108 With the lack of federal backing for new energy
sources, much of the American West experienced a true bust.109 Perhaps the best
documented bust happened in oil shale. When the price of oil dropped below $30
a barrel, Exxon quickly pulled out from western Colorado’s shale lands in 1982,
leaving behind an angry, confused population.110 Coal development slowed slight-
ly in a few sections of the American West, even if it was far more successful.111
The uranium build-up ended due to a combination of factors, including con-
tinued environmental action, overproduction, and delays in plant construction.
Uranium producers could not compete against the lower cost of foreign imports.
Their petitions to the Reagan administration were in vain, as the government was
no longer interested in being the main arbiter of the uranium market. Many Cold
War “yellowcake towns” therefore dried up. Their unemployment rates soared and
property values collapsed.112
Despite the diminished threat, a number of grassroots groups in the American
West maintained their strength. The Northern Plains Resource Council contin-
ued to bring ranchers and environmentalists together. By 1979 the failure of inter-
national détente and the resulting rise of more militaristic politicians created what
some have called the “Second Cold War.”113 Worries about a potential nuclear war
returned. In Montana, antiwar and antinuclear activists pulled together events like
“Montana’s Missiles and the U.S. Arms Race,” a 1980 symposium held at the Uni-
versity of Montana.114 Meyer Chessin continued his activism as well, publishing
works like “Montana and the Nuclear Winter.”115 Meanwhile, the bad publicity of

nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl encouraged an antinuclear
alliance between environmentalists and peace protestors throughout the 1980s.116
A number of counties and communities across the nation and world followed Mis-
soula’s lead by declaring themselves nuclear-free zones.117
Montana also furthered its limits on nuclear development. In 1979 and 1980
the environmental groups Friends of the Earth and the Headwaters Alliance
fought for a successful initiative to completely ban radioactive waste disposal in
Montana. Fearing that uranium mining might be on the horizon, the initiative
took a 1978 federal law, which required the cleanup of uranium tailings from
mines and mills, one step further. It sought a total ban on piles of tailings. It also
succeeded in completely banning the disposal of waste created during both weap-
ons and nuclear power production in Montana.118
\\\
The energy crisis, boom, and crash took place in a little over a decade, but it still
offers two big lessons about environmental protection during the Cold War. First,
concerns about Cold War weaponry continued to influence environmental activ-
ism long after the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963. Activists’ antiauthoritarian
rhetoric and environmental health fears connected nuclear power to the feder-
al government’s checkered atomic past. Such populism is understandable in at-
tacks on the nuclear power industry, which was a privately owned commercial
enterprise, but which had strong ties to, and was often promoted by, the federal
agencies that regulated it. A palpable feeling that the Soviet Union and the United
States might soon destroy the world with nuclear weapons meant that anything
with the word nuclear attached to its name became a target.
Second, region matters. The federal government considered Montana for many
nuclear projects because it saw the state, like the rest of the American West, as full
of open, unpopulated spaces. In the 1970s energy producers rushed to the region
for the same reason. Region also mattered for those forming grassroots groups.
Whereas antiauthoritarian, anti- big-
government feelings have often worked
against environmental reforms in western states, in this case, they worked for
Montana’s antinuclear activists. Regional pride in a beautiful, healthy, supposedly
pristine environment pushed many Montanans to protest massive energy projects.
The West’s environmental activists additionally had more access to referen-
dums and initiatives than those in other regions, which allowed citizens them-
selves, after gathering signatures, to place an issue on the ballot. The decentralized
power structure of the United States allowed the citizens of states like Montana to
have more impact on energy policy than those in other parts of the country. Legal
and attitudinal changes during the 1970s meant that many U.S. citizens came to

expect true democratic involvement in environmental decisions, but residents of
the U.S. West were particularly likely to demand a say, especially when it appeared
that outsiders were involved. This factor was especially true in Montana, where
anti-corporate appeals carried even more weight than in most other states. Suspi-
cious of outsiders and worried about their backyards, many Montanans felt con-
nected to the antinuclear movement, whether they were urban or rural, Democrat
or Republican.
Using Cold War connections, populist appeals, and regional/state pride, Mon-
tana’s environmentalists therefore became some of the most effective antinuclear
activists of the 1970s.

PART II
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THE POROUS IRON CURTAIN

8
Building a Socialist Environment

Czechoslovak Environmental Policy
from the 1960s to the 1980s
Eagle Glassheim
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After World War II, Czechoslovakia rapidly expanded its output of chemicals, ve-
hicles, military hardware, and steel. These heavy industrial sectors demanded large
amounts of energy, which the country generated from its ample supply of brown
coal, which was located primarily in northern Bohemia. Brown coal, or lignite, is a
relatively young coal with a high moisture and ash content and low energy density.
These physical attributes and the country’s heavy dependence on coal had devas-
tating consequences for landscapes, natural ecologies, and human health from the
1950s through the 1980s. Expanding strip mines in northern Bohemia consumed
more than one hundred villages and parts of larger cities.1 Sprawling power plants,
built in close proximity to the mines, spewed ash, sulfur dioxide, mercury, and
other toxic particulates into the air. Coal-based energy and industrial production
poisoned streams and tainted soils, imposing significant costs upon other sectors
of the state-managed economy, including health care, agriculture, and municipal
infrastructure.
Starting in 1960, the Communist-led one-party state publicly acknowledged
the growing environmental crisis, and enacted a series of regulations aimed at
reducing smokestack emissions and chemical effluents. During Czechoslovakia’s
liberalization from 1966 to 1968, the country’s media published scores of reports
on pollution that sharply criticized pollution-control efforts and industrial pol-
icy more generally. Even after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion ended the Prague
Spring, Czechoslovak authorities continued to address environmental concerns
locally, nationally, and in conjunction with international environmental initiatives
of the United Nations (UN) and other global bodies. Prague even hosted a ma-
jor UN symposium, “On the Problems of the Environment,” in 1971 as the UN
prepared for the groundbreaking Stockholm Conference on the Human Environ-
ment in 1972.
137
Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, the Czechoslovak government
monitored environmental harms, acknowledged them openly in official publica-
tions, and commissioned several major studies by the Academy of Sciences about
causes, consequences, and solutions to pollution problems.2 Still, environmental
problems got steadily worse. Unlike West Germany, the United Kingdom, and the
United States, which saw significant improvements in air and water quality after
1970, Czechoslovakia, like much of the Communist-dominated Eastern Bloc, did
not. But it was not for lack of attention to the problem. This chapter traces Czecho-
slovakia’s intensifying and increasingly internationalized environmental discourse
from the 1960s to the 1980s. It also considers several reasons for the failure of
what appeared to be a significant and bona fide effort to mitigate the country’s
expanding environmental crisis.
A handful of geographers and historians have already advanced explanations
for the failures of environmental policy, in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in the
Eastern Bloc. Writing in 1993, J. W. Carter blames the Czechoslovak Communist
Party for insufficient data collection, government stonewalling and denial, “exces-
sive and inconsiderate extraction of natural resources, extensive waste . . . and fail-
ure to observe ecological and aesthetic laws.”3 The geographers Petr Pavlínek and
John Pickles reject such “myths” of a unique or inherent Communist disregard
for the environment. Rather, they suggest that both the environmental problems
and the policy responses of Communist regimes were complex, tied to global
resource markets, global and regional financial pressures, particular geographies
within Communist states, and bloc politics.4 They also suggest that “there were
important similarities between state socialism and capitalism in . . . production
and consumption processes, with parallels in both environmental consequences
and ideological understandings of nature and society.”5
Working from a comparison of environmental policy and outcomes in East
and West Germany, the historian Raymond Dominick draws some similar conclu-
sions. Due to rapid economic growth in the 1950s, both West and East Germany
had serious and worsening environmental problems in the 1950s and 1960s. West
Germany’s consumer economy meant more automobile pollution, garbage, and
oil use. East Germany’s emphasis on heavy industry and higher dependence on
coal meant more particulate pollution, as well as more effluents and waste pro-
duced by the country’s developing consumer economy. The difference was, as
Dominick points out, that West Germany turned a corner around 1970, while East
Germany did not.
He identifies a few related factors that explain this difference. First, West Ger-
many’s relative affluence allowed a growing public concern about environmental
problems and a willingness to trade some economic growth for significant pollu-
138 Eagle Glassheim

tion control investments.6 Second, a combination of West Germany’s wealth and
geography gave it particular advantages in the era of higher energy prices in the
1970s. Investments in nuclear power and imports of oil and natural gas, natural
advantages for the production of hydro power, the import of steel and other heavy
industrial products (i.e., outsourcing pollution), and favorable prevailing winds
combined to allow West Germany to improve its air quality without substantial
economic sacrifices.7 East Germany, on the other hand, continued to insist on rap-
id economic growth, through the production of steel and consumer goods. To do
this in an era of rising global energy prices, East Germany became even more reli-
ant on brown coal, its only significant domestic energy source. The government’s
unwillingness to slow growth to invest in environmental protection was ultimate-
ly a political decision, rooted partly in concern over lagging living standards and
partly in an ideology that privileged production over other values.
Dominick’s third major factor explaining East Germany’s environmental
policy failure was a lack of significant popular pressure on environmental issues.
Unlike in West Germany, where environmental citizens’ initiatives took off in the
1960s and 1970s, the East German regime coopted environmental groups, limit-
ed public information on the environment, and cracked down on environmental
dissent.8 In West Germany environmentalist politics became a substantial force in
the late 1960s, to the point that all major political parties (and governments) ad-
dressed environmental concerns from 1970 onward. Though there was a political
cost to pollution in East Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, it was much lower than
in West Germany. As Dominick concludes, “If capitalist West Germany did more
in recent years than its communist neighbor to mitigate environmental damage,
the reasons have less to do with private property, profit incentives, or marketplace
magic than with civil liberties, a free flow of reliable information, and a multiparty
political system—in other words, with democracy.”9
Czechoslovakia shared many of East Germany’s liabilities when it came to en-
vironmental policy, including a heavy reliance on brown coal, limited civic initia-
tive, and a political imperative for rapid growth in both consumer goods and heavy
industrial production. However, there were also substantial political forces press-
ing for environmental protection within Czechoslovakia, which was, like East
Germany, a single-party dictatorship. As Dominick points out, democracy alone
does not automatically yield environmental protection; a democratic West Ger-
many favored growth over environmental protection for much of the 1950s and
1960s (and the same can be said of industrializing democracies like the United
States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century). Likewise, even without
substantial independent citizens’ initiatives, there were significant political pres-
sures, both domestically and internationally, that made the environment a difficult
Building a Socialist Environment 139

subject for the Czechoslovak regime to ignore. This chapter traces the shifting ten-
or and intensity of those political influences from the 1960s to the 1980s, as well
as their actual impact on environmental policy and outcomes.
The 1960s
In late 1960, the Czechoslovak federal government issued a set of seemingly wide-
ranging environmental regulations. The published text of the new measures noted
widespread environmental harms of “increasing industrialization” and the regime’s
“fundamental” obligation to protect the living standard of workers, including the
quality of their living and working environment.10 The regulations called on dis-
trict national committees to assess smokestack emissions and waterway effluents,
communicate violations of established norms to industrial plants, and levy fines
for persistent violations. Production and economic growth remained paramount,
with the regulations allowing appeals to regional national committees and/or the
ministry to which the enterprise was responsible. It also exempted violators that
could demonstrate that mitigation was not technologically feasible.
Why, at this time, did the regime choose to issue environmental regulations
and thereby legitimate environmental policy discussions at all levels of govern-
ment? There seemed little political imperative to do so, as there had been no sig-
nificant domestic or international political pressure to address environmental
problems in the Stalinist 1950s. Secondary sources are no help with this question,
as they mostly ignore the 1960 environmental regulations, focusing instead on
environmental initiatives and failures in the 1970s and 1980s.11 Until historians
make a deeper dive into relevant party and state archives, we can only speculate
on why the government put environmental mitigation on the table in 1960. I see
at least three factors that might have led the Party Central Committee to act. First,
visible pollution and landscape devastation increased significantly in the 1950s,
as the volume of coal mined (and burned) doubled from 1950 to 1960.12 Sulfur
dioxide emissions correspondingly doubled during the decade, with acid rain
starting to kill forests along the mountainous northern border by the late 1950s.13
Second, northern Bohemia, the most polluted region in the country, had a per-
sistent problem attracting and retaining workers in the 1950s. In general, the gov-
ernment understood perceptible pollution and landscape devastation as disincen-
tives for workers to remain in or move to industrial regions facing significant labor
shortages.14
Third, as Bradley Moore demonstrates, public health officials gained in influ-
ence in 1950s Czechoslovakia on the basis of a convincing ideological argument
about environmental impacts on health.15 The public health bureaucracy became
a major proponent of environmental mitigation. In 1951 the Ministry of Health
140 Eagle Glassheim

created the Department of Hygiene, which set up a network of “hygiene stations”
around the country.16 During the 1960s some district health officials were particu-
larly active and vocal in local efforts to enforce government pollution control reg-
ulations. We can get a sense of this activity, as well as its ideological legitimation,
in the work of the district hygienist of the heavily polluted Most mining and ener-
gy region, a busy and persistent doctor named František Švec. Born in 1931 near
Most, Švec completed a medical degree in 1957 at Charles University and became
director of the Most District Hygienic Station soon after.17 Drawing on the grow-
ing authority of preventative medicine in Czechoslovakia, Švec argued that pollu-
tion was a significant threat to public health. Presenting to the District National
Committee of Most in 1964, Švec began with the basic premises of Marxist ma-
terialism and their implications for public health: “The environment is made up
of physical, chemical, biological, and social influences, very closely and mutually
intertwined, which act in the course of life on the individual. These favorable and
unfavorable external influences, together with internal biological and psychic in-
ternal factors, fundamentally channel human life.”18 He went on to enumerate the
high regional emission levels of ash, sulfur dioxide, and other pollutants, asserting
correlations with the region’s elevated rates of cancers, lung ailments, mortality,
and medical absenteeism. In spite of the significant legal and ideological basis for
action, Švec concluded, the environmental “regulations (of 1960) are barely being
followed, if at all.”19
Reacting to the 1960 initiative from above to build “a socialist environment,”
north Bohemian national committees identified a range of environmental prob-
lems, from emissions of ash and toxins to noise pollution and general ugliness.20
Over the next few years, local officials reported occasional improvements by chem-
ical and electric works, but they also expressed frustration at the lack of progress.21
Above all, they complained about their inability to enforce existing environmental
regulations. The Ústí nad Labem District National Committee, for example, regu-
larly levied fines on local polluters, but the amounts (from a few thousand to sev-
eral hundred thousand crowns) were trifling compared to the cost of technology
upgrades to reduce emissions.22 In a 1966 report the Ústí Committee lamented
that “legal regulations from 1960 . . . do not give organs the means they need”
to effectively pursue environmental violations.23 At the center, in Prague, an in-
terministerial report of 1969 made a similar point, blaming underinvestment in
emissions-reduction technology, fines inadequate to deter pollution, and “the
prioritization of narrow enterprise, economic interests over those of society as a
whole.”24
Local frustration burst into the open during Czechoslovakia’s political liber-
alization, which intensified from 1966 to 1968. Waves of articles appeared in the

officially sanctioned public media.25 In early 1966 the north Bohemian cultural
journal Dialog ran a multipart series on the difficulties of establishing a sense of
home (domov) in the heavily polluted region. Several writers noted the substantial
population turnover after the expulsion of Czechoslovakia’s three million ethnic
Germans after the war—industrial north Bohemia had been overwhelmingly Ger-
man until 1946. Milan Gajda, the chief architect for the city of Most, cited the
expulsion as one cause of alienation in the region. Though he thought it possible
for Czech settlers to adapt to a new home, the bad air quality and “devastation” of
the landscape had “a depressive effect on people” and inhibited affection for the
region.26 František Voráček, writing in Dialog in 1968, claimed that grim physi-
cal surroundings were a key factor behind northern Bohemia’s high suicide rate
(along with alcoholism, crime, and divorce). Without an attachment to place (do-
mov), he reasoned, the population was more prone to psychological unmooring.27
The most outspoken Czech journal of the reform period, Literarní noviny, ex-
plored similar questions in openly critical articles from 1966 to 1968. Reflecting
on the expanding strip mines and power production in north Bohemia, Vladimír
Karfík castigated the regime for ignoring the social, medical, and cultural costs
of pollution. “Nor do they count in their budgets the damages to the landscape,”
he added, concluding, “I wonder how much it really costs to write off an entire
district?”28 As the environmental planner and future energy historian Václav Smil
wrote in the ensuing discussion, “the carrying capacity (únosnost) of the land-
scape, the rational spatial potential, and the hygienic limits [of the Most region]
were already long ago exceeded.”29 Karfík added a broader point: that unhealthy
landscapes and unhealthy societies were related. Why, he asked rhetorically, did
so few local residents care about the “destruction of the landscape, the dying for-
ests, or the disappearing streams?”30
Karfík’s question about popular indifference to the environment points to a
telling detail: in the 1960s, including during the Prague Spring, the loudest and
most persistent complaints about environmental conditions came from local offi-
cials, not from the population at large. Contrary to Carter’s assertion of an infor-
mation embargo by the Communist regime, the general outlines of the country’s
environmental problems were widely reported, not just during the liberal period
of the late 1960s, but even during the more repressive 1970s and 1980s. But rather
than protest, or even complain, the general public remained quiet, at least until the
mid-1980s.31 Dominick assumes that Communist regimes, being undemocratic,
were largely immune to the politics of public opinion, and therefore could afford
to ignore popular concern about the environment.32 Actually, though, Czechoslo-
vakia’s Communist government was quite attuned to public opinion, particular-
ly once it pursued a policy of “normalization” after the Prague Spring. Indeed, a
142 Eagle Glassheim

central premise of normalization was that the regime would trade a “normal” life,
with rising living standards and consumption, for the population’s political acqui-
escence. To keep up its end of the bargain, the regime needed to deliver consumer
goods and a related sense of stability in everyday life.
In the absence of a democratic process for gauging opinion, the government
used sociological polling data from the Academy of Sciences, particularly after the
mid-1960s.33 One such study commissioned by the city of Most in 1966 showed
a clear preference for material security over environmental mitigation. At least 90
percent of respondents indicated an awareness of bad environmental conditions
in Most, though 80 percent said that the economic importance of mines and in-
dustry outweighed their negative effects. Phrased another way, over 65 percent
answered that good jobs were worth the environmental damages caused by the
region’s industries.34 Another poll from 1971 tried to correlate attitudes toward
pollution with degrees of local patriotism and satisfaction with everyday life in
north Bohemia. In Neštěmice (an industrial suburb of 3,200 people near Ústí
nad Labem), locals avowed a sense of belonging and general satisfaction with life,
while at the same time expressing dissatisfaction with the region’s air and water
quality. Though 77.5 percent were newcomers to the town after 1945, the over-
whelming majority (72 percent) said they felt at home there in 1971, and only
10.5 percent expressed a desire to leave. Poll respondents viewed the local factory
(a significant polluter) positively, primarily for its contribution to the town’s eco-
nomic well-being. The study’s authors concluded that a certain “lack of a critical
view” toward environmental problems stemmed from a close identification with
the town and its factory.35
Both Neštěmice and Most had been German-majority cities until 1945–1946.
As it happened, the mining and heavy industrial regions of northern Bohemia and
Moravia were the epicenter of the population shifts after the war. Communist
officials had managed the redistribution of German property, and Czech settlers
returned the favor with overwhelming support for the Communist Party in 1946
elections.36 In general, settlers tended to be working class and strong supporters
of the Communist Party and its industrial policy. Though there were also seri-
ous environmental problems in Prague and a few other areas with deeply rooted
Czech populations, the most polluted areas were only recently settled, easing the
political pressure for environmental mitigation.
As Ostrava’s chief hygienist, Vladimír Kořinek, wrote in 1968, Czechoslovakia’s
lack of progress on environmental protection had more to do with skewed priori-
ties than a lack of legislative or administrative effort. Existing laws and regulations
set clear policy directions, specifying responsibilities for both implementation
and enforcement. But most actors within the system “considered the fulfillment

of hygienic obligations as a completely secondary matter, and from the ‘political’
point of view, so inconsequential that they decided to blatantly and willfully ig-
nore these obligations.” The hygiene services remained “political outsiders,” often
viewed by enterprise managers as “nit-picking bureaucrats.”37 There were some
local, if temporary, victories for the hygiene services, such as when they teamed
with the Academy of Sciences to block construction of a power plant in the mid-
dle of the country’s famous spa triangle in 1970.38 Even so, and in spite of the on-
going official attention to environmental problems in the 1960s, the politics of
production largely outweighed the politics of environmental protection. A 1972
Radio Free Europe report summed up this systemic problem nicely: “There are
no visible opponents to the solution of these pressing problems in the CSSR [the
Czechoslovak Socialist Republic]. The health sector is demanding improvement,
though so far with very little result. The population, especially in the most affected
areas, is concerned. Economists and politicians are well aware of the danger . . .
The greatest obstacles are economic considerations, which everyone adduces as
an excuse for not taking preventative measures.”39
The 1970s
The government’s economic and technical concerns grew in the 1970s, as envi-
ronmental problems worsened and global attention to environmental issues grew.
Over the decade, the Academy of Sciences addressed the country’s expanding
environmental crisis with a series of commissions, studies, and reports on air,
water, and soil pollution. The language of those studies and public discussions
of environmental problems suggested a serious engagement with an intensifying
international environmental discourse. This came via a variety of channels, includ-
ing Czechoslovak participation in United Nations environmental initiatives in the
1970s.
In 1971 Prague hosted a major UN symposium, “On the Problems of the En-
vironment.” Czechoslovakia’s delegation submitted a brutally honest accounting
of the country’s energy dilemma, pollution problems, and limited success at en-
vironmental mitigation.40 The symposium paid particular attention to the difficul-
ties reconciling rising standards of living with environmental protection, devoting
several panels and papers to what might now be called environmental economics. In
the Czechoslovak submission on “Economic and Socio-Economic Aspects of the
Environment,” V. Kasalický wrote that the “urgent question . . . [is] what part of the
over-all costs of running modern society should rightly be allocated for the main-
tenance and development of the environment, as against those categories of costs
relating to other functions of society.”41 The symposium included discussions of
cost-benefit analyses of environmental policies, measurement of environmental
144 Eagle Glassheim

externalities, and comprehensive (rather than ad hoc) environmental plans and
investments.
Though disputes over the status of East Germany led Czechoslovakia and other
Eastern Bloc countries to boycott the Stockholm Conference on the Human En-
vironment in 1972, Czech and Slovak scientists and officials readily drew on the
Stockholm Declaration’s rhetoric and policy conclusions.42 In particular, the Com-
munist embrace of the “scientific and technological revolution” meshed well with
the Stockholm principles of carefully planned, technology-driven development
that could reconcile economic growth and environmental quality. The Czechoslo-
vak Academy of Science’s interdisciplinary Council for Environmental Questions,
formed in 1973, issued a wide range of reports on both broad environmental pol-
icy and specific regional questions. These reports were permeated with global en-
vironmental discourse and reflected Czechoslovak engagement with international
bodies, including the 1971 UN Symposium on the Environment in Prague and
the 1976 UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat) in Vancouver.43
In an early example of this global discourse, the Geographical Institute of the
Academy of Sciences reported in 1973 that Czechoslovakia had reached a point
where “the disruption of the relationship of man to his surroundings is starting to
manifest itself in his biological essence (so-called civilizational sicknesses) and in
the disruption of supplies of essential natural resources.”44 The report emphasized
both the material and social importance of a healthy environment, concluding that
a “socialist environment” should ensure “the rational exploitation of natural re-
sources of a landscape for economic, industrial and agricultural production (and)
the healthy development of socialist man and the whole of society, including the
satisfaction of its aesthetic, cultural, and recreational needs.”45 The report stressed
that environmental problems had serious economic, socio-medical, and political
consequences. Though it did not recommend particular policies, it emphasized
that rational, comprehensive planning was needed to address the complex rela-
tionship between economic growth and environmental quality.
Another Academy report in 1977 echoed these conclusions, arguing that plan-
ning decisions needed to account more fully for environmental costs, both direct
and indirect.46 In order to ensure the most rational approach to the use and pro-
tection of the natural environment, the report concluded, it would be “necessary
to employ the newest accomplishments of scientific-technological development”
to reconcile growth and environmental protection. Socialist planning needed
to conceptualize “social production as a particular element of a functioning bio-
economic system, in which economic, social, and biological (ecological) process-
es are mutually interconnected.”47 The report acknowledged that it was often dif-
ficult to quantify all the impacts of environmental investments (and harms), but

that a multidisciplinary, comprehensive, long-term planning process would better
capture costs and benefits than planning by individual sectors. Ideally, “ecolog-
ical economics” would pervade the entire planning apparatus.48 Environmental
policies should include not only sufficient penalties to deter pollution but also
significant investment in pollution control technologies.
In all these reports and internal discussions during the 1970s, Czechoslova-
kia’s scientific and health communities used a variety of strategies to legitimize
their expertise on environmental questions and to promote environmental goals
in the planning process. They drew on international discourse, Marxist ideology,
and even invocations of public opinion, both domestically and internationally. As
the Geographical Institute noted in its 1973 report: “Citizens . . . are sensitive to
how state and party organs respond to [environmental problems]; moreover, the
environment is a fashionable issue these days in the foreign propaganda directed
at our state.”49 Likewise, the Academy’s 1977 report emphasized both domestic
and international political concerns, claiming that the environment had become
a major area of “competition between the socialist and capitalist social systems.”50
The Academy noted that Czechoslovakia and other Socialist countries had em-
braced environmental action and cooperation in a number of international venues,
including the United Nations Environment Programme, UNESCO’s Man and the
Biosphere program, and 1975 Helsinki negotiations.51 Socialist Czechoslovakia
was a modern industrialized economy. Being part of this club brought both envi-
ronmental problems and environmental responsibilities.
Environmental policy during the 1970s did yield some air and water quality
improvements, though many indicators continued to worsen. Scrubbers sub-
stantially reduced ash and other particulates coming from power plants, though
sulfur dioxide emissions continued to increase up until 1980, with correspond-
ing increases in forest damage.52 In keeping with the global environmental policy
discourse stressing the use of technology to reconcile economic growth with en-
vironmental quality, the Czechoslovak regime favored investments in mitigation
technologies over production cuts. But as in the 1960s, narrow economic calcu-
lations and constraints remained paramount, both at the federal level and in local
enterprises. By the early 1980s, Czechoslovakia and East Germany had tried and
failed to develop desulphurization equipment that would match Western Euro-
pean technologies, and growing hard currency debt in the 1970s discouraged the
purchase of Western equipment. At the same time, the global rise in energy prices
decreased the availability of subsidized natural gas from the Soviet Union, making
Czechoslovakia even more dependent on domestic brown coal supplies.53
Local enterprises were clearly aware of their emissions and often paid fines
for violations. A 1977 report from the Ústí nad Labem Chemical and Metallurgi-
146 Eagle Glassheim

cal Complex indicates how local enterprises negotiated the financial and political
crosswinds of environmental policy. The report quantified the factory’s significant
violations, as well as modest fines paid, noting that “as a result of continuing and
necessary increase in the volume of production, pollution limits were exceeded.”
The factory had successfully requested from “superior economic organs of the gov-
ernment” a temporary relaxation of effluent emission limits until it could install
new wastewater treatment equipment. To do so, the factory would need more
investment from the government, which was not forthcoming.54 Even though lo-
cal authorities often imposed fines on polluters like the Ústí chemical works, the
fines were low and could simply be added to the costs of production.55 Even with
substantial environmental regulations on the books, the economic conditions of
the 1970s often forced planners and factory managers alike to choose between
production growth and environmental protection.
The 1980s
While Czechoslovak environmental policies in the 1970s tended to frame pollu-
tion as part of a global crisis of modern industrial economies, shifting international
environmental discourses of the 1980s put the Czechoslovak government on the
defensive. Though escalating American Cold War rhetoric in the early 1980s did
not emphasize environmental issues, West German officials and news outlets tied
Eastern Bloc environmental problems to broader economic and political failures
of communism.56 Czechoslovak official and public discourse on the environment
was further complicated in the early 1980s by a growing chorus of environmen-
tal criticism from Czech and Slovak dissidents, which echoed in the international
press. Though the government attempted to limit public information on pollu-
tion and health during the 1980s, the Academy of Sciences continued to generate
reports about the escalating crisis. Additionally, local authorities continued to
express concern about pollution’s effects on local health, particularly in northern
Bohemia. The government responded with some modest health initiatives, but
made no significant investments in pollution control or fundamental changes in
energy policy.57
In the early 1980s Czechoslovakia’s leading dissident collective, Charter 77, be-
gan to incorporate environmental concerns into its human rights agenda. Though
harassed and ridiculed by the Communist regime, Charter 77 had connections
within the Academy of Sciences and used their clandestine publishing network
to engage and expand both official and unofficial environmental discourse in
Czechoslovakia. In conjunction with a Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences inter-
nal study on the environment begun in 1981 and completed in 1983, Charter 77
published a series of letters on the environmental crisis in Czechoslovakia.58 A

1983 public letter argued that north Bohemia’s environmental problems were a
function of both the expulsion of Germans after 1945 and the “cynical and con-
scious exploitation” of the region for intensive industrial development, which had
profound social and health effects.59 Youth had little hope for the future, leading
to a “destructive negativism” and chronic alcoholism and drug abuse. Diseases
caused by pollution and hopelessness were intertwined. “In the suffocating atmo-
sphere of Czechoslovakia,” the letter added, north Bohemia was among the most
oppressive—“and we don’t mean just the air.” Charter 77 also managed to pass
along the 1983 Academy of Sciences report to foreign news outlets. It was repub-
lished in whole or in part in 1984 by Le Monde, Tageszeitung, Die Zeit, and Radio
Free Europe.60
Ecology also became central to an evolving Sudeten German critique of Czech
stewardship of the former Sudetenland, including the heavily polluted regions
in northern and western Bohemia. German expellee organizations, but also the
mainstream German press, connected Czechoslovakia’s environmental problems
with the cultural and material losses associated with the expulsion of the country’s
three million Germans in 1945 and 1946. Now ecological destruction featured
prominently alongside cultural neglect in publications of the Sudetendeutscher
Rat, a group representing expellee interests in West Germany. A promotional
booklet from 1984 warned that the “once flourishing natural and cultural land-
scape” of the Sudetenland had exceeded even “the grimmest horror visions of the
more insistent critics of civilization.”61 Pollution-induced forest death, known as
Waldsterben in German, was spreading through northwest Bohemia, and even
across the west Bohemian border into Bavaria. Throughout the 1980s, Waldster-
ben had been a preoccupation in Germany, as foresters and scientists reported
that over 50 percent of German forests had been weakened, perhaps fatally, by
air pollution and acid rain.62 Citing the recent Charter 77 reports on the environ-
ment, the Sudetendeutscher Rat claimed that Waldsterben was even worse in the
Bohemian borderlands, which the Communist regime was sacrificing for energy
production.63
The popular German news magazine Der Spiegel took a similar tack in a 1983
exposé titled “‘Our Country Will Soon Be Unlivable’: The Advancing Devastation
of the Environment in Czechoslovakia.” Drawing on Czech government health
and pollution statistics, the article described dying forests, contaminated rivers,
and falling life expectancies. The environmental crisis was worsening in spite of
the more than three hundred laws and regulations devoted to environmental pro-
tection since the 1960s. The reason, Der Spiegel claimed, was the regime’s “Ton-
nenideologie,” with production quotas trumping all other goals.64 In the midst of
an ongoing economic crisis, the article suggested, the government could ill afford
148 Eagle Glassheim

to cut energy production or invest in expensive pollution control technologies.
As Der Spiegel reported, the Bavarian premier Franz-Josef Strauss—normally no
friend of the environment—had recently presented a letter to the Czechoslovak
ambassador complaining about cross-border pollution from northwest Bohemia.
The Communist Party daily newspaper, Rudé Právo, previously willing to ac-
knowledge environmental problems, responded with a polemic against German
demagoguery, accusing Strauss of blaming Czechoslovakia for West Germany’s
own pollution.65
The Der Spiegel article reflected a shift in Western portrayals of Eastern Bloc
pollution. The global environmental discourse of the 1970s had depicted envi-
ronmental problems as a function of modern industrial development, regardless
of economic system, with a corresponding need for global cooperation on solu-
tions.66 But in the early 1980s, as Western countries made progress on environ-
mental protection and Cold War rhetoric escalated, there was a growing tendency
among Western critics to identify Eastern Bloc pollution with the economic and
administrative failures of Socialism, as both a political and economic order.67 For
the Communist regime, pollution was no longer a by-product (even a badge) of
its industrial modernity—increasingly, as dissidents and international critics put
it, pollution was a marker of Communist failure.
This shift in perception resulted in moves to contain the political fallout of pol-
lution, rather than significant new policies to reduce pollution itself. In the early
1980s the Czechoslovak government rolled out or expanded several programs
aimed at mitigating the health effects of bad air quality, particularly in northern
Bohemia. Government-issued vitamin supplements went out to over 128,000
children, accompanied by a “school-in-nature” initiative that sent a similar num-
ber of children for weeks at a time to study in areas with cleaner air. 68 In 1982 the
government introduced a 2,000 crown annual subsidy for residents of the most
polluted parts of north Bohemia. The locals jokingly called this their “burial bo-
nus.” At the same time, the government sought to tighten its control over infor-
mation about the environment and public health. In 1982 the Ministry of Health
issued a directive limiting the release of any data about the environment or health
that might adversely affect the reputation of the ministry or the state.69
Though Czechoslovakia continued to spend money on environmental re-
search and mitigation throughout the 1980s, most kinds of pollution worsened,
rather than improved.70 Though domestic news outlets did cover environmental
issues to some extent, embargoes on health data limited public access to infor-
mation that could have buttressed campaigns for cleaner air and water. With the
most significant environmental critiques coming from dissidents and abroad, the
regime adopted a largely defensive posture on the environment. As Mikhail Gor-

bachev withdrew Soviet support for hardline Communist regimes in the latter half
of the 1980s, new waves of environmental dissent merged with broader opposi-
tion movements to undermine and then, in November 1989, displace the Czecho-
slovak Communist regime.71
\\\
Ramachandra Guha, in an excellent global history of environmentalism, of-

fers the following set of generalizations about state socialism: “The ideology of
state socialism is antithetical to environmentalism on a number of grounds: in
its worship of technology; in its arrogant desire to conquer nature; through its
system of central planning in which pollution control comes in the way of the
fulfillment of production targets. Most of all, though, state socialism has inhibited
environmentalism by throttling democracy.”72 This is all true, broadly speaking.
Generalizations like this, however, which have pervaded much of the literature on
Communist environments, obscure a complex and historically contingent devel-
opment of environmental harms, debates, policies, and practices in state Socialist
regimes. Environmental policies under Stalinist regimes in the 1940s and 1950s
were very different from those in the reformist 1960s, the global 1970s, and the
unsettled 1980s. Though centralized and authoritarian, Communist regimes were
not monolithic. Though undemocratic, the regimes did observe and often heed
both domestic and international concerns about pollution.
In Czechoslovakia, as elsewhere, the failures of environmental protection
should not obscure the history of environmental policy-making, the development
of a significant public-health infrastructure, waves of public discussion about pol-
lution and landscape devastation, participation in global environmental discourse
and initiatives, and the substantial mobilization of scientists funded by the re-
gime to study and address environmental problems. Though competing interests
effectively neutralized most environmental initiatives until the fall of the Com-
munist regime in 1989, the government had a wide range of local and national
experts monitoring environmental problems and advocating mitigation strategies.
Czechoslovak environmental scientists and policy-makers engaged broadly with
global environmental initiatives, gatherings, and discourse starting around 1970.
Though the local, national, and international politics of pollution weighed on the
regime from the 1960s to the 1980s, the impact of those political forces varied
over time, region, and level of government. The escalating environmental disaster
in Czechoslovakia was not caused primarily by neglect, censorship, or isolation,
but rather by an internal balance of interests willing to sacrifice environmental and
human health of certain regions for economic growth. This was not so different,
ultimately, from other countries, East and West, in the industrialized world.
150 Eagle Glassheim

9
Protesting Pollution
Environmental Activism in East Germany
and Poland, 1980–1990
Julia E. Ault
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
In the summer of 1988, environmental activists from Eastern and Western Europe
transcended the Iron Curtain to convene in Kraków, Poland. A growing number
of environmental protest groups in Eastern Europe, buttressed by experienced
Western European activists, assembled to discuss the impact of pollution on the
forests and people of Eastern Europe. As one East German participant eagerly re-
ported to friends, the meeting was a “high point in European environmentalists’
work and served as a learning experience for young people from the most different
of countries.”1 Together, the independent Polski Klub Ekologiczny (Polish Eco-
logical Club, PKE) and the Dutch-based European Youth Forest Action organized
this workshop, which drew 126 representatives from fourteen countries, including
East and West Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands. While the Iron Curtain still
partitioned Europe, this week-long event demonstrated both the swiftly changing
political situation as well as a burgeoning environmental consciousness in Eastern
Europe. The longstanding challenges of working across the great political divide
had not disappeared, but fundamentally shifted in the second half of the 1980s.
Gorbachev’s introduction of glasnost and perestroika created an impetus for
change while the nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in April
1986 sparked environmental outcries in both the East and West.
Histories have tended to focus on green movements in Western Europe over-
looking the impressive resonance that environmental causes found in Eastern
Europe despite a severely restricted—if not nonexistent—public sphere.2 Indeed,
the success of green movements and parties in Western Europe, especially West
Germany, was enormous as they succeeded in lobbying democratically elected
governments on matters of public safety, water and air quality, and nuclear ener-
gy.3 Unlike in Western Europe, however, environmental movements in the Soviet
151
Bloc could not organize freely, demonstrate publicly, or publish openly. By defi-
nition, movements that the party or state did not directly control were a threat to
an all-encompassing system, which meant they remained relatively small. Some
scholars have considered them ineffective or simply copycats of Western green
movements without properly considering the limitations on social engagement in
a dictatorship.4 Despite these complications, over the course of the 1980s, Eastern
Europeans expressed frustration with stifling pollution and the failure of official
policies to reverse it. This sense of dissatisfaction generated protest that spurred a
movement. Eastern Europeans reacted to their own political and environmental
situations and deployed information and tactics from Western green movements
to call for fundamental changes.5
In particular, the East German and Polish cases highlight structural difficulties
that the Soviet system imposed, but offer the opportunity to examine variations
within the Communist Bloc.6 These two countries illustrate two different experi-
ences among the Soviet satellite states, while emphasizing the shared and growing
import of environmental issues in the 1980s. East Germany (German Democratic
Republic, GDR) rejected Gorbachev’s reforms, becoming more hard-line than
the Soviet Union by the end of the 1980s. Yet German traditions of hiking and
spending time in nature yielded greater popular interest in the protection of na-
ture and a different conception of environmentalism than in Poland or the rest of
the Soviet Bloc.7 Thus while not sparking a mass movement, pollution spawned
grassroots interest in the environment that highlighted the discrepancy between
the Socialist Unity Party’s (SED) environmental and economic goals.
The GDR was not anomalous in the Communist Bloc, and here, Poland com-
plements the East German example.8 Poland also experienced Stalinist style
“smokestack” industrialization—with an emphasis on coal and steel—and the
environmental devastation that followed. Additionally, the relationship between
the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) and Polish society contrasts strongly
with the GDR. The ruling PZPR tolerated, or struggled to rein in, public criticism,
which led to a large and well-organized mass opposition movement. In part, the
Catholic Church’s powerful position in Polish society, which fostered provided
important and widespread anti-Communist rhetoric that countered the PZPR’s
influence. These forces led to the creation of Solidarność (Solidarity) in 1980 and
1981, which won major concessions from the state, including the right to orga-
nize independently of official structures.9 Solidarność, though, did not explicitly
revolve around environmental issues, engaging with them only when it became
politically convenient. Environmental activism, therefore, remained more nar-
rowly in the domain of experts and scientists until after the Chernobyl disaster
in 1986. Poland’s more relaxed political atmosphere permitted networking across
152 Julia E. Ault

communist bloc in an unparalleled way, making Poland a site of international (and
inter-bloc) exchange at the end of the 1980s.
The case of independent environmental movements in the GDR and Poland
highlights the difficulties of developing protest movements under repressive re-
gimes. It also demonstrates how quality of life issues gained popularity, even in the
economically stagnant countries of Communist Eastern Europe, where material
shortages still existed. As the Soviet Bloc faced new obstacles with the introduc-
tion of Gorbachev’s reforms after 1985, increasingly interconnected movements
across Eastern Europe pushed for environmental protection, drawing on local
conditions and attracting the support of Western European green movements.
These networks and resources contributed to pushing the boundaries of public
discourse and the broader discrediting of the Communist system. Simultaneously,
they expanded conceptions of environmental politics and protest that spanned
the Iron Curtain and force a reconsideration of green movements.
Sources of Pollution, Sources of Protest

After World War II, the Soviet Union devoted enormous resources to rebuilding
Eastern Europe, particularly by emphasizing heavy industry, a process that the his-
torian Charles Maier has called “smokestack industrialization.”10 The GDR, as the
most industrialized country in the Soviet Bloc, specialized not only in coal min-
ing but also in energy-intensive industries, such as the production of chemicals
for plastics and fertilizers. Coal mining was an instrumental part of the economy
in Poland, particularly in Silesia, as well, and large works like the Skawina alu-
minum smelting plant outside of Kraków and the metallurgy plant in Siechnice
near Wrocław (Breslau), also contributed to dangerous levels of pollution in the
air, water, and soil. In the early decades of Communism, local populations accept-
ed the pollution as the cost of rebuilding after the war.11 Over time, however, both
the states and the people recognized the human and economic dangers these in-
dustries posed. The ossifying political and economic structures in both countries
struggled to adapt and respond to these concerns.12
Pollution in the German Democratic Republic

By the 1980s the pollution from more than two decades of heavy industry was
obviously damaging nature and the local population in the GDR. In the Leipzig
region smokestack Socialism left an indelible mark on the physical and social
landscape. In a region long known for its coal deposits, open-pit mines were an
established fixture of the landscape, but in the GDR, the excavation of coal took
on unprecedented proportions. Enormous mines geographically larger than the
neighboring villages destabilized the ground and lowered the local water table. In
Protesting Pollution 153

this area approximately fifteen villages were evacuated between 1951 and 1988
and their 7,800 residents resettled on safer ground. More than 3,000 people were
moved between 1977 and 1988.13 For those who stayed, air pollution from the
beneficiation plant in Espenhain made it nearly impossible to breathe. As one re-
port from the late 1980s detailed, “These towns are falling apart, drab and grey,
creating an oppressive impression of filth in this poisoned atmosphere. The build-
ings are black with smoke and soot, and crumbling plaster on the facades . . . show
the clear signs of thick layers of dust.”14 Residents were unable to leave windows
open or hang laundry outside for fear that everything would turn filthy brown-
black from the soot in the air.
Emissions from power plants, industrial production, and domestic energy con-
sumption also generated enormous amounts of air pollution that damaged large
tracts of forest across the GDR. The lignite found in the GDR often contained
high levels sulfur that was only partially removed, if at all, during processing so
that when it was burned it created acid rain. The acid rain, in turn, devastated the
East German landscape. Officials euphemistically referred to this phenomenon
as “forest damage” (Forstschäden), and denied that the phenomenon that West
Germans called “forest death” (Waldsterben) was occurring in the GDR.15 Iconic
images of dead and dying spruce and pine trees and entire hillsides and mountain
ridges dotted with corpse-like tree trunks and broken-off branches still define our
understanding of the Waldsterben concept today.
The chemical industry, which was concentrated in the Halle district and be-
came known as the Chemical Triangle, caused a second widespread set of prob-
lems. Because the GDR was not rich in natural resources, officials sought to make
up for shortages through science and technology, specifically by using materials
more efficiently, and producing synthetic ones where necessary.16 This faith in
science was so prevalent within the SED’s mindset that the increasingly com-
plex chemical industry even had its own ministry and produced everything from
photo-processing chemicals and fertilizer to pesticides and household cleaning
agents. While Western governments had recognized the negative effects of many
of these products, the SED’s commitment to the chemical industry and the intran-
sigence of the planned economy assured their continued use.
The processes used to produce these goods had a devastating impact on the
natural environment, not to mention being hazardous in the home. By-products
were released into the air and water with little oversight and regulations were often
ignored.17 In industrialized areas with high levels of particulate and sulfur diox-
ide pollution, residents, especially children, were prone to croup, laryngitis, and
other respiratory illnesses. While regular citizens only observed these symptoms
anecdotally, officials from the Ministry for Public Health recorded health statistics
154 Julia E. Ault

faithfully in their reports.18 By-products from the GDR’s many industries flowed
unchecked into local rivers and streams. A 1968 report revealed that 66 percent
of the GDR’s watercourses were “inadmissibly polluted.”19 Water became undrink-
able in many districts, particularly in Halle, and the SED privately admitted that
it had failed to properly care for its citizens’ well-being. By 1980 classified reports
from scientists warned that one and half million East Germans were consuming
drinking water that had an “impermissibly high level of nitrates” that could have
dangerous effects on the health of over thirty thousand pregnant women and chil-
dren. The administrative areas where water quality was worst (Potsdam, Dresden,
Leipzig, Erfurt, and Karl-Marx-Stadt) represented nearly a third of the districts in
the GDR and well over a third of the population.20
Poland
Like the GDR, Poland experienced rapid rebuilding and industrialization after the
Second World War. Having been ravaged by six years of German and Soviet occu-
pation, Warsaw lay in rubble, while other once-industrial cities like Wrocław fared
only slightly better.21 Stalinist policies in the immediate postwar years sparked rap-
id economic growth in heavy industry with a focus on energy-intensive plants and
large coal-burning facilities, but left little room for quality of life concerns or con-
sumer goods. Moreover, Poland simultaneously underwent rapid urbanization
and the environmental problems associated with housing shortages such as in-
sufficient water supplies and sewage treatment.22 Despite rapid economic growth
and rebuilding, Poland lagged noticeably behind the GDR in standard of living
throughout the postwar era.
Pollution caused by this emphasis on heavy industry was apparent in Kraków.
The Lenin Steelworks in the planned suburb of Nowa Huta, just outside of the city
proper, came to represent everything that was wrong with the Polish economy and
environment.23 Acid rain eroded building facades, while parks were gray and grim.
Moreover, the Vistula River’s water was contaminated “along its whole length.”24
Although prevailing winds blew most of the pollution from Nowa Huta away from
Kraków, its presence was still felt. A second source of pollution in the area was
the aluminum smelting plant in nearby Skawina. Obvious pollution sparked local
opposition to Skawina, and in 1981 the Polish authorities finally responded to pro-
tests and agreed to close the “most dangerous parts of the aluminum works,” refer-
ring to one of the smelters.25 The actual and perceived pollution from Nowa Huta
and Skawina caused Kraków to become the heart of the environmental movement
in the 1980s.26
Steelworks—whether notorious cases such as those of Katowice or less
famous ones such as at Siechnice, about twelve kilometers upstream from

Wrocław—became another major source of pollution and frustration. In Siech-
nice local groups complained about “the irreversible effects of contamination by
heavy metals, chromium, and water bearing areas of Wrocław, starting just 200
m from the slag heap and steelworks.”27 Once a spa town, Siechnice became bet-
ter known for the “carcinogenic and mutagenic” compounds found in its water in
the 1980s, as local scientists and activists began to publish information about the
effects of long-term heavy metal poisoning on humans.28 As in the GDR, heavy
industry based on steel and other metal production resulted in high levels of air
pollution, as well as respiratory and circulatory illnesses across Poland.29 Despite
the obvious environmental degradation, social and economic problems dominat-
ed official decision-making.
Both the SED and the PZPR began to acknowledge the detrimental effects
of the pollution in the 1960s as economic losses and the detriment to workers’
health became undeniable. But the question of how to address these issues and
to ensure their citizens’ well-being persisted. The two ruling parties opted for in-
creased regulation, and even went so far as to include people’s right to (and re-
sponsibility for) a clean environment in updated versions of their constitutions.30
The SED established a comprehensive Land Stewardship Law (Landeskulturge-
setz) in 1970, while the PZPR used piecemeal legislation until 1980.31 As the po-
litical scientist Barbara Hicks argues, the Polish environmental law of 1980 “was
the first major coordinated attempt to control the destruction of the environment,
not only as nature had created it but also as humans had transformed it.”32 The
SED and the PZPR appealed to their respective populations, creating new and
expanding existing organizations to promote conservation and environmental
awareness. In the GDR the Gesellschaft für Natur und Umwelt (Society for Na-
ture and Environment) became popular and an integral part of SED’s mass social
programs, and in Poland the PZPR pushed youth participation in the Liga Ochro-
ny Przyrody (Nature Conservation League).33 Given these regulations and con-
stant propaganda that alleged improved living conditions, it is not surprising that
East Germans and Poles became exasperated when actual environmental progress
failed to materialize.
The Origins and Growth of Independent Movements

Although the SED and the PZPR both claimed to protect the environment
through regulation and the support of mass social organizations, their effective-
ness remained limited. Pollution levels stayed high, and in some regions, like the
GDR’s Chemical Triangle and Silesia in Poland, conditions further deteriorated.
In Communist dictatorships, such as Poland and the GDR, these obvious failures
156 Julia E. Ault

discredited the ruling party’s claims to govern in the best interest of its “citizen-
workers” and, consequently, weakened the entire system.34
The challenges of living under dictatorship and the lack of free speech inspired
disappointed citizens to express their concerns on the fringes or outside of official
channels. In the GDR independent environmental activism rose in popularity just
as the peace movement of the early 1980s faced serious setbacks, most especially
the stationing of intermediate-range missiles in West Germany.35 Finding a home
in the Protestant Church, especially after its 1978 reconciliation with the SED, the
movement adopted Christian rhetoric and a parish-oriented structure. In Poland
the environmental movement was not closely connected to the powerful Catholic
Church, but instead came from the scientific community as it sought to enlighten
the government and the population alike.36 In their early years the two movements
focused primarily on local issues and had little contact with one another. Never-
theless, they both learned to navigate restrictive political structures, operating on
the edges of what their respective regimes allowed and relying on the cachet of
other institutions and movements. In the GDR the Protestant Church played a
prominent role, sheltering environmental groups, while in Poland independent
groups such as PKE actually had members in official scientific and academic po-
sitions.37 After two transformative events in the Soviet Union—the introduction
of glasnost in 1985 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986—these two movements
found new opportunities. Freer speech, more chances to travel, and greater res-
onance in the face of crisis allowed the movements to expand domestically and
begin to network internationally.
Environmental Protest in the German Democratic Republic

In the GDR a series of agreements in the 1970s normalized relations between the
Protestant Church and the regime, and the church experienced a revival. By rec-
ognizing the SED’s authority and its own role as the “Church in Socialism” in 1978,
the Protestant Church received unprecedented leeway from the SED.38 No longer
subject to the same level of discrimination as in previous decades, East Germans
returned to the church and it became a haven for a variety of groups, including
those working on human rights, peace, feminism, gay rights, and the environ-
ment.39 Initially, the SED and the Stasi (Ministry for State Security) considered
environmental organizations less threatening than peace advocates, and accord-
ingly paid them less attention.40 Environmental groups focused on local problems,
stemming from nearby industries, and employed a theological language that limit-
ed their appeal to the broader population. The SED, however, underestimated the
eventual influence of these groups. They developed an effective Christian critique

of official policy and eventually became some of the regime’s most vocal critics.
The Ecclesiastical Research Center (Kirchliches Forschungsheim, KFH) in
Wittenberg and a small cohort of environmentally engaged Christians provided
one of the early impetuses for a movement independent distinct from the par-
ty or state. Under the leadership of Pastor Hans-Peter Gensichen, the KFH ex-
plored the connections between the environment and theology in working groups,
hosted weekend conferences, and published a newsletter called Briefe.41 The KFH
advanced theological justifications for environmental engagement and created a
language, based on biblical teachings, to express it. This language was then applied
to local environmental issues and used as a justification for engagement outside of
the official conservation and ecology organizations in the SED’s Cultural League.
Seemingly innocuous and with small appeal, the KFH’s work provided a foun-
dation for independent environmental groups’ critiques of the SED in the 1980s.
Its 1980 booklet, Die Erde ist zu retten (The earth is to be saved), which criti-
cized environmental policy and pollution in the GDR, described the relationship
between religion and the environment. Its authors wrote, “A Christian view of en-
vironmental problems is never without hope,” and that it should inspire adherents
to advocate for change.42 The text, which other groups often cited, encouraged
Christians to “link spiritual and cultural activities” in order to advance environ-
mental protection.43 By assuming individual responsibility and calling for person-
al, Christian engagement in the issue, the authors questioned the regime’s ability
to provide environmental protection and took up that call themselves. Christian
activists augmented the arguments laid out in Die Erde ist zu retten with locally ori-
ented projects, such as cleaning up churchyards and planting trees. In the village of
Rötha, for example, independent activists started an annual campaign to “improve
the living conditions in our region,” in November 1981. Seventy-five participants
between the ages of one and eighty-five participated.44 Such small-scale efforts
drew on long-standing German traditions of conservation, which the SED made
frequent reference to as well.45 By taking independent action outside of party and
state organizations, however, activists implicitly questioned the regime’s effective-
ness and challenged their attempted monopoly on expressions of environmental
concern.
This assumption of individual accountability—charged by a higher, non-
Socialist authority—stood in contrast to the SED’s stale rhetoric and structural
lethargy. It posed a symbolic threat to the GDR’s totalizing system. In the context
of the SED’s efforts to develop a “socialist environmentalism,” Christian-inspired
environmentalism offered an alternative path for human engagement with the en-
vironment. It defied the SED’s rational, progressive outlook, which relied heavily
on technological innovation, and instead grounded itself in religious language, un-
158 Julia E. Ault

dermining the claims of Socialist propaganda. It questioned the SED’s use of natu-
ral resources and exposed flaws in its internal logic. For instance, it asked how the
SED could both increase material standards of living based on limited resources
while at the same time blaming the West for its materialism and exploitation of
the natural world.
The 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant provoked the
explicit threat to the SED that the regime had feared. Although the event occurred
on April 26, the SED did not release any information about it until May 2, after
May Day parades and festivities. By this point East Germans had been hearing
about Chernobyl from West German media for days, and had grown increasingly
concerned. The SED’s inexplicable silence fueled their demands for more infor-
mation about the potential dangers of the meltdown. Independent groups formed
in response to this threat and the existing movement attracted a broader range of
supporters, including East Germans who were not involved in the church. The
Chernobyl accident—and the SED’s bungled handling of it—transformed envi-
ronmental discontent in the GDR from a critique of specific policies into a critique
of the entire system. It united local and theological concerns, which had generally
only appealed to specific segments of the East German population, with larger,
existential questions about the SED’s ability and desire to protect its citizens.
In the months after the Chernobyl disaster demands for more accurate in-
formation did not go away, regardless of the SED’s rejection of glasnost and its
clampdown on reporting on the crisis. One particularly influential environmental
group was the Environmental Library in Berlin. Founded largely in response to
the lack of satisfying answers about Chernobyl, the Environmental Library was a
physical space (a library) as well as a group of activists.46 The idea of a library was
calculated, because it seemed relatively harmless. It was not as public or seemingly
political as a demonstration, but it still disseminated controlled information.47 On
September 2, 1986, the library opened its doors and offered a few dozen books
on environmental topics to anyone who was interested in learning more about
ecology and the natural environment. According to Wolfgang Rüddenklau, one of
the library’s founders, the Environmental Library had about fifty members when
it first opened.48 Over the next three years the group’s membership increased, but
even more than the growing numbers of supporters, the group’s samizdat (illegal
and self-published) newsletter, Umweltblätter, represented the expanding influ-
ence and networking within the environmental movement.
Umweltblätter served two purposes. First, it was a means of communication
for independent environmental networks to share information, data, and news of
their activities. Secondly, it enabled the Environmental Library to bring together
previously isolated groups from different parts of the GDR. It helped them learn

from one another and expand their programs. The Environmental Library pro-
moted “environmental church services,” conferences, and other related events
through Umweltblätter. It informed groups in Dresden, Rostock, and Berlin about
living conditions in other parts of the GDR. For example, articles about the need
to improve living conditions in the coal-mining region around Leipzig became
common in 1988 and 1989, and even led to the collection of donations for the
campaign, “A Mark for Espenhain.”49
Second, Umweltblätter reached a broader population, raising awareness among
those not already active in the movement. Initially the newsletter focused on the
Chernobyl accident, but it expanded its scope to include information on wider
dissident movements both in the GDR and in other Eastern European counties.
Between 1986 and 1989 it became one of the most successful underground pub-
lications in the GDR. Umweltblätter expanded on concerns that many East Ger-
mans had and cited Western news sources to provide information that the SED
did not print. When the newsletter began in the fall of 1986, the Environmental
Library printed between 150 and 200 copies, but by 1989 circulation had reached
over 2,000 copies,50 making it the most widely read underground publication in
the GDR.51 One man wrote to the editors of Umweltblätter in May 1989 that he
had come across an issue of the newsletter at the Third Full Ecumenical Assembly
in Dresden, and “because the subjects broached interested him greatly,” he asked
for a subscription.52
Despite interference from the infamous state police, the Stasi, the indepen-
dent environmental movement continued to undermine the SED’s authority in
the late 1980s. It undermined official policies and offered an alternative motiva-
tion for environmental protection. Many of the leaders of groups founded in the
1980s became crucial figures in the citizens’ movements (Bürgerbewegungen) that
demonstrated en masse against the regime in the fall of 1989 and contributed to
the opening of the Berlin Wall. Environmental issues played a major role in these
protest movements.
Development of Environmental Protest in Poland

In Poland environmental issues stayed subordinated to the ongoing economic
crisis, lack of consumer goods, and the struggle over the Catholic Church’s place
in Communism. With both the PZPR and the leading opposition organization,
Solidarność, focusing on these concerns, engagement with the environment
lacked mass appeal, especially before Chernobyl. Solidarność’s successes, though,
benefitted a nascent independent environmental movement. Once Solidarność
won the right to organize independently in the summer of 1980, environmental-
ly minded individuals took the opportunity to found Polski Klub Ekologiczny
160 Julia E. Ault

(PKE). The PKE thus became the first legal independent environmental organi-
zation in the Soviet Bloc.53 The regime’s laxer regulation of social organizations,
especially after martial law was lifted in 1983, permitted the kind of networking
among environmentalists across Poland in a way that was forbidden in the GDR.
This phenomenon demonstrates the differing extent of freedom of speech allowed
within Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. In Poland the less repressive character
of the regime allowed for greater cooperation between state and environmental
organizations, even if there was less public awareness about pollution and its ef-
fects on the population.
After waves of strikes and economic crisis had plagued the PZPR for the better
part of a decade, tensions between society and the regime came to a head in the
summer of 1980. The Polish government, under First Party Secretary Władysław
Gomułka, granted a number of concessions, chief of which was the right to orga-
nize independent trade unions and other social-interest groups. Thus, from the
summer of 1980 until December 1981, when martial law was imposed, Poles were
permitted to establish organizations and associations outside the purview of the
PZPR.
The largest such group was Solidarność, but many other interest groups took
the initiative to organize as well, including the Kraków-based PKE. Founded in
September 1980, this club was composed of scientists and interested individuals
at Jagiellonian University and sought to blend scientific expertise with grassroots
activism.54 In the period between its founding and the imposition of martial law,
the PKE pressured the regime into shutting down a major source of pollution in
the region—an aluminum smelter that was part of the Skawina works, located not
far outside of the city. Although complaints about the pollution had surfaced well
before the founding of the PKE, it was during this period of liberalization that ac-
tivists were able to push for its closure.55 Despite Poland’s relative lower standard
of living within the Soviet Bloc and its major economic issues, the push for and
success in forcing the closure of the plant suggested that quality of life issues mat-
tered to people, even when economic conditions were dire.
Environmental issues were not at the heart of the Solidarność movement, but
nonetheless played a role throughout the period of liberalization and martial law
that followed. Environmental concerns were included in the program for Solidar-
ność’s First National Congress in September and October 1981.56 However, these
proposals were never implemented as Solidarność’s focus remained on their eco-
nomic and political demands. A month and half after the First National Congress,
Solidarność’s hard-won rights came to an end when General Jaruzelski declared
martial law on December 13, 1981. The environmental movement, however, was
not explicitly oppositional and, despite limitations, persisted in functioning on a

local and regional level. In fact, interest in official environmental and conservation
organizations, such as the Nature Conservation League, further rose during this
period, and in 1984 even helped spark a nexplicitly environmental youth group
called Wolę być (I’d rather be).57
With the end of martial law in 1983 and the introduction of Gorbachev’s re-
forms in 1985, groups such as the PKE were able to hold national conferences
again and to take on larger projects. It helped that the PKE did not view itself as
explicitly opposed to the regime. The group’s leader, Zygmunt Fura, viewed it as a
group of doctors, scientists, journalists, and members of workers’ councils who all
viewed environmental issues as part of Poland’s larger social and economic issues,
but were always willing to cooperate with local officials. Although this created
some tension between them and some Solidarność members who called PKE ac-
tivists “regime-loyal,” Fura and the PKE simply viewed their task as different from
Solidarność’s explicitly oppositional one.58 Its willingness to compromise served
the club well as it sought to inspire environmental reforms in the second half of
the decade. By the late 1980s Fura estimated that the PKE had three thousand
members across Poland, roughly seven hundred of whom belonged to the region-
al branch based in Kraków.59
Around this time, a younger generation of activists distinct from the founders
of Solidarność established new groups that challenged the PZPR’s environmental
record and complacency. The most prominent example, Wolność i Pokój (Free-
dom and Peace, WiP), was established in 1985 in Kraków and Warsaw, and later
developed a strong presence in Wrocław, too. Unlike Solidarność and the PKE,
WiP never sought to negotiate with the Communist authorities. In this, it repre-
sented generational shift in the movement from older workers and professionals
to young people whose initial focus was conscientious objection to military ser-
vice.60 Although the group grew out of the peace movement of the 1980s, WiP
connected concern for peace to concern for the environment, primarily in regards
to the nuclear question.61
Although WiP started off as an organization only partially concerned with the
environment and fully opposed to the regime, its focus shifted after the Chernobyl
catastrophe. Protests against the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant built upon previ-
ously planned environmental protests, such as one on Children’s Day ( June 1) in
Kraków. WiP became more active in planning and participating in such events af-
ter Chernobyl. For example, on June 1, 1986, they helped organize women to carry
dead flowers as they left the Marian Church in the center of Kraków to symbolize
the death of nature. As they entered the market square, WiP posters greeted them
and the group began to sing songs that were part of the Solidarność movement.62
Radio Free Europe estimated that roughly two thousand Krakowians participat-
162 Julia E. Ault

ed in the Children’s Day protests. Reminiscent of the Western European green
movements, they rallied around the motto “better active today than radioactive
tomorrow.”63 In the wake of the Chernobyl accident, WiP began to engage more
actively with the environmental aspects of its platform and more explicitly protest
against pollution on many levels.
The disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant particularly resonated in
Poland because not a year earlier the government had begun to build the coun-
try’s first nuclear power plant, Żarnowiec, thirty-five miles northwest of Gdansk.
Questions about Chernobyl were immediately raised about the proposed nucle-
ar power plant, which would have relied on the same technology and safety sys-
tems. Although Radio Free Europe concluded, “Public opposition to Żarnowiec
will probably be of little consequence, simply because construction is unlikely to
make much headway soon,” nuclear energy continued to be contentious for en-
vironmental and opposition groups.64 In the weeks after the Chernobyl incident,
three thousand Poles from the northeastern city of Białystok signed a petition to
the Sejm (Parliament) demanding a stop to the construction of Żarnowiec. Frus-
tration over the danger posed by the Chernobyl plant, and the possible danger
associated with the planned Żarnowiec reactor, fed into larger discontent with the
regime.
With Gorbachev’s reforms, travel between East and West became easier, too,
allowing environmental groups from the Eastern Bloc to come into closer contact
with those in the West. In 1985 a few activists from Poland and Hungary were able
to attend a conference on acid rain organized by the Friends of the Earth (FOE)
in Eerbeek, the Netherlands. There, the Eastern Europeans found an “excellent
opportunity, not only for meeting other participants, but for also starting contacts
between both countries.”65 At this conference, and with the aid of the FOE and a
handful of other Western groups, the Polish and Hungarian representatives de-
veloped the idea of networking among environmental groups in Eastern Europe.
Along with a handful activists from Czechoslovakia, they took advantage of the
eased travel regulations to meet in Hungary later in the year, and founded Green-
way, an English-language collaboration among activists in Eastern Europe.66
In October 1987 the PKE became a full member of the FOE, further breaking
down boundaries between east and west. To formalize the affiliation, a PKE rep-
resentative from Warsaw, Andrzej Kassenberg, attended the executive committee
meeting in Geneva. While at the meeting he aimed to make Western Europeans
more aware of conditions in Poland, and Eastern Europe more generally. He ar-
gued that “The environment—and air pollution—do not care about boundaries,
and environmental protection isn’t defined by politics or profit factors.” Kassen-
berg further pointed out that Poland was a large contributor to air pollution in

Europe, as well as being in a “difficult economic situation, and owes money to
western countries.”67 These obvious interconnections between east and west high-
lighted how Eastern Europe’s pollution and economic situation affected Western
Europeans, and helped to bridge the mental Cold War divide.
The relative freedoms enjoyed in Poland sharply contrasted with the repressive
situation in the GDR. While Poles were increasingly permitted to travel within
and outside of the Soviet Bloc, the SED resisted any sort of reform.68 In the GDR,
not only were Western environmental groups suspect, they were actively spied
on. The Stasi went so far as to keep lists of suspected West German Greenpeace
members for their “actions directed against the GDR,” and to plant unofficial in-
formants in Greenpeace organizations in West Berlin to keep tabs on the groups’
plans regarding the GDR. The “reliable” informant was “instructed to seek out
and develop contacts” with West Berlin Greenpeace members to keep the Stasi
abreast of protests against East German air and water pollution in West Berlin.69
As Poland and Hungary allowed more contact with the West, the SED remained
entrenched in its paranoid Cold War mentality.
Gorbachev’s loosening of the reins across the Soviet Bloc must be viewed in
conjunction with domestic crises of confidence in the ruling Communist parties
across the region. As the historian Stephen Kotkin has argued, the collapse of
Communism in Eastern Europe was not just the result of popular protest but also
of officialdom’s loss of faith in its own system.70 It was not only in Poland that the
ruling Communist Party retreated from a hard line—a similar process occurred in
Hungary and, more gradually, in Czechoslovakia. Even the staunchest supporters
of the system could not deny the pollution that surrounded them daily—in the air,
soil, and water. The varied approaches Eastern European activists took to address
degradation, using official, unofficial, and oppositional means reflected a grow-
ing consensus about the problem. More broadly, too, the environmental situation
reflected the multifaceted challenges that the Soviet Bloc faced in the mid-1980s,
posing related questions about how to proceed.
Interactions and Influences: Poland as Site of International Exchange

As the political situation in the Communist Bloc changed after 1985, Poland be-
came a site of international exchange. Relaxed travel restrictions made it easier
for Poles to travel beyond the Soviet Bloc, and also allowed westerners inside the
country. While the GDR clamped down on any hint of reform or protest, Poland
experienced a meaningful international revival and provided a unique space for
Eastern and Western Europeans to meet. East Germans who could obtain visas
to Poland witnessed a more lenient, albeit economically weaker Communist state
than their own. Additionally, for East German environmental activists, traveling
164 Julia E. Ault

east actually allowed more direct contact with the West.71 This convoluted connec-
tion with the West further undermined the eroding system.
While protest was picking up in response to environmental degradation in Po-
land, the country also became an integral part of a larger Eastern European move-
ment. Offering more freedom than virtually any other Eastern European country,
Poland—and in particular Kraków—became a center of networking and cooper-
ation. Under the leadership of Zygmunt Fura, the PKE hosted numerous interna-
tional conferences, which brought together activists from the Soviet Union, the
Eastern Bloc, and Western Europe. The debates and resolutions from these con-
ferences and workshops were then published in Greenway’s self-titled newsletter,
as well as in samizdat publications in other Eastern European countries. These
initiatives offered East German activists additional means to protest against the
SED, and Polish activists were able to root themselves in a larger environmental
network.
Looking eastward—especially to Poland—helped East German environmen-
tal activists discredit the SED regime. Gorbachev’s reform policies, which were be-
ing taken more seriously in other Bloc countries, illustrated how even Soviet–style
Communism acknowledged the need for openness and restructuring. In Poland
travel restrictions and censorship were eased, making it possible for activists to
congregate in larger numbers. In the summers of 1987 and 1988 the PKE hosted
multi-day events that brought together participants from all over Eastern Europe,
including Poles, Czechoslovaks, Hungarians, East Germans, and Soviets. The par-
ticipants concluded that the “environmental situation in socialist countries is bad
and seems to be getting worse, despite our governments’ programs and activities.”
They argued that they should “play a larger role” in pushing for solutions to “eco-
logical problems.”72 This banding together of activists from across the Soviet Bloc,
with Poles at the center, created a new sense of purpose and unity.
By visiting Poland, East German activists saw how independent environmen-
tal groups could cooperate with the authorities. In fact, many were surprised
by the level of support and cooperation the PKE received from local officials in
Kraków. Not only did the PKE leader and lecturer at the university, Zygmunt Fura,
appear to have a good working relationship with the head environmental inspec-
tor in Kraków, Bronisław Kamiński, but Kamiński actually led visitors on a tour
of the infamous local polluter, the Lenin Steelworks at Nowa Huta.73 Moreover,
the government-funded scientific projects, including measuring and publishing
data—which was banned in the GDR—and even encouraged international col-
laboration. This more tolerant atmosphere signaled to East Germans that glasnost
was taking effect in other countries and encouraged them to demand more change
at home.

After such events, participants returned to their home countries to share the
results and impressions from these meetings with those who could not attend.
Reports on visits to Poland in 1987 and 1988 were written up for multiple under-
ground and church-affiliated publications in the GDR, such as Umweltblätter, pub-
lished in Berlin and Briefe, the newsletter published at the KFH.74 A report from
East German activists on the European Youth Forest Action conference in July
1988 discussed the relative acceptance of independent groups in different coun-
tries, helping to contextualize the East German efforts. As the author explained,
“In Hungary, Poland, Estonia, and Ukraine, autonomous environmental groups
can exist and register as independent organizations . . . [But] the situation is sub-
stantially more problematic in the GDR, CSSR [Czechoslovakia], and Romania,
where these groups are only partially tolerated.”75 The combination of personal
contact and written dissemination of information provided an impetus for the in-
dependent movements.
Despite the easing of travel restrictions within the Communist Bloc as well as
with the West, cooperation faced numerous political and cultural challenges. Co-
ordination between GDR and Polish security apparatuses, albeit sometimes reluc-
tantly on the Polish side, limited East German activists’ effectiveness. For known
oppositional and environmental figures in the GDR, travel to Poland—much less
West Germany—remained difficult. After having entered Poland with the intend-
ed destination of Katowice, one known activist was reported to have surfaced at
the port of Gdańsk, attempting to take the ferry to Finland for an international
conference there.76 The activist’s visa only permitted travel to Poland, Czecho-
slovakia, and the Soviet Union, and Polish border authorities therefore denied
him passage to Finland. Polish police officers even went so far as to confiscate a
“note of protest” that the activist had planned to pass on to his Finnish companion,
should he be detained. Ever thorough, the Stasi then requested that the note be
handed over to them for safekeeping.77
In other cases, the SED forbade East Germans from leaving the GDR, even to
visit other Socialist countries. As one thesis written at the Stasi academy in Pots-
dam explained, for years, “non-socialist representatives . . . [had used] meetings in
socialist countries to come into contact with GDR-people, particularly those for-
bidden from travel to the non-socialist world.”78 The student then specifically list-
ed Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary as the three most problematic countries.
This system was maintained up to the GDR’s final months, when the Stasi forbade
representatives from Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, Russia, and Latvia from attend-
ing a Greenway meeting in Berlin in the summer of 1989. Fearing that “‘Greens’
from different capitalist countries wanted to participate,” officials declared the
conference “not officially registered and not permitted,” and participants from the
166 Julia E. Ault

Soviet Union were banned from entering the GDR.79 Even as communication in-
creased among the Soviet Bloc, the vigilance of the security apparatuses held the
movement in check.
Language barriers and cultural chauvinism, too, hindered collaboration among
Eastern European activists. Although Umweltblätter described a 1988 meeting
in Kraków as the “high point in European environmental activists’ work,” and a
“building block in overcoming barriers,” at least one East German activist did not
agree.80 After the official work was done, he reported that some of the activists
wanted to “try their luck at the local disco, Krak,” because “female participants
were in the minority.” Despite the reasonable cost of drinks, the German “eco-
freaks” were unimpressed with the club. The author complained in his article
that “After the second dance, [two Polish women] excused themselves saying that
sexual intercourse [Beischlaf] would cost 150 DM, and if we were interested, we
could follow them.” He further whined about how when “the music went out it
took paying the disc jockey 1000 zloty to get it going again.”81 The author reiter-
ated long-standing German stereotypes about Polish women, Poles’ inability—or
refusal—to speak German or English, and their general laziness.82 In a few brief
sentences, the disgruntled activist revealed real and perceived cultural differences
between the GDR and Poland. Growing cooperation among Eastern European
activists strengthened the movements’ overall effectiveness, but continued to face
more than just political obstacles.
Despite these barriers, Poland became a welcoming space for Eastern Euro-
pean activists to congregate and a model in protesting Communist governments.
Having a more lenient party in the PZPR and a better organized opposition of-
fered numerous benefits to the environmental movement that ultimately brought
together activists from both sides of the Iron Curtain. Western Europeans learned
about the extent of pollution on the other side of the Iron Curtain while providing
crucial knowledge and resources to their counterparts in the Soviet Bloc. At the
same time, Eastern European activists bonded over their shared grievances and
were better able to push their governments on environmental, as well as larger
social and political, issues.
\\\
Environmental degradation was a major source of concern for Eastern Europe-

ans and their Communist governments in the 1980s. The Soviet economic system
relied on antiquated and exploitive industries that emitted disastrous pollution
and prompted official responses, as well as backlash from the general population.
Thus, environment policy became a key issue in the debate about the legitimacy of
the Communist regimes more broadly. The communist parties—the SED and the

PZPR—drew up reform-minded policies and even established social organiza-
tions to capture the interest of conservation-minded citizens. Still, environmental
issues contributed to popular frustration with ossifying social and political struc-
tures. Independent activists took their concerns outside of official channels and
carved out space on the fringes of society and politics, facing political ostracism if
not outright persecution for their actions. To pursue their cause, despite political
challenges, activists found sanctuary in the Protestant Church in the GDR or in
Solidarność and the scientific community in Poland. Over the course of Com-
munism’s final decade in Eastern Europe they raised awareness about pollution’s
effects on the population and natural environment and, in doing so, also critiqued
the degradation of Communist systems as a whole.
A comparison of the GDR and Poland illustrates the varying tolerance of pro-
tests across the Soviet Bloc. Rather than viewing society and politics behind the
Iron Curtain as a monolith, different cultural and political traditions shaped the
character of protest in each country. The lack of a broad based opposition in the
GDR was known for its social complacency can be explained in part by the SED’s
open rejection of Gorbachev’s reforms after 1985. The environment was one of
the few topics around which East Germans rallied, building on traditions of pop-
ular engagement with nature and therefore such protests were not necessarily
interpreted as acts of dissent. Alternatively, in Poland, protest—successful pro-
test—was more common, but it did not necessarily revolve around environmen-
tal issues. Nevertheless, the relative political freedom there permitted Poland to
become a site for environmental activists from across Eastern Europe to network
and collaborate.
Environmental politics and protest in Eastern Europe responded to concrete
domestic problems, but increasingly shared quality of life concerns with Western
European green movements. Poland—and to a lesser extent Hungary—were hubs
of communication, collaboration, and common values in their role as sites of ex-
change between East and West. This fact highlights the porous nature of the Iron
Curtain and complicates the traditional narrative that green movements only arise
and are successful in liberal democracies. Concerns about the impact of pollution
on Europeans evolved not only on both sides of Europe’s divide, but in fact, across
it. Especially after the introduction of glasnost and the disaster at the Chernobyl
Nuclear Power Plant when travel and correspondence became easier, activists on
both sides of the Iron Curtain came together to find common solutions and to
share knowledge. Thus, environmentalism in the GDR and Poland expands our
conception of the “greening of postwar Europe.” By bridging Eastern and Western
Europe, environmental activists created a critique that contributed to the collapse
of communism and connected Europeans in a new way.
168 Julia E. Ault

10
About Environmental Policy

in Socialist Yugoslavia
Hrvoje Petrić
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
The internal organization of Socialist Yugoslavia featured a union of states—a

federation of six republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia,
Montenegro, and Macedonia) and two autonomous provinces (Kosovo and Vo-
jvodina) that were formally part of Serbia. Yugoslavia was a federation with nomi-
nally Socialist political institutions, dominated by a single Communist party until
1990.1 The country’s political structure evolved in three major stages: as an or-
thodox member of the monolithic Soviet-led Communist Bloc (1945–1948), as
a nonaligned Communist country whose slogan was “brotherhood and unity” 2
among its constituent republics and autonomous provinces, and after its new con-
stitution in 1974 as a decentralized federation, with no dominant leader and with
most aspects of political power focused at regional levels.3 This evolving political
system is reflected in nature conservation and environmental policy. This chapter
explores how nature protection was structured in Socialist Yugoslavia, who was
involved, and the relative roles of government, scientific experts, and civil society
at large.
This chapter also attempts to answer the question of when awareness of en-
vironmental problems in Yugoslavia appeared and how it developed. Further, it
seeks to connect the awareness of Socialist Yugoslavia’s environmental problems
to the transfer of ideas between the East and the West during the Cold War.4 Yugo-
slavia after 1948, and especially after 1967, occupied a unique position neither east
nor west of the Iron Curtain. Foreigners had easy access to Yugoslavia, especially
after it waived all visa requirements in 1967. In addition, millions of Yugoslavs ac-
quired experience of Western Europe after authorities legalized labor emigration
in 1963 and reached an agreement with West Germany on a program of (theoret-
ically) temporary guest workers in 1968. At its height around 1970–1972, several
169
hundred thousand Yugoslavs worked in the gastarbeiter program in West Germa-
ny. Moreover, in the western parts of Yugoslavia people watched TV from Italy
and Austria without difficulty. All this influenced the transfer of ideas between
Yugoslavia and the West, and marked Yugoslavia off from those countries—such
as the USSR—where the Communist Party exercised much tighter control over
information.
To the best of my knowledge, there is still no comprehensive research present-
ing a full picture of environmentalism in Socialist Yugoslavia. Some notable works
paint parts of that picture however. For instance, a collection of documents on the
environmental movement in Yugoslavia for the period 1971–1991,5 as well as some
subnational studies (i.e., on environmental protection associations during the last
stage of Socialism in Croatia),6 or on the development of ecological thought and
ideas in Slovenia.7 Given the paucity of works on the Yugoslav case, this chapter
devotes considerable space to establishing the basic chronology and institutional
structure of Yugoslav environmentalism.
Nature Protection in Socialist Yugoslavia—Some Basic Information

Yugoslavia came into existence in 1918 in the aftermath of World War I. Socialist
Yugoslavia emerged from the wreckage of World War II, and its efforts at nature
protection date from 1945. A systematic, continuous effort to protect nature in
Yugoslavia began after the end of World War II with the creation of federal Yugo-
slavia—in July 1945 Yugoslavia passed a law on the protection of cultural monu-
ments and natural rarities. Its first article captures the guiding principle: “Natural
rarities of zoological, botanical, geological paleontological, mineralogical and
petrographic and geographic character, no matter to whom they belong and no
matter whose possession they are, may be put under state protection.”8
In 1946 the National Assembly of Yugoslavia passed a new and more com-
plete general act on protection of cultural monuments and natural rarities, in line
with the new Yugoslav constitution, which devolved considerable authority upon
the six constituent republics.9 On the basis of that law, from 1947 to 1949 the
assemblies of the federal republics of Yugoslavia adopted laws on the protection
of nature, and those acts were the basis of nature protection. So until 1949, all six
republics of Yugoslavia passed laws regulating the protection of natural rarities,
and later, regulating nature conservation. However, professional institutions were
being formed at much slower pace and with few staff.10
Despite these efforts, nature conservation in Yugoslavia encountered a number
of problems. This is why in 1953 an inter-republic conference on nature protection
and the scientific study of natural rarities of Yugoslavia was held in Belgrade; the
170 Hrvoje Petrić

conference adopted a resolution on the necessity of a general protection of nature,
not just of natural rarities.11
New laws on nature protection were adopted in 1960 in Croatia and Mace-
donia; in 1961 in Montenegro and Serbia; in 1965 in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In
parallel developments, the Yugoslav republics created institutes responsible for
environmental protection, apart from bodies focused on cultural monuments, be-
ginning with Croatia. These laws were amended in 1965 to be compliant and in
line with the second Yugoslav constitution, which was passed in 1963. Additional
regulations and laws were passed in 1965 that jointly aimed at “protection and
promotion” of nature and the environment.12 In some parts of Yugoslavia social
organization with activities related to reforestation and care for nature preser-
vation emerged. However, they were not independent in their actions and were
forced to work within the boundaries defined by the regime.13
The adoption of Yugoslavia’s third constitution in 1974 was particularly signif-
icant for environmental protection because it annulled the relevant federal leg-
islation, and shifted responsibility for the adoption of new laws to the member
republics and autonomous provinces.14 On the basis of the new constitution, the
six republics passed new laws on building national parks, protecting forests and
water, on hunting and fishing, on air pollution, and on spatial planning. The effec-
tiveness of legislation and its implementation were shown by the fact that many
natural areas and habitats in Socialist Yugoslavia were placed under protection;
among them were twenty-two national parks, established between 1948 and 1986,
involving all the republics and autonomous provinces of Yugoslavia.
In the beginning, institutions for the protection of nature were established
only in Croatia and Serbia. In Croatia the National Institute for the Protection of
Natural Rarities of the People’s Republic of Croatia was established on January 26,
1946—the institute operated for four years and kept under state protection the
“natural curiosities,” places of great natural value, such as Plitvice Lakes, Paklenica,
Mljet, Krk, the forest Dundo, Lokrum, Hušnjakovo, Rupnica, nearby Voćin, etc.
In 1950 the institute merged with the Department of Cultural Monuments, as the
Conservation Institute of the People’s Republic of Croatia’s Department of Natu-
ral Rarities until 1960, when it reemerged as an independent Croatian Institute for
Nature Protection.15
On April 30, 1948, Serbia established the Institute for the Protection and Sci-
entific Research of Natural Rarities of Serbia (Zavod za zaštitu i naučno prouča-
vanje prirodnih retkosti NR Srbije). Establishment of the institute was helped by
the activities of the most important institutions in this field: the Natural Histo-
ry Museum, the Institute of Ecology and Biogeography, biological groups at the
About Environmental Policy in Socialist Yugoslavia 171

Faculty of Sciences, and Faculty of Forestry at the University of Belgrade. Its first
resolution from 1949 referred to the protection of the Velika and Mala Ripaljka
waterfalls on Mount Ozren.16
In other republics, the protection of nature was the task of special departments
and offices at the Institutes for Protection of Cultural Monuments and Natural
Rarities. The first such institution was established in Slovenia in 1945: the De-
partment for Protection and Scientific Study of Cultural Monuments and Natural
Attractions of Slovenia.17 In 1947 one of its sections was dedicated to protection of
nature. Even at later stages, Slovenia did not have an independent institute for na-
ture protection, but only a service within the Department of Cultural Monuments
and Nature. In Bosnia and Herzegovina such a service was formed in 1953; in
Macedonia, in 1958. Both services operated within the framework of the Institute
for Protection of Cultural Heritage. A new independent office for nature protec-
tion was established in Montenegro in 1961; in Vojvodina in 1966; in Kosovo in
1974.18
From the 1950s, civil society became increasingly involved in nature protec-
tion in Yugoslavia. The various republic had individual societies (some of them
run by scientific experts and some run by volunteers) for the protection of nature.
They were in loose contact, and could not organize a broader action to protect
nature at the federal level. After the founding of the Conservators Society of Yu-
goslavia in Vranje, Serbia, in 1957, environmental-protection activities connecting
these societies commenced. First, they organized links among the republics, and
subsequently established a federal association of all societies of environmental
protection. In 1965, as part of this federal association, another society was formed
for the protection of birds; later on, another one supporting national parks. This
situation remained until 1973, when in Sarajevo the Association for the Protec-
tion of Nature of Yugoslavia was established, a separate association charged with a
task of organizing wider actions to protect nature. Its aim was to establish identical
societies at the level of individual Yugoslav republics and provinces; however, it
succeeded only in Serbia. After the adoption of the 1974 constitution, the Society
for Protection of Nature of Yugoslavia ceased to exist.19 The reason for this was the
fact that the issue of environmental policy was transferred from the federal level to
the jurisdiction of individual republics and provinces.
Yugoslavia adopted a number of international conventions related to the pro-
tection of nature: Convention on the Protection of Vegetation (1951), Conven-
tion on the Establishment of the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection
Organization (1951), Convention on Fishing and the Protection of Living Re-
sources on the High Seas (1958), Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and
Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Prop-
172 Hrvoje Petrić

erty (1972), Convention for the Protection of Birds (1973), Convention on the
Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1974), Convention on
Wetlands of International Importance as Waterfowl Habitat/Ramsar Convention
(1976), etc. 20 In 1948 Yugoslavia broke relations with the Soviet Union and its
Eastern Bloc satellite countries.21 Marshall Josip Tito, Yugoslavia’s leader, was ea-
ger to demonstrate his independence from Stalin on the international stage. It is
not clear whether this was the reason for joining international conventions begin-
ning in 1951, but it is a plausible inference.
Environmental Policy and Environmental Social Movements

The problems of environmental pollution were felt in many of Yugoslavia’s indus-
trial cities and their surroundings: Maribor, Split, Rijeka, Zenica, Sarajevo, Tuzla,
Slavonski Brod, Pančevo, Kragujevac, Niš, and Kruševac, were among the most
affected. One of the first environmental activists in Yugoslavia was the biologist
Siniša Stanković. In 1933 he had published a book, Okvir života (The framework
of life), in which he warned of the problems of environmental degradation.22
Even though many laws on environmental issues were passed right after World
War II, pollution attracted little attention because the state prioritized industrial-
ization, hoping to overcome the widespread poverty of predominantly agrarian
Yugoslavia.
Toward an Environmental Movement in Yugoslavia

After the split with Stalin, Yugoslavia enjoyed increasingly cordial relations with
its neighbors in Western Europe. It also took an active part in many internation-
al debates. But Yugoslavia was not a country with a lively environmental culture.
There were, nevertheless, some initiatives growing with the general awareness of
the need for environmental protection from the 1960s onward. Probably this re-
flects a transfer of ideas about environmental awareness from West to East of the
sort prevalent elsewhere in Europe.23
As the global environmental crisis emerged in the late 1960s, Yugoslavia was
quick to respond. Within its borders, environmental problems were growing, and
technological solutions were scarce. The ongoing process of industrialization in-
tensified urbanization and pollution. At the same time geographers, biologists,
architects, and others turned increasingly to environmental issues, organizing a
series of events and publications, notably in Slovenia.24 Representatives of the
Natural History Society of Slovenia participated at the European Year of Environ-
ment in 1970.25 In addition to the Slovenian activities, ecologically oriented publi-
cations began to appear in Belgrade, Yugoslavia’s capital.26
Meanwhile in 1971, the five-year plan for development of Yugoslavia stated that

the problem of environmental quality would be treated as an essential element of
living standards. It also called for the introduction of technology that is not harm-
ful to the environment. In 1971 in Herceg Novi, Montenegro, an international
conference took place, aimed at preparing for the United Nations Conference on
the Human Environment in Stockholm.27 The Yugoslav state, like many elsewhere,
was now showing an unprecedented degree of interest in environmental matters.
In addition, there were new initiatives on the part of individuals and civil so-
ciety organizations for the protection of the environment in different parts of Yu-
goslavia. One of the most important was the Community for Environmental Pro-
tection of Slovenia, established on March 20, 1971.28 In 1972 Croatia adopted the
Resolution on the Protection of Man’s Environment, which is still in effect today.
In Zagreb in 1972 the international meeting of the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Man and the Biosphere (MAB)
program took place. Rudi Supek, a sociology professor at the University of Zagreb
published a book about the ecological problems of Yugoslavia, the translated title
of which is This Is Our Only Country: Disaster or A Third Revolution (1973).29
On February 1–2, 1973, in Belgrade, over four hundred stakeholders came to-
gether and established the Council for the Protection and Improvement of the
Environment of Yugoslavia. Everyone with an interest in environmental protec-
tion took part, from the federal government of Yugoslavia to the Speleologist So-
ciety. The sponsor of the founding meeting was Yugoslavian president Josip Tito;
Edvard Kardelj, his second-in-command, spoke at the conference. The council
assembly elected seventy members (ten from each republic, and five from each
of the two autonomous regions). Its president became Ales Bebler; the vice pres-
ident Vera Johanides; and the secretary general Tadija Popović.30 The council em-
barked on a lively public relations effort, publishing three environmental maga-
zines in different cities.31 The establishment of the Council for the Protection and
Improvement of the Environment of Yugoslavia was followed by similar councils
in the republics.32
The environmental movements organized in the 1970s developed slowly until
the mid-1980s. The initiatives that bubbled up in Yugoslavia came from citizens
and scientists moved by genuine concern about the environment. They ques-
tioned the state’s traditional emphasis on industrial development, which seemed
to imperil the foundations of life, such as air and water. But by the mid-1970s the
state had regained the initiative. It did not exert formal control over citizen envi-
ronmental organizations, but through its own agencies and bureaucracies man-
aged to control environmentalism in Yugoslavia, taming it as a political force, co-
opting what—from the state’s point of view—threatened to become a source of
instability. The state retained the upper hand until the mid-1980s.
174 Hrvoje Petrić

The Introduction of Environmental Issues in the Yugoslav Constitution
and Environmental Policies up to the Disintegration of the Socialist State
At the urging of the Council for the Protection and Improvement of the Environ-
ment of Yugoslavia, a new article was added to the 1974 constitution. Article 192
referred to the right to a healthy environment. To the best of my knowledge, this
was the first mention in any Yugoslav constitution of the human right to a healthy
environment as a constitutional right.33 The constitutions of some Yugoslav re-
publics, too, incorporated provisions on the protection of the environment and
nature.34
After 1974, thanks to the decentralization of power in the new constitution,
protection and improvement of the environment was under the jurisdiction of
individual republics and provinces, while the federal authorities meddled in en-
vironmental issues only when it was of interest to the entire country and the in-
ternational community.35 This arrangement reflected the politics of Yugoslavia at
the time, but it did not fit well with the interconnectedness of the natural environ-
ment itself.
By the 1980s, the need for coordination of environmental policy at the fed-
eral level became too obvious to neglect. Environmental problems sometimes
spanned the borders of individual republics; others existed in multiple republics.
In those times, the most difficult environmental problems in Yugoslavia included
the loss of arable land to urban and industrial development, the depopulation of
the mountain regions and overpopulation of the plains and valleys, drought and
flooding, water pollution and shortages of clean water, reduction in forest area,
and increased use of fertilizers and chemical pesticides in agriculture. These prob-
lems existed in many parts of Yugoslavia, so tackling them in a decentralized fash-
ion was inefficient and expensive. Furthermore, by the mid-1980s, deterioration in
the economic situation in Yugoslavia reduced the chances of effective prevention
or remediation of pollution sources.36 Thus in 1985 the Commission of the Fed-
eral Council of the Assembly of Yugoslavia for the Protection and Improvement
of the Environment was created. The Federal Executive Council (the Yugoslav
government) operated a Coordination Committee on the Environment, Physical
Planning, Housing and Utilities of federal, republican, and provincial authorities
until its demise in 1989.37
International Environmental Cooperation After the Stockholm

Conference
The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm
in 1972, had a great influence on the founding of environmental agencies in many

countries worldwide.38 In 1972 there were only ten such agencies, but by 1985
the number had risen to 140. In addition, the United Nations Environmental Pro-
gram (UNEP) was brought into being.39 The remit of UNEP included operating
a small fund for environmental protection programs in developing countries. Part
of its coordination work was the collation of results from international confer-
ences, thus supporting an international network on environmental issues. Yugo-
slavia took part in UNEP’s initiatives from the beginning. For instance, a series of
conferences on the protection of the Adriatic Sea took place from 1974 onward.40
Split, Dubrovnik, Rovinj, and Portorož established institutes that were engaged in
research on the sea. The results of Adriatic study were relayed to UNEP, and the
situation with respect to common and protected fishing zones of Italy and Yugo-
slavia was closely monitored from that time onward.41
Yugoslavia’s cooperation with UNEP was part of a broader involvement in in-
ternational environmental organizations. Yugoslavia took part in the Committee
on the Environment of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Develop-
ment (OECD). It collaborated with the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance,
led by the Soviet Union (unfortunately, however, no records on this are currently
available). Yugoslavia also cooperated with neighboring countries—Bulgaria, Ita-
ly, Hungary, Austria, and Romania—in environmental accords. Individual repub-
lics also participated in international environmental collaboration; for example,
Slovenia and Croatia participated in the Alpe-Jadran regional organization. Yugo-
slavia or its republics also participated in regional understandings and agreements
on international rivers such as the Danube, Tisa, Soča, Vardar, Drava, and Mura,
and on international lakes. 42
In total, Yugoslavia ratified thirty-four international conventions and partici-
pated in more than one hundred international treaties, agreements, and protocols
pertaining to the environment. These international connections helped shape
Yugoslav officialdom’s approach to the environment. The first general review of
the environmental situation in Yugoslavia was prepared in 1977, and published
in 1979.43 In this respect, Yugoslavia followed the new international tradition of
national environmental assessments. It also shared the international trend toward
new technologies of environmental protection. In Ljubljana, a specialized fair sell-
ing equipment for environmental protection took place. In 1984, at the request
of the delegation of Yugoslavia, the OECD Environmental Committee in Paris
launched a project evaluating environmental policy in Yugoslavia; in 1985 it is-
sued a report entitled “Environmental Situation and Policy in Yugoslavia.” After
further debate in Yugoslavia and at the Committee of the OECD, the report be-
came a book, Environmental Policies in Yugoslavia, published in 1986.44 With Yugo-
slavian international cooperation in the years after the United Nations Conference
176 Hrvoje Petrić

on the Human Environment came a sustained transfer of ideas, strengthening en-
vironmental awareness—a suitable subject for future research.
Society and Media in the 1970s

The environmental movement in Socialist Yugoslavia had three phases. The first
phase began in the 1970s and represents the attempt to establish a popular envi-
ronmental movement. The second phase took place in the mid-1980s when there
was a renewal of the environmental movement, while the third phase, at the end of
the 1980s, featured an attempt to unify the various groups within the environmen-
tal movement and the establishment of the first green parties.45
The first phase began with university students. On April 14, 1971, the student
activists at Ljubljana University in Slovenia organized the first environmental
protest in Yugoslavia. The protest was directed against noise pollution, bringing
together about two thousand students. With the permission of the police, the stu-
dents quietly marched from the northern part of Ljubljana to the downtown cen-
ter, publicly making an environmental statement outside the Slovenia Assembly.46
The government took only very soft repressive measures against these student ac-
tivists; in late May 1971 other students rebelled and organized the “occupation” of
Ljubljana University Faculty of Philosophy.47 In 1972 Zagreb University launched
a multidisciplinary education of environmental engineers, the first of its kind in
Yugoslavia, primarily thanks to Vera Johanides, university professor and vice pres-
ident of Yugoslavia’s Council for Environmental Protection and Improvement.48
Another university professor, Otto Weber from the Dubrovnik Inter-University
Center, organized international courses on environmental issues from the per-
spective of the social sciences and frequently invited professors from Yugoslavia
and abroad.49
Educational institutions and personnel remained central to the environmen-
tal movement throughout the 1970s. Teaching activities related to the environ-
ment were systematized by the educator Ivan Furlan, who in 1974 published the
well-regarded book Pedagogizacija čovjekove okoline (Teaching the human envi-
ronment).50 The next step occurred in 1979 when the scientists Ivo Matoničkin,
Zlatko Pavletić, and Milan Cvitković published Čovjek i njegova okolina (Man
and the environment).51 This book was intended for teachers in primary and sec-
ondary schools so they could bring issues related to the environment into their
classrooms.52 As a parallel process, introduction of environmental content into
school textbooks was taking place as well. In Croatia, for example, a textbook by
Vicko Pavičić and Angela Rokavec, Živi svijet i njegova okolina (The living world
and its environment), was introduced in all six grades of primary school in 1974.
This book went through eleven editions.53 There were similar efforts in other parts

of Yugoslavia, and in 1978 Vojvodina introduced a brand new subject of environ-
mental education in its schools.54
The press and media joined educational institutions in drawing attention to
environmental issues. The trend is best represented by the weekly magazine Arena,
which dealt with Yugoslav everyday life, and in which there was some room for
limited criticism of the problems in society. Its first environment-centered articles
first appeared in the early 1970s; from the mid-1970s on they were more frequent,
clearer, and more open in their criticisms.55
The fact is that the media had plenty to criticize. Nominally strong legislation
on environmental protection lacked impact on the practical level, despite the of-
ficial public image that implied otherwise. Tacit agreements between politicians
and investors, who misled the public, sidestepped environmental legislation.
Environmental Social Movements in the 1980s

In the 1980s, due to a grim and growing economic crisis in Yugoslavia, the So-
cialist regime suffered an increasing loss of legitimacy. Concurrently, various en-
vironmental initiatives resurfaced and citizen groups began to conduct their ac-
tivities independently and outside of the system. Civil society movements started
to emerge, pointing to the problems related to pollution of the Krupa River, or
operation of the Krško Nuclear Power Plant, and a number of local activities and
protests were targeting the garbage dump sites and hydropower plants issues. It
was the anti-power-plants movements that were well-defined and properly orga-
nized. In general, Yugoslavia defined its energy policy as the need for maximum
power production. In pursuing energy needs, it often failed to comply with envi-
ronmental protection.
Hydroelectric plants became a characteristic target of ad hoc environmental
campaigns. After blueprints had been drafted for a new hydropower station on the
Una River (which flows through Croatia and Bosnia) in 1984, the very next year in
Bihać, an environmental group to protect the river was established. Its members
fiercely opposed the hydroelectric plant. From 1984 to 1988 in Slovenia, ecology
experts, local farmers, and youth organizations joined forces with environmen-
talists from Austria and Hungary, putting up a successful resistance to the plans
to build a series of hydroelectric plants on the Mura River.56 Since the mid-1980s
local farmers, foresters, and geographers had strongly protested against hydroelec-
tric power plants on the Drava River. Inspired by these activities, in the late 1980s
activists founded two local environmental nongovernmental organizations.57 In
the fight against the harmful, adverse effects of the hydroelectric power plant, con-
tacts and collaborations were made with other, more experienced environmental
activists and the environmental movement in Hungary, which had evolved since
178 Hrvoje Petrić

the mid-1980s. It is not yet investigated how the pressure from environmental
activists in Hungary also contributed to Hungary’s withdrawal from this project,
and the Hungarian government’s decision not to support the construction of this
hydroelectric power plant.
In the mid-1980s, while opposition to hydroelectric projects revitalized the
environmental movement, Yugoslavia had severe problems with its energy poli-
cy. The state’s stated priorities ran into opposition from the citizenry. Among the
first warning signs were frequent coal miners’ strikes and a budding antinuclear
movement. The antinuclear movement was only one aspect of the reinvigorated
environmental movement. Two other aspects were spontaneity in local protests
and self-organization of citizen’s youth groups. Spontaneity was important be-
cause freedom of association, speech, and action existed only in theory in 1980s
Yugoslavia. At the time of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster in 1986,
the Yugoslav public was not opposed to nuclear energy—the media pictured
nuclear energy in a positive light.58 But the Chernobyl accident changed matters.
The rise of an antinuclear movement was particularly noticeable in Slovenia, the
only republic with a nuclear power plant (Krško Nuclear Power Plant). Perhaps
the masses joining antinuclear protests also indicated opposition to the system,
as elsewhere in Europe. Over time, antinuclear themes gained media attention,
particularly after the extent of the Chernobyl disaster became clear. Spontaneous
antinuclear meetings with thousands of protesters, roundtables, and expert panels
were taking place across Yugoslavia. Numerous petitions against nuclear power
plants were filed, one of them signed by seventy thousand high school students
in Serbia. In Croatia in 1986, during a debate on the medium-term social devel-
opment plan, participants filed hundreds of legal amendments aimed at stopping
plans to build the Prevlaka Nuclear Power Plant. Due to the pressure of antinu-
clear activism, the Assembly of Slovenia declared a moratorium on nuclear power
plants until the year 2000. After that victory, the Slovenian public lost interest in
the antinuclear theme, although hardcore antinuclear activists continued to work
until the collapse of Yugoslavia and Slovenia’s independence in 1990–1991.59
Far from Slovenia, the Tara River in Montenegro became another site of op-
position to hydropower development in the 1980s. Its canyon, the largest in Eu-
rope, had been declared by UNESCO in 1980 as part of the natural heritage of
humanity. Nevertheless, authorities planned a hydropower plant at Buk Bijela on
the Drina River (into which the Tara River flows). However, the professional com-
munity rebelled, alarming the media and the public. Thus began one of the few all-
Yugoslavia environmental campaigns. A 1987 Constitutional Court decision indi-
cated the strong impact the environmental movement exerted upon the judiciary
within the political system of that period. This decision spared the Tara River Can-

yon from flooding and turning into a reservoir. Slovenia’s umbrella organization
of nature protection societies initiated the actions that led to the court decision,
invoking obligations from international treaties Yugoslavia had signed earlier. Tara
River Canyon was a part of Durmitor National Park, under protection according
to the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of World Cultural Heritage, which
Yugoslavia had already ratified. Without this international commitment, it would
have been difficult to stop the devastation of one of the loveliest river canyons in
Europe, and it would be doubtful that the institutions within the Yugoslav system
would have found the strength to stop the project.60 It is significant that the oppo-
sition to the hydropower station was strongest in Slovenia, far from the Tara River
Canyon. From 1987 to 1989 there were several more successful environmental
groups and activities across Slovenia. As for Zagreb (Croatia), an environmental
society called Svarun was active from 1986 to 1988, which, among other things,
dealt with the issues of environmental protection. In the autonomous province
of Vojvodina, between 1987 and the breakup of Socialist Yugoslavia in 1991–1992,
there were some lively groups of environmental activists in Novi Sad and Panče-
vo. In October 1989 various environmental groups from Yugoslavia made the first
attempt to create a permanent tie among them. On this occasion, some twenty
representatives of various activist groups from all the republics of Yugoslavia ex-
cept Macedonia gathered. A joint statement was issued, but without any further
joint actions.61
But, in the late 1980s, a time of deepening social and economic crisis in the
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, environmental issues were not the main
focus of the public. Attempts to unify spontaneous activist environmental groups
met with little success.
Founding of the First Green Parties

Only in Slovenia did environmental activists succeed in organizing significant in-
stitutionalized political and social power. Individual activists had been fostering
the idea of a formal political group, which led to the establishment of the Green
Party of Slovenia.62 The first Green Party in Yugoslavia, the Greens of Slovenia,
was established on June 11, 1989,63 initiated by a prominent Slovenian geogra-
pher, Dušan Plut.64 The Greens of Slovenia entered the anti-Communist coalition
Demokratična opozicija Slovenije (Democratic Opposition of Slovenia, DEM-
OS), which eventually won the first postwar multiparty elections in Slovenia in
early 1990.65 The Green Party of Slovenia won 9 percent of votes,66 and party
president Dušan Plut was elected as president of Slovenia.67 However, some party
members did not agree with the DEMOS coalition, and joined the Liberals or the
League of Communists (until then the ruling party), which then formed so-called
180 Hrvoje Petrić

Green Factions, whose members went to the polls as a nonpartisan Civic Green
list.68
In other republics of Yugoslavia, environmental movements did not enjoy as
much power as did Slovenia’s. At the initiative of University Association of Eco-
logical Public in Zagreb, the First Environmental Parliament of Croatia was held in
March 1989. It took almost a year to establish Croatia’s Union of the Green in Feb-
ruary 1990, as a loose federation of local environmental organizations. However,
representatives of professional societies refused to become part of this organiza-
tion.69 When in February 1990 the Green Party was established in Serbia, the Ser-
bian authorities organized the Environmental Movement of Socialist Republic of
Serbia, which was supposed to be a counterbalance. This movement never came
to life; however, the Green Party did not achieve any serious successes, except in
Pančevo (Vojvodina), where it won about 13 percent of the vote. As for Monte-
negro, in 1990 there was the Environmental Movement of Montenegro, but it did
not participate in the elections; in Macedonia the Ecology Movement was estab-
lished in May 1990. In early 1991 there was a split in the movement leading to the
formation of the Greens of Macedonia in April 1991. In Kosovo and in Bosnia and
Herzegovina there were no environmental organizations with political ambitions
until the breakup of Yugoslavia.70 Despite all the initiatives and efforts, the envi-
ronmental movement in Yugoslav republics other than Slovenia failed to organize
political movements of any consequence.71
\\\
In Socialist Yugoslavia, immediately after World War II, the very first institutions
for the protection of nature were established. From the 1970s onward, environ-
mental policies were formed, largely decentralized, and left to the jurisdiction of
individual Yugoslav republics in accordance with the centripetal tendencies of Yu-
goslav politics.
From the 1970s onward, an environmental movement developed gradually.
However, it should be noted that in Socialist Yugoslavia civil society (according to
Western standards) did not exist outside of the Socialist system. State-sponsored
environmental organizations dominated the scene, and citizens interested in envi-
ronmental issues typically joined or cooperated with these entities. Nevertheless,
in many local communities, activists found ways to operate with a modicum of
independence, especially during the 1980s. The system of political monopoly by
the ruling Communist Party slowly dissolved and gradual liberalization was visi-
ble even within the environmental movement.
After the mid-1980s, environmental groups were organized outside the govern-
mental framework of socialist Yugoslavia. These groups protested against the pre-

vious governmental attitude toward the environment, and gradually entered into
conflict with the state. Activities of spontaneous environmentalist groups were fo-
cused on unplanned, unsanitary, nonorganic garbage dumps, which in the second
half of the 1980s spread to all regions of Yugoslavia, significantly impairing the
quality of life and the health of people living near them. Local residents blocked
entrances to landfills, sometimes engaging in physical conflict with municipal
workers and the police. On the other hand, protests against hydroelectric power
plants were more organized and more successful, and they managed to stop some
planned construction. As for spontaneous youth environmental groups, most of
them were organized in Slovenia, which was always at the forefront environmental
awareness and concrete action. Their environmental protests were a part of an ef-
fort to change Slovenian society across the board, and to escape Yugoslav author-
itarianism. In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was an unsuccessful attempt to
unify the numerous individual environmental movements, initiatives, and groups
throughout Yugoslavia. After quickly gaining popularity, some environmental
movements went into decline, and the public lost interest in them. Moreover, they
lacked financial resources and organizational experience, too. We can assume that
the declining popularity of the environmental movement had to do with the rapid
dissolution of the Yugoslav Socialist system—because the main aim of the move-
ment—namely to improve Socialist environmental politics—disappeared after
the breakup of Yugoslavia. Besides, growing nationalisms and stronger conflicts
within the country, culminating in the bloody wars of 1991–2001, soon marginal-
ized the environmental issues entirely.
182 Hrvoje Petrić

11
“It Makes No Sense to Work against Nature”

Cold War Modernization in West German Agriculture
Scott Moranda
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
Even as they tackled pressing problems such as denazification, occupation au-

thorities in postwar Germany devoted a great deal of attention to food policy and
farming practices. They were not alone. Malthusian concerns about population
growth and natural resources prompted global conferences and high-level meet-
ings of world leaders during and after World War II to determine how best to feed
the world.1 In some ways, the continued influence of Malthusian thinking was not
unexpected. Soil fertility, food scarcity, and resource conservation had occupied
many leading political minds in the 1930s, from New Deal technocrats tackling
the crises of the Dust Bowl to Germans colonizing Eastern Europe to secure “liv-
ing space” and raw materials.2 In the postwar occupation zones, authorities debat-
ed whether divided Germany’s concentrated centers of industry could continue
to exist without degrading the nation’s soil or encouraging militarism and impe-
rialism.3 Some planners insisted that industrial output and high levels of meat
consumption could be maintained without degrading natural systems as long
as Germany continued to import food and other necessities on favorable terms.
Others, however, believed that the defeated country had to scale back production
and consumption in order to reduce its reliance on imperial expansion and the
plunder of distant soils and forests. Germany would have to use its own soil more
intensely. These latter experts argued that ecological stability could be maintained
despite the expansion of cultivation into former grasslands and forests. The key
would be embracing new technologies and limiting the consumption of resources
in urban centers. Perhaps the best-known advocate of limiting German resource
consumption was Henry Morgenthau Jr., the American secretary of the treasury
who wrote the controversial book Germany Is Our Problem in 1945.
Discussions of energy imports and industrial capacity intersected with de-
183
bates about the modernization of agriculture.4 As increased agricultural produc-
tion placed more pressure on soil fertility, some early twentieth-century German
agronomists had pushed for greater mechanization and the use of chemical fertil-
izers. Others had warned against a heavy reliance on chemicals and emphasized
the more efficient use of barnyard manure and other methods that improved the
soil’s physical properties. While advocates of technological modernization were
on the rise, they were in no way dominant before World War II. Just a few years
into the Cold War, however, dire Malthusian prophets of civilizational collapse
and advocates of alternatives to industrialized agriculture became less influential.
By the time of the Kitchen Debate in 1959, promoters of technology’s ability to
overcome hunger and environmental crisis triumphed.5 On both sides of the Iron
Curtain, promoters of chemical fertilizers ushered in the age of high-input “fac-
tory” farming.6 While Western promoters of mechanization and chemicalization
promoted small to midsize factory farms as a more democratic path to moderniza-
tion, agronomists in the Communist world insisted that only collectivization could
eliminate “archaic” practices that they linked to uneconomic small landholdings.7
According to Frank Uekötter, postwar farmers in West Germany led this tran-
sition to high-input farming from below. They embraced chemical fertilizers as a
“panacea,” especially once low energy prices made them less costly. Farmers often
ignored the warnings of those agricultural scientists wary of excessive reliance on
chemical fertilizers, high-input farming, and specialization (or monocultures).8 In
other words, Uekötter argues, the modernization of postwar agriculture had as
much, if not more, to do with the choices made by landowners than it did with the
advice of technocratic experts. Given that agricultural history often focuses too
much attention on planners and experts and too often ignores the motivations of
landowners, Uekötter’s emphasis on the agency of postwar farmers is welcome.
Farmers, however, did not act alone. Advisors and experts influenced their
choices. Of course, enthusiasts of mechanization and increased use of chemical
fertilizers had always pushed farmers in this direction. More pertinent to this
chapter, however, are those skeptics. Did they become less influential or less skep-
tical? Upon closer inspection, the transition to high-input farming depended in
part upon skeptical experts changing their attitudes toward chemicalization and
mechanization. Between 1948 and 1960 such skeptics convinced themselves that
new technologies (along with greater market specialization) could coexist with
and even benefit soil conservation.
The history of agriculture in Cold War Germany, in other words, is an envi-
ronmental history. German agronomists contemplating high-input farming tech-
niques helped usher in a whole suite of environmental changes that ultimately led
to an increased nitrification of central European waterways (among other conse-
184 Scott Moranda

quences). These agronomists also practiced an underappreciated form of infor-
mal environmentalism. Beyond the landscape architects, foresters, and landscape
preservationists more commonly discussed in histories of postwar German en-
vironmentalism, a different set of actors (farmers, agronomists, and agricultural
economists) engaged in a conversation about soil conservation and resource scar-
city. Even as they introduced methods that later environmentalists would identify
as unsustainable, postwar agronomists considered questions of sustainability and
contributed to Germany’s self-image as the greenest nation of the world.
This story also has larger implications for Cold War history. First, the ways
agricultural experts selected winners and losers among American proposals re-
veals how Cold War American hegemony depended on finding common ground
with local elites around the world. The important role of neoliberal thinkers in
this agricultural transition also highlights the links between Cold War ideological
debates and material change on the ground. Finally, the story of postwar agricul-
ture reminds us not to exaggerate discontinuities between the Cold War era and
earlier periods. Instead, it points to important continuities between the programs
of postwar advisors and prewar debates about modernization and colonialism.
Indeed, German agronomists did not convert overnight to the belief that tech-
nology could conquer nature and its limits. Even as they broke new ground, the
subjects of this story often clung to older habits of mind. First, the immediate
postwar years often found agronomists continuing a long tradition of criticizing
American agriculture that had first emerged in the nineteenth century. German-
speaking emigrants and visitors to the United States often wrote extensively on the
horrors of the wanton soil plunder practiced by Anglo Americans. These reports
almost always contrasted Anglo American destruction of the soil with the loving
stewardship practiced by ethnic Germans both in the United States and back in
the old country.9 Now that market specialization, high-protein fodder, and factory
farming were also linked to the global outreach of American New Dealers, one
might imagine that advocates of high-input farming in Germany would have to
overcome their aversions to American agriculture.
Instead, new practices succeeded because of their anti-Americanism. Agrono-
mists came to believe that capital-intensive dairy farming featuring chemical fer-
tilizers, irrigation, and confined animal feeding offered an opportunity for West
Germany to stay true to a land ethic and avoid American–style soil plunder. They
decided that certain innovations fit well with Germany’s climate and soils. Indeed,
they increasingly believed that greater specialization in modernized dairy farming
was essential for better adapting German agriculture to nature.
Just as anti-Americanism continued after the war, so did older assumptions
about racial hierarchies. In this respect, continuities in thought again influenced
“It Makes No Sense to Work against Nature” 185

changing attitudes toward agricultural innovation. As it had in the Nazi Empire,
the discussion of German soil, conservation, and economic productivity contin-
ued to intersect with notions of cultural progress and racial difference. When Ger-
man advocates of natural farming began to accept new technologies and methods,
their choices reflected a worldview that placed Germans and Western Europeans
at higher level of development than the residents of Eastern Europe or the Global
South.
While shaped by longer continuities of thought, the postwar transition was
also contingent upon the unique circumstances of the early Cold War. Occupa-
tion plans initially built upon Malthusian fears of resource scarcity to argue that
Germans’ rich diets were unnatural and depended on the plunder of central and
Eastern Europe. Occupation authorities, however, quickly abandoned plans to
deindustrialize Germany that would force West Germans to eat less meat and oth-
er luxuries. Envisioning a bulwark against the Soviet Bloc, they instead embraced
the status quo and endorsed a livestock economy of family farms long celebrated
both by German traditionalists for its benefits to soil fertility and by modernizers
for its ability to feed workers in urban centers. In addition, the Cold War gave birth
to neoliberalism, with its particular ideas about free trade and the natural flow of
goods across the global economy. Key players in the agricultural transformation of
West Germany had important links to neoliberal networks. Postwar decoloniza-
tion also influenced this story. At times, agronomists anxiously sought continued
access to raw materials from colonial or postcolonial realms. New German agricul-
tural practices could fit comfortably with a common belief that developed coun-
tries were naturally suited for adding value to raw materials best cultivated in less
developed colonial realms. At other times, innovations in pasture management
offered to compensate for Europe’s recent loss of colonial possessions. In respond-
ing to immense postwar changes, German agronomists almost always sought the
most natural solution, as they defined it at the time.
The Morgenthau Plan

It is useful to consider how the first few years after the end of World War II pro-
vided a tantalizing but short-lived window of opportunity for advocates of small-
scale agriculture to consider ecological constraints and their implications for in-
dustrial capitalism. A few prominent voices even imagined building a new agrarian
democracy of small farms, decentralized light industry, and radically altered diets.
Germans, they insisted, would have to consume less meat and make do without
importing fats and protein from abroad. Henry Morgenthau Jr. became the most
famous example of this type of thinking.10
Morgenthau placed much of the blame for Nazism and German militarism
186 Scott Moranda

on the overindustrialization of Germany. He argued that Germany had expanded
rapidly by limiting industrial expansion in other European countries. To prop up
domestic industry, German leaders also diverted energies from agricultural pro-
duction and allowed it to stagnate. As a result, a bloated Germany could not feed
itself. To maintain low wages for workers and provide middle-class Germans with
rich diets, Germany used diplomatic pressure, economic imperialism, and mili-
tary aggression to ensure that other European states devoted most of their resourc-
es to agriculture. Morgenthau thus insisted that curtailing Germany’s “extremely
unnatural overemphasis on employment in factories” would allow industry to re-
distribute in a less-concentrated pattern across the rest of Europe.11 At the same
time, Germany would no longer exploit the fertility of foreign soils and have to
rely more on its own agricultural production. As Morgenthau wrote, “If we treat
our friends fairly, Germany will have little food except what she can raise herself.”12
Morgenthau openly admitted that this probably meant that Germans would have
to make do with less, at least in the short term.
For Morgenthau, deindustrialization was not only about punishment and rep-
arations, but was also intertwined with his association of self-reliant farmers with
a healthy democracy. Throughout Germany Is Our Problem, Morgenthau insisted
(incorrectly) that small landowning farmers had been immune to militarism and
Nazism, and were “the backbone of a peaceful, perhaps a democratic nation.”13 As
he understood German history, conservative and militaristic estate owners who
had exploited farm laborers had also steered the country toward warfare. Mor-
genthau believed that that Germans “yearning to get back to the land” could now
settle on small family farms and thus cultivate a type of American self-reliance that
would put an end to authoritarianism and political extremism.14
In the long run, Germans would eventually be able to return to richer diets.
While others argued that poor climate and soils limited Germany’s agricultural
productivity, Morgenthau believed archaic, backward social conditions held Ger-
many back. He wrote, “Most of the Junkers were as backward in their farming as
in their social outlook. Rather primitive agricultural techniques prevailed. Large
areas were kept as hunting preserve. Most of the rest was used for the crude pro-
duction of grains instead of making the most of the land from higher grade food
crops and cattle.”15 On the other hand, small landowners were often more progres-
sive. Through land reform, therefore, Germany could increase its self-sufficiency
to the point that it only relied on imports for 5 percent of their foodstuffs (instead
of 17 percent).16
While his critique of land tenure in Germany is often recognized, Morgen-
thau’s links to the conservation movement remain quite underappreciated.17 Mor-
genthau drew heavily on New Deal conceptualizations of soil conservation and

agrarian democracy in his writings. He had been a student of Liberty Hyde Bailey,
a leader of the country life movement, which celebrated small landowners as the
backbone of democracy.18 Morgenthau also managed his own farm and served as
the director of the Department of Conservation in New York State during Frank-
lin Delano Roosevelt’s term as governor.19 In many ways, Morgenthau hoped to
establish a “New Deal” for Germany and imagined the restructuring of the Ger-
man economy as a conservation project that would lead to more efficient use of
the soil. For example, he proposed creating a German agency modeled after the
Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration in order to
support 2.5 million former factory workers with advice, credit, seed, and tools
on new farms. In an extended discussion, Morgenthau noted that beneficiaries of
such programs in the United States had transformed exhausted lands into profit-
able small farms through contour plowing and fertilizers and with the aid of the
Soil Conservation Service. Morgenthau concluded that their success “could be
repeated in a smaller way and with variations by millions of Germans.”20 In other
words, a German “New Deal” not only would create an agrarian democracy but
also help Germany become more self-reliant and sustainable.
To Feed Humans or Livestock?

While the military government in the American Zone later distanced itself from
the Morgenthau Plan’s focus on deindustrialization, it initially shared Morgen-
thau’s doubts about Germany’s ability to feed itself without significant land re-
form and lifestyle changes. In one illustrative example, American occupation
authorities in Germany demanded in 1946 that Germans in the American Zone
reduce the cattle herd by 11.4 percent, or by about five hundred thousand cattle.21
As authorities often repeated, German farms had spent large sums to purchase
feedstock from abroad to support German consumers and their desire for meat.22
The Americans believed that food supply shortages and Germany’s inability to pay
for imported livestock feed made the action unavoidable.23 They also repeatedly
reminded their German contacts that livestock made inefficient use of agricultur-
al land, as meat fed fewer people per hectare than grain and vegetable produc-
tion.24 The occupiers thus demanded the plowing under of many pastures and
replacing fodder crops with grain and vegetables.25 When Germans protested that
such a conversion would increase soil erosion, the Bipartite Control Office glibly
dismissed such predictions as an overreaction given the country’s gentle climate
and abundance of woodland.26 Plans for culling the livestock herd and expanding
cropland continued to shape American policy through 1948.
The Americans discovered, however, stiff resistance to their various projects
of livestock reduction, cropland expansion, and self-sufficiency. Peasants with the
188 Scott Moranda

least land grumbled the most since they bore the brunt of the cattle-reduction
initiative.27 In 1933 farmers in Bavaria with less than twenty hectares of land had
owned just over 1.2 million of the roughly 1.7 million dairy cows in the future
American Zone, and while some of these may have specialized in large-scale live-
stock production, 80 percent of cattle owners in Bavaria had six or fewer cows.
Many of these farmers depended on those cows to supplement their meager in-
comes by bringing dairy products to market or to fertilize their soil with barnyard
manure.28 They resisted by underreporting their livestock numbers and ignoring
demands for deliveries to slaughterhouses.29 As of August 1946, in fact, farmers in
the American Zone actually possessed more cattle and pigs than they had a year
earlier.30 To continue feeding the persistently high numbers of cattle, scofflaws had
set aside 210,000 extra hectares just for livestock feed instead of producing food
for direct consumption.31
The foot-dragging reflected both economic pragmatism and cultural preferenc-
es. Given the uncertainties about currency reform, many German farmers held
onto their cattle as a savings bank, or an economic hedge, until the economy sta-
bilized. Farmers also recognized that the black market offered lucrative opportu-
nities and surreptitiously raised additional cattle for this purpose.32 Bavarian offi-
cials also described American directives as unrealistic, poorly implemented, and a
threat to their land’s unique culture and economy. At the village and county level,
local officials had close relationships with small landowners and had little incen-
tive to coerce their neighbors and colleagues at the request of the occupation of-
ficials.33 At the state level, Bavarian food minister Joseph Baumgartner refused to
force small farmers to give up their livestock and accused German and American
officials in Frankfurt of dictatorial methods.34 The cultural aspect of this resistance
became clear in Baumgartner’s repeated insistence that he was defending Bavar-
ian interests from overreaching north Germans, or “Prussians” as he sometimes
called them. Hans Schlange-Schöningen, the German director of agriculture in
the American and British Zones, was one of those so-called Prussians that en-
forced American policies even if he also often criticized overzealous American
proposals.35
Defending Nature from Assault

In addition to their concerns about cash-strapped small farmers, German critics
believed that American initiatives for livestock reduction and cropland expan-
sion posed a severe threat to the land itself. They consistently mobilized notions
of naturalness and the organic to make their case, insisting that reconstruction
plans threatened environmental stability and severed long-standing trade rela-
tionships they identified as natural and unalterable. In other words, they believed

that a human-nature system had been established in central Europe that could
not be disrupted without threatening a descent into disorder and chaos. In part,
these ideas of nature and health drew on older cultural criticisms of modernity
as a threat to German ties to the soil.36 Less recognized are the ways that organic
thinking connected to the postwar neoliberalism.
For alarmed German administrators, one of the glaring failures of the occupa-
tion regime’s demand for cropland expansion in the late 1940s was its threat to a
livestock economy they believed to be well adapted to “natural and economic con-
ditions.”37 For example, one critic noted that requisitions by the military govern-
ment too often ignored the natural conditions under which farmers worked and
failed to allow farmers the flexibility to adapt to the “soil and climatic conditions
of their village.”38 In response to the military government’s demands that farmers
plow under pastureland for grain or vegetable crops, Schlange-Schöningen com-
plained, “It makes no sense to work against nature.”39 Carl Brandt, a German ag-
ricultural economist who had fled Germany in 1933, had long believed that the
dairy industry in Germany was the “result of a highly refined adaptation of agri-
cultural production to the climate, the soils, the topography, the relative scarcity
of land in comparison with the population, and finally the competitive situation
in the market.”40
Concerns about adaptation to Germany’s natural environment especially influ-
enced the debate over the American military government’s cattle-reduction pro-
gram. In meetings and in newspapers, German agriculturalists often reminded the
Americans that a large livestock herd was essential for increasing the productivity
of central Europe’s poor soil and protecting it from wind and water erosion.41 At
a 1946 meeting about cattle reduction, for example, the German participants told
occupation officials that, besides other negative consequences, the high slaughter
rates meant a “loss of stable manure.”42 A prominent Bavarian politician endorsed
this sentiment when he exclaimed, “None of us will need our manure pitchforks
anymore!”43 Throughout his career, Brandt also emphasized that farmers actually
improved soils as they grew their livestock herd (and thus their manure supply) to
meet the market demand for dairy and meat products.44 After the war, he contin-
ued to insist that livestock production prevented environmental decline and soil
degradation by transforming fiber into manure.45 Occasionally, even the Amer-
icans acknowledged German criticisms that the reduction of cattle had actually
lowered yields, due to declines in soil fertility.46
The architects of the social market economy and neoliberal critics of Keynes-
ian economics added a second dimension to these arguments about naturalness.
While Morgenthau and his allies advocated deindustrializing Germany, German
190 Scott Moranda

economists lobbied for an expansion of industrial output in order to pay for im-
ports of grain or livestock feed and to produce fertilizers and tractors for farmers.47
They presented a return to an export economy as a return to normality. Germany,
in their eyes, was the beating heart of Europe’s economy, and any radical alter-
ation of German manufacturing would send Europe into economic convulsions.
Germany, in other words, had a natural role to play in the global economy, and
Morgenthau’s proposals threatened this natural order of things.48
By 1949 American advisors increasingly agreed about the naturalness of Ger-
man heavy industry. President Truman, under pressure from German economists
and their American allies, asked Herbert Hoover to review the food situation in
1947.49 Morgenthau had resigned in 1945, but a cadre of military officials contin-
ued to honor his vision for postwar Germany. Truman officially abolished the last
remnants of the Morgenthau Plan in 1947, and American advisors began to push
for a revival of Germany’s industrial economy.50 Stanley Andrews and Hugh Ben-
nett were two prominent advisors to American military authorities whose grow-
ing influence reflected the change in American priorities. They initially shared
some of Morgenthau’s conclusions about inefficient German farming methods
and their supposed contribution to Germany’s democratic deficit.51 Andrews, a
representative of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and future head of the Point
Four programs to provide developmental aid to poor countries, served as an advi-
sor and director for the Food and Forestry Division of the military government in
1945 and again in 1948. In his reports and newspaper articles, Andrews consistent-
ly described a “medieval” or “feudal” land system that left farmers struggling with
scattered fields and outdated equipment.52 He insisted that Germany was stuck
“in the ox cart stage rather than the tractor and the airplane stage.”53 Hugh Ben-
nett, another backer of Point Four development schemes, noted in his travel diary
that Germans “love and preserve the land.”54 Yet, he added, this intensive farming
was “still primitive” with farmers managing the land as their “great grandfathers
had done.”55 Elsewhere, he described peasants as a “crude” and “brutish people”
with the “social standards of the middle ages.”56 With Andrews and Bennett, the
emphasis of American planning shifted away from the agrarian pastoral. Morgen-
thau, even as he called for the modernization of German farms, seemed to cling to
visions of small, diversified farms connected to markets but not exposed entirely
to their dangers. While Morgenthau shared a pessimism about excessive urban-
ization and the market economy with one faction of New Deal planners, Andrews
and Bennett joined another faction of New Dealers who praised technological
fixes and associated conservation with investments in new machines.57 Andrews
and Bennett thus became key allies of economists who pushed to reestablish West

Germany as an industrial juggernaut exporting finished goods and importing raw
materials. Andrews told the St. Louis Globe Democrat in 1948, “The notion that
Germany can ever become a purely agricultural nation is complete nonsense.”58
Carl Brandt, in particular, encouraged this shift in American policy as he at-
tacked the Allied High Commission’s postwar agricultural planning.59 Brandt, a
liberal agricultural economist, worked at the Hoover Food Research Institute
at Stanford University, served as an economic advisor to the chief of food and
agriculture for the military government in Germany, and later joined the White
House Council of Economic Advisers. He argued that “agricultural fundamental-
ists” such as Morgenthau mistakenly saw farming as the only source of national
prosperity, moral virtue, and democratic self-reliance. Brandt, in passages that
were incredibly insensitive to Jewish victimhood, labeled the Morgenthau Plan as
short-sighted at best and, at worst, “emotional” or “bitter” or “blind” vengeance
that ignored that Germans were as much victims of Hitler as “all the others whom
he conquered.”60 In 1945, for example, he noted, “[Morgenthau’s] very popular
and forceful argument is inspired by the desire for revenge; even in the Old Tes-
tament the Lord says that revenge is HIS, not man’s. Hundreds of specialists are
busy devising elaborate plans for forcing the German people down to a diet and
a standard of living lower than that of the poorest victimized nation, and keeping
them in that sort of perpetual concentration camp.”61 Elsewhere, Brandt argued,
“It would be more humane and more logical to reopen the gas chambers of Belsen
and Buchenwald and to blow out the lives of 30 or 40 million Germans and other
Europeans with lethal gas.”62
Brandt’s criticism may have amounted to little if not for the fact that a trans-
atlantic network of neoliberals emerged after World War II to mobilize against
Keynesianism and promote free trade. Brandt’s influence owed much to the cru-
cial role he played within that network, and agricultural reform in West Germa-
ny clearly reflected this network’s vision of the “world economy.” Brandt helped
found the Mont Pèlerin Society, an international think tank founded by Friedrich
Hayek and Wilhelm Röpke to fight for the reconstruction of a liberal internation-
al order free of protectionism and excessive state regulation of markets. While it
shared the New Deal’s faith in technological progress, the neoliberal network re-
mained skeptical about foreign aid and state intervention. For them, Morgenthau’s
plan for Germany reflected a larger movement toward interventionism and New
Deal social engineering that they saw as a threat to the global economy, which they
described as a living, unified organism.63 They described rail lines, shipping lanes,
and telegraph networks as the veins or nerves of the growing organism. This “sec-
ond nature,” as depicted in maps and treatises, was increasingly imagined as natu-
ral and unalterable; its alteration would throw the world into upheaval and crisis.
192 Scott Moranda

Imaginings of a global organism also required that these economists naturalize an
“international division of labor,” which they believed reflected natural differences
in intellectual capabilities around the globe.64
As the neoliberals did, German and American agricultural planners increasing-
ly understood Germany’s economic position in the world economy as natural and
irreversible. Carl Brandt labeled rash demands for deindustrializing Germany as
the equivalent to arguing, “Nobody need fear heart failure, since the heart is only
a small percentage of the weight of the human body.”65 According to Andrews, the
division of Germany interrupted the “natural flow of food down from the North
and East [that pushed] the local produce further into the greater western indus-
trial areas as far as the Saar Basin.”66 He also explained that the Colorado potato
beetle epidemic rattling postwar Germany reflected the disruption of “normal
two-way trade” with Sweden, a major supplier of the arsenic needed for insecti-
cides. Andrews concluded, “The life blood has stopped and either new channels
will have to be made or the economic body of central Europe will die.”67 As these
examples suggest, critics of postwar reconstruction believed that a near-fatal blow
had been dealt to the carefully constructed nature-technological system necessary
for keeping German agriculture productive. Communist rule in East Germany, of
course, was the most unnatural and destructive blow to the global flow of goods.
Brandt, in many publications, insisted that Germany’s adaptation to local nat-
ural conditions depended on a global trading system where all participants pro-
duced goods according to their local environmental conditions.68 He argued that
the Third Reich’s goal of economic autarky had forced German farmers to plant
oilseed crops in the 1930s that never stood a chance of replacing imports due to
Germany’s cool, wet climate and poor soils.69 If Germany returned to free trade
and open borders, German farmers would instead plant crops “for which natural
conditions are much more favorable.”70 Since farms in Europe were in close prox-
imity to industrial cities, high land values (in addition to the cool climate) pre-
vented farmers from competing with distant lands in producing basic foodstuffs
such as grain.71 Farmers thus adapted to natural conditions and the second nature
of a global economy by producing high-value meat and dairy products demand-
ed by growing cities. Instead of asking postwar Germans to accustom themselves
to slower economic growth and/or to adjust their diets to the supposed natural
carrying capacity of the land, Brandt, Andrews, Bennett, and their German col-
leagues insisted on a restoration of the natural flow of goods in and out of Ger-
many.72 Rather than question German or European diets as unnaturally rich as
Morgenthau did, Brandt and his allies in Germany described “the people’s urgent
desire to restore the prewar consumption of fats” as natural and healthy.73

Decolonization’s Potential Threat to Natural Flows
Arguments about Germany’s natural position in the global economy inevitably in-
tersected with anxieties about decolonization and Germany’s status in the postwar
order. Germans shrilly complained of being victims of Anglo American and Rus-
sian colonial plunder, which only promised to rob Germany of its natural resourc-
es. At the same time, German agronomists and allied neoliberals responded to the
forward progress of decolonization by defending colonialism’s global division of
labor. In their eyes, different cultures produced goods according to their natural
environment and their natural abilities.
Schlange-Schöningen, even as he avoided directly antagonizing occupation
officials, joined his more critical colleagues in complaining about Germany’s new
“colonial” status. For example, he built on older racial ideas central to Nazi Germa-
ny’s colonial order in Eastern Europe when he decried the potential desertifica-
tion, or Versteppung, of eastern Germany by the Soviets. In the West, he believed
occupiers wanted to reduce Germany to a colony in order to brutally eliminate
German economic competition. He also predicted that global racial hierarchies
would be turned upside down as technical advisors from the United States and
Europe helped former colonial subjects. In one passage, he painted a nightmare
scenario in which nuclear technologies allowed scientists to change Germany’s
climate, thus allowing Chinese colonial masters to exploit German labor on citrus
plantations outside of Hamburg. Anticipating Germany’s future of colonial sub-
jugation, Schlange-Schöningen adopted the language of colonial resistance. He
desperately exclaimed, “We want peace, an opportunity to thrive, work, and deter-
mine our own fates, just as the yellow, brown, and black nations do!”74
Leading neoliberal economists such as Wilhelm Röpke also warned of the pos-
sibility of race suicide. In their eyes, the global New Deal to develop former colo-
nies into industrial economies promised to destroy civilization as non-Europeans
came to dominate global politics. For free market advocates, morality and Chris-
tian principles played a crucial role in guiding market behavior. The world econ-
omy was a “community of values” that “supranational institutions could not leg-
islate into existence,” according to Röpke.75 To falsely promote egalitarianism
ignored real and natural differences between races and denied the reality that co-
lonial subjects could never develop modern economies on their own. Without the
West’s guiding hand, the world economy threatened to disintegrate and cultures
everywhere would become dangerously disconnected to their values and tradi-
tions. Worse still, artificially developing colonial realms into industrial economies
promised to cause a shortage of agricultural imports to Europe necessary to main-
tain living standards.76
194 Scott Moranda

Brandt was on record in support of Röpke’s vision of a global race war, and his
promotion of a German agricultural economy fed by imported raw materials rest-
ed on a racialized “division of labor.”77 To sustain beef and dairy industries, German
farmers long had relied on oilseeds and protein-rich livestock feed imported from
overseas. Between 1909 and 1913 Europe consumed about 2.2 million tons of veg-
etable oils, of which 1.5 million was imported, increasingly from Asia, Africa, and
South America. If the Allies treated Germany as a colony, Brandt suggested, this
violated natural economic laws as well as geographical and environmental realities,
but if colonial relationships survived (formally or informally), tropical regions
would benefit. Their “lower stage of development” demanded that they continue
to export natural resources in exchange for European manufactured goods.78 In
Brandt’s view, cash-crop plantations managed by Europeans only benefited work-
ers in Manchuria, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, British Malaya, Ceylon,
and West Africa.79 While he accepted land reform to break up large agricultural
estates in Europe as essential for free trade unhindered by unnatural tariffs, he
warned against land reform on tropical plantations, as “the situation in the tropics
is not comparable to that of Europe, at least not now, nor will it be in the near fu-
ture.”80 European peasants, he believed, had achieved levels of cultural and moral
development far beyond that of the peasants of Asia or Africa and could man-
age the land better than the aristocratic owners of large estates had. In the tropics,
however, “The native peasants were . . . not sufficiently educated to understand or
intelligently apply the efficient operational methods of modern plantations.”81 Re-
sponding to Malthusian criticisms of a global economy that privileged European
consumption and that had plundered the biological environment of distant lands,
Brandt claimed this “illogical” criticism was “emancipated from the function of
time and successive stages of economic development.”82 For Brandt and others,
Germans thus still had an important role to play in the “white race’s mission” to
help the “colored world” through the dispersal of science and technology.83
Colonial trade, furthermore, promised to heal damaged lands inside Germany.
Brandt described the import of oilseeds that “can be produced with a minimum of
costs in the tropics and on large scale plantations” as the “import of fertilizer, since
a part of their nutrient content reappear[ed] in the manure after passing through
the animal intestinal tract, and thus aid[ed] the cultivation of crops.”84 Accord-
ing to foresters, a more efficient exploitation of tropical timber reserves in Brit-
ish and French colonies with the aid of German experts would prevent erosion
and desertification in Germany they predicted to result from American plans to
convert forest into cropland.85 In at least one instance, American occupation au-
thorities agreed with their German colleagues. Carl Ross of the Food, Agriculture,
and Forestry Group of the American military government imagined developing

plantations in Portuguese Angola under German supervision even though he ac-
knowledged that Allies would resist “any German overseas development that even
remotely resemble[d] a colony.”86 No matter how unrealistic these proposals were,
such fantasies multiplied because many believed that Germany’s natural environ-
ment depended upon them.
Improved Pastures: The Invisible Colony

While the debate about agricultural practices and soil conservation was wide-
ranging, it especially focused on pasture management and dairy farming because
of new American innovations in these fields in the previous two decades. If some
experts looked to European colonies for high-protein feedstock that would in-
crease dairy farms’ productivity, others increasingly looked to American innova-
tions to increase the output of Germany’s domestic grasslands. In the first two
decades of the postwar era, West German experts and farmers introduced stall
feeding, increased corn silage production, and replaced natural meadows with
high-yielding alfalfa and grass monocultures reliant on expensive capital invest-
ments. In addition to draining wet meadows and mechanizing fodder production,
they began to apply commercial fertilizers to pastures.
If critics of American cattle reduction policies in 1947 and 1948 worried about
environmental consequences of American agricultural policy, now in the 1950s
agronomists looked to some American technological innovations as particularly
suited for West Germany’s climate and environment. Perhaps, they capitulated
to American demands or, as Uekötter argued, conceded to changes in farming
practices already happening on the ground. German agricultural experts, however,
were not passive. Instead, they played an important role in picking and choos-
ing winners among various American modernization initiatives. They embraced
those proposals that they believed best suited Germany’s “nature”—both local en-
vironmental conditions and the nation’s supposedly natural position in the global
economy.
For American authorities in the late 1940s, pasture and livestock management
in the United States represented the cutting edge of modern innovation. Bennett
and Andrews both devoted much of their energy to improving German grasslands,
which they believed were outdated and inefficient. They insisted that grasslands
could produce 30 percent more livestock feed with the help of high-yielding vari-
eties and chemical fertilizers commonplace in the United States.87 Elsewhere, the
Bipartite Control Office complained, “Most of the meadows and pastures in Ger-
many are in a pathetically poor condition. The import of modern grassland meth-
ods in seeding and preservation would allow an enormous increase in livestock
numbers without additional acreage for fodder crops.”88
196 Scott Moranda

To facilitate change, after 1948 the military brought American pasture experts
to Germany and sent German agronomists to the United States.89 Authorities
hoped these exchanges would lead German farmers to mimic American dairy
farmers who had embraced crop specialization. Americans also had pioneered
new high-yielding seeds that grew more quickly, produced more protein-rich
leaves, and yielded more harvests per year. In addition, they had invested capi-
tal in artificial hay-drying technologies and commercial fertilizers intended for
pastures.90 Small farmers in Germany, on the other hand, often had avoided fi-
nancial risk by optimizing scarce resources. They not only valued dairy cows as
producers of milk for home consumption and for market—they also cherished
the same cows as multipurpose tools that provided priceless manure for fertilizer
and supplied draft power. Likewise, many farmers relied on “natural grasslands”
or seeded a mix of grasses without much emphasis on the highest-quality and
highest-yielding varieties.91 Natural grasslands required little capital investment,
and as some scientists have recently argued, mixes of grasses often outperform
grass monocultures in nitrogen fixation or erosion protection.92 Both strategies
also helped farmers hedge against droughts or diseases that might limit the growth
of one species or another. Visiting Americans found such caution backwards and
wasteful. In a report on German grasslands in 1952, the American H. A. Schoth
joked that he found more “white land” than “green land” in his travels for Ger-
many. In other words, he found pastures filled with a mishmash of grasses and
legumes allowed to flower and go to seed long after they should have been cut for
feed. Schoth, in recommending specialization in high-yielding varieties, pushed
farmers toward capital-intensive investments. For example, he advocated drying
machines that allowed farmers in damp climates to abandon low-yielding variet-
ies with small leaves or narrow blades valued for their ability to dry faster under
imperfect conditions. High-yielding seeds with larger leaves and higher protein
levels only succeeded in combination with such investments in new machinery.
For Schoth, Germans had to become entrepreneurs who invested more capital in
grasslands to improve milk production.93
If Americans understood German grassland management as primitive, Ger-
man agronomists touring American farms in the 1950s struggled to abandon ste-
reotypes about American soil plunder.94 Outside of a few model farms and gov-
ernment experimental stations, they found little to admire. Alfred Könekamp, a
grasslands specialist, insisted that many of the techniques promoted by the Soil
Conservation Service were already “self-evident” to German farmers.95 Another
visitor emphasized that Americans ignored the “humus economy and all related
questions (manure, straw) . . . almost completely.”96 Frustrated by their treatment
as pupils, at least one participant lobbied instead for a “forthright exchange in

both directions” so that German expertise might help American farmers conserve
their soil.97 Such views were so common that one friendlier German visitor voiced
his impatience with “know-it-alls” incapable of being “self-effacing” guests.98
Despite deeply held beliefs about American waste, German agronomists be-
gan to introduce new methods learned abroad.99 Schlange-Schöningen, minister
for agriculture in the bizonal government, had been friendlier to the Americans
than many other agronomists, but his attitude shifted notably after returning from
tours of American farms in 1948. In particular, he brought back an enthusiasm for
pasture improvement. He encouraged farmers to plant American breeds of high-
yielding alfalfa to “triple meat production and increase milk supplies.”100 Schlange-
Schöningen echoed Schoth’s criticism of risk-averse German farmers who let their
grasses blossom and go to seed in the fields in the hopes that grass left to grow
later in the season would dry more quickly and feed more livestock. He explained
that while the blossoms were “pretty” to look at, they made for terrible feed. 101
Könekamp, for his part, returned from abroad in 1949 with a mission to push Ger-
man farmers to abandon small grains and natural meadows and becoming prag-
matic specialists only raising dairy cows in feed stalls and cultivating high-yielding,
high-protein fodder grasses such as new varieties of alfalfa.102 While he expected
German farmers to find the concept alien, he believed they too needed to imagine
the cow as “a machine for processing protein feed into milk.”103
Könekamp believed these new techniques helped West Germany reduce its
dependence on foreign sources of feedstock. The young state had little ability to
dictate global trade norms, and it, of course, could no longer rely on raw materials
from Eastern Europe. Decolonization also complicated things. In a remarkable
article, Könekamp addressed all these problems without ever explicitly referring
to Germany’s past imperial projects or European colonialism. He promised read-
ers that new innovations in grassland management would provide West Germany
with an “invisible colony.”104 In other words, increased yields at home provided a
boost to the economy that colonies once had promised.
While specialization in grasslands and dairy farming would be a radical change
for most peasants, Könekamp and others insisted that the application of tech-
nology and fertilizer to pasture and grasslands fit well with a German land ethic
agronomists had long celebrated. Even market specialization, they argued, might
help farmers farm more naturally. While comparisons with American plunder pre-
viously had emphasized how more ethical German farmers grew a mix of crops to
help preserve soil fertility and avoid the risks of specialization, postwar experts
now emphasized that many small grains in a typical crop rotation often under-
performed in Germany’s poor climate. Small grains, they now insisted, were not a
natural fit for most local microclimates and soils. If Germans had been previous-
198 Scott Moranda

ly praised for utilizing manure to conserve soil fertility, they now were criticized
for growing small grains (for straw and cattle feed) just to ensure their barnyard
manure supplies.105 In words almost identical to Schlange-Schöningen’s early
critiques of American policies, Könekamp argued, “One cannot work against
nature.”106
Technological improvements to boost grassland productivity, experts believed,
also promised to help Germany farm even more sustainably. Könekamp argued
that new varieties of alfalfa aided by commercial fertilizers fixed nitrogen more
effectively, so that when farmers did rotate out grasses for other fodder crops such
as maize or root crops, subsequent yields improved without sacrificing soil fer-
tility.107 Elsewhere, German administrators and scientists also emphasized that
intense applications of commercial fertilizers reappeared as additional “barnyard
manure back in the tilled fields,” as fertilizers boosted the quality and quantity of
livestock feed.108 Schlange-Schöningen, in a 1947 pamphlet, continued to warn
against overusing commercial fertilizers as he did before the war, but he now be-
lieved that the wise use of chemical fertilizers would generate “first-class barnyard
manure,” and thus complement loving care of the soil.109
Even liquid manure, the scourge of modern-day German environmentalists
fighting the heavy nitration of rivers and lakes, was initially seen as one of the eco-
logical rewards of intensified dairy and grassland production. The use of liquid
manure originated in the high-altitude Allgäu region, where farmers could not
grow the straw needed to mix with manure. They instead added water to animal
waste and applied liquid manure directly to their pastures.110 With the help of state
subsidies from the North Rhine-Westphalia government, West German agrono-
mists introduced these methods to northern Germany between 1950 and 1960.111
Liquid manure required the keeping of cattle in stalls to help mechanize its collec-
tion, so its adoption in northern Germany went hand-in-hand with a transition
from pasturing on natural meadows to intensive production of grasses meant to
supply fodder for stall-housed cows.112 Crops only could absorb about 5 percent
of the nitrogen in the now abundant manure, and the excess made its way into the
local streams and lakes, leading to algae blooms and nitration problems.113 One of
the early advocates of liquid manure, however, praised its use because, as he wrote,
manure remained essential for soil health. He rejected biodynamic agriculture be-
cause he believed commercial fertilizers were essential to improving yields. At the
same time, he acknowledged that elements of natural farming, such as the use of
barnyard manure and the planting of nitrogen-fixing alfalfa, were essential to soil
conservation.114 Liquid manures from dairy farms using livestock feed boosted
by commercial fertilizers, he and others argued, promised to outperform typical
barnyard manure. Even better, the transition to liquid manures allowed farmers

to mechanize the manuring process and easily mix in mineral additives (such as
phosphates), thus lowering labor costs.115 For advocates in the 1950s, liquid ma-
nure was the “liquid gold of agriculture” that promised to conserve soil fertility in
a modern, labor-efficient manner.116
\\\
The transition to high-input, high-energy agriculture in the twentieth century, in

Germany as elsewhere, had many causes. Farmers did not just accept the advice of
scientists and agribusiness uncritically, and within the scientific community, not
everyone agreed on the best path forward. Ultimately, many different actors need-
ed to see the benefits in such a transition.
Proponents of natural farming in Germany had long voiced concern about
mechanized market farming. They often, in fact, held German small farmers up as
the ideal practitioners of industrious and loving care of the soil. For them, Ameri-
can agriculture served as a warning against an agriculture that not only plundered
the soil but also indebted farmers. Given such skepticism, some agriculturalists
received American plans for West German agriculture coolly.
The rapid transformation of West German agriculture and environments over
the next decades might suggest that the proponents of natural farming conced-
ed defeat, but the story was not so simple. In part, German agriculturalists and
farmers who had embraced mechanized agriculture and chemical fertilizers did
win out over their skeptical opponents. Yet, the livestock farming and grassland
management of the postwar era triumphed not just because individual agricultur-
al scientists or farmers welcomed it. It also became dominant because proponents
of chemical and natural farming both came to agree that an agricultural economy
specializing in livestock production best fit Germany’s “natural” advantages and
offered an opportunity for immense productivity gains in a manner that fit their
self-image as a nation that carefully conserved soil fertility. While everyday farm-
ers might have moved toward high-input agriculture on their own (as Uekötter
argues), the new alignment of chemical and natural farming experts certainly en-
couraged changes “from below.”
Without the Cold War, this new alignment might not have been possible. As
shown, the choices of German agronomists depended partly on the policies of
American occupation authorities. With the emergence of the Truman Doctrine,
the Americans turned away from a draconian restructuring of West German in-
dustry in order to offer a dynamic alternative to the centrally planned economy
of East Germany. Americans also believed that dairy farming played an especially
important role in establishing a prosperous liberal democracy of satisfied urban
consumers and efficient family farms. They repeatedly contrasted those family
200 Scott Moranda

dairy farms in the West with collectivized agriculture and consume scarcity in the
East in order to prove the superiority of liberal capitalism. American Cold War
interests also dovetailed nicely with the concerns of German agronomists who
advocated adapting agriculture to the natural environment. These West German
agronomists had long despaired over the supposed threat of Communism and
Slavic culture to natural landscapes. Finally, a Cold War battle against centrally
planned economies encouraged and provided a stage for Austrian and German
neoliberals to promote a supposedly natural free-trade system that also shaped
West Germany’s transition to high-input farming.
Ironically, the architects of high-input farming often imagined they were ad-
hering to natural laws and systems. From today’s perspective, high-input farming
with its large confined livestock operations has come under significant criticism
for disrupting nutrient cycles and biodiversity. A recognition that agronomists
linked their proposals to soil conservation and naturalness does not mean that
today’s environmentalists are wrong, The history of postwar agriculture, however,
does remind us of the unintended consequences of well-intended choices and the
cultural construction of nature. In addition to global economic forces and short-
term economic decisions, nationalism and the cultural comparisons emphasized
by transnational actors also created the agricultural and environmental systems of
the postwar order.

PART III
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ENVIRONMENTALISM AND DÉTENTE?

12
An American Miracle in the Desert

Environmental Crisis and Nuclear-Powered
Desalination in the Middle East
Jacob Darwin Hamblin
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I remember very clearly talking with [Israeli Ambassador to the United States Yitzhak]
Rabin about the whole idea, and Rabin shook his head and said, “how can you guys five
thousand miles away from Israel in a little town in the hills of Tennessee cook up schemes
for solving the problems in the Middle East?” And I said, “well is that any crazier than
Herzl sitting in a café in Vienna?”
—Alvin Weinberg
Addressing an audience at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City, at a 1964
dinner for the Weizmann Institute of Science, President Lyndon B. Johnson
waxed on about the significance of fresh water. To these friends of Israel, the pres-
ident observed that water meant life. “Water can banish hunger and can reclaim
the desert and change the course of history.” That very day, he said, the Cuban
government had shut off water to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo, and fortu-
nately the Americans had stockpiles to manage the crisis. Likewise, water security
was crucial to a vulnerable nation such as Israel. “Water should never be a cause of
war,” he said. “It should always be a force for peace.” The president announced that
the United States and Israel already were beginning a cooperative scheme to use
nuclear energy to turn saltwater into freshwater to improve Israel’s water security.1
The resulting Water for Peace initiative, fashioned after the Atoms for Peace
projects begun in the 1950s, linked environmental crisis to armed conflict, and
touted technological solutions as a route to lasting peace. President Johnson once
said that it was as important to America as the space program. Yet it was so short-
lived that, as a historical phenomenon, it barely merits a footnote. Why did the
initiative achieve such high-level endorsement, funding, and promotion in the
205
mid-1960s, only to disappear unceremoniously just as quickly in the late 1960s?
The purported environmental crisis in arid lands certainly did not go away, nor did
the benefits of desalinating seawater. How then can we account for the fleeting na-
ture of the extraordinary political backing for Water for Peace? Scholars of foreign
policy and nuclear proliferation typically note that Water for Peace was really an
example of trying (and failing) to provide an incentive for Israel to agree to on-site
inspections of its controversial nuclear facility at Dimona.2 However, monitoring
the Israeli bomb project was only one of several factors motivating the program. At
the time, the United States was accustomed to leveraging its advantages in science
and technology to achieve foreign policy goals, placing extraordinary confidence
in scientific experts to address problems ranging from race relations to world
peace.3 Some experts and administrators, especially in the Atomic Energy Com-
mission and the Department of the Interior, even believed that nuclear-powered
seawater desalination would be successful—with a little faith and imagination.
This chapter highlights how environmental crisis became an instrument of
U.S. foreign policy, providing a justification to attempt a major nuclear project in
the Middle East. In the face of Malthusian population pressures and rising ten-
sions over water access in the Middle East, the Johnson administration created
a program wedded not to solving a problem but to promoting a particular kind
of solution—namely, a nuclear one. The president’s commitment to addressing
environmental crisis was focused on the ability of the United States to claim an
ambitious and novel technological success that could not only outshine what the
Soviet Union had achieved by supporting the Aswan High Dam in Egypt, but that
also could become a foreign policy program comparable to his domestic plans
for a Great Society. Even as his domestic reforms emphasized new regulations to
preserve clean water (1963), wilderness (1964), and endangered species (1966),
to name just a few, Johnson’s Water for Peace program revealed a different kind of
environmental vision that relied heavily on technology as a means of overcoming
the constraints of nature, putting on display what the United States could offer
to other countries. This kind of environmental approach was shaped by compe-
tition with the Soviet Union, at a time when several others in the United States
and Israel had stakes in promoting nuclear solutions to problems, and as the war
in Vietnam was undermining the United States’ commitment to peace. President
Johnson’s enthusiasm encouraged nuclear boosters in his government to play up
the links between environmental crisis and political and military strains in the
Middle East, to insist on nuclear technology as the sine qua non of any techno-
logical solution for desalinating water, and ultimately to lead policy action far in
advance of technological capability. Although the rhetorical basis for the program
was imminent water crises in arid lands, its energies focused on making a dual-use
206 Jacob Darwin Hamblin

(electricity and desalination) nuclear plant work, despite scientific warnings that
attempting it was folly. There were many missed opportunities to scrap the nucle-
ar plant idea along the way and stick to a fossil fuel plant, which would not have
entailed the enormous economic uncertainties of nuclear power. When nuclear
reactors finally were removed as a core of the program in the late 1960s, the proj-
ect itself evaporated, like water in the desert.
Blood and Water

The term technological fix is itself intimately tied to nuclear desalination. Alvin
Weinberg, the longtime director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, employed
the term in 1966 to show how complex social problems could be reduced to tech-
nological problems. Weinberg believed that social pressures could be mitigated
by engineering, and he identified nuclear desalination as a leading example.4 “I
have little doubt that within the next ten to twenty years we shall see huge dual-
purpose desalting plants springing up on many parched sea coasts of the world.” It
took a visionary engineer to solve such problems, he wrote, or at least to buy some
time, which he called that “precious commodity that converts violent social rev-
olution into acceptable social evolution.”5 A colleague later described Weinberg
as a “prophet for the nuclear age,” who saw nuclear energy as a “way to extricate
mankind from the Malthusian curse.”6 By 1963 Weinberg had persuaded Presi-
dent John F. Kennedy’s science advisor, Jerome Wiesner, to form an interagency
task group to do a feasibility study on nuclear-powered desalination.
Nuclear desalination appeared at an opportune moment. The Department of
the Interior was headed by Stewart Udall, who had been inspired by Rachel Car-
son’s 1962 Silent Spring before writing his own conservation manifesto in 1963,
The Quiet Crisis. It argued for a shift away from strict economic conservation in fa-
vor of quality of life issues such as clean air and water.7 Udall would gather support
for key legislative acts during the Johnson years, including the Wilderness Act and
the Endangered Species Act, and he put environmental concerns into Johnson’s
Great Society programs. He had faith in nuclear technology to resolve a host of
human ills, seeing it as an alternative to unrestrained resource extraction. One of
Udall’s chief aides, Sharon Francis, later called The Quiet Crisis “a hymn to nuclear
power.”8
Udall made the ideal ally for Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chairman
Glenn Seaborg, who was not a committed environmentalist but was looking for
a “win” in the arena of peaceful uses of atomic energy. With the signing of the
Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, aboveground nuclear detonations were banned,
cutting into the AEC’s idea to use nuclear explosions for large construction jobs.9
Seaborg and Udall, encouraged by Weinberg and others, led a chorus of advocacy
An American Miracle in the Desert 207

for nuclear desalination. Their enthusiasm infected the president, who saw it as
a potential foreign policy piece of his Great Society programs, already oriented
toward poverty reduction and civil rights in the United States.10
President Johnson’s chief concerns about the Middle East were in placating the
pro-Israel political constituency at home by supporting Israel, while managing a
rocky relationship with the world’s leading Arab politician, Egypt’s Gamal Nass-
er.11 Future access to water and electricity already had become issues for Cold War
competition. Most in the Johnson administration saw Nasser as a font of Soviet
influence in the region, and Soviet technical advisors played a role in the construc-
tion of the Aswan High Dam, a technological marvel set to go into operation by
the end of the decade. With Aswan, the Soviets had scored a major propaganda
coup, helping to transform nature to ensure electricity production and stabilize
water supplies in Egypt. The United States could make no comparable claim.12
Johnson saw an opportunity to kill several birds with one stone when the idea
of nuclear-powered desalination plants was raised—he could show support for
Israel, speak to the issue of regional stability, and steal back the technological edge
from the Soviet Union. In addition, it fit neatly into his broad agenda for a Great
Society.
Johnson was so enthusiastic, in fact, that he soon began promising far more
than he could deliver, making his closest advisors extremely uncomfortable. One
of these was Donald Hornig, his chief scientific advisor and head of the President’s
Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). Hornig knew Weinberg well and was fa-
miliar the AEC’s enthusiasm for finding viable and creative applications of atomic
energy, and he knew that Interior Secretary Udall had high hopes for nuclear pow-
er. But he also knew that the technology was science fiction. The United States
had not committed to creating large-scale desalinating plants even at home. The
largest desalination plants in the United States could produce a little more than
a million gallons of water per day. The government’s own feasibility study stated
that facilities would need to produce five hundred million gallons per day to be
profitable.13
That feasibility study, completed in March 1964, had been cautiously opti-
mistic. It had stated that the heat from a nuclear reactor might be used as a pow-
er source if better desalinating methods could be developed, but that the costs
would be prohibitive for use in agriculture. A research and development program
to build a successful demonstration dual-purpose plant in the United States by
1975–1978 would cost about $169 million, with about $70 million of that coming
from government assistance.14
Most of these qualifiers were lost by the time President Johnson promised to
use the technology to transform the desert. He already had announced the plan

publicly at the annual gathering of the Weizmann Institute. Later in 1964 he dou-
bled down on the promise during a toast at a White House dinner with Israeli
Minister Levi Eshkol. “Mr. Prime Minister, you told me only this morning that
water was blood for Israel,” he said. “So we shall make a joint attack on Israel’s
water shortage through the highly promising technique of desalting. Indeed, let
us hope that this technique will bring benefit to all of the peoples of the parched
Middle East.”15 Immediately the president suffered criticism for favoring Israel. A
Syrian newspaper called Johnson’s plan “the ultimate in American support for Is-
rael,” and a Lebanese columnist railed against “Johnson the Jew.”16 Aware that the
Soviets had begun to explore nuclear-powered desalination, and not wishing to
have another Aswan situation on his hands, Johnson publicly offered to share the
technology widely, including with Israel’s neighbors and even the Soviet Union.
The anxiety such promises produced in Hornig is palpable in archival docu-
ments. Unlike Johnson, he understood the inadequacy of the technology itself. He
reminded the president that the plants envisaged would necessitate nuclear reac-
tors three times larger than anything previously built, would require water output
far beyond anything ever accomplished, and—most importantly—would require
some explicit instructions and money to both the Atomic Energy Commission
and the Department of the Interior to begin a crash program.17
Johnson was unperturbed by such details. The United States already had an
open-ended commitment to the Apollo program, itself based on Kennedy’s no-
tion that putting a man on the moon was a test of the US and Soviet systems. A
similar approach to miracle technologies in arid lands seemed appropriate, and
the foreign policy dividends would likely be worth the expense. To Hornig, John-
son offered something just shy of a blank check. The existing annual budget at
the Department of Interior’s Office of Saline Water was about $10 million, which
appalled Johnson. He told Hornig that a budget of 50 or 100 million dollars was
not out of the question, and that the project was, according to Hornig’s note for
the record, “just as important as space.” 18 Johnson had already made the speeches
and built up expectations. He would now need to create a bold and imaginative
program to match it.
The problem of regional water security was quite real. The most significant
fresh water source was the Jordan River, which flowed through Lake Tiberias.
In the 1950s the Arab states attempted to hammer out an agreement with Israel
about how much freshwater each could take from the Jordan and its tributaries,
but major conflicts such as the Suez Crisis in 1956 prevented formal agreement.19
The negotiations, however, had established de facto limits of use and for a few
years these were respected.20
This precarious peace faltered when Israel began to improve its infrastructure

in the early 1960s, in order to take more fresh water from Lake Tiberias. By late
1963, American policy analysts were advising the U.S. Secretary of State that con-
flict over the Jordan’s water was only going to intensify and “the strains will be
great at best.”21 The governments of Jordan and Syria in 1964 started their own
infrastructure re-design, which included the possibility of significantly re-routing
the Jordan.22
Could nuclear reactors mitigate this conflict over water? In July 1965, Ameri-
cans and Israelis convened in Philadelphia to consider a technological fix. Among
the Israelis were nuclear scientist Shimon Yiftah, director of Israel’s Atomic Ener-
gy Commission, Chaim Cats, chief of Israel’s electric power company, and Zvi Zur,
general manager of Mekorot, the national water company. Zur had been Chief of
Staff of Israel’s military forces, and appreciated the nexus between conventional
arms, water security, and nuclear reactors. Most of this discussion was quite tech-
nical, but one detail stands out—the desalination project had to be a nuclear one.23
At the time, Israel had a clandestine project to build a chemical separation
plant for plutonium production, so any new reactors would have potentially con-
tributed to producing bomb fuel.24 When meeting with Americans, the Israelis
consistently rebuffed suggestions that a joint desalination project might move
forward using non-nuclear fuels. During a discussion on the promising future of
using light water reactors to power desalination at 100 million gallons of water per
day, Zur, Yiftah, and the other Israelis present argued that any other kind of fuel
besides nuclear should henceforth be eliminated from consideration. And in fact
it was. Originally, the next phase of the project was to include “comparison of the
economics of the favored alternative nuclear plant with those of a fossil-fueled
dual-purpose plant of comparable capacity.” After the July 1965 meeting with the
Israelis, this was deleted.25
White Elephants in the Desert

Despite plenty of reasons for skepticism, Water for Peace became a major initiative
of the Lyndon Johnson presidency. “It seems that desalting has a mystique of its
own,” presidential advisor Charles Johnson mused, noting the mounting pressure
to announce “a foreign aid ‘spectacular’” to bring nuclear-powered desalination to
reality in arid lands.26 Myer Feldman, the high-profile attorney who advised pres-
idents Kennedy and Johnson on matters involving Israel, imagined incorporating
desalination into LBJ’s Great Society program, and offering it not only to Israel
but also to Egypt and, closer to home, to Mexico.27 An interagency committee of
the State Department, Atomic Energy Commission, and others, began meeting
regularly to lay out practical plans, and the US hosted the first international sym-
posium on desalination in Washington, D.C. in October 1965.

The president’s science advisor, Don Hornig, feared that Water for Peace was
a “white elephant”—huge, unwieldy, unprofitable, and impossible to sweep under
the proverbial carpet. Even if the technology were to become available, it would
not be available at a reasonable price. Building desalination plants would have to
be heavily subsidized wherever they were built. It might not even work, and worse,
it could inflame Arab-Israeli tensions rather than contribute to peace. After all, the
only practical plan underway was a facility for Israel, which seemed to indicate
preferential treatment.28
More worrying perhaps was that such plants would require ambitious nuclear
programs. Was it wise for the United States to commit to projects that not only
accepted but actively encouraged other nations to develop their nuclear infra-
structure beyond research reactors, toward major nuclear power plants? Large
200-megawatt power plants would produce enough plutonium to build nuclear
weapons, and if rumors were true that Israel was planning a chemical separation
plant to extract plutonium, the Water for Peace program would be providing cover
for Israel’s production of bomb fuel.29
Despite these concerns, the president announced a major initiative at the 1965
desalination symposium. It was an opportunity he could not miss, with over 2,500
registrants from 65 nations and six international organizations. He invited the of-
ficial delegates to the White House and unveiled his plan for a new effort to find
solutions to humanity’s water problems. That is when journalists began to refer
to it as “Water for Peace.” He promised to construct prototype plants, to create a
special international fund to help, and to send scientists to help other countries.30
Along with other White House officials, Hornig advised the president against
turning desalination into such a significant project, fearing a serious flop that
would do more harm than good. But rather than play down expectations, Presi-
dent Johnson ratcheted up the drama, tying desalination to his notion of a Great
Society. “Let future generations remember us,” he stated to his White House
guests, “as those who freed man forever from his most ancient and dreaded ene-
mies—drought and famine.” 31 At some future date, he mused, they would all look
back to 1965 as the year when the United States showed leadership in banishing
not only hunger and thirst but also poverty, illiteracy, ignorance, and disease.
With such a broad commitment, Israel saw the United States as a key partner
in developing its nuclear program, either by providing reactors or helping to fi-
nance them. In late 1965, Israeli nuclear engineer Joseph Adar visited Oak Ridge
to discuss reactor designs. What really concerned him was whether an American
reactor could withstand a bomb attack. The experts at Oak Ridge could not re-
assure him on that score. Although the Americans had several creative ideas for
siting the plant away from population centers, such as building an artificial island

offshore, or even a “deep water caisson containing the entire plant and a floating
station,” 32 these simply carried the plan further down the road of science fiction.
Adar pointed out to these dreamers that it was not a hypothetical problem. Given
the suspicions that any nuclear site might contribute to an Israeli nuclear weapon,
nuclear reactors might very well be bombed.
The Americans were divided on whether to link Water for Peace to a reactor
inspections agreement. Myer Feldman saw the program as part and parcel of the
Great Society, not as a carrot for agreeing to site inspections. Similarly, former
presidential science advisor Jerome Wiesner wrote to the president, saying that
pulling unlimited amounts of fresh water from the sea had “the aura of a scientific
miracle and in your hands, could bring about a political miracle.” 33 Yet he also saw
benefit in leverage: why not promise nuclear desalination for both Egypt and Is-
rael in return for a promise not to undertake nuclear weapons development? Oth-
ers were skeptical, including presidential advisor Robert Komer, who derided the
“glorious scheme” to use nuclear desalination as “sweeteners” for arms reduction.
He called it “a long shot.” Israel would never accept international inspectors, he
stated. “The Israelis already allow us to secretly police Dimona, anyway.” 34 Besides,
it seemed unwise to single out Israel. The idea of supplying Nasser with a reactor
in Egypt in return for not developing a weapon, when he had no existing nuclear
capability, struck Komer as completely illogical.
Tying Water for Peace to nuclear weapons safeguards would have stalled it—
and in 1966, when Johnson was making promise after promise about making
deserts bloom, this simply was untenable. In mid-1965, the president had asked
Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol to agree to International Atomic Energy Agen-
cy safeguards, but Eshkol had not replied. A number of advisors, including special
assistant to the president Walt Rostow and Hornig, pointed out that this put the
United States in a tricky position. At best, the Israelis would stall a major Ameri-
can initiative. At worst, it would be an ineffective bargain, since the temptation to
cheat—with hostile neighbors next door—would be enormous. “If they could get
away with it, we would have enhanced the potential of each to build nuclear weap-
ons without establishing compensating controls,” Rostow noted. “From the view-
point of preventing nuclear proliferation, it might be better to have no new nuclear
reactors in the Middle East and to look more closely at desalting with non-nuclear
fuels, especially if nuclear desalting shows no clear-cut economic advantage.”35
In practice, President Johnson did little more than write finely crafted personal
notes inviting the Israeli prime minister to accept IAEA safeguards, while pressing
forward with Water for Peace and helping Israel to expand its nonnuclear arms
capabilities. Discussions with the Israeli ambassador in mid-1966 moved back and
forth between Israel’s desire for nuclear desalinating and for napalm bombs, an-

titank cluster bombs, and Sidewinder missiles. Surrounded by hostile neighbors
possessing Soviet-supplied MiG fighter jets, Israel lobbied the United States for
the best military equipment it could get, including the Hawk surface-to-air missile
system. The United States was trying to build up nuclear infrastructure in what
was shaping up to be war zone.36
Only Nuclear Water Will Do

Amid such uncertainties, Water for Peace only got bigger and bigger, and advo-
cates on all sides pinned expectations on its nuclear component. President John-
son appointed the diplomat Ellsworth Bunker to negotiate with Israel.37 The State
Department coached him to strike a deal with Israel that made the acceptance of
IAEA safeguards on all reactors the price for getting nuclear reactors for desali-
nation.38 But others, notably the AEC and the Department of the Interior, were
simply keen to see Israel choose American designs and commit to large facilities,
which would address water conservation and the peaceful atom. They knew the
economics made no sense—but neither did the economics of the space program,
or some of the Great Society programs, for that matter. To those who foresaw
white elephants emerging from nuclear-powered desalination, Rostow retorted
with a note of optimism. “I keep remembering,” he observed to the president,
“that we would not have built the transcontinental railway on a conventional cost/
benefit basis.”39
The Israelis said they were trying to look beyond strict costs and benefits as
well. By the end of 1966 Prime Minister Eshkol shifted his aspirations for electric-
ity output from two hundred MW to three hundred MW, counting on economies
of scale to help bring down costs. But in meetings with Bunker and other Ameri-
cans, he stated that the project’s value went beyond economics. Eshkol stated that
he perceived agricultural expansion as crucial for welcoming Jews immigrating
to Israel. At the present rate, he noted that Israel’s water sources would be com-
pletely developed by the early 1970s. The future rested upon agricultural devel-
opment. That meant new sources of water were absolutely necessary for Israel’s
future prospects.
Stoking the fires of imagination for a future of nuclear-powered desalination,
President Johnson convened—and presided over—another international confer-
ence dedicated to Water for Peace in late May 1967, in Washington, DC. At the
opening ceremony, Johnson spoke of his desire to “share the fruits of this tech-
nology” with all the countries of the world. One optimistic presentation by R.
Philip Hammond estimated that food could be grown with water costing a mere
three cents per day per person. This kind of economic promise harkened back to
the dream of providing electricity “too cheap to meter,” (as AEC chairman Lewis

Straus had sometimes put it in the mid-1950s), and stood in sharp contrast to the
predictions of economic white elephants coming from some of the president’s ad-
visors. AEC commissioner James Ramey urged presidential advisor Walt Rostow
to reject the negativism of bureaucrats in Washington, and to think imaginative-
ly.40 The Water for Peace conference, ending on May 31, 1967, set a new high point
of enthusiasm for nuclear solutions to environmental pressures, with projects in
Israel leading the way.
Enthusiasm was soon tempered by violence. While the conference continued
in Washington, Jordan and Egypt signed a defense pact and shored up military
forces. On June 5, 1967, aware of these preparations, Israel launched a surprise
attack on Egyptian air bases in the Sinai Peninsula. The conflict quickly widened
to include Jordan and Syria. In a matter of days, Israeli ground forces changed the
map of the region dramatically, occupying the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip
(previously held by Egypt), the West Bank, including eastern Jerusalem (previ-
ously held by Jordan), and the Golan Heights (previously held by Syria). That
conflict, known as the Six-Day War, set the stage for even deeper grievances be-
tween Israelis and their neighbors, and between the Israeli government and the
Palestinians living in occupied territories.41
Crucial areas targeted for occupation by Israel in the June conflict were sourc-
es of potable water. Occupation gave Israel the West Bank’s extensive freshwater
aquifer, previously belonging to Jordan. East of Lake Tiberias and along the river
to the north was the Golan Heights, previously part of Syria. It stretched into the
foothills of Mount Hermon, whose often-snowy peaks formed the river’s source.
Occupying the West Bank and Golan Heights thus secured more fresh water for
Israel.42
Rather than fuel concerns about putting nuclear reactors into a war zone, the
Six-Day War emboldened American officials to push harder to make nuclear-
powered desalination a reality. AEC chairman Glenn Seaborg felt that now Israel
might be willing to put its entire nuclear program under safeguards, in return for
Water for Peace reactors (it was not). He wrote to the secretary of state, “it seems
to me that the recent events may well intensify the problem of water allocation in
the area rather than ease it.”43
Despite the Six-Day War, momentum for Water for Peace seemed stronger than
ever. A couple of weeks after the war, former president Dwight Eisenhower met
with Johnson and emphasized his view that the water problem in the Middle East
had to be solved before any of the other outstanding issues could be. Eisenhower
had his own nuclear cheerleader, former AEC chairman Lewis Strauss, who fed
him ideas more ambitious than those yet offered under Water for Peace. Strauss
wanted to set up a corporation owning the reactors, and the United States would

own 51 percent of the stock, with the rest owned by bankers. One such potential
investor, Edmund de Rothschild, soon proposed building nuclear desalinating fa-
cilities for Israel and Jordan, and another in the Gaza Strip, with the ostensible aim
of assisting the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of refugees now looking for
land and water.44
Johnson’s project had been ambitious enough, but now the Strauss/Eisen-
hower plan imagined facilities ten times as big, to be put into the most contest-
ed areas of the recent Arab-Israeli conflict. “By a simple, bold, and imaginative
step,” Strauss proclaimed confidently in a memorandum to Eisenhower, “it is in
our power to solve both problems.” Three new, gigantic facilities could produce
cheap electricity to attract industry and fresh water, “opening to settlement many
hundred square miles which heretofore have never supported human life,” mak-
ing moot the controversy over Jordan River waters. Strauss envisioned massive
construction projects that would employ thousands of refugees building plants,
laying pipelines, constructing an electricity grid, and digging irrigation ditches
and reservoirs. When finished, those workers “could be settled in irrigated areas
under conditions far superior to any life that they have ever experienced.” All of
this could be achieved, Strauss observed, for “substantially less than one year’s
expenditure on the moon program.” He urged Eisenhower to take the plan to Pres-
ident Johnson, so that he could “electrify the world by such a proposal,” much as
Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace plan had done. Strauss predicted that it would be
hailed by millions, and that it “might well be the beginning of a new life in the
lands of the oldest civilizations.”45
The political problem with Eisenhower’s proposal was that it stole Johnson’s
thunder. The New York Times columnist C. L. Sulzberger wrote about the Strauss/
Eisenhower plan in three installments in July 1967, calling it at various turns bold,
imaginative, and visionary, always implying that the idea was brand new, spon-
sored by “our Number One elder statesman.”46 Sulzberger made no mention of
Water for Peace, but instead wrote that the Strauss/Eisenhower proposal dwarfed
previous ideas. The New York Times gave the impression that nuclear desalination
was not part of the Great Society, but a new Republican technological fix. Sub-
sequent coverage called it a “Republican peacemaking initiative for the Middle
East,” and noted that President Johnson gave it only “lukewarm endorsement.”
That apparent sluggishness led Republican senator Howard Baker Jr. to sponsor a
resolution calling for the prompt design and construction of nuclear desalinating
plants in the region, not only for economic reasons but also as a pathway to peace.
It passed the Senate unanimously in December 1967.47
On the surface, there appeared to be unity on desalination in the Middle East.
Eisenhower wrote to Johnson that his support was disinterested and nonpartisan,

and Johnson wrote back in a similar spirit, saying, “I know we have both long felt
in our bones” that achieving cost-effective desalination for irrigation might be-
come “a great constructive turning point in human history.”48 But Johnson and his
advisors could sense that they had lost the initiative, and they had done so head-
ing into an election year. The crisis in the Middle East, combined with nuclear-
powered desalination, became a political opportunity for the Republicans trying
to take shots at the Democrat in the White House. Interior Secretary Udall com-
plained to Johnson, “At this point the Republicans have—through the Strauss-
Eisenhower effort—‘stolen our clothes’ as far as the water issue in the Middle East
is concerned.” Strauss’s plan seemed bold and imaginative, despite the fact that the
Johnson administration had planned to spend more on desalination in one year
than Eisenhower had in his total eight years in office. 49
The Republican public relations coup encouraged some people, notably Udall
and Seaborg, to push forward with something as dramatic as possible to retake the
political initiative. Seaborg advocated approval for a large demonstration project
in California. Such unbridled enthusiasm astonished presidential science advisor
Don Hornig, who pointed out that the AEC’s dream project could present “a very
serious safety and licensing problem,” because it would be so close to a large pop-
ulation center, and because of earthquakes and other geological issues.50 Hornig
was disturbed by how political pressure was leading boosters like Seaborg and
Udall to ignore basic prudence. He tangled with the AEC over the text of John-
son’s State of the Union speech, to be delivered in January 1968, and tried to elim-
inate references to food factories from dual-use nuclear plants. 51
The president’s own enthusiasm for nuclear desalination decreased precipi-
tously when Washington insiders began referring to it as the Eisenhower-Strauss
plan. No one seemed to associate it with the Great Society at all. And because
those plans were based on the enthusiasm of scientists such as Alvin Weinberg
at Oak Ridge, the Johnson administration increasingly perceived Weinberg as a
Republican partisan. The president veered now to Don Hornig’s position. His
State of the Union address was dominated by discussion of the violence and pos-
sible routes to peace in Vietnam, and other crises at home and abroad—with no
mention of food factories, desalination, or any peaceful use of atomic energy. As
Rostow described the ideas coming out of Oak Ridge to the president: “We don’t
quarrel with its vision and hope, but it is naïve on two serious counts”; name-
ly, that nuclear desalinating was practical and that freshwater would bring about
permanent peace. Rostow had turned a corner in his own thinking—this was the
same man who had compared Water for Peace to building the transcontinental
railway. Now he sputtered that “AEC has a way of going wild with its ideas and
getting nuclear desalting out of economic perspective.”52

The lynchpin of the Water for Peace program had always been the president
himself, and he was now alienated from it. Arguments for the project’s symbol-
ic value no longer held sway—especially after, amidst the worsening situation in
Vietnam, he announced on March 31, 1968, that he would not run again for pres-
ident. The idea of nuclear desalination no longer inspired him. President John-
son appointed George D. Woods, former president of the World Bank, to take
over negotiations with Israel, undoubtedly knowing the choice meant it would
be evaluated in economic rather than political terms. Woods made short work
of the problem, saying that an economically justifiable dual-purpose project was
almost certainly impossible, and he seriously doubted that such desalinating proj-
ects were good business opportunities. He proposed a much smaller venture with
Israel and wanted to move forward without necessarily coupling desalination with
nuclear reactors.53
For advocates of atomic energy, this recommendation to make nuclear reactors
optional was the worst possible outcome. AEC chairman Seaborg and Secretary
of the Interior Udall, for example, based their aspirations on the dream of atomic
energy, and faith that the technology would add up to more than the sum of its
economic parts. Given that so much of the impetus for the whole program came
from atomic energy boosters, they predicted that the whole program would fall
apart without reactors. But in the end, a deflated President Lyndon Johnson de-
ferred to Woods’s recommendations and left open the question of whether nucle-
ar fuel had to be used.54
Without a clear nuclear dimension, the scheme fell apart utterly. Johnson
would hand the next president, Richard Nixon, a project with no technological
appeal and no significant boosters. Nixon himself had supported the Strauss-
Eisenhower idea and even made it seem like a Republican idea. But that was
during election season. Now the Nixon administration confronted a project that
made no economic sense and lacked the bold miracle implied by dual-use nuclear
plants. Moreover, the nuclear dimension was gaining influential critics because of
proliferation concerns.55 In the first year of his presidency, the Nixon administra-
tion picked the project clean of its nuclear roots and its foreign policy agenda, and
Water for Peace disappeared.
\\\
In the case of Water for Peace, maintaining the nuclear dimension turned out to
be much more important to its array of supporters than actually addressing the
environmental crisis. Some supporters, like Weinberg, were true believers in nu-
clear technology as a panacea for many of society’s challenges. Others, like AEC
chairman Seaborg, were eager to prove the value of atomic energy in the civilian

realm, regardless of the specific application. President Johnson saw in nuclear-
powered desalination an ambitious project worthy of his Great Society programs,
and envisioned great stores of political and foreign relations potential, among an
important political constituency at home ( Jewish voters), and in a contested re-
gion of the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union. Still others, especially in
the State Department, saw it as a potential incentive for Israel to agree to reactor
inspections—which never happened. Israelis themselves were interested in the
project as a guarantee of future water security, but they also insisted that nuclear
reactors be used, and they were secretly developing the capability to process spent
reactor fuel into plutonium.
What can we learn from a studying a high-level project that purported to ad-
dress a major environmental crisis but was in fact intended to serve entirely differ-
ent purposes? We should avoid the simplistic conclusion that these events were
simply the results of misguided faith in technological fixes. Environmental con-
cern often was merely an opportunistic justification for achieving political goals,
comparable to the deft manipulations of environmental movements by politicians
and diplomats in the United States and Soviet Union throughout the Cold War,
on issues ranging from radioactive waste disposal to river and air pollution. In the
decades after World War II, so-called peaceful nuclear technologies would time
and again be invoked as potential solutions for environmental problems ranging
from population pressure to climate change.56 And while these crises were often
quite real, nuclear boosters were not necessarily interested, primarily, in solving
them. To all of the actors in the Water for Peace story, solving the specific envi-
ronmental problem, itself a tangle of population growth, geopolitical conflict, and
limited water sources, held less appeal than the means by which it might be done.
It had to be a technological miracle using nuclear reactors. Today it may seem
surprising that both major political parties in the United States advocated putting
scores of nuclear reactors into war zones in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Not
only did they do so, but for them, the nuclear dimension was the critical piece of
the entire project. Once it disappeared, so did the dream of plentiful water and the
vision of an American technological solution in the Middle East.

13
East Germany’s Fight for

Recognition as a Sovereign State
Environmental Diplomacy as
Strategy in Cold War Politics
Astrid Mignon Kirchhof
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
In September 1973 the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) admitted
the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) and the Federal Repub-
lic of Germany (FRG, West Germany) as members.1 Nearly thirty years after the
end of World War II, with this act both German states were finally recognized as
two separate and sovereign states. For East Germany this event marked the end
of decades of struggling for international recognition and equal treatment with
West Germany.2 Although West Germany had not officially obtained sovereignty
before 1973, the Western Allies had already treated West Germany as a sovereign
state, and refused to grant East Germany the same status. In this latter respect, the
Allies accepted West German claims to be the sole legitimate political representa-
tion of Germany, following (after 1955) the Hallstein Doctrine, which guided the
Federal Republic’s policy toward East Germany.3
Both German states promoted the idea of a reunified Germany in the first years
after 1945. Despite promoting its growing integration into the Western allianc-
es, West Germany never gave up the aim of reunification. East Germany deviated
from reunification plans during the second half of the 1950s and started following
a policy of seeking recognition as an independent state.4 Simultaneously, it sent
diplomatic notes to West Germany suggesting a loose confederation of both Ger-
man states under the aegis of Socialism.5 When West Germany rejected this idea,
East Germany’s policy finally settled on a Germany of two independent sovereign
states.
To support its policy of recognition, East Germany planned to cultivate atti-
tudes friendly toward Socialism in West Germany. To this end, it established com-
mittees entrusted with so-called West Work, which conducted the “entirety of all
official political efforts [of the leading Socialist Unity Party of Germany, SED], of
219
all propaganda activities, and all unofficial as well as intelligence operations di-
rected at West Germany, with the goal of converting the whole of Germany to the
socialist model of the GDR.”6 To reach this goal East Germany enlisted large num-
bers of its people, often including mass organizations. Their task was to spread
pro-East German sentiments among leading West Germans in a variety of fields:
politics, media, culture, and science. Among these “messengers” were also expert
natural scientists and volunteer nature conservationists. They promoted Social-
ism in the West at conferences, meetings, and excursions focused on the natural
environment and environmental protection—which in the 1950s and 1960s in
both countries meant nature conservation rather then ecology.7 These exchanges
were not always arranged from above by politicians; nature protecionists on both
sides had an interest in those meetings. The reports written about the exchanges
remind us that the atmosphere between them was often characterized by produc-
tive competition about which was the better system for nature conservation.
Nature conservation was not the most prominent field within East Germany’s
scheme to influence parts of West German society and politics. But from its early
days the state engaged nature conservationists via one of its mass organisations,
the Cultural League, to create a political environment in the West favorable to
East Germany. At first, these people contributed to the Socialist Party’s mission of
creating a reunited, Socialist Germany. Later, they worked to establish diplomatic
relations between the two Germanys. From the beginning of the 1960s, East Ger-
many’s West Work overlapped with its long-term goal of achieving recognition as
a sovereign state.8
Advancing “sovereignty through the back door ” by sending its own citizens
to West Germany was one approach East Germany tried.9 Another one was to es-
tablish normal relations with Western and developing countries, as well as repeat-
edly applying to the United Nations (UN) for membership. As direct admission
to the UN had no prospect of success in the 1950s due to Cold War tensions, the
East German Foreign Ministry concentrated its endeavors on joining UN special
organizations or securing the participation of East Germany in UN internation-
al conferences.10 The first international conference of environmental significance
was the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. East
Germany asked to participate equally alongside West Germany at the conference
and a one-and-a-half-year struggle between UN member states and associated
countries ensued over this issue.
Historians have shown how members of the leading Socialist Party, beginning
in the late 1960s, used environmental policy to help gain international recogni-
tion for East Germany.11 Indeed, environmental diplomacy was a political tool for
East Germany’s government because with the advent of détente between the su-
220 Astrid Mignon Kirchhof

perpowers, global environmental policy became an important factor in the Cold
War.12 Thus, international environmental politics and diplomacy accelerated and
aided East Germany’s quest for recognition because it created a new sphere for
East-West negotiations. In the arena of environmental politics, strict Cold War
rules were less prominent than in traditional political arenas and scientists were
eager to cooperate across system borders.
Environmental diplomacy was a means East Germany used not only from the
onset of détente but as early as the foundation of the GDR—as a result I place
central importance on the enduring approach of this policy.
As part of East Germany’s West Work nature conservationists beginning in the
late 1940s employed existing exchanges with their West German colleagues to
fight for recognition and acceptance of their Socialist state. Thus, East Germany’s
desire to participate in the United Nations Conference on the Human Environ-
ment as a member in the beginning of the 1970s did not mark the advent of envi-
ronmental diplomacy for gaining international recognition. East Germany merely
used the conference to make this aim clear once more. The state attempted over
two decades to gain acceptance as a sovereign state, partly by means of environ-
mental diplomacy through multiple channels.
East Germany’s Environmental Diplomacy with West Germany in the

1950s and 1960s
East Germany’s West Work came in two stages: First, it tried to promote a re-
united Germany, and when this political goal proved unattainable it aimed in a
second stage to create a better political environment for the German Democratic
Republic as a sovereign state. Up until the mid-1950s SED party officials imagined
they would be able to influence parts of West German society, and put their hopes
especially in West German Social Democrats, trade unionists, and middle-class
society.13 As the examples in this chapter show, amateur nature conservationists
and professional natural scientists organized in the Cultural League were engaged
to undertake diplomatic relations with similar organisations in the West. To un-
derstand how these people became part of East Germany’s West Work scheme, it
is necessary to go back to the beginnings of the Cultural League.
The Cultural League was founded by the poet and politician Johannes R.
Becher during the summer of 1945 in the Soviet Occupied Zone of Germany.14
Originally, the organization strove to integrate intellectuals and creative people
to develop and shape a new beginning after the collapse of the Nazi dictatorship.
In addition to their ideological function, organized activities offered citizens so-
cial contact with like-minded people and opportunities to do useful work. Very
soon, not only academics and creative people became members of the Cultural
East Germany’s Fight for Recognition as a Sovereign State 221

League, but hiking enthusiasts, nature protectionists, and folk dancing groups
also joined.15 Beginning in 1949 these people had an organized chapter within the
Cultural League, called the Friends of Nature and the Heimat (Natur-und Hei-
matfreunde, NHF). After a few years in many local groups they were “so strongly
represented that the Cultural League was hardly recognizable anymore as an ‘or-
ganization for the intelligentsia.’”16
In the beginning Cultural League activists and party officials opposed each
other because of these developments.17 After a few years, the first secretary, Walter
Ulbricht, and the Socialist Unity Party recognized the usefulness of the NHF be-
cause their activities helped advance a new identity for East Germans in the new
Socialist “home.” Moreovoer, the East German nature protectionists were tailor-
made to explain the supposed advantages of the socialist system to fellow nature
protectionists in the West. Many of them were convinced that Socialism would
be the better system for nature protection because nature was a common good
and ideally didn’t belong to anybody as it was often the case in capitalit societies.
Finally, the initial animosities between East Germany’s nature and homeland ac-
tivists and state instiutions gave way to closer cooperation from the 1950s onward.
Thus, the Cultural League reached out to the Friends of Nature and the Heimat to
connect with like-minded people in the West and employ these nature enthusiasts
for the party’s West Work scheme.18 They organized mutual hiking excursions, city
tours, and workshops with West German hiking and Heimat clubs and nature pro-
tectionist associations such as the socialist West German Verein der Naturfreunde
(Association of the Friends of Nature).19
At the end of the 1950s East Germany had replaced the traditional Heimat
definition with a Socialist version, in which Heimat was now understood as a po-
litical entity rather than a geographic area with natural features distinct to certain
people.20 In the eyes of Ulbricht and his colleagues, inventing a special concept of
(Socialist) Heimat was significant because it would give East German people an
identity bound to the Socialist state.
That the Friends of Nature and Heimat not only had an interest in exchanging
views on nature conservation questions but also a political motivation to get in
touch with West Germany’s “Socialist-leaning” nature associations becomes clear
from the following statement in 1953.
From true love for one’s Heimat nourishes the understanding of political events of
our time. Therefore we recognize the immense danger that threatens peace and our
fatherland by the EDC Treaties [Treaties of the European Defense Community] and
militarization. The treaties of Bonn and Paris block the street that leads to German
reunification and open the path to a new war.…We, the Friends of Nature and the

Heimat, make this great commitment to join in the all-German work more than we
have so far. We have to establish contacts with West German friends that engage in
the same areas as we do.21
The background to this statement was that in 1952 Joseph Stalin had offered the
Western Allies a peace treaty with Germany, the so-called Stalin Note, which the
Western powers declined. Instead, West Germany signed the General Treaty with
France, the United Kingdom, and the United States (the Treaties of Bonn and
Paris). These treaties regulated the Western integration and rearmament of West
Germany. This formally ended the state’s status as occupied country and—with
some restrictions—gave it the rights of a sovereign state.22 On the one hand East
Germany felt threatened by West Germany’s rearmament—on the other hand
they realized that reunification was a dead letter. In this situation cadres of the
Cultural League deployed groups such as Friends of Nature and the Heimat be-
cause they felt that nature and Heimat enthusiasts were the right people to convey
the advantages of Socialism to colleagues in West Germany in a convincing way.
After West Germany had signed these treaties, the SED continued its West
Work in many fields. Another example, this time of a middle-class nature asso-
ciation of the West, that the Friends of Nature and the Heimat contacted was the
“Rhönclub.”23 This was a hiking and Heimat association founded in the nineteenth
century, which originally brought together nature enthusiasts from Prussia, Ba-
varia, and Thuringia. In 1954 the secretary of the NHF’s central commission, Dr.
Liesel Noack, initiated contact with the West German association and suggested
sending a delegation to the Rhönclub’s next meeting. Before the trip the delega-
tion was told what was expected of them: “to bring our thoughts and ideas about
peacekeeping and the solution of the German nation’s life questions to West Ger-
many and thus overcome wrong perceptions about the German Democratic Re-
public.”24 They also invited the members of the club back to East Germany to show
them the nature conservation achievements of their state, such as the cultivation
of nature reserves. After a few years of mutual exchange they stopped because they
realized that even if there were a number of Chancellor Adenauer critics in the
club, they were still far from “feeling sympathy for the GDR.”25
Here it is necessary to distinguish between the numerous volunteer conserva-
tionists and the NHF’s leadership. In general, the NHF leaders’ interest in these
meetings was to strive for a positive picture of Socialist East Germany in the West
and, thus, recognition as a sovereign state with recognizable environmental, So-
cialist politics distinguished from the West. On the other hand, many rank-and-file
members still hoped to see Germany reunified. Even at the end of the 1950s, when
the SED politics had given up on reuinification already for some years, members

used international environmental meetings to point out the mutuality of East and
West. As one person put it, “Yes, if they up there [the politicians] can’t find com-
mon ground, then we down here have to do it, from human to human.”26 The re-
ports of the Cultural League and the Friends of Nature and the Heimat show that
individual members went against the will of the leadership and stayed in touch
with West German nature protection groups even after the official policy of the
NHF had ended the contacts.27
The end of the 1950s was the time when the East German ruling party general-
ly recognized that many attempts did not have the intended effect on Western col-
leagues.28 About the lack of influence on the Rhönclub, the Friends of Nature and
the Heimat remarked somewhat disappointedly: “It all is—at least amongst the
leadership [of the Rhönclub]—a really bourgeois matter, so that our all-German
intention, which is to support opposing forces against the Adenauer Regime, will
not be realized.”29
Despite experiences like this one, the NHF continued to send nature protec-
tionists to the West in search for new contacts, but also for exchanges with estab-
lished ones. One existing contact that the NHF sought to reactivate was the So-
ciety for the Regional History of Brandenburg’s West Berlin branch. In the 1950s
the NHF’s Potsdam chapter had organized mutual excursions with up to sixty-five
participants from the society’s West Berlin branch. They had been quite success-
ful in attracting well-known West German nature protectionists for these outings,
like the later state representative for nature and landscape conservation in the
West Berlin Senate, Prof. Dr. Herbert Sukopp. In the mid-1960s East German pro-
fessional natural scientists, as well as amateur nature protectionists, were called
upon once more to reach out to the Federal Republic for “political-ideological”
work and search for contacts among guests and visitors to East Germany from the
West.30 That these were not just enjoyable exchanges between hobby nature pro-
tectionists but also carried political intentions is revealed in participants’ reports
sent back to the NHF’s management, and in their subsequent correspondence
with the Cultural League. As the report to the editors of the NHF’s journal states,
these excursions were to promote existing relations “to undermine false and harm-
ful accounts [about East Germany] and pave the way for peaceful co-operation.”31
Overall, West Work did not change East Germany’s image in West Germany
substantially. The fact that East Germany employed nature conservationists and
professional nature scientists for its goals, however, shows that the state experi-
mented with the West Work scheme, and not completely unsuccessfully. Many
Western nature protectionists were indeed impressed with measurements East
Germany undertook to protect nature already early on, like the passing of the na-
ture protection law in 1954.32 Including environmental diplomacy in West Work

since the early days of the state’s existence advanced East Germany’s quest for in-
ternational recognition.
East Germany’s Environmental Diplomacy at the Beginning of the 1970s:

The State’s Way to the United Nations Conference on the Human
Environment
A further attempt toward achieving recognition as a sovereign state was East Ger-
many’s effort to become a member of the United Nations and thus establish nor-
mal relations with the countries of the Western world. That effort had its roots
early in the history of East Germany.
In the first years of its existence, East Germany made efforts to achieve mem-
bership in some specialized UN agencies, such as the the International Telecom-
munications Union and the World Meteorological Organization—but was not ad-
mitted. In 1955 the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin (Deutsche Akademie
der Wissenschaften, DAW) asked the government to examine the possibility of
joining UNESCO.33 Although the application was turned down, the regime inten-
sified its efforts to be accepted into UNESCO in the following years. Support for
these efforts was provided by Yugoslavia and Eastern Bloc countries such as Hun-
gary, Poland, and the Soviet Union, which supported both the admission of East
Germany to UNESCO conferences as well as its accession as a full member.34 The
1961 election of Burmese diplomat U Thant as secretary general of the UN, replac-
ing Swedish secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld, proved favorable to East Ger-
many. While the new secretary general did not exactly support East Germany’s
agenda, he was more disposed than his predecessor to adopt a neutral position
between both blocs and superpowers. Significantly, under U Thant the United
Nations broke with the custom of simply ignoring petitions from East Germany.
For West Germany, these changes presented new challenges. On the one hand,
it was able to continue its nonrecognition policy in relation to East Germany. On
the other hand, it was facing decreasing opportunities to assert itself. Due to the
dwindling willingness of other member states to support the Federal Republic’s
policy of blocking East Germany’s ascension, West Germany had to make greater
efforts to prevent East Germany from joining the United Nations and its special
organizations.35
From the mid-1960s onward the East German government intensified its ef-
forts to raise its international standing even more. Walter Ulbricht succeeded in
gaining permission from the Soviet leadership to pursue full membership in the
UN and also included the Polish and Czechoslovak Socialist Republic’s (CSSR)
foreign ministries in the planning. In 1966 East Germany officially applied for
UN membership. U Thant received the application personally. However, Jordan

blocked the application before it could be officially submitted to the organization.
East Germany submitted another application later that same year, but here, too,
without success. Twice, in 1968 and 1970, East Germany also implemented acces-
sion treaties to the World Health Organization (WHO) with the help of an East
German working commission of the same acronym. The task of the commission
was to pave East Germany’s way into the UN and to work against the perceived
blockage of East German representatives and institutions within the UN.36 Many
UN member states were increasingly of the opinion that the recognition of East
Germany could be put off no longer. The 1968 WHO application was accepted by
the director general as an official petition, and by its second application in 1970
the proportion of votes had shifted in favor of East Germany. Nonetheless, UN
member states ultimately rejected the treaties and the Federal Republic requested
a prorogation of the application.37
Alongside the applications for inclusion in the special organizations of the
United Nations, East Germany’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs attempted to secure
the participation in the UN’s international conferences in order to come closer
to the goal of achieving full recognition. The United Nations Conference on the
Human Environment, which took place in Stockholm in June 1972, was one such
conference. The East German delegation had been granted observer status by all
sides, but was not content with this arrangement. 38
Even though East Germany had not received an official invitation to partici-
pate, it nevertheless hoped to be able to participate in the conference and submit-
ted its national report through the Commission of Socialist Land Improvement.39
This report addressed rising environmental problems in East Germany, including
increasing traffic, noise pollution, air pollution, soil erosion, river siltation, waste,
unsustainable agricultural practices, and difficulties arising from different indus-
tries such as pulp, oil, chemicals, energy, and fuel. A large part of the East German
report outlined positive measures that had already been taken. For instance, it
pointed out that environmental protection was anchored in the East Germany’s
Basic Law as well as the Law on the Conservation and Protection of the Environ-
ment (Landeskulturgesetz), which was passed two years earlier in 1970.40 This law
was passed in order to respond to environmental issues beyond mere conserva-
tion and, above all, addressed the consequences of environmental pollution for
human beings.41 Awareness-raising measures and engagement by volunteers were
nothing new in East German conservation and environmental protection.42 For
instance, the report mentioned the engagement of volunteers for the protection of
wild plants. One of these many volunteers was Uwe Wegener, who, along with fel-
low nature conservationists, was a member of the Cultural League’s central expert

committee on botany. His unpublished account confirms the report’s description
of citizens’ commitment to conservation by explaining to the reader his lifelong
advocacy for wild orchids in East Germany.43
From 1970 onward environmental groups went beyond inculcating a basic ap-
preciation of the beauty of the local countryside to advocate for a more conscien-
tious use of natural resources. This involved a focus on the individual person, for
the state wanted responsibility for the environment to fall also on the shoulders of
citizens. Although scholars such as the environmental lawyer Michael Klopfer and
others described the Law on the Conservation and Protection of the Environment
rightly as “progressive” and “exemplary,” there was a gap between theory and prac-
tice, because the law was not implemented in the intended way.44 Nevertheless,
the fact that East Germany passed its own nature conservation law in 1954 had
the potential to give an important signal for other countries to do the same.45 Both
the preparatory committee of the UN conference and the department that had
summarized all national reports stressed the significance of role model functions
and the importance of international communication.46 Thus, they pointed to the
relevance of international information exchange for countries that took part in the
United Nations Conference on the Human Environment.47
Besides referring to environmental laws, the national report East Germany
had sent to the UN committee that prepared the Conference on the Human En-
vironment also described other environmental protection activities. It referred to
the renovation of urban spaces, the creation of local leisure areas and new nature
preserves, and air pollution-control improvements made through the inspection
of motor vehicle exhaust. Even though other measures, such as imposing finan-
cial penalties and creating monitoring authorities, had already been undertaken
in the 1950s, the report noted that the environmental situation was still less than
ideal.48 It concluded that “complex measures for an effective improvement of en-
vironmental and living conditions will be required in the future.”49 Thus, the re-
port referred to measures that still had to be initiated—such as decommissioning
obsolete facilities, tough requirements for the operators of air-polluting facilities,
ecological rehabilitation of rivers by means improving wastewater treatment and
introducing water-saving technologies, or the usage of industrial waste as second-
ary raw material.50 The report was written at a time of great hope for East Germa-
ny’s environmental policy. A Ministry for Environmental Protection and Water
Management had been created in 1970, and a year later a comprehensive seven-
million Deutschmark environmental program was passed. However, the new laws
like the Landeskulturgesetz would hardly be observed in the future. This was due
to both political decisions at home and the recession of the mid-1970s caused by

the global economic slowdown. Ecological goals were placed on the backburner
and the IX and X Party Conferences of the ruling party, SED, did not pass any
more environmental programs, only general resolutions.
The historian Kai Hünemörder called this national report a “decorated paper,”
and noted that in large parts it reads as if the state had already attained its goal—
namely, unifying environmental protection and Socialism.51 According to the re-
port, polluting factories would be closed in the near future and environmental
factors would be taken into consideration in economic policy and social planning.
This account can be put into perspective when reading the commentary of the
U.S. Department of Housing that summarized the national reports, and shows
that many countries not only reported failures but also referred to successes of
environmental steps undertaken in their countries. Nevertheless, Hünemörder’s
criticism of the report points to a basic ambivalence of East Germany’s environ-
mental preservation laws. The East German government wrote its conservation
laws earlier than many other countries, in part to claim a moral advantage over the
capitalist West. At the same time, these laws were circumvented and not always
observed, even though conservationists and scientists repeatedly insisted that this
be done.52 But conservationists not only made moral arguments, they also saw
inherent advantages in the Socialist system. They believed in the Socialist state’s
promise that certain parts of the natural world, such as lakes, should ideally not
be held as private property, and thus could not be subject to commercial exploita-
tion.53 Conservationists also exchanged views on the question if federal or cen-
trally organized states are more in favor of environmental protection. This issue
was also taken up by the U.S. Department of Housing, which argued in its sum-
mary that states that are organized centrally can be advantageous in specific areas.
This view was supported by contemporary scientists such as the Dutch ecologist
Marten Scheffer, who argues that centralized states should be able to implement
conservation regulations more easily than states with a federal structure because
decisions can be made quicker and avoid being submerged in too many debates
and opinions.54 An economy that is also centrally planned like in East Germany is
seen more critically. Historians have pointed out that central planning was proba-
bly rather harmful in Eastern Germany’s economy because it seems to be difficult
to plan a country’s economy out in all its details and for a longer period of time.
But similarly to the capitalist West, the East German economy was geared toward
growth.55 While labor productivity was lower, research for the time after 1970
shows that East Germany’s economic growth could keep up and even exceeded
that of West Germany at times.56
Nevertheless, conservation in East Germany was chronically underfunded.57
From the 1980s onward, economic decline and the growing technological gap

with the West put East Germany in a dead-end situation. It continually reduced
the financing of environmental protection, increasingly exploited the natural
world and stood by as the ecological equilibrium was lost.58 Articles by environ-
mental activists that were written fifteen years after the Stockholm report describe
many environmental issues that the state was supposed to tackle but (still) did
or could not. For example, the biologist Hannelore Kurth reported in an inter-
view that the party often had allowed car racing rallies through nature preserves
and thus did not follow its own plans of reducing air and noise pollution.59 Jour-
nals such as Umweltblätter and Arche secretly printed by environmental groups
in the 1980s regularly reported on issues like water contamination, air pollution,
outdated housing (e.g., no bathrooms and toilets or central heating), and hous-
ing shortages. According to these accounts, some East German groundwater was
contaminated by nitrates and phosphates; citizens had to suffer inhumane living
conditions in confined spaces without sewer systems.60 Additionally, East Germa-
ny had extremely high sulphur dioxide emissions.61
A year before the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, a
special section, a so-called unit, was formed within the Academy of Sciences to
concentrate more on East Germany’s environmental politics. With the exception
of Professor Sinaida Rosenthal, the members of the unit were all male, and num-
bered among the most illustrious personalities from East Germany’s scientific
world.62 The unit’s task was to explore the problems of human beings and the en-
vironment scientifically, and to give recommendations for environmental policies
to the government. It supported the accession of the Academy of Sciences to the
academies of Socialist states and to international organizations such as the United
Nations.63
Since East Germany could not speak for itself at the UN’s international meet-
ings, it was represented by the Soviet Union. In 1971 the Soviets threatened that
the exclusion of East Germany could lead to the withdrawal of the Soviet Union,
though they were not actually considering a fundamental change of direction in
foreign policy at this time. The Soviet representative Alexej Nestrenko said that
confrontations should be avoided at this time, decisions on East Germany’s par-
ticipation delayed, and perhaps even the whole conference postponed. In fact,
since preparations for the Conference on the Human Environment had begun,
talks between East Germany and West Germany had advanced quite a bit. After
the ratification of the Treaty of Moscow and the Treaty of Warsaw, as well as the
implementation of the Four Power Agreement in June 1972, talks began on the
so-called “normalization of relations between the German Democratic Republic
and the Federal Republic of Germany.”64 This occurred on July 15, shortly after
the Conference on the Human Environment ended.65 Due to the ongoing nego-

tiations between Moscow and Bonn, the tensions caused by the conference were
particularly worrying. Thus, the federal chancellor, Willy Brandt, cautioned Swed-
ish president Olof Palme that no decisions should be made that would torpedo
the negotiations with Moscow at the last minute.66
The UN General Assembly decided on December 20, 1971, not to postpone
the conference and voted for compliance with the Vienna Convention on Dip-
lomatic Relations of 1961—as a result, only members of the United Nations or
its special organizations were invited.67 East Germany was thus unable to partic-
ipate in the conference as a full member. The result surprised the Soviet Union
somewhat and, for several months, it was unclear what the Soviet Union would
decide about East German participation in the conference.68 In the end the Sovi-
ets withdrew from negotiations with the Western powers.69 Australia’s suggestion
that East Berlin send experts with observer status was rejected by the Eastern Bloc.
Consequently, all of the Warsaw Pact countries with the exception of Romania
boycotted the conference.70
This outcome was widely perceived as failure for global cooperation and for
environmental politics as well as détente in general. It demonstrated that the UN’s
original intention to put environmental matters first and support international co-
operation were overtaken by Cold War animosities and threats from both sides of
the Iron Curtain. Even with good intention at first, all sides involved fell back on
old patterns and arguments. Some historians put more stress on the boycotting
of the conference by the Warsaw Pact states than the exclusion of East Germany
by the United Nations.71 This view overlooks the fact that it was not a one-sided
action since (un)successful communication always involves more than one par-
ty. Besides, the United States had little interest in the Soviet Union taking part
in the conference, so it was less inclined to find an agreement with the Eastern
Bloc countries. The historian Jacob Darwin Hamblin points out that the USSR’s
absence served American interests very well because the Soviets “no longer were
serious contenders for leadership in whatever global body might emerge from the
conference.”72 It can be argued that requesting participation at the Conference on
the Human Environment as a full member was not a provocative surprise, but in
line with the East Germany‘s diplomatic strategy since the mid-1950s to achieve
sovereignty. Even though the USSR and East Germany could have foreseen that
their insistence might lead to ongoing arguments in the run-up to the conference,
this policy might even have accelerated the process.
To change this situation and establish a more stable world political situation,
it took the concerted efforts of many countries over many years. East Germa-
ny’s long-term efforts to point out the injustice of its situation, including its re-
peated UN applications as well as its West Work, added to other critical factors

such as détente, the new Ostpolitik of chancellor Willy Brandt’s government, and
produced a willingness of all sides to pursue a different path of communication,
namely in the important area of environmental politics. All this opened up new
possibilities for international cooperation.
\\\
With the Hallstein Doctrine, West Germany created an instrument that claimed
exclusive rights to all-German foreign policy. Until the normalization of bilateral
and diplomatic relations in 1973, the thwarting of the Hallstein Doctrine was East
Germany’s top priority, to which all others were subordinated. To reach this goal,
the SED tried out two approaches via environmental diplomacy, one of which
started long before the rise of global environmental politics. Thus, I place central
importance on the long-term nature of this policy: East Germany attempted over
two decades, by means of environmental diplomacy, to gain acceptance as a sov-
ereign state.
One approach was connected to East Germany’s West Work scheme by send-
ing its own citizens to West Germany. The Friends of the Heimat and the Nature, a
chapter within the Cultural League, established or used preexisting relations with
West German colleagues to fight for recognition and acceptance of their Social-
ist state beginning in the late 1940s. In this context, however, the foreign policy
goals of the NHF leadership should be differentiated from the involvement of East
German volunteers, who were less interested in environmental diplomacy than in
East-West cooperation and exchange in the hopes that the two Germanys would
be reunited one day.
The other approach was to establish normal relations with Western and devel-
oping countries while trying to gain accession to UN suborganizations, to interna-
tional conferences, and finally to the United Nations itself. East Germany’s desire
to participate in the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment as a
member was therefore in line with past attempts to gain international recognition
through other channels in the United Nations. Thus, it did not mark the advent of
environmental diplomacy—East Germany merely used this environmental con-
ference to make its aim clear once more. Since the East German-West German
negotiations were then in full swing, East Germany’s demands for sovereignty in
the run-up to the conference might have accelerated the process of recognizing
East Germany as sovereign state.
The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment offered a new
forum in which countries could discuss common problems that had to be thought
through globally and coordinated internationally. But in the early 1970s the East-
West conflict still dominated global policy on both sides of the porous Iron Cur-

tain, and ultimately cast its shadow over events. After a promising beginning in
overcoming Cold War politics, the conference was overtaken by threats from both
East and West and led to the (self) exclusion of East Germany and nearly all East-
ern Bloc countries.
East Germany was not alone in using the environment as a political instru-
ment. Since the rise of environmental awareness, neighboring countries have
been tempted to use promises of reduction in cross-border pollution to extract
concessions. Even close allies, such as the United States and Canada, occasionally
engaged in such politics. Neighbors with sharp political differences, such as Russia,
Ukraine, and the Baltic countries after 1991, did so regularly.73 Aid agencies, both
governmental and private, routinely engaged in environmental modifications
such as dam-building or tree-planting campagins in exchange for political favors
from aid recipients.74 East Germany’s effort, however, lasted longer than most.

NOTES
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Introduction
1. An earlier volume, J. R. McNeill and Corinna Unger, eds., Environmental Histories of the
Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), sought to explore some of the im-
plications of the Cold War for nature. Unlike this book, it included only a short section on
environmentalism with chapters on nuclear testing policy, Chinese environmental policy, and
the thought of the brothers Huxley on nature protection. This book delves far deeper into envi-
ronmentalism and environmental policy, and presents clear contrasts and comparisons on both
sides of the Iron Curtain. It includes deep archival probes, revealing much of what differed and
what did not in environmentalism among several countries involved in the Cold War.
2. Two recent and responsible overviews are Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World
History (New York: Basic Books, 2017), and Carole Fink, Cold War: An International History,
2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2017).
3. Erik Richardson, NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the Iron Curtain (New York: Cavendish
Square Publishing, 2017).
4. Nicholas Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propa-
ganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); there
seems to be no scholarly study of Soviet external propaganda during the Cold War, but on Sovi-
et efforts within Eastern Europe, see Michael David-Fox, ed., Cold War Crossings: International
Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014);
for orientation see chapters of Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo, eds., The Oxford Hand-
book of Propaganda Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Rana Mitter and Philip
Major, eds., Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History (London: Frank Cass, 2004)
includes chapters dealing with cultural components of propaganda.
5. Crises were especially frequent in 1956–1962 and 1979–1985.
6. General histories of environmentalism or environmental policy include Ramachandra
Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (Longman, 1999); Paul Harris, ed., Routledge Hand-
book of Global Environmental Politics (London: Routledge, 2015); and Marco Armiero and Lise
Sedrez, eds., A History of Environmentalism: Local Struggles, Global Histories (London: Blooms-
bury Academic, 2014).
7. An explicitly comparative treatment of nuclear installations—bomb factories—and the
culture surrounding them in the United States and the USSR is Kate Brown, Plutopia (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2014). On the superpowers individually, see Paul R. Josephson,
Red Atom: Russia’s Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today (Pittsburgh: University of Pitts-
burgh Press, 2005), and Bruce Cameron Reed, The History and Science of the Manhattan Project
(Berlin: Springer, 2014). Still useful, and recently updated, is Spencer Weart, The Rise of Nuclear
Fear (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
233
8. On the revival of Malthusian anxiety, see Alison Bashford, Global Population: History,
Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), and Thomas Rob-
ertson, The Malthusian Moment (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
9. With the proviso that nuclear questions divided European countries and were dealt with
quite differently in different places. For recent research on nuclear power in Europe, see the
information and research of the project HoNESt, http://www.honest2020.eu/.
10. For recent research on environmentally inflected social movements in Europe, see An-
drew Tompkins, Better Active than Radioactive! (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), and
Stephen Milder, Greening Democracy. The Anti-Nuclear Movement and Political Environmentalism
in West Germany and Beyond 1968–1983 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
11. Paul Josephson et al., An Environmental History of Russia (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2013); J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of
the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), and Patrick Allitt, A Climate of
Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism (New York: Penguin, 2014).
12. Wolfram Kaiser, “Transnational Networks in European Governance. The Informal Pol-
itics of Integration,” in The History of the European Union: Origins of a Trans-and Supranational
Polity 1950–72, ed. Wolfram Kaiser, Morten Rasmussen, and Brigitte Leucht (London: Rout-
ledge, 2009), 12–33.
13. Hartmut Kaelble, “Between Comparison and Transfers,” in Comparative and Transna-
tional History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives, ed. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt
and Jürgen Kocka (New York, Oxford, 2009), 33–38; Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Appropriating
the Environment: How the European Institutions Received the Novel Idea of the Environ-
ment and Made it Their Own,” KFG Working Paper Series, no. 31, September 2011; Kolleg-
Forschergruppe (KFG) “‘The Transformative Power of Europe,” Freie Universität Berlin,
http://userpage.fuberlin. de/kfgeu/kfgwp/wpseries/WorkingPaperKFG_31.pdf.
14. In 1949 the American nuclear weapons plant in Hanford, Washington, suffered a mis-
hap when an experimental release of radioactivity (probably) went awry. Many details remain
secret, but what is known is summarized in Michele Gerber, On the Home Front: The Cold War
Legacy of the Hanford Nuclear Site, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). In
1957 in the English county of Cumbria, a fire broke out in a plutonium-making nuclear plant,
the scope of which authorities concealed until the 1980s. See Lorna Arnold, Windscale 1957,
3rd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). In contrast, the 1979 accident at Three Mile Is-
land in Pennsylvania took place at a commercial nuclear reactor and authorities did not bother
to try to keep details secret.
15. Michael Beleites, “Die unabhängige Umweltbewegung der DDR,” in Umweltschutz in
der DDR—Analysen und Zeitzeugenberichte, vol. 3 (Munich, Germany: Oekom Verlag 2007),
179–224.
16. See Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, “‘Der freie Mensch fordert keine Freiheiten, er lebt ein-
fach’: Die Nestoren des DDR Naturschutzes und die Herausbildung einer reformbewegten
Gegenwelt,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 41, no. 1 (2015): 71–106. Another one is the biblical ref-
erence “swords to ploughshares,” which became a phrase of the East German peace movement
and was taken over by the West German peace movement in the 1980s.
17. Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, “‘For a Decent Quality of Life’: Environmental Groups in East
and West Berlin,” Journal of Urban History 41 (2015): 625–46.
18. Alan Roe, “Into Soviet Nature: Tourism, Environmental Protection, and the Formation
of Soviet National Parks” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2015).
19. Ronnie Hjorth, “Internationellt miljösamarbete: Tre strategier,” Internasjonal Politikk
234 Notes to Pages 6–9

49 (1991): 467–78; Ronnie Hjorth, “Baltic Sea Environmental Cooperation,” Cooperation and
Conflict 29 (1994): 11–31.
20. Joanne Linnerooth, “The Danube River Basin: Negotiating Settlements to Transbound-
ary Environmental Issues,” Natural Resources Journal 30 (1990): 629–60. Effective pollution
control on the Danube did not begin until after the Cold War.
21. According to Braden Allenby the foci of politics shifted after the breakdown of the bi-
polar geopolitical structure so that environmental issues intersect more with national security
considerations at a national policy level. See Braden R. Allenby, “Environmental Security: Con-
cept and Implementation,” International Political Science Review 21, no. 1 (2000): 5–21.
22. See the two insightful chapters by Stéphane Frioux (“Environmental History of Water
Resources,” 121–42) and Stephen Mosley (“Environmental History of Air Pollution and Pro-
tection,” 143–69), in The Basic Environmental History, ed. Mauro Agnoletti and Simone Neri
Serneri (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2014).
23. A comparison of Eastern and Western Europe on the policy of automobiles and urban
planning is analysed in the current project “The ‘Car-Oriented City’ as an Area of Conflict:
Open Space Planning in Inner-City Areas as an Urbanisation Strategy in East and West Germa-
ny since 1945.” The project’s research agenda is focused on the expansion and dismantling of
“car-oriented:” city structures, the appropriation of urban space by habitants, the circulation of
the “car-oriented city” as a guiding planning principle, and the role of local actors as well as the
comparison between Eastern and Western Europe.
24. Raymond Dominick, “Capitalism, Communism, and Environmental Protection,” En-
vironmental History 3 (1998): 310–32; Raymond Dominick, The Environmental Movement in
Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
25. Giacomo Corneo, Is Capitalism Obsolete? A Journey through Alternative Economic Systems
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
26. Raul Zelik, “Gutes Leben im grünen Sozialismus,” Luxemburg 3 (2012): 78–83.
27. Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (London and New York: Verso, 2010).
The German translation was published as Reale Utopien: Wege aus dem Kapitalismus (Berlin:
Suhrkamp, 2017).
28. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Elinor Ostrom, Larry Schroeder, and Susan
Wynne, Institutional Incentives and Sustainable Development: Infrastructure Policies in Perspective
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993).
1. Building a Soviet Eco-Power While Looking at the Capitalist World
This article presents some results of a research funded by the Agence Nationale de la Re-
cherche (ANR) for the joint French-German EcoGlobReg project (2014–2017). I thank Marc
Élie, Fabien Locher, Ilia Kukulin, Maria Majofis, Marie-Hélène Mandrillon, Marie-Claude
Maurel, Astrid Mignon-Kirchhof, Mihail Nemcev, and Niccolò Pianciola for their comments.
The text was edited and proofread in English by Nicky Brown.
1. Klaus Gestwa, Die Stalinschen Grossbauten des Kommunismus: sowjetische Technik-und
Umweltgeschichte, 1948–1967 (Oldenbourg, Germany: Wissenschaftsverlag, 2010).
2. Donald Filtzer, “Poisoning the Proletariat: Urban Water Supply and River Pollution
in Russia’s Industrial Regions During Late Stalinism 1945–1953,” Acta Slavica Iaponica 26
(2009): 85–108; “Environmental Health in the Regions During Late Stalinism: The Example
of Water Supply,” in Soviet Medicine: Culture, Practice, and Science, ed. Frances Bernstein, Chris-
topher Burton, and Daniel Healy (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010), 214–36;
Notes to Pages 9–17 235

Christopher Burton: “Destalinization as Detoxification? The Expert Debate on Industrial Tox-
ins under Khrushchev,” in Soviet Medicine, 237–57.
3. Marc Élie, “Formulating the Global Environment: Soviet Soil Scientists and the Interna-
tional Desertification Discussion 1968–91,” Slavonic and East European Review 93, no. 1 (2015):
181–204.
4. Douglas R. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to
Gorbachëv (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
5. Stephen Brain, “Stalin’s Environmentalism,” Russian Review 69, no. 1 (2010): 93–118.
6. Pierre Lascoumes, L’éco-pouvoir (Paris: La Découverte, 1994).
7. Val Dusek, Philosophy of Technology: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 2.
8. State Archive of the Russian Federation (hereafter GARF), 637/1/19, 121.
9. GARF, 637/1/1, 121.
10. For example: Paul Josephson et al., An Environmental History of Russia (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013).
11. Filtzer: “Political Economy,” 235n10; Donald Filtzer, The Hazards of Urban Life in Late
Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943–1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 116.
12. Gestwa, Die Stalinschen Grossbauten, 393–439.
13. Ronald G. Oechsler, Policies to Control Water Pollution 1917–72: Agenda Setting in the
USSR (Washington: DC: National Council for Soviet and East European Research, 1989).
14. Oechsler, Policies, 44.
15. United Nations, “Integrated River Basin Development: Report by a Panel of Experts,”
New York, 1958.
16. V. V. Zvonkov and Robert N Taaffe, “Principles of Integrated Transport Development in
the U.S.S.R.,” Lecture delivered at the University of Chicago, December 3, 1957.
17. See David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 89.
18. Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (hereafter ARAN) in Moscow, 1540/2/35
and 36.
19. V. V. Zvonkov, ed., K voprosu kompleksnogo ispol’zovaniâ malyh rek Sovetskogo soûza
(Moscow: Rečizdat, 1940).
20. Andy Bruno, The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016), 66–82.
21. Thomas Jundt, “Dueling Visions for the Postwar World: The UN and UNESCO 1949
Conferences on Resources and Nature, and the Origins of Environmentalism,” Journal of Amer-
ican History 101 (2014): 4470.
22. Richard P. Tucker, “Containing Communism by Impounding Rivers: American Stra-
tegic Interests and the Global Spread of High Dams in the Early Cold War,” in Environmental
Histories of the Cold War, ed. J. R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 155–56.
23. John V. Krutilla and Otto Eckstein, Multiple Purpose River Development; Studies in Ap-
plied Economic Analysis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1958).
24. S. L. Vendrov and G. Kalinin, “Surface-Water Resources of the USSR: their Utilization
and Study,” Soviet Geography 1, no. 6 (1960): 3549; emphasis mine. The article was published
in Russian the same year in a collection edited by Zvonkov under the title Research and Integrat-
ed Use of Water Resources (Moscow: Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1960); emphasis mine.

25. Peter M. Haas, “Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coor-
dination,” International Organization 46, no. 1 (1992): 1–35.
26. Oechsler, Policies, 45–51.
27. Burton, “Destalinization,” 241–48.
28. “V zashchitu Baikala,” Literaturnaia gazeta, October 21, 1958.
29. Laurent Coumel, “A Failed Environmental Turn? Khrushchev’s Thaw and Nature Pro-
tection in Soviet Russia,” Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 40, no. 2 (2013): 167–89.
30. Weiner, Little Corner, 349–50.
31. GARF, A-637/1/23, 13. Draft of a letter dated November 30, 1960.
32. GARF, A-637/1/101, 27–31, esp. 28–29.
33. GARF, A-637/1/101, 27–31, esp. 28–29.
35. GARF, A-637/1/101, 100–101.
36. See GARF, A-637/1/23, 7–12, a letter about and critical review of a VODGEO report
by the geographer Mark L’vovich, and Oechsler, Policies, 25.
37. Lada V. Kochtcheeva, Comparative Environmental Regulation in the United States and
Russia: Institutions, Flexible Instruments, and Governance (New York: SUNY Press, 2009), 156.
38. GARF, R-5446/100/919, 18–28. The letter to the Council of Ministers is dated March
9, 1965.
39. GARF, R-5446/99/1098, 74–77. Letter dated August 25, 1965.
40. GARF, R-5446/100/919, 62. Letter dated September 3, 1965.
41. GARF, R-5446/100/919, 67–68.
42. GARF, R-5446/106/931, 127–36.
43. GARF, R-5446/106/931, 139–56, 159.
44. Weiner, Little Corner, 240.
45. Russian State Archive of Economy (RGAE), 7486/33/83, 4. Annual report of the labo-
ratory on its scientific research work, 1966.
46. Joachim Radkau, The Age of Ecology (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2014).
47. David Stradling, The Environmental Moment, 1968–1972 (Seattle: University of Wash-
ington Press, 2012).
48. David Armand, Nam i vnukam (Moscow: Mysl’, 1966), 68. On the importance of this
book for Soviet environmentalism, see Weiner, Little Corner, 326.
49. Armand, Nam i vnukam, 85. Two examples of advanced water legislation were given in
other Socialist countries: Poland and East Germany.
50. GARF, R-436/2/726, 10–11.
51. GARF, R-436/2/726, 198–206.
52. GARF, R-436/2/726, 200.
53. GARF, R-5446/106/933, 119–20. Instruction signed by A. Kosygin dated November
20, 1967.
54. GARF, R-5446/106/933, 124–25. A letter classified “secret” dated January 24, 1968.
55. GARF, R-5446/106/934, 87–92, esp. 87. Dated August 10, 1970, it also mentions the
“heavy experience of waterways pollution in industrially developed countries: the USA, En-
gland, France, Japan and others.”
56. GARF, R-5446/106/934, 98–99. Dated August 24, 1970.
57. GARF, R-5446/106/934, 125. Dated August 13, 1970.
58. GARF, R-5446/106/936, 1–3. Dated June 10, 1971.

59. Available at www.net-film.ru/film-52323.
60. “The Price of Optimism,” Time, August 1, 1969.
61. David Stradling and Richard Stradling, “Perceptions of the Burning River: Deindus-
trialization and Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River,” Environmental History 13, no. 3 (2008): 515–35.
64. President Nixon’s veto message for S. 2770, October 17, 1972, Senate roll call on the
veto of S. 2770, October 17, 1972.
65. Kochtcheeva, Regulation, 150–51, 153–54.
66. Paul Josephson et al., Environmental History, 204–6.
67. Robert G. Darst, Smokestack Diplomacy: Cooperation and Conflict in East-West Environ-
mental Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 14–15.
68. P. Kapitsa, “Nash dom. Planeta Zemlia,” Pravda, May 15, 1973.
69. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William Behrens III,
The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New
York: Universe Books, 1972).
70. An English version was published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists ( January 1981):
39–42. I thank Nicky Brown for this reference.
71. Published in P. Kapitsa, Pis’ma o nauke 1930–1980 (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii,
1989), 151.
72. Laurent Coumel, “The Scientist, the Pedagogue, and the Party Official: Interest Groups,
Public Opinion, and Decision-Making in 1958 Educational Reform,” in Khrushchev in the Krem-
lin: State and Society, ed. Melanie Ilic and Jeremy Smith (London: Routledge, 2009).
73. ARAN, 2112/1/18, 190–91, minutes of the annual meeting, February 19–20, 1973.
74. Philip P. Micklin, “The Siberian Water Transfer Scheme,” in Engineering Earth: The
Impacts of Megaengineering Projects, ed. Stanley D. Brunn (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer,
2011), 1515–30. Note that the Sibaral had a Western equivalent: the North American Water
and Power Alliance.
75. ARAN, 1764/1/46, 37, minutes dated April 29, 1974.
76. ARAN, 1764/1/46, 48.
77. ARAN, 1764/1/46, 87; emphasis mine.
78. ARAN, 1764/1/46, 62–63.
79. ARAN, 1764/1/46, 71–73.
80. RGAE 4372/67/176, 199–203, esp. 202, August 5, 1975.
81. RGAE, 4237/67/177, 160–65, letter dated November 4, 1975. Vinogradov died on No-
vember 11, 1975.
83. David F. Duke, “Seizing Favours from Nature: The Rise and Fall of Siberian River Di-
version,” in A History of Water: Water Control and River Biographies, ed. Terje Tvedt and Eva
Jakobsson (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 5–34.
84. M. Zelikin, Istoriya vechnozelenoy zhizni [Story of an evergreen life] (Moscow: Faktorial
Press, 2001); interview with Mikhail Zelikin, Moscow, January 2015.
85. RGAE, 436/2/6416, 152, minutes of a meeting dated April 12, 1986.
86. ARAN, 1718/1/103, 150, minutes of the Scientific Council for Biosphere Problems,
September 4, 1986.
87. RGAE, 9480/13/2646, 8–10.
88. Josephson et al., Environmental History, 271–74, 294–95.

90. A. L. Yanshin, “Kto vinovat?,” Zvezda, July 1989.
91. Loren Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet
Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 74.
92. RGAE, 9480/13/2642, 186.
93. Pravda, October 23, 1989.
94. Nauka i zhizn, October 1989, 5.
95. Stephen Brain, “The Appeal of Appearing Green: Soviet-American Ideological Compe-
tition and Cold War Environmental Diplomacy,” Cold War History (2014): 1–20.
96. Darst, Smokestack Diplomacy, 199–200.
97. Douglas Weiner, “Environmental Activism in the Soviet Context: A Social Analysis,” in
Shades of Green: Environmental Activism around the Globe, ed. Christof Mauch, Nathan Stoltzfus,
and Douglas R Weiner (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 101–35; Élie, “Formu-
lating,” 203.
98. Radkau, Age of Ecology; Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Thousand
Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1992).
99. Frank Fischer, Citizens, Experts, and the Environment: The Politics of Local Knowledge
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 108.
2. Water Pollution and Protection in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic
1. This study on the environmental history of the Baltic Sea Region was possible due to
the generous support from the Academy of Finland, Nordic Council of Ministers (the Nordic
Environmental Research Programme for 1993–1997), and the municipal water and wastewater
works of Helsinki and Oslo. Later support from the Maj and Tor Nessling Foundation was of
crucial help. In addition, we would like to thank Dr. Irina Shilnikova for providing valuable
archival material from the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) in Moscow, and Dr.
Salla Jokela at the University of Helsinki for drawing maps and figures for our article.
2. “Governing the Baltic Sea Region,” NESS Conference 2011, Stockholm, Sweden, June
14–16, 2011.
3. For an overall description of the area, see Witold Maciejewski, ed., The Baltic Sea Region:
Cultures, Politics, Societies (Uppsala, Sweden: Baltic University Press, 2002). For a comparative
history of the region, see David Kirby and Marja-Liisa Hinkkanen, The Baltic and the North Seas
(London: Routledge, 2000).
4. The same question was asked of the thirty or so spectators at a session on the Soviet
Union during the European Society for Environmental History Conference (ESEH) in 2015.
The most popular answer here was also “zero” or “none.”
5. Lars Lundgren, Vattenförorening: Debatten i Sverige 1890–1921 [Water pollution: Debate
in Sweden, 1890–1921] (Lund: Gleerup, 1974); Jens Engberg, Det heles vel: Forureningns-
bekæmpelsen i Danmark fra loven om sundhedsvedtægter fra 1850´erne til miljøloven 1974 [For
the commonweal: Pollution control in Denmark from the 1850s until 1974] (Copenhagen:
Københavns Kommune, Miljøkontrollen, 1999); Harald-Adam Velner, ed., Veekaitse Eestis
1945–2002 [Water protection in Estonia 1945–2002] (Tallinn: TTÜ, 2004).
6. For a pioneering study on postwar environmental conditions in the Soviet Union, see
Donald Filtzer, The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living
Standards, 1943–1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chapter 2. Martin Me-
losi’s seminal study, The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial
Times to the Present (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), focuses on the
urban not the national level.

7. Paul Josephson et al., An Environmental History of Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2013) covers the prewar and imperial time period but contains surprisingly little
information on water pollution or protection.
8. See M. Goldman, The Spoils of Progress: Environmental Pollution in the Soviet Union (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Ivan Volgyes, ed., Environmental Deterioration in
the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (New York: Praeger, 1974); Boris Komarov, The Destruction
of Nature in the Soviet Union (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1980); Charles Ziegler, Environmental
Policy in the USSR (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987); R. Mnatsakanian, Envi-
ronmental Legacy of the Former Soviet Republics (Glasgow, Scotland: Centre for Human Ecology,
1992); M. Feshbach and A. Friendly, Ecocide in the USSR Health and Nature under Siege (New
York: Basic Books, 1992).
9. The main results of this and consequent projects were published in the following vol-
umes and special issues on the environmental history of the Baltic Sea: Simo Laakkonen and
Sari Laurila, eds., “The History of Urban Water Management in the Baltic Sea Region,” Europe-
an Water Management 2, no. 4 (August 1999): 29–76; European Water Management 5 (1999):
51–56; European Water Management 1 (2000): 41–50; Simo Laakkonen and Sari Laurila, eds.,
“Man and the Baltic Sea,” AMBIO: A Journal on the Human Environment 4, no. 5 (2001): 263–
326; Simo Laakkonen et al., eds., “Science and Governance of the Baltic Sea,” AMBIO: A Jour-
nal on the Human Environment 2, no. 3 (April 2007): 123–286. See also Simo Laakkonen and
Sari Laurila, The Sea and the Cities. A Multidisciplinary Project on Environmental History, http://
www.valt.helsinki.fi/projects/enviro.
10. J. Sabaliauskas, A. Breiviene, R. Vaitiekunas, and E. Levuliene, Otsitska stochnih vod v
respublike [Treatment of wastewaters in the republic] (Lithuania: Ministerstvo melioratsii i
vodinovo khozaistva, 1985).
11. Anolda Cetkauskaite and Ausra Jakstaite, “Wastewater Treatment in Lithuania from
1950 to 1990,” European Water Management 2, no. 4 (1990): 40–50; Anolda Cetkauskaite, Dmi-
try Zarkov, and Liutauras Stoskus, “Water Quality Control, Monitoring and Wastewater Treat-
ment in Lithuania from 1950 to 1999,” AMBIO: A Journal on the Human Environment 4, no. 5
(August 2001): 297–305; Anolda Cetkauskaite and Simo Laakkonen, “Jokien pilaantumisen ja
suojelun ympäristöhistoriaa 1945–1990” [Environmental history of pollution and protection
of rivers in the Lithuanian SSR], Terra 3 (2009): 217–26. See also Dmitry Zarkov, “Pavirsiniu
vandenu tarsos Vilniuje 1945–1998 m. laikotarpio istorija” [History of the surface water pol-
lution in Vilnius during the period from 1945 up to 1998] (master’s thesis, Vilnius University,
1999); Ausra Jakstaite, “Nuoteku valymo įrenginiu statyba ir eksploatavimas Lietuvoje 1950–
1990 m.m.” [Sewage treatment plant building and exploitation in Lithuania in 1950–1990]
(master’s thesis, Vilnius University, 1999).
12. One pioneering volume has explored the history of various water studies in the Soviet
Union: Vitaly Kimstach, Michel Meybeck, and Ellysar Baroudy, eds., A Water Quality Assess-
ment of the Former Soviet Union (London: E & FN Spon, 1998).
13. Lietuvos Respublikos Aplinkos apsugos departamentas, Vandenų skyrius (Department
of Environmental Protection of the Lithuania Republic, Department of Water Management),
“Vandenų skyriaus 1990 metų suvestinė apie nuotekų valymo įrenginių būklę” [Review on the
state of wastewater treatment facilities in Lithuania in 1990].
14. The larger project, of which this chapter is a result, involved a Lithuanian research team
of diverse expertise. In addition to Simo Laakkonen and Anolda Cetkauskaite, the following
scholars and institutions contributed to this project: Ausra Jakstaite, Environmental Studies
Center, University of Vilnius; Liutauras Stoskus, Department of Botany and Genetics, Vilnius
University/Joint Research Center of the Ministry of Environment of Lithuania; Dmitry Zarkov,

Institute for Environmental Engineering, Kaunas University of Technology; Kestutis Kilkus
and Jurgita Rimkuviene, Department of Hydrology and Climatology, University of Vilnius.
15. Andres Kasekamp, A History of Baltic States (Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), 61–67.
16. For an overall picture, see Kasekamp, 61–66; Romuald J. Misiunas and Rein Taagepera,
The Baltic States: Years of Dependence 1940–1990 (London: Hurst & Company, 1993), chap-
ter 3. For rural life, see Diana Mincyte, “Everyday Environmentalism: The Practice, Politics,
and Nature of Subsidiary Farming in Stalin’s Lithuania,” Slavic Review 68, no. 1 (Spring 2009):
31–49.
17. Violeta Davoliute, The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania (London: Routledge,
2013).
18. Lars Hakanson, Physical Geography of the Baltic (Uppsala, Sweden: Ord and Vetande,
1991), 7–8.
19. J. Burneikis and B. Gailiusis, Lietuvos TSR upiu kadastras: Nuotekio reguliavimas [Riv-
ers Cadastre of the Lithuanian SSR: Regulation of rivers water flow] (Vilnius: Mintis, 1970);
Aplinkos būklė, kitimo tendencijos, aplinkos apsaugos valdymas [State and trends of changes of the
environment and management of environmental protection] (Vilnius: Lietuvos Respublikos
Aplinkos apsaugos departamentas, 1992); HELCOM, The Baltic Sea Joint Comprehensive En-
vironmental Action Programme, Baltic Sea Environment Proceedings No. 48 (Helsinki: Helsinki
Commission, 1993).
20. GARF, f.P9226, op.1, D.687. Report of the Main State Sanitary Inspectorate of the Lith-
uanian SSR for 1945, L.9. Acronym already in note 3.
21. Aurelija Ceponiene, Head of Department, Joint Research Center, Ministry of Environ-
ment of Lithuania Republic, personal communication to Liutauras Stoskus in Vilnius, 1999;
Bronius Vertelka, Head of Department, Department of Water Protection, Ministry of Environ-
ment of Lithuania Republic, personal communication to Liutauras Stoskus in Vilnius, 1999;
GARF, D.1174, Report (Form no. 41) of the Main State Sanitary Inspectorate of the Lithuanian
SSR for 1952, L.31.
22. All postwar reports of GARF address lack of resources; for a general view of sanitary
authorities, see Donald Filtzer, The Hazards of Urban Life, chapter 1.
23. GARF, D.687. Report of the Main State Sanitary Inspectorate of the Lithuanian SSR for
1945, L.9, L.11. Main GSI of the Lithuanian SSR issued instructions on this matter.
24. On the limits of effectiveness of fines in Czechoslovakia under Communist rule, see
chapter 8. Unfortunately, the limit of effectiveness of fines in postwar capitalist countries has
been poorly studied so far.
25. Already in 1945, the Sate Sanitary Inspectorate stopped the operations of one indus-
trial facility, partially due to their pollution violations. GARF, D.687, Report of the Main State
Sanitary Inspectorate of the Lithuanian SSR for 1945, L.9; D.827, Report (Form no. 41) of
the Main State Sanitary Inspectorate of the Lithuanian SSR for 1947 and description of the
republic sanitary conditions, L.80; D.1026, Report (Form no. 41) of the Main State Sanitary
Inspectorate of the Lithuanian SSR for 1950, L.74, L.76; D.1253, Reports (Form no. 41) of the
Main State Sanitary Inspectorates of the Armenian SSR, Lithuanian SSR, Tajik SSR, Turkmen
SSR for 1953, T.2, L.29.
26. On the development of environmental protection in the USSR generally, and water
quality specifically, see chapter 1.
27. Juozas Krisciunas, personal communication to Liutauras Stoskus in Vilnius, 1999.
28. B. Vertelka, “Valstybinės gamtosaugos Lietuvoje 40-metis: apie Gamtos apsaugos
komitetą” [40 years of Environmental Protection], Žemėtvarka ir melioracija 3 (1997): 59–

63; Vertelka, personal communication, 1999; Zarkov, “Pavirsiniu vandenu tarsos Vilniuje
1945–1998.”
29. Ceponiene, personal communication, 1999; R. Daubaras, “Neries baseino upių
cheminės sudėties formavimas, hidrocheminė charakteristika ir savaiminis apsivalymas” [For-
mation of chemical structure, hydrochemical characteristics and self-cleaning of Neris basin
rivers] (PhD diss., Vilnius University, 1968); GARF, D.1174, Report (Form no. 41) of the Main
State Sanitary Inspectorate of the Lithuanian SSR for 1952, L.38, L.39, and L.40.
30. GARF, D.1253, Reports (Form no. 41) of the Main State Sanitary Inspectorates of the
Armenian SSR, Lithuanian SSR, Tajik SSR, Turkmen SSR for 1953, T.2, L.59, L60, L61.
31. Ceponiene, personal communication, 1999; Lietuvos upių vandens kokybės 1993 m. me-
traštis [Lithuanian rivers water chronicle of tear 1993] (Vilnius: Lietuvos Respublikos Aplinkos
apsaugos ministerija, 1994).
32. Ceponiene, personal communication, 1999; Lietuvos upių vandens kokybės 1993 m.
metraštis.
33. For discussion on MAC concept see the publication series Gigiena i Sanitariia [Hygiene
and Sanitation] 8 (1958) and 7 (1960).
34. M. N. Tarasov, D. N. Loranskij, and I. M. Kutyrin, “Analysis and Control System of
Water Chemical Composition: Proceedings of Scientific-Technical Conference on Protection
of Surface and Ground Waters from Pollution,” Tallinn, Estonia, 1967; Cetkauskaite and Laak-
konen, “Jokien pilaantumisen ja suojelun ympäristöhistoriaa,” 220.
35. Daubaras, “Neries baseino upių cheminės sudėties formavimas.”
36. Z. Ambraziene and R. Merkiene, “Pagrindinių respublikos upių tarša naftos produktais”
[The pollution of main rivers of the Republic by petroleum products], Lietuvos TSR vandens
ištekliai ir jų apsauga nuo išsekimo ir užteršimo” [Water resources of Lithuanian SSR and their
protection from exhaustion and pollution], in Moksl.-techn. konf., įvykusios 1971 m. spalio 26–27
d., tezės (Vilnius, 1971), 70–71; Z. Ambraziene, A. Markeviciene, R. Merkiene, and R. Mick-
iene, “Pagrindinių respublikos upių tarša komunalinėmis ir pramoninėmis nuotekomis” [The
pollution of main rivers of the republic by wastewaters of municipality and industry), in Moksl.-
techn. konf., įvykusios 1971 m. spalio 26–27 d., tezės (Vilnius, 1971), 72–73; Lietuvos upių vandens
kokybės 1993 m. metraštis [Lithuanian rivers water chronicle of year 1993] (Vilnius: Lietuvos
Respublikos Aplinkos apsaugos ministerija, 1994); Lietuvos TSR Melioracijos ir vandens ūkio
minissterijos veiklos ataskaita už vandens resursų naudojimą ir apsaugą 1976 m. [Report on ac-
tivity of Ministry of Land Reclamation and Water Economy of Lithuanian SSR in the field of
use and protection of water resources during year 1976] (Vilnius: Lietuvos TSR Melioracijos ir
vandens ūkio minissterija, 1977).
37. Z. Ambraziene, “Lietuvos upių sanitariniai- mikrobiologiniai tyrimai” [Sanitary-
Microbiological research of Lithuania rivers] (master’s thesis, Institute of Botany of Academy
of Sciences of Lithuanian SSR, 1973).
38. Organic discharges from sugar factories caused fish kills in the Venta River and those
from a tannery killed fish in Lake Talsi. GARF, D.827, Report (Form no. 41) of the Main State
Sanitary Inspectorate of the Lithuanian SSR for 1947 and description of the republic’s sanitary
conditions, L.80; D.1026, Report (Form no. 41) of the Main State Sanitary Inspectorate of the
Lithuanian SSR for 1950, L.74; D.1174, Report (Form no. 41) of the Main State Sanitary Inspec-
torate of the Lithuanian SSR for 1952, L.49.
39. GARF, D.1026, Report (Form no. 41) of the Main State Sanitary Inspectorate of the
Lithuanian SSR for 1950, L.74.
40. Gosudarstvennii Komitet po Delam Stroitelstva pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR (State Com-

mittee on Building Affairs at the Council of Ministers of the USSR), Ukazaniia po proiektiro-
vaniiu naruzhnoi kanalisatsii promishlennikh predpriiatsnij [Instructions on planning of outdoor
sewers of industrial enterprises] (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1961).
41. Lietuvos upių vandens kokybės 1996 m. metraštis [Lithuanian rivers water chronicle of
year 1996] (Vilnius: Lietuvos Respublikos Aplinkos apsaugos ministerija, 1997).
42. Kriciunas, personal communication, 1999.
43. “Valstybine statistine ataskaita. Forma Nr. 1—Vanduo” [A governmental statistical re-
port. Form 1—water], Statistikos departamentas prie Lietuvos Respublikos Vyriausybes, Pat-
virtinta 1991 m. gruodzio 9 d. nutarimu no. 110, 1991.
44. GARF, D.729. Annual Report of the Main State Sanitary Inspectorate of the Lithuanian
SSR for 1946, L.11.
45. Probably the first wastewater treatment plant built in Soviet Lithuania started to op-
erate in 1949 in a tannery in Šiauliai. GARF, D.1026, Report (Form no. 41) of the Main State
Sanitary Inspectorate of the Lithuanian SSR for 1950, L.72–73, 75; D.1253, Reports (Form no.
41) of the Main State Sanitary Inspectorates of the Armenian SSR, Lithuanian SSR, Tajik SSR,
Turkmen SSR for 1953. T.2, L.29.
Lithuanian SSR for 1950, L.74. A biofilter was renovated in 1950 in a meat-packing plant in
Šiauliai as well. D.1026, Report (Form no. 41) of the Main State Sanitary Inspectorate of the
Lithuanian SSR for 1950, L.75.
47. Gosudarstvennii Komitet po Delam Stroitelstva pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR, Ukazani-
ja po projektirovaniju naruzhnoi kanalisatsii promishlennih predprijatsnij; Lietuvos Respublikos
Aplinkos apsugos departamentas, Vandenų skyrius (Department of Environmental Protection
of the Lithuania Republic, Department of Water Management), “Vandenų skyriaus 1990 metų
suvestinė apie nuotekų valymo įrenginių būklę” [Review on the state of wastewater treatment
facilities in Lithuania in 1990].
48. For early cooperation between East and West in terms of water protection, see Elena
Kochetkova, “Between Water Pollution and Protection in the Soviet Union, Mid-1950s–60s:
Lake Baikal and River Vuoksi,” Water History (2018).
49. Gosudarstvennii Komitet po Delam Stroitelstva pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR, Ukazanija
po projektirovaniiu naruzhnoi kanalisatsii promishlennikh predpriiatsnij; S. V. Jakovseev and J. B.
Voronov, Biologitseskii filtri [Biological filters] (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1982); Kanalizacijos valy-
mo įrenginiu eksploatavimas: Lietuvos TSR valstybinio statybos reikalu komiteto centrinis techninės
informacijos ir propagandos biuras [Exploitation of sewerage treatment facilities, Central Office
of Technical Information and Teaching at State Building Affairs Committee of the Council of
Ministers of Lithuania SSR] (Vilnius: Lietuvos TSR Komunalinio ukio minissterija, 1966).
50. Gosudarstvennii Komitet po Grazhdanskomu Stroitelstvu i Arkhitekture pri GOSS-
TROI SSSR (State Committee on Building and Architecture at the GOSSTROI of the USSR)
SN 337–65, Vremennie ukazala po proiektirovaniiu otsistnikh sooruzennii mestnoi kanalisatsii
[Temporary instructions on design of wastewater treatment of local sewerage] (Moscow:
Stroiizdat, 1967); Burneikis and Gailiusis, Lietuvos TSR upiu kadastras, 1992; E. S. Razumovskij,
G. L. Medrish, and V. A. Kazarian, Otsitska i obezzarazhivanie stoitshnih vod malikh nethselennit
punktov [Treatment and rendering harmless of wastewaters of small residence places] (Mos-
cow: Stroiizdat, 1986).
51. Lietuvos upių vandens kokybės 1998 m. metraštis, 1999.
52. On this general theme, see “Transcontinental and Transnational Links in Social Move-
ments and Environmental Policies in the 20th century,” Australian Journal of Politics and History

61, no. 3 (2015) and “Global Protest against Nuclear Power: Transfer and Transnational Ex-
change in the 1970s and 1980s,” Historical Social Research 39, no. 4 (2014).
53. Cetkauskaite and Jakstaite, “Wastewater Treatment in Lithuania from 1950 to 1990,” 44.
Gozudarstvennii Komitet po Delam Stroitelstva pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR (State Commit-
tee on Building Affairs at the Council of Ministers of the USSR) SNiP 2–32–74. Kanalisatsiia.
Naruzhnie seti i sooruzheniia Sevarage [Outdoor networks and buildings] (Moscow: Stroiizdat,
1974)
54. J. A. Karelin, D. D. Zhukov, and V. N. Zhurov, Ochishchenie kanalizatsinnoe ustanoskij
v stranakh zapadnoi Evropi [Sewage treatment facilities in the countries of Western Europe]
(Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1977).
56. GARF, D.729. Annual Report of the Main State Sanitary Inspectorate of the Lithuanian
SSR for 1946, L.11.
Lithuanian SSR for 1950, L.73–74; Zarkov, “Pavirsiniu vandenu tarsos Vilniuje 1945–1998 m.
laikotarpio istorija.”
58. Tapio Katko, Vettä! Suomen vesihuolloin kehitys kaupungeissa ja maaseudulla [Water!
The development of rural and urban water management in Finland] (Tampere, Finland: Vesi-ja
viemärilaitosyhdistys, 1996), 254, 280–81.
60. Cetkauskaite, Zarkov, and Stoskus, “Water Quality Control, Monitoring and Wastewa-
ter Treatment in Lithuania from 1950 to 1999,” 301.
Lithuanian SSR for 1952, L35.
62. Cetkauskaite, Zarkov, and Stoskus, “Water Quality Control, Monitoring and Wastewa-
ter Treatment in Lithuania from 1950 to 1999,” 301.
63. Cetkauskaite, Zarkov, and Stoskus, “Water Quality Control,” 301.
64. Simo Laakkonen, “Waves of Laws and Institutions: The Emergence of National Aware-
ness of Water Pollution and Protection in the Baltic Sea Region over the Twentieth Century,”
in The Sea of Identities: A Century of Baltic and East European Experiences with Nationality, Class,
and Gender, ed. Norbert Götz (Huddinge, Sweden: Södertörns högskola, 2014), 293–318.
65. Raymond Dominick, “Capitalism, Communism, and Environmental Protection: Les-
sons from the German Experience,” Environmental History 3, no. 3 (1998): 315.
66. Cetkauskaite and Jakstaite, “Wastewater Treatment in Lithuania,” table 4; Kimstach,
Meybeck, and Baroudy, A Water Quality Assessment of the Former Soviet Union, 87.
3. The Fallout of Chernobyl
1. Anastasiya Leukhina, “Ukrainian Environmental NGOs After Chernobyl Catastrophe:
Trends and Issues,” International Journal of Politics and Good Governance 17, no. 1 (2010): 1–12.
2. Palema Bickford Sak, “Law in Ukraine: From the Roots to the Bud,” UCLA Journal of
Environmental Law and Policy 11, no. 2 (1993): 203–53.
3. Jane I. Dawson, Eco-Nationalism: Anti-Nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia,
Lithuania, and Ukraine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
4. David R. Marples, The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster (London: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 1988); David R. Marples, “Chernobyl: A Reassessment,” Eurasian Geography and Econom-
ics 45 (2004): 588–607.
5. Olga Vasiyta, Ecology and Politics (Chernivtsi, Ukraine: Zelena Bukovina, 1998), 172–76.
6. Natalia Gorlo, “The Impact of the Dnieper Hidroconstruction on the Social Sphere of

Naddnipriancshina (50–70s of the XX century),” Ukraina XX st.: kyltyra, ideologia, politika 14
(2008): 221–31, 223.
7. Statement by Ukrainian president L. D. Kuchma at the nineteenth special session of the
UN General Assembly, “To Ensure the Environmental Safety of the Planet,” Governmental Cou-
rier, June 26, 1997, 1–7, 3.
8. Marples, “Chernobyl: A Reassessment,” 602.
9. UNSCEAR’s assessments of the radiation effects of the Chernobyl accident, http://www.
unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html.
10. Mikhail Gorbachev, “Chernobyl Made Me Another,” Novaya gazeta, February 3, 2006,
http://2006.novayagazeta.ru/nomer/2006/15n/n15n-s17.shtml.
11. A sievert is a unit, named after the Swedish physicist Rolf Maximilian Sievert, which
measures the health effects of low levels of ionizing radiation on the human body.
12. Chernobyl Accident, 1986. World Nuclear Association, April 2018, http://www.world-
nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/chernobyl-accident.
aspx.
13. Tetiana Perga, “Environmental Policy of Ukraine through the Prism of Memory on
Chernobyl Disaster,” History Pages 42 (2016): 138–44, 141–42.
14. Nataliya Baranivska, “Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster on the Transformation Process-
es in Society (On the 25th Anniversary of the Tragic Events),” Ukrainskij Istorichnij Journal 2
(2011): 123–42, 123.
15. See, regarding the population’s attitude to the Chernobyl accident, December 5, 1986,
Аrchive of the National Liberation Movement of Committee for State Security (hereafter
ANLM), http://avr.org.ua/index.php/viewDoc/24464.
16. “From the Council of Ministers of the USSR,” Pravda Ukrainu 99 (1986): 3.
17. “From the Council of Ministers of the USSR,” Izvestia 124 (1986): 2.
18. “From the Council of Ministers of the USSR,” Trud 105 (1986): 2.
19. Georgij Arbatov, “Boomerang,” Pravda 129 (1986): 4.
20. On those days the USSR celebrated international worker’s solidarity (May 1) and the
capitulation of the German Army in 1945 (May 9).
21. Note on the situation of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant region, February 5, 1986,
ANLM, http://avr.org.ua/index.php/viewDoc/24476/.
22. “TASS News Agency: To the Events at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant: In the Press
Center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR,” Izvestia 128 (1986): 3.
23. Victor Gubarev and Mikhail Odinets, “From Chernobyl to Kiev,” Pravda 130 (1986): 4.
24. “Speech by Mikhail Gorbachev on Soviet Television,” Pravda 135 (1986): 1.
25. “From the Council of Ministers of the USSR,” Krasnaja Zvezda 104 (1986): 3; “From
the Council of Ministers of the USSR,” Prapor Commynizmy 109 (1986): 1.
26. “From the Council of Ministers of the USSR,” Pravda Ukrainu 99 (1986): 3.
27. Vladimir Zhukov, Vladimir Itkin, and Lev Chernenko, “Always Remember: The Atom is
a Two-Faced,” Trud 112 (1986): 4.
28. Volodymir Golikiv, “Radiation and Safety,” Argumenti i Fakty 20 (1986): 4.
29. Transcript of the plenary session, session hall of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, De-
cember 11, 1991, http://iportal.rada.gov.ua/meeting/stenogr/show/4642.html.
30. http://iportal.rada.gov.ua/meeting/stenogr/show/4642.html.
31. Boris Zakharov, Outline of the History of the Dissident Movement in Ukraine (1956–1987)
(Kharkiv, Ukraine: Folio, 2003): 97–120.
32. Volodymyr Borejko, The Course of the Young Soldier of DOP (Kiev: Kiev Ecological and
Cultural Center, 2003), 33–45.

33. Oleg Yanitsky, Ecological Movement of Russia: Critical Analysis (Moscow: Institute of
Sociology of RAS, 1996), 177.
34. Neil J. Smelser, Social Movements: Sociology (Moscow: Fenix, 1994), 587.
35. “Demonstrators Protest Pollution at Armenian and Latvian Rallies,” Ukrainian Weekly,
January 17, 1988, 2.
36. “500 in Kiev Protest Nuclear Power Plants,” Ukrainian Weekly, May 1, 1988, 1.
37. On the work of party committees of the republic with amateur public organizations,
June 24, 1989, 76, Central State Archives of the Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of
Ukraine (hereafter TsDAVO of Ukraine), F1, D32, file 2658.
38. Небезразличные in Russian and Небайдужі in Ukrainian.
39. Announcement of the KGB to the Central Committee, “About Meetings, Paces, and
Prayers in the Crimean, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk Region” and “About the Situation in the Mines of
Chervonograd,” September 25, 1986, ANLM, http://avr.org.ua/index.php/viewDoc/11248/.
40. Jaroslav Hrycak, Essay on the History of Ukraine: Formation of Modern Ukrainian Nation
in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (Kiev: Genesis, 1996), 215.
41. Bohdan Nahaylo, “Opposition Mounts in Ukraine to Nuclear Energy Program,”
Ukrainian Weekly, March, 27, 1988, 2.
42. Nahaylo, 2.
43. In a 1953 speech President Eisenhower had promised a reasonable balance between
military (nuclear armament) and civilian use (nuclear reactors) of nuclear power.
44. Nahaylo, “Opposition Mounts in Ukraine,” 12.
45. Nahaylo, 11.
46. “What is the Forecast for Tomorrow? Nuclear Power in Ukraine,” Literaturna Ukraina
3 (1988): 3.
47. Roman Solchanyk, “Still More Controversy Brews over Nuclear Energy in Ukraine,”
Ukrainian Weekly, July 3, 1988, 2, 15.
48. Roman Solchanyk, “Ukrainians Appeal to Party Conference about Development of Nu-
clear Energy,” Ukrainian Weekly, July 10, 1988, 15.
49. Viktor Andronyaky, “Crimea—In the Red Book?” Krimskij Komsomolec 20 (1989): 5;
Viktor Andronyaky, “Crimea—In the Red Book? Act!” Krimskij Komsomolec 22 (1988): 4; Vik-
tor Andronyaky, “And Time Does Not Wait,” Krimskij Komsomolec 25 (1988): 5; “Chernobyl
and Ukraine’s Energy Restructuring,” Krimskij Komsomolec 25 (1988): 6; Svetlana Syhanova,
“Resort and NPP Are Incompatible,” Krimskaja Pravda 120 (1988): 3.
50. Anatoliy Svidzinsky, “Moral Aspects of Nuclear Energy,” Literaturna Ukraina 17 (1990): 1.
51. Note of Department 5 of the KGB, “About Some Active Amateur Civil Organisations of
Kiev,” November 15, 1988, ANLM, http://avr.org.ua/index.php/viewDoc/11238/.
52. “500 in Kiev Protest Nuclear Power Plants,” 1; Roman Solchanyk, “Soviet Press Publish-
es Report on Anti-Nuclear Protest in Kiev,” Ukrainian Weekly, June 19, 1988, 2.
53. “Ukrainian Helsinki Union’s Statement and Petition on Nuclear Plants,” Ukrainian
Weekly, December 18, 1988, 2, 13.
54. RUKH is a Ukrainian Center-Right political party with a nationalist and liberal-
conservative ideology. It was initially organized as the People’s Movement of Ukraine for Re-
construction, and founded in 1989.
55. Vasyl Derevinskyy, Vyacheslav Chornovil: Portrait Sketch Policy (Ternopil, Ukraine: Jura,
2011), 178–223.
56. “Thousands Gather in Kiev to Protest Ecological Hazards,” Ukrainian Weekly, July 3,
1988, 1.
57. Note of the KGB to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine from

“On the Rally in Kiev on the Problems of Ecology,” November 14, 1988, ANLM, http://avr.org
.ua/index.php/viewDoc/11231/.
58. Note of the KGB to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, http://
avr.org.ua/index.php/viewDoc/11231/.
59. Note of the KGB to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, http://
avr.org.ua/index.php/viewDoc/11231/.
60. Tatiana Zaharenko, “The Environmental Movement and Ecological Law in the Soviet
Union: The Process of Transformation,” Ecology Law Quarterly 17, no. 3 ( June 1990): 455–75,
462.
61. Narodychi is known as an urban–type settlement in Zhytomyr Oblast in northern
Ukraine, which suffered the most from radioactive contamination as a result of the Chernobyl
accident.
62. “The Constituent Congress of People’s Movement of Ukraine,” Literaturna Ukraina 34
(1989): 2.
63. John Stewart, The Soviet Environment: Problems, Policies, and Politics (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1992), 2.
64. Dawson, Eco-Nationalism, 65.
65. Alexander Shubin is a Russian historian and public figure of the political Left. He is
the head of the Center of the History of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus of the Institute of World
History of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
66. Alexander Shubin, “Ecological Movement in the USSR and Emerging Countries,” in
Ecological Organizations in the Territory of the Former USSR, ed. Elena Kofanova and Nikilav
Krotov (Moscow: RAU-Press, 1992), 2–15.
67. This concept was outlined in Mikhail Gorbachev’s book, published in October 1987,
Perestroika and a New Way of Thinking for Our Country and the World.
68. “Ukrainian Ecological Association Begins Joint Projects with North Americans,”
Ukrainian Weekly, November 25, 1990, 4.
69. “Greens of Ukraine Confer with New Jersey Governor, Staff,” Ukrainian Weekly, January
27, 1991, 4.
70. “‘Greens’ of U.S. and Ukraine Begin Vitamin Project,” Ukrainian Weekly, February 3,
1991, 3.
71. Decree of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union of November 27, 1989, on emergen-
cy measures for the environmental rehabilitation of the country, Levonevskiy Valerij Stanisla-
vovich, http://pravo.levonevsky.org/baza/soviet/sssr1133.htm.
72. Melanie Arndt et al., “Memories, Commemorations, and Representations of Cher-
nobyl: Introduction,” Anthropology of East Europe Review 30, no. 1 (2012): 1–12, 1.
73. Andrey Burovskiy and Sergei Jakyceni, Political Ecology (Moscow: Litres, 2017), 367–68.
74. “Construction of the Biocomplex is Suspended,” Izvestia 54 (1990): 4.
75. Zaharenko, “The Environmental Movement and Ecological Law in the Soviet Union,”
462.
76. Charles E. Zieger, “Political Participation, Nationalism, and Environmental Politics in
the USSR,” in The Soviet Environment: Problems, Policies, and Politics, ed. John Massey Stewart
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 28.
77. Marco Armiero and Lise Sedrez, A History of the Environmentalism: Local Struggles, Glob-
al Histories (London: A&C Black, 2014), 197–98.
78. Zieger, “Political Participation Nationalism, and Environmental Politics in the USSR,”
27–29.
79. Green Party of Ukraine, http://greenparty.ua.

4. Keeping the Air Clean?
As one outcome of my project about utility companies, my book on conflicts on electrici-
ty—Stromkonflikte. Selbstverständnis und strategisches Handeln der Stromwirtschaft zwischen Poli-
tik, Industrie, Umwelt und Öffentlichkeit (1970–1989) [Self-conception and strategic actions by
utility companies between politics, industry, environment and the public (1970–1989)]—was
published by Steiner in 2017 as a supplement to Vierteljahresheft für Social-und Wirtschaftsges-
chichte (VSWG).
1. Frank Uekötter, “Die Kommunikation zwischen technischen und juristischen Exper-
ten als Schlüsselproblem der Umweltgeschichte: Die preußische Regierung und die Berliner
Rauchplage,” Technikgeschichte 66 (1999): 1–31; Frank Uekötter, “Das organisierte Versagen:
Die deutsche Gewerbeaufsicht und die Luftverschmutzung vor dem ökologischen Zeitalter,”
Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 43 (2003): 127–50.
2. Jens Ivo Engels, “Umweltschutz in der Bundesrepublik: von der Unwahrscheinlichkeit
einer Alternativbewegung,” in Das Alternative Milieu: Antibürgerlicher Lebensstil und linke Politik
in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Europa 1968–1983, ed. Sven Reichardt and Detlef Sieg-
fried (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2000), 407.
3. Joachim Radkau, Die Ära der Ökologie: Eine Weltgeschichte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011),
171f.
4. Frank Uekötter, Von der Rauchplage zur ökologischen Revolution: Eine Geschichte der Luft-
verschmutzung in Deutschland und den USA 1880–1970 (Essen, Germany: Klartext 2003);
Franz-Josef Brüggemeier and Thomas Rommelspacher, Blauer Himmel über der Ruhr: Ges-
chichte der Umwelt im Ruhrgebiet 1840–1990 (Essen, Germany: Klartext, 1992); Franz-Josef
Brüggemeier and Michael Toyka-Seid, eds., Industrie-Natur: Lesebuch zur Geschichte der Umwelt
im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus, 1995), 60–92.
5. Frank Uekötter, Umweltgeschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Oldenbourg, Ger-
many, 2007), 33.
6. Edda Müller: Innenwelt der Umweltpolitik: Sozial-liberale Umweltpolitik—(Ohn)macht
durch Organisation?, 2nd ed. (Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher, 1986), 71ff.
7. Karl Ditt, “Die Anfänge der Umweltpolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland während
der 1960er und 1970er Jahre,” in Demokratisierung und gesellschaftlicher Aufbruch: Die sechziger
Jahre als Wendezeit der Bundesrepublik, ed. Matthias Frese, Julia Paulus, and Karl Teppe (Pader-
born, Germany: Schöningh, 2005), 314ff.
8. Besides this, a number of studies focused systematically on the role of companies in gen-
eral environmental and resource issues. See Mathias Mutz, Umwelt als Ressource: Die sächsische
Papierindustrie 1850–1930 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013); Raymond G. Stokes,
Roman Köster, and Stephen C. Sambrook: The Business of Waste. Great Britain and Germany,
1945 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Christopher Neumaier,
Dieselautos in Deutschland und den USA: Zum Verhältnis von Technologie, Konsum und Politik,
1949–2005 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010); Slyvia Wölfel, “Zwischen ökologischer Verantwortung
und ökonomischem Zwang: Vom VEB dkk Scharfenstein zur FORON Hausgeräte GmbH,”
Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte 54, no. 2 (2009): 179–201; Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsges-
chichte, February 2009, Nature Incorporated, Unternehmensgeschichte und ökologischer Wan-
del/Business History and Environmental Change.
9. Kai F. Hünemörder, Die Frühgeschichte der globalen Umweltkrise und die Formierung der
deutschen Umweltpolitik (1950–1973) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004), 47.
10. Matthias Heymann, “Luftverschmutzung, Atmosphärenforschung. Luftreinhaltung:

Ein technisches Problem,” in Natur-und Umweltschutz nach 1945. Konzepte, Konflikte, Kompe-
tenzen, ed. Franz-Josef Brüggemeier (Frankfurt and New York: Campus 2005), 327.
11. Heymann, 327.
12. U. Berkner, “Recht der Elektrizitätswirtschaft 1989,” Elektrizitätswirtschaft 89, no. 3
(1990): 76–110.
13. Joachim Radkau, “Das RWE zwischen Kernenergie und Diversifizierung 1968–1988,” in
Der gläserne Riese: RWE—ein Konzern wird transparent, ed. Dieter Schweer and Wolf Thieme
(Wiesbaden: Gabler, 1998), 239;
Martin Bemmann, Beschädigte Vegetation und sterbender Wald. Zur Entstehung des Umwelt-
problems in Deutschland 1893–1970 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012).
14. M. Hildebrand, “Stand der Rauchgasreinigung bei EVU-Kraftwerken SO2-und NOx-
Minderung,” Elektrizitätswirtschaft 89, no. 9 (1990): 432–50.
15. Even the energy market was separated and monopolized in certain supply areas, and
economic competition between the energy sources and their production costs existed to a cer-
tain extent. Until the “profitable” generation of electricity by nuclear power, Preußenelektra
complained that their company’s location gave them a disadvantage compared to RWE. They
complained that RWE had a huge advantage because of the natural occurrence of brown coal
in the Ruhr area and the political influence of the coal lobby to generate electricity much more
cheaply. This argument was summed up by the word Revierferne (away from home ground);
this term became a political buzzword.
16. Heinz-Günther Kemmer, “Größter Stinker der Nation,” Die Zeit, December 6, 1985.
17. Dietmar Kuhnt, “Die Verordnung über Großfeuerungsanlagen (13. BImSchV), Ver-
fahrensgeschichte, Inhalte, Auswirkungen, Problematik,” Energiewirtschaftliche Tagesfragen 33,
no. 8 (1983): 567.
18. Wolfgang R. Schladt, Der Begriff Stand der Technik im Immissionsschutz (Kaiserslautern,
Germany: Diss., 1980).
19. Der Rat von Sachverständigen für Umweltfragen, Waldschäden und Luftverunreinigun-
gen, Sondergutachten März 1983, Stuttgart, Germany, 1983, 124, figure 520.
20. Vorbereitungsdokument für die Gespräche von Rudolf von Bennigsen mit dem
PREAG-Vorstand, AR-und Beiratssitzungen, November 12, 1981, bzw. December 3, 1981, 7.
Preußenelektra 300 Aufsichtsratssitzungen 1981. E.ON archive Düsseldorf.
21. Leonhard Müller, Handbuch der Elektrizitätswirtschaft: Technische, wirtschaftliche und
rechtliche Grundlagen (Berlin: Springer, 2000), 314–16.
22. Niederschrift des Aufsichtsrates und des Beirates der Preußenelektra, May 27, 1983,
6–8. E.ON archive Munich, AR-Protokolle June 1975–May 1982, EEA 608.
23. Auftrag für eine REA zwischen BKB an Davy KcKee AG, Anlage zur Vorstandssitzung
am 20, January 1986, 1, E.ON archive Munich, Vorstandsbüro, Allgemeines vom October 19,
1987–August 17, 1990, EEA 2820.
24. Protokoll über das Gespräch mit dem Hessischen Minister für Umwelt und Energie,
February 19, 1986, Schriftwechsel Cramer 1986–1992, 4, E.ON archive Munich EEA 1065;
Protokoll der Vorstandsratssitzung der Preußenelektra, March 6, 1986, 3. E.ON archive Han-
nover Vorstand.
25. Müller, Innenwelt der Umweltpolitik, 51–53. Patronage is defined here as direct influence
on the political decision-making process through by powerful means and aiming a certain
purpose.
26. Müller, 204–7.
27. For example, Ulrich Segatz, CEO of Preußenelektra, Niederschrift des Aufsichtsrates
und des Beirates der Preußenelektra, December 3, 1981, 7, E.ON archive Munich EEA 608.

28. Ulrich Segatz, Thesen für die Podiumsdiskussion zum Thema “Steinkohle und Kernen-
ergie—notwendige Energieträger zur Sicherung des Wirtschaftswachstums?” zur Tagung des
Ruhrkohlenkonzerns, June 29, 1977, E.ON archive Munich, Vorstandsbüro Segatz. Unterlagen
December 1, 1976–June 30, 1979. 2364.
29. Kai F. Hünemörder: “Vom Expertennetzwerk zur Umweltpolitik. Frühe Umweltkon-
ferenzen und die Ausweitung der öffentlichen Aufmerksamkeit für Umweltfragen in Europa
(1959–1972),” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 43 (2003): 275–96.
30. Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Greening Europe? Environmental Interest Groups and the Europe-
anization of a New Policy Field,” Comparativ 20, no. 3 (2010): 83–104.
31. Niederschrift über die Sitzung des Verwaltungsausschusses der Preußenelektra, August
17, 1988, 2, E.ON archive Munich EEA 3275.
32. Niederschrift über die Sitzung des Verwaltungsausschusses der Preußenelektra, No-
vember 18, 1975, 6, E.ON archive Düsseldorf 1/5/39–270.
33. Niederschrift über die Sitzung des Aufsichtsrates und Beirates der Preußenelektra, May
9, 1978, 8, E.ON archive Munich EEA 608.
34. J. Jung, “Investitionsaufwand für die SO2-und NOx-Minderung in der deutschen Elek-
trizitätswirtschaft,” VGB Kraftwerkstechnik, February 2, 1988, 154.
35. Statistics from the federal government, cited from Jürgen Salzwedel and Werner Preusk-
er, Umweltschutzrecht und -verwaltung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Cologne: Bundesan-
zeiger, 1983), 49.
36. Niederschrift des Aufsichtsrates und des Beirates der Preußenelektra, July 6, 1983, 3,
E.ON archive Munich EEA 609.
37. Jens Ivo Engels and Philipp Hertzog, “Die Macht der Ingenieure. Zum Wandel ihres
politischen Selbstverständnisses in den 1970er Jahren,” Revue d’Allemagne et des Pays de langue
allemande 43 (2011): 19–38; Bodo B. Gemper, ed., Energieversorgung: Expertenmeinungen zu
einer Schicksalsfrage (Munich: Vahlen, 1981).
38. Hendrik Ehrhardt, “Energiebedarfsprognosen: Kontinuität und Wandel energiew-
irtschaftlicher Problemlagen in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren,” in Energie in der modernen
Gesellschaft: Zeithistorische Perspektiven, ed. Hendrik Ehrhardt and Thomas Kroll (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 193–222.
39. Cornelia Altenburg, “Wandel und Persistenz in der Energiepolitik: Die 1970er Jahre
und die Enquete-Kommission ‘Zukünftige Kernenergie-Politik,’” in Energie in der modernen Ge-
sellschaft, ed. Hendrik Ehrhardt and Thomas Kroll (Göttingen: Zeithistorische Perspektiven,
2012), 245–64.
40. Gabriele Metzler, “Demokratisierung durch Experten? Aspekte politischer Planung in
der Bundesrepublik,” in Aufbruch in die Zukunft: Die 1960er Jahre zwischen Planungseuphorie
und kulturellem Wandel. DDR, CSSR und Bundesrepublik Deutschland im Vergleich, ed. Heinz-
Gerhard Haupt and Jörg Requate (Weilerswist, Germany: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2004),
267–87.
41. For instance, the Hessian minister of finance, Heribert Reitz, was one of the strong advo-
cates of this opinion. See Niederschrift des Aufsichtsrates und des Beirates der Preußenelektra,
December 3, 1981, 15, E.ON archive Munich EEA 608.
42. Niederschrift des Aufsichtsrates und des Beirates der Preußenelektra, December 3, 1981,
16.
43. Niederschrift des Aufsichtsrates und des Beirates der Preußenelektra, December 3, 1981,
16.
44. Joachim Radkau, Natur und Macht. Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt (Munich: C. H. Beck,

2000); Uekötter, Umweltgeschichte im 19. und 20.; Brüggemeier, Natur-und Umweltschutz nach
1945.
45. Michael Kloepfer, ed., Schübe des Umweltbewußtseins und der Umweltrechtsentwicklung
(Bonn: Economica, 1995); Günter Küppers, Peter Lundgreen, and Peter Weingart, Umweltfor-
schung—die gesteuerte Wissenschaft? Eine empirische Studie zum Verhältnis von Wissenschaftsent-
wicklung und Wissenschaftspolitik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978); Martin Bemmann, Beschädigte
Vegetation und sterbender Wald: Zur Entstehung des Umweltproblems in Deutschland 1893–1970
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012).
46. Joachim Radkau, Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt (Munich: C. H. Beck,
2000), 311.
47. Franz-Josef Brüggemeiner, “Erfolg ohne Väter? Die Umweltpolitik in der Ära Rau,” in
Versöhnen statt Spalten: Johannes Rau: Soziademokratie, Landespolitik und Zeitgeschichte, ed. Jür-
gen Mittag and Klaus Tenfelde (Oberhausen, Germany: Assoverlag, 2007), 193–204.
48. Aktenvermerk RWE, Betriebsverwaltung Goldenbergwerk zur REA der Firma Bischoff,
August 8, 1973, Historical Archives of RWE 13565.
49. See, for example, Michaela Schmitz, “Die Umweltproblematik der RWE-Braunkoh-
lekraftwerke in den 1980er Jahren” (master’s thesis, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 2009).
50. Eckehard Koch, “Blau statt grau: Geschichte der Entschwefelung von Braun-und Stein-
kohlekraftwerken in NRW,” in Umwelt + Technik, ed. Energiewirtschaft und Technik Verlags-
gesellschaft (Düsseldorf: Energiewirtschaft und Technik Verlagsgesellschaft, 1988), 17.
51. RWE Umwelt-Bilanz: Umweltschutz im und am Kraftwerk (Essen, Germany: RWE, 1984), 8.
52. RWE-Umweltschutzbrief (Essen, Germany: RWE, 1981), 4–7.
53. See, for example, Schmitz, “Die Umweltproblematik der RWE-Braunkohlekraftwerke
in den 1980er Jahren.”
54. Schmitz, “Die Umweltproblematik der RWE-Braunkohlekraftwerke in den 1980er
Jahren.”
55. Lutz Mez, Neue Wege in der Luftreinhaltepolitik: Eine Fallstudie zum informalen Verwal-
tungshandeln in der Umweltpolitik am Beispiel des RWE (Berlin: Internat. Institut für Umwelt
und Gesellschaft, 1984), 75–77.
56. Mez, 121.
57. For more details, see Hendrik Ehrhardt, Stromkonflikte: Selbstverständnis und strate-
gisches Handeln der Stromwirtschaft zwischen Politik, Industrie, Umwelt und Öffentlichkeit (1970–
1989) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2017).
58. Gespräch mit dem RWE, February 17, 1986. Vorstandsbüro, 5, Gespräche mit anderen
Gesellschaften, E.ON archive Munich, EEA 2697.
59. The DFG-funded project on Waldsterben located at the University of Freiburg has
dramatically increased our knowledge about different aspects of the phenomena. See Martin
Bemmann, Birgit Metzger, and Roland Schäfer, “Das deutsche Waldsterben als historisches
Phänomen,” Revue d’Allemagne et des Pays de langue allemande 39, no. 3 (2007): 423–36; Rod-
erich von Detten, “Wissenschaft und Umweltpolitik in der Debatte um das Waldsterben,” Ar-
chiv für Sozialgeschichte 50 (2010): 217–69; Roland Schäfer and Birgit Metzger, “Was macht
eigentlich das Waldsterben?” in Umweltgeschichte und Umweltzukunft: Zur gesellschaftlichen Rel-
evanz einer jungen Disziplin, ed. Patrick Masius, Ole Sparenberg, and Jana Sprenger (Göttingen,
2009), 201–27.
60. Antrag der Fraktion der SPD, Notprogramm gegen das Waldsterben, Bundestag (BT)-
Drucksache 10/35; Antrag der Fraktion Die Grünen, Programm gegen Luftbelastung Waldster-
ben, BT-Drucksache 10/67.

61. Stellungnahme der Verbände der Elektrizitätswirtschaft (VDEW, VGB, VIK) zur öffen-
tlichen Anhörung zum Thema, “Waldsterben und Luftverunreinigungen,” in Innenausschuss
Deutscher Bundestag, 10, Wahlperiode 1983, Protokoll über die öffentliche Anhörung zu Fra-
gen des Umweltschutzes am Montag, dem 24. Oktober und Dienstag, dem 25., October 1983,
Bonn, Bundeshaus, Innenausschuss-Protokoll no. 8 and no. 9, Teil II, 556.
62. Kenneth Anders and Frank Uekötter, “Viel Lärm ums stille Sterben−Die Debatte über
das Waldsterben in Deutschland,” in Wird Kassandra heiser? Die Geschichte falscher Ökoalarme,
ed. Jens Hohensee (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004), 112–38.
63. Sondergutachten des Rates von Sachverständigen für Umweltfragen “Waldschäden und
Luftverunreinigungen,” März 1983, BT-Drucksache 10/113, 78–81.
64. Susanne Lehringer, “Energiewirtschaft auf der Suche nach wissenschaftlichen Ant-
worten über die Ursachen der Waldschäden,” Allgemeine Forstzeitschrift 40, no. 8 (1985):
154–56.
65. Joachim Radkau, “Das RWE zwischen Kernenergie und Diversifizierung 1968–1988,”
in “Der gläserne Riese”: RWE—ein Konzern wird transparent, ed. Dieter Schweer and Wolf
Thieme (Wiesbaden: Gabler, 1998), 240.
66. Uekötter, Von der Rauchplage zur ökologischen Revolution, 292–302.
67. RWE Umwelt-Bilanz: Umweltschutz im und am Kraftwerk (Essen, Germany, 1984), 5.
68. RWE Umwelt-Bilanz, 7.
69. http://www.rwe.de/web/cms/de/334490/rwe-magazin/rwe-magazin-archiv/
archiv-2009/ausgabe-3/umweltschutz/25-jahre-r we-umweltschutz.
70. Radkau, Natur und Macht, 311–23; Uekötter, Umweltgeschichte im 19. und 20., 33–37;
Müller, Innenwelt der Umweltpolitik, 51–96.
71. Interview with Dr. Werner Hlubek, August 25, 2009, Essen, Germany.
72. Felix Christian Matthes, Stromwirtschaft und deutsche Einheit: Eine Fallstudie zur Trans-
formation der Elektrizitätswirtschaft in Ost-Deutschland (Berlin: F.C. Matthes 2000), 192.
73. M. Hildebrand, “Stand der Rauchgasreinigung bei EVU-Kraftwerken SO2-und NOx-
Minderung,” Elektrizitätswirtschaft 89, no. 9 (1990): 432–50.
5. From Anti-Nuke to Ökopax
1. Peter Graf Kielmansegg, Nach der Katastrophe: Eine Geschichte des geteilten Deutschland
(Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 2000), 234.
2. Helge Heidemeyer, “NATO-Doppelbeschluss, westdeutsche Friedensbewegung und der
Einfluss der DDR,” in Zweiter Kalter Krieg und Friedensbewegung: Der NATO-Doppelbeschluss in
deutsch-deutscher und internationaler Perspektive, ed. Philipp Gassert, Tim Geiger, and Hermann
Wentker (Munich, Germany: Oldenbourg, 2011), 249.
3. Friederike Brühöfener, “Politics of Emotions: Journalistic Reflections on the Emotion-
ality of the West German Peace Movement, 1979–1984,” German Politics and Society 33, no. 4
(Winter 2015): 97–111.
4. On the destruction foreseen by Battle Royale and Carte Blanche, see Mark Cioc, Pax
Atomica: The Nuclear Defense Debate in West Germany during the Adenauer Era (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1988), 25–30.
5. See, for example, Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried, eds, Between Marx and Coca-Cola:
Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960—1980 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006).
Arthur Marwick’s contribution to that volume, “Youth Culture and the Cultural Revolution of
the Long Sixties,” makes this point particularly clearly.
6. Astrid Mignon Kirchhof has argued that ecofeminism provided this common ground—I

propose here that environmentalism more generally was essential to the development of com-
mon cause amongst Germans of different ages and backgrounds. See Astrid Mignon Kirchhof,
“Finding Common Ground in the Transnational Peace Movements,” Australian Journal of Politics
and History 61, no. 3 (2015): 432–49.
7. Silke Mende and Birgit Metzger, “Ökopax. Die Umweltbewegung als Erfahrungsraum
der Friedensbewegung,” in Entrüstet Euch! Nuklearkrise: NATO-Doppelbeschluss und Friedensbe-
wegung, ed. Christoph Becker-Schaum (Paderborn, Germany: Schöningh, 2012), 123. I build
here on Mende and Metzger’s excellent essay by showing how the “apoliticality” of environ-
mental themes and the local, grassroots nature of anti-reactor protest in particular shaped the
1980s peace movement.
8. This was particularly true in West Germany. The situation was rather different in France,
where harnessing the atom—for both military and civilian purposes—was deemed essential to
the restoration of French grandeur after the embarrassing defeat of 1940. See Gabrielle Hecht,
The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2009), and Michael Bess, The Light Green Society: Ecology and Technological Moder-
nity in France, 1960–2000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
9. Susanne Schregel, Der Atomkrieg vor der Wohnungstür: Eine Politikgeschcihte der neuen
Friedensbewegung in der Bundesrepublik, 1970–1985 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2011).
10. “Wie es die ÖTV befahl,” Der Spiegel, April 30, 1958.
11. Cioc, Pax Atomica, 128.
12. Jared Donnelly, “Staying Civil: Conscientious Objection and Civil Society in West Ger-
many, 1956–1966” (PhD diss., Texas A&M University, 2015), 124. Despite its small size, the
vigil did attract significant notice in the press, particularly when visitors from Japan, the United
States, and Great Britain took part.
13. Cioc, Pax Atomica, 122.
14. “Kabinettstod gegen Atomtod,” Der Spiegel, April 16, 1958; “Umwege über Afrika,” Der
Spiegel, April 23, 1958.
15. On West Germany’s shifting position, see Cioc, Pax Atomica, 176.
16. Donnelly, “Staying Civil,” 125.
17. On the beginnings of the Aldermaston March, see Lawrence Wittner, Resisting the Bomb:
A History of the World Disarmament Movement, 1954–1970 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1997), 48.
18. Wittner, 220.
19. Holger Nehring, The Politics of Security: British and West German Protest Movements and
the Early Cold War, 1945—1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 242, 190.
20. Nehring, Politics of Security, 32–33.
21. Nehring, 70.
22. Nehring, 201–2.
23. See, for example, Dieter Rucht, Von Wyhl nach Gorleben: Bürger gegen Atomprogramm
und nukleare Entsorgung (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1980), but Wyhl has also featured prominently
in range of works on environmental and antinuclear activism, including Jens-Ivo Engels, Natur-
politik in der Bundesrepublik: Ideenwelt und politische Verhaltensstile in Naturschutz und Umwelt-
bewegung, 1950—1980 (Paderborn, Germany: Schöningh, 2006). See also Andrew Tompkins,
Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016), and Stephen Milder, Greening Democracy: The Antinuclear
Movement and Political Environmentalism, 1968–1983 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2017).

24. “200 Mann stoppen Reaktorbau in Wyhl,” Stuttgarter Nachrichten, February 20, 1975.
25. “Signal Wyhl,” Der stille Weg 27, nos. 5–6 (1975): 20.
26. Walter Mossmann, “Die Bevölkerung ist hellwach!” Kursburch 39 (April 1975): 129–54.
27. Theodor Ebert to Heinz Siefritz, September 3, 1974, Archiv der Badisch-Elsässische
Bürgerinitiative (hereafter ABEBI) Haag Lore 8HL6.
28. Theodor Ebert, “Als Berliner in Wyhl: Friedensforschung und Konfliktberatung vor
Ort,” Gewaltfreie Aktion 24/25 (1975): 36–42.
29. Roland Vogt to Günter Richter, March 9, 1975, ABEBI Haag Lore 12HL12.
30. Ebert, “Als Berliner in Wyhl,” 37
31. Vogt to Richter, March 9, 1975.
32. In fact, Nehring argues that the very idea of an atomic age was used to describe both the
“poverty” of nuclear destruction and the “paradise” of nuclear energy production. See Nehring,
Politics of Security, 50.
33. Ebert described the “de-provincialization” of the struggle as the chief point for the fur-
ther development of the citizens’ initiatives when he came to “advise” them in March 1975. See
Rainer Stephan, “Wyhl zeigt ein neues Verständnis von Demokratie,” Badische Zeitung, March
25, 1975.
34. On the importance of authenticity in 1970s protest, see Sven Reichardt, Authentizität
und Gemeinschaft: Linksalternatives Leben in den siebziger und frühen achtziger Jahren (Berlin:
Suhrkamp, 2014).
35. “Kundgebung und Volksfest: Die neue Wacht am Rhein,” Dernières nouvelles d’Alsace,
April 1, 1975.
36. “10.000 beim Ostertreffen in Wyhl,” Kommunistische Volkszeitung. The Dernières nou-
velles d’Alsace noted the presence of delegations from the same countries. Neither report speci-
fied how large these groups were. See “Kundgebung und Volksfest,” Dernières nouvelles d’Alsace.
37. “Kundgebung und Volksfest.”
38. Jo Leinen, “Von der Apfelsinenkiste auf den Ministersessel,” in Im Streit für die Umwelt:
Jo Leinen, Basis-Aktivist und Minister: Bilanz und Ausblick, ed. Karl-Otto Sattler (Kirkel, Germa-
ny: Edition Apoll, 1995), 48.
39. Bundesverband Bürgerinitiativen Umweltschutz, “Oster-Treffen aller Atomkraftsgegner
in Wyhl,” Petra-Kelly-Archiv (hereafter PKA) Akte 3168.
40. Petra Kelly, “WAS TUN ??? Einige Aktionsmöglichkeiten für die Westeuropäischen So-
zialisten!” November 1975, 1, PKA Akte 534, 2; emphasis in original.
41. “Die Kämpfe in Wyhl haben die Volksmasse im ganzen Land ermutigt,” Kommunistische
Volkszeitung, April 1975, 9.
42. KPD Regional Komitee Baden-Württemberg, “Kein KKW in Wyhl,” February 23, 1975,
Archiv Soziale Bewegungen Freiburg (hereafter ASB), no. 3599.
43. The Green Party that campaigned for the European Parliament in Germany was Sons-
tige Politische Vereinigung: Die Grünen—a special, provisional association created solely to
stand for the European elections. It was succeeded by Die Grünen in January 1980. On the cam-
paign, see Stephen Milder, “Between Grassroots Activism and Transnational Aspirations: Anti-
Nuclear Protest from the Rhine Valley to the Bundestag, 1974–1983,” HSR 39, no. 1 (2014):
191–211.
44. Petra Kelly to Dear Friends and Comrades, March 24, 1979, PKA Akte 540, 6.
45. Petra Kelly and Roland Vogt, “Ökologie und Frieden: Der Kampf gegen Atomkraft-
werke aus der Sicht von Hiroshima,” Forum Europa ( January–February 1977): 18.
46. Saskia Richter, “Der Protest gegen den NATO-Doppelbeschluss und die Konsolo-

dierung der Partei Die Grünen zwischen 1979 und 1983,” in Zweiter Kalter Krieg und Friedens-
bewegung: Der NATO-Doppelbeschluss in deutsch-deutscher und internationaler Perspektive, ed.
Philipp Gassert, Tim Geiger, and Hermann Wentker (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011), 229.
47. In fact, in the October 1980 Bundestag election (the federal election that followed most
closely on the heels of the announcement of the dual-track decision), the Greens did quite
poorly, receiving only 1.5 percent of the vote. This revealed a lingering unwillingness to accept a
third way, even when both the SPD and CDU campaigned in support of the dual-track decision.
48. Schregel, Atomkrieg, 59; Thomas Leif, Die Strategische (Ohn-)Macht der Friedensbewe-
gung: Kommunikations-und Entscheidungsstrukturen in den Achtziger Jahren (Opladen, Germa-
ny: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990), 41.
49. Jo Leinen, “Wie sich die Ökologiebewegung zur Friedensbewegung erweiterte, Variante
B,” in Prinzip Leben: Ökopax—die neue Kraft, ed. Petra Kelly and Jo Leinen (Berlin: Olle und
Wolter, 1982), 18.
50. Schregel, Atomkrieg, 67.
51. Schregel, 10–11.
52. See, for example, Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2011), and Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (New York: Penguin, 2010).
53. Belinda Davis, “A Brief Cosmogeny of the West German Green Party,” German Politics &
Society 33, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 53–65.
6. An Unguided Boom
1. J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-
Century World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), chapter 5; Alessandro Trigila et al., Dissesto
idrogeologico in Italia: pericolosità e indicatori di rischio. Rapporto 2015 (Rome: ISPRA, 2015).
2. Pietro Scoppola, La repubblica dei partiti: Evoluzione e crisi di un sistema politico (Bologna:
Il Mulino, 1991), 305.
3. Christian Pfister, Das 1950er Syndrom: Der Weg in die Konsumgesellschaft (Bern: Haupt,
1995); Joachim Radkau, “Wirtschaftswunder ohne technologische Innovation? Technische
Modernität in den 50er Jahren,” in Modernisierung im Wiederaufbau: Die westdeutsche Ge-
sellschaft der 50er Jahre, ed. Axel Schildt and Arnold Sywottek (Bonn: Dietz, 1998); Sandra
Chaney, Nature of the Miracle Years: Conservation in West Germany, 1945–1975 (Oxford: Ber-
ghahn Books, 2012); Will Steffen et al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Accel-
eration,” Anthropocene Review, January 16, 2015.
4. Guido Crainz, Storia del miracolo italiano: culture, identità, trasformazioni fra anni cinquan-
ta e sessanta (Rome: Donzelli, 1996), ix; Paul Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi:
società e politica, 1943–1988 (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), 287.
5. A review of the position of the Italian left in respect to the environmental issue is provid-
ed in Wilko Graf von Hardenberg and Paolo Pelizzari, “The Environmental Question, Employ-
ment, and Development in Italy’s Left, 1945–1990,” Left History 13, no. 1 (2008). For a broader
perspective on the positions of the Italian left on postwar reconstruction, see Marina Comei, Le
Sinistre e la ricostruzione (Bari, Italy: Edizioni Dedalo, 1979).
6. Edgar H. Meyer, “L’evoluzione della coscienza ambientale attraverso i movimenti ecolo-
gisti,” in Storia ambientale: una nuova frontiera storiografica, ed. Andrea Saba and Edgar H. Meyer
(Milan: Teti, 2001), 125–26; Scoppola, La repubblica dei partiti, 305–39.
7. Roberto Balzani, “La difesa dell’ambiente e del paesaggio nelle pagine del ‘Mondo,’” in
Storia dell’ambiente in Italia tra Ottocento e Novecento, ed. Angelo Varni (Bologna: Il Mulino,
1999), 214–15.

8. See, for example, Percy Allum, “The Politics of Town Planning in Postwar Naples,” Jour-
nal of Modern Italian Studies 8, no. 4 (2003): 500–527; and Simone Neri Serneri, “Environne-
ment et industrie en Italie au temps du miracle économique (1950–1970),” Histoire & Sociétés:
Revue européenne d’histoire sociale, no. 27 (2009): 40–57.
9. Scoppola, La repubblica dei partiti; Rolf Petri, Storia economica d’Italia: dalla Grande guer-
ra al miracolo italiano, 1918–1963 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 182; Silvio Lanaro, Storia dell’Ita-
lia repubblicana: dalla fine della guerra agli anni novanta (Venice: Marsilio, 1992), 5.
10. Petri, Storia economica d’Italia, 183–88; Federico Paolini, “A Country on Four Wheels:
The Car and Society in Italy (1900–1974),” TST: Transportes, Servicios Y Telecomunicaciones, no.
17 (2009): 113.
11. Chaney, Nature of the Miracle Years, 4.
12. Rolf Petri, “Dalla ricostruzione al miracolo economico,” in Storia d’Italia: 1943–1963, ed.
Giovanni Sabbatucci and Vittorio Vidotto (Rome: Laterza, 1997), 313, 361.
13. Pasquale Saraceno, Intervista sulla ricostruzione, 1943–1953, ed. Lucio Villari (Rome and
Bari: Laterza, 1977), 3; Petri, “Dalla ricostruzione al miracolo economico,” 389.
14. Scoppola, La repubblica dei partiti, 314; Crainz, Storia del miracolo italiano, 22; Ginsborg,
Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi, 291–92.
15. Paolini, “A Country on Four Wheels,” 114, 120–21.
16. Paolini, 129–30; Federico Paolini, “Transport and the Environment in Italy (1950–
2006),” Economics and Policy of Energy and the Environment, no. 2 (2012): 219–22; Federico
Paolini, “A Country ‘Up to the Neck in Cars’: Automobiles and the Emissions Regulation in
Italy (1950–2008),” Storia e Futuro, no. 37 (2015): 1–14.
17. Aurelio Lepre, Storia della prima Repubblica: l’Italia dal 1942 al 1992 (Bologna: Il Mulino,
1993), 167; Federico Paolini, “La malaria delle città: Motorizzazione privata e degrado ambi-
entale (1950–1974),” I Frutti di Demetra. Bollettino di storia e ambiente, no. 7 (2005): 27–32;
Federico Paolini, “A Study of the Car in Italy. Notes for a Social and Environmental History,” La
Lettre du GERPISA, no. 183 (2005): 12–14; Paolini, “A Country on Four Wheels,” 113–14; Petri,
“Dalla ricostruzione al miracolo economico,” 359.
18. Lepre, Storia della prima Repubblica, 167. For more information on this second wave
in the Italian nature conservation movement, see Luigi Piccioni, Il volto amato della Patria: Il
primo movimento per la conservazione della natura in Italia, 1880–1934 (Camerino: Università
degli Studi di Camerino, 1999), 272–73; James Sievert, The Origins of Nature Conservation in
Italy (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), 201–8.
19. Giorgio Botta, Difesa del suolo e volontà politica: inondazioni fluviali e frane in Italia
(1946–1976) (Milan: F. Angeli, 1977), 68.
20. Meyer, “L’evoluzione della coscienza ambientale attraverso i movimenti ecologisti,” 126.
21. Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini, A che punto è la notte (Milan: Mondadori, 1987),
101.
22. Paolini, “Transport and the Environment in Italy (1950–2006),” 235.
23. Crainz, Storia del miracolo italiano, 130–31; Petri, “Dalla ricostruzione al miracolo eco-
nomico,” 420.
24. Sidney Tarrow, “Aspetti della crisi italiana: note introduttive,” in La crisi italiana, ed. Lu-
igi Graziano and Sidney Tarrow (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), 15; Giuseppe Dematteis, “Le trasfor-
mazioni territoriali e ambientali,” in Storia dell’età repubblicana, vol. 2, ed. Francesco Barbagallo
(Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 661–65.
25. Leonardo Rombai, “Paesaggi culturali, analisi storico-geografica e pianificazione,” Storia
e Futuro, no. 1 (2002); Botta, Difesa del suolo e volontà politica, 88. See articles 9 and 44 of the

constitution and Giovanni Cordini, Diritto ambientale: profili internazionali europei e comparati
(Turin: Giappichelli, 2005), 115.
26. While most of Italy’s regions were instituted only in the 1970s a handful of autonomous
regions, with wide-ranging powers in a variety of policy field, had been created early on: Sicily
was granted a special statute as early as 1946; Sardinia, Valle d’Aosta, and Trentino/Südtirol
were afforded theirs in 1948. Friuli-Venezia Giulia became instead an autonomous region only
in 1963.
27. Giulio Giovannoni and Raimondo Innocenti, “Dallo Schema strutturale al secondo Pi-
ano strategico: Il governo dell’area metropolitana,” in Firenze. Il progetto urbanistico: Scritti e
contributi 1975–2010, ed. Pietro Giorgieri (Florence: Alinea Editrice, 2010), 598.
28. Cordini, Diritto ambientale, 116–20; Francesco Silvestri, “Una breve storia della conser-
vazione del paesaggio in Italia (con particolare attenzione ai parchi naturali),” Storia e Futuro,
no. 4 (2004): 3.
29. The so-called Merli and Merli-bis laws on water pollution were issued in 1976 and 1979,
respectively; the law on soil and sea pollution in 1982; the Galasso decree on the implemen-
tation of landscape plans in 1984; and the framework law on protected areas only in 1991. See
also Neri Serneri, “Environnement et industrie en Italie au temps du miracle économique
(1950–1970),” 53–55.
30. Francesco Ventura, “Alle origini della tutela delle ‘bellezze naturali’ in Italia,” Storia Ur-
bana 40, no. 3 (1987): 31; Guido Melis, Storia dell’amministrazione italiana: 1861–1993 (Bo-
logna: Il Mulino, 1996), 351–53; Giorgio Ruffolo, Riforme e controriforme (Rome and Bari:
Laterza, 1975), 44.
31. Vanni Bulgarelli and Catia Mazzeri, “Sviluppo urbano e politiche ambientali: Modena
novecentesca,” in Storia e ambiente : città, risorse e territori nell’Italia contemporanea, ed. Gabriel-
la Corona and Simone Neri Serneri (Rome: Carocci, 2007), 164.
32. Lanaro, Storia dell’Italia repubblicana, 242–48.
33. Dematteis, “Le trasformazioni territoriali e ambientali,” 668.
34. Botta, Difesa del suolo e volontà politica, 123.
35. Botta, 9–10.
36. Botta, 10–11, 88.
37. Walter Palmieri, “Per una storia del dissesto e delle catstrofi idrogeologiche in Italia
dall’Unità ad oggi.,” Quaderno ISSM, no. 164 (2011): 18–19. Some insight into the impact of
floods and landslides of varying intensity on the landscapes of Italy may be gained by perusing
the Aree Vulnerate Italiane archive, http://sici.irpi.cnr.it/avi.htm.
39. Lanaro, Storia dell’Italia repubblicana, 173–77; Dematteis, “Le trasformazioni territoriali
e ambientali,” 672–73; Valentino Parlato, Eugenio Peggio, and Santo Mazzarino, Industrializ-
zazione e sottosviluppo il progresso tecnologico in una provincia del Mezzogiorno (Turin: Einaudi,
1960); Salvatore Adorno, “Il polo industriale di Augusta-Siracusa. Risorse e crisi ambientale
(1949–2000),” in Storia e ambiente: città, risorse e territori nell’Italia contemporanea, ed. Gabriella
Corona and Simone Neri Serneri (Rome: Carocci, 2007), 195–217; Salvatore Adorno, “Petro-
chemical Modernity in Sicily,” in Nature and History in Modern Italy, ed. Marco Armiero and
Marcus Hall (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 180–94.
40. Crainz, Storia del miracolo italiano, 22–23.
41. Tarrow, “Aspetti della crisi italiana: note introduttive,” 23.
42. Petri, Storia economica d’Italia, 216.
43. Paolini, “Transport and the Environment in Italy (1950–2006),” 221.

44. Tarrow, “Aspetti della crisi italiana: note introduttive,” 23.
45. Judith Chubb, Patronage, Power and Poverty in Southern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), 55–57.
46. Tarrow, “Aspetti della crisi italiana: note introduttive,” 25; Neri Serneri, “Environne-
ment et industrie en Italie au temps du miracle économique (1950–1970),” 52.
47. Petri, “Dalla ricostruzione al miracolo economico,” 428; Giorgio Roverato, “La Terza
Regione Industriale,” in Storia d’Italia. Le Regioni. Il Veneto, ed. Silvio Lanaro (Turin: Einaudi,
1984).
48. Petri, “Dalla ricostruzione al miracolo economico,” 330–32.
49. Saverio Luzzi, Il virus del benessere: ambiente, salute, sviluppo nell’Italia repubblicana
(Rome: Laterza, 2009), 41; Hardenberg and Pelizzari, “The Environmental Question, Employ-
ment, and Development in Italy’s Left, 1945–1990,” 79–81.
50. Federico Paolini, “I territori dello sviluppo: L’area fiorentino-pratese (1946–95),” in Sto-
ria e ambiente: città, risorse e territori nell’Italia contemporanea, ed. Gabriella Corona and Simone
Neri Serneri, (Roma: Carocci, 2007), 181.
51. Dematteis, “Le trasformazioni territoriali e ambientali,” 667–8; Ruffolo, Riforme e con-
troriforme, 33–39.
52. Paolini, “I territori dello sviluppo. L’area fiorentino-pratese (1946–95),” 181; Botta, Dif-
esa del suolo e volontà politica, 123.
53. Cfr. Monika Bergmeier, Umweltgeschichte der Boomjahre 1949—1973: das Beispiel Bay-
ern (Münster: Waxmann, 2002), 25–28.
54. Vezio De Lucia, Nella città dolente: Mezzo secolo di scempi, condoni e signori del cemento.
Dalla sconfitta di Fiorentino Sullo a Silvio Berlusconi (Roma: Castelvecchi, 2014); Dematteis, “Le
trasformazioni territoriali e ambientali,” 667–8; Meyer, “L’evoluzione della coscienza ambien-
tale attraverso i movimenti ecologisti.,” 129; Balzani, “La difesa dell’ambiente e del paesaggio
nelle pagine del «Mondo».”
55. Lepre, Storia della prima Repubblica, 187.
56. Petri, “Dalla ricostruzione al miracolo economico,” 337.
57. Christian Pfister, “Learning From Nature Induced Disasters: Theoretical Considerations
and Case Studies from Western Europe,” in Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses: Case Studies
Toward a Global Environmental History, ed. Christof Mauch and Christian Pfister (Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 17–40; Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, “Atti di Dio, atti dell’uo-
mo?,” Passato e Presente, no. 82 (2011): 21–26; Botta, Difesa del suolo e volontà politica, 21n3.
58. Botta, Difesa del suolo e volontà politica, 124; Sara B. Pritchard, “An Envirotechnical Di-
saster: Nature, Technology, and Politics at Fukushima,” Environmental History 17, no. 2 (2012):
219–43. For a complete understanding of disasters as the complex output of the interplay of
natural, social, and technical causes, see also Anthony Oliver-Smith, “Theorizing Disasters: Na-
ture, Power, and Culture,” in Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster, ed. Anthony
Oliver-Smith and Susanna M. Hoffman (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), 23–47.
60. Maurizio Reberschak and Ivo Mattozzi, Il Vajont dopo il Vajont: 1963–2000 (Venice:
Marsilio, 2009); Maurizio Reberschak, Il grande Vajont (Verona: Cierre, 2003); Tina Merlin,
Sulla pelle viva: come si costruisce una catastrophe: Il caso del Vajont (Verona: Cierre, 1997); An-
drea F. Saba, “Le dighe,” Passato e Presente, no. 82 (2011): 32–37; Marco Armiero, A Rugged
Nation: Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy (Cambridge: White Horse, 2011), 192.
61. Hardenberg and Pelizzari, “The Environmental Question, Employment, and Develop-
ment in Italy’s Left, 1945–1990,” 79–86.

62. For an extremely brief, but very informative account of the development of research in
the humanities in respect to “disasters,” see Giacomo Parrinello, Fault Lines: Earthquakes and
Urbanism in Modern Italy, 2015, 4. Also see Hardenberg, “Atti di Dio, atti dell’uomo?”
64. Botta, 29–36, 46–51.
65. Botta, 39–43.
66. Botta, 125; Luigi Lugaresi, 1951 la rotta, il Po, il Polesine, 2nd ed. (Rovigo, Italy: Minel-
liana, 2001); Gian Antonio Cibotto, Cronache dell’alluvione (Milan: Bompiani, 1991); Wilko
Graf von Hardenberg, “The Great Fear: The Polesine Flood of 1951,” Environment & Society
Portal, Arcadia, no. 3 (2013).
67. Dematteis, “Le trasformazioni territoriali e ambientali,” 670.
68. Botta, Difesa del suolo e volontà politica, 63, 75, 82–84; Ruffolo, Riforme e controriforme,
32.
69. Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi, 106.
70. Meyer, “L’evoluzione della coscienza ambientale attraverso i movimenti ecologisti,”
127–28.
71. Crainz, Storia del miracolo italiano, 130.
7. Nuclear Power, Grassroots Environmentalism, and Montana’s Cold War Initiatives
1. Bruce Hevly and John M. Findlay, eds., The Atomic West (Seattle: University of Washing-
ton Press, 1998). More good work on federal facilities, weapons, landscapes, and communities
is in Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American
Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Howard G. Wilshire, Jane E.
Nielson, and Richard W. Hazlett, The American West at Risk: Science, Myths, and Politics of Land
Abuse and Recovery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 181–212; Ryan H. Edgington,
Range Wars: The Environmental Contest for White Sands Missile Range (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2014).
2. Traci Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Michael A. Amundson, Yellowcake Towns: Ura-
nium Mining Communities in the American West (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002);
Raye C. Ringholtz, Uranium Frenzy: Saga of the Nuclear West (Logan: Utah State University
Press, 2002). Combining the first and second branches of research is Sarah Alisabeth Fox,
Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014).
3. Thomas R. Wellock, Critical Masses: Opposition to Nuclear Power in California, 1958–1978
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998); Thomas R. Wellock, “Atomic Power in the
West,” Journal of the West 44, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 45–54; Kyle Harvey, American Anti-Nuclear
Activism, 1975–1990: The Challenge of Peace (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 14–17.
4. Among many fine works, see Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and
Environmental Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 1995); Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hid-
den History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Carolyn
Merchant, Earthcare: Women and the Environment (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 1995);
Christopher C. Sellers, Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in
Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); and Adam
Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmen-
talism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
5. James Morton Turner, The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since
1964 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 225–66.

6. Lee Scamehorn, High Altitude Energy: A History of Fossil Fuels in Colorado (Boulder: Uni-
versity Press of Colorado, 2002), 177. A couple of books that briefly mention environmental-
ism’s place in the energy boom are William R. Travis, New Geographies of the American West:
Land Use and the Changing Patterns of Place (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2007), 13–32, and
Andrew Gulliford, Boomtown Blues: Colorado Oil Shale, 1885–1985 (Boulder: University Press
of Colorado, 1989), 8.
7. Wellock, “Atomic Power in the West,” 48.
8. Wellock, Critical Masses; Thomas R. Wellock, “Stick it in L.A.! Community Control and
Nuclear Power in California’s Central Valley,” Journal of American History 84, no. 3 (December
1997): 942–78; Daniel Pope, “Antinuclear Activism in the Pacific Northwest: WPPSS and Its
Enemies,” in The Atomic West, edited by Bruce Hevly and John M. Findlay (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 1998), 242.
9. Major rhetorical themes in the 1970s nuclear debate are discussed in J. Samuel Walker,
“The Nuclear Power Debate of the 1970s,” in American Energy Policy in the 1970s, ed. Robert Lif-
set (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 221–54. The method of discourse analysis
is explored in Peter Schottler, “Historians and Discourse Analysis,” History Workshop Journal 7
(1989): 37–65.
10. Walker, “The Nuclear Power Debate,” 246.
11. Michael Amundson, “Uranium on the Cranium”: Uranium Mining and Popular Culture,”
in Atomic Culture: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Boulder: University
Press of Colorado, 2004), 49–64.
12. Quotes are in E. P. Lorenz to Lee Metcalf, March 26, 1955; See also Bob Durkee to
Lee Metcalf, March 26, 1955; Lee Metcalf to Lewis L. Strauss, March 28, 1955; Lee Metcalf
to E. P. Lorenz, March 28, 1955; all in folder 4, box 101, Lee Metcalf Papers, Manuscript Col-
lection 172 (hereafter MC 172), Montana Historical Society Research Center, Helena, Mon-
tana (hereafter MHS). A few of the old uranium mines became radon “health” mines. See “The
Underground Health Mines of Western Montana,” Venue, June 2013, http://v-e-n-u-e.com
/The-Underground-Health-Mines-of-Western-Montana.
13. Shaun Higgins, “A Nuclear Plant Almost Came to Montana,” Daily Missoulian, October
15, 1978. The article is based on research by David Quammen, a proponent of the antinuclear
ballot initiative in 1978 and now a well-known author. Research at the Idaho facility helped lead
to a commercial nuclear industry, which Congress made possible with a 1954 law that eased
restrictions to information about atomic power. See J. Samuel Walker, “From the ‘Atomic Age’
to the ‘Anti-Nuclear Age’: Nuclear Energy in Politics, Diplomacy, and Culture,” Companion to
Post-1945 America, ed. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2006), 509.
14. Tom Powers to Mike Mansfield, June 11, 1965, folder 2, box 287; Ray to Senator Mike
Mansfield, June 3, 1965, folder 1, box 287. Both in Mike Mansfield Papers (hereafter MSS 65),
K. Ross Toole Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana
(hereafter UMT).
15. Leonard Pierre to Lee Metcalf, September 23, 1965, folder 5, box 101, MC 172, MHS;
“Can We Eat Our Cake and Have It Too?” Great Falls Tribune, September 16, 1965; Lyman Tra-
han to Mike Mansfield, Lee Metcalf, Arnold Olsen, and James Battin, folder 3, box 287, MSS
65, UMT.
16. “Atom Smasher Interest in State Slight—Chapman,” Great Falls Tribune, October 29,
1965; The Report of the National Academy of Sciences’ Site Evaluation Committee, Washington,
DC: March 1966, I-2, folder 1, box 287, MSS 65, UMT; Bruce Ellis to Mike Mansfield, April 30,
1976, folder 1, box 287, MSS 65, UMT.

17. Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American
Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
18. E. Jerry Jesse, “Radiation Ecologies: Bombs, Bodies, and Environment During the At-
mospheric Nuclear Weapons Testing Period, 1942–1965” (PhD diss., Montana State Universi-
ty, 2013), 384–416.
19. Edward J. Brunenkant to Lee Metcalf, September 6, 1968, folder 3, box 101, MC 172, MHS.
20. Gary M. Matson to Mike Mansfield, February 7, 1969, and Glenn T. Seaborg to Senator
Mike Mansfield, August 29, 1969. Both in folder 1, box 287, MSS 65, UMT. “Site Investigation
Announcement” and “Background Information—For Use in Responding to Inquiry,” folder 3,
box 101, MC 172, MHS.
21. Dick Hogan to Mike Mansfield, February 9, 1969, folder 1, box 287, MSS 65, UMT. See
also Shari Pettit to Lee Metcalf, February 17, 1970, folder 3, box 101; Louise Snowden to Lee
Metcalf, February 7, 1970, folder 3, box 101; Don Mendenhall to Lee Metcalf, March 30, 1970,
folder 3, box 101; Gary M. Matson to Lee Metcalf, February 7, 1969, folder 3, box 101. All of
the aforementioned are in MC 172, MHS. See the president of the Carter County Sheep and
Cattle Growers’ Association take issue with the AEC in Lawrence Capra to Mike Mansfield,
September 8, 1969, folder 1, box 287, MSS 65, UMT.
22. Carl Jansky to Mike Mansfield, April 24, 1970, folder 1, box 287, MSS 65, UMT.
23. Carl Jansky to Lee Metcalf, May 19, 1970, folder 3, box 101, MC 172, MHS. See also Carl
Jansky to Lee Metcalf, May 6, 1970, folder 3, box 101, MC 172, MHS.
24. Glenn T. Seaborg to Mike Mansfield, August 29, 1969, folder 1, box 287, MSS 65, UMT.
25. See examples like Gladys L. Hyde to Lee Metcalf, April 2, 1970, and Gladys L. Hyde
to Lee Metcalf, June 14, 1970, both in folder 3, box 101, MC 172, MHS; A. J. Briggs, Alan B.
Underwood, David J. Everett, A.W. Cannon, Davy Utter, Roy Todd, William Griffin, Wayne
N. Roth, Ben T. Apelands, Jace Blazek, Keith Cabot, Norman Linesay, Dennis Miller to Lee
Metcalf, December 24, 1970, folder 2, box 101, MC 172, MHS.
26. Roger Rapoport, “Catch 24,400 (or, Plutonium Is My Favorite Element),” Ramparts
(May 1970): 21–24.
27. Eric Mogren, “Mining the Atom: Uranium in the Twentieth-Century American West,”
Mining North America: An Environmental History Since 1522, ed. J. R. McNeill and George Vrtis
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 219–255, quote on 242.
28. Mark Fiege, The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (Seat-
tle: University of Washington Press, 2012); Brian Black, “The Consumer’s Hand Made Visible:
Consumer Culture in American Petroleum Consumption of the 1970s,” in American Energy
Policy in the 1970s, ed. Robert Lifset (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 257–82.
29. William J. Barber, James L. Cochrane, Neil de Marchi, and Joseph A. Yager, “Energy:
1945–1980: From John F. Kennedy to Jimmy Carter,” Wilson Quarterly 5, no. 2 (April 1981):
70–90.
30. Charles Wilkinson, Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest
(Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999), xii, 208–15.
31. Andrew H. Gahan and William D. Rowley, The Bureau of Reclamation: From Developing
to Managing Water, 1945–2000, vol. 2 (Denver: Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Department of the
Interior, 2012), 769–802.
32. Oil shale is a sedimentary rock containing petroleum-like kerogens. On the boom, see
Gulliford, Boomtown Blues, 8; Patty Limerick, Jason L. Hanson, and Ryan L. Rebhan, “Engi-
neering the Second Boom,” in What Every Westerner Should Know about Oil Shale (Boulder:
Center of the American West, University of Colorado, 2008), http://centerwest.org/projects
/energy/oil-shale/; Gulliford, Boomtown Blues, 8–12, 86–87, 119–51.

33. Wilkinson, Fire on the Plateau; Barbara Freese, Coal: A Human History (Cambridge, MA:
Perseus, 2003), 163–97; K. Ross Toole, The Rape of the Great Plains: Northwest America, Cattle
and Coals (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976). See more on how energy development
in coal allowed for the urban Southwest in Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the
Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
34. Edward W. Fleming to Lee Metcalf, June 21, 1974; John Goers to Bill Cristiansen,
MEAC Agency, and University Representatives, July 2, 1974; Bill Cristiansen to Thomas Gross,
February 8, 1974; James L. Liverman to Lee Metcalf, July 18, 1974; all in folder 1, box 101, MC
172, MHS.
35. Martin V. Melosi, Atomic Age America (New York: Pearson, 2013), 222–25; Alice L.
Buck, A History of the Atomic Energy Commission (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Ener-
gy, August 1982), 5; Jack M. Holl, Roger M. Anders, and Alice L. Buck, United States Civilian
Nuclear Power Policy, 1954–1984: A Summary History (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Energy, February 1986), 9–10.
36. Amundson, Yellowcake Towns, 17–36, 135–72.
37. Atomic Energy Commission of the United States of America, Resource Division, Poten-
tial Uranium Resources of the Western United States, Grand Junction office, May 1973, 1–5; Ed-
ward H. Allen and Lars Hansen, “Financing Infrastructure in Energy Production Areas,” Rocky
Mountain Institute for Policy Research, August 1975, folder 8, box 4, Montana Department of
Natural Resources and Conservation, Director’s Office Records, Record Series 443 (hereafter
RS 443), MHS; Russel H. Ball, “Nuclear Power Considerations,” 1971 Northwest Public Power
Association Electric Marketing Conference, September 1971, box 6, folder 9, Missoula Electric
Cooperative Records, MSS229, UMT.
38. Gulliford, Boomtown Blues, 1.
39. Travis, New Geographies of the American West, 20.
40. Jack A. Barnett to Water Resources Committee of the Western States Resource Council,
May 16, 1974, folder 21, box 4, RS 443, MHS.
41. Gary J. Wicks to Clifford H. McConnell, May 30, 1974, folder 21, box 4, RS 443, MHS.
42. Kenneth Cmiel, “The Politics of Civility,” in The Sixties: From Memory to History, ed.
David Farber (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994): 263–84.
43. Cody Ferguson This Is Our Land: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Late Twentieth Cen-
tury (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 1–70.
44. Toole, The Rape of the Great Plains, 144–158, 221–224.
45. James Conaway, “The Last of the West: Hell, Strip It!” Atlantic Monthly, September 1973,
102.
46. Pope, “Antinuclear Activism in the Pacific Northwest,” 242.
47. Mike McCormick news release, June 4, 1976, folder 1, box 323, MSS65, UMT; “Nuclear
Critics Get Blast,” Montana Standard, June 5, 1976; “N-Plant Dissent a Fraud,” Great Falls Tri-
bune, June 5, 1976.
48. Lettie McSpadden Wenner and Manfred W. Wenner, “Nuclear Policy and Public Partic-
ipation,” American Behavior Scientist 22, no. 2 (December 1978): 281.
49. See the “Petition for Initiative,” folder 4, box 20, MSS 630. More information is in 1906–
Present Historical Ballot Initiatives and Referenda, Montana Secretary of State, Elections and
Government Services Division, 11, http://sos.mt.gov/elections/ballot_issues/documents/
Statutory-Ballot-Issues-1906-Current.pdf.
50. “Last Minute Battle Shaping Over Nuclear Proposal,” Havre Daily News, October 15,
1976. See also “Nuclear Initiative Issue Heads for Showdown,” Montana Standard, September
23, 1976.

1976. See also “Nuclear Initiative Issue Heads for Showdown,” Montana Standard, September
23, 1976.
52. Sam Gilluly, “Montana: A Political Battleground,” July 8, 1976, folder 6, box 10, Warren
McGee Collection Unprocessed Manuscript Collection 11 (hereafter UPMC 11), MHS.
53. Paul Bunning, “Two Montana Scientists Rap Installation of Warheads,” Spokesman-
Review (Spokane, WA), February 7, 1975; Committee on Nuclear Strategy, Minutes, folder 11,
box 18, Meyer Chessin Papers MSS 630 (hereafter MSS 630), UMT.
54. Sheldon Novick to Harry Billings, February 8, 1968, folder 7, box 20, MSS 630, UMT.
On the news publication, see Anne Elizabeth Pettinger, “Harry and Gretchen Billings and the
People’s Voice” (master’s thesis, University of Montana, 2006). See also Mel Christopher to
Lee Metcalf, September 17, 1968, folder 3, box 101, MC 172, MHS.
55. “Nuclear Materials Fire, Missoula, Montana, March 31, 1971,” and Melvin W. Carter to
Larry L. Lloyd, May 11, 1971, both in folder 22, box 18, MSS 630, UMT.
56. “Uranium Carrier Burns,” Billings Gazette, April 2, 1971; “Large Scale AEC Alert ‘Not
Serious,’” Missoulian, April 2, 1971; “Uranium-Carrying Boxcar No Missoula Threat,” Great
Falls Tribune, April 2, 1971.
1976; “Nuclear Initiative Issue Heads for Showdown,” Montana Standard, September 23, 1976;
Flynn J. Ell, “Dunkle Attacked for Opposing ’71,’” Billings Gazette, October 31, 1976.
58. Sam Gilluly, “Montana: A Political Battleground,” July 8, 1976, folder 6, box 10, UPMC
11, MHS.
59. Montanans Against 71 Committee, “The Facts about Initiative 71: The Nuclear Ban,”
1976, folder 6, box 10, UPMC 11, MHS.
60. Montanans Against 71 Committee, “The Facts about Initiative 71.”
61. R. F. Gilkeson to Philadelphia Electric Company shareholder, October 22, 1976; John J.
Tuohy to Long Island Lighting Company shareholder, October 25, 1976; Francis E. Drake and
Paul W. Briggs to Rochester Gas and Electric Corporation shareholders, n.d.; Charles F. Luce
to Consolidated Edison Company of New York Montana stockholder, October 14, 1976, all in
folder 18, box 1A, Montana Commissioner of Political Practices Records, Record Series 260
(hereafter RS 260), MHS.
62. Walker, “The Nuclear Power Debate,” 246.
63. J. W. Lewis to Middle South Utilities stockholders in Montana, October 11, 1976, folder
18, box 1A, RS 260, MHS.
64. Summary of Receipts and Expenditures to the State of Montana, Commissioner of
Campaign Finances and Practices, September 1, 1976 to October 9, 1976; October 9, 1976 to
October 23, 1976; October 1, 1975 to September 9, 1976, all in folder 18, box 1A, RS 260, MHS.
65. Summary of Receipts and Expenditures to the State of Montana, Commissioner of
Campaign Finances and Practices, October 8, 1976 to October 25, 1976; September 27, 1976
to October 15, 1976; October 25, 1976 to November 12, 1976, all in folder 18, box 1A, RS 260,
MHS.
66. Pope, 242.
67. Lee Metcalf to Rod Brewer, March 9, 1977, folder 1, box 398, MC172, MHS. On the
debate, see “Law Says State Not a Dump for Nuclear Wastes,” Billings Gazette, March 23, 1977.
68. Montanans for Jobs and Energy and Citizens Against the Ban, “Vote Against Initiative
80,” 1978, folder 11, box 6, Campaign Materials Collection, 1892–2014, Pam 05 (hereafter Pam
05), UMT. See a shorter version of this argument for the newspaper in “Vote against 80,” Mis-
soulian, November 2, 1978. I-80 opponents won the support of the Great Falls Tribune, which

cited similar arguments about the energy crisis and the subsequent need to keep nuclear power
as an option. See “Initiative 80: No,” Great Falls Tribune, November 5, 1978.
69. “The Nuclear Initiative: Safeguard or Ban?” Prospector (Carroll College, Helena, MT),
October 31, 1978. See also Marilyn M. Osterhout, “Letter to the Editor,” Fallon County Times
(Baker, MT), October 19, 1978.
70. “Vote against 80,” folder 11, box 6, Pam 05, UMT; “Vote against 80,” Great Falls Tribune,
November 6, 1978.
71. Montanans for Jobs and Energy & Citizens against the Ban, “Vote against Initiative 80,”
1978, Pam 05, box 6, folder 11, UMT.
72. Don Frisbee to Montana Stockholders of Pacific Power & Light Company, November
3, 1978, folder 11, box 6, Pam 05, UMT. In 1979 the Department of State Lands reported that
eighteen companies and individuals were still exploring for uranium in twenty-three Montana
counties. See Jeannie Cross, “Uranium Explorers May Be Delayed,” Billings Gazette, November
20, 1979.
73. On Anaconda’s ownership of state newspapers, see Dennis L. Swibold, Copper Chorus:
Mining, Politics, and the Montana Press, 1889–1959 (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press,
2006). On Anaconda’s oversized role in state politics (and the debate over just how big that
role was), see K. Ross Toole, “A History of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company: A Study
in the Relationships between a State and Its People and a Corporation, 1880–1950,” (PhD diss.,
University of California, Los Angeles, 1954); Bradley Dean Snow, “From the Sixth Floor to the
Copper Dome: ‘The Company’s’ Political Influence in Montana, 1920–1959” (master’s thesis,
Montana State University, 2003); Michael P. Malone, “Montana as a Corporate Bailiwick: An
Image in History,” Montana: Past and Present (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial
Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 1976), 55–76; David M. Emmons, “The Price
of Freedom: Montana in the Late and Post-Anaconda Era,” Montana: The Magazine of Western
History 44, no. 4 (Autumn 1994): 66–73.
74. On the role of the media in framing and distributing ideas in nuclear debates, see Astrid
Mignon Kirchhof and Jan-Henrik Meyer, “Global Protest against Nuclear Power, Transfer and
Transnational Exchange in the 1970s and 1980s,” Historical Social Research 39 (2014): 165–90.
75. Mike Dahlem to Flo and Meyer Chessin, September 15, 1978, “Nuclear Awareness
Week Schedule,” October 1978, both in folder 4, box 20, MSS 630, UMT
76. Notes on “Montana’s Concerns,” folder 4, box 20, MSS 630, UMT.
77. Jean Curry and Headwaters Alliance Political Action Committee, “Fact Sheet: Nuclear
Power,” Summer 1978, folder 4, box 20, MSS 630, UMT.
78. Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, “Nuclear Power Plants . . . A Unique Problem”;
Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, “Nuclear Power . . . Bad for Jobs”; “Nuclear Threats to
Human Survival”; “Plutonium: The Most Deadly Waste,” all in folder 4, box 20, MSS 630, UMT.
79. “The Nuclear Initiative: Safeguard or Ban?” Prospector, October 31, 1978. See also Mari-
lyn M. Osterhout, “Letter to the Editor,” Fallon County Times, October 19, 1978.
80. Nuclear Free Missoula, “Nuclear Power in Missoula County: It’s the ‘Bargain’ We Can’t
Afford,” 1978, folder 11, box 6, Pam 05, UMT.
81. Nuclear Free Missoula, “Nuclear Power in Missoula County.”
82. Don Schwennesen, “Nuclear Initiative Foes, Supporters Square Off,” Missoulian, Octo-
ber 22, 1978.
83. Schwennesen, “Nuclear Initiative Foes, Supporters Square Off.”
84. Schwennesen, “Nuclear Initiative Foes, Supporters Square Off.”
85. Sam Reynolds, “Let Initiative 80 Send the Nuclear Power People a Message,” Missoulian,

October 24, 1978. See also Missoulian, October 26, 1978. Discussion of the “dragon-like freak”
is in a later letter to the editor, which further pointed out that some of Reynold’s claims were
overblown, including the conflations he made in figures for power plant waste, combining it
with atomic weapons waste. See John W. Kaufmann, “Irrational on I-80,” Missoulian, November
3, 1978.
86. “The Nuclear Initiative: Safeguard or Ban?” Prospector, October 31, 1978.
87. “Consultant Claims Nuclear Power Twice the Cost of Coal,” Billings Gazette, October
25, 1978.
88. Lee Metcalf to Rod Brewer, March 9, 1977, folder 1, box 398, MC 172, MHS. “Melcher
Applauds Vote on Nuclear Initiative,” Livingston Enterprise (Livingston, MT), November 15,
1978. On MHD’s ability to turn Montana coal “green,” see Marsha Freeman, “MHD—Plasma
Technology for Electric Power,” EIR: Science and Technology, November 15, 1985, 16–20.
89. Jeannie Cross, “Foes Call Anti-Nuclear Initiative ‘Trojan Horse,’” Missoulian, November
2, 1978; “Visiting Journalist Blasts Initiative 80,” Great Falls Tribune, November 2, 1978.
90. Cathy Kradolfer, “Anti-Initiative 80 Ad Lists Two Names of Citizens Who Favor the
Initiative,” Missoulian, November 6, 1978.
91. “New Nuclear Law Must Not Be Weakened,” Great Falls Tribune, November 9, 1978.
92. Cross, “Foes Call Anti-Nuclear Initiative ‘Trojan Horse.’”
93. “60 Picket against Nuclear Initiative,” Missoulian, November 6, 1978.
94. Kradolfer, “Anti-Initiative 80 Ad Lists Two Names of Citizens”; “Initiative 80 Oppo-
nents Blasted for ‘Lies’ in Ad,” Great Falls Tribune, November 6, 1978.
95. David D. Schmidt, Citizen Lawmakers: The Ballot Initiative Revolution (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1989), 74.
96. Quote is in “6-Mill Levy, Nuclear Issue Approved,” Missoulian, November 8, 1978. For
totals, see “Final Unofficial Totals in Missoula County,” Missoulian, November 9, 1978; Report
of the Official Canvas of the Vote Cast at the General Election Held in the State of Montana,
November 2, 1976.
97. “New Nuclear Law Must Not Be Weakened,” Great Falls Tribune, November 9, 1978.
98. Larry Elkin, “Pro-Nuke Forces Victims of Campaign Overkill,” Great Falls Tribune, No-
vember 9, 1978; “Initiative 80 Reaction Leading to Hysteria, Says Nuclear Vote,” Great Falls
Tribune, November 3, 1978.
99. Stuart S. White, “Nuclear Power Gets Negative State Vote,” Great Falls Tribune, Novem-
ber 8, 1978; “These People Are for Initiative 80,” Great Falls Tribune, November 6, 1978.
100. “Right to Choose,” Great Falls Tribune, November 5, 1978.
101. Jeffrey T. Renz, “On Whom Should We Rely for Nuclear Advice?” Great Falls Tribune,
November 2, 1978.
102. Lori Winship, Preston Adams, Ann Miller, Rose Heine, and Dianna Detienne, “80
Gives Us a Chance,” Great Falls Tribune, November 2, 1978.
103. Bert Lindler, “What Will Follow Nuclear Vote?” Great Falls Tribune, November 3, 1978.
104. Report of the Official Canvas of the Vote Cast at the General Election Held in the State
of Montana, November 2, 1976.
105. “MFU Endorses Initiative 80,” Missoulian, November 6, 1978; “Farmer’s Union Votes
I-80 Support,” Great Falls Tribune, November 6, 1978.
106. Wellock, Critical Masses, 8; Wellock, “Stick it in L.A.!”
107. Stephen Milder, “Between Grassroots Protest and Green Politics: the Democratic Po-
tential of the 1970s Antinuclear Activism,” German Politics and Society 33, no. 4 (Winter 2015):
25–39.

108. David S. Painter, “From the Nixon Doctrine to the Carter Doctrine: Iran and the Geo-
politics of Oil in the 1970s,” in American Energy Policy in the 1970s, ed. Robert Lifset (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 85.
109. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Claudia Puska, Andrew Hildner, and Eric Skovsted, What
Every Westerner Should Know about Energy (Boulder: Center of the American West, University
of Colorado, 2003), 19.
110. Gulliford, Boomtown Blues, 85–228.
111. Scamehorn, High Altitude Energy, 187.
112. Amundson, Yellowcake Towns, 135–180.
113. Harvey, 2–41; Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War (London: Verso, 1983).
114. Michael Kreisberg, “MCH Evaluation: Montana’s Missiles and the Arms Race,” June 5,
1980, in folder 28, box 2, MSS 630, UMT; Meyer Chessin to Margaret C. Kingsland, October
18, 1979, in folder 25, box 19, MSS 630, UMT. For broader context, see Gretchen Heefner, The
Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2012).
115. Meyer Chessin, “Montana and the Nuclear Winter,” Proceedings of the Montana Acade-
my of Sciences 45 (1985): 16–18.
116. Len Ackland, Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 181–188.
117. Harvey, American Anti-Nuclear Activism, 1975–1990, 68–167.
118. Roger Clawson, “Proposed Initiative Would Ban Dumping N-Wastes in Montana,” Bill-
ings Gazette, December 22, 1979; Eric W. Mogren, Warm Sands: Uranium Mill Tailings Policy in
the Atomic West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), 145–61.
8. Building a Socialist Environment
1. Miroslav Vaněk, Nedalo se tady dýchat: ekologie v českých zemích v letech 1968 až 1989
(Prague: Ústav pro Soudobé Dějiny AV ČR: MAXDORF, 1996), 54.
2. The Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences was created in 1953 to manage research in a
range of scientific and social scientific disciplines. The degree of ideological pressure on re-
searchers varied by field and time period. The government appears to have commissioned envi-
ronmental research in the 1960s–1980s in a genuine effort to understand the scope of environ-
mental problems. Various studies were quite critical of government environmental policy, but
they were generally not released to the public. An important exception was a comprehensive
environmental accounting of 1983 that was leaked, via dissidents, to foreign press outlets.
3. F. W. Carter, “Czechoslovakia,” in Environmental Problems in Eastern Europe, ed. Francis
W. Carter and David Turnock (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 63.
4. Petr Pavlínek and John Pickles, “Environmental Pasts/Environmental Futures,” Environ-
mental Politics 13, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 242–43.
5. Pavlínek and Pickles, 243.
6. Raymond Dominick, “Capitalism, Communism and Environmental Protection: Lessons
from the German Experience,” Environmental History 3, no. 3 (1998): 323–24.
7. Dominick, 324.
8. Dominick, 325
9. Dominick, 326.
10. Vyhláška no. 178, Ministry of Finance, December 1, 1960, “O opatřeních na ochranu
čistoty ovzduší,” Sbírka zákonů, December 16, 1960, 625. The preface to the regulations states
that the Ministry of Finance drafted the regulations, at the behest of the federal government, in

agreement with the State Planning Commission, the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of
Agriculture.
11. Vaněk, Nedalo; Petr Pavlínek and John Pickles, Environmental Transitions: Transforma-
tion and Ecological Defence in Central and Eastern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2000); Carter,
“Czechoslovakia.”
12. This statistic refers to coal production in north Bohemia, but it is indicative of trends in
Czechoslovakia as a whole. See Pavlínek and Pickles, Environmental Transitions, 99.
13. Pavlínek and Pickles, 55.
14. See Eagle Glassheim, “Ethnic Cleansing, Communism, and Environmental Devasta-
tion in Czechoslovakia’s Borderlands, 1945–1989,” Journal of Modern History 78, no. 1 (March
2006): 65–92. See also a multi-ministry report from 1969 that made this reasoning explicit:
Ministerstvo výstavby a techniky and Ministerstvo lesního a vodního hospodářství ČSR,
Analýza příčin vzniku současného stavu životního prostředí v Severočeské hnědouhelné pánvi,
October 15, 1969, 10, Okresní národní výbor (ONV) Most, Státní okresní archiv (SOkA) Most,
k 167 ic 502.
15. Bradley Matthys Moore, “For the People’s Health: Ideology, Medical Authority and
Hygienic Science in Communist Czechoslovakia,” Social History of Medicine 27, no. 1 (2013):
122–43.
16. Moore, 131.
17. Jan Ševčík, “Odešel skromný člověk,” Hygiena 58, no. 1 (2013): 37.
18. Dr. Švec, Okresní ústav národního zdraví v Mostě, K některým otázkám vlivu zivotní
prostředí na zdravotní stav obyvatelstva mosteckého okresu, February 20, 1964, 1, Okresní
národní výbor (ONV) Most, Státní okresní archiv (SOkA) Most, k 169 ic 504.
19. Švec, 8.
20. See letter from ONV Ústí to members of environmental review committee, n.d. (1960)
and Plánovací komise ONV v Ústí nad Labem politicko-organizační opatření . . . ke zlepšení
přírodního a pracovního prostředí v ústeckém okrese, December 9, 1960, Okresní národní vý-
bor (ONV) Ústí nad Labem, Archiv města Ústí nad Labem, k 138 ic 515. The north Bohemian
regional presidium of the Communist Party directed this effort. See “Za socialistické životní
prostředí v Severočeském kraji,” speech of KSC tajemník Oldřich Voleník and environmental
program of Krajský výbor Severočeské KSČ, November 1960, Okresní národní výbor (ONV)
Ústí nad Labem, Archiv města Ústí nad Labem, k 138 ic 515. This paragraph draws in part from
Glassheim, “Ethnic Cleansing.”
21. Pavlínek and Pickles report that higher smokestacks and scrubbers installed in the
1960s dispersed emissions and substantially cut ash deposition, but sulfur dioxide and NOx
emissions increased until 1980 and remained high until after 1990. See Pavlínek and Pickles,
Environmental Transitions, 57.
22. Of the many such reports, see Souhrnná zpráva koordinační komise o stavu životního
prostředí v okrese Ústí n. L., February 18, 1966, 17–18, Okresní národní výbor (ONV) Ústí nad
Labem, Archiv města Ústí nad Labem, k 138 ic 515.
23. Souhrnná zpráva koordinační komise o stavu životního prostředí v okrese Ústí n.L.,
February 18, 1966, 17, Okresní národní výbor (ONV) Ústí nad Labem, Archiv města Ústí nad
Labem, k 138 ic 515.
24. Ministerstvo výstavby a techniky and Ministerstvo lesního a vodního hospodářství
ČSR, Analýza příčin vzniku současného stavu životního prostředí v Severočeské hnědouhelné
pánvi, October 15, 1969, Okresní národní výbor (ONV) Most, Státní okresní archiv (SOkA)
Most, k 167 ic 502, 14, 17. Catherine Albrecht notes that exemptions were common: “Some

2,300 exceptions permitting enterprises to release untreated effluent were granted between
1957 and 1970.” See Catherine Albrecht, “Environmental Policies and Politics in Contemporary
Czechoslovakia,” Studies in Comparative Communism 20, no. 3/4 (1987): 294.
25. The following two paragraphs are adapted from Eagle Glassheim, “Unsettled Land-
scapes: Czech and German Conceptions of Social and Ecological Decline in the Post-War
Czechoslovak Borderlands,” Journal of Contemporary History 50, no. 2 (2015): 318–36.
26. Milan Gajda, interviewed in “Už gesto obrany,” Dialog [Ústí nad Labem] 3 (1966): 1.
27. František Voráček, “Smutné prvenství,” Dialog [Ústí nad Labem] 3 (1968): 14.
28. Vladimír Karfík, “Most: Obležené město,” Literární noviny 15, no. 26 (1966): 6–7.
29. Václav Smil, “Ke stanovisku inž. Josefa Odvárky,” Literární noviny 15, no. 51 (1966):
8. Smil added, “I have only seen in the SHR (North Bohemia Brown Coal Mines) plan . . .
numbers as to how much we will gain. But how much will we lose? Not only land, but water
sources, forests, and even basic human feelings of satisfaction, certainty, and peace.” Elsewhere
Smil wrote that rising standards of living were meaningless if they were purchased at such great
expense to health and environment. See Václav Smil, “Energie, krajina, lidé,” Vesmír 45, no. 5
(1966): 133. Smil’s official position in 1966 was as a scientific adviser in the office of the chief
architect for the city of Most. Personal communication, April 26, 2016.
30. Karfík, “Most,” 6–7.
31. In the mid-to late 1980s there were some modestly attended environmental protests as
the Communist regime weakened.
32. Dominick, “Capitalism, Communism,” 326.
33. This paragraph draws on the following articles: Glassheim, “Ethnic Cleansing”; Eagle
Glassheim, “Most, the Town that Moved: Coal, Communists, and the ‘Gypsy Question’ in Post-
War Czechoslovakia,” Environment and History 13, no. 4 (2007): 447–76.
34. Útvar hlavního architekta Most, 1, etapa zpracování sociologického průzkumu život-
ního prostředí Mostecka, December 1966, 8, 9, 24, 29, 30. Okresní národní výbor (ONV) Most,
Státní okresní archiv (SOkA) Most, k 169 ic 504. This survey was one of hundreds undertaken
by Czechoslovakia’s Communist government from the 1960s through the 1980s. Though we
cannot be certain that respondents answered any survey truthfully, I have not found a reason
to doubt the credibility of the Most survey of 1966, which occurred during a period of relative
openness.
35. Československá sociologická společnost při ČSAV Praha, Výzkumný tým v Ústí nad
Labem, Vliv některých faktorů životního prostředí na identifikaci občanů s městem Neštěmice, 1971.
Okresní národní výbor (ONV) Ústí nad Labem, Archiv města Ústí nad Labem, k 262 ic 1025.
Note that 68 percent of the town’s population identified themselves as “workers,” thus strength-
ening identification with local and regional industry.
36. See Glassheim, “Ethnic Cleansing.”
37. Vladimír Kořinek, “Životní prostředí, hygiena a právo,” Literární noviny 17, no. 4 ( Jan-
uary 1968): 10.
38. David N. Leff, “Familiar Story,” Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Develop-
ment 12, no. 4 (1970): 11–13.
39. F. Pohl, RFE Research, “Environmental Problems in Czechoslovakia,” May 17, 1972, 8,
RFE/RL Research Unit, OSA 300–30–6, 140.
40. Economic Commission for Europe, “ECE Symposium on Problems Relating to Envi-
ronment: Proceedings and Documentation of the Symposium,” United Nations, 1971, 57–60.
Czechoslovakia sent twenty-seven representatives, mostly from ministries, with a few from the
Academy of Sciences and the Hygiene Service. The latter two institutions were the most active

in promoting environmental protection in Czechoslovakia, and their minimal representation
may point to their political marginalization.
41. Economic Commission for Europe, 27.
42. United Nations, “Report of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environ-
ment,” Stockholm, June 5–16, 1972. For more on the dispute over the status of East Germany,
see chapter 13.
43. The Academy of Sciences noted its preparations for the 1976 United Nations Confer-
ence on Human Settlements (Habitat) in Vancouver in Zasedání presidia ČSAV, March 10,
1976, “Zpráva o činnosti Komise presidia ČSAV pro otázky životního prostředí,” Archive Akad-
emie věd (AAK), Komise presidia ČSAV pro otázky životního prostředí (KŽPČSAV), Prague,
k. 1, sig. 1, 6–7.
44. Geografický ústav ČSAV v Brně, “Životní prostředí v ČSR: současný stav, problémy a
perspektivy,” October 1973, 1, Archive Akademie věd (AAK), Komise presidia ČSAV pro otáz-
ky životního prostředí (KŽPČSAV), Prague, k. 4, sig. 1.
45. Geografický ústav ČSAV v Brně, 2.
46. Analýza současného stavu péče o životní prostředí, January 1977, Archive Akademie
věd (AAK), Komise presidia ČSAV pro otázky životního prostředí (KŽPČSAV), Prague, k. 4,
sig. 1, 47.
47. Analýza, 48.
48. Analýza, 57.
49. Geografický ústav ČSAV v Brně, “Životní prostředí,” 3.
50. Analýza, 5.
51. Analýza, 6. Similarly, a 1978 internal report on “Tasks of the Biological Sciences in the
Protection and Formation of the Environment” drew explicitly from the UNESCO Man and
the Biosphere program, the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE),
and the environment section of the 1975 Helsinki Accords. 7. Zasedání presidia ČSAV, Sep-
tember 19, 1978, “Úkoly biologických věd při ochraně a tvorbě životního prostředí,” Archive
Akademie věd (AAK), Komise presidia ČSAV pro otázky životního prostředí (KŽPČSAV),
Prague, k. 1, sig. 1, 1.
52. Pavlínek and Pickles, Environmental Transitions, 56–62.
53. Pavlínek and Pickles, 13, 15.
54. Spolek pro chemickou a hutní výrobu, Ústí, Zpráva o stavu a řešení problematiky ochra-
ny přírodních složek ž p v závodě v Ústí, March 14, 1977, Okresní národní výbor (OSN) Ústí
nad Labem, Archiv města Ústí nad Labem, k 262 ic 1019. In a similar case, the Ústí District Na-
tional Committee found itself begging the Regional National Committee to exert pressure—on
whom is unclear—to prioritize the repair of electrostatic precipitators in a local gasworks. The
District Committee could levy fines, but they could not mandate or finance the repairs. See
Odbor vodního a lesního hospodářství ONV Ústí to Předseda Severočeského KNV, n.d. (but
likely 1977), Okresní národní výbor (OSN) Ústí nad Labem, Archiv města Ústí nad Labem, k
262 ic 1020.
55. Pavlínek and Pickles, Environmental Transitions, 201.
56. See, for example, “’Unser Land wird bald unbewohnbar’ Die fortgeschrittene Ver-
wüstung der Umwelt in der Tschechoslowakei,” Der Spiegel 12 (1983): 150–58.
57. Both the seventh five-year plan (1980–1985) and the eighth five-year plan (1986–1990)
doubled previous investments in environmental policy, but this remained a very small propor-
tion (less than 0.5 percent) of national income. See Albrecht, “Environmental Policies,” 299.
58. Charter 77, “Zpráva o stavu životního prostředí,” May 12, 1981, reprinted in Charta 77:

Dokumenty 1977–1989 [Charter 77: Documents 1977–1989], vol. 2, ed. Blanka Císařovská and
Vilém Prečan (Prague: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2007), 381–90.
59. “Dopis předsednictvu vlády ČSSR o situaci v Severočeském kraji,” Informace o Chartě
77 6, no. 7 (1983): 1–2. See also “Rozbor ekologické situace ČSSR,” Informace o Chartě 77 6,
no. 12 (1983): 1–19; and Dokument 33/87, “Aby se dalo dýchat,” Informace o Chartě 77 10, no.
7 (1987): 2–10.
60. Vaněk, Nedalo, 69.
61. Sudetendeutscher Rat, “Rettet das Sudetenland!” (Munich: Sudetendeutscher Rat,
1984), 4.
62. On Waldsterben fears in the 1980s, see Franz-Josef Brueggemeier, “Waldsterben: The
Construction and Deconstruction of an Environmental Problem,” in Nature in German His-
tory, ed. Christof Mauch (New York: Berghahn, 2004), 119–31; Kenneth Anders and Frank
Uekötter, “Viel Lärm ums stille Sterben: Die Debatte über das Waldsterben in Deutschland,” in
Wird Kassandra heiser? Die Geschichte falscher Ökoalarme, ed. Frank Uekötter and Jens Hohens-
ee (Stuttgart, 2004), 112–38; and Joachim Radkau, Die Aera der Oekologie: Eine Weltgeschichte
(Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011), 235–40.
63. Sudetendeutscher Rat, Rettet das Sudetenland! (Munich: Sudetendeutscher Rat, 1984),
6–8.
64. Der Spiegel, “Unser Land,” 153. Literally this means an ideology of tonnage, but is per-
haps best understood as an ideology of “more is better.”
65. Der Spiegel, 158.
66. In Nedalo, Vaněk makes a related argument: in the late 1960s and early 1970s, “the glob-
al extent of the problem was (paradoxically from an ecological point of view) a reason why the
Czechoslovak leadership did not consider itself directly threatened politically by the environ-
mental crisis” (29).
67. Zsuzsa Gille documents this Western rhetoric of socialist inefficiency and waste in From
the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Post-Socialist
Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 2–3.
68. Odbor oblastního plánování SKNV, re: Zpráva o plnění úkolů . . . k programu péče o žp,
January 22, 1985, Severočeský krajský národní výbor (SKNV) Ústí nad Labem, Státní oblastní
archiv (SOA) Most, ic 248 k 668, 3–4.
69. Vaněk, Nedalo, 67.
70. For an excellent summary of Czechoslovak policy and outcomes in the 1980s, see Al-
brecht, “Environmental Policies.”
71. On environmental protest in Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s, see Padraic Kenney, A
Carnival of Revolution-Central Europe 1989 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002),
254–57; see also Vaněk, Nedalo, 87–104.
72. Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Longman, 2000),
134. For a useful critique of generalizations about the systemic and ideological roots of state-
Socialist environmental policy failures, see Zsuzsa Gille, “Two Pairs of Women’s Boots for a
Hectare of Land: Nature and the Construction of the Environmental Problem in State Social-
ism,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 8, no. 4 (1997): 1–21.
9. Protesting Pollution
1. “Europäische Waldaktion—Sommertreffen der EYFA in Krakow,” Arche Nova II, Octo-
ber 1988, Archiv Bürgerbewegung Leipzig (ABL).
2. David Bathrick, The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 1995), 32–34.

3. Frank Uekötter, The Greenest Nation? A New History of German Environmentalism (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 1–2. For a traditional understanding of New Social Movement
Theory, and within that green movement, see Roland Roth and Dieter Rucht, ed. Neue soziale
Bewegungen in der Bundesrepublik Detuschland (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1987).
4. See Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1949–1989 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995), and Hubertus Knabe, “Neue Soziale Bewegungen im Sozial-
ismus: Zur Genesis alternativer politischer Orientierungen in der DDR,” Kölner Zeitschrift für
Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 40 (1988).
5. This is not to say that there was not a transfer process between environmental groups in
East and West, but this chapter focuses on the influences on and evolution of environmental
positions in the GDR and Poland. For more on environmental protest in East and West Ber-
lin as well as the concept of transfer, see Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, “For a Decent Quality of
Life: Environmental Groups in East and West Berlin,” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 4 (2015):
625–46.
6. Scholarship on environmental politics in the Soviet Bloc tends to focus on a single coun-
try or provide side-by-side comparisons without delving into connections between countries.
For example, Tobias Huff, Natur und Industrie im Sozialismus: Eine Umwelgeschichte der DDR
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015); Barbara Hicks, Environmental Politics in Poland:
A Social Movement between Regime and Opposition (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996); Eagle Glassheim, Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands: Migration, Environment, and
Health in the Former Sudetenland (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016); Edward
Snajder, Nature Protests: The End of Ecology in Slovakia (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2008).
7. The German populist style of conservation, dating back to the nineteenth century, stands
in contrast to the top-down, scientifically oriented style of environmentalism that tended to
predominate in the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Bloc more generally. For a discussion of types
of German and Russian conservationism and engagement with nature, see, for example, Doug-
las Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nation Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berke-
ley: University of California Press 1999), and John Alexander Williams, Turning to Nature in
Germany: Hiking, Nudism and Conservation, 1900–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2007).
8. This comparison of the GDR and Poland is part of my larger dissertation project that
seeks to place the GDR in a larger, Central European context. In it, I heed Andrew Port and
Mary Fulbrook’s call to find “fresh ways of interpreting life behind the Iron Curtain” and to view
the GDR in relationship to larger international developments rather than in isolation. See Mary
Fulbrook and Andrew I. Port, eds., Becoming East German: Socialist Structures and Sensibilities
after Hitler (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 15.
9. Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols and the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the
Fall of State Socialism in Poland (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994),
104–5.
10. Charles Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 83–85.
11. DK 5/1831, “Information über den Stand und die Entwicklung des Umweltschutzes in
der DDR,” Wambutt, April 5, 1972, BArch.
12. In contrast, most Western European economies deindustrialized in the 1970s, focusing
on service and high-tech industries instead of coal and steel. For more on the economic trans-
formation of Western Europe, see Konrad H. Jarausch, “Zwischen‚ Reformstau und Sozialab-
bau’: Anmerkungen zur Globalisierungsdebatte in Deutschland, 1973–2003,” in Das Ende der

Zuversicht? Die siebziger Jahre als Geschichte, ed. Konrad. H. Jarausch (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 2008), 330–49.
13. Lausitzer und Mitteldeutsche Bergbau-Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH, “10 Jahre Sanie-
rungsbergbau mit Tagebaugroßgeräten: Eine Informationsschrift in Wort und Bild” (Borna,
Germany, 2000), 196.
14. RHG/ÜG 03, “Eine Reise nach Mölbis, Rötha und Espenheim: Erlebnisse, Fakten und
ein Aufruf!” undated, Arche, Grün-ökologisches Netzwerk in den Ev. Kirchen der DDR, Rob-
ert Havemann Gesellschaft.
15. By the mid-1970s, East Germans (although not officials) had begun to import the West
German word for this phenomenon: Waldsterben, or the dying of the forest. Waldsterben be-
came an important plank in the West German Green Party’s platform in the 1980s. Even into
the late 1980s, officials denied that Waldsterben existed in the GDR. For an example of this
rhetoric, see Erich Honecker, “Interview Erich Honeckers für BRD-Wochenzeitung “Die Zeit,”
Neues Deutschland, January 31, 1986.
16. B/II/3/1172, “Hauptziele der DDR-Umweltpolitik,” veröffentlicht in Der Morgen
(LDPD), Ost-Berlin, no. 150, June 27, 1984, Bundestagsfraktion, Ökologie in Osteuropa, Ar-
chiv Grünes Gedächtnis (AGG).
17. DC 20-I/3/715, “Prognose: Industrielle Abprodukte und planmäßige Gestaltung ein-
er sozialistischen Landeskultur in der DDR,” Dokumente zu den Tagesordnungspunkten des
Ministerrats, BArch.
18. RGH/Th 02/08, “PSEUDOKRUPP—Krankheitsverlauf und Therapie,” Umweltbe-
wegung—Luftverschmutzung, ADO. DK 500/22, “Titel der Vorlage: Information über die
Aufgabestellung des Forschungsprojektes‚ Medizinische Aspekte des Umweltschutzes,” Min-
isterium für Gesundheitswesen, Beirat für Umweltschutz im Ministerrat der DDR, 1984–1986,
BArch.
19. DC 20-I/3/715, “Prognose: Industrielle Abprodukte und planmäßige Gestaltung ein-
er sozialistischen Landeskultur in der DDR,” Dokumente zu den Tagesordnungspunkten des
Ministerrats, BArch.
20. DK 5/2145, “Bericht über Ergebnisse des Umweltschutzes in der Deutschen
Demokratischen Republik, 1981,” Ministerium für Umweltschutz und Wasserwirtschaft,
BArch.
21. Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1997), 14.
22. Barbara Hicks, Environmental Politics in Poland: A Social Movement between Regime and
Opposition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 37–38.
23. Katherine Lebow, Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–
1956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 14.
24. Hicks, Environmental Politics in Poland, 165; “Perspective from the East,” Airplan: Air
Pollution Action Network, no. 11, December 1987, 10, AGG.
25. RHG/Th 12/03, “Polski Klub Ekologiczny (PKE)—wer wir sind . . . ,” n.d., Osteuropa,
Polen.
26. Hicks, Environmental Politics in Poland, 123–24.
27. Materiały ogólne, “Uwaga: Huta Siechnice,” n.d., Wolność i Pokój: Oddział Życia Społec-
znego, Ossolineum Biblioteka, Wrocław.
28. Materiały ogólne, “Huta Siechnice powoduje zagrożenie dla środowiska naturalnego,
a w konsekwencji dla zdrowia ludzi,” Mariusz Urbanek, 1986, Wolność i Pokój, Oddział Życia
Społecznego, Ossolineum Biblioteka, Wrocław.

29. B II/3/1110, “Appell an den Sejm betreffend die ‘Huta im. Lenina’—Stahlwerke,” 1988,
Polski Klub Ekologiczny, AGG, Berlin.
30. Artikel 15, Absatz II, Verfassung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1968. Ma-
teriały ogólne, “Huta Siechnice powoduje zagrożenie dla środowiska naturalnego, a w konse-
kwencji dla zdrowia ludzi,” Mariusz Urbanek, 1986, Wolność i Pokój: Oddział Życia Społecznego,
Ossolineum Biblioteka, Wrocław.
31. Michał Kulesza, “Efektywność prawa i administracji w zakresie ochrony przyrody i śro-
dowiska, Fragment Raportu KOP PAN na III Kongres Nauki Polskiej,” in Problemy Ochrony
Polskiej Przyrody, ed. Romuald Olaczek and Kazimierz Zarzycki (Warsaw: Polish Scientific
Publishers, 1988), 24.
32. Hicks, Environmental Politics in Poland, 56.
33. Hermann Behrens, Würzeln der Ummweltbewegung: Die “Gesellschaft für Natur und
Umwelt” (GNU) im Kulturbund der DDR (Marburg: BdWi Verlag, 1993), 14; “Historia Ligi
Ochrony Przyrody,” http://www.lop.org.pl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article
&id=18&Itemid=24.
34. For more on the concept of “welfare dictatorship,” in which Communist parties in East-
ern Europe claimed to rule in the best interest of their citizen-workers, see Konrad H. Jarausch,
“Care and Coercion: The GDR as Welfare Dictatorship,” in Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a
Socio-Cultural History of the GDR, ed. Konrad H. Jarausch (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999),
57–62.
35. Gareth Dale, Popular Protest in East Germany, 1945–1989 (New York: Routledge, 2005),
102.
36. There are striking parallels to the Russian and Soviet traditions. See Douglas Weiner,
Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).
37. See, for example, contributors to Ekozwój Szansą Przetrwania Cywilizacji: Materiały z
Konferencji Polskiego Klubu Ekologicznego, 4–5 Czerwiec 1985 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Akade-
mii Górniczo-Hutniczej, 1986), and Problemy Ochrony Polskiej Przyrody, ed. Romuald Olaczek
and Kazimierz Zarzycki (Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1988).
38. Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship, 109.
39. The tension between activists in the church and state security (Stasi) surveillance con-
tinued until the SED’s fall in 1989–1990. Explicit persecution of Christians, such as making it
difficult to attend university, ended with this agreement in 1978. For more on church-state rela-
tions, see Claudia Lepp, Tabu der Einheit? Die Ost-West-Gemeinschaft der evangelischen Christen
und die deutsche Teilung (1945–1969) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005).
40. MfS/JHS 20205, ‘Diplomarbeit: Die Organisierung der politisch-operativen Arbeit
zur Verhinderung des Mißbrauchs von Umweltschutzproblemen für politische Untergrund-
tätigkeit,’ October 31, 1984, Juristische Hochschule Potsdam, Bundesbeauftragten für die Stasi-
Unterlagen (BStU), 8.
41. DO 4/800, Hans-Peter Gensichen, “Eine neue Phase des Umweltengagements in den
Kirchen,” Die Zeichen der Zeit 7/88, Heinz Blauer, ed, Berlin (Ost), Evangelische Verlaganstalt,
BArch.
42. Kirchliches Forschungsheim, Die Erde ist zu retten, 1980, 22, ABL.
43. Kirchliches Forschungsheim, 27.
44. RGH/TH 02/03, “Eine Mark für Espenhain oder ein Protest bekommt Flügel,” 1988,
Kohle-und Bergbau.
45. Jan Palmowski, Inventing a Socialist Nation: Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the
GDR, 1945–1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 26–31.

46. The members of the UB had previously been associated with a different congregation
in Lichtenberg, Berlin, and had a different name, but moved to the Zion Church in September
1986.
47. In November 1982 the East German Council of Ministers restricted access to all envi-
ronmental data, making it difficult for East Germans to learn the extent of the pollution. DK
5/1982, “Bericht über Probleme des Geheimnisschutzes beim Informationen zum Umwelt-
schutz,” October 25, 1982, Arbeitsgruppe für Organisation und Inspektion beim Ministerrat,
Ministerium für Umweltschutz und Wasserwirtschaft, BArch.
48. Wolfgang Rüddenklau, Störenfried: DDR Opposition, 1986–1989, Mit Texten Aus Den
“Umweltblättern” (Berlin: BasisDruck, 1992), 69.
49. RGH/TH 02/03, “Eine Mark für Espenhain oder ein Protest bekommt Flügel,” 1988,
Kohle-und Bergbau.
50. We can assume that readership was even higher, as each newsletter was typically passed
around to family members and circles of friends.
51. German History in Documents and Images, Robert Havemann Gesellschaft, http://
germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_image.cfm?image_id=2836.
52. RHG/RG/B 19/08, Letter to the editor, May 12, 1989, Umweltblätter Redaktion.
53. Polski Klub Ekologiczny, http://www.pke-zg.home.pl/.
54. Hicks, Environmental Politics in Poland, 105.
55. Hicks, 123–24.
56. Hicks, 125.
57. “Odezwa Programowa,” 1984; quoted in Hicks, 79–80.
58. Sabine Rosenbladt, Der Osten ist grün? Öko-raportage aus der DDR, Sovietunion, Tsche-
choslowakei, Polen, Ungarn (Hamburg, Rasch und Röhring Verlag, 1988), 14–15.
59. RHG/Th 12/03, “Polski Klub Ekologiczny (PKE)—wer wir sind . . . ,” n.d., Osteuropa,
Polen.
60. Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution, 59–60.
61. Hicks, Environmental Politics in Poland, 79–80.
62. Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution, 71–73.
63. Różne—WiP, Wolność i Pokój, Oddział Życia Społecznego, Ossolineum Biblioteka,
Wrocław.
64. Research: Polish Situation Report, 10/86, 18 11:27, June 27, 1986, Radio Free Europe,
http://storage.osaarchivum.org/low/92/5e/925e4dd8–9fe4–475f-81cd-c48e6ee0dc46_l.pdf.
65. B II 3/1101, “Greenway: The Youth Environmental Network in Eastern Europe,”
Bundesvorstand, AGG.
66. B II 3/1101, “Greenway.”
67. B II 3/1101, “Perspective from the East.”
68. The SED’s lack of reform also had to do with competition with West Germany and a
need to justify its existence as an independent (and necessary) East German state. If it did not
set itself in stark opposition to the West, its reason for being could be questioned. Moreover, it
faced the challenge of combating West German influence via radio and television among its
own population.
69. RHG/RR 02, Uwe Bastian, Arbeitspapier, “Greenpeace im unsichtbaren Visier des
MfS,” Personalbestand Rüdiger Rosenthal.
70. Stephen Kotkin, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), xiv–xv.
71. East Germans could, and did, listen to West German radio and television. Traveling
to the West remained difficult, and so East Germans who could get visas to visit Poland had

another way of gaining contacts to and information from West Germany, and Western Europe
more generally.
72. B II 3 1101, Greenway Meeting, September 17–20, 1987, Kraków, “Eastern Euro-
pe,”Bündnis 90/Die Grünen Bundestagsfraktion, 1994, 1998, AGG.
73. B II 3 1101, Greenway Meeting.
74. RGH/HJT 14, Jörg Naumann, “3: Greenway-Treffen in Krakow,” Briefe, April 17, 1988,
Personalbestand Hans Jürgen Tische, “Europäische Waldaktion—Sommertreffen der EYFA in
Krakow,” Arche Nova II, October 1988, ABL. Umweltblätter is a play on words that can be trans-
lated either as “environmental pages” or “environmental leaves.”
75. RHG/Th 02/06, “Europäische Waldaktion—Somertreffen der E.Y.F.A. in Krakow,”
Waldsterben, DDR-Umweltbewegung.
76. MfS Abt X 257, Correspondence between Ministry for State Security, Regional Depart-
ment Berlin, and the Polish Foreign Ministry, June–August 1989, Abteilung X, Internationale
Verbindungen, BStU.
77. MfS Abt X 257, Correspondence between the Bezirksverwaltung für Staatssicherheit
Berlin, Abteilung XX and the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, Abteilung X, Internationale
Verbindungen, July 14, 1989, BStU. In his book Przyjaźń której nie było, Tytus Jaskułowski ex-
plores the cooperation (or lack thereof) between the Stasi and the Polish Interior Ministry. He
argues that they rarely worked together and that it was often counterproductive when they did,
typically trying to use their partner ministries for their own purposes. While this does seem to
generally hold true for environmental activists, in Jordan’s case, they did cooperate. For a short
summary of Jaskułowski’s book, see http://www.hait.tu-dresden.de/ext/fors_2.asp?ma=96.
78. MfS JHS MF VVS 681 76, Fachschulabschlußarbeit, “Die politisch-operative Aufga-
benstellung bei der vorbeugenden Absicherung der zentralen staatlichen Leitung des Umwelt-
schutzes unter besondere Berücksichtigung seiner zunehmenden Bedeutung in den internatio-
nalen Beziehungen,” January 4, 1977, Juristische Hochschule Potsdam, BStU.
79. MfS HA XX 17175, “Information über eingeplantes‚ Greenway-Arbeitstreffen‘vom 28.9.
bis 1.10.1989 in der Kirchgemeinde Berlin-Friedrichsfelde,” Hauptabteilung XX, Staatsapparat,
Blockparteien, Kirchen, Kultur, “politischer Untergrund,“ BStU.
80. “Europäische Waldaktion—Sommertreffen der EYFA in Krakow,” Umweltblätter, Sep-
tember 27, 1988, ABL.
81. RHG/TH 02/01, “Youth Forest Action in Cracow (Poland) 10.-14.7.1988,” Umwelt-
bewegung Allgemein. At the time 100 zloty was about 1.40 DM (as referenced in Sabine Ro-
senbladt, Der Osten ist grün? Öko-Reportage aus der DDR, Sowjetunion, Tschechoslowakei, Polen,
Ungarn (Hamburg: Rasch und Röhring Verlag, 1988), 13.
82. These stereotypes date back at least to the Enlightenment, as Larry Wolff ’s Inventing
Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 1994) suggests. Prussian and German authorities reiterated ideas that
Poles were lazy and poor after German unification in the 1870s, as Matthew P. Fitzpatrick
points out in Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansion and Nationalism, 1848–1914 (New
York: Berghahn Books, 2008). Tensions were, of course, exacerbated in the twentieth century
with German minorities in Poland during the interwar years, and then the German occupation
of Poland during World War II. For a discussion of the GDR’s position in the Soviet Bloc and its
more western orientation (rather than aligning with its Slavic neighbors), see for example, John
Connelly, “The Paradox of East German Communism: From Non-Stalinism to Neo-Stalinism?”
in Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe, ed. Vlad-
imir Tismaneanu (New York: Central European University Press, 2009), 161–94.

10. About Environmental Policy in Socialist Yugoslavia
1. Despite its outward form, at the beginning in 1945 federal Yugoslavia, it was not a true
federation. All the important decisions were taken by the top leadership of the Communist Par-
ty. In 1964 reforms began moving the country in the direction of true federalism. The reforms
resulted in the Yugoslav constitution of 1974, which gave great powers of the six republics and
two autonomous provinces. It guaranteed them the right to their independence.
2. The Ninth Summit Conference of Heads of State of the Non-Aligned Movement, Belgrade,
Yugoslavia, September 4–7, 1989, adopted a declaration that is partly focused on the environ-
ment. See United Nations, General Assembly, Security Council, District General, A/44/551,
S/20870, September 29, 1989, Final documents of the Ninth Conference of Heads of State
or Goverment of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries, Belgrade, September 4–7, 1989,
107–9. The role of this nonaligned movement has not yet been investigated.
3. Some of the general works that briefly present the history of socialist Yugoslavia are John
R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country (New York: Cambridge Universi-
ty Press, 1996), and Sabrina P. Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and Legitimation,
1918–2005 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
4. On the environmental history of the Cold War, see J. R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger,
eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
5. Zoran Oštrić, “Ekološki pokreti u Jugoslaviji—građa za proučavanje razdoblja 1971–
1991,” Socijalna ekologija 1, no. 1 ( January–March 1992): 83–104.
6. Vladimir Lay and Jelena Puđak, “Civilno društvo i udruge na području zaštite okoliša u
Hrvatskoj 1989–2014,” Ekonomska i ekohistorija 10, no. 1 (2014): 27–30.
7. Katarina Polajnar Horvat, “Razvoj okoljske mislenosti v Sloveniji,” Geografski vestnik 81,
no. 2 (2009): 72–75; Katarina Polajnar Horvat, Aleš Smrekar, and Matija Zorn, “The Devele-
poment of Environmental Thought in Slovenia: a Short Overview,” Ekonomska i ekohistorija, no.
10 (2014): 16–25.
8. Službeni list Demokratske Federativne Jugoslavije, no. 54, Beograd, 1945.
9. Službeni list Federativne Narodne Republike Jugoslavije, no. 81, Beograd, 1946.
10. Službeni list Narodne Republike Bosne i Hercegovine, no. 19, 1947; Službeni glasnik Narodne
Republike Srbije, no. 54, 1948; Službeni glasnik Narodne Republike Crne Gore, no. 4, 1949; Službe-
ni vesnik Narodne Republike Makedonije, no. 11, 1949; Narodne novine (Službeni list Narodne Re-
publike Hrvatske), no. 48, 1949; Uradni list Ljudske Republike Slovenije, no. 23, 1948.
11. Hrvatski državni arhiv (hereafter HDA) HR-HDA-1032 Gušić Branimir, box 12.
12. Narodne novine (Službeni list Narodne Republike Hrvatske), no. 19, 1960; Narodne novine
(Službeni list Socijalističke Republike Hrvatske), no. 34, 1965; Službeni glasnik Narodne Repub-
like Srbije, no. 47, 1961; Službeni glasnik Socijalističke Republike Srbije, no. 24, 1965; Službeni list
Narodne Republike Bosne i Hercegovine, no. 4, 1965; Službeni glasnik Narodne Republike Crne
Gore, no. 17, 1961; Službeni glasnik Socijalističke Republike Crne Gore, no. 12, 1965.
13. Borivoje Trajković, Milutin Milošević, and Branislav Vesnić, Pokret gorana Srbije: 1960–
1980 (Beograd: Republička konferencija Pokreta gorana Srbije, 1981), 96.
14. The Constitution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (New York: Cross-Cultural
Communications, 1976).
15. Ratko Kevo, ed., Zaštita prirode u Hrvatskoj (Zagreb: Zavod za zaštitu prirode, 1961).
16. Milorad M. Janković et al., Pet decenija Zavoda za zaštitu prirode Srbije (Beograd: Zavod
za zaštitu prirode Srbije, 1998).

17. Slovenia carried a different cultural and historical heritage from other parts of Yugoslavia.
It had previously belonged to the developed Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
Perhaps this heritage helps explain why Slovenia emerged as the most progressive of the Yugo-
slav republic in environmental matters (among others).
18. Stane Peterlin, “Nekaj o zametkih in začetkih varstva narave v Sloveniji,” Varstvo spome-
nikov 20 (1976): 90–91; Dubravka Bujanović, “Istorijat rada na zaštiti prirode u SFRJ sa poseb-
nim prikazom rada na zaštiti prirode u SAP Vojvodini,” magistarski rad, Centar za postiplomski
studij, Sveučilište u Zagrebu, unpublished manuscript, Zagreb, 1979, 44–45.
19. Bujanović, 46–47.
20. Đorđije Minjević, ed., Međunarodni ugovori i drugi sporazumi u oblasti čovekove sredine
(Beograd: Koordinacioni odbor za čovekovu sredinu, prostorno uređenje i stambene i komu-
nalne poslove Saveznog izvršnog veća i izvršnih veća socijalističkih republika i socijalističkih
autonomnih pokrajina, 1986).
21. Ivo Banac, With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).
22. Siniša Stanković, Okvir života (Beograd: Nolit, 1933).
23. Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, “‘For a Decent Quality of Life’: Environmental Groups in East
and West Berlin,” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 4 (2015): 625–46; Astrid Mignon Kirch-
hof and Chris McConville, “Introduction: Transcontinental and Transnational Links in Social
Movements and Environmental Policies in the 20th Century,” Australian Journal of Politics and
History 61, no. 3 (2015): 331–38, here 333.
24. In the 1970s public opinion polls indicated high environmental awareness in Slovenia
compared to Western and Northern Europe. See “Rezimeji referata na plenarnim sastancima
i sastancima sekcija VI. kongresa geografa FNRJ u Ljubljani od 27. do 30. septembra 1961,” in
Proceedings of the VI. Congress of Geographers of Yugoslavia, Ljubljana, 1961; Franci Avčin, Človek
proti naravi [Man against nature] (Ljubljana: Tehniška založba Slovenije, 1969); Stane Peterlin,
ed., Zelena knjiga o ogroženosti okolja v Sloveniji [The green book on the threat to the environ-
ment in Slovenia] (Ljubljana: Prirodoslovno društvo Slovenije: Zavod za spomeniško varstvo
SR Slovenije, 1972). Zelena knjiga o ogroženosti okolja v Sloveniji was published in preparation
for United Nations Conference on Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972.
25. Hovat, “Razvoj okoljske mislenosti v Sloveniji,” 74.
26. One such was the publication of the environmental magazine Ekologija [Ecology], ed-
ited by Siniša Stanković; Planerski atlas prostornog uređenja [The planning atlas of spatial plan-
ning] (Beograd: Jugoslovenski institut za urbanizam i stanovanje, 1973); Nenad Prelog, ed.,
Borba za život, platforma za ekološku akciju [Fight for life, a platform for environmental action]
(Beograd: Komunist: Jugoslovenski savet za zaštitu i unapređenje čovekove okoline, 1973), a
publication of the founding meeting of the Council for Protection and Improvement of the
Environment of Yugoslavia.
27. Božidar Gluščević, Siniša Maričić, and Branislava Perović, eds., Nauka, čovek i njegova
okolina: zbornik Četvrte medjunarodne konferencije Nauka i društvo, Herceg-Novi od 3. do 10. jula
1971 (Beograd : Udruženje Nauka i društvo, 1972).
28. Arhiv Republike Slovenije, Ljubljana, SI AS 1176/34/40, Skupnost za varstvo okolja.
29. Rudi Supek, Ova jedina zemlja: Idemo li u katastrofu ili u Treću revoluciju (Zagreb: Napri-
jed, 1973.)
30. Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, 627. Savet za zaštitu i unapređenje životne sredine.
31. Environmental magazines: Čovek i životna sredina [Man and environment] (Beograd),

Zaštita atmosphere [The protection of the atmosphere] (Sarajevo), and Naše okolje [Our envi-
ronment] (Ljubljana). These publications brought theory to applied, practical issues but also
helped to promote relevant legislation.
32. For the Croatian example, see HDA, Zagreb, Socijalistički savez radnog naroda Hr-
vatske, Republička konferencija. Savjet za zaštitu i unapređenje čovjekove okoline i prostorno
uređenje, box 1.
33. Ustav Socijalističke Federativne Republike Jugoslavije. Ustav Socijalističke Republike Hr-
vatske (Zagreb: Pregled—Novinsko izdavačka ustanova, 1984), 100, 323–24.
34. For example, article 276 of the 1974 constitution of the Socialist Republic of Croatia.
Ustav Socijalističke Federativne Republike Jugoslavije, 100, 323–24.
35. The first of the Yugoslav republics to establish a Ministry of Environment was Slovenia
in 1974. In Croatia the first ministry that carried the name of environmental protection was the
Committee for Construction, Housing and Utilities and Environmental Protection, established
under that name in 1982—as a part of it, there was a Department of Planning and Environmen-
tal Protection. In that same year Macedonia and Vojvodina each established an environmental
ministry, and Serbia did so in 1989—the other republics, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Monte-
negro, and Kosovo did not have any environmentally oriented ministry. See Arhiv Republike
Slovenije, Ljubljana, SI AS 710, Republiški komite za varstvo okolja in urejanje prostora Social-
istične republike Slovenije; Interview by Hrvoje Petrić with the first minister for Environment
of Socialist Republic Croatia Danijel Režek, Prelog, Croatia, February 27, 2015; HDA, Zagreb,
Republički komitet za građevinarstvo, stambene i komunalne poslove i zaštitu čovjekove oko-
line, box 1–5; Arhiv Vojvodine, Novi Sad, RS 02, F 198, Izvršno veće Vojvodine; Službeni list
Socijalističke Autonomne Pokrajine Vojvodine, no. 13, 1982; Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Sarajevo,
Republički sekretarijat za prostorno uređenje i zaštitu okoline.
36. Various volumes of the journal: Čovek i životna sredina: jugoslovenski časopis za
unapređenje kvaliteta života (1980–1989); Avguštin Lah, “Jugoslavija—Zaštita i unapređen-
je čovjekove okoline,” Enciklopedija Jugoslavije 6 (Zagreb: Jugoslavenski leksikografski zavod
Miroslav Krleža 1990), 215.
37. Lah, 215.
38. On the United Nations Conference of the Human Environment and the German ques-
tion, see chapter 13.
39. For the draft declaration of the conference, see National Archive at College Park
(NACP), telegram 2054 of the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm to the U.S. Department of State in
Washington on June 16, 1972, file SCI 41–3 UN, 1970–1973, General Records of the Depart-
ment of State, RG 59.
40. The first Conference on the Protection of the Adriatic was held In Opatija, Croatia,
in late 1974, issuing fifty-six communications on the complex issues of the Adriatic Sea; the
second brought together more than four hundred participants, held in Hvar, Croatia, in April
1979; the third conference was held in Budva, Montenegro, in 1984; the fourth was held in
Neum, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
41. Branislav Krstić and Dušan Pajović, Zakonodavstvo urbanizma, arhitekture, baštine, pros-
tornog uređenja, čovjekove sredine (Beograd: Naučna knjiga, 1987), 56. Interview by Hrvoje
Petrić with first director of the Croatian Institute for Physical Planning and Environment Fa-
cility, Ljubomir Jeftić, Zagreb, Croatia, March 3, 2015. Janez Stanovnik was at the head of the
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe from 1968 to 1983. Within the commission he
tried to include Yugoslavia in environmental issues, but Yugoslavia did not show interest. At
the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, he gave a short talk. He was also

a member of World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), or Brundtland
Commission. Interview by Hrvoje Petrić with Janez Stanovnik, Ljubljana, Slovenia, August 25,
2015.
42. Đorđije Minjević, ed., Međunarodni ugovori i drugi sporazumi u oblasti čovekove sredine
(Beograd: Koordinacioni odbor za čovekovu sredinu, prostorno uređenje i stambene i komu-
nalne poslove Saveznog izvršnog veća i izvršnih veća socijalističkih republika i socijalističkih
autonomnih pokrajina, 1986). In 1967–1970 a development plan was drafted for the southern
Adriatic on the initiative of the UNDP and the United Nations Center for Housing, Construc-
tion and Planning. See Lah, “Jugoslavija,” 215.
43. Branislav Krstić, ed., Čovekova sredina i prostorno uređenje u Jugoslaviji—pregled stanja
(Beograd: Beogradski izdavačko-grafički zavod, 1979).
44. Environmental Policies in Yugoslavia (Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development, 1986).
45. Oštrić, “Ekološki pokreti u Jugoslaviji,” 84.
46. Ciril Baškovič, Pavel Gantar, Marjan Pungartnik, and Pavel Zgaga, Študentsko gibanje:
1968-’72 (Ljubljana: Republiška konferenca ZSMS, Univerzitetna konferenca ZSMS, 1982);
Nika Nikolič, “Položaj študentov: vpliv študentskih gibanj in organizacij na družbeno-politični
prostor” (master’s thesis, University of Ljubljana, 2009, 14–15).
47. Boris Kanzleiter, “1968. u Jugoslaviji—tema koja čeka istraživanje” [1968 in Yugosla-
via—a topic yet to be explored], in Društvo u pokretu: Novi društveni pokreti u Jugoslaviji od 1968
do danas [New social movements in Yugoslavia: From 1968 until the present day], ed. Đorđe
Tomić and Petar Atanacković (Novi Sad, Serbia: Cenzura, AKO, Žindok centar, 2009), 41.
48. Tomislav Krčmar, “Ekološko obrazovanje korist cijeloj zajednici. Razgovor s prof. dr.
Verom Johanides, osnivačem studija ekološkog inženjerstva na zagrebačkom sveučilištu,” Čovek
i životna sredina 3, no. 1 (1978): 43–44.
49. From 1971 to 1991 Otto Weber was the chairman of the UNESCO Man and Biosphere
program for Yugoslavia—it was his doing that led UNESCO later to declare Dubrovnik, Plit-
vice Lakes National Park and the Tara River Canyon as World Heritage Sites. See Marko Šarić
“Prof. dr. Otto A. Weber (1924.-1994.),” Arhiv za Higijenu Rada i Toksikologiju [Archives of In-
dustrial Hygiene and Toxicology] 45 (1994): 285–86.
50. Ivan Furlan, Pedagogizacija čovjekove okoline (Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1974), 1–123.
51. Ivo Matoničkin, Zlatko Pavletić, and Milan Cvitković, Čovjek i njegova okolina (Zagreb:
Centar za industrijsko oblikovanje, 1979), 1–143.
52. There were several methods of spreading the news on environmental issues among
young people. I recall preschool kids without reading skills who in 1978 were taught about the
environment with self-adhesive stickers and albums.
53. Vicko Pavičić and Angela Rokavec, Živi svijet i njegova okolina. Priroda za 6. razred
osnovne škole (Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1974).
54. “Kako je u Vojvodini prihvaćen novi nastavni predmet,” Čovek i životna sredina 3, no. 1
(1978): 45.
55. Arena: ilustrirani tjednik. The magazine was in print from 1970 to 1990.
56. Lay and Puđak, “Civilno društvo i udruge na području zaštite okoliša u Hrvatskoj 1989–
2014,” 27–30 ; Oštrić, “Ekološki pokret u Jugoslaviji,” 86–93.
57. Arhivi Ekoloških društava Koprivnica i Đurđevac (Archives of Ecological Societies Ko-
privnica and Đurđevac); in private ownership.
58. Ljubomir Petrović, “Nuklearna havarija u Černobilu 1986. godine,” Istorija XX. veka 28,
no. 2 (2010): 101–16.

59. Damir Mikulčić, Nuklearne elektrane. Činjenice za razmišljanje (Zagreb: Zajednica elek-
troprivrednih organizacija Hrvatske, 1988), 1–64; Janez Sušnik, “Evaluation of Consequences
and Risks in Slovenia,” Nuclear Society of Slovenia, Third Regional Meeting: Nuclear Energy in
Central Europe, Portorož, Slovenia, September 16–19, 1996, 33–42; Oštrić, “Ekološki pokret
u Jugoslaviji,” 87,
60. Oštrić, “Ekološki pokret u Jugoslaiji,” 87–93.
61. Marko Strpić, “Anarhizam u Hrvatskoj u drugoj polovici 20. stoljeća,” in Snaga utopije—
Anarhističke ideje i akcije u drugoj polovici dvadesetog stoljeća, ed. Dražen Šimleša (Zagreb: Što
čitaš, 2005); Oštrić, “Ekološki pokret u Jugoslaiji,” 97.
62. On debates on the founding of the Greens, see Silke Mende, Nicht rechts, nicht links,
sondern vorn. Eine Geschichte der Gründungsgrünen (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2011); Astrid
Mignon Kirchhof, “Interactions between the Australian and German Environmental Move-
ments,” in: Von Amtsgärten und Vogelkojen: Beiträge zum Göttinger Umwelthistorischen Kolloqui-
um 2011–2012, ed. Manfred Jakubowski-Tiessen (Göttingen: Universitätsverlag, 2014), 67–77;
Christopher Rootes, “Exemplars and Influences: Transnational Flows in the Environmental
Movement,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 61, no. 3 (2015): 414–31.
63. Carlos González Villa, “Slovenian 1989: Elite Construction of a National Democracy,”
Časopis za povijest Zapadne Hrvatske 9, no. 9 (2014): 61–62.
64. He is the author of several books that have influenced the strengthening of the environ-
mental movement in Slovenia. See Dušan Plut, Slovenija—zelena dežela ali pustinja (Ljubljana:
Krt, 1987); see also Dušan Plut, Belokranjske vode (Novo Mesto, Slovenia: Dolenjski muzej,
1988).
65. Richard. J. Crampton, Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century—and After (London and
New York: Routledge, 1997), 455.
66. Zofija Savec, Volitve 1990 (Ljubljana: Zavod Republike Slovenije za statistiko, 1990),
1–106.
67. Andrej Hozjan, “Zeleni Slovenije od ustanovitve leta 1989. do padca demosove vlade,”
Časopis za zgodovino in narodopisje/Review for History and Ethnograhy 72, no. 3–4 (2001):
418.
68. Oštrić, “Ekološki pokret u Jugoslaviji,” 99.
69. Ivan Grdešić, Mirjana Kasapović, Ivan Šiber, and Nenad Zakošek, Hrvatska u izborima
’90 (Zagreb: Naprijed, 1991), 5–255; Oštrić, “Ekološki pokret u Jugoslaviji,” 96–97.
70. Marko Mijatović, Lokalni izbori u Republici Srbiji nakon obnove višestranačkog sistema
1990–2015 (Beograd: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, 2016), 1–410; Veselin Pavićević, Izborni
sistem i izbori u Crnoj Gori: 1990–1996 (Podgorica: CID, 1997), 1–356; Oštrić, “Ekološki
pokret u Jugoslaviji,” 99–101.
71. Državno izborno povjerenstvo Republike Hrvatske, izbori 1990; Republički zavod za
statistiku, Dokumentacija 801; Oštrić, “Ekološki pokret u Jugoslaviji,” 100; Dejan Jović, “Re-
gionalne političke stranke,” Društvena istraživanja 1, no. 1 (1992): 173–88.
11. “It Makes No Sense to Work against Nature”
1. In 1943 President Roosevelt convened a conference in Hot Springs, Virginia, on nutrition
and food supply. Here, delegates created the Food and Agriculture Organization. Later confer-
ences took place in Quebec City, where the Morgenthau Plan also first received attention. See
Amy L. Sayward, The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organi-
zation, and World Health Organization Changed the World, 1945–1965 (Kent, OH: Kent State
University Press, 2006).

2. Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For an introduction to Germany, the Nazi
Empire, and Malthusian thinking, see E. M. Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the
Battle for Food (New York: Penguin Press, 2012); David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature:
Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); Mi-
chael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (London:
Pan, 2002); C. Unger, Ostforschung in Westdeutschland: Die Erforschung des europäischen Ostens
und die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 1945–1975 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007).
3. Postwar planners did not use the term socio-ecological metabolism, but as scholars of social
metabolism do, they studied the flow of calories and energy in and out of the country. For one
example of work on social metabolism, see Manuel González de Molina Navarro and Víctor
Manuel Toledo, The Social Metabolism: A Socio-Ecological Theory of Historical Change (New
York: Springer, 2014).
4. Frank Uekötter, Die Wahrheit ist auf dem Feld: Eine Wissensgeschichte der deutschen Land-
wirtschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhöck & Ruprecht, 2010).
5. See Frank Uekötter and Jonathan Harwood, Europe’s Green Revolution and Others Since:
The Rise and Fall of Peasant-Friendly Plant Breeding (London: Routledge, 2012).
6. Kiran Klaus Patel, “The Paradox of Planning: German Agricultural Policy in a Europe-
an Perspective, 1920s to 1970s,” Past & Present 212, no. 1 (August 2011): 239–69; Arnd Bau-
erkämper, “The Industrialization of Agriculture and its Consequences for the Natural Environ-
ment: An Inter-German Comparative Perspective,” Historical Social Research 29, no. 3 ( July
2004): 124–49; Mark Finlay, “New Sources, New Theses, and New Organizations in the New
Germany: Recent Research on the History of German Agriculture,” Agricultural History 75, no.
3 (Summer 2001): 279–307; Kiran Klaus Patel, Europäisierung wider Willen die Bundesrepub-
lik Deutschland in der Agrarintegration der EWG 1955—1973 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009);
Ulrich Kluge, Vierzig Jahre Agrarpolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Hamburg: P. Parey,
1989).
7. On East German agricultural policy, see Andreas Dix, ‘Freies Land:’ Siedlungsplanung im
ländlichen Raum der SBZ und frühen DDR 1945–55 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2002); After the
“Socialist Spring”: Collectivisation and Economic Transformation in the GDR (New York: Berghahn
Books, 2009); Patrice Poutrus, Die Erfindung des Goldbroilers. Über den Zusammenhang zwi-
schen Herrschaftssicherung und Konsumentwicklung in der DDR (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2002).
8. Frank Uekötter, “Why Panaceas Work: Recasting Science, Knowledge, and Fertilizer
Interests in German Agriculture,” Agricultural History 88, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 68–86; Frank
Uekötter, “Know Your Soil: Transitions in Farmers’ and Scientists’ Knowledge in Germany,” in
Soils and Societies: Perspectives from Environmental History, ed. J. R. McNeill and Verena Wini-
warter (Winwick, Cambridgeshire, UK: White Horse Press, 2006).
9. In my larger project, I am tracing the history of this discourse about American soil plun-
der as it evolved among German Americans and German nationals before World War I until
the early Cold War. On postwar comparisons of German Kultur and American materialism, see
Christoph Hendrik Müller, West Germans against the West: Anti-Americanism in Media and Pub-
lic Opinion in the Federal Republic of Germany 1949–68 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010). Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno thought a lot about a German or
European third way in-between Soviet Communism and American materialism. See Theodor
W. Adorno, “Kultur and Culture,” Social Text 27, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 145–58; Eric S. Nelson,
“Revisiting the Dialectic of Environment: Nature as Ideology and Ethics in Adorno and the
Frankfurt School,” Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Politics, Philosophy, Critical Theory, Culture, and

the Arts 155 (2011): 105–26; Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity:
Technology, Politics, and Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
10. Morgenthau was not alone in pushing for Germans to consume less. Others included
some East German landscape architects such as Georg Pniower and Reinhold Lingner. See
Georg Pniower, Bodenreform und Gartenbau (Berlin: Siebeneicher Verlag, 1948), and Reinhold
Lingner, Landschaftsgestaltung (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1952). Another American with similar
ideas was James Stewart Martin, “Germany’s Cartels Are at It Again,” in The Dilemma of Postwar
Germany, ed. Julia E. Johnsen (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1948).
11. Henry Morgenthau, Germany Is Our Problem (New York: Harper, 1945), 46–48, 62–64,
68–69.
12. Morgenthau 44–45.
13. Morgenthau 48, 51–60, 146.
14. Morgenthau 60
15. Morgenthau 52–53, 57–60.
16. Morgenthau 54, 56.
17. The scholarship on the Morgenthau Plan is underdeveloped and some of it is highly
politicized. See John Dietrich, The Morgenthau Plan Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy
(New York: Algora, 2002); Warren F. Kimball, Swords or Ploughshares?: The Morgenthau Plan
for Defeated Nazi Germany, 1943–1946 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1976); Jeffry M Diefendorf,
Axel Frohn, and Hermann-Josef Rupieper, American Policy and the Reconstruction of West Ger-
many, 1945–1955 (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1993).
18. Scott J. Peters, “‘Every Farmer Should Be Awakened’: Liberty Hyde Bailey’s Vision of
Agricultural Extension Work,” Agricultural History 80, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 190–219; Paul A.
Morgan and Scott J. Peters, “The Foundations of Planetary Agrarianism: Thomas Berry and
Liberty Hyde Bailey,” Journal of Agricultural & Environmental Ethics 19, no. 5 (October 2006):
443–68; James Kates, “Liberty Hyde Bailey, Agricultural Journalism, and the Making of the
Moral Landscape,” Journalism History 36, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 207–17; Ben A. Minteer, “Bio-
centric Farming? Liberty Hyde Bailey and Environmental Ethics,” Environmental Ethics 30, no.
4 (Winter 2008): 341–59.
19. Herbert Levy, Henry Morgenthau, Jr.: The Remarkable Life of FDR’s Secretary of the Trea-
sury (New York: Skyhorse, 2010).
20. Morgenthau, Germany Is Our Problem, 50–52.
21. “Vorschlag für Abbau des Viehbestandes in der US Zone,” May 20, 1946, Bundesarchiv
Koblenz (hereafter BAK), B116/1616; “US UK Occupied Areas Cattle Livestock,” 1947, BAK
B116/1618.
22. “Wichtige Eilnachricht für den deutschen Bauern,” Zeitungs-und Rundfunkaufsatz, no.
10, July 1947, BAK B116/1616.
23. “Auswirkungen des Abbaus des Viehs in der US Zone,” 1946.05.20 and “Bericht über
eine Sitzung betreffend Schlachtvieherfassung,” August 30, 1946, BAK B116/1616.
24. John E. Farquharson, “The Management of Agriculture and Food Supplies in Germany,
1944–1947,” in Agriculture and Food Supply in the Second World War, ed. Martin and Milward
(Ostfildern, Germany: Scripta Mercaturae Verlag, 1985), 51–52.
25. Subcommittee Fertilizers—Länderrat Main Committee Food and Agriculture, Novem-
ber 22, 1946, BAK Z1/100; Bipartite Control Commission, “Jahresbericht für die Ernaehrungs-
und Landwirtschaftsorganisation der Vereinten Nationen,” 1947, BAK Z6/171; Report, “Ger-
many, US Zone, Land Greater Hessen,” August 9, 1946, 1946 Report on European Mission
Folder, Government Service File (1942–1948), Andrews Papers, Truman Library (hereafter

APTL); Report, “Certain Shortfalls in German Performance in Food and Agriculture through
March 1947,” 1947 General Folder, Government Service File (1942–1948), APTL; Report,
“Germany, US Zone,” August 30, 1946, 1946 Report on European Mission Folder, Government
Service File (1942–1948), APTL; Report, “A Year of Potsdam,” 1946 Year of Potsdam Folder,
Government Service File (1942–1948), APTL; Report, “USDA OFAR Agricultural and Food
Programs of the ERP Countries,” October 7, 1949, 13, 1942–53—1949 General Folder, Gov-
ernment Service File, APTL; Subcommittee Agricultural Policy and Production Planning, May
29, 1946, Länderrat, BAK Z/100; Proposed Policy Concerning Forest Land Conversion and
Cropping Program (August 1946) and Letter from W. M. Kane, Regional Government Coor-
dinating Office, January 3, 1947, BAK Z1/802.
26. Bipartite Control Commission, “Jahresbericht für die Ernährungs-und Landwirt-
schaftsorganisation der Vereinten Nationen,” 1947, 25, BAK Z6/171; Report, “Germany, US
Zone, Land Bavaria,” August 13, 1946, 1946 Report on European Mission Folder, Government
Service File—1942–53, APTL.
27. “Wichtige Eilnachricht für den deutschen Bauern,” Zeitungs-und Rundfunkaufsatz, no.
10, July 1947, BAK B116/1616.
28. Farquharson, “The Management of Agriculture and Food Supplies in Germany,” 57.
29. Farquharson, 63; John B. Canning and Willis Ellington, “Gewisse Ausfälle in der deut-
schen Leistung in der Ernährungs-und Landwirtschaft während des Monats März 1947,” June
22, 1947, 5–6, BAK Z6/127; Livestock Adjustment Program, November 1, 1946; and Otto
Bauer, “Viehabbauplan und seine Durchführung,” November 15, 1946, BAK B116/1616.
30. Hugh Hester, “Programm über die Anpassung der Viehbestände in der US Zone,” Au-
gust 30, 1946, BAK B116/1616.
31. Farquharson, “The Management of Agriculture and Food Supplies in Germany,” 57–58;
Canning and Ellington, “Gewisse Ausfälle in der deutschen Leistung in der Ernährungs-und
Landwirtschaft während des Monats März 1947,” June 22, 1947, 10–11, BAK Z6/127.
32. “Bericht über eine Sitzung betreffend Schlachtvieherfassung beim Länderrat am
29, August 1946,” BAK B116/1616; Bipartite Control Commission, “Jahresbericht für die
Ernährungs-und Landwirtschaftsorganisation der Vereinten Nationen,” 1947, BAK Z6/171;
Hans Schlange-Schöningen, Im Schatten des Hungers: Dokumentarisches zur Ernährungspolitik
und Ernährungswirtschaft in den Jahren 1945–1949 (Hamburg: Verlag Paul Parey, 1955), 85;
Karl Brandt, “Can Germany Ever Feed its People?” Saturday Evening Post, November 16, 1946,
52; Farquharson, “The Management of Agriculture and Food Supplies in Germany,” 58–59;
John B. Canning and Willis Ellington, “Gewisse Ausfälle in der deutschen Leistung in der
Ernährungs-und Landwirtschaft während des Monats März 1947,” June 22, 1947, 5–9, BAK
Z6/127; September 17, 1946, and December 18, 1946, meetings, Main Committee Food and
Agriculture, Länderrat, BAK Z1/100; “Rinderschlachtungsprogramm,” February 24, 1947,
BAK B116/1618; Aktenvermerk Viehabbauprogramm 1947, February 19, 1947; and “Aus den
Protokoll der Sitzung des hauptauschusses für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft am 17.9.1946,”
September 17, 1946; and “Entwurf-Bericht über den Viehanpassungsplan nach den Stand von
Ende Mai 1947,” June 1, 1947; and “Wichtige Eilnachricht für den deutschen Bauern,” Zeitungs
und Rundfunkaufsatz, no. 10, July 1947, BAK B116/1616.
33. Farquharson, “The Management of Agriculture and Food Supplies in Germany,” 60–63.
34. Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 31, 1947, BAK Z6/I93; Fernschreiben to Dr. Hans Schlange-
Schöningen from Dr. Hans Erhard, November 8, 1947, BAK Z6/I91; “Abschrift—Dr. Baum-
gartner kritisiert Zweizonenamt für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft,” November 6, 1947, BAK
Z6/I91; Letter from Dr. Wilhelm Niklas to Stanley Andrews, Octover 30, 1949, 1949 personal

folder, box 2, APTL; Farquarson, “The Management of Agriculture and Food Supplies in Ger-
many,” 60–61.
35. VELF, “Vorschlag zur deutschen Selbsthilfe in der Ernährungslage,” May 12, 1947, BAK
Z6/I26; Schlange-Schöningen, 1955, 115–16, 136–47, 174–80; “Stellungnahme zur Kritik Bay-
erns an den Arbeiten der VELF,” November 8, 1948, BAK Z6/I93.
36. On Germany and ideas of nature, see Frank Uekötter, The Greenest Nation?: A New Histo-
ry of German Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014); Thomas Rohkrämer, Eine
andere Moderne? Zivilisationskritik, Natur und Technik in Deutschland 1880–1933 (Paderborn,
Germany: Schöningh, 1999); Thomas Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Pres-
ervation and German Identity, 1885–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003);
William H. Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in
the German Heimatschutz Movement, 1904–1918 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1997).
37. VELF, “Jahresbericht 1949 für das Bizone and die Ernährungs-und Landwirtschafts-
organisationen der Vereinten Nationen,” May 23, 1949, BAK Z1/I171; Report on European
Mission, September 14, 1946, 1946 Report on European Mission folder, box 1, APTL; “USDA
OFAR Agricultural and Food Programs of the ERP Countries,” October 7, 1949, 13, 1942–53–
1949 general folder, box 2, APTL.
38. VELF, “Vorschlag zur deutschen Selbsthilfe in der Ernährungslage,” May 12, 1947, BAK
Z6/I26. In effect, the Americans did not just behave as an occupier but also were “seeing like
a state,” as defined by James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the
Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
39. Scott, Seeing Like a State.
40. Karl Brandt, “The German Fat Plan and Its Economic Setting,” Fats and Oils Studies,
Food Research Institute, Stanford University, no. 6, September 1938, 18.
41. VELF, “Jahresbericht 1949 für das Bizone und die Ernährungs-und Landwirtschaftsor-
ganisationen der Vereinten Nationen,” May 23, 1949, 24–25, BAK Z1/I171; “Lebendige Land-
wirtschaft,” Die Zeit, August 7, 1947; “Vorläufiger Kurzbericht über die USA Reise Dr. Köne-
kamp,” January 4, 1949, BAK Z6/I172.
42. December 18, 1946, meeting, Main Committee Food and Agriculture, Länderrat, BAK
Z1/100.
43. Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 31, 1947, BAK Z6/I93.
44. Karl Brandt, The Reconstruction of World Agriculture (New York: W. W. Norton, 1945),
24, 138, 242, 252; Karl Brandt, “Reconstruction of European Agriculture,” Foreign Affairs, Jan-
uary 1945, 291; Karl Brandt, “Crisis in German Agriculture,” Foreign Affairs, July 1932, 634;
Brandt, The Reconstruction of World Agriculture, 24, 138.
45. Karl Brandt, Is There Still a Chance for Germany? America’s Responsibility (Hinsdale, IL:
H. Regnery Co., 1948), 12–13; Karl Brandt, “MALTHUS REVISITED—AGAIN!” Challenge
(05775132) 14, no. 4 (March 1966): 45–46.
schaftsorganisation der Vereinten Nationen,” 1947, BAK Z6/171.
47. “Die deutsche Wirtschaftsnot: Gemeinsame Stellungnahme des Ernährungs-und Land-
wirtschaftsrates sowie des Verwaltungsrats für Wirtschaft zu der britisch-amerikanischen Kritik
an den deutschen Ernährungs-und Wirtschaftsverhältnissen,” July 3, 1947, BAK Z6/127; VELF,
“Befreiung von der Zwangswirtschaft durch Erzeugungssteigerung,” December 8, 1948, BAK
Z6/I72; VELF, “Proposals for Self-Aid with Regard to the Food Situation,” May 13, 1947, BAK
Z6/I26; Letter to Ministerial Rat von John from Staatsrat im Bayer, Staatsministerium für En-

rährung, January 26, 1948, BAK Z6/I28; unpublished memoirs, 478–80, 483, 491, “Journal of
a Retread,” vol. 2, box 30, APTL; Euguene V. Rostow, “The Partition of Germany and the Unity
of Europe,” in The Dilemma of Postwar Germany, ed. Julia Johnsen (New York: H. W. Wilson
Co., 1948), 141–42.
48. See note 44 for German concerns. Morgenthau, despite the accusations of his critics,
actually did not propose a complete deindustrialization of West Germany. He only insisted
on scaling industry back to lessen the influence of cartels and prominent industrialists. See
Morgenthau, Germany Is Our Problem, 44–45. Not unlike the proponents of the Tennessee Val-
ley Authority or fellow American critics of laissez faire economics such as Benton McKaye or
Lewis Mumford, he imagined a decentralized economy supporting a mixed landscape of small-
scale industry, agriculture, open spaces, and midsize cities. For American thinking, see Adam
Wesley Dean, An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil
War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), and Larry Anderson, Benton
MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner, and Creator of the Appalachian Trail (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 2008). These visions of an organic modernity resembled (and sometimes
built upon) efforts in interwar Germany by landscape architects to plan urban expansion and
economic growth to retain green spaces necessary for the social and cultural well-being of Ger-
mans. See Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature, 99–152.
49. Schlange-Schöningen, Im Schatten des Hungers, 120.
50. Unpublished memoirs, 545, “Journal of a Retread” memoir file, vol. 3 folder, box 31,
APTL.
51. Report, “Agricultural Extension in Bavaria, Food, Agriculture, and Forestry Group
(OMGUS),” Travel Europe 1949 folder, Travel Europe Fall 1949 to Travel South America file,
HBTL; Report, J. H. Richter, “The Farm Family in Europe,” October 13, 1950, 1950 Speech
Folder, Government Service file, 1942–53, APTL; unpublished memoirs, 986, “Journal of a
Retread” memoir file, vol. 4 folder, box 31, APTL.
52. Report, “A Year of Potsdam,” 1946 Year of Potsdam folder, Government Service file
(1942–1948), APTL; OMGUS Press Release, February 4, 1949, 1948–49 Newspaper Clip-
pings and Press Releases folder, Government Service file, 1942–1953, APTL.
APTL.
54. Diary of the Germany trip, Travel Europe 1949 folder, box 4, HBTL; Notes and Draft on
Increasing Food Supply in Germany, Travel Europe Fall 1949 folder, box 3, HBTL.
55. Diary of the Germany trip, Travel Europe 1949 folder, box 3, HBTL; Speech, “We Must
Win the Peace,” We Must Win the Peace folder, box 3, HBTL; Notes and Draft, “Increasing
Food Supply in Germany,” August 1949, Travel—Europe, Fall 1949 folder, Scrapbooks to Trav-
el Europe 1949 file, Hugh Bennett Papers, Truman Library (hereafter HBTL).
56. Speech, “We Must Win the Peace,” We Must Win the Peace folder, box 3, HBTL; “The
Obligations of International Leadership,” Scrapbook Folder no. 4, box 2, HBTL. While struc-
tural problems did exhaust weary landowners, both Bennett and Andrews constantly underes-
timated peasants and their careful adaptation to environmental and economic risks.
57. Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 283; Notes for Berlin speech, April 23, 1951, Berlin
Speech folder, box 5, APTL; Speech, “The Food Picture in Europe (Frankfurt),” April 23, 1951,
1951 Trip to Europe folder, box 5, APTL; Speech in Bonn, May 9, 1951, 1951 Personal Corre-
spondence folder, box 5, APTL; Letter to Andrews from Conrad Hammer, March 11, 1952,
1952 Personal Correspondence folder 3, box 6, APTL; Notes and Draft, “Increasing Food
Supply in Germany,” August 1949, Travel—Europe, Fall 1949 folder, box 3, HBTL; Letter to
Notes to Page 191 285

John McCloy, High Commissioner West Germany, August 24, 1949, Travel—Europe, Fall 1949
folder, box 3, HBTL.
58. St. Louis Globe Democrat, December 6, 1948, 1948 general folder 2, box 1, APTL;
Speech, “Germany—Key to European Recovery,” January 6, 1948, 1948 general folder 1, box
1, APTL; unpublished memoirs, 433, “Journal of a Retread” memoir file, vol. 2 folder, box 30,
APTL; Speech, “We Must Win the Peace,” We Must Win the Peace folder, box 3, HBTL.
APTL.
60. Karl Brandt, “What to Do with Germany?” Vital Speeches of the Day, June 22, 1945, 657,
659; Karl Brandt, Germany: Key to Peace in Europe (Claremont, CA: Claremont College, 1949),
6–7, 15, 24, 26–27.
61. Brandt, “What to Do with Germany?” 659.
62. Brandt, Germany Is Our Problem, 18; Brandt, Germany: Key to Peace, 26, 63; Karl Brandt,
“What is Going on in Germany Today?” Vital Speeches of the Day, November 15, 1949, 77.
63. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neo-
liberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Quinn Slobodian,
“How to See the World Economy: Statistics, Maps, and Schumpeter’s Camera in the First Age of
Globalization,” Journal of Global History 10, no. 2 (2015): 313. This transatlantic network of neo-
liberal economists and other scholars went on to play a key role in establishing West Germany’s
social market economy, but it also influenced the rise of the New Right in the United States and
Thatcherism in the United Kingdom.
64. Slobodian, 317.
65. Brandt, Germany Is Our Problem, 9.
66. Speech, “Feed the People,” 1946, 1943–1946 general folder, box 1, APTL.
67. “Feed the People,” 25.
68. Karl Brandt, “The German Fat Plan and Its Economic Setting,” 10; Karl Brandt, “Public
Control of Land Use in Europe,” Journal of Farm Economics 21 (February 1939): 66.
69. Brandt, “The German Fat Plan and Its Economic Setting,” 218–25.
70. Brandt, “Crisis in German Agriculture,” 640.
71. Brandt, “Reconstruction of European Agriculture,” 290.
72. Brandt, The Reconstruction of World Agriculture, 364, 368; Brandt, Germany: Key to Peace,
61; Brandt Germany Is Our Problem, 7; Brandt, Is There Still a Chance for Germany?, 12–13, 18;
Brandt, “What is Going on in Germany Today?,” 78. On Andrews and Bennett, see Speech in
Bonn, May 9, 195, 1951 Personal Correspondence folder, box 5, APTL; Notes, “Some Thoughts
on German Agricultural Policy,” 1951 Trip to Europe—Berlin Speech folder, box 5, APTL;
Newspaper clipping, September 1949, Scrapbooks (3 of 7) folder, box 2, HBTL.
73. Brandt, The Reconstruction of World Agriculture, 364; Letter to British and U.S. mem-
bers of the Bipartite Board from VELF, July 3, 1947, BAK Z6/I27; Allgemeine Zeitung, August
8, 1948, BAK Z6/I199; Dr. Arthur Hanau, Bericht über die Teilnahme an FAO der Vereinten
Nationen, November 1948, January 8, 1949, BAK Z6/I173.
74. Hans Schlange-Schöningen, Lebendige Landwirtschaft (Hanover: Landbuch Verlag,
1947), 209–11, 213.
75. Quinn Slobodian, “The World Economy and the Color Line: Wilhelm Röpke, Apart-
heid and the White Atlantic,” German Historical Institute Bulletin Supplement no. 10 (2014): 70.
76. In addition to Slobodian, “The World Economy and the Color Line,” see J. Daniel Ham-
mond and Claire H. Hammond, “Religion and the Foundation of Liberalism,” Modern Age 55,
no. 1/2 (2013): 35–51.

77. Slobobian, “The World Economy and the Color Line,” 62; Brandt, The Reconstruction of
World Agriculture, 16.
78. Brandt, The Reconstruction of World Agriculture, 20, 55.
79. Brandt, 55.
80. Brandt, 354.
81. Brandt, 354–355.
82. Brandt, “MALTHUS REVISITED—AGAIN!” 46.
83. Alfred Könekamp, Der Grünlandbetrieb: Gegenwarts-und Zukunftsfragen für den Prakti-
ker (Stuttgart: Eugen Ulmer, 1959), 15.
84. Brandt, The Reconstruction of World Agriculture, 16, 30, 48, 253, 369.
85. Reichsstelle für Naturschutz, Abschrift—Bericht des Sonderausschusses “Erhaltung
des deutschen Waldes,” April 26, 1946, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, B245/230; Graf von der Re-
cke, “Der Holzexport nach England: Falsche Voraussetzungen/schwere Folgen,” Stuttgarter
Wirtschaftszeitung, October 24, 1947; Wilhelm Münker, “Hilferuf des sterbenden Waldes-Eine
Silvesterbetrachtung über Holz und Kohle,” December 31, 1946; “Protokoll der Gründungsver-
sammlung und ersten Arbeitstagung der SDW,” December 5, 1947, BAK B245/230. See also
Prof. Dr. K. Mantel, “Die Lage des deutschen Waldes (Gutachten),” April 23, 1948; Letter from
Mantel, April 23, 1948; Letter from Krautwig of Direktorialkanzlei to VELF, May 28, 1948,
BAK Z13/802; “Protokoll der Gründungsversammlung und ersten Arbeitstagung der SDW,”
December 5, 1947, BAK B245/230; Letter to Franz Heske from Carl Schenck, June 14, 1948,
North Carolina State University Special Collections MC.35.05.
86. Carl Ross, OMGUS, Notes on Overseas Food Production Scheme for Germany, Sep-
tember 6, 1949, General Correspondence (1933–1971) folder, box 1, HBTL.
87. Letter to John McCloy, August 24, 1949, Travel—Europe Fall 1949 folder, box 3, APTL;
Report, “USDA OFAR Agricultural and Food Programs of the ERP Countries,” October 7,
1949, 13, 1942–53–1949 general folder, box 2, APTL; Notes for Berlin Speech, April 23, 1951,
Berlin Speech folder, box 5, APTL; Speech, “The Food Picture in Europe,” April 23, 1951, 1951
Trip to Europe folder, box 5, APT; Notes and Draft, “Increasing Food Supply in Germany,” Au-
gust 1949, Travel—Europe, Fall 1949 folder, box 3, HBTL.
schaftsorganisation der Vereinten Nationen,” 1947, BAK Z6/171.
89. Schedule for Bizonal Military government officials, August 11, 1948, BAK Z6/I199; “An-
trag—USA Studienreise für deutsche Grünlandfachleute,” November 1, 1951; 1952 Technical
Assistance Program; “Technical Assistance,” March 21, 1952; H. A. Schoth, “Entwurf für den
Bericht über die Grünlandüberprüfung in Westdeutschland,“ May 20, 1952, BAK B116/629.
90. Kendra Smith-Howard, Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History Since 1900
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); A. A. Hanson, D. K. Barnes, and R. R. Hill, Alfal-
fa and Alfalfa Improvement (Madison, WI: American Society of Agronomy, 1988); Notes and
Draft, “Increasing Food Supply in Germany,” August 1949, Travel—Europe, Fall 1949 folder,
box 3, HBTL; Schlange-Schöningen, Lebendige Landwirtschaft, 105–10.
91. Report, “USDA OFAR Agricultural and Food Programs of the ERP Countries,” Octo-
ber 7, 1949, 13, 1942–53–1949 general folder, box 2, APTL.
92. Daniel Nyfeler, Olivier Huguenin-Elie, Matthias Suter, Emmanuel Frossard, and An-
dreas Lüscher, “Grass–Legume Mixtures Can Yield More Nitrogen than Legume Pure Stands
Due to Mutual Stimulation of Nitrogen Uptake from Symbiotic and Non-Symbiotic Sources,”
Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment 140, no. 1/2 ( January 2011): 155–63.
93. H. A. Schoth, “Entwurf für den Bericht über die Grünlandüberprüfung in Westdeutsch-
land,” May 20, 1952, BAK B116/629.

94. Dr. Joris, “Erfahrungs-und Erfolgsbericht,” April 22, 1953; OLF Gräber Landwirt-
schaftskammer für Hessen Nassau—Erfahrungs-und Erfolgsbericht, April 20, 1953; Dr. Klaus
Brandy, “Erfahrungs-und Erfolgsbericht,” April 17, 1953, BAK B245/640.
95. Könekamp, Ausschnitte aus der Landwirtschaft der Nordoststaaten der USA unter beson-
derer Berücksichtigung der Grünlandwirtschaft und des Futterbaues (Berlin: Paul Parey, 1950),
416–17; Könekamp, “Zusammenfassung der Eindrücke einer Studienreise in USA,” January 4,
1949, and Heinz Speiser, “Beobachtungen über den Extension Service in USA,” December 28,
1948, BAK Z6/I172; M. Kloeckner, “Erfahrungs-und Erfolgsbericht,” April 16, 1953, and von
Halen, “Bericht über die Auswertung der USA Studienreise,” April 16, 1953, BAK B245/640;
Uekötter, Die Wahrheit ist auf dem Feld, 270.
96. Heinz Speiser, “Beobachtungen über den Extension Service in USA,” December 28,
1948, BAK Z6/I172; Ulrich Schmid, “USA Landwirtschaft als Beispiel: Nutzanwendung für
die Bizone,” Die Welt, August 26, 1948, BAK Z6/I199. Dr. Rühmann, “Erfahrungs-und Erfolgs-
bericht,” April 22, 1953, and Dr. Horst von Bleichert, “Erfahrungs-und Erfolgsbericht,” April
27, 1953, BAK B245/640. See also Alfred Könekamp, “Vorläufiger Kurzbericht über die USA
Reise,” January 4, 1949, BAK Z6/I172; Könekamp, Ausschnitte aus der Landwirtschaft, 444–49;
Könekamp, Der Grünlandbetrieb, 13.
97. C. H. Dencker, “Vorbericht über die Ergebnisse einer Studienreise nach den USA,” De-
cember 1948, BAK Z6/I172.
98. Rudolf Kelch, “Erfahrungs-und Erfolgsbericht,” April 13, 1953, BAK B245/640.
99. Brandt, “The German Fat Plan and Its Economic Setting,” 226–30, 249. Dencker,
“Vorbericht über die Ergebnisse einer Studienreise nach den USA”; C. H. Dencker, “Land-
technik,” January 25, 1949, and Vermerk, February 8, 1949, BAK Z6/I173; Dr. Klaus Brandy,
“Erfahrungs-und Erfolgsbericht,” April 17, 1953, and Friedrich Brünner, “Erfahrungs-und Er-
folgsbericht,” April 8, 1953, and Rudolf Kelch, “Erfahrungs-und Erfolgsbericht,” April 13, 1953,
and C. Michaelis, “Erfahrungs-und Erfolgsbericht,” March 26, 1953, BAK B245/640.
100. “Die Überwindung der kommenden Agrarkrise: Ein Gespräch mit Dr. Schlange Schö-
ningen über seine Studienreise in den Ver. Staaten,” Stuttgarter Nachrichten, August 23, 1948;
Hans Schlange-Schöningen, speech, August 12, 1948; and “Umbau der Landwirtschaft: Ein
Interview mit Dr. Schlange-Schönignen,” Die Zeit, August 26, 1948, BAK Z6/I199.
101. “Umbau der Landwirtschaft: Ein Interview mit Dr. Schlange-Schönignen,” Die Zeit,
August 26, 1948.
102. Könekamp, Ausschnitte aus der Landwirtschaft, 416; Könekamp, “Vorläufiger Kurzbe-
richt über die USA Reise,” January 4, 1949, BAK Z6/I172; Könekamp, “Zusammenfassung der
Eindrücke einer Studienreise in USA, ” January 4, 1949, BAK Z6/I172; Könekamp, Der Grün-
landbetrieb, 12–16, 30–37.
103. Könekamp, Ausschnitte aus der Landwirtschaft, 430. On specialization in grass produc-
tion, see Könekamp, Der Grünlandbetrieb, 17–18.
104. Alfred Könekamp, “Grünland—die unsichtbare Kolonie,” Deutsche Bauernzeitung 2,
no. 20 (1949): 5.
105. Könekamp, Der Grünlandbetrieb, 23–27.
106. Könekamp, 22, 25, 29.
107. Könekamp, “Vorlaeufiger Kurzbericht über die USA Reise,” January 4, 1949, BAK Z6/
I172.
108. VELF, “Jahresbericht 1949 für das Bizone und die Ernährungs-und Landwirtschafts-
organisationen der Vereinten Nationen,” May 23, 1949, BAK Z1/I171; Dr. Arthur Hanau, “Be-
richt über die Teilnahme an FAO der Vereinten Nationen in November 1948,” January 8, 1949,

BAK Z6/I173; Könekamp, “Vorläufiger Kurzbericht über die USA Reise,” January 4, 1949,
BAK Z6/I172.
109. Schlange-Schöningen, Lebendige Landwirtschaft, 209–11, 214–19.
110. Frank Uekötter, “As flüssige Gold der Landwirtschaft,” in Kuriosa der Wirtschafts-, Un-
ternehmens-und Technikgeschichte: Miniaturen einer ‘fröhlichen Wissenschaft’ (Essen, Germany:
Klartext, 2008), 77.
111. Uekötter, 78–79.
112. Uekötter, 79.
113. Uekötter, 80.
114. Könekamp, Der Grünlandbetrieb, 74–79.
115. Könekamp, 74, 82.
116. Uekötter, “As flüssige Gold der Landwirtschaft,” 77.
12. An American Miracle in the Desert
Quoted from Aaron Wolfe audio interview with Alvin Weinberg and Calvin Burwell, 1991,
courtesy of Aaron Wolfe. The episode is also mentioned in Alvin M. Weinberg, “Chapters from
the Life of a Technological Fixer,” Minerva 31, no. 4 (1993): 379–454.
1. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks in New York City at the Dinner of the Weizmann Institute
of Science,” February 6, 1964, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=26060.
2. The metaphor of carrots and sticks is used routinely by scholars describing U.S.-Israel
relations vis-à-vis the Dimona nuclear site. See, for examples, Yakub Halabi, US Foreign Policy
in the Middle East (London: Ashgate, 2009); Michael Karpin, The Bomb in the Basement: How
Israel Went Nuclear and What that Means for the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006);
Jeremy Pressman, Warring Friends: Alliance Restraint in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press, 2008), chapter 4.
3. See Audra J. Wolfe, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold
War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).
4. Weinberg, “Chapters from the Life of a Technological Fixer”; see also Lisa Rosner, ed.,
The Technological Fix: How People Use Technology to Create and Solve Problems (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2004).
5. Alvin M. Weinberg, “Can Technology Replace Social Engineering?” Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, December 1966, 4–8.
6. Alexander Zucker, “Alvin M. Weinberg, 20 April 1915—18 October 2006,” Proceedings of
the American Philosophical Society 152, no. 4 (2008): 571–76.
7. Stewart L. Udall, The Quiet Crisis (New York: Avon, 1963).
8. L. Boyd Finch, Legacies of Camelot: Stewart and Lee Udall, American Culture, and the Arts
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 135.
9. Scott Kirsch, Proving Grounds: Project Plowshare and the Unrealized Dream of Nuclear
Earthmoving (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005).
10. Julian E. Zelizer, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for
the Great Society (New York: Penguin, 2015).
11. Warren I. Cohen, “Lyndon Baines Johnson vs. Gamal Abdul Nasser,” in Lyndon Johnson
Confronts the World: Foreign Policy, 1963–1968, ed. Warren I. Cohen and Nancy Bernkopf Tuck-
er (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 279–310.
12. The political stakes in such massive transformations are discussed in Richard P. Tucker,
“Containing Communism by Impounding Rivers: American Strategic Interests and the Global
Spread of High Dams in the Early Cold War,” in Environmental Histories of the Cold War, ed. J. R.

McNeill and Corinna R. Unger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 139–66; Silvia
Borzutsky and David Berger, “Dammed if You Do, Dammed if You Don’t: the Eisenhower Ad-
ministration and the Aswan Dam,” Middle East Journal 64, no. 1 (2010): 84–102.
13. Task Group on Nuclear Power and Saline Water Conservation, An Assessment of Large
Nuclear Powered Sea Water Distillation Plants: A Report of an Interagency Task Group (Washing-
ton: Office of Science and Technology, 1964).
14. Task Group on Nuclear Power and Saline Water Conservation, An Assessment of Large
Nuclear Powered Sea Water Distillation Plants.
15. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Toasts of the President and Prime Minister Eshkol,” June 1, 1964,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=26285.
16. Seth M. Siegel, Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 103.
17. Memorandum from the President’s Special Assistant for Science and Technology
(Hornig) to President Johnson, July 9, 1964, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–
1968, vol. 34, Energy Diplomacy and Global Issues, document 132, http://history.state.gov
/historicaldocuments/frus1964–68v34/d132.
18. Donald F. Hornig, Memorandum for the Record, July 9, 1964, Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy Diplomacy and Global Issues, document 133, http://
history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964–68v34/d133.
19. Sara Reguer, “Controversial Waters: Exploitation of the Jordan River, 1950–80,” Middle
Eastern Studies 29, no. 1 (1993): 53–90.
20. The American attitude can be found in Telegram from the Consulate General at
Jerusalem to the Department of State, October 14, 1955, Foreign Relations of the United
States, 1955–1957, vol. 14, Arab- Israeli Dispute, 1955, doc 336, http://history.state.gov
21. Memorandum from the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South
Asian Affairs (Talbot) to Secretary of State Rusk, November 18, 1963, Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1961–1963, vol. 18, Near East, 1962–1963, doc 364, http://history.state.gov
22. Itay Fischhendler, “When Ambiguity in Treaty Design Becomes Destructive: A Study
in Transboundary Water,” Global Environmental Politics 8, no. 1 (2008): 111–36. See also Yoram
Nimrod, Angry Waters: Controversy over the Jordan River (Givat Haviva, Israel: Center for Ara-
bic and Afro Asian Studies, 1966). For an overview of the conflict over the Jordan River basin,
see Miriam R. Lowi, Water and Power: The Politics of a Scarce Resource in the Jordan River Basin
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
23. A. Giambusso, “Trip Report—Catalytic Construction Company, Philadelphia, Penn-
sylvania—July 19–21, 1965 (U.S.-Israel Study),” n.d., National Archives and Records Admin-
istration, Southeast Region, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Files of the Former Reactor
Division, box 19.
24. On Israel’s plutonium separation program in the 1960s, see Avner Cohen, Israel and the
Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
25. Giambusso, “Trip Report.”
26. Memorandum from the President’s Special Assistant ( Johnson) to the President’s Spe-
cial Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy), August 30, 1965, Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy Diplomacy and Global Issues, document 138, http://
27. Memorandum of conversation, November 2, 1964, Foreign Relations of the United States,

1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy Diplomacy and Global Issues, document 134, http://history
.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964–68v34/d134.
28. Memorandum from the President’s Special Assistant for Science and Technology
(Hornig) to the President’s Special Assistant (Valenti), September 14, 1965, Foreign Relations
of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy Diplomacy and Global Issues, document 140,
http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964–68v34/d140.
29. Details about Israel’s nuclear weapons program are in Cohen, Israel and the Bomb.
30. Information Memorandum from the Director of the Office of International Scientific
Affairs (Pollack) to Secretary of State Rusk, October 20, 1965, Foreign Relations of the Unit-
ed States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy Diplomacy and Global Issues, document 144, http://
31. Information Memorandum from the Director of the Office of International Scientific
Affairs (Pollack) to Secretary of State Rusk, October 20, 1965.
32. Richard Philippone, Reactor Projects Branch, “Visit of Joseph Adar of Israel to ORNL,”
December 21, 1965, National Archives and Records Administration, Southeast Region, U.S.
Atomic Energy Commission, Files of the Former Reactor Division, box 19.
33. Letter from Jerome Wiesner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to President
Johnson, February 28, 1966, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy
Diplomacy and Global Issues, document 146, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments
/frus1964–68v34/d146.
34. Letter from Jerome Wiesner to President Johnson, February 28, 1966.
35. Memorandum from the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow) to President Johnson,
May 30, 1966, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy Diplomacy
and Global Issues, document 148, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964–68
v34/d148.
36. For a conversation covering military aircraft as well as desalinating, see Memorandum
for the Record, May 3, 1966 [between Rostow and Ambassador Harman], Foreign Relations of
the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 18, Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1964–67, document 288, http://
37. See editorial note, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy
/frus1964–68v34/d151.
38. Memorandum from the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow) to President John-
son, August 12, 1966, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy Di-
plomacy and Global Issues, document 152, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments
/frus1964–68v34/d152.
39. Memorandum from the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow) to President John-
son, September 19, 1966, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy
/frus1964–68v34/d155.
40. See editorial note, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy
/frus1964–68v34/d161.
41. A more thorough dissection of the proximate causes of the Six-Day War can be found
in Roland Popp, “Stumbling Decidedly into the Six-Day War,” Middle East Journal 60, no. 2
(2006): 281–309.
42. For an overview of the political landscape of water negotiations, including the Johnston

negotiations of the 1950s and the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967, see Aaron T. Wolf,
Hydropolitics along the Jordan River: Scarce Water and its Impact on the Arab-Israeli Conflict (New
York: United Nations University Press, 1995).
43. Memorandum from the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (Seaborg)
to Secretary of State Rusk, June 13, 1967, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968,
vol. 34, Energy Diplomacy and Global Issues, document 163, http://history.state.gov
July 19, 1967, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy Diplomacy and
Global Issues, document 164, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964–68v34
/d164.
45. “A Proposal for Our Time,” memorandum from Admiral Lewis J. Strauss to Former
President Eisenhower, n.d., Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy
/frus1964–68v34/d166.
46. C. L. Sulzberger, “Foreign Affairs: Water and Work I,” New York Times, July 14, 1967; C.
L. Sulzberger, “Foreign Affairs: Water and Work II,” New York Times, July 16, 1967; C. L. Sulz-
berger, “Foreign Affairs: Water and Work III,” New York Times, July 19, 1967.
47. “G.O.P. Pushes Plan on Mideast Water,” New York Times, October 20, 1967.
48. Editorial note, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy Di-
plomacy and Global Issues, document 168, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments
/frus1964–68v34/d168.
49. Editorial note, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, document 168.
March 9, 1968, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy Diplomacy and
Global Issues, document 170, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964–68v34
/d170.
53. Letter from the Coordinator of the Israeli Power and Desalting Project (Woods) to the
President’s Special Assistant (Rostow), August 28, 1968, Foreign Relations of the United States,
1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy Diplomacy and Global Issues, document 172, http://history.state
.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964–68v34/d172.
54. Memorandum from Harold Saunders of the National Security Council Staff to President
Johnson, December 18, 1968, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy
/frus1964–68v34/d174.
55. Critics included the University of Chicago political scientist Albert Wohlstetter, who
even convinced his graduate student Paul Wolfowitz to write on the subject for his doctoral
thesis. Wolfowitz concluded that the benefits to be derived from nuclear desalinating were not
worth the nuclear proliferation risks involved in introducing so many reactors. See James Mann,
Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Penguin, 2004). See also Da-
vid Milne, Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2015), chapter 8. See also Paul Wolfowitz, “Nuclear Proliferation in the Middle
East: The Politics and Economics of Proposals for Nuclear Desalting” (PhD diss., University
of Chicago, 1972).
56. This theme of manipulating crisis on the international scale is developed in Jacob Dar-

win Hamblin, Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), and Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Arming
Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press,
2013).
13. East Germany’s Fight for Recognition as a Sovereign State
1. The arguments outlined in this article were first developed and discussed at the confer-
ence “Nature Protection, Environmental Policy and Social Movements in Communist and
Capitalist Countries during the Cold War” in Washington, DC, May 2015. Research for this
article was funded by a postdoctoral fellowship in the humanities at universities and research
institutes in the United States and Germany, granted by the Volkswagenstiftung.
2. Bernhard Neugebauer, “DDR, UN-Politik,” in Lexikon der Vereinten Nationen, ed. Helmut
Vogler (Munich and Vienna: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2000), 46–52, 46.
3. The Hallstein Doctrine claimed the western half of the country had the exclusive right
to represent the whole of Germany. According to this doctrine, the West German government
regarded diplomatic recognition of East Germany by other states or international organizations
as a hostile act and isolated the German Democratic Republic internationally for decades. See
William Glenn Gray, “Die Hallstein-Doktrin: Ein souveräner Fehlgriff?,” Aus Politik und Zeitge-
schichte 17 (2005): 1, http://www.bpb.de/apuz/29088/die-hallstein-doktrin-ein-souveraener
-fehlgriff?p=; Joost Kleuters, Reunification in West German Party Politics from Westbindung to
Ostpolitik (Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 70–72. See also Joachim
Naumann, “Der lange Weg zur Anerkennung,” in DDR-Außenpolitik im Rückspiegel: Diploma-
ten im Gespräch, ed. Siegfried Bock, Ingrid Muth, and Hermann Schwiesau (Berlin: Lit Verlag
2004), 83–101, 83.
4. Carel Horstmeier, “Ostdeutsche Ohnmacht und widerwillige Hilfe durch Bruderstaaten:
Die Anerkennungspolitik der DDR 1949–1973,” in Die DDR in Europa—zwischen Isolation und
Öffnung, ed. Heiner Timmermann (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2005), 69–87, 71.
5. Silke Amberg, Die deutschen Westzonen und die Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1945–66,
http://www.silke-amberg.de/dokumente/geschichte/brd.pdf.
6. Heike Amos, Die SED-Deutschlandpolitik 1961–1991: Ziele, Aktivitäten und Konflikte
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 16.
7. While nature conservation consisders nature as a value per se and aims at maintaining
the health of the natural world, environmental protection or ecology wants to create a healty
environment for the environment but also humans.
8. Amos, Die SED-Deutschlandpolitik, 16–17. See also Heike Amos, Die Westpolitik der SED
1948/49–1961. “Arbeit nach Westdeutschland” durch die Nationale Front, das Ministerium für Aus-
wärtige Angelegenheiten und das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, Berlin,
1999).
9. See Horstmeier, “Ostdeutsche Ohnmacht,” 71.
10. Mathias Stein, Der Konflikt um Alleinvertretung und Anerkennung in der UNO. Die deutsch-
deutschen Beziehungen zu den Vereinten Nationen von 1949–1973 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2011), 119–20, 122–23.
11. Tobias Huff, Natur und Industrie und Sozialismus: Eine Umweltgeschichte der DDR (Göt-
tingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015).
12. Kai Hünemörder, “Environmental Crisis and Soft Politics: Détente and the Global En-
vironment, 1968–75,” in Environmental Histories of the Cold War, ed. J. R. McNeill and Corinna
R. Unger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 257–76.

13. Michael B. Klein, Das Institut für Internationale Politik und Wirtschaft (Berlin: Duncker
und Humblot, 1999), 38–39; Amos, Die SED Deutschlandpolitik, 35.
14. Brief an Mr. Bell der Information Section Control Branch am 6. 6. 1947 on June 6, 1947,
file DY 27, Kulturbund der DDR, no. 841, Bundesarchiv Berlin (herafter BArch, Berlin). The
exact application and approval date differs slightly in different documents.
15. Ulrike Köpp, “Heimat DDR. Im Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutsch-
lands,” in Ethnografisches Arbeiten in Berlin: Wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Annäherungen, ed. Mar-
tina Krause et al. (Münster: Berliner Blätter, Ethnographische und ethnologische Beiträge,
2003), 97–107, 97.
16. Thomas Schaarschmidt, “Heimat in der Diktatur. Zur Relevanz regionaler Identifikation
im Nationalsozialismus und in der frühen DDR,” in Zwischen Emotion und Kalkül: “Heimat” als
Argument im Prozess der Moderne, ed. Manfred Seifert (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag,
2010), 127–41, 138. See also Jan Palmowski, Inventing a Socialist Nation: Heimat and the Poli-
tics of Everyday Life in the GDR 1945–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009),
30.
17. Schaarschmidt argues convincingly that many East German citizens—likewise to their
fellow Germans in the West—had a strong attachment to their homeland. In the 1950s SED
cultural officials used this bond to win them over for the Socialist developing state. See Schaar-
schmidt, “Heimat in der Diktatur,” 127–41.
18. Berichterstattung der Bezirksleitung Potsdam des Deutschen Kulturbund an die Bunde-
sleitung Deutscher Kulturbund über erste Maßnahmen zur Verwirklichung der Aufgaben auf
dem Gebiet der nationalen Politik, 2. 4. 1965, file Rep. 538, Kulturbund, no. 338, BLHA.
19. Auszugsweise Abschriften aus Berichten der Bezirksleitungen, o. D. [1956], file DY 27,
Kulturbund der DDR, no. 7322, BArch, Berlin.
20. The Cultural League provided a forum to develop this new concept of Heimat. Mainly
in the years 1958–1961 there was a discussion about the Heimat concepts, which was conduct-
ed in the journal of the Friends of the Nature and the Heimat, Aus der Arbeit der Natur-und
Heimatfreunde. Involved in defining a new concept were for instance the editor, journalist, and
nature protectionist Reimar Gilsenbach, and the director of the Maerkisches Museum, Erik
Hühns. But workers and farmers also had their say; see Aus der Arbeit der Natur-und Heimat-
freunde im Deutschen Kulturbund 3 (1958), 8 (1958), 10 (1960), 11 (1961).
21. Tätigkeitsbericht des Sekretärs der Bezirkskommission Natur-und Heimatfreunde,
ohne Datum, [vmtl. 1953], file Rep. 538 Kulturbund—Bezirksvorstand Potsdam, no. 372,
BLHA. As an introduction to the history of the association in Berlin and Brandenburg, see Ol-
iver Kersten, Die Naturfreundebewegung in der Region Berlin-Brandenburg 1908–1989/90: Kon-
tinuitäten und Brüche (Berlin: Naturfreunde Verlag, 2007). Naturefriends International is today
one of the worldwide biggest nongovernmental organizations, with 350,000 members (per the
organization’s website; that number may be as large as 600,000 according to other sources),
http://www.nfi.at//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2&Itemid=63.
22. On these treaties, see Heiner Timmermann, ed., Deutschlandvertrag und Pariser Verträge:
Im Dreieck von Kaltem Krieg, deutscher Frage und europäischer Sicherheit (Münster: Lit-Verlag,
2003).
23. Hans-Werner Frohn and Jürgen Rosebrock, “Naturschutz im geteilten Deutschland:
Deutsch-deutsche Naturschutzkontakte 1945–1969, ” Natur und Landschaft 83, no. 7 (2008):
325–28, 327.
24. Stellungnahme zur Verbindung der Bezirksleitung des Deutschen Kulturbundes mit

dem westdeutschen Rhönclub, 3.6.1959: 1, file DY 27, Kulturbund der DDR, no. 7322, BArch,
Berlin.
25. Brief des Kulturbundes, Bezirksleitung Suhl, an die Zentrale Kommission der Natur-
und Heimatfreunde, 17.1. 1958, file DY 27, Kulturbund der DDR, no. 7322, BArch, Berlin.
26. Protokoll über die Teilnahme der Delegation am Heidelsteintreffen des Rhönclubs:4,
file DY 27, Kulturbund der DDR, no. 7322, BArch, Berlin.
27. Stellungnahme zur Verbindung der Bezirksleitung des Deutschen Kulturbundes mit
dem westdeutschen Rhönclub, 3.6.1959: 5, file DY 27, Kulturbund der DDR, no. 7322, BArch,
Berlin.
28. Amos, Die SED Deutschlandpolitik, 209.
29. Amos, 209.
30. Berichterstattung der Bezirksleitung Potsdam des Deutschen Kulturbund an die Bunde-
sleitung Deutscher Kulturbund über erste Maßnahmen zur Verwirklichung der Aufgaben auf
dem Gebiet der nationalen Politik, 2. 4. 1965, file Rep. 538, Kulturbund, no. 338, BLHA.
31. Abschrift an die Redaktion ‚Aus der Arbeit der Natur-und Heimatfreunde, ohne Datum
[nach 1958], 3, file Rep. 538, Kulturbund, no. 464, BLHA.
32. “Blick durch den Eisernen Vorhang,” Unser Wald, December 1957, 320.
33. Brief des Ministeriums für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten der DDR an den Präsidenten
der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 22.8.1955, file Akademieleitung 1945–1968, no.
507, Archiv Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (herafter: ABBAW). See
also Neugebauer, “DDR, UN-Politik,” 46–52, 50, 51.
34. Abschrift des Briefes des Vorsitzenden der Nationalen UNESCO Kommission der Un-
garischen Volksrepublik am 7.3.1956, file Akademieleitung 1945–1968, no. 507, ABBAW.
35. Stein, Der Konflikt, 135–36.
36. Brief des stellvertretenden Ministers für Gesundheitswesen an den Leiter der Akademie
der Wissenschaften am 25.7.1958, file Akademieleitung 1945–1968, no. 501, ABBAW.
37. Stein, Der Konflikt, 120–21.
38. Elizabeth DeSombre, Global Environmental Institutions (New York: Routledge, 2006),
22–23. Hünemörder states that the economic and social council had already agreed to the sug-
gestion in 1968; see Die Frühgeschichte der globalen Umweltkrise und die Formierung der deutschen
Umweltpolitik (1950–1973) (Freiburg: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004), 242.
39. Kommission für sozialistische Landeskultur beim Ministerrat der DDR, ed., Probleme
der Umwelt. Deutsche Demokratische Republik, February 1971, NW 455, no. 717, Landesarchiv
Nordrhein-Westfalen, Abteilung Rheinland (hereafter LAV NRW R).
40. See Dix and Gudermann, “Naturschutz in der DDR,” 535–624, 570.
41. Protokoll der Sitzung am 3.2.1972 in Berlin der problemgebundenen Klasse “Mensch/
Umwelt,” 17.2.1972, file Akademieleitung 1969–1991, no. 1014, ABBAW.
42. For the educational and public relations work in the area of GDR conservation, which
was deemed necessary at an early stage, see Kurt Kretschmann, Bericht über die Tätigkeit der
Landesfachstelle für Naturschutz im August 1951, Freienwalde, 8.8.1951, Rep. 205 D, no. 1,
BLHA; see also Uwe Wegener, “Ohne sie hätte sich nichts bewegt—zur Arbeit der ehrenamtli-
chen Naturschutzhelfer und–helferinnen,” in Naturschutz in den neuen Bundesländern—ein
Rückblick, ed. Institut für Umweltgeschichte und Regionalentwicklung e.V. (Marburg: BdWi-
Verlag, 1998), 89–107.
43. Uwe Wegener, “Ein Leben mit und für die Orchideen, ” unpublished document, Hal-
berstadt, 2015.

44. Michael Kloepfer, Umweltrecht (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994), 140, and Josef Füllenbach,
Umweltschutz zwischen Ost und West: Umweltpolitik in Osteuropa u. gesamteuropäische Zusam-
menarbeit (Bonn: Europa-Union-Verlag, 1977), 24. Both of these references can be found in
Huff, Natur und Industrie, 172–73.
45. “Blick durch den Eisernen Vorhang,” Unser Wald, December 1957, 320.
46. The Human Environment: A World View, Department of Housing and Urban Develop-
ment (HUD)/Office of International Affairs, special supplement, no. 6, June 1972, 2, 5, Russell
E. Train Paper Division, Committee of Environmental Quality, United Nation Conference on
the Human Environment, June 1972, box 15, folder 6, Library of Congress (hereafter LoC).
47. Hünemörder, “Environmental Crisis,” 263.
48. Christian Möller, “Zwischen Gestaltungseuphorie, Versagen und Ohnmacht: Umwelt,
Staat und volkseigene Wirtschaft in der DDR,” Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte (ZUG) 2,
no. 60 (2015): 141–67, 148–49. Kommission für sozialistische Landeskultur, ed., Probleme der
Umwelt, 16, 19, 20, 21.
49. Kommission für sozialistische Landeskultur, 14.
50. Kommission für sozialistische Landeskultur, 16, 19, 20, 21.
52. Scientists in the Academy of Sciences saw their task mainly in rising awareness amongst
politicians as to what extent the “dangerous” effects of pollution affected the environment.
See Protokoll der Sitzung am 10.2.1972 in Berlin der problemgebundenen Klasse “Mensch/
Umwelt,” 3, file Akademieleitung 1969–1991, no. 1014, ABBAW. Among of the best-known
conservationists in the GDR were voluntary conservationists like Kurt and Erna Kretschmann,
whose environmental commitment spanned several decades and who saw their task as mak-
ing the government and the public aware of environmental pollution and the need for nature
protection. See Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, “‘Der freie Mensch fordert keine Freiheiten, er lebt
einfach.’ Die Nestoren des DDR Naturschutzes und die Herausbildung einer reformbewegten
Gegenwelt,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 41 (2015): 71–106.
53. Professor Otto Rühle demanded that lakesides have to be accessible to the public and
should not be blocked through building constructions; see letter from Otto Rühle to Kurt Kret-
schmann, October 29, 1958, file 027–32, 1951–1999, Kurt Kretschmann, Korrespondenz, 200,
Studienarchiv Umweltgeschichte (StUG).
54. Marten Scheffer, Frances Westley, and William Brock, “Slow Response of Societies to
New Problems: Causes and Costs,” Ecosystems 6, no. 5 (2003): 493–502, 497. See also The
Human Environment, 3.
55. André Steiner, “Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer Planwirtschaft,” in Die DDR im Rück-
blick. Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, Kultur, ed. Helga Schultz and Hans-Jürgen Wagener (Ber-
lin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2007), 135–54, 136.
56. See Gerhard Heske, “Bruttoinlandsprodukt, Verbrauch und Erwerbstätigkeit in Ost-
deutschland 1970–2000. Neue Ergebnisse einer volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnung,” HSR-
Supplement 17 (2005). Heske’s findings are mentioned in Karl Mai, “War die DDR wirtschaft-
lich unterlegen? Ergänzungen zu Hans Modrows Interpretation,” Sozialismus 9 (2008), http://
www.schattenblick.de/infopool/geist/history/ggwir010.html. According to the historian Vik-
toria Settele, in its agricultural policy West Germany focused more on an increase in labor pro-
ductivity, while East Germany concentrated more on production increase. Thus, while West
Germany gave preference to its economic efficiency (e.g., the efficiency of animals and soil),
East Germany focused more on the quantity of animals (Veronika Settele in an email to the
author on August 19, 2016).

57. Professor Otto Rühle in a talk to the head of the Institute for Nature Protection,
“‘Müritzhof ’ ‘Nature protection yes,’ if volunteers do it without payment. ‘Nature protection no’
if financial efforts are involved, even though the legal principles of the GDR were acknowledge
as exemplary at home and abroad!” See Kurt Kretschmann, Entstehung der Lehrstätte für Natur-
schutz ‘Müritzhof’ (Neustrelitz, Germany: Verlag Lenover Neustrelitz, 1995), 12.
58. Dix and Gudermann, “Naturschutz in der DDR,” 535–624, 594–604.
59. Gabriele Goetle, “Leben am Plagesee. Zu Besuch bei Hannelore Gilsenbach,” Tageszei-
tung, July 20, 2007, http://www.taz.de/?id=digi-artikel&ressort=ku&dig=2007/07/30/a0005.
60. See “Nitratbedrohung für Köpenicker Grundwasser,” Umweltblätter, October 1, 1987,
no. 7, file PS 107/17, Robert Havemann Gesellschaft, Berlin (thereafter RHG). See also, “Wann
gibt es auch in der DDR ein Sortiment phosphatfreier Vollwaschmittel,” Arche (Spring 1988),
no 1, file PS 0110/01, RHG; “Sozial-und Wohnungspolitik menschlich besehen–Ein Beitrag
des Bereiches Humanökologie,” Arche (Spring 1988), no. 1, file PS 0110/01, RHG.
61. “Die Kohleverbrennung in der DDR,” Arche (1988), no. 2, file PS 010/04, RHG.
62. Anlage zur Konzeption der problemgebundenen Klasse, file Akademieleitung 1969–
1991, no. 1014, ABBAW. From 1969 to 1972 Sinaida Rosenthal was a professor at the Institute
for Physiological and Biological Chemistry at Humboldt University, and from 1972 until her
death in 1988 she was the head of department at the Central Institute for Molecular Biology of
the GDR Academy of Sciences. See Annette Vogt, “Rosenthal, Sinaida,” in Wer war wer in der
DDR, vol. 2 (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2010), 842.
63. Konzeption der problemgebundenen Klasse, “Optimale Gestaltung der Umweltbedin-
gungen (Mensch und Umwelt),” file Akademieleitung 1969–1991, no. 1014, ABBAW.
64. In the Treaties of Moscow and Warsaw, the USSR and West Germany, and Poland and
West Germany, respectively, expressed their ambition to keep international peace and strive
for a normalization of the relations between the European states based on the guidelines of the
UN charter. Moreover, the treaties recognized post–World War II borders, especially the Oder-
Neisse line. See Frank Pfetsch, Die Außenpolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Schwalbach,
Germany: Wochenschau-Verlag, 2011), 104-25.
65. Stenographic transcript of the exchange of opinions between Secretary of State Dr.
Michael Kohl and Secretary of State Egon Bahr on the establishment of normal relations be-
tween East Germany and West Germany, DY 30/J IV 2/201/1145, Stiftung Archiv Parteien
und Massenorganisationen der DDR (SAPMO). The document appears in Potthoff, Bonn und
Ost-Berlin, 199–207.
66. Note on a meeting of Carl Swartz, Jan Olander, Christian Herter, and Barbara Schrage,
January 26, 1972, file SCI 41–3 UN, 1970–1973, General Records of the Department of State,
RG 59, NACP.
67. Airgram of the U.S. mission in the United Nations to the Department of State, February
22, 1972, file SCI 41–3 UN, 1970–1973, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59,
n.p., [2], NACP.
68. Telegram 11892 of the Department of State to the U.S. Embassy, Bonn, January 20, 1972,
file SCI 41–3 UN, 1970–1973, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NACP.
69. Summary letter of the Department of State to all diplomatic consulates, May 11, 1972,
file SCI 41–3 UN, 1970–1973, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NACP.
70. Telegram 4736 of the American embassy in Bonn to the Department of State, April
6, 1972, file SCI 41–3 UN, 1970–1973, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59,
NACP.

72. Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature. The Birth of Catastrophic Environmental-
ism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 194.
73. See Robert G. Darst, Smokestack Diplomacy: Cooperation and Conflict in East-West En-
vironmental Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), and the review of his book by Alli-
son Morrill Chatchyan in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, http://journals.sagepub
.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/03058298010300020412.
74. On the political use of dam-building, see Christopher Sneddon, Concrete Revolution:
Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and the US Bureau of Reclamation (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2015).

CONTRIBUTORS
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Julia E. Ault is an assistant professor of History at the University of Utah, having

earned her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015. She
has a forthcoming article in German History titled “Defending God’s Creation?
The Environment in State, Church and Society in the GDR, 1975-1989,” which
stems from her related book project, Saving Nature in Socialism: Transnational
Environmentalism in East Germany, 1968–1990. The book explores the rise of en-
vironmentalism in East Germany through networks behind and across the Iron
Curtain, especially connections with Poland and West Germany, to expand our
understanding of the ‘greening’ of postwar Europe.
Anolda Cetkauskaite received her PhD in biology (biochemistry) in 1984 and

was an associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at
Vilnius University, Lithuania. Her research interests include biodegradation and
mechanisms of toxicity in microorganisms of chlororganic pollutants and analysis
of effluent and sediment toxicity. She coordinated the research of a Lithuanian
network in an international project exploring the environmental history of pollu-
tion and protection of the Baltic Sea.
Laurent Coumel is an assistant professor of contemporary history at the National

Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations, and a researcher at the Center
of Russian Studies (CERCEC, CNRS) in Paris. In 2014 he published a book on
the reforms to schools and higher learning in the Khrushchev period, “Rappro-
cher l’école et la vie”? Une histoire des réformes scolaires en Russie (1918–1964). His
current project focuses on environmentalism in Soviet Russia in the second half of
the 20th century, with the provisional title “Understanding Russian Environment
at the Source: The Upper Volga River between Use Conflicts and Heritage Build-
ing, 1950–2000.”
299
Hendrik Ehrhardt studied political science and history in Jena, Germany, and
Tampere, Finland. He received an MA and PhD from the Friedrich-Schiller-Uni-
versität Jena. From 2013 to 2017 he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the
Technische Universität Berlin (Technical University of Berlin) and was a manager
responsible for “energy politics” at the German Electric and Electronic Manufac-
turers’ Association. Since 2017 he has been senior manager for public affairs at
Stiebel Eltron in Berlin.
Eagle Glassheim is a professor of history at the University of British Columbia,

where he teaches Central European and environmental history. His most recent
book is Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands: Migration, Environment, and Health
in the Former Sudetenland (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016). His current re-
search focuses on open-pit mining towns in Europe and North America.
Jacob Darwin Hamblin is a professor of history at Oregon State University. He

is the author of Oceanographers and the Cold War (Washington, 2005), Poison in
the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (Rutgers,
2008), and Arming Mother Nature: the Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism
(Oxford, 2013).
Wilko Graf von Hardenberg is senior research scholar at the Max Planck Insti-
tute for the History of Science in Berlin, where he coordinates the research cluster
“Art of Judgement” and works on a history of the concept of mean sea level. Trained
as a political historian and a geographer in Turin and Cambridge his researches
have been mainly aimed at disentangling different aspects of 20th century Italian
environmental history. Prior to moving to Berlin he worked at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, the Rachel Carson Center and the Deutsches Museum in
Munich, the University of Trento, and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.
Astrid Mignon Kirchhof is a senior researcher and lecturer at Humboldt Univer-

sity, Berlin, and currently a scholar-in-residence at the Deutsches Museum, Mu-
nich. From 2015 to 2018 she was research associate at the Deutsches Museum in
the EU-funded project History of Nuclear Energy and Society. Previously she was
a Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Georgetown
University and the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC. From 2010 to
2014 she was principal investigator of a research project about the nature conser-
vation movement in East and West Berlin between 1945 and 1990, funded by
the German Research Foundation at the Humboldt University. Her edited book
300 Contributors
Pathways Into and Out of Nuclear Power in five Western European Countries will be
published by Deutsche Museum Studies, volume 3 (Münster: Deutsches Muse-
um Verlag), in 2019.
Simo Laakkonen is a senior lecturer of landscape studies at the University of

Turku, Finland. He has explored the environmental history of World War II and
the Cold War. The primary outcome of this work is The Long Shadows: Global
Environmental History of the Second World War (2017). His main research theme
is, however, environmental history of pollution and protection of watercourses in
the Baltic Sea region, and he has planned and directed several international proj-
ects in this area since 1995.
Brian James Leech is associate professor of history at Augustana College in Rock

Island, Illinois. His research focuses on the environmental histories of energy,
food, and mining. He authored The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Ex-
panding Berkeley Pit (University of Nevada Press, 2018) and he has begun writing
a history of speed limits in the American West.
Stephen Milder is assistant professor of politics and society at the University of

Groningen. He is the author of Greening Democracy: The Antinuclear Movement
and Political Environmentalism in West Germany and Beyond, 1968–1983.
J. R. McNeill is professor of history and University Professor at Georgetown Uni-

versity. He is the author or editor of nineteen books, and he is former president
of the American Society for Environmental History and the American Historical
Association. In 2018 he was awarded the Heineken Prize in History by the Royal
Dutch Academy of Arts and Science.
Scott Moranda is an associate professor of history at the State University of New

York at Cortland, where he teaches world environmental history, as well as courses
on Germany, Eastern Europe, the Holocaust, and Europe since 1914. He published
The People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism, and Dictatorship in East Germany in
2014 with the University of Michigan Press. In this monograph, he explores how
state socialism’s attempts to improve public health and labor productivity, as well
as prevent popular unrest, shaped the tourism economy, which in turn influenced
how conservationists lobbied for environmental protections in a state primarily
focused on heavy industry and economic growth.
Contributors 301
Tetiana Perga is senior researcher in the Institute of World History of the Na-
tional Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She has a PhD in history from the Kiev
State University Taras Shevchenko, Kiev, Ukraine (1998). She is currently a
DAAD fellow in the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies
(2018). She is author of a book whose translated title is Global Environmental Po-
licy and Ukraine (Nizhyn, 2014) and 140 scientific articles, as well as coauthor of
five books. Her research interests include environmental history, environmental
movements in the late Soviet Union, eco-nationalism, the Chernobyl accident,
pre- and post-Chernobyl transformations in Ukraine, and peculiarities of national,
regional, and global environmental policy.
Hrvoje Petrić is associate professor of history at the Department of History in the

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. He is an editor of
the journal Ekonomska- i ekohistorija (Economic and Environmental History). He
has written a series of articles about environmental history. He is a member of the
board of the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH).
302 Contributors
INDEX
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Note: Page numbers in italics indicate illustrative material.
Academy of Sciences and the State Committee for Andrews, Stanley, 191–92, 193
Science and Technology (GKNT), 23–24, 26, 28 APO (Außerparlamentarische Opposition; Extra-
acid rain, 75, 83, 140, 148, 154, 155 Parliamentary Opposition), 92–93
Action Group for Nonviolence (AG), 89–90, 91 Arden, Edward, 45
activated sludge process, 45 Armand, David, 25–26
Adar, Joseph, 211–12 Armiero, Marco, 112–13
Advisory Council on the Environment (Der Rat von Army Corps of Engineers, 21
Sachverständigen für Umweltfragen), 84 Association for the Protection of Nature of Yugoslavia,
AEC (Atomic Energy Commission), 118, 119–20, 121, 172
123, 207, 213 Association of the Friends of Nature (Verein der
agriculture: and colonialism, 194–96; and global Naturfreunde), 222
economy, 190–93; livestock vs. crops, 188–90; Aswan High Dam, 208
Morgenthau plan, 186–88, 190–91; overview atomic energy. See nuclear energy
of development in postwar West Germany, Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 118, 119–20, 121,
183–86; pasture improvement in West Germany, 123, 207, 213
196–200 Ault, Julia E.: about, 299; chapter by, 151–68; com-
Agrigento landslide (1966), 108, 114 ments on, 9
air pollution management: in East Germany, 153–54; Autostrada del Sole, 105
in Italy, 106–7; and Waldsterben (forest dieback),
75, 83–84, 148, 154, 251n59, 272n17; West Baibakov, Nikolai, 26, 27
German utility company application of policies Baker, Howard, Jr., 215
on, 81–83; West German utility company role Baltic Sea Region (BSR), 36–37. See also Lithuania
in political debate on, 76–80, 83–84; in West Barnett, Jack, 121
Germany, 74–75, 75 Barngrover, Jim, 130
Albrecht, Catherine, 267–68n24 Bauer, Max, 89
Aldermaston March, 91 Baumgartner, Joseph, 189
Alekseevskii, Evgenii, 24, 26 BDI (Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie;
Allenby, Braden, 235n21 Federation of German Industries), 82
All-Union Institute for Water Supply Engineering and Bebler, Ales, 174
Hydrogeology (VODGEO), 23 Becher, Johannes R., 221
American Geographical Society, 20 Beck, Ulrich, 34
Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine (AHRU), Bennett, Hugh, 191–92, 193
68, 69 Berliner Städtische Elektrizitätswerke (BEWAG), 77
Amosov, Mykola, 64 BImSchG (Bundes-Immissionsschutzgesetz; Federal
Amundson, Michael, 121 Pollution Control Act ), 74
Anaconda Company, 126 biofiltration facilities, 44–45
303
biological oxygen demand, 43 Clamshell Alliance, 69
Bipartite Control Office, 188, 196 Clean Water Act (1972), 28
Board of Use and Protection of Water Resources, coal energy: debate in Montana, 122, 128, 129; emis-
40, 46 sions from, 74–75, 75, 76; Soviet focus on, 153
Brain, Stephen, 17–18, 33 Cold War: East-West transmission of ideas during,
Brandt, Carl, 190, 192, 193, 195 8–9; historical overview, 4–6
Brandt, Willy, 74, 230, 231 Colonialism (as understood in postwar Germany),
Braunschweigsche Kohlen Bergwerke (BKB), 77 194–96
Brekhovskikh, Leonid, 30 Commission of the Federal Council of the Assembly
Briefe (newsletter), 158, 166 of Yugoslavia for the Protection and Improve-
Bulat, Taras, 68 ment of the Environment, 175
Bundesverband Bürgerinitiativen Umweltschutz Committee for Air Pollution Prevention, 73
(Federal Association of Citizens’ Initiatives for Committee on Nuclear Strategy, 123
Environmental Protection, BBU), 97 Committee on the Environment of the Organization
Bunker, Ellsworth, 213 for Economic Cooperation and Development
Bureau of the Department of Oceanology, Atmo- (OECD), 176
spheric Physics, and Geography, 29 Communism, as term, 3
Burton, Christopher, 17, 21 Communist League of West Germany, 98
Buschhaus, 76 Communist Party of Italy (Partito Comunista Italia-
no, PCI), 110, 112–13, 114
Campos Venuti, Giuseppe, 111 Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm
capitalism, as term, 3 1972), 145, 175–76, 226, 227, 229–30
Carson, Rachel, 207 Conservators Society of Yugoslavia, 172
Carter, J. W., 138 Coumel, Laurent: about, 299; chapter by, 17–35
The Cathedral (Honchar), 60 Council for Environmental Questions, 145
cattle reduction, in postwar Germany,188–90 Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, 176
Central Committee of the Communist Party, 23, 25, Council for the Protection and Improvement of the
31 Environment of Yugoslavia, 174, 175
Ceponiene, Aurelija, 38 Council for the Protection of Natural Resources, 68
Cetkauskaite, Anolda: about, 299; chapter by, 36–54 Council of Ministers (East Germany), 274n47
Charter 77, 147–48 Council of Ministers (Russia), 18, 23, 25
Chemical Triangle (East Germany), 154, 156 Council of People’s Commissars of the Lithuanian
Chernobyl accident: development of international SSR, 40
green network after, 67–69, 70–71; development Coyle, McCarthy, 130
of Ukrainian environmental movement after, Critical Mass, 122
60–65; impact on East Germany, 159; impact cropland expansion (West Germany), 188–90
on Poland, 162–63; impact on Yugoslavia, 179; Cultural League, 221–22, 224, 227, 294n20
and Soviet economic ambitions, 55–57; Soviet Curry, Jean, 128
response to, 57–59 Cvitković, Milan, 177
Chernobyl Movement, 62 Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 138, 143, 144–46,
Chernobyl Way, 71 147–48, 266n2, 268–69n40, 269n43
Chernovol, V’yacheslav, 66 Czechoslovakia: 1960s environmental legislation,
Chessin, Meyer, 119, 123, 126, 132 140–44, 267–68n24, 268n29; 1970s environ-
Children of Chernobyl Relief Fund (CCRF), 69 mental legislation, 144–47, 269n54; 1980s envi-
Christian Democratic Party (Democrazia Cristiana, ronmental legislation, 147–50, 268n31, 269n57
DC; Italy), 102–3, 109–13
Christian Democratic Union (CDU; West Germany), Darst, Robert, 34
90–91, 92 Davis, Belinda, 101
Churchill, Winston, 5 Dawson, Jane, 67
Citizens Against the Nuclear Ban, 130 De Gasperi, Alcide, 104
304 Index
deindustrialization, 186–87, 190–91, 193, 285n48 10–12; East-West transmission of ideas, 8–9;
Dematteis, Giuseppe, 106, 107 emergence as movement, 7. See also agriculture;
Demokratična opozicija Slovenije (Democratic air pollution management; environmental
Opposition of Slovenia, DEMOS), 180 policies and legislation; nuclear energy; peace
Department for Protection and Scientific Study of movement; water pollution management
Cultural Monuments and Natural Attractions of Environmental Library, 159–60
Slovenia, 172 environmental policies and legislation: in 1960s
desalination. See nuclear desalination Czechoslovakia, 140–44, 267–68n24, 268n29;
desulfurization, flue-gas, 77, 78–79, 81–82 in 1970s Czechoslovakia, 144–47, 269n54; in
détente, 5, 9, 132, 220–21, 230 1980s Czechoslovakia, 147–50, 268n31, 269n57;
Dialog (journal), 142 in East Germany, 156, 226–28, 296n56; environ-
Division for Environmental Protection (Abteilung mental disasters due to inadequate, 108, 112–14;
Umweltschutz), 73 fight for Initiative 71 (I-71), 122–24; fight for
Dnieper River, 56, 60 Initiative 80 (I-80), 116, 125–32, 263–64n68; in
Dobson, Ed, 123 Italy, 106–8, 257n29; Limited Test Ban Treaty
Dominick, Raymond, 12, 53, 138–39, 142 (1963), 119, 207; in Poland, 156; in Russia,
Döring, Wolfgang, 89 21–22, 23, 25; utility company application of en-
Drach, Ivan, 66 vironmental, 81–83; and utility company role in
dual-track decision, 87–88, 99 political debate on air pollution, 76–80, 83–84;
Dudko, Sviatoslav, 68 in West Germany, 74–75, 75, 296n56; West vs.
Duffy, Joe, 130 East Germany outcomes, 138–39; in Yugoslavia,
170–73, 175, 278n35
Easter March, 91–93, 96 Environment Committee, 61
Easter Monday rally, 96–97 epistemic community, defined, 20–21
East Germany: activist interactions with Polish Die Erde ist zu retten (The earth is to be saved), 158
environmental groups, 165–67; applications Eshkol, Levi, 209, 212, 213
for UN membership, 225–31; cultural tension European Youth Forest Action, 151, 166
with Poland, 167, 275n82; environmental data exchange of ideas. See transmission of ideas
restriction in, 274n46; environmental diplomacy Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (Außerparlamenta-
with West Germany, 221–25; environmental leg- rische Opposition, APO), 92–93
islation in, 156, 226–28, 296n56; environmental
movement in, 157–60, 164, 271n7; Hallstein fallout. See Chernobyl accident
Doctrine, 219, 231, 293n3; pollution in, 153–55; farming. See agriculture
UN recognition of, 219; vs. West Germany envi- Federal Pollution Control Act (Bundes-
ronmental policy outcomes, 138–39; West Work Immissionsschutzgesetz, BImSchG), 74
approaches, 219–21 Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). See West
East-West exchange. See transmission of ideas Germany
Ebert, Theodor, 95–96, 254n33 Federation of German Industries (Bundesverband
Ecclesiastical Research Center (Kirchliches For- der Deutschen Industrie, BDI), 82
schungsheim, KFH), 158, 166 Fedorov, Evgenii, 24
ECOFOND, 68 Feldman, Myer, 210, 212
Ecological Initiative, 61–62 Ferguson, Cody, 122
Ecology (environmentalist group), 61 Filbinger, Hans, 94
Ecology and Peace, 62 Filtzer, Donald, 17
ECOLOS, 69 Fischer, Frank, 34
Ehrhardt, Hendrik: about, 300; chapter by, 73–86; Fischer, Joschka, 78
comments on, 11 Florio, Jim, 69
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 63, 214–16, 246n43 flue-gas desulfurization, 77, 78–79, 81–82
Elie, Marc, 17, 34 Food and Agriculture Organization, 280n1
environmentalism: East-West broad comparisons, food production. See agriculture
Index 305
For Ecological Restructuring, 61 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 5, 57, 59, 64, 68, 149–50, 151,
forest damage (Forstschäden), 154 164
forest dieback (Waldsterben), 75, 83–84, 148, 154, Goskompriroda (Soviet State Committee for Nature
251n59, 272n15 Protection), 32, 40, 70
Forrester, Jay W., 28 Gosplan, 21, 26
For Us and Our Grandchildren (Armand), 25–26 Gosvodkhoz (State Committee for Water Manage-
Francis, Sharon, 207 ment of the Russian Republic), 18–19, 21–22, 25
Free Democratic Party (FDP), 91 Graham, Loren, 33
free trade, 190–93 Great Lakes (North America), 27, 28–29, 33
Friends of Nature and the Heimat (Natur-und Hei- Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, 27
matfreunde, NHF), 222–24, 294n20 Green Charity, 61
Friends of the Earth, 133, 163 Green Parties (Yugoslavia), 180–81
Fruttero, Carlo, 105 Green Party (West Germany), 98–99, 254n43,
Fulbrook, Mary, 271n8 255n47
Fura, Zygmunt, 162, 165 Greens of the United States of America, 69
Furlan, Ivan, 177 Green World Association, 62, 69
Grushko, Mikhail, 21
Gajda, Milan, 142 Guha, Ramachandra, 150
Galazii, Grigorii, 22 Gulliford, Andrew, 121
General Electric, 121, 131
Genscher, Hans-Dietrich, 73 Haas, Peter, 20–21
Gensichen, Hans-Peter, 158 Hallstein Doctrine, 219, 231, 293n3
Gerasimov, Inokentii, 28 Hamblin, Jacob Darwin: about, 300; chapter by,
German Academy of Sciences (Deutsche Akademie 205–18; comments on, 6, 230
der Wissenschaften, DAW), 225, 229, 296n52 Hammarskjöld, Dag, 225
German Democratic Republic (GDR). See East Hammond, R. Philip, 213
Germany Hanford Works, 128
German Peace Society—United War Resisters Hardenberg, Wilko Graf von: about, 300; chapter by,
(Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft—Vereinigte 102–15; comments on, 11
Kriegsdienstgegner, DFG-VK), 100 Harvey, Kyle, 117
Germany. See East Germany; West Germany Hayek, Friedrich, 192
Germany Is Our Problem (Morgenthau), 183 Headwaters Alliance Political Action Committee, 127,
Gesellschaft für Natur und Umwelt (Society for 129, 133
Nature and Environment), 156 Heimat concept, 222, 294n17, 294n20
Gestwa, Klaus, 17 Heritage Club, 65, 66
GfAVO (Großfeuerungsanlagenverordnung; Regula- Hicks, Barbara, 156
tion on Large Combustion Plants), 74, 77, 79, highway construction, 104–5
83 Hlubek, Werner, 86
Gidrometsluzhba (Hydrological and Meteorological Honchar, Oles,’ 60, 62, 63
Service), 23–24, 26, 28, 30 Hoover, Herbert, 191
Gidroproekt (Hydro Project) Institute, 17 Hornig, Donald, 208, 209, 211, 212, 216
Gilsenbach, Reimar, 294n20 Hühns, Erik, 294n20
Ginsborg, Paul, 102, 104 Hünemörder, Kai, 228, 295n38
GKNT (Soviet Academy of Sciences and the State Hydrochemical Laboratory (Lithuania), 40, 43–44
Committee for Science and Technology), 23–24, hydroelectric power plants (Yugoslavia), 178–80
26, 28 Hydrological and Meteorological Service (Gidromet-
glasnost, 31, 61, 72, 151, 159, 165 sluzhba), 23–24, 26, 28, 30
Glassheim, Eagle: about, 300; chapter by, 137–50; Hydrometeorological Board, 40
comments on, 7 Hygiene Service (Czechoslovakia), 141, 144,
Gomułka, Władysław, 161 268–69n40
306 Index
industrialization: in Poland, 152, 153; push for Kennedy, John F., 209
deindistrialization in West Germany, 186–87, Keynesian economics, 190–91, 192
190–91, 193, 285n48; and regulations in Czecho- KFH (Kirchliches Forschungsheim; Ecclesiastical
slovakia, 140; and Soviet economic ambitions, Research Center), 158, 166
55–57, 153; and urbanization in Italy, 103–6 Khrushchev, Nikita, 18, 20
Initiative 71 (I-71), 122–24 Kielmansegg, Peter Graf, 87
Initiative 80 (I-80), 116, 125–32, 263–64n68 Kirchhof, Astrid Mignon: about, 300; chapters by,
Inspectorate of Water Economy (Lithuania), 40 3–14, 219–32; comments on, 11
Institute for Protection of Cultural Heritage (Yugo- Kirilenko, Andrei, 24
slavia), 172 Kirillin, Vladimir, 24
Institute for the Protection and Scientific Research Klopfer, Michael, 227
of Natural Rarities of Serbia (Zavod za zaštitu Komanoff, Charles, 128, 129
i naučno proučavanje prirodnih retkosti NR Komer, Robert, 212
Srbije), 171–72 Könekamp, Alfred, 197–98, 199
Institute of Water Geology (VodGeo), 45 Kořinek, Vladimír, 143–44
International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards, Kornev, Konstantin, 22, 23
212 Koronkevich, Nikolai, 31–32
iodine prophylaxis, 59 Kosygin, Aleksey, 24
Iron Curtain, as concept, 5 Kotkin, Stephen, 164
Israel. See Water for Peace program Krefeld Appeal, 87
Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica (Italian National Kretschmann, Kurt and Erna, 296n52
Urban Planning Institute), 111 Krisciunas, Juozas, 38
Italy: environmental disasters in, 108, 112–14; Kurth, Hannelore, 229
environmental legislation in, 106–8, 257n29; Kychun, Vasyl, 68
patronage politics in, 104, 109–12; postwar
reconstruction of, 103–6 Laakkonen, Simo: about, 301; chapter by, 36–54;
Izrael, Yuri, 59 comments on, 36
Laboratory of Nature Protection, 24
Jansky, Carl, 119–20 Lake Baikal, 21, 29, 34
Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 161 Landeskulturgesetz (Law on the Conservation and
Jaskułowski, Tytus, 275n77 Protection of the Environment; 1970), 156,
Johanides, Vera, 174, 177 226–27
Johnson, Lyndon B.: abandonment of desalination Lascoumes, Pierre, 18
program, 216–17; legislation on fissionable Laskorin, Boris, 30
material, 121; push for desalination program, Law 184 (1952), 107–8
205, 208–10, 211, 213; request for nuclear weap- League of Green Parties, 68
ons safeguards, 212; and Strauss/Eisenhower Leech, Brian James: about, 301; chapter by, 116–34;
proposal, 214–16 comments on, 6
Jordan, Matthew, 130 legislation. See environmental policies and legisla-
tion
Kamiński, Bronisław, 165 Leinen, Jo, 97, 99
Kapitsa, Pyotr, 28–29 Liga Ochrony Przyrody (Nature Conservation
Kardelj, Edvard, 174 League), 156
Karfík, Vladimír, 142 Lilienthal, David, 20
Kasalický, V., 144 Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963), 119, 207
Kassenberg, Andrzej, 163–64 The Limits to Growth (Forrester), 28
Kaufmann, John, 128 Lingner, Reinhold, 282n10
KdA (Kampf dem Atomtod; Fight the Atomic Lion Society, 62, 65
Death), 87, 89–90 liquid manures, 199–200
Kelly, Petra, 97–99, 100 Literarní noviny (journal), 142
Index 307
Lithuania: administration of water management in, Montana Farmer’s Union, 131
40, 41; antinuclear activism in, 70; factors for de- Montana Major Facilities Siting Act (1973), 124
velopment of water management in, 50–53; ge- Montanans Against 71 Committee, 123–24
ography and history, 38–39, 39; monitoring and Montanans for Jobs and Energy, 129–30
classification of surface water in, 40–43, 47–50, Montanans for Safe Power, 123
48, 49; monitoring and treatment of wastewater Montana Power Company, 119–20, 126
in, 43–47, 47, 51, 243n45; and scholarship on Montana Public Interest Research Group, 124
water management in BSR, 36–37 Mont Pèlerin Society, 192
Lockett, W. T., 45 Moore, Bradley, 140
Lozanskij, Vladimir, 27 Moranda, Scott: about, 301; chapter by, 183–205;
Lûbov, 31 comments on, 6
Lucentini, Franco, 105 Morgenthau, Henry, Jr, 183, 186–88, 190–91, 192
L’vovich, Mark, 30 Mossmann, Walter, 94
Lyashko, Aleksander, 58 motorization, 104–5
Muller, Kit, 122
Mackevich, Vladimir, 24 Mumford, Lewis, 285n48
magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), 129
Maier, Charles, 153 Nasser, Gamal, 208, 212
Males, Mike, 130 National Environmental Policy Act, U.S., (1970), 121
Malthusian thinking, 183, 184, 186, 195, 206 National Institute for the Protection of Natural Rari-
Matoničkin, Ivo, 177 ties of the People’s Republic of Croatia, 171
maximum allowable concentrations (MAC), 42 nationalism: in Lithuania, 52; in Ukraine, 67
McCormack, Mike, 122 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 5, 87,
McKaye, Benton, 285n48 88, 90, 91, 92
McNeill, J. R.: about, 301; chapter by, 3–14 Nature and Society (film), 27
Melcher, John, 129 Nature Conservation League, 162
Mende, Silke, 88, 253n7 Naturefriends International, 294n21
Metcalf, Lee, 125 Nature Protection Brigades, USSR, (Druzhinnoe
Metzger, Birgit, 88, 253n7 dvizhenie), 60
Michurin, Ivan, 32 Nehring, Holger, 91–92, 254n32
Middle East. See Water for Peace program neoliberalism, 190–93, 286n63
Milder, Stephen: about, 301; chapter by, 87–101; Nestrenko, Alexej, 229
comments on, 6 NHF (Natur-und Heimatfreunde; Friends of Nature
Ministry for Environmental Protection and Water and the Heimat), 222–24, 294n20
Management, 227 Nikonov, Viktor, 31
Ministry of Agriculture, 24, 25 1950s syndrome, 102
Ministry of Environmental Protection (later Ministry nitrogen, 46–47
of Environment of the Lithuanian Republic), 40 nitrogen dioxide emissions, 74–75, 75, 76, 86
Ministry of Internal Affairs, 19 Nixon, Richard, 28, 120, 217
Ministry of Land Reclamation and Water Manage- Noack, Liesel, 223
ment (Minvodkhoz), 23–24, 26, 31, 32, 33, 40 noise pollution, 177
Mishchenko, Yuriy, 68–69 Noosphere, 61
Missoula (Montana) County Ban Petition, 127 North Rhine-Westphalian Company (Rheinisch-
Mogren, Eric, 120 Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk, RWE), 76, 81–83,
Montana: and energy independence, 120–22; fight 84–85, 249n15
for Initiative 71 (I-71), 122–24; fight for Initia- Not Indifferent, 61
tive 80 (I-80), 116, 125–32, 263–64n68; mixed NPRC (Northern Plains Resource Council), 122, 132
response to nuclear development in, 118–20; nuclear desalination: abandonment of, 216–17;
and scholarship on environmental movement in criticism of, 209, 211–12, 217, 292n55; and
American West, 116–17 nuclear weapons safeguards, 212–13; Strauss/
308 Index
Eisenhower proposal, 214–16; support for, Pavlínek, Petr, 138, 267n21
207–10 PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano; Communist Party
nuclear energy: development of international green of Italy), 110, 112–13, 114
network after Chernobyl, 67–69, 70–71; devel- PDK (predel’no dopustimye kontsentratsii; maximum
opment of Ukrainian environmental movement allowable concentrations), 42
after Chernobyl, 60–65; disaster examples, Peace Committee (Ukrainian Republic), 62
234n14; and energy independence, 120–22; fight “peaceful atom,” 63, 246n43
for Initiative 80 (I-80), 116, 125–32, 263–64n68; peace movement: mass peace movement in 1980s,
mixed response to, in Montana, 118–20; Nuclear 98–100; overview, 87–89; and partisan politics,
Safeguards Initiatives (1976), 122–25; protests 89–93; protests against nuclear energy, 93–98,
in East Germany against, 159; protests in Poland 254n33
against, 162–63; protests in West Germany Peace Walks, 68
against, 93–100, 254n33; protests in Yugoslavia perestroika, 31, 61, 72, 151
against, 179; Soviet response to Chernobyl, Perga, Tetiana: about, 302; chapter by, 55–72;
57–59 comments on, 6
Nuclear Free Missoula, 127–28 Petrić, Hrvoje: about, 302; chapter by, 169–82;
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 124 comments on, 4, 9
Nuclear Safeguards Initiatives (1976), 122–25 Pfeiffer, Burt, 119, 123
Nuclear Vote, 130 phosphorus, 46
nuclear weapons: connection to Water for Peace Pickles, John, 138, 267n21
program, 212–13. See also peace movement PKE (Polski Klub Ekologiczny; Polish Ecological
Club), 151, 160–61, 162, 163, 165
OAPEC (Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Plachinda, Sergey, 66
Countries), 120 Plut, Dušan, 180, 280n64
OECD (Committee on the Environment of the Pniower, Georg, 282n10
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Poland: cultural tension with East Germany, 167,
Development), 176 275n82; environmental legislation in, 156;
Oechsler, Ronald, 19, 23, 28 environmental movement in, 160–64; pollution
Ohne mich (without me) movement, 87 in, 155–56; as site of international exchange,
oil shale, 120, 132, 261n32 164–67; Treaty of Warsaw, 297n64
Okvir života (The framework of life; Stanković), 173 Polesine flood, Italy, (1951), 113–14
Olivetti, Adriano, 111 policies. See environmental policies and legislation
Oliynyk, Borys, 63 pollution. See air pollution management; nuclear
Olshaniwsky, Bozhena, 68 energy; water pollution management
Operation Plowshare, 119 Pope, Daniel, 118
Orlov, V. P., 21 Popović, Tadija, 174
overindustrialization (as concerned Germany) , 187 Popular Fronts, 71
Ovsyannikov, Nikolai, 22 Port, Andrew, 271n8
oxidation baths, 45 Pravda (newspaper), 28
Preußenelektra, 76, 77, 78, 80, 83, 249n15
Palme, Olof, 230 Protestant Church, 157–59, 273n39
Palmieri, Walter, 108 proxy awareness, 25–26
Panov, Anatoly, 68–69 PZPR (Polish United Workers’ Party), 152, 156, 160,
Paolini, Federico, 105, 109 161
Paton, Boris, 64
patronage politics, 104, 109–12 Quammen, David, 260n13
Pauley, Anne, 128 The Quiet Crisis (Udall), 207
Pavičić, Vicko, 177
Pavletić, Zlatko, 177 Rabin, Yitzhak, 205
Pavlichko, Dmitriy, 66 Radkau, Joachim, 34, 73, 80, 84
Index 309
Ramey, James, 214 Shcherbytsky, Volodymyr, 58
Reagan, Ronald, 132 Shevchenko, Oleksadr, 66
Redding, John, 122 Shubin, Alexander, 68, 247n65
Regulation on Large Combustion Plants (Großfeuer- Sibaral (Siberian River Diversion Project), 29, 31,
ungsanlagenverordnung, GfAVO), 74, 77, 79, 32, 34
83 Sievert, Rolf Maximilian, 245n11
Reitz, Heribert, 250n41 Silent Spring (Carson), 207
reunification of Germany, 219, 220, 221–23 Six-Day War (1967), 214
Reynolds, Sam, 128–29, 265n85 Smil, Václav, 142, 268n29
Rhönclub, 223, 224 smokestack industrialization, 153
Richter, Saskia, 99 Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD; West
road building (Italy), 113–14 Germany), 89–91, 92
Rokavec, Angela, 177 Socialist-Communist parties (Italy), 102–3, 110,
Romanenko, Anatoliy, 59 112–13, 114
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 280n1 Socialist Unity Party (SED; East Germany), 152, 156,
Röpke, Wilhelm, 194 157–59, 164, 221, 222, 223, 228, 274n68, 294n17
Rosenthal, Sinaida, 229, 297n62 socio-ecological metabolism, 281n3
Ross, Carl, 195–96 Socio-Ecological Union, 68
Rostow, Walt, 212, 213, 214, 216 soil conservation, Italian legislation on, 107–8,
Rothschild, Edmund de, 215 257n29. See also agriculture
Rüddenklau, Wolfgang, 159 Solidarność (Solidarity), 152, 160, 161, 162
Rudé Právo (newspaper), 149 Soviet Geography (journal), 20
Rühle, Otto, 296n53 Soviet Union: collapse of, 71; comparative discourse
RUKH, 71, 246n54 on water management in, 25–30, 27, 31–33;
Russia. See Soviet Union economic and industrial ambitions, 55–57, 153;
RWE (Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk, emergence of epistemic community on water
North Rhine-Westphalian Company), 76, 81–83, management in, 18–21; internal struggle for
84–85, 249n15 water management control in, 21–25, 30–31;
push for East German UN membership, 229–30;
Salerno flooding and mudslide (Italy, 1954), 108, 113 response to Chernobyl, 57–59; Treaty of
San Joaquin Nuclear Project, 132 Moscow, 229, 297n64. See also Czechoslovakia;
saprobic zones, 42–43 East Germany; Lithuania; Poland; Ukraine;
Saraceno, Pasquale, 104 Yugoslavia
Scamehorn, Lee, 117 SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany; West
Schaarschmidt, Thomas, 294n17 Germany), 89–91, 92
Scheffer, Marten, 228 Der Spiegel (newspaper), 148–49
Scherbina, Boris, 58 Stalin, Joseph, 223
Schlange-Schöningen, Hans, 189, 190, 194, 198 Stanković, Siniša, 173
Schmidt, Helmut, 99 Stanovnik, Janez, 278–79n41
Schoth, H. A., 197 Stasi (Ministry for State Security), 157, 160, 164,
Schregel, Susanne, 89, 100 273n39, 275n77
Scientific Council for Biosphere Problems, 29–30 State Board of Natural Resources, 124
Scoppola, Pietro, 102 State Committee for Nature Protection (Goskom-
Seaborg, Glenn, 207–8, 214, 216, 217 priroda), 32, 40, 70
SED (Socialist Unity Party; East Germany), 152, 156, State Committee for Water Management of the Rus-
157–59, 164, 221, 222, 223, 228, 274n68, 294n17 sian Republic (Gosvodkhoz), 18–19, 21–22, 25
Segatz, Ulrich, 80 State Sanitary Inspectorate, 40, 241n25
Settele, Viktoria, 296n56 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment
Shashkov, Zosima, 24 (1972), 145
Shcherbak, Yuri, 71 Strauss, Franz-Josef, 149
310 Index
Strauss, Lewis, 213–16 Ukrainian State Committee for the Protection of the
Student Union Community (Ukraine), 65 Environment, 62
Sudetendeutscher Rat, 148 Ulbricht, Walter, 222, 225
Sukopp, Herbert, 224 Umweltblätter (newsletter), 159–60, 166, 167
sulfur dioxide emissions, 74–75, 75, 76, 86, 140, 146, UNESCO, 225
154, 229, 267n21 Union Chernobyl, 62
Sullo, Fiorentino, 111 United Nations (UN), 219, 225–30
Sulzberger, C. L., 215 United Nations Conference on the Human Environ-
Supek, Rudi, 174 ment (Stockholm, 1972), 145, 175–76, 226, 227,
Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (1977), 229–30
122 United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP),
Svarun, 180 176
Švec, František, 141 United States: agricultural policy in West Germany,
Svidzinsky, Anatoliy, 65 188–93; and Conference on the Human Envi-
ronment, 230; German criticism of agriculture in,
Tara River Canyon (Yugoslavia), 179–80 185, 197–98; as model for agricultural manage-
Technical-Economic Justifications (TEO), 31 ment, 196–98; as model for water management,
technocratic environmentalism, 34–35 21, 22, 24–26, 29–30, 32–33; occupation of West
Terehov, Volodymyr, 65 Germany, 194–96. See also Montana; Water for
Thant, U, 225–26 Peace program
Tito, Josip Broz, 4, 173, 174 uranium, 118, 121, 123, 132, 133
Togliatti, Palmiro, 112 urban planning, 105–6, 107, 110–12
transmission of ideas: and comparative discourse on USSR. See Soviet Union
water management, 25–30, 27, 31–33; concern- Ústí nad Labem District National Committee
ing agriculture, 188–93, 196–98; concerning (Czechoslovakia), 141, 269n54
water pollution management, 19–20, 44, 45, utility companies: application of environmental
53; and East-West competition theory, 17–18, policies, 81–83; concern for public relations,
33–34; and international green movement 84–86; role in political debate on air pollution,
network, 68–69, 163–64; overview of, during 76–80, 83–84
Cold War, 8–9; Poland as site of international
exchange, 164–67; between Yugoslavia and the Vajont Dam landslide (Italy, 1963), 112
West, 175–77, 278nn40–41 Vanĕk, Miroslav, 270n66
Treaty of Moscow, 229, 297n64 Vanoni, Ezio, 104
Treaty of Warsaw, 229, 297n64 Vendrov, Semen, 22–23, 30
Truman, Harry S., 191 Verein der Naturfreunde (Association of the Friends
Tucker, Richard P., 20 of Nature), 222
Turner, James Morton, 117 Vernadsky, Vladimir, 20
Vertelka, Bronius, 38
Udall, Stewart, 207–8, 216, 217 Vinogradov, Aleksandr, 29, 30
Uekötter, Frank, 83, 184, 200 VODGEO (All-Union Institute for Water Supply
Ukraine: and development of international green Engineering and Hydrogeology), 23
network, 67–69, 70–71; industrial development Vogt, Roland, 95–96
in, 56–57; post-Chernobyl environmental move- Voráček, František, 142
ment in, 60–67; Soviet response to Chernobyl
accident, 57–59 Waldsterben (forest dieback), 75, 83–84, 148, 154,
Ukrainian Association of Independent Intellectuals, 251n59, 272n17
65 Walker, J. Samuel, 118
Ukrainian Cultural Club, 65 Warsaw Pact, 5, 87, 92
Ukrainian Democratic Union, 65 Water for Peace program: abandonment of, 216–17;
Ukrainian Helsinki Group, 65 context behind, 207–10; criticism of, 209,
Index 311
Water for Peace program: criticism of (cont.), 211–12, Westinghouse Electric Corporation, 121, 128, 131
217, 292n55; overview, 205–7; and Strauss/Ei- White, Gilbert, 19
senhower proposal, 214–16 Wicks, Gary J., 121
water pollution management: administration in Wiesner, Jerome, 207, 212
Lithuania, 40, 41; comparative discourse on, Williams, Larry, 129
25–30, 27, 31–33; creation of unified Soviet min- WiP (Wolność i Pokój; Freedom and Peace), 162–63
istry for, 31–32; in East Germany, 154–55; and Wohlstetter, Albert, 292n55
East-West competition theory, 17–18, 33–34; Wolę być (I’d rather be), 162
emergence of Soviet epistemic community on, Wolfowitz, Paul, 292n55
18–21; factors for development of, in Lithuania, Woods, George D., 217
50–53; “integrated,” 19, 20, 21; Italian legislation World Federation for the Protection of Life (Welt-
on, 107, 257n29; monitoring and classification bund zum Schutze des Lebens, WSL), 94
of surface water in Lithuania, 40–43, 47–50, 48, World Health Organization (WHO), 226
49; monitoring and treatment of wastewater in Wyhl occupation, 93–98, 254n33
Lithuania, 43–47, 47, 51, 243n45; scholarship on
water management in BSR, 36–37; Soviet inter- Yablokov, Aleksey, 33
nal struggle for, 21–25, 30–31; and technocratic Yanshin, Aleksandr, 31, 32–33
environmentalism, 34–35; in Yugoslavia, 178–80 Yugoslavia: development of environmental move-
Water Resources Research Act (1964), 26 ment in, 173–74, 177–81; environmental legisla-
Weber, Otto, 177, 279n49 tion in, 170–73, 175, 278n35; as federation, 169,
Wegener, Uwe, 226–27 276n1; independence of, 4, 173; international
Weinberg, Alvin, 205, 207, 216 environmental cooperation, 175–77, 278nn40–
Weiner, Douglas, 17, 34 41; scholarship on environmental movement in,
Wellock, Thomas, 117, 118, 132 170, 276n2; Slovenia heritage, 277n17
Western Environmental Trade Association (WETA),
123 Zalygin, Sergey, 33
Western Montana Scientists’ Committee for Radia- Żarnowiec, 163
tion Information (WMSCRI), 119 Zelikin, Mikhail, 31
West European Socialists, 97–98 Zvonkov, Vasilii, 19–21, 22
West Germany: colonial status of, 194–96; criticism
of pollution in Czechoslovakia, 148–49; develop-
ment of environmental movement in, 80–81; vs.
East Germany environmental policy outcomes,
138–39; environmental diplomacy with East
Germany, 221–25; environmental legislation in,
74–75, 75, 296n56; Hallstein Doctrine, 219, 231,
293n3; mass peace movement in 1980s, 98–100;
and Morgenthau agricultural plan, 186–88,
190–91; overview of peace movement in, 87–89;
overview of postwar agricultural development,
183–86; partisan politics of 1950s/60s, 89–93;
pasture improvement in, 196–200; protests
against nuclear energy in, 93–98, 254n33; role
in global economy, 190–93; Treaties of Moscow
and Warsaw, 229, 297n64; UN recognition of,
219; U.S. agricultural policy in, 188–93; utility
company application of air pollution policies
in, 81–83; utility company concern for public
relations in, 84–86; utility company role in air
pollution debate in, 76–80, 83–84
312 Index

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NATURE AND THE IRON CURTAIN

NATURE AND THE

Environmental Policy and Social Movements

Edited by ASTRID MIGNON KIRCHHOF and J. R. MCNEILL

\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4545-1

Cover art: Soviet-era enviromentalism poster, by Igor Markovich Maystrovsky, c. 1989

2 Water Pollution and Protection in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic

3 The Fallout of Chernobyl

4 Keeping the Air Clean?

10 About Environmental Policy in Socialist Yugoslavia

11 “It Makes No Sense to Work against Nature”

13 East Germany’s Fight for Recognition as a Sovereign State

Environmentalism, Environmental Policy,

Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and J. R . McNeill

The rise of environmentalism as a social movement, and the formation of envi-

The Cold War and Environmentalism: Historical Contexts

4 Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and J. R. McNeill

Environmentalism, Environmental Policy, Capitalism, and Communism 5

6 Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and J. R. McNeill

Environmentalism, Environmental Policy, Capitalism, and Communism 7

8 Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and J. R. McNeill

Environmentalism, Environmental Policy, Capitalism, and Communism 9

10 Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and J. R. McNeill

Environmentalism, Environmental Policy, Capitalism, and Communism 11

The Structure of the Book

12 Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and J. R. McNeill

Environmentalism, Environmental Policy, Capitalism, and Communism 13

14 Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and J. R. McNeill

COMMUNIST AND CAPITALIST SYSTEMS REVISITED

A Comparison of Their Environmental Politics

Building a Soviet Eco-­Power while

“Between East and West”: The Emergence of an Epistemic Community

Building a Soviet Eco-Power while Looking at the Capitalist World 19

“Proven by the U.S. Experience”: Internal Lobbying for an Independent

Building a Soviet Eco-Power while Looking at the Capitalist World 21

Building a Soviet Eco-Power while Looking at the Capitalist World 23

Proxy Awareness: Comparisons in Soviet Discourses on Environmental

Building a Soviet Eco-Power while Looking at the Capitalist World 25

United States Soviet Union

Source: GARF, R-436/2/726, 199–200.

Building a Soviet Eco-Power while Looking at the Capitalist World 27

“How Is This Problem Solved Abroad?” Strategies of Opposition to the

Building a Soviet Eco-Power while Looking at the Capitalist World 29

Epilogue: The Apex of Western Legitimization for Building a Soviet

Building a Soviet Eco-Power while Looking at the Capitalist World 31

Soviet Technocratic Environmentalism as a By-­Product of the East-­West

Building a Soviet Eco-Power while Looking at the Capitalist World 33

Building a Soviet Eco-Power while Looking at the Capitalist World 35

Water Pollution and Protection in

Anolda Cetkauskaite and Simo Laakkonen

In the summer of 2011 Simo Laakkonen helped organize a workshop in Stock-

Water Pollution and Protection in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic 37

Materials and Methodology

Lithuania’s Geography and History

38 Anolda Cetkauskaite and Simo Laakkonen

of thousands were deported to Siberia, most agriculture was collectivized, and a

Water Pollution and Protection in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic 39

The Development of Soviet Lithuanian Surface-­Water Monitoring and

40 Anolda Cetkauskaite and Simo Laakkonen

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Building a Soviet Eco-Power while

Soviet Technocratic Environmentalism as a By-Product of the East-West

The Development of Soviet Lithuanian Surface-Water Monitoring and

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Utility Companies as Victims of Environmental Air-Quality Control?

From Anti-N uke to Ökopax

Connecting the Dots: The Challenge of Linking Anti-R eactor Protest