Saving Nature under Socialism

In memories of the Cold War, the German Democratic Republic's (GDR) horrific environmental record casts a long shadow. According to popular memory, the East German regime cared little for the environment and its people, poisoning the water, air, and land in pursuit of “real, existing socialism.” Thirty years after the collapse, its reputation as an “ecocidal” regime endures. This story is at best incomplete and at worst misleading. Much of it is a product of the regime's sudden end in 1989 and the “green” politics of reunification that followed. In her new book, Saving Nature under Socialism, Julia Ault demands we widen the lens beyond 1989 and the borders of the GDR. Ault argues that environmentalism and environmental thought had a longer and often contradictory history that dated back to the country's founding. Ault traces how the regime's attitudes, policies, and diplomatic efforts around the environment reflected its shifting position within Cold War geopolitics; how citizens took direction from the regime, and then later organized in semiautonomous spaces around environmental issues; and finally, how environmentalists became radicalized over the last decade of the country's existence, looking to the West and the East for answers. Ault's book is a history not just of East Germany but also of the world of environmental ideas, politics, and activism that permeated, traversed, and undermined its militarized borders.Saving Nature is a comprehensive history of state and nonstate actors, laws, institutions, and ideas about nature in the GDR. Ault shows how environmental thought was not a Western import but had taken root prior to 1949 and then expanded and evolved over the next four decades. Surprisingly, the East German state was at the forefront of this movement between 1950 and 1970, promoting environmental policies that balanced nature protection with the demands of heavy industry and the planned economy. The regime tasked mass social organizations like the Friends of Nature and Heimat and the Cultural League with the promotion of a socialist environmentalism. It passed laws and constitutional amendments to protect the environment in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It created a Ministry for Environmental Protection in 1971, less than a year after the US Environmental Protection Agency and three years before West Germany created its own ministry. And it conducted environmental diplomacy with Western and Eastern European countries, participating in bilateral and multinational negotiations in conferences from Helsinki to Stockholm, to name just two places. In other words, it behaved like all industrial countries during the Cold War, responding to the growing environmental awakening abroad while also acting with ambivalence toward effective environmental regulation at home.The story of East German environmentalism, however, is also a protest story. As mass demonstrations against nuclear power, militarization, and chemical pollution roiled western Europe, a similar, albeit smaller movement took root in the East. Under the aegis of the Protestant church, which had carved out a semiautonomous zone within the GDR, activists and church leaders hosted forums, traveled to conferences, and produced environmentalist materials. All of this occurred with the tacit permission of the regime—that is, until the 1980s. It was in this decade, punctuated by foreign and domestic crises, that the regime chose repression. Believing environmental activism threatened the financial and political solvency of the country, it classified all environmental data, deployed the Stasi against activists, and publicly pretended the pollution crisis didn't exist. Not all socialist regimes, however, chose this direction.In the most original contribution of the book, Ault traces the diverging environmentalism of the GDR and its socialist neighbor Poland. For the first three decades of its existence, Poland's environmental politics mapped directly onto the GDR's, allowing the two socialist neighbors to coordinate on numerous issues, including transborder pollution and scientific and technological exchanges. Cooperation collapsed in the 1980s as both countries faced interrelated political and financial crises. After the suppression of Solidarity, however, the Polish government pursued its own program of glasnost, tolerating more open discussion of economic problems, pollution, and human rights. By the end of the 1980s, East German activists openly admired their Polish comrades for their relative power, collaborating with them and allies in West Germany to openly confront the regime. Ault's discovery reveals an underappreciated schism in the supposed monolithic bloc, with the Polish government continuing to take its cues from Moscow while the GDR remained beholden to the planned economy and Western creditors.Ault's book raises an important question about the centrality of environmentalism to the revolution of 1989. While the regime's crackdown and the shock of Chernobyl radicalized activists, their numbers remained small. As late as 1988, there were just a few thousand active participants. And in 1989, environmental issues were one of the myriad grievances articulated by protesters, from human rights to democratization. Yet as Ault shows, pollution and environmental activists were in every part of the country. Both were impossible to miss. Add in forty years of active, state-backed environmental education, and you have a population conditioned to receive a radical critique and demand change. Environmentalism didn't spark the protest of 1989, but it covered every inch of the country for decades with dry, combustible kindling

Communism · Economic history · Environmental ethics · Environmentalism · Political science · Politics · Socialism · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies

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