Nature And The Iron Curtain: Environmental Policy And Social Movements In Communist And Capitalist Countries, 1945–1990 0822945452, 9780822945451

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgments......Page 8
Introduction. Environmentalism, Environmental Policy, Capitalism, and Communism / Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and J. R. McNeill......Page 12
PART I. Communist and Capitalist Systems Revisited: A Comparison of Their Environmental Politics......Page 24
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......Page 26
2. Water Pollution and Protection in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic / Anolda Cetkauskaite and Simo Laakkonen......Page 45
3. The Fallout of Chernobyl: The Emergence of an Environmental Movement in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic / Tetiana Perga......Page 64
4. Keeping the Air Clean?: Environmental Policy, Utility Companies, and Social Movements in West Germany since the 1970s / Hendrik Ehrhardt......Page 82
5. From Anti-Nuke to Ökopax: 1970s Anti-Reactor Activism and the Emergence of West Germany's Mass Movement for Peace / Stephen Milder......Page 96
6. An Unguided Boom: Environmental Policies of Cold War Italy / Wilko Graf von Hardenberg......Page 111
7. Nuclear-Free Montana: Grassroots Environmentalism and Montana's Antinuclear Initiatives / Brian James Leech......Page 125
PART II. The Porous Iron Curtain......Page 144
8. Building a Socialist Environment: Czechoslovak Environmental Policy from the 1960s to the 1980s / Eagle Glassheim......Page 146
9. Protesting Pollution: Environmental Activism in East Germany and Poland, 1980–1990 / Julia E. Ault......Page 160
10. About Environmental Policy in Socialist Yugoslavia / Hrvoje Petrić......Page 178
11. "It Makes No Sense to Work against Nature": Cold War Modernization in West German Agriculture / Scott Moranda......Page 192
PART III. Environmentalism and Détente?......Page 212
12. An American Miracle in the Desert: Environmental Crisis and Nuclear-Powered Desalination in the Middle East / Jacob Darwin Hamblin......Page 214
13. East Germany's Fight for Recognition as a Sovereign State: Environmental Diplomacy as Strategy in Cold War Politics / Astrid Mignon Kirchhof......Page 228
Notes......Page 242
Contributors......Page 308
Index......Page 312

Citation preview

NATURE AND THE IRON CURTAIN

NATURE AND THE IRON CURTAIN

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

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 \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

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

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

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 \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

The rise of environmentalism as a social movement, and the formation of environmental policy as a state initiative coincided with the Cold War (c. 1946–1991). However, this is not coincidental. The following thirteen chapters illuminate several connections between the Cold War and modern environmentalism and environmental 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 environmental matters. Second, that broad conclusions about differences in environmental 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 economic 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 former West Germany. Both terms thus embrace a broad spectrum of systems. This book deal with several different national and transnational contexts, drawing 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 governmental 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 consisted 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, Czechoslovakia, 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 military power. The most significant of these uprisings took place in Poland and East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Yugoslavia remained a special case because it, in effect, liberated itself from German wartime occupation and did not come under Soviet control. Its unquestioned leader until 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 independent course, allied with neither the USSR nor the United States. Yugoslavia’s environmental policy, developed in the 1970s and 1980s, also followed an idiosyncratic 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 Eastern Europe, which were hard enough. China, after Communists won its civil war 4

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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 another 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 international 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 crystallized 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 demise in 1991. Its first decades featured hardening of positions, evermore restrictions 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 increasingly 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 liberalizing the flow of information, softening repression, and reducing the centralization Environmentalism, Environmental Policy, Capitalism, and Communism

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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 environmentalism 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 chemicalized 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 Darwin 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.

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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 industrial 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 genuinely 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. Governments found it prudent to create departments or ministries devoted to environmental protection and remediation. They gradually sorted through their priorities, depending on the issues in a given country, and formulated environmental policies—as chapters 1, 4, 8, and 10 show. By and large, these emphasized issues related 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 environmentalism and the creation of deliberate environmental policy, everywhere and always environmental issues stood well down the list of human and governmental priorities. 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 environmentalists 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.

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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 willingness to accept new ideas and values, absorb them, and adjust them to the specific 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 responsible for controlling what people could know. U.S. and Western European authorities 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 environmental 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 permitted 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 happening 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 Ger8

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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 suggests 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 cooperation 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 opportunity for such cooperation during the Cold War. Environmentalism, Environmental Policy, Capitalism, and Communism

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Environmentalism, Environmental Policy, and Comparisons across the Iron Curtain The priority attached to environmental concerns on both sides of the Iron Curtain 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 Europe. 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 acceptance of air pollution and the strength—or weakness—of efforts to deal with it.22 10

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Ehrhardt’s examination of the West German utility industry (chapter 4) offers 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 political struggles. As Astrid Mignon Kirchhof demonstrates in chapter 13, East German officials saw an opportunity in the negotiations leading up to 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment to promote their goal of recognition 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 automobile 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 European cities, however, usually constructed (or, in many cases, reconstructed) public transit networks on a par with those of Eastern Europe. The embrace of the automobile in capitalist countries was symptomatic of an ideologically driven emphasis on the individual—a sharp contrast to the focus on communities in Socialist and Communist countries. That difference had multiple impacts on environmental priorities. Some of these may seem counterintuitive. Postwar Italy enjoyed remarkable 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 peculiarities of politics, especially the importance of patronage networks, proved Environmentalism, Environmental Policy, Capitalism, and Communism

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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 authorities 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 approximation, 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 Capitalist Systems Revisited: A Comparison of Their Environmental Politics,” Laurent Coumel, Anolda Cetkauskaite, Simo Laakkonen, Tetiana Perga, Hendrik Ehrhardt, 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 privately owned means of production play? Was the question of freedom of expression important for environmentalism? How did security concerns and the emphases 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 opportunities 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 between détente and environmentalism. In chapters 12 and 13 Jacob Darwin Hamblin 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

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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 approaches they take, will help to illuminate the complex, and sometimes counterintuitive, relationships among modern environmentalism, the environmental policies 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 century’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 organization, and an exploitative understanding of nature.26 We offer three concluding thoughts, which we hope will trigger further research in terms of environmentalism beyond the two dominating systems of the twentieth century. First, society needs to empower itself. The chapters in this volume show that while capitalism expanded the power of capital, Communism empowered 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 environmental 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 traditional 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

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such as pastures and forests, fish stocks, irrigation systems, roads, buildings, and so forth over centuries were collectively used and sustainably maintained by communities. 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 toward 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 respects society, democracy, and nature?

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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 \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

A convergence between the two adversary systems of the Cold War has been addressed 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) Institute 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’ competition 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 internationalization of environmental knowledge was, in fact, more important between both sides of the Iron Curtain even before the creation of the United Nations Environment 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 movement, 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 competition and “nature protection,” combining in my methodology an institutional and a cultural approach. Ultimately, I contend that the rise of a technocratic environmentalism 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 governing 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 independent 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 practices 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

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(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 reassessed 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, taking 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, although 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 water 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 scientific exchanges.” This was a turning point in his vision of water-­resource management. 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 account 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 geographer 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

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the United States and the USSR in 1958.17 A global community of international experts 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 complicated 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 management 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 Conservation 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 representative.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 influence each other toward the end of the 1950s—the time of the Thaw and of “Peaceful Coexistence,” the official slogan used by Khrushchev to qualify the new direction 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 Soviet Geography, which published translations of academic articles from the other side of the Iron Curtain. The sixth issue included an article by two Soviet geographers on the independent monitoring of water resources with a clear protection 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 resources, 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

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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 origin of this decision may have been the controversy surrounding sanitary issues of water quality studied by Christopher Burton: second-­rank scientists contested 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 detoxification 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 integrated 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 institutional “ordering of integrated use and strengthening of protection.” In October 1960 the Russian law on nature protection was adopted, after four years of lobbying of party and state institutions by authoritative scholars, including biologists and geographers.29 While the movement was not influential enough to achieve Building a Soviet Eco-Power while Looking at the Capitalist World

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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 Protection (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 coordination 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 rivers 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 Committee 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 added 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 coun22

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try’s water-­pollution issue: “There is a widespread view that maintaining the proper 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 proven 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 approach to the issue they were dealing with, although their first goal was to counterbalance, 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 authors 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 (Minvodkhoz) 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 papers 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 stakeholders were the Academy of Sciences and the State Committee for Science and Building a Soviet Eco-Power while Looking at the Capitalist World

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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 consideration 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 institutions 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 Gidrometsluzhba 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 Gidrometsluzhba’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 possibility 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

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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 debates 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 Ministers and Central Committee Decree of December 1972, “on measures to strengthen 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 country’s ecological problems without being suspected of anti-­Soviet propaganda. Published a few months before Khrushchev’s dismissal, the geographer David Armand’s book, For Us and Our Grandchildren (1964), is one of the first global surveys of environmental problems published for a large audience in the postwar era. Systematically, it looked at the situation in the United States before giving examples 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-­ Building a Soviet Eco-Power while Looking at the Capitalist World

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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 . . . question concerning the creation of special All-­Union and Republican organs for integrated 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 committee 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 committee would have weakened the attention of other ministries and agencies.54 In the summer of 1970, the Gidrometsluzhba and the GKNT launched a new attempt: they proposed a joint project for a state body responsible for the monitoring, 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 issue, 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 counterattack. 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 resources 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

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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 (since 1964)

Soviet Union

Number of research institutes

One in each state (fifty)

One institute (Minsk) & a dozen laboratories or laboratory departments

Amount of staff (scientific and technical)

Around twenty thousand

Around four hundred (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 convincing 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 protection was unsuccessful.58 The discourse emphasizing the damage in capitalist countries and partly masking 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 Society, 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 apocalyptic 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 rather 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 commission, 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. Building a Soviet Eco-Power while Looking at the Capitalist World

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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 Resources 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 Legislation 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 responding positively to Western calls for environmental cooperation.67 The Soviet scientific elites continued their lobbying in favor of a new form of decision making on environmental issues. The academician and physicist Pyotr Kapitsa, an internationally 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. Forrester and his colleagues’ 1972 book, The Limits to Growth.69 A paragraph was devoted 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 superiority 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

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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 democracy.” 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 environment, 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 geochemist, 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 under 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 Building a Soviet Eco-Power while Looking at the Capitalist World

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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 matter 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 solutions 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 perhaps 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 consensus 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 involving 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 unification of air and water control by Gidrometsluzhba. He stressed the need “to activate participation in international programs on the study of nature and its components 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 Minvodkhoz and its institutes would prepare the documents, while the Academy of Sciences’ 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 movement 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 Zelikin.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 according 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, according 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 agriculture, 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 geographer Nikolai Koronkevich made a significant remark on the issue of improving Moscow’s freshwater supply with regard to another much-­criticized project involving the construction of a dam near the city of Rzhev on the Upper Volga—it Building a Soviet Eco-Power while Looking at the Capitalist World

31

was necessary, he said, to study West Berlin’s experience in terms of a closed water circle, before building a new dam there.86 The positive perception of Western techno-­scientific practices was a key argument in these controversies now becoming 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 evidence 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 conservationist 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 sci32

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 institution.92 In October 1987 both the writer Sergey Zalygin and the biologist Aleksey 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 exist 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 hardest 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, argued 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 . . . transformed 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 competition 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, respectively a failed and a successful attempt at a scientist-­led technocracy. This is Building a Soviet Eco-Power while Looking at the Capitalist World

33

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 interested 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 environmentalism. 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 environmental 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 improve the independent monitoring of nature, and their discourse reached a progressively 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 rapprochement 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 assessment, 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 scholars truly advocated for the establishment of environmental management separate from social and economic spheres: a reign of experts with green awareness. A Soviet–style eco-­power.

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

35

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 Stockholm 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 pollution 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 environmental 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 wastewater treatment plant. However, they were unable to point to any research findings to support their views. Instead, they referred to the generally destructive environmental heritage of the Soviet occupation of the eastern part of the Baltic Sea Region. 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 twentieth century was water pollution, the participants of the session were asked the following 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 sur36

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 policy 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 early 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 explore 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 dealing 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 conducted in the Soviet Union?12 What was known about water pollution in Soviet Lithuania? How did scientific research about the condition of the waterways begin? 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 geographic and economic areas (rural, urban, and industrial), among different functions 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 efficient 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 environmental 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 official 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 Unfortunately, as we discovered in archival materials, the register does not include information 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 Lithuanian 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 Lithuanians 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 occupied 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

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of thousands were deported to Siberia, most agriculture was collectivized, and a censorship and intelligence-­gathering system was established.16 However, Lithuania 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 population 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 Lithuanian 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 Pollution and Protection in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic

39

Water Protection and Management in the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic Immediately after Lithuania’s incorporation into the Soviet Union, the State Sanitary 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 observation of air quality and surface waters. A regulatory body (whose title translates 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 resources, 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 authorities collected information and conducted consultations and, where needed, imposed penalties.24 By repeatedly fining those responsible, the State Sanitary Inspectorate 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 Hydrochemical Laboratory. The Inspectorate of Water Economy oversaw the emission 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 Nature 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 watercourses were conducted in the years immediately after World War II. The first permanent monitoring stations for the condition of rivers were founded in Soviet 40

Anolda Cetkauskaite and Simo Laakkonen

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Lithuania in 1950. Six stations began to monitor water color, levels of ammonia, nitrites, nitrates, chlorides, oxygen, oxidation, biological oxygen demand, and bacteria counts at regular intervals.29 One of these monitoring stations was situated in Lithuania’s second largest city, Water Pollution and Protection in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic

41

Kaunas. In the early 1950s authorities carried out analyses of river water pollution 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 included physical, chemical, and bacteriological analysis. In principle such a broad approach 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 started 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 hydrobiological 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 program about water pollution were not classified as secret, in contrast to the situation 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 requirements. The same classification system was in use throughout the Soviet Union and was based on chemical parameters and certain components within maximum 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 monitored. 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 hydrobiological 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 42

Anolda Cetkauskaite and Simo Laakkonen

emphasizing the quantity of dissolved oxygen in water). As water quality was then estimated with the aid of more specific biological, chemical, or biological parameters 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 biological 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 fundamentally the same basic hygienic, physical, chemical, and biological methods and classification criteria as did the rest of the world. For example, the analysis of biological 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 component 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 objective 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 untreated 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 regard 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 staWater Pollution and Protection in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic

43

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 basis.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 Šiauliai 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 neutralization of alkaline water, sedimentation of suspended solids in settling tanks, biological 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 wastewaters 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 appeared 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 biofiltration facilities were built in Lithuania before 1990.49 In the 1970s and 1980s almost one hundred filtration fields were built in Lithuania’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, 44

Anolda Cetkauskaite and Simo Laakkonen

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 ditches, 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 transfer 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 contemporary Lithuania. The activated sludge process was developed by the English engineers 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 microbial treatment process. The treatment became even more effective when supplemental 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 addition, 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 biological 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 Water Pollution and Protection in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic

45

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 Vilnius 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 construction 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, construction slowed because so many treatment plants had already been built. In Finland 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 treatment 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 existence is strongly supported by the available data, also largely explains why the most significant local failures in water protection in Soviet Lithuania were specifically 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 necessary 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 re46

Anolda Cetkauskaite and Simo Laakkonen

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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 represented 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 Water Pollution and Protection in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic

47

 





 



 



 

   





     

 



  

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

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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. However, 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 48

Anolda Cetkauskaite and Simo Laakkonen

 







 



 



 





 

   

   

 



   

 

 

 

 

 

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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, however, without results. Although the economic output of the republic and the consequent 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 Water Pollution and Protection in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic

49

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 circumstances 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 subjected it to Soviet priorities, such as maximization of heavy industry. These circumstances 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 after 1945. It established management of water protection in Lithuania immediately after the war. Studies of water pollution, which led to regular follow-­up with standardized 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 Lithuanian SSR immediately began to undertake practical measures to reduce water-­ pollution emissions. As a result of the long-­term water-­protection policy in Lithuania 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 environmental 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? 50

Anolda Cetkauskaite and Simo Laakkonen

0 0 1 8 20 92 133 94 48 396

Year

1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975* 1980 1985 1990 Total

0 1 0 2 23 28 67 38 3 162

Oxidation ditches 1 2 4 12 12 4 1 0 0 36

Biofilters 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 3 7 13

Biological ponds 0 0 3 8 12 12 32 18 3 97

Filtration fields 0 0 0 0 6 6 30 14 1 68

0 0 3 14 15 15 16 11 0 88

Other types of biological Mechanical treatment treatment

Note: * In 1975 small plants, such as septic tanks, were removed from the list of treatment plants.

Activated sludge 0 0 3 5 7 7 23 13 2 68

Physicochemical treatment

1 3 8 30 73 162 263 170 62 772

1 3 14 49 95 206 302 194 64 928

Total number of WWTPs Biological All Types

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.

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 measures. 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 population’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 traditions 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 appeared 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 historical continuity, which is nationalism. National identities and interests, although discouraged, hardly disappeared in Soviet Lithuania. Native-­born Lithuanian experts and decision-­makers were responsible for studies about rivers and their protection, 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 protection 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 Lithuania 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 procedures 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 52

Anolda Cetkauskaite and Simo Laakkonen

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 particular 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 centralization, we see clearly a top-­down approach to water-­quality management in Lithuania that contrasts with the evolution of water pollution control in neighboring 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 undertaken 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 watercourses throughout the USSR, the approach the state took was the only method for attaining these objectives in the newly absorbed territories as well. This centralized, 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 Lithuania 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 mechanical 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 exception 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, Water Pollution and Protection in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic

53

was treated sufficiently to meet official Soviet standards. The rate of efficient treatment 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 Soviet 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 generalizations about environmental quality and environmental protection during the Cold War.

54

Anolda Cetkauskaite and Simo Laakkonen

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 accelerated the end of the Cold War. From today’s perspective, the Chernobyl accident 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 effects 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 immediate 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 United 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 disproportionate 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 enterprises 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 experience complex environmental problems. Forty-­one of the 45 major cities experienced 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 number 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 energy 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 justified 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 subordination of all enterprises located in Ukraine to the authorities in Moscow. Authoritarian decisions made in Moscow were carried out by local functionaries and contributed 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 dissidents—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 secrecy 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 Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.10 Fire crews and military units responding to the accident often worked without protective clothing and received high doses of radiation. 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 immediate 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 receiving 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 reported the establishment of a government commission to “liquidate the consequences of the accident” led by the deputy prime minister of the USSR, Boris Scherbina.17 The first government delegation to the Chernobyl region finally arrived 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 environment. 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 accident, 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 stable 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 Committee 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 Western 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 admitted 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 never, 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 international 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 undertaken only because “people could not be put at risk.”27 The cynicism of these statements 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, Romanenko 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 Soviet authorities during the April 1986 crisis as “a total lie, falsehoods, cover-­up and concealment; that is a crime of the Communist system.”30

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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 institutionalized and put under the control of the Communist Party. In the Soviet Union, independent 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, imprisonment, or exile.31 The Soviet Union purported to support nature conservation and citizen participation 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 people 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 activities 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 protests 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 attitudes 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 collective action aimed at receiving reliable information and a demand for transparent decision-­making and communication with authorities. This popular demand 60

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for reliable information combined with “dramatic changes that happen to people” 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, increasing poverty, the failure of state financing) inspired people to action. However, 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 reforms associated with Gorbachev—gave leaders the opportunity to cover various environmental issues in newspapers and magazines and to increase popular awareness 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 degradation. A special feature of the Ukrainian environmental movement throughout 1986–1987 was the formation of informal groups around specific ecological issues, such as industrial pollution or nuclear power plants (single-­issue interest 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 The Fallout of Chernobyl

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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 Simferopol 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 debates, 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 environmental 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 ensuring their own personal security through the protection and restoration of the environment in Ukraine and through the establishment of new forms of legal, administrative, and other mechanisms for solving ecological problems. In the early post–Chernobyl years, environmental activity in the Ukrainian SSR was segmented and scattered due to the size of the territory, the numerous local environmental problems, and a generally weak environmental awareness. Organized environmental protests only began in 1989, when the Green World Association finally assumed 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 movement. Using their celebrity and credibility, they influenced popular views on environmental issues. After the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident, the republic’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 nu62

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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 inspired their activism. They demonstrated their concern within weeks of the accident 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 decision, 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 Ministers to “take public opinion into account” in this matter.42 This letter was the beginning 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 nuclear 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 newspaper 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 nuclear power stations by organizing activities in response to the government’s ambitious program to expand electricity production in Ukraine. Historically, scientists played a decisive role in the Soviet economy’s development. Enjoying great prestige in Soviet society and privileged access to information, they formed effective antinuclear lobbies. Scientists opposed government plans to build an additional The Fallout of Chernobyl

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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 Paton, 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 discussion 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 Labor 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 expansion 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 further 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 environmental protests, Mikhail Gorbachev addressed the Party Congress about the necessity of “drastically improving” the ecological situation in the country. 64

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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 another 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 Nuclear 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 political 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 example, 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 placards 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 politicization 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 information, and to participate in decision-­making.53 Some of the dissidents, such as The Fallout of Chernobyl

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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 Democratic 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 situation 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 monitor 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 environmental decision-­making or in the enforcement of environmental laws. Therefore, 66

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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 environmental movement in Ukraine during the last years of the Soviet Union and the widespread use of environmental issues not only by democratic but also nationalist movements. The popularity of environmental issues meant they were included in the platforms 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 environmental 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 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident, as well as many other environmental problems, 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 concretized and clarified the negative consequences of the Communist Party’s dominance 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 network across the Soviet Union that outlasted the Soviet Union itself. Because these The Fallout of Chernobyl

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groups were informal, lacked official sanction, and involved a small number of participants engaging in semi-­legal activities, it is extremely difficult to find information 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 informal groups, in December 1988 fourteen Ukrainian organizations from Kharkov, Mariupol, Nikolayev, Sumy, Ternopl, Odessa, Kiev, and other cities helped establish in Moscow the nationwide Socio-­Ecological Union.65 In April 1990 this organization, 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 Moscow in 1990. A year later organizations from Kiev, Odessa, and Illichivsk participated 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 established 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 Olshaniwsky 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

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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 distribution 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 documents characterized the environmental situation in the country as “disturbing and sometimes critical.” The Aral Sea region was recognized as a zone of ecological 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 regions 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 dangerous 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 environment. The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident demonstrated that the totalitarian system could not provide good environmental governance and democracy, which Ukrainians demanded. This failure further undermined the authority 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 The Fallout of Chernobyl

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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 Decree of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union on November 27, 1989, on emergency measures for the environmental rehabilitation, could not stop the protests that were spreading across the Ukrainian SSR. In light of the environmental conditions 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 factories 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 information 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 reaction to fierce public discussions and the recommendations of independent ecological 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 Tashkent 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 national liberation. In a society where the state once attempted to organize and control virtually all social activities, the rapid mobilization of independent nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is remarkable, and indicates the rise of a civil

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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 nuclear death.”79 A distinctive feature of environmentalism in the Soviet republics was that green movements actively cooperated with Popular Fronts that fought for independence from the Soviet Union. In the late 1980s the Popular Front of Latvia, Popular Front of Estonia, the Sąjūdis movement in Lithuania, the Moldavian Popular 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 relationship many enterprises had to the Soviet military-­industrial complex, these closures caused a domino effect that caused social and economic problems in other 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 foundation 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 disintegrated into fifteen independent countries. A new chapter opened for environmental movements in the post–Soviet reality. \\\

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The development of the ecological movement in Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic 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 Nuclear 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 participated 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 sources, 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 culture, 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 conversation 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.

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4 Keeping the Air Clean? Environmental Policy, Utility Companies, and Social Movements in West Germany since the 1970s

Hendrik Ehrhardt \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

Air pollution has been a central environmental issue since the end of the nineteenth century—in both Germany and throughout the industrial world. Emissions, 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 adjustments.1 At the time various technical associations, which united homogeneous actors, 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 minister of the interior, Hans-­Dietrich Genscher.5 Instead it was the Division for Environmental 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 federal 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 environmental 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 fundamentally 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 powerful 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 domain 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 Federal 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 emissions 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 stations, 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 per74

Hendrik Ehrhardt

Table 4.1. Development of legal limits for SO2 emissions from coal power plants, West Germany, 1974–1983

Year

SO2 critical value

Minimum size of plants to which limit applied (in megawatts)

1974

1.150 mg/m

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 February 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

3

Comments

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 environmental policy of the 1970s: sulfur dioxide emissions. Its polluting potential had been more or less known since the beginning of industrialization in the nineteenth 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 sulfur 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

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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 Elektrizitätswirtschaft 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 utility 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 discussion of the 1970s and 1980s because of its huge emissions. The media and environmental 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 generate 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 centered 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

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financial aspects of the legislation, which required expenditure on retrofitting. On the other hand, several environmental organizations considered the GfAVO regulation insufficient. In their opinion, the legislation did not take the “state of technology” 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 particularly afraid that older power plants would be affected by stricter legislation because they could not meet environmental requirements. Many also feared that environmental 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 measures 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 percent 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 electricity.22 Conveniently, Preußenelektra left out the fact that federal and state governments 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 examples 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, Keeping the Air Clean?

77

Joschka Fischer—did not want the utility company to build a nuclear power station there. In the negotiations with the ministry Preußenelektra received financial subsidies for installing a filter and rejecting the nuclear option.24 Overall, the additional 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 permission 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 industries. 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 environmental problems beyond, for example, the probability of energy shortfalls, as inappropriate.28 This attitude continued despite the fact that environmental conferences 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 emission 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

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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 retrofitting 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 companies.34 In 1983 the federal government estimated that the GfAVO would cost companies between 6 and 12 billion deutschmarks.35 In terms of economic impact the regulation of old power plants was the most important part of the GfAVO. 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 between 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-

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79

zens. According to this strategy, an emphasis on public relations was not necessary. It was the persuasion of the technically minded management that those employees would be missed in the core business operations. This perception of politics and social pressures changed considerably over time, and utility companies recognized 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 Popular trust in their expertise decreased especially in the energy sector. Overall, society began to believe that different fields of knowledge, ranging from economic to legal to technical expertise, were necessary to make complex decisions. Furthermore, politicians began to trust in expert knowledge less.38 At the same time other societal actors, which started as nongovernmental organizations or social movements like the Öko-­Institute, gradually gained acceptance and finally became recognized 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 management boards to heed changing popular opinion and suggested improving communications with the public—for example, by not portraying environmental protection 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 justifiable and efficient.42 Utility companies asserted that support for more rigorous environmental 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 opponents were quite common. Factually, though, Ulrich Segatz was not as wrong about initial support for environmental regulation, as Joachim Radkau and several other environmental historians have shown.44 It is easy to forget that environmental movements entered the political sphere slowly and from the outside.

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Beginning in 1970 a plurality of educational programs were initiated in the environmental 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 environmental 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 utility companies became more complex. They struggled to explain complicated legal 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 underestimated 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 miscalculated 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 consider 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 provincial government. In the early 1970s RWE started to test different techniques for flue gas desulfurization using its pilot plant built in the Goldenbergwerk station.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

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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 different 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 Neurath 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 Stations would exceed the pollution limits. Due to the existing legislation, the company expected the imposition of obligations and monetary fines. An internal memorandum recommended following the guidelines of the Federation 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 desulfurization in order to reduce emissions. This commitment was to have the positive 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 renovate 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 operated 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 investing in pollution-­abatement measures. If the costs of these new measures proved inevitable, the companies lobbied to pass them on to electricity consumers. However, 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 guidelines 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 regulations with scientific arguments. They rejected the cause-­and-­effect chain of pollutant 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 associations 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 environmental 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 environmental politics at that time, because the government did not do anything Keeping the Air Clean?

83

revolutionary, and instead continued to follow existing routines and habits, between 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 electricity 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 environmental 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 rethinking.”65 This rethinking was strongly motivated by strategic considerations. As one of the biggest flue gas polluters, RWE was aware of the advantages of presenting 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 polluters 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 power plants were equipped with filters that significantly improved air quality. This process was accompanied by public relations campaigns initiated by the companies. 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, beginning 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 importance 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 controversial 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” accomplishment of twenty-­five years of environmental protection.69 \\\ With the emergence of environmental problems and the environmental movement, utility companies were forced to deal with this topic. The production of electricity could no longer be conceptualized in exclusively technical and economic terms, but also in terms of societal costs. Through this process, utility companies 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 legislation 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 especially 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 arrangements with the government and the installation of REAs continued. From the mid-­1980s, utility companies complained much less about environmental 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 Keeping the Air Clean?

85

change in strategy was described by one of the leading RWE managers responsible for the implementation of air-­quality improvements, Werner Hlubek, “As we realized 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 administration 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 oxide (NOx) emissions caused by power plants decreased by 87 percent and 68 percent, 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 issues, such as clean air, and claim to understand that their environmental policies contribute significantly to the legitimacy of their business and their public image.

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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 political 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 protests 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 German 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 included many newcomers to protest politics.2 Such a sizable transformation requires an explanation. Frequently, the expansion 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 suggested 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 nuclear 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 transformation. As Silke Mende and Birgit Metzger have put it, the 1970s environmental movement served as an “experiential space” for the 1980s peace movement.7 Environmentalism was so important because environmentalists approached politics differently than the peace protesters of the 1950s and 1960s had. Environmentalists were focused first and foremost on immediate, local dangers—such as individual 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

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to an environmental issue that seemed outside the Cold War framework, and had immediate local consequences.8 Though it seems paradoxical, Susanne Schregel 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 recruiting West Germans. Second, it looks at the very different techniques that organizers 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 nuclear 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 beyond 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 Germany’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 continue 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

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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 actions 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 support 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, Social 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 partisan 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 itself 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

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nuclear armament, and FDP leaders were moving closer to the Christian Democrats 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 established 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 toward 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 movement 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 recently 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 movement, 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 participated 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 marchFrom Anti-Nuke to Ökopax

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es were conceived by their organizers as an attempt to prefigure a third way between 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 dangerous 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 succeed 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 divided 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 marches 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 (Außerparlamentarische 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

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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 political 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 energy, 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 energy were not held in parliament, but rather in public meeting halls in towns and villages 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 occupation 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 usual 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, government officials treated grassroots opposition to nuclear reactor projects as a parochial 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 From Anti-Nuke to Ökopax

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the West German population that such apolitical concerns were legitimate. Their realization that elected officials did not care about their concerns pushed grassroots 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 recounted 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 interested only in protecting their villages and their livelihoods. This widespread acceptance 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 Federation 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 Mossmann, 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 struggle 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 potent means of forging a third way within the Cold War political order precisely because it seemed to stand outside of politics.

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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 activists, gave the farmers’ and vintners’ struggle to protect their interests from government 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 Germany’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 ongoing 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 disobedience, 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 communication, Ebert explained that he and Vogt had been inspired, “as old Easter Marchers,” From Anti-Nuke to Ökopax

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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 reactor.” Yet, as Vogt himself readily admitted, the Easter marches had been dismissed by the political mainstream during the 1960s because they were allegedly “infiltrated 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 energy 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 essential 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 campaign, which had attracted widespread support throughout the region. The Easter marches had never approached this level of popular support. When grassroots activists 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

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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 Monday 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 outside 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 politics in general. Indeed, flyers promoting the Easter Monday gathering and speakers 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 concern you, come to Wyhl this Easter.” The BBU supported this plea for participation 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 local 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 protests to broader European politics. In a letter she sent to the West European Socialists, 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 From Anti-Nuke to Ökopax

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themselves to building and promoting links between disparate grassroots anti-­ reactor actions in order to turn these localized protests into a nonviolent movement 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 occupation into particularly grand and universal terms. This action, the paper reported, “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 people’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, Communists 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 potent 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” position 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, significantly affect West German politics. Having received nearly nine hundred thousand 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, incorporating it more clearly than ever before into “high politics.” But the Greens’ campaign 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

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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 German 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 construct 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 participants, 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 weapons 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 From Anti-Nuke to Ökopax

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most important. Leading anti-­missile activists like Petra Kelly had risen to prominence 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 network localized actions in order to create a widespread, transnational antinuclear movement. Much like rural people’s efforts to preserve themselves, their hometowns, and their livelihoods from the threat of nuclear reactors, the peace movement 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 effective 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 influences 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 traditions, 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 create 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 ordinary 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 mobilizations 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 century 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 pursue individual interests. These interpretations cast “single-­issue” movements, including 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 activism and other grassroots-­based environmental movements altered the frameworks 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 places 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 population 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. From Anti-Nuke to Ökopax

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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 expectancy. 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 characterized 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 period 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 liberal 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 reliance 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 parties 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 directives, 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 dimension of the problem. Scholarship approaching the issue of the environmental impact of the postwar boom from a national perspective has instead, at times explicitly, 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 economic sectors. While many industries (such as the mechanical, energy, and textile ones) suffered minimal damage, those that were the primary targets of Allied bombings (like iron and steel, chemistry, ship-­building) were devastated. Wartime 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 industrial 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 Reconstruction, 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

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(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 resulted 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 territorial 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 development 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 development 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 representing 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 number 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 atmospheric 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

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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 government launched a major program of roadbuilding that favored the construction of toll highways rather than the maintenance and repair of existing roads. The extension 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 impact of the new highways on the environment and landscapes, as well as the inherent 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 postwar 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 cities 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 architectural 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 industrial areas also followed chaotic patterns, which were determined by local condiAn Unguided Boom

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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 aspects of prewar Fascist town planning and landscape-­management legislation had been relatively advanced. In theory, the new republican constitution of 1948 provided for the protection of the landscape and the rational use of resources. However, 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 tradition of the Italian state, dedicated a major part of state resources to addressing emergencies, neglecting the development of long-­term solutions that could prevent 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 implemented.25 The postwar constitution delegated land management to the regional 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 municipalities 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 fundamental right and a primary interest of the community, legislation regarding pollution was practically absent. The constitution, by nature a compromise among all parliamentary parties, committed the state to promote a framework of general conditions, 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 eventually every citizen gained the right, formally defensible in court, to a healthy environment.28 Nonetheless, the first law explicitly about air pollution was not passed 106

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until 1966, and legislative acts regarding water and soil pollution and the actual execution 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 preservation 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 enforcement 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 experiencing widespread uncontrolled urbanization, started drafting a promising intermunicipal plan on housing and urban services, which, however, was never implemented. 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 government 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 ambiguous 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 drafting, 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 An Unguided Boom

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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 practice 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 substantially change the status quo and limit the greatest distortions of the postwar reconstruction 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 surroundings. In the end most of these plants turned out to be white elephants. Essentially, 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

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The Christian Democrats, the Patronage System, and the Environment The Christian Democrats, the moderate, pro-­NATO majority party whose activities characterized the politics of the entire period, followed a tactic of winning consent 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 focused 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 system 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 increasingly 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 influence 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 An Unguided Boom

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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 Democratic patronage politics, saw the development of a mixed agricultural-­industrial economy and a concentration of microbusinesses in the less technologically advanced sectors. This process, which caused radical changes to both the landscape and ecological networks, exclusively favored the economic interests of new business 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 political 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 Comunista Italiano—PCI) in decision-­making difficult, the priorities of the Left (besides 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 industrialization 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 technocratic 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 investment 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 Democratic politics on the postwar environment was the practice of using residential housing 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 110

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made the land valuable in the first place. The resulting unchecked growth of residential 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 interests.”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 administrations 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 unrealistic 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 development 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 municipality 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 Planning 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 environmentalist 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 tendency 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 reAn Unguided Boom

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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 Fascist 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 ability 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 landslides occurred, underlining the limits of a development model that had overlooked 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 disasters, 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 northeastern 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 prevented. The dam was built without the necessary geological report, and the possible 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 112

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used the disaster to discuss the effects of capitalism on the environment. According 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 acquiescent 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 Communist Party paid to environmental disasters and the human causes behind them may appear counterintuitive, when the appalling environmental record of the Soviet 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 consistent 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 Rivers, is probably the most famous rainfall-­related disaster that occurred during reconstruction. The rising waters of the Po accelerated due to the narrowing of the An Unguided Boom

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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 defense 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 potentially 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 Communist opposition, which was actively accusing the government of being responsible 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 excessive building, and the flood of the Arno in Florence, exacerbated by the excavation 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 geological 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 114

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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 reconstruction 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 exclusively 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 enemy 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 transformation were thus seen as inseparable from their heavy environmental costs. Already 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 patronage 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 development and the maintenance of its landscapes in the years of the boom were recursively 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.

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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 regulatory 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 power 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 major 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 hidden, health risks, including cancer and death. Many Native Americans, whether as

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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 antinuclear movement in the United States was primarily an antinuclear power movement 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 perspective 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 major rallying issue.5 This chapter shows that additional elements of 1970s environmental 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 environmental controls of the 1970s prevented, or even perceptibly slowed, the expansion 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 includes 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-

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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 Montana looks more similar to the diverse attitudes Thomas Wellock described in California, 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 galvanized 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 mobilized 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 development, nor as a hotbed of grassroots environmentalism. Yet during the first decades of the Cold War, Montana experienced a minor boom in uranium exploration, 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 office 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

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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 Montana 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 residents’ 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 movement, whose advocates believed scientists had a social obligation to provide citizens with accessible information so that they could engage in public policy debates.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 traveling lectures about the “peaceful applications of nuclear energy,” but a growing undercurrent of unease greeted new attempts at development.19 A 1969 AEC proposal centered on eastern Montana’s supposedly empty plains. The AEC was looking 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. Farmers worried about losing productive land; environmentalists cited wildlife and water 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 corNuclear-Free Montana

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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 regulation 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 major allies, including the United States. The resulting protest became the Organization 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 Americans. Lines at gas stations stretched around city blocks.28 As a result, President Nixon enacted Project Independence, which called for further exploration of native 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 Although 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 mission 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 gassification and reclamation.34 Districts in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona became the 120

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center of a renewed uranium boom. The AEC initially held a monopoly on uranium procurement, but in 1964 President Lyndon Johnson signed a law that gave private companies the right to own fissionable material. The AEC had also gradually 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 population growth and an economic boom.36 A 1973 Atomic Energy Commission report 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 Conservation, 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 participatory 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 government decisions. Acts like these required public notice of, and public participation in, the review process for new developments. Citizens could even appeal agency Nuclear-Free Montana

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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 farmers joined with young members of the burgeoning environmental movement. Both groups worried about the effects of outside coal companies on plains ecology, 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 leadership 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 hippies.”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 energy 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, encouraged 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 initiative 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. Calling antinuclear campaigns across the American West “totally fraudulent,” McCormack 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) appeared on the ballot. I-­71 would have required state legislative approval of any 122

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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 support 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 reason 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 skepticism 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 lowly enriched uranium rods arrived in the Missoula yards from the Hanford, Washington, nuclear facility. During a routine boxcar check, railroad employees discovered 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 extinguished 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 Nuclear-Free Montana

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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 responsibility 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 approve new energy development, and this board included environmental and human 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 Consolidated 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 adoption 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 barely 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 Corporation, 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 124

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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 safeguards, while Montanans stood at 41 percent.66

The 1978 Battle of the Bans Despite their disappointment in 1976, Montana’s antinuclear activists rebounded 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 refuse 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 proposed 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 difficult 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 economic 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 regNuclear-Free Montana

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ulatory authority and new insurance requirements would be costly and perhaps illegal. The possibility of Montana-­based uranium mining would end. Even if power 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 offshoot 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 important 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 Progressive Student Union joined with the student government to host Nuclear Awareness Week. During the event, talks about the broader history of energy development 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 organizing, and showed films such as the popular satire of Cold War nuclear enthusiasm, 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 together as a major environmental health crisis.76 Such talks brought awareness to the student body, only a month before the November election. 126

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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 Alliance Political Action Committee, based in Missoula, became a leading supporter of both the local zoning ordinance and the statewide initiative. Its campaign literature 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 safely. 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 section 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 continued 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 consequences of nuclear power. Such literature also continued to connect the nuclear power industry to nuclear weapons. That same sheet reminds the reader that “plutonium 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 unpublicized federal study had suggested six Montana rivers as possible sites for a nuclear 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 attacked 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 Nuclear-Free Montana

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and the “normal, low-­level radiation,” that endangered both Montana’s “agricultural 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 representatives were two engineers from the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which the Missoulian described as “a corporate energy giant.” The Missoula environmentalist 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 debate 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, Komanoff 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 uncomfortable 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 Komanoff 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 commercial facilities continued to be strong in antinuclear rhetoric. After the debate, an editorial in the Missoulian written by Sam Reynolds came

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out in favor of I-­80, suggesting that the nuclear industry’s “out-­of-­state drumbeaters” should not be given the pleasure of victory. It reiterated points from the debate, 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 monster’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—Montanans had to keep the nuclear monster under control.85 The I-­80 fight made for odd bedfellows. Environmental groups like the Headwaters 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 increasingly willing to promote conventional energy sources as a way to gain votes. Following the Missoula debate, the Headwaters Alliance brought Charles Komanoff 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 maintain 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 magnetohydrodynamics (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, judging 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

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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 interlopers, 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 permission 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. Missoula 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.97 130

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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 intimidate 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 environmental 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 trying 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 power 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 essentially 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 corporate raiders, as many had faced off against coal developers on the Plains. The Montana 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. EarliNuclear-Free Montana

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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 Valley 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 efforts 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 slightly 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 continued 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 continued to bring ranchers and environmentalists together. By 1979 the failure of international 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 University of Montana.114 Meyer Chessin continued his activism as well, publishing works like “Montana and the Nuclear Winter.”115 Meanwhile, the bad publicity of 132

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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 Missoula’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 weapons 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 activism long after the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963. Activists’ antiauthoritarian rhetoric and environmental health fears connected nuclear power to the federal government’s checkered atomic past. Such populism is understandable in attacks 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 referendums and initiatives than those in other regions, which allowed citizens themselves, 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 Nuclear-Free Montana

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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. Suspicious of outsiders and worried about their backyards, many Montanans felt connected to the antinuclear movement, whether they were urban or rural, Democrat or Republican. Using Cold War connections, populist appeals, and regional/state pride, Montana’s environmentalists therefore became some of the most effective antinuclear activists of the 1970s.

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PART II \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

THE POROUS IRON CURTAIN

8 Building a Socialist Environment Czechoslovak Environmental Policy from the 1960s to the 1980s

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After World War II, Czechoslovakia rapidly expanded its output of chemicals, vehicles, 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 devastating 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 policy 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 major UN symposium, “On the Problems of the Environment,” in 1971 as the UN prepared for the groundbreaking Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. 137

Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, the Czechoslovak government monitored environmental harms, acknowledged them openly in official publications, 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 Czechoslovakia’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, “excessive and inconsiderate extraction of natural resources, extensive waste . . . and failure 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 conclusions. 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 produced 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 Germany’s relative affluence allowed a growing public concern about environmental problems and a willingness to trade some economic growth for significant pollu138

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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 rapid 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 reliant on brown coal, its only significant domestic energy source. The government’s unwillingness to slow growth to invest in environmental protection was ultimately 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, limited 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) addressed 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 environmental policy, including a heavy reliance on brown coal, limited civic initiative, and a political imperative for rapid growth in both consumer goods and heavy industrial production. However, there were also substantial political forces pressing 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 Germany 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 pressures, both domestically and internationally, that made the environment a difficult Building a Socialist Environment

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subject for the Czechoslovak regime to ignore. This chapter traces the shifting tenor 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 district 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 government? There seemed little political imperative to do so, as there had been no significant 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 persistent problem attracting and retaining workers in the 1950s. In general, the government understood perceptible pollution and landscape devastation as disincentives 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 influence 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

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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 particularly active and vocal in local efforts to enforce government pollution control regulations. 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 energy 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 growing authority of preventative medicine in Czechoslovakia, Švec argued that pollution 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 materialism 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 internal 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 problems, from emissions of ash and toxins to noise pollution and general ugliness.20 Over the next few years, local officials reported occasional improvements by chemical 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, regularly levied fines on local polluters, but the amounts (from a few thousand to several 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 interministerial 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 liberalization, which intensified from 1966 to 1968. Waves of articles appeared in the Building a Socialist Environment

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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 German 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 physical surroundings were a key factor behind northern Bohemia’s high suicide rate (along with alcoholism, crime, and divorce). Without an attachment to place (domov), he reasoned, the population was more prone to psychological unmooring.27 The most outspoken Czech journal of the reform period, Literarní noviny, explored 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 landscape, 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 forests, 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 officials, not from the population at large. Contrary to Carter’s assertion of an information 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, Czechoslovakia’s Communist government was quite attuned to public opinion, particularly once it pursued a policy of “normalization” after the Prague Spring. Indeed, a 142

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central premise of normalization was that the regime would trade a “normal” life, with rising living standards and consumption, for the population’s political acquiescence. 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 industry 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 overwhelming 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 economic 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 serious 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 priorities 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 Building a Socialist Environment

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of hygienic obligations as a completely secondary matter, and from the ‘political’ point of view, so inconsequential that they decided to blatantly and willfully ignore 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 middle of the country’s famous spa triangle in 1970.38 Even so, and in spite of the ongoing 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 environmental 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, including Czechoslovak participation in United Nations environmental initiatives in the 1970s. In 1971 Prague hosted a major UN symposium, “On the Problems of the Environment.” Czechoslovakia’s delegation submitted a brutally honest accounting of the country’s energy dilemma, pollution problems, and limited success at environmental mitigation.40 The symposium paid particular attention to the difficulties 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 maintenance 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

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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 Environment in 1972, Czech and Slovak scientists and officials readily drew on the Stockholm Declaration’s rhetoric and policy conclusions.42 In particular, the Communist 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 Czechoslovak Academy of Science’s interdisciplinary Council for Environmental Questions, formed in 1973, issued a wide range of reports on both broad environmental policy and specific regional questions. These reports were permeated with global environmental 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 resources 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 relationship between economic growth and environmental quality. Another Academy report in 1977 echoed these conclusions, arguing that planning 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 protection 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) processes are mutually interconnected.”47 The report acknowledged that it was often difficult to quantify all the impacts of environmental investments (and harms), but Building a Socialist Environment

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that a multidisciplinary, comprehensive, long-­term planning process would better capture costs and benefits than planning by individual sectors. Ideally, “ecological 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, Czechoslovakia’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 embraced 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 environmental problems and environmental responsibilities. Environmental policy during the 1970s did yield some air and water quality improvements, though many indicators continued to worsen. Scrubbers substantially reduced ash and other particulates coming from power plants, though sulfur dioxide emissions continued to increase up until 1980, with corresponding increases in forest damage.52 In keeping with the global environmental policy discourse stressing the use of technology to reconcile economic growth with environmental quality, the Czechoslovak regime favored investments in mitigation technologies over production cuts. But as in the 1960s, narrow economic calculations 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 European 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 Metallurgi146

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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 government” 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 local 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 pollution 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 environmental criticism from Czech and Slovak dissidents, which echoed in the international press. Though the government attempted to limit public information on pollution 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, began 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 internal 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 Building a Socialist Environment

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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 conscious 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 atmosphere 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 republished 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 landscape” 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, Waldsterben 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 environment, 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 protection since the 1960s. The reason, Der Spiegel claimed, was the regime’s “Tonnenideologie,” 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

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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 acknowledge 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 environmental problems as a function of modern industrial development, regardless of economic system, with a corresponding need for global cooperation on solutions.66 But in the early 1980s, as Western countries made progress on environmental 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 pollution, 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 number 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 bonus.” At the same time, the government sought to tighten its control over information 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 research 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 information 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 GorBuilding a Socialist Environment

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bachev withdrew Soviet support for hardline Communist regimes in the latter half of the 1980s, new waves of environmental dissent merged with broader opposition movements to undermine and then, in November 1989, displace the Czechoslovak Communist regime.71 \\\ Ramachandra Guha, in an excellent global history of environmentalism, offers 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 development 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 pollution and landscape devastation, participation in global environmental discourse and initiatives, and the substantial mobilization of scientists funded by the regime to study and address environmental problems. Though competing interests effectively neutralized most environmental initiatives until the fall of the Communist 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

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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 reported 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 Ecological 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 overlooking 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 energy.3 Unlike in Western Europe, however, environmental movements in the Soviet 151

Bloc could not organize freely, demonstrate publicly, or publish openly. By definition, 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 experiences 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 nature 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 complements 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 organize 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 narrowly in the domain of experts and scientists until after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Poland’s more relaxed political atmosphere permitted networking across 152

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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 regimes. 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 introduction 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 historian Charles Maier has called “smokestack industrialization.”10 The GDR, as the most industrialized country in the Soviet Bloc, specialized not only in coal mining 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 aluminum 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 accepted 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 industries 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

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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 report from the late 1980s detailed, “These towns are falling apart, drab and grey, creating an oppressive impression of filth in this poisoned atmosphere. The buildings 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 consumption 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 became known as the Chemical Triangle, caused a second widespread set of problems. 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 complex 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 intransigence 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 dioxide 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

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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 undrinkable 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 children. 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 occupation, Warsaw lay in rubble, while other once-­industrial cities like Wrocław fared only slightly better.21 Stalinist policies in the immediate postwar years sparked rapid 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 consumer goods. Moreover, Poland simultaneously underwent rapid urbanization and the environmental problems associated with housing shortages such as insufficient 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 protests and agreed to close the “most dangerous parts of the aluminum works,” referring 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 Protesting Pollution

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Wrocław—became another major source of pollution and frustration. In Siechnice 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 better 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 dominated 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 increased regulation, and even went so far as to include people’s right to (and responsibility for) a clean environment in updated versions of their constitutions.30 The SED established a comprehensive Land Stewardship Law (Landeskulturgesetz) in 1970, while the PZPR used piecemeal legislation until 1980.31 As the political 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 Nature 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 Ochrony Przyrody (Nature Conservation League).33 Given these regulations and constant 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 effectiveness 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

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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. Nevertheless, 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 positions.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 resonance 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 recognizing 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 environment.39 Initially, the SED and the Stasi (Ministry for State Security) considered environmental organizations less threatening than peace advocates, and accordingly paid them less attention.40 Environmental groups focused on local problems, stemming from nearby industries, and employed a theological language that limited their appeal to the broader population. The SED, however, underestimated the eventual influence of these groups. They developed an effective Christian critique

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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 party or state. Under the leadership of Pastor Hans-­Peter Gensichen, the KFH explored 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 foundation 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 criticized environmental policy and pollution in the GDR, described the relationship between religion and the environment. Its authors wrote, “A Christian view of environmental 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 environmental protection.43 By assuming individual responsibility and calling for personal, 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 oriented 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 effectiveness 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 environment. It defied the SED’s rational, progressive outlook, which relied heavily on technological innovation, and instead grounded itself in religious language, un158

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dermining the claims of Socialist propaganda. It questioned the SED’s use of natural 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 information 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 environmental 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 information 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 influence 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 Protesting Pollution

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from one another and expand their programs. The Environmental Library promoted “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 publications in the GDR. Umweltblätter expanded on concerns that many East Germans 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 independent environmental movement continued to undermine the SED’s authority in the late 1980s. It undermined official policies and offered an alternative motivation 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, environmentally minded individuals took the opportunity to found Polski Klub Ekologiczny 160

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(PKE). The PKE thus became the first legal independent environmental organization 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 effects 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 organize 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 activists 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 mattered 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 Solidarność’s First National Congress in September and October 1981.56 However, these proposals were never implemented as Solidarność’s focus remained on their economic 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 Protesting Pollution

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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 reforms 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 activists “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 regional 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 (Freedom 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 represented generational shift in the movement from older workers and professionals to young people whose initial focus was conscientious objection to military service.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 previously 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 after 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 participat162

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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 country’s first nuclear power plant, Żarnowiec, thirty-­five miles northwest of Gdansk. Questions about Chernobyl were immediately raised about the proposed nuclear power plant, which would have relied on the same technology and safety systems. 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 environmental 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. Frustration 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 developed 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 Greenway, 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 representative 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 argued that “The environment—and air pollution—do not care about boundaries, and environmental protection isn’t defined by politics or profit factors.” Kassenberg further pointed out that Poland was a large contributor to air pollution in Protesting Pollution

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Europe, as well as being in a “difficult economic situation, and owes money to western countries.”67 These obvious interconnections between east and west highlighted 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 informants 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 growing 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 became 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

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east actually allowed more direct contact with the West.71 This convoluted connection with the West further undermined the eroding system. While protest was picking up in response to environmental degradation in Poland, the country also became an integral part of a larger Eastern European movement. Offering more freedom than virtually any other Eastern European country, Poland—and in particular Kraków—became a center of networking and cooperation. Under the leadership of Zygmunt Fura, the PKE hosted numerous international conferences, which brought together activists from the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, and Western Europe. The debates and resolutions from these conferences 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 environmental activists discredit the SED regime. Gorbachev’s reform policies, which were being 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 participants 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 “ecological 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 environmental 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 inspector 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 collaboration. 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. Protesting Pollution

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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 underground and church-­affiliated publications in the GDR, such as Umweltblätter, published 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 countries, 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 substantially 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 independent movements. Despite the easing of travel restrictions within the Communist Bloc as well as with the West, cooperation faced numerous political and cultural challenges. Coordination between GDR and Polish security apparatuses, albeit sometimes reluctantly 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 intended 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, Czechoslovakia, 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 Potsdam explained, for years, “non-­socialist representatives . . . [had used] meetings in socialist countries to come into contact with GDR-­people, particularly those forbidden from travel to the non-­socialist world.”78 The student then specifically listed 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 attending 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

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Soviet Union were banned from entering the GDR.79 Even as communication increased 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 reiterated 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 European activists to congregate and a model in protesting Communist governments. Having a more lenient party in the PZPR and a better organized opposition offered 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 Europeans 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 Protesting Pollution

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PZPR—drew up reform-­minded policies and even established social organizations to capture the interest of conservation-­minded citizens. Still, environmental issues contributed to popular frustration with ossifying social and political structures. 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 Communism’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 protests 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 popular engagement with nature and therefore such protests were not necessarily interpreted as acts of dissent. Alternatively, in Poland, protest—successful protest—was more common, but it did not necessarily revolve around environmental 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 exchange 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

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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 Vojvodina) that were formally part of Serbia. Yugoslavia was a federation with nominally Socialist political institutions, dominated by a single Communist party until 1990.1 The country’s political structure evolved in three major stages: as an orthodox 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 constitution 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 environmental 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 Yugoslavia 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 acquired experience of Western Europe after authorities legalized labor emigration in 1963 and reached an agreement with West Germany on a program of (theoretically) temporary guest workers in 1968. At its height around 1970–1972, several 169

hundred thousand Yugoslavs worked in the gastarbeiter program in West Germany. 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 presenting 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 Yugoslavia—in July 1945 Yugoslavia passed a law on the protection of cultural monuments 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 complete 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

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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 Macedonia; 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, beginning 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 preservation 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 significant for environmental protection because it annulled the relevant federal legislation, 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 effectiveness 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 Natural 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 Scientific Research of Natural Rarities of Serbia (Zavod za zaštitu i naučno proučavanje prirodnih retkosti NR Srbije). Establishment of the institute was helped by the activities of the most important institutions in this field: the Natural History Museum, the Institute of Ecology and Biogeography, biological groups at the

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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 Department 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 nature 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 protection 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 protection 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 Yugoslavia 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 Protection 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 protection of nature: Convention on the Protection of Vegetation (1951), Convention on the Establishment of the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization (1951), Convention on Fishing and the Protection of Living Resources on the High Seas (1958), Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Prop172

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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 eager to demonstrate his independence from Stalin on the international stage. It is not clear whether this was the reason for joining international conventions beginning 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 industrial 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 industrialization, 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 international 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 reflects 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 intensified 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 Environment in 1970.25 In addition to the Slovenian activities, ecologically oriented publications began to appear in Belgrade, Yugoslavia’s capital.26 Meanwhile in 1971, the five-­year plan for development of Yugoslavia stated that About Environmental Policy in Socialist Yugoslavia

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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 harmful 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 society organizations for the protection of the environment in different parts of Yugoslavia. One of the most important was the Community for Environmental Protection 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 together and established the Council for the Protection and Improvement of the Environment of Yugoslavia. Everyone with an interest in environmental protection took part, from the federal government of Yugoslavia to the Speleologist Society. 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 president Vera Johanides; and the secretary general Tadija Popović.30 The council embarked on a lively public relations effort, publishing three environmental magazines 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 questioned 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 environmental organizations, but through its own agencies and bureaucracies managed 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

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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 Environment 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 republics, 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 environmental issues only when it was of interest to the entire country and the international community.35 This arrangement reflected the politics of Yugoslavia at the time, but it did not fit well with the interconnectedness of the natural environment itself. By the 1980s, the need for coordination of environmental policy at the federal 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 problems existed in many parts of Yugoslavia, so tackling them in a decentralized fashion 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 Federal 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 About Environmental Policy in Socialist Yugoslavia

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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 Program (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 conferences, thus supporting an international network on environmental issues. Yugoslavia 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 Yugoslavia was closely monitored from that time onward.41 Yugoslavia’s cooperation with UNEP was part of a broader involvement in international environmental organizations. Yugoslavia took part in the Committee on the Environment of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (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, Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Romania—in environmental accords. Individual republics also participated in international environmental collaboration; for example, Slovenia and Croatia participated in the Alpe-­Jadran regional organization. Yugoslavia 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 participated 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 selling 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 issued a report entitled “Environmental Situation and Policy in Yugoslavia.” After further debate in Yugoslavia and at the Committee of the OECD, the report became a book, Environmental Policies in Yugoslavia, published in 1986.44 With Yugoslavian international cooperation in the years after the United Nations Conference 176

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on the Human Environment came a sustained transfer of ideas, strengthening environmental 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 environmental 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 environmental 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 students quietly marched from the northern part of Ljubljana to the downtown center, publicly making an environmental statement outside the Slovenia Assembly.46 The government took only very soft repressive measures against these student activists; 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 president 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 perspective of the social sciences and frequently invited professors from Yugoslavia and abroad.49 Educational institutions and personnel remained central to the environmental movement throughout the 1970s. Teaching activities related to the environment were systematized by the educator Ivan Furlan, who in 1974 published the well-­regarded book Pedagogizacija čovjekove okoline (Teaching the human environment).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 secondary 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 About Environmental Policy in Socialist Yugoslavia

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of Yugoslavia, and in 1978 Vojvodina introduced a brand new subject of environmental 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 official 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 Socialist regime suffered an increasing loss of legitimacy. Concurrently, various environmental initiatives resurfaced and citizen groups began to conduct their activities 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 organized. In general, Yugoslavia defined its energy policy as the need for maximum power production. In pursuing energy needs, it often failed to comply with environmental 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 environmentalists 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 hydroelectric 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, contacts and collaborations were made with other, more experienced environmental activists and the environmental movement in Hungary, which had evolved since 178

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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 policy. 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 because 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 development plan, participants filed hundreds of legal amendments aimed at stopping plans to build the Prevlaka Nuclear Power Plant. Due to the pressure of antinuclear 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 opposition to hydropower development in the 1980s. Its canyon, the largest in Europe, 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 community rebelled, alarming the media and the public. Thus began one of the few all-­ Yugoslavia environmental campaigns. A 1987 Constitutional Court decision indicated the strong impact the environmental movement exerted upon the judiciary within the political system of that period. This decision spared the Tara River CanAbout Environmental Policy in Socialist Yugoslavia

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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 opposition 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 Pančevo. 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 except 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 institutionalized 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 geographer, Dušan Plut.64 The Greens of Slovenia entered the anti-­Communist coalition Demokratična opozicija Slovenije (Democratic Opposition of Slovenia, DEMOS), 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

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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 Ecological 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 February 1990, as a loose federation of local environmental organizations. However, representatives of professional societies refused to become part of this organization.69 When in February 1990 the Green Party was established in Serbia, the Serbian 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 Montenegro, in 1990 there was the Environmental Movement of Montenegro, but it did not participate in the elections; in Macedonia the Ecology Movement was established 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 environmental 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, environmental policies were formed, largely decentralized, and left to the jurisdiction of individual Yugoslav republics in accordance with the centripetal tendencies of Yugoslav 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 environmental 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 visible even within the environmental movement. After the mid-­1980s, environmental groups were organized outside the governmental framework of socialist Yugoslavia. These groups protested against the preAbout Environmental Policy in Socialist Yugoslavia

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vious governmental attitude toward the environment, and gradually entered into conflict with the state. Activities of spontaneous environmentalist groups were focused 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 effort to change Slovenian society across the board, and to escape Yugoslav authoritarianism. 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 movement—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 marginalized the environmental issues entirely.

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11 “It Makes No Sense to Work against Nature” Cold War Modernization in West German Agriculture

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Even as they tackled pressing problems such as denazification, occupation authorities 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 meetings 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 “living space” and raw materials.2 In the postwar occupation zones, authorities debated whether divided Germany’s concentrated centers of industry could continue to exist without degrading the nation’s soil or encouraging militarism and imperialism.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 de183

bates about the modernization of agriculture.4 As increased agricultural production placed more pressure on soil fertility, some early twentieth-­century German agronomists had pushed for greater mechanization and the use of chemical fertilizers. 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 “factory” farming.6 While Western promoters of mechanization and chemicalization promoted small to midsize factory farms as a more democratic path to modernization, 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 transition 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 skeptical? 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 environmental history. German agronomists contemplating high-­input farming techniques helped usher in a whole suite of environmental changes that ultimately led to an increased nitrification of central European waterways (among other conse184

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quences). These agronomists also practiced an underappreciated form of informal environmentalism. Beyond the landscape architects, foresters, and landscape preservationists more commonly discussed in histories of postwar German environmentalism, a different set of actors (farmers, agronomists, and agricultural economists) engaged in a conversation about soil conservation and resource scarcity. 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 reveals 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 agriculture 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 technology 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. Agronomists came to believe that capital-­intensive dairy farming featuring chemical fertilizers, 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”

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changing attitudes toward agricultural innovation. As it had in the Nazi Empire, the discussion of German soil, conservation, and economic productivity continued to intersect with notions of cultural progress and racial difference. When German 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. Occupation 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 other 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 decolonization also influenced this story. At times, agronomists anxiously sought continued access to raw materials from colonial or postcolonial realms. New German agricultural practices could fit comfortably with a common belief that developed countries 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 responding 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 provided a tantalizing but short-­lived window of opportunity for advocates of small-­ scale agriculture to consider ecological constraints and their implications for industrial 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

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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 production 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 military aggression to ensure that other European states devoted most of their resources to agriculture. Morgenthau thus insisted that curtailing Germany’s “extremely unnatural overemphasis on employment in factories” would allow industry to redistribute 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 reparations, 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. Morgenthau 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 Germany 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 production 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 progressive. 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, Morgenthau’s links to the conservation movement remain quite underappreciated.17 Morgenthau drew heavily on New Deal conceptualizations of soil conservation and “It Makes No Sense to Work against Nature”

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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 Franklin 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 German 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 profitable 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 Morgenthau’s doubts about Germany’s ability to feed itself without significant land reform 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 agricultural land, as meat fed fewer people per hectare than grain and vegetable production.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

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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 livestock 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 incomes 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 preferences. Given the uncertainties about currency reform, many German farmers held onto their cattle as a savings bank, or an economic hedge, until the economy stabilized. Farmers also recognized that the black market offered lucrative opportunities and surreptitiously raised additional cattle for this purpose.32 Bavarian officials 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 incentive to coerce their neighbors and colleagues at the request of the occupation officials.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 Bavarian 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 enforced 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 expansion 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 relationships they identified as natural and unalterable. In other words, they believed “It Makes No Sense to Work against Nature”

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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 occupation 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 conditions.”37 For example, one critic noted that requisitions by the military government 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 complained, “It makes no sense to work against nature.”39 Carl Brandt, a German agricultural 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 agricultural 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 influenced the debate over the American military government’s cattle-­reduction program. 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 continued to insist that livestock production prevented environmental decline and soil degradation by transforming fiber into manure.45 Occasionally, even the Americans 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 Keynesian economics added a second dimension to these arguments about naturalness. While Morgenthau and his allies advocated deindustrializing Germany, German

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economists lobbied for an expansion of industrial output in order to pay for imports 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 alteration 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 German 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 continued 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 Bennett were two prominent advisors to American military authorities whose growing 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 advisor 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 consistently 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 Bennett, 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. Morgenthau, 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 urbanization 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

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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 attacked 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 fundamentalists” 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 Testament 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 transatlantic network of neoliberals emerged after World War II to mobilize against Keynesianism and promote free trade. Brandt’s influence owed much to the crucial role he played within that network, and agricultural reform in West Germany 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 international order free of protectionism and excessive state regulation of markets. While it shared the New Deal’s faith in technological progress, the neoliberal network remained 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 “second nature,” as depicted in maps and treatises, was increasingly imagined as natural and unalterable; its alteration would throw the world into upheaval and crisis. 192

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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 increasingly 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 industrial 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 insecticides. 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 natural conditions depended on a global trading system where all participants produced 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 proximity to industrial cities, high land values (in addition to the cool climate) prevented 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 demanded 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 colleagues insisted on a restoration of the natural flow of goods in and out of Germany.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

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Decolonization’s Potential Threat to Natural Flows Arguments about Germany’s natural position in the global economy inevitably intersected with anxieties about decolonization and Germany’s status in the postwar order. Germans shrilly complained of being victims of Anglo American and Russian colonial plunder, which only promised to rob Germany of its natural resources. 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 Germany’s colonial order in Eastern Europe when he decried the potential desertification, 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 subjugation, Schlange-­Schöningen adopted the language of colonial resistance. He desperately exclaimed, “We want peace, an opportunity to thrive, work, and determine our own fates, just as the yellow, brown, and black nations do!”74 Leading neoliberal economists such as Wilhelm Röpke also warned of the possibility of race suicide. In their eyes, the global New Deal to develop former colonies into industrial economies promised to destroy civilization as non-­Europeans came to dominate global politics. For free market advocates, morality and Christian principles played a crucial role in guiding market behavior. The world economy was a “community of values” that “supranational institutions could not legislate into existence,” according to Röpke.75 To falsely promote egalitarianism ignored real and natural differences between races and denied the reality that colonial 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 traditions. Worse still, artificially developing colonial realms into industrial economies promised to cause a shortage of agricultural imports to Europe necessary to maintain living standards.76 194

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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 rested 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 vegetable 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 workers 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 future.”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 manage 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 Responding 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 According to foresters, a more efficient exploitation of tropical timber reserves in British 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 authorities agreed with their German colleagues. Carl Ross of the Food, Agriculture, and Forestry Group of the American military government imagined developing “It Makes No Sense to Work against Nature”

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plantations in Portuguese Angola under German supervision even though he acknowledged 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 environment 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 increase dairy farms’ productivity, others increasingly looked to American innovations 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 investments. 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 choosing winners among various American modernization initiatives. They embraced those proposals that they believed best suited Germany’s “nature”—both local environmental 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 varieties and chemical fertilizers commonplace in the United States.87 Elsewhere, the Bipartite Control Office complained, “Most of the meadows and pastures in Germany are in a pathetically poor condition. The import of modern grassland methods in seeding and preservation would allow an enormous increase in livestock numbers without additional acreage for fodder crops.”88 196

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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 capital in artificial hay-­drying technologies and commercial fertilizers intended for pastures.90 Small farmers in Germany, on the other hand, often had avoided financial 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 Germany. 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 varieties 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, German agronomists touring American farms in the 1950s struggled to abandon stereotypes about American soil plunder.94 Outside of a few model farms and government 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 “It Makes No Sense to Work against Nature”

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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 began 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 German farmers to abandon small grains and natural meadows and becoming pragmatic 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 readers 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 technology 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 previously 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 underperformed 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 previous198

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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 fertility.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 believed 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 ecological 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 agronomists introduced these methods to northern Germany between 1950 and 1960.111 Liquid manure required the keeping of cattle in stalls to help mechanize its collection, 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 because 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 “It Makes No Sense to Work against Nature”

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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 manure 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 needed 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, American 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 conceded 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 agricultural 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 farmers might have moved toward high-­input agriculture on their own (as Uekötter argues), the new alignment of chemical and natural farming experts certainly encouraged 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 industry 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

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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 adhering 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.

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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 \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

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 president 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 fortunately 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 nature 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 Commission 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 tensions 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 competition 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 technological 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

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(electricity and desalination) nuclear plant work, despite scientific warnings that attempting it was folly. There were many missed opportunities to scrap the nuclear 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 project 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 technological 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 revolution 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 President 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 Carson’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 favor 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

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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 Nasser.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 construction 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 familiar 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 power. 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 optimistic. It had stated that the heat from a nuclear reactor might be used as a power 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 208

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publicly at the annual gathering of the Weizmann Institute. Later in 1964 he doubled 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 Israel,” 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 documents. Unlike Johnson, he understood the inadequacy of the technology itself. He reminded the president that the plants envisaged would necessitate nuclear reactors 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 notion 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, Johnson 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 An American Miracle in the Desert

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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 conflict 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, Americans and Israelis convened in Philadelphia to consider a technological fix. Among the Israelis were nuclear scientist Shimon Yiftah, director of Israel’s Atomic Energy 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 technical, 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 contributed 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 presidents 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 symposium on desalination in Washington, D.C. in October 1965. 210

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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 infrastructure 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 official 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, President 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 enemies—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 finance 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 reassure 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 An American Miracle in the Desert

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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 Israel in return for a promise not to undertake nuclear weapons development? Others 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 Agency 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 American 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 weapons without establishing compensating controls,” Rostow noted. “From the viewpoint 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, an212

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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 advocates on all sides pinned expectations on its nuclear component. President Johnson 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 desalination.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 electricity 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 Americans, 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 completely developed by the early 1970s. The future rested upon agricultural development. 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 conference 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 technology” 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 An American Miracle in the Desert

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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 advisors. AEC commissioner James Ramey urged presidential advisor Walt Rostow to reject the negativism of bureaucrats in Washington, and to think imaginatively.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 (previously 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 between 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 sources 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 214

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own 51 percent of the stock, with the rest owned by bankers. One such potential investor, Edmund de Rothschild, soon proposed building nuclear desalinating facilities 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/Eisenhower plan imagined facilities ten times as big, to be put into the most contested 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,” making 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 President 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, sponsored 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. Subsequent 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, An American Miracle in the Desert

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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 become “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 heading 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 complained 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 population 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 Johnson’s State of the Union speech, to be delivered in January 1968, and tried to eliminate references to food factories from dual-­use nuclear plants. 51 The president’s own enthusiasm for nuclear desalination decreased precipitously 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 possible 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”; namely, 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.”52 216

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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 symbolic 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 president. The idea of nuclear desalination no longer inspired him. President Johnson 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 projects 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 deferred to Woods’s recommendations and left open the question of whether nuclear 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 administration 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 nuclear 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 An American Miracle in the Desert

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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 region 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 address a major environmental crisis but was in fact intended to serve entirely different purposes? We should avoid the simplistic conclusion that these events were simply the results of misguided faith in technological fixes. Environmental concern 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 environmental 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.

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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 Republic 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 representation 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 alliances, 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 German 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 attitudes friendly toward Socialism in West Germany. To this end, it established committees 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 directed 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 numbers 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 Socialism 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 productive 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 Germany’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 establish normal relations with Western and developing countries, as well as repeatedly 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 international 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 recognition for East Germany.11 Indeed, environmental diplomacy was a political tool for East Germany’s government because with the advent of détente between the su220

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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 Environment as a member in the beginning of the 1970s did not mark the advent of environmental 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 environmental 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 reunited 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 understand 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 social 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

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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 Heimatfreunde, NHF). After a few years in many local groups they were “so strongly represented that the Cultural League was hardly recognizable anymore as an ‘organization 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 because 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 activists 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 protectionist 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 political 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

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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 because 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 association 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, Bavaria, 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 delegation 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 Germany and thus overcome wrong perceptions about the German Democratic Republic.”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 conservationists 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, Socialist 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 East Germany’s Fight for Recognition as a Sovereign State

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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 common ground, then we down here have to do it, from human to human.”26 The reports 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 generally recognized that many attempts did not have the intended effect on Western colleagues.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 protectionists to the West in search for new contacts, but also for exchanges with established ones. One existing contact that the NHF sought to reactivate was the Society 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 successful 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 professional 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 protectionists 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 harmful 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 experimented 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 nature protection law in 1954.32 Including environmental diplomacy in West Work 224

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since the early days of the state’s existence advanced East Germany’s quest for international 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 Germany’s effort to become a member of the United Nations and thus establish normal 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 membership in some specialized UN agencies, such as the the International Telecommunications Union and the World Meteorological Organization—but was not admitted. 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 intensified 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 Hungary, 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, replacing Swedish secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld, proved favorable to East Germany. 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 efforts 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 East Germany’s Fight for Recognition as a Sovereign State

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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 accession 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 participate, it nevertheless hoped to be able to participate in the conference and submitted 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 industries 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 Environment (Landeskulturgesetz), which was passed two years earlier in 1970.40 This law was passed in order to respond to environmental issues beyond mere conservation 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 fellow nature conservationists, was a member of the Cultural League’s central expert

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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 appreciation of the beauty of the local countryside to advocate for a more conscientious 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 practice, 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 Environment 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 financial 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 environmental and living conditions will be required in the future.”49 Thus, the report 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 secondary raw material.50 The report was written at a time of great hope for East Germany’s environmental policy. A Ministry for Environmental Protection and Water Management had been created in 1970, and a year later a comprehensive sevenmillion 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

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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 report, 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 environmental 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 exploitation.53 Conservationists also exchanged views on the question if federal or centrally 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 summary 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 probably 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 228

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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 environmental 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 interview 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 Journals 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 housing 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 Germany 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 numbered 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 environment 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 meetings, 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 participation 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 negoEast Germany’s Fight for Recognition as a Sovereign State

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tiations between Moscow and Bonn, the tensions caused by the conference were particularly worrying. Thus, the federal chancellor, Willy Brandt, cautioned Swedish 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 Diplomatic 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 participate 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 Soviets 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 cooperation 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 party. 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 Germany’s long-­term efforts to point out the injustice of its situation, including its repeated UN applications as well as its West Work, added to other critical factors 230

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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 sovereign state. One approach was connected to East Germany’s West Work scheme by sending 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 Socialist 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 developing countries while trying to gain accession to UN suborganizations, to international 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 conference 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 CurEast Germany’s Fight for Recognition as a Sovereign State

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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 Eastern Bloc countries. East Germany was not alone in using the environment as a political instrument. 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.

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NOTES \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

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 implications 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 environmentalism 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 Propaganda 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 Soviet 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 Handbook 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 Handbook of Global Environmental Politics (London: Routledge, 2015); and Marco Armiero and Lise Sedrez, eds., A History of Environmentalism: Local Struggles, Global Histories (London: Bloomsbury 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 Pittsburgh 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).

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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 Robertson, 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 Andrew 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 University 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 Politics 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: Routledge, 2009), 12–33. 13. Hartmut Kaelble, “Between Comparison and Transfers,” in Comparative and Transnational 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 Environment 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 mishap 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 Island 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 einfach’: 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 reference “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

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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 Transboundary 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 bipolar geopolitical structure so that environmental issues intersect more with national security considerations at a national policy level. See Braden R. Allenby, “Environmental Security: Concept 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 Protection,” 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 Germany 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,” Environmental 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 Recherche (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, Christopher Burton, and Daniel Healy (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010), 214–36;

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Christopher Burton: “Destalinization as Detoxification? The Expert Debate on Industrial Toxins under Khrushchev,” in Soviet Medicine, 237–57. 3. Marc Élie, “Formulating the Global Environment: Soviet Soil Scientists and the International 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 American History 101 (2014): 4470. 22. 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 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 155–56. 23. John V. Krutilla and Otto Eckstein, Multiple Purpose River Development; Studies in Applied 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 Integrated Use of Water Resources (Moscow: Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1960); emphasis mine.

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Notes to Pages 17–20

25. Peter M. Haas, “Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination,” 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 Protection 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. 34. Oechsler, Policies, 49. 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 laboratory 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 Washington 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, England, 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.

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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: Deindustrialization and Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River,” Environmental History 13, no. 3 (2008): 515–35. 62. Oechsler, Policies, 96. 63. Oechsler, Policies, 81. 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 Environmental 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 Kremlin: 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 November 11, 1975. 82. Weiner, Little Corner, 418. 83. David F. Duke, “Seizing Favours from Nature: The Rise and Fall of Siberian River Diversion,” 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.

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Notes to Pages 27–32

89. Weiner, Little Corner, 434. 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 Competition 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, “Formulating,” 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: Forureningnsbekæmpelsen 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 Melosi’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.

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7. Paul Josephson et al., An Environmental History of Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University 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 (Cambridge: 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, Environmental 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 volumes 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,” European 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 Journal 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, Dmitry Zarkov, and Liutauras Stoskus, “Water Quality Control, Monitoring and Wastewater Treatment 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 pollution 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 Assessment 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,

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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), chapter 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 [Rivers 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 Environmental 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 Lithuanian SSR for 1945, L.9. Acronym already in note 3. 21. Aurelija Ceponiene, Head of Department, Joint Research Center, Ministry of Environment of Lithuania Republic, personal communication to Liutauras Stoskus in Vilnius, 1999; Bronius Vertelka, Head of Department, Department of Water Protection, Ministry of Environment 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 industrial 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–

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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” [Formation 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. metraštis [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 Laakkonen, “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. Mickiene, “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 activity 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 Inspectorate 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-

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Notes to Pages 41–43

mittee on Building Affairs at the Council of Ministers of the USSR), Ukazaniia po proiektirovaniiu 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 report. Form 1—water], Statistikos departamentas prie Lietuvos Respublikos Vyriausybes, Patvirtinta 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 operate 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. 46. GARF, D.1026, Report (Form no. 41) of the Main State Sanitary Inspectorate of the 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, Ukazanija 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 valymo 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 GOSSTROI 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] (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1986). 51. Lietuvos upių vandens kokybės 1998 m. metraštis, 1999. 52. On this general theme, see “Transcontinental and Transnational Links in Social Movements and Environmental Policies in the 20th century,” Australian Journal of Politics and History

Notes to Pages 43–45

243

61, no. 3 (2015) and “Global Protest against Nuclear Power: Transfer and Transnational Exchange 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 Committee 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). 55. Cetkauskaite and Jakstaite, “Wastewater Treatment in Lithuania from 1950 to 1990,” 44. 56. GARF, D.729. Annual Report of the Main State Sanitary Inspectorate of the Lithuanian SSR for 1946, L.11. 57. GARF, D.1026, Report (Form no. 41) of the Main State Sanitary Inspectorate of the 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. 59. Cetkauskaite and Jakstaite, “Wastewater Treatment in Lithuania from 1950 to 1990,” 48. 60. Cetkauskaite, Zarkov, and Stoskus, “Water Quality Control, Monitoring and Wastewater Treatment in Lithuania from 1950 to 1999,” 301. 61. GARF, D.1174, Report (Form no. 41) of the Main State Sanitary Inspectorate of the Lithuanian SSR for 1952, L35. 62. Cetkauskaite, Zarkov, and Stoskus, “Water Quality Control, Monitoring and Wastewater 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 Awareness 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: Lessons 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 Macmillan, 1988); David R. Marples, “Chernobyl: A Reassessment,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 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

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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 Courier, 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 Processes 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, December 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.

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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 Nuclear 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; Viktor 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 Publishes 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 Reconstruction, 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

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“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: Cambridge 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 emergency measures for the environmental rehabilitation of the country, Levonevskiy Valerij Stanislavovich, http://pravo.levonevsky.org/baza/soviet/sssr1133.htm. 72. Melanie Arndt et al., “Memories, Commemorations, and Representations of Chernobyl: 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, Global 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.

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4. Keeping the Air Clean? As one outcome of my project about utility companies, my book on conflicts on electricity—Stromkonflikte. Selbstverständnis und strategisches Handeln der Stromwirtschaft zwischen Politik, 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 Wirtschaftsgeschichte (VSWG). 1. Frank Uekötter, “Die Kommunikation zwischen technischen und juristischen Experten 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 Siegfried (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 Luftverschmutzung in Deutschland und den USA 1880–1970 (Essen, Germany: Klartext 2003); Franz-­Josef Brüggemeier and Thomas Rommelspacher, Blauer Himmel über der Ruhr: Geschichte 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, Germany, 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 (Paderborn, Germany: Schöningh, 2005), 314ff. 8. Besides this, a number of studies focused systematically on the role of companies in general 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 Wirtschaftsgeschichte, February 2009, Nature Incorporated, Unternehmensgeschichte und ökologischer Wandel/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:

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Ein technisches Problem,” in Natur-­und Umweltschutz nach 1945. Konzepte, Konflikte, Kompetenzen, 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 Umweltproblems 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 certain 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), Verfahrensgeschichte, 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 Luftverunreinigungen, 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 Hannover 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.

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28. Ulrich Segatz, Thesen für die Podiumsdiskussion zum Thema “Steinkohle und Kernenergie—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 Umweltkonferenzen 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 Europeanization 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, November 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 Elektrizitätswirtschaft,” VGB Kraftwerkstechnik, February 2, 1988, 154. 35. Statistics from the federal government, cited from Jürgen Salzwedel and Werner Preusker, Umweltschutzrecht und -­verwaltung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Cologne: Bundesanzeiger, 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 energiewirtschaftlicher 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 Gesellschaft, 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 advocates 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,

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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, Umweltforschung—die gesteuerte Wissenschaft? Eine empirische Studie zum Verhältnis von Wissenschaftsentwicklung 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. Jürgen 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-Braunkohlekraftwerke in den 1980er Jahren” (master’s thesis, Ruhr-­Universität Bochum, 2009). 50. Eckehard Koch, “Blau statt grau: Geschichte der Entschwefelung von Braun-­und Steinkohlekraftwerken in NRW,” in Umwelt + Technik, ed. Energiewirtschaft und Technik Verlagsgesellschaft (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 Verwaltungshandeln 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 strategisches 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; Roderich von Detten, “Wissenschaft und Umweltpolitik in der Debatte um das Waldsterben,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 50 (2010): 217–69; Roland Schäfer and Birgit Metzger, “Was macht eigentlich das Waldsterben?” in Umweltgeschichte und Umweltzukunft: Zur gesellschaftlichen Relevanz 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 Waldsterben, BT-­Drucksache 10/67.

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251

61. Stellungnahme der Verbände der Elektrizitätswirtschaft (VDEW, VGB, VIK) zur öffentlichen Anhörung zum Thema, “Waldsterben und Luftverunreinigungen,” in Innenausschuss Deutscher Bundestag, 10, Wahlperiode 1983, Protokoll über die öffentliche Anhörung zu Fragen 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 Antworten 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 Transformation 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 Emotionality 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: Columbia 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

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Notes to Pages 83–88

propose here that environmentalism more generally was essential to the development of common 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 Friedensbewegung, 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 environmental 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 Modernity 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 Germany, 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, Naturpolitik in der Bundesrepublik: Ideenwelt und politische Verhaltensstile in Naturschutz und Umweltbewegung, 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).

Notes to Pages 88–93

253

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 further 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 nouvelles d’Alsace noted the presence of delegations from the same countries. Neither report specified 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, Germany: 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 Sozialisten!” 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 Sonstige 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 campaign, 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 Atomkraftwerke aus der Sicht von Hiroshima,” Forum Europa ( January–February 1977): 18. 46. Saskia Richter, “Der Protest gegen den NATO-­Doppelbeschluss und die Konsolo-

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dierung der Partei Die Grünen zwischen 1979 und 1983,” in Zweiter Kalter Krieg und Friedensbewegung: 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 Friedensbewegung: Kommunikations-­und Entscheidungsstrukturen in den Achtziger Jahren (Opladen, Germany: 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 Gesellschaft 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: Berghahn Books, 2012); Will Steffen et al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” Anthropocene Review, January 16, 2015. 4. Guido Crainz, Storia del miracolo italiano: culture, identità, trasformazioni fra anni cinquanta 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 provided in Wilko Graf von Hardenberg and Paolo Pelizzari, “The Environmental Question, Employment, 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 ecologisti,” 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.

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8. See, for example, Percy Allum, “The Politics of Town Planning in Postwar Naples,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8, no. 4 (2003): 500–527; and Simone Neri Serneri, “Environnement 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 guerra al miracolo italiano, 1918–1963 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 182; Silvio Lanaro, Storia dell’Italia 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 ambientale (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 economico,” 420. 24. Sidney Tarrow, “Aspetti della crisi italiana: note introduttive,” in La crisi italiana, ed. Luigi Graziano and Sidney Tarrow (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), 15; Giuseppe Dematteis, “Le trasformazioni 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

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Notes to Pages 103–106

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 Piano 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 conservazione 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 implementation 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 Urbana 40, no. 3 (1987): 31; Guido Melis, Storia dell’amministrazione italiana: 1861–1993 (Bologna: 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. Gabriella 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. 38. Botta, Difesa del suolo e volontà politica, 12. 39. Lanaro, Storia dell’Italia repubblicana, 173–77; Dematteis, “Le trasformazioni territoriali e ambientali,” 672–73; Valentino Parlato, Eugenio Peggio, and Santo Mazzarino, Industrializzazione 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, “Petrochemical 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.

Notes to Pages 106–109

257

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, “Environnement 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, Employment, and Development in Italy’s Left, 1945–1990,” 79–81. 50. Federico Paolini, “I territori dello sviluppo: L’area fiorentino-­pratese (1946–95),” in Storia 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 controriforme, 33–39. 52. Paolini, “I territori dello sviluppo. L’area fiorentino-­pratese (1946–95),” 181; Botta, Difesa del suolo e volontà politica, 123. 53. Cfr. Monika Bergmeier, Umweltgeschichte der Boomjahre 1949—1973: das Beispiel Bayern (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 ambientale 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’uomo?,” 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 Disaster: 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: Nature, 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. 59. Botta, Difesa del suolo e volontà politica, 133. 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); Andrea 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 Development in Italy’s Left, 1945–1990,” 79–86.

258

Notes to Pages 109–113

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?” 63. Botta, Difesa del suolo e volontà politica, 32. 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: Minelliana, 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 Washington 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 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Michael A. Amundson, Yellowcake Towns: Uranium 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 Carolina Press, 1995); Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden 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 Environmentalism (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.

Notes to Pages 113–117

259

6. Lee Scamehorn, High Altitude Energy: A History of Fossil Fuels in Colorado (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002), 177. A couple of books that briefly mention environmentalism’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 Lifset (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 Collection 172 (hereafter MC 172), Montana Historical Society Research Center, Helena, Montana (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 Trahan 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.

260

Notes to Pages 117–119

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 Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Testing Period, 1942–1965” (PhD diss., Montana State University, 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 (Seattle: 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, “Engineering 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.

Notes to Pages 119–120

261

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 Energy, 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, Potential Uranium Resources of the Western United States, Grand Junction office, May 1973, 1–5; Edward 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 Century (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 Tribune, June 5, 1976. 48. Lettie McSpadden Wenner and Manfred W. Wenner, “Nuclear Policy and Public Participation,” 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.

262

Notes to Pages 120–123

51. “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. 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. 57. “Last Minute Battle Shaping Over Nuclear Proposal,” Havre Daily News, October 15, 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,” Missoulian, November 2, 1978. I-­80 opponents won the support of the Great Falls Tribune, which

Notes to Pages 123–125

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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 Marilyn 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, October 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,

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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 Opponents 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, November 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, November 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 Potential of the 1970s Antinuclear Activism,” German Politics and Society 33, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 25–39.

Notes to Pages 129–132

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108. David S. Painter, “From the Nixon Doctrine to the Carter Doctrine: Iran and the Geopolitics 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 University Press, 2012). 115. Meyer Chessin, “Montana and the Nuclear Winter,” Proceedings of the Montana Academy 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,” Billings 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 researchers varied by field and time period. The government appears to have commissioned environmental research in the 1960s–1980s in a genuine effort to understand the scope of environmental 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,” Environmental 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

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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: Transformation 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 Devastation 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 výbor (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

Notes to Pages 140–141

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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 Landscapes: 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 životního 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 strengthening identification with local and regional industry. 36. See Glassheim, “Ethnic Cleansing.” 37. Vladimír Kořinek, “Životní prostředí, hygiena a právo,” Literární noviny 17, no. 4 ( January 1968): 10. 38. David N. Leff, “Familiar Story,” Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 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 Environment: 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

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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 Environment,” 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 Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat) in Vancouver in Zasedání presidia ČSAV, March 10, 1976, “Zpráva o činnosti Komise presidia ČSAV pro otázky životního prostředí,” Archive Akademie 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 otázky 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, September 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 ochrany 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 National 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 Verwüstung 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 proportion (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:

Notes to Pages 144–147

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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 History, 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 Hohensee (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 perhaps 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 global 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 environmental 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 Albrecht, “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 Socialism,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 8, no. 4 (1997): 1–21.

9. Protesting Pollution 1. “Europäische Waldaktion—Sommertreffen der EYFA in Krakow,” Arche Nova II, October 1988, Archiv Bürgerbewegung Leipzig (ABL). 2. David Bathrick, The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 32–34.

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3. Frank Uekötter, The Greenest Nation? A New History of German Environmentalism (Cambridge, 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 Sozialismus: 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 Berlin 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 country 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, Douglas Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nation Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley: 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 (Princeton, 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 transformation of Western Europe, see Konrad H. Jarausch, “Zwischen‚ Reformstau und Sozialabbau’: Anmerkungen zur Globalisierungsdebatte in Deutschland, 1973–2003,” in Das Ende der

Notes to Pages 151–153

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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 Sanierungsbergbau 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, Robert 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 became 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, Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis (AGG). 17. DC 20-­I/3/715, “Prognose: Industrielle Abprodukte und planmäßige Gestaltung einer sozialistischen Landeskultur in der DDR,” Dokumente zu den Tagesordnungspunkten des Ministerrats, BArch. 18. RGH/Th 02/08, “PSEUDOKRUPP—Krankheitsverlauf und Therapie,” Umweltbewegung—Luftverschmutzung, ADO. DK 500/22, “Titel der Vorlage: Information über die Aufgabestellung des Forschungsprojektes‚ Medizinische Aspekte des Umweltschutzes,” Ministerium für Gesundheitswesen, Beirat für Umweltschutz im Ministerrat der DDR, 1984–1986, BArch. 19. DC 20-­I/3/715, “Prognose: Industrielle Abprodukte und planmäßige Gestaltung einer 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 Społecznego, 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.

272

Notes to Pages 154–156

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. 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. 31. Michał Kulesza, “Efektywność prawa i administracji w zakresie ochrony przyrody i środowiska, 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 Eastern 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 Akademii 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 continued 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 relations, 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 Untergrundtätigkeit,’ 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.

Notes to Pages 156–158

273

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 environmental 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 Umweltschutz,” 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, Tschechoslowakei, 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

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Notes to Pages 159–165

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 Europe,”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 translated 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 Department 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 explores 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 Aufgabenstellung bei der vorbeugenden Absicherung der zentralen staatlichen Leitung des Umweltschutzes unter besondere Berücksichtigung seiner zunehmenden Bedeutung in den internationalen 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, September 27, 1988, ABL. 81. RHG/TH 02/01, “Youth Forest Action in Cracow (Poland) 10.-­14.7.1988,” Umweltbewegung Allgemein. At the time 100 zloty was about 1.40 DM (as referenced in Sabine Rosenbladt, 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: Stanford 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. Vladimir Tismaneanu (New York: Central European University Press, 2009), 161–94.

Notes to Pages 165–167

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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 Party. 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 environment. 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 University 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 Develepoment 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; Službeni vesnik Narodne Republike Makedonije, no. 11, 1949; Narodne novine (Službeni list Narodne Republike 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 Republike 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).

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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 Yugoslav republic in environmental matters (among others). 18. Stane Peterlin, “Nekaj o zametkih in začetkih varstva narave v Sloveniji,” Varstvo spomenikov 20 (1976): 90–91; Dubravka Bujanović, “Istorijat rada na zaštiti prirode u SFRJ sa posebnim 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 komunalne 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 Kirchhof 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 environment 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], edited by Siniša Stanković; Planerski atlas prostornog uređenja [The planning atlas of spatial planning] (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: Naprijed, 1973.) 30. Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd, 627. Savet za zaštitu i unapređenje životne sredine. 31. Environmental magazines: Čovek i životna sredina [Man and environment] (Beograd),

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277

Zaštita atmosphere [The protection of the atmosphere] (Sarajevo), and Naše okolje [Our environment] (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 Hrvatske, Republička konferencija. Savjet za zaštitu i unapređenje čovjekove okoline i prostorno uređenje, box 1. 33. Ustav Socijalističke Federativne Republike Jugoslavije. Ustav Socijalističke Republike Hrvatske (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 Environmental 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, Montenegro, 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 Socialistične 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 okoline, 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 unapređenje 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 question, 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 Department 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, prostornog uređenja, čovjekove sredine (Beograd: Naučna knjiga, 1987), 56. Interview by Hrvoje Petrić with first director of the Croatian Institute for Physical Planning and Environment Facility, 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

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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 komunalne 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, Construction 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 Yugoslavia—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, Plitvice 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 Industrial 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 Koprivnica and Đurđevac); in private ownership. 58. Ljubomir Petrović, “Nuklearna havarija u Černobilu 1986. godine,” Istorija XX. veka 28, no. 2 (2010): 101–16.

Notes to Pages 176–179

279

59. Damir Mikulčić, Nuklearne elektrane. Činjenice za razmišljanje (Zagreb: Zajednica elektroprivrednih 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 Movements,” in: Von Amtsgärten und Vogelkojen: Beiträge zum Göttinger Umwelthistorischen Kolloquium 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 environmental 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, “Regionalne 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 conferences 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 Organization, and World Health Organization Changed the World, 1945–1965 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006).

280

Notes to Pages 179–183

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); Michael 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 Landwirtschaft (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 European Perspective, 1920s to 1970s,” Past & Present 212, no. 1 (August 2011): 239–69; Arnd Bauerkämper, “The Industrialization of Agriculture and its Consequences for the Natural Environment: 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 Bundesrepublik 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 zwischen 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 Winiwarter (Winwick, Cambridgeshire, UK: White Horse Press, 2006). 9. In my larger project, I am tracing the history of this discourse about American soil plunder 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 Public 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

Notes to Pages 183–185

281

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 Germany, 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, “Biocentric 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 Treasury (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, November 22, 1946, BAK Z1/100; Bipartite Control Commission, “Jahresbericht für die Ernaehrungs-­ und Landwirtschaftsorganisation der Vereinten Nationen,” 1947, BAK Z6/171; Report, “Germany, US Zone, Land Greater Hessen,” August 9, 1946, 1946 Report on European Mission Folder, Government Service File (1942–1948), Andrews Papers, Truman Library (hereafter

282

Notes to Pages 186–188

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, Government 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 Coordinating Office, January 3, 1947, BAK Z1/802. 26. Bipartite Control Commission, “Jahresbericht für die Ernährungs-­und Landwirtschaftsorganisation 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 deutschen 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,” August 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. Baumgartner 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

Notes to Pages 188–189

283

folder, box 2, APTL; Farquarson, “The Management of Agriculture and Food Supplies in Germany,” 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 Bayerns 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 History 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 Preservation 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 Landwirtschaftsorganisationen 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 Landwirtschaftsorganisationen der Vereinten Nationen,” May 23, 1949, 24–25, BAK Z1/I171; “Lebendige Landwirtschaft,” Die Zeit, August 7, 1947; “Vorläufiger Kurzbericht über die USA Reise Dr. Könekamp,” 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, January 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. 46. Bipartite Control Commission, “Jahresbericht für die Ernährungs-­und Landwirtschaftsorganisation der Vereinten Nationen,” 1947, BAK Z6/171. 47. “Die deutsche Wirtschaftsnot: Gemeinsame Stellungnahme des Ernährungs-­und Landwirtschaftsrates 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-

284

Notes to Pages 189–191

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 Valley 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 Hopkins 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 Germans. 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 Clippings and Press Releases folder, Government Service file, 1942–1953, APTL. 53. Unpublished memoirs, 986, “Journal of a Retread” memoir file, vol. 4 folder, box 31, 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 Travel 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 structural problems did exhaust weary landowners, both Bennett and Andrews constantly underestimated 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 Correspondence 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

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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. 59. Unpublished memoirs, 487, “Journal of a Retread” memoir file, vol. 2 folder, box 30, 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 Neoliberal 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 neoliberal 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. members 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, Apartheid 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 Hammond and Claire H. Hammond, “Religion and the Foundation of Liberalism,” Modern Age 55, no. 1/2 (2013): 35–51.

286

Notes to Pages 192–194

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 Praktiker (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 Recke, “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 Gründungsversammlung 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, September 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,” August 1949, Travel—Europe, Fall 1949 folder, box 3, HBTL. 88. Bipartite Control Commission, “Jahresbericht für die Ernährungs-­und Landwirtschaftsorganisation der Vereinten Nationen,” 1947, BAK Z6/171. 89. Schedule for Bizonal Military government officials, August 11, 1948, BAK Z6/I199; “Antrag—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, Alfalfa 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,” October 7, 1949, 13, 1942–53–1949 general folder, box 2, APTL. 92. Daniel Nyfeler, Olivier Huguenin-­Elie, Matthias Suter, Emmanuel Frossard, and Andreas 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 Westdeutschland,” May 20, 1952, BAK B116/629.

Notes to Pages 195–197

287

94. Dr. Joris, “Erfahrungs-­und Erfolgsbericht,” April 22, 1953; OLF Gräber Landwirtschaftskammer 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 besonderer 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 Erfolgsbericht,” 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,” December 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, “Landtechnik,” 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 Erfolgsbericht,” 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 Schöningen 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 Kurzbericht 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 Grünlandbetrieb, 12–16, 30–37. 103. Könekamp, Ausschnitte aus der Landwirtschaft, 430. On specialization in grass production, 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 Landwirtschaftsorganisationen der Vereinten Nationen,” May 23, 1949, BAK Z1/I171; Dr. Arthur Hanau, “Bericht über die Teilnahme an FAO der Vereinten Nationen in November 1948,” January 8, 1949,

288

Notes to Pages 197–199

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-­, Unternehmens-­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: Cornell 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: Routledge, 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 Tucker (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.

Notes to Pages 199–208

289

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 Administration 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 (Washington: 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 /historicaldocuments/frus1955–57v14/d336. 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 /historicaldocuments/frus1961–63v18/d364. 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 Arabic 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, Pennsylvania—July 19–21, 1965 (U.S.-­Israel Study),” n.d., National Archives and Records Administration, 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 Special 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:// history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964–68v34/d138. 27. Memorandum of conversation, November 2, 1964, Foreign Relations of the United States,

290

Notes to Pages 208–210

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 United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy Diplomacy and Global Issues, document 144, http:// history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964–68v34/d144. 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:// history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964–68v18/d288. 37. See editorial note, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy Diplomacy and Global Issues, document 151, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments /frus1964–68v34/d151. 38. Memorandum from the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow) to President Johnson, August 12, 1966, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy Diplomacy and Global Issues, document 152, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments /frus1964–68v34/d152. 39. Memorandum from the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow) to President Johnson, September 19, 1966, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy Diplomacy and Global Issues, document 155, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments /frus1964–68v34/d155. 40. See editorial note, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 34, Energy Diplomacy and Global Issues, document 161, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments /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

Notes to Pages 211–214

291

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 /historicaldocuments/frus1964–68v34/d163. 44. Memorandum from the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow) to President Johnson, 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 Diplomacy and Global Issues, document 166, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments /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. Sulzberger, “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 Diplomacy 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. 50. Editorial note, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, document 168. 51. Editorial note, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, document 168. 52. Memorandum from the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow) to President Johnson, 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 Diplomacy and Global Issues, document 174, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments /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 David 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-

292

Notes to Pages 214–218

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 conference “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 Zeitgeschichte 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: Diplomaten 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 Auswärtige 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 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015). 12. Kai Hünemörder, “Environmental Crisis and Soft Politics: Détente and the Global Environment, 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.

Notes to Pages 219–221

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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 Deutschlands,” in Ethnografisches Arbeiten in Berlin: Wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Annäherungen, ed. Martina 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 Politics 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 Schaarschmidt, “Heimat in der Diktatur,” 127–41. 18. Berichterstattung der Bezirksleitung Potsdam des Deutschen Kulturbund an die Bundesleitung 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 conducted 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 Heimatfreunde 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 Oliver Kersten, Die Naturfreundebewegung in der Region Berlin-­Brandenburg 1908–1989/90: Kontinuitäten 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

294

Notes to Pages 221–223

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 Bundesleitung 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 Ungarischen 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 suggestion 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 ehrenamtlichen 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, Halberstadt, 2015.

Notes to Pages 223–227

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44. Michael Kloepfer, Umweltrecht (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994), 140, and Josef Füllenbach, Umweltschutz zwischen Ost und West: Umweltpolitik in Osteuropa u. gesamteuropäische Zusammenarbeit (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 Development (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. 51. Hünemörder, “Environmental Crisis,” 264. 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 making 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 Kretschmann, 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 Rückblick. Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, Kultur, ed. Helga Schultz and Hans-­Jürgen Wagener (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2007), 135–54, 136. 56. See Gerhard Heske, “Bruttoinlandsprodukt, Verbrauch und Erwerbstätigkeit in Ostdeutschland 1970–2000. Neue Ergebnisse einer volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnung,” HSR-­ Supplement 17 (2005). Heske’s findings are mentioned in Karl Mai, “War die DDR wirtschaftlich unterlegen? Ergänzungen zu Hans Modrows Interpretation,” Sozialismus 9 (2008), http:// www.schattenblick.de/infopool/geist/history/ggwir010.html. According to the historian Viktoria Settele, in its agricultural policy West Germany focused more on an increase in labor productivity, 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).

296

Notes to Pages 227–228

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 Naturschutz ‘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,” Tageszeitung, 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 Umweltbedingungen (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 between 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. 71. Hünemörder, “Environmental Crisis,” 266.

Notes to Pages 228–230

297

72. Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature. The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 194. 73. See Robert G. Darst, Smokestack Diplomacy: Cooperation and Conflict in East-­West Environmental Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), and the review of his book by Allison 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).

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Notes to Pages 230–232

CONTRIBUTORS \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

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 environmentalism 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 pollution 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, “Rapprocher 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 Building, 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-Universität 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 Manufacturers’ 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 research 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 Institute 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 University, Berlin, and currently a scholar-in-residence at the Deutsches Museum, Munich. 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 conservation 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 Museum 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 projects 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 Expanding 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 University. 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 National 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 Policy 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).

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INDEX \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate illustrative material. Academy of Sciences and the State Committee for Science and Technology (GKNT), 23–24, 26, 28 acid rain, 75, 83, 140, 148, 154, 155 Action Group for Nonviolence (AG), 89–90, 91 activated sludge process, 45 Adar, Joseph, 211–12 Advisory Council on the Environment (Der Rat von Sachverständigen für Umweltfragen), 84 AEC (Atomic Energy Commission), 118, 119–20, 121, 123, 207, 213 agriculture: and colonialism, 194–96; and global economy, 190–93; livestock vs. crops, 188–90; Morgenthau plan, 186–88, 190–91; overview of development in postwar West Germany, 183–86; pasture improvement in West Germany, 196–200 Agrigento landslide (1966), 108, 114 air pollution management: in East Germany, 153–54; in Italy, 106–7; and Waldsterben (forest dieback), 75, 83–84, 148, 154, 251n59, 272n17; West German utility company application of policies on, 81–83; West German utility company role in political debate on, 76–80, 83–84; in West Germany, 74–75, 75 Albrecht, Catherine, 267–68n24 Aldermaston March, 91 Alekseevskii, Evgenii, 24, 26 Allenby, Braden, 235n21 All-­Union Institute for Water Supply Engineering and Hydrogeology (VODGEO), 23 American Geographical Society, 20 Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine (AHRU), 68, 69 Amosov, Mykola, 64 Amundson, Michael, 121 Anaconda Company, 126

Andrews, Stanley, 191–92, 193 APO (Außerparlamentarische Opposition; Extra-­ Parliamentary Opposition), 92–93 Arden, Edward, 45 Armand, David, 25–26 Armiero, Marco, 112–13 Army Corps of Engineers, 21 Association for the Protection of Nature of Yugoslavia, 172 Association of the Friends of Nature (Verein der Naturfreunde), 222 Aswan High Dam, 208 atomic energy. See nuclear energy Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 118, 119–20, 121, 123, 207, 213 Ault, Julia E.: about, 299; chapter by, 151–68; comments on, 9 Autostrada del Sole, 105 Baibakov, Nikolai, 26, 27 Baker, Howard, Jr., 215 Baltic Sea Region (BSR), 36–37. See also Lithuania Barnett, Jack, 121 Barngrover, Jim, 130 Bauer, Max, 89 Baumgartner, Joseph, 189 BDI (Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie; Federation of German Industries), 82 Bebler, Ales, 174 Becher, Johannes R., 221 Beck, Ulrich, 34 Bennett, Hugh, 191–92, 193 Berliner Städtische Elektrizitätswerke (BEWAG), 77 BImSchG (Bundes-­Immissionsschutzgesetz; Federal Pollution Control Act ), 74 biofiltration facilities, 44–45

303

biological oxygen demand, 43 Bipartite Control Office, 188, 196 Board of Use and Protection of Water Resources, 40, 46 Brain, Stephen, 17–18, 33 Brandt, Carl, 190, 192, 193, 195 Brandt, Willy, 74, 230, 231 Braunschweigsche Kohlen Bergwerke (BKB), 77 Brekhovskikh, Leonid, 30 Briefe (newsletter), 158, 166 Bulat, Taras, 68 Bundesverband Bürgerinitiativen Umweltschutz (Federal Association of Citizens’ Initiatives for Environmental Protection, BBU), 97 Bunker, Ellsworth, 213 Bureau of the Department of Oceanology, Atmospheric Physics, and Geography, 29 Burton, Christopher, 17, 21 Buschhaus, 76 Campos Venuti, Giuseppe, 111 capitalism, as term, 3 Carson, Rachel, 207 Carter, J. W., 138 The Cathedral (Honchar), 60 cattle reduction, in postwar Germany,188–90 Central Committee of the Communist Party, 23, 25, 31 Ceponiene, Aurelija, 38 Cetkauskaite, Anolda: about, 299; chapter by, 36–54 Charter 77, 147–48 Chemical Triangle (East Germany), 154, 156 Chernobyl accident: development of international green network after, 67–69, 70–71; development of Ukrainian environmental movement after, 60–65; impact on East Germany, 159; impact on Poland, 162–63; impact on Yugoslavia, 179; and Soviet economic ambitions, 55–57; Soviet response to, 57–59 Chernobyl Movement, 62 Chernobyl Way, 71 Chernovol, V’yacheslav, 66 Chessin, Meyer, 119, 123, 126, 132 Children of Chernobyl Relief Fund (CCRF), 69 Christian Democratic Party (Democrazia Cristiana, DC; Italy), 102–3, 109–13 Christian Democratic Union (CDU; West Germany), 90–91, 92 Churchill, Winston, 5 Citizens Against the Nuclear Ban, 130

304

Clamshell Alliance, 69 Clean Water Act (1972), 28 coal energy: debate in Montana, 122, 128, 129; emissions from, 74–75, 75, 76; Soviet focus on, 153 Cold War: East-­West transmission of ideas during, 8–9; historical overview, 4–6 Colonialism (as understood in postwar Germany), 194–96 Commission of the Federal Council of the Assembly of Yugoslavia for the Protection and Improvement of the Environment, 175 Committee for Air Pollution Prevention, 73 Committee on Nuclear Strategy, 123 Committee on the Environment of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 176 Communism, as term, 3 Communist League of West Germany, 98 Communist Party of Italy (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI), 110, 112–13, 114 Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm 1972), 145, 175–76, 226, 227, 229–30 Conservators Society of Yugoslavia, 172 Coumel, Laurent: about, 299; chapter by, 17–35 Council for Environmental Questions, 145 Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, 176 Council for the Protection and Improvement of the Environment of Yugoslavia, 174, 175 Council for the Protection of Natural Resources, 68 Council of Ministers (East Germany), 274n47 Council of Ministers (Russia), 18, 23, 25 Council of People’s Commissars of the Lithuanian SSR, 40 Coyle, McCarthy, 130 Critical Mass, 122 cropland expansion (West Germany), 188–90 Cultural League, 221–22, 224, 227, 294n20 Curry, Jean, 128 Cvitković, Milan, 177 Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 138, 143, 144–46, 147–48, 266n2, 268–69n40, 269n43 Czechoslovakia: 1960s environmental legislation, 140–44, 267–68n24, 268n29; 1970s environmental legislation, 144–47, 269n54; 1980s environmental legislation, 147–50, 268n31, 269n57 Darst, Robert, 34 Davis, Belinda, 101 Dawson, Jane, 67 De Gasperi, Alcide, 104

Index

deindustrialization, 186–87, 190–91, 193, 285n48 Dematteis, Giuseppe, 106, 107 Demokratična opozicija Slovenije (Democratic Opposition of Slovenia, DEMOS), 180 Department for Protection and Scientific Study of Cultural Monuments and Natural Attractions of Slovenia, 172 desalination. See nuclear desalination desulfurization, flue-­gas, 77, 78–79, 81–82 détente, 5, 9, 132, 220–21, 230 Dialog (journal), 142 Division for Environmental Protection (Abteilung Umweltschutz), 73 Dnieper River, 56, 60 Dobson, Ed, 123 Dominick, Raymond, 12, 53, 138–39, 142 Döring, Wolfgang, 89 Drach, Ivan, 66 dual-­track decision, 87–88, 99 Dudko, Sviatoslav, 68 Duffy, Joe, 130 Easter March, 91–93, 96 Easter Monday rally, 96–97 East Germany: activist interactions with Polish environmental groups, 165–67; applications for UN membership, 225–31; cultural tension with Poland, 167, 275n82; environmental data restriction in, 274n46; environmental diplomacy with West Germany, 221–25; environmental legislation in, 156, 226–28, 296n56; environmental movement in, 157–60, 164, 271n7; Hallstein Doctrine, 219, 231, 293n3; pollution in, 153–55; UN recognition of, 219; vs. West Germany environmental policy outcomes, 138–39; West Work approaches, 219–21 East-­West exchange. See transmission of ideas Ebert, Theodor, 95–96, 254n33 Ecclesiastical Research Center (Kirchliches Forschungsheim, KFH), 158, 166 ECOFOND, 68 Ecological Initiative, 61–62 Ecology (environmentalist group), 61 Ecology and Peace, 62 ECOLOS, 69 Ehrhardt, Hendrik: about, 300; chapter by, 73–86; comments on, 11 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 63, 214–16, 246n43 Elie, Marc, 17, 34 environmentalism: East-­West broad comparisons,

Index

10–12; East-­West transmission of ideas, 8–9; emergence as movement, 7. See also agriculture; air pollution management; environmental policies and legislation; nuclear energy; peace movement; water pollution management Environmental Library, 159–60 environmental policies and legislation: in 1960s Czechoslovakia, 140–44, 267–68n24, 268n29; in 1970s Czechoslovakia, 144–47, 269n54; in 1980s Czechoslovakia, 147–50, 268n31, 269n57; in East Germany, 156, 226–28, 296n56; environmental disasters due to inadequate, 108, 112–14; fight for Initiative 71 (I-­71), 122–24; fight for Initiative 80 (I-­80), 116, 125–32, 263–64n68; in Italy, 106–8, 257n29; Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963), 119, 207; in Poland, 156; in Russia, 21–22, 23, 25; utility company application of environmental, 81–83; and utility company role in political debate on air pollution, 76–80, 83–84; in West Germany, 74–75, 75, 296n56; West vs. East Germany outcomes, 138–39; in Yugoslavia, 170–73, 175, 278n35 Environment Committee, 61 epistemic community, defined, 20–21 Die Erde ist zu retten (The earth is to be saved), 158 Eshkol, Levi, 209, 212, 213 European Youth Forest Action, 151, 166 exchange of ideas. See transmission of ideas Extra-­Parliamentary Opposition (Außerparlamentarische Opposition, APO), 92–93 fallout. See Chernobyl accident farming. See agriculture Federal Pollution Control Act (Bundes-­ Immissionsschutzgesetz, BImSchG), 74 Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). See West Germany Federation of German Industries (Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie, BDI), 82 Fedorov, Evgenii, 24 Feldman, Myer, 210, 212 Ferguson, Cody, 122 Filbinger, Hans, 94 Filtzer, Donald, 17 Fischer, Frank, 34 Fischer, Joschka, 78 Florio, Jim, 69 flue-­gas desulfurization, 77, 78–79, 81–82 Food and Agriculture Organization, 280n1 food production. See agriculture

305

For Ecological Restructuring, 61 forest damage (Forstschäden), 154 forest dieback (Waldsterben), 75, 83–84, 148, 154, 251n59, 272n15 Forrester, Jay W., 28 For Us and Our Grandchildren (Armand), 25–26 Francis, Sharon, 207 Free Democratic Party (FDP), 91 free trade, 190–93 Friends of Nature and the Heimat (Natur-­und Heimatfreunde, NHF), 222–24, 294n20 Friends of the Earth, 133, 163 Fruttero, Carlo, 105 Fulbrook, Mary, 271n8 Fura, Zygmunt, 162, 165 Furlan, Ivan, 177 Gajda, Milan, 142 Galazii, Grigorii, 22 General Electric, 121, 131 Genscher, Hans-­Dietrich, 73 Gensichen, Hans-­Peter, 158 Gerasimov, Inokentii, 28 German Academy of Sciences (Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften, DAW), 225, 229, 296n52 German Democratic Republic (GDR). See East Germany German Peace Society—United War Resisters (Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft—Vereinigte Kriegsdienstgegner, DFG-­VK), 100 Germany. See East Germany; West Germany Germany Is Our Problem (Morgenthau), 183 Gesellschaft für Natur und Umwelt (Society for Nature and Environment), 156 Gestwa, Klaus, 17 GfAVO (Großfeuerungsanlagenverordnung; Regulation on Large Combustion Plants), 74, 77, 79, 83 Gidrometsluzhba (Hydrological and Meteorological Service), 23–24, 26, 28, 30 Gidroproekt (Hydro Project) Institute, 17 Gilsenbach, Reimar, 294n20 Ginsborg, Paul, 102, 104 GKNT (Soviet Academy of Sciences and the State Committee for Science and Technology), 23–24, 26, 28 glasnost, 31, 61, 72, 151, 159, 165 Glassheim, Eagle: about, 300; chapter by, 137–50; comments on, 7 Gomułka, Władysław, 161

306

Gorbachev, Mikhail, 5, 57, 59, 64, 68, 149–50, 151, 164 Goskompriroda (Soviet State Committee for Nature Protection), 32, 40, 70 Gosplan, 21, 26 Gosvodkhoz (State Committee for Water Management of the Russian Republic), 18–19, 21–22, 25 Graham, Loren, 33 Great Lakes (North America), 27, 28–29, 33 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, 27 Green Charity, 61 Green Parties (Yugoslavia), 180–81 Green Party (West Germany), 98–99, 254n43, 255n47 Greens of the United States of America, 69 Green World Association, 62, 69 Grushko, Mikhail, 21 Guha, Ramachandra, 150 Gulliford, Andrew, 121 Haas, Peter, 20–21 Hallstein Doctrine, 219, 231, 293n3 Hamblin, Jacob Darwin: about, 300; chapter by, 205–18; comments on, 6, 230 Hammarskjöld, Dag, 225 Hammond, R. Philip, 213 Hanford Works, 128 Hardenberg, Wilko Graf von: about, 300; chapter by, 102–15; comments on, 11 Harvey, Kyle, 117 Hayek, Friedrich, 192 Headwaters Alliance Political Action Committee, 127, 129, 133 Heimat concept, 222, 294n17, 294n20 Heritage Club, 65, 66 Hicks, Barbara, 156 highway construction, 104–5 Hlubek, Werner, 86 Honchar, Oles,’ 60, 62, 63 Hoover, Herbert, 191 Hornig, Donald, 208, 209, 211, 212, 216 Hühns, Erik, 294n20 Hünemörder, Kai, 228, 295n38 Hydrochemical Laboratory (Lithuania), 40, 43–44 hydroelectric power plants (Yugoslavia), 178–80 Hydrological and Meteorological Service (Gidrometsluzhba), 23–24, 26, 28, 30 Hydrometeorological Board, 40 Hygiene Service (Czechoslovakia), 141, 144, 268–69n40

Index

industrialization: in Poland, 152, 153; push for deindistrialization in West Germany, 186–87, 190–91, 193, 285n48; and regulations in Czechoslovakia, 140; and Soviet economic ambitions, 55–57, 153; and urbanization in Italy, 103–6 Initiative 71 (I-­71), 122–24 Initiative 80 (I-­80), 116, 125–32, 263–64n68 Inspectorate of Water Economy (Lithuania), 40 Institute for Protection of Cultural Heritage (Yugoslavia), 172 Institute for the Protection and Scientific Research of Natural Rarities of Serbia (Zavod za zaštitu i naučno proučavanje prirodnih retkosti NR Srbije), 171–72 Institute of Water Geology (VodGeo), 45 International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards, 212 iodine prophylaxis, 59 Iron Curtain, as concept, 5 Israel. See Water for Peace program Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica (Italian National Urban Planning Institute), 111 Italy: environmental disasters in, 108, 112–14; environmental legislation in, 106–8, 257n29; patronage politics in, 104, 109–12; postwar reconstruction of, 103–6 Izrael, Yuri, 59 Jansky, Carl, 119–20 Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 161 Jaskułowski, Tytus, 275n77 Johanides, Vera, 174, 177 Johnson, Lyndon B.: abandonment of desalination program, 216–17; legislation on fissionable material, 121; push for desalination program, 205, 208–10, 211, 213; request for nuclear weapons safeguards, 212; and Strauss/Eisenhower proposal, 214–16 Jordan, Matthew, 130 Kamiński, Bronisław, 165 Kapitsa, Pyotr, 28–29 Kardelj, Edvard, 174 Karfík, Vladimír, 142 Kasalický, V., 144 Kassenberg, Andrzej, 163–64 Kaufmann, John, 128 KdA (Kampf dem Atomtod; Fight the Atomic Death), 87, 89–90 Kelly, Petra, 97–99, 100

Index

Kennedy, John F., 209 Keynesian economics, 190–91, 192 KFH (Kirchliches Forschungsheim; Ecclesiastical Research Center), 158, 166 Khrushchev, Nikita, 18, 20 Kielmansegg, Peter Graf, 87 Kirchhof, Astrid Mignon: about, 300; chapters by, 3–14, 219–32; comments on, 11 Kirilenko, Andrei, 24 Kirillin, Vladimir, 24 Klopfer, Michael, 227 Komanoff, Charles, 128, 129 Komer, Robert, 212 Könekamp, Alfred, 197–98, 199 Kořinek, Vladimír, 143–44 Kornev, Konstantin, 22, 23 Koronkevich, Nikolai, 31–32 Kosygin, Aleksey, 24 Kotkin, Stephen, 164 Krefeld Appeal, 87 Kretschmann, Kurt and Erna, 296n52 Krisciunas, Juozas, 38 Kurth, Hannelore, 229 Kychun, Vasyl, 68 Laakkonen, Simo: about, 301; chapter by, 36–54; comments on, 36 Laboratory of Nature Protection, 24 Lake Baikal, 21, 29, 34 Landeskulturgesetz (Law on the Conservation and Protection of the Environment; 1970), 156, 226–27 Lascoumes, Pierre, 18 Laskorin, Boris, 30 Law 184 (1952), 107–8 League of Green Parties, 68 Leech, Brian James: about, 301; chapter by, 116–34; comments on, 6 legislation. See environmental policies and legislation Leinen, Jo, 97, 99 Liga Ochrony Przyrody (Nature Conservation League), 156 Lilienthal, David, 20 Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963), 119, 207 The Limits to Growth (Forrester), 28 Lingner, Reinhold, 282n10 Lion Society, 62, 65 liquid manures, 199–200 Literarní noviny (journal), 142

307

Lithuania: administration of water management in, 40, 41; antinuclear activism in, 70; factors for development of water management in, 50–53; geography and history, 38–39, 39; monitoring and classification of surface water in, 40–43, 47–50, 48, 49; monitoring and treatment of wastewater in, 43–47, 47, 51, 243n45; and scholarship on water management in BSR, 36–37 Lockett, W. T., 45 Lozanskij, Vladimir, 27 Lûbov, 31 Lucentini, Franco, 105 L’vovich, Mark, 30 Lyashko, Aleksander, 58 Mackevich, Vladimir, 24 magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), 129 Maier, Charles, 153 Males, Mike, 130 Malthusian thinking, 183, 184, 186, 195, 206 Matoničkin, Ivo, 177 maximum allowable concentrations (MAC), 42 McCormack, Mike, 122 McKaye, Benton, 285n48 McNeill, J. R.: about, 301; chapter by, 3–14 Melcher, John, 129 Mende, Silke, 88, 253n7 Metcalf, Lee, 125 Metzger, Birgit, 88, 253n7 Michurin, Ivan, 32 Middle East. See Water for Peace program Milder, Stephen: about, 301; chapter by, 87–101; comments on, 6 Ministry for Environmental Protection and Water Management, 227 Ministry of Agriculture, 24, 25 Ministry of Environmental Protection (later Ministry of Environment of the Lithuanian Republic), 40 Ministry of Internal Affairs, 19 Ministry of Land Reclamation and Water Management (Minvodkhoz), 23–24, 26, 31, 32, 33, 40 Mishchenko, Yuriy, 68–69 Missoula (Montana) County Ban Petition, 127 Mogren, Eric, 120 Montana: and energy independence, 120–22; fight for Initiative 71 (I-­71), 122–24; fight for Initiative 80 (I-­80), 116, 125–32, 263–64n68; mixed response to nuclear development in, 118–20; and scholarship on environmental movement in American West, 116–17

308

Montana Farmer’s Union, 131 Montana Major Facilities Siting Act (1973), 124 Montanans Against 71 Committee, 123–24 Montanans for Jobs and Energy, 129–30 Montanans for Safe Power, 123 Montana Power Company, 119–20, 126 Montana Public Interest Research Group, 124 Mont Pèlerin Society, 192 Moore, Bradley, 140 Moranda, Scott: about, 301; chapter by, 183–205; comments on, 6 Morgenthau, Henry, Jr, 183, 186–88, 190–91, 192 Mossmann, Walter, 94 motorization, 104–5 Muller, Kit, 122 Mumford, Lewis, 285n48 Nasser, Gamal, 208, 212 National Environmental Policy Act, U.S., (1970), 121 National Institute for the Protection of Natural Rarities of the People’s Republic of Croatia, 171 nationalism: in Lithuania, 52; in Ukraine, 67 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 5, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92 Nature and Society (film), 27 Nature Conservation League, 162 Naturefriends International, 294n21 Nature Protection Brigades, USSR, (Druzhinnoe dvizhenie), 60 Nehring, Holger, 91–92, 254n32 neoliberalism, 190–93, 286n63 Nestrenko, Alexej, 229 NHF (Natur-­und Heimatfreunde; Friends of Nature and the Heimat), 222–24, 294n20 Nikonov, Viktor, 31 1950s syndrome, 102 nitrogen, 46–47 nitrogen dioxide emissions, 74–75, 75, 76, 86 Nixon, Richard, 28, 120, 217 Noack, Liesel, 223 noise pollution, 177 Noosphere, 61 North Rhine-­Westphalian Company (Rheinisch-­ Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk, RWE), 76, 81–83, 84–85, 249n15 Not Indifferent, 61 NPRC (Northern Plains Resource Council), 122, 132 nuclear desalination: abandonment of, 216–17; criticism of, 209, 211–12, 217, 292n55; and nuclear weapons safeguards, 212–13; Strauss/

Index

Eisenhower proposal, 214–16; support for, 207–10 nuclear energy: development of international green network after Chernobyl, 67–69, 70–71; development of Ukrainian environmental movement after Chernobyl, 60–65; disaster examples, 234n14; and energy independence, 120–22; fight for Initiative 80 (I-­80), 116, 125–32, 263–64n68; mixed response to, in Montana, 118–20; Nuclear Safeguards Initiatives (1976), 122–25; protests in East Germany against, 159; protests in Poland against, 162–63; protests in West Germany against, 93–100, 254n33; protests in Yugoslavia against, 179; Soviet response to Chernobyl, 57–59 Nuclear Free Missoula, 127–28 Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 124 Nuclear Safeguards Initiatives (1976), 122–25 Nuclear Vote, 130 nuclear weapons: connection to Water for Peace program, 212–13. See also peace movement OAPEC (Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries), 120 OECD (Committee on the Environment of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), 176 Oechsler, Ronald, 19, 23, 28 Ohne mich (without me) movement, 87 oil shale, 120, 132, 261n32 Okvir života (The framework of life; Stanković), 173 Olivetti, Adriano, 111 Oliynyk, Borys, 63 Olshaniwsky, Bozhena, 68 Operation Plowshare, 119 Orlov, V. P., 21 overindustrialization (as concerned Germany) , 187 Ovsyannikov, Nikolai, 22 oxidation baths, 45 Palme, Olof, 230 Palmieri, Walter, 108 Panov, Anatoly, 68–69 Paolini, Federico, 105, 109 Paton, Boris, 64 patronage politics, 104, 109–12 Pauley, Anne, 128 Pavičić, Vicko, 177 Pavletić, Zlatko, 177 Pavlichko, Dmitriy, 66

Index

Pavlínek, Petr, 138, 267n21 PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano; Communist Party of Italy), 110, 112–13, 114 PDK (predel’no dopustimye kontsentratsii; maximum allowable concentrations), 42 Peace Committee (Ukrainian Republic), 62 “peaceful atom,” 63, 246n43 peace movement: mass peace movement in 1980s, 98–100; overview, 87–89; and partisan politics, 89–93; protests against nuclear energy, 93–98, 254n33 Peace Walks, 68 perestroika, 31, 61, 72, 151 Perga, Tetiana: about, 302; chapter by, 55–72; comments on, 6 Petrić, Hrvoje: about, 302; chapter by, 169–82; comments on, 4, 9 Pfeiffer, Burt, 119, 123 phosphorus, 46 Pickles, John, 138, 267n21 PKE (Polski Klub Ekologiczny; Polish Ecological Club), 151, 160–61, 162, 163, 165 Plachinda, Sergey, 66 Plut, Dušan, 180, 280n64 Pniower, Georg, 282n10 Poland: cultural tension with East Germany, 167, 275n82; environmental legislation in, 156; environmental movement in, 160–64; pollution in, 155–56; as site of international exchange, 164–67; Treaty of Warsaw, 297n64 Polesine flood, Italy, (1951), 113–14 policies. See environmental policies and legislation pollution. See air pollution management; nuclear energy; water pollution management Pope, Daniel, 118 Popović, Tadija, 174 Popular Fronts, 71 Port, Andrew, 271n8 Pravda (newspaper), 28 Preußenelektra, 76, 77, 78, 80, 83, 249n15 Protestant Church, 157–59, 273n39 proxy awareness, 25–26 PZPR (Polish United Workers’ Party), 152, 156, 160, 161 Quammen, David, 260n13 The Quiet Crisis (Udall), 207 Rabin, Yitzhak, 205 Radkau, Joachim, 34, 73, 80, 84

309

Ramey, James, 214 Reagan, Ronald, 132 Redding, John, 122 Regulation on Large Combustion Plants (Großfeuerungsanlagenverordnung, GfAVO), 74, 77, 79, 83 Reitz, Heribert, 250n41 reunification of Germany, 219, 220, 221–23 Reynolds, Sam, 128–29, 265n85 Rhönclub, 223, 224 Richter, Saskia, 99 road building (Italy), 113–14 Rokavec, Angela, 177 Romanenko, Anatoliy, 59 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 280n1 Röpke, Wilhelm, 194 Rosenthal, Sinaida, 229, 297n62 Ross, Carl, 195–96 Rostow, Walt, 212, 213, 214, 216 Rothschild, Edmund de, 215 Rüddenklau, Wolfgang, 159 Rudé Právo (newspaper), 149 Rühle, Otto, 296n53 RUKH, 71, 246n54 Russia. See Soviet Union RWE (Rheinisch-­Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk, North Rhine-­Westphalian Company), 76, 81–83, 84–85, 249n15 Salerno flooding and mudslide (Italy, 1954), 108, 113 San Joaquin Nuclear Project, 132 saprobic zones, 42–43 Saraceno, Pasquale, 104 Scamehorn, Lee, 117 Schaarschmidt, Thomas, 294n17 Scheffer, Marten, 228 Scherbina, Boris, 58 Schlange-­Schöningen, Hans, 189, 190, 194, 198 Schmidt, Helmut, 99 Schoth, H. A., 197 Schregel, Susanne, 89, 100 Scientific Council for Biosphere Problems, 29–30 Scoppola, Pietro, 102 Seaborg, Glenn, 207–8, 214, 216, 217 SED (Socialist Unity Party; East Germany), 152, 156, 157–59, 164, 221, 222, 223, 228, 274n68, 294n17 Segatz, Ulrich, 80 Settele, Viktoria, 296n56 Shashkov, Zosima, 24 Shcherbak, Yuri, 71

310

Shcherbytsky, Volodymyr, 58 Shevchenko, Oleksadr, 66 Shubin, Alexander, 68, 247n65 Sibaral (Siberian River Diversion Project), 29, 31, 32, 34 Sievert, Rolf Maximilian, 245n11 Silent Spring (Carson), 207 Six-­Day War (1967), 214 Smil, Václav, 142, 268n29 smokestack industrialization, 153 Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD; West Germany), 89–91, 92 Socialist-­Communist parties (Italy), 102–3, 110, 112–13, 114 Socialist Unity Party (SED; East Germany), 152, 156, 157–59, 164, 221, 222, 223, 228, 274n68, 294n17 socio-­ecological metabolism, 281n3 Socio-­Ecological Union, 68 soil conservation, Italian legislation on, 107–8, 257n29. See also agriculture Solidarność (Solidarity), 152, 160, 161, 162 Soviet Geography (journal), 20 Soviet Union: collapse of, 71; comparative discourse on water management in, 25–30, 27, 31–33; economic and industrial ambitions, 55–57, 153; emergence of epistemic community on water management in, 18–21; internal struggle for water management control in, 21–25, 30–31; push for East German UN membership, 229–30; response to Chernobyl, 57–59; Treaty of Moscow, 229, 297n64. See also Czechoslovakia; East Germany; Lithuania; Poland; Ukraine; Yugoslavia SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany; West Germany), 89–91, 92 Der Spiegel (newspaper), 148–49 Stalin, Joseph, 223 Stanković, Siniša, 173 Stanovnik, Janez, 278–79n41 Stasi (Ministry for State Security), 157, 160, 164, 273n39, 275n77 State Board of Natural Resources, 124 State Committee for Nature Protection (Goskompriroda), 32, 40, 70 State Committee for Water Management of the Russian Republic (Gosvodkhoz), 18–19, 21–22, 25 State Sanitary Inspectorate, 40, 241n25 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (1972), 145 Strauss, Franz-­Josef, 149

Index

Strauss, Lewis, 213–16 Student Union Community (Ukraine), 65 Sudetendeutscher Rat, 148 Sukopp, Herbert, 224 sulfur dioxide emissions, 74–75, 75, 76, 86, 140, 146, 154, 229, 267n21 Sullo, Fiorentino, 111 Sulzberger, C. L., 215 Supek, Rudi, 174 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (1977), 122 Svarun, 180 Švec, František, 141 Svidzinsky, Anatoliy, 65 Tara River Canyon (Yugoslavia), 179–80 Technical-­Economic Justifications (TEO), 31 technocratic environmentalism, 34–35 Terehov, Volodymyr, 65 Thant, U, 225–26 Tito, Josip Broz, 4, 173, 174 Togliatti, Palmiro, 112 transmission of ideas: and comparative discourse on water management, 25–30, 27, 31–33; concerning agriculture, 188–93, 196–98; concerning water pollution management, 19–20, 44, 45, 53; and East-­West competition theory, 17–18, 33–34; and international green movement network, 68–69, 163–64; overview of, during Cold War, 8–9; Poland as site of international exchange, 164–67; between Yugoslavia and the West, 175–77, 278nn40–41 Treaty of Moscow, 229, 297n64 Treaty of Warsaw, 229, 297n64 Truman, Harry S., 191 Tucker, Richard P., 20 Turner, James Morton, 117 Udall, Stewart, 207–8, 216, 217 Uekötter, Frank, 83, 184, 200 Ukraine: and development of international green network, 67–69, 70–71; industrial development in, 56–57; post-­Chernobyl environmental movement in, 60–67; Soviet response to Chernobyl accident, 57–59 Ukrainian Association of Independent Intellectuals, 65 Ukrainian Cultural Club, 65 Ukrainian Democratic Union, 65 Ukrainian Helsinki Group, 65

Index

Ukrainian State Committee for the Protection of the Environment, 62 Ulbricht, Walter, 222, 225 Umweltblätter (newsletter), 159–60, 166, 167 UNESCO, 225 Union Chernobyl, 62 United Nations (UN), 219, 225–30 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm, 1972), 145, 175–76, 226, 227, 229–30 United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), 176 United States: agricultural policy in West Germany, 188–93; and Conference on the Human Environment, 230; German criticism of agriculture in, 185, 197–98; as model for agricultural management, 196–98; as model for water management, 21, 22, 24–26, 29–30, 32–33; occupation of West Germany, 194–96. See also Montana; Water for Peace program uranium, 118, 121, 123, 132, 133 urban planning, 105–6, 107, 110–12 USSR. See Soviet Union Ústí nad Labem District National Committee (Czechoslovakia), 141, 269n54 utility companies: application of environmental policies, 81–83; concern for public relations, 84–86; role in political debate on air pollution, 76–80, 83–84 Vajont Dam landslide (Italy, 1963), 112 Vanĕk, Miroslav, 270n66 Vanoni, Ezio, 104 Vendrov, Semen, 22–23, 30 Verein der Naturfreunde (Association of the Friends of Nature), 222 Vernadsky, Vladimir, 20 Vertelka, Bronius, 38 Vinogradov, Aleksandr, 29, 30 VODGEO (All-­Union Institute for Water Supply Engineering and Hydrogeology), 23 Vogt, Roland, 95–96 Voráček, František, 142 Waldsterben (forest dieback), 75, 83–84, 148, 154, 251n59, 272n17 Walker, J. Samuel, 118 Warsaw Pact, 5, 87, 92 Water for Peace program: abandonment of, 216–17; context behind, 207–10; criticism of, 209,

311

Water for Peace program: criticism of (cont.), 211–12, 217, 292n55; overview, 205–7; and Strauss/Eisenhower proposal, 214–16 water pollution management: administration in Lithuania, 40, 41; comparative discourse on, 25–30, 27, 31–33; creation of unified Soviet ministry for, 31–32; in East Germany, 154–55; and East-­West competition theory, 17–18, 33–34; emergence of Soviet epistemic community on, 18–21; factors for development of, in Lithuania, 50–53; “integrated,” 19, 20, 21; Italian legislation on, 107, 257n29; monitoring and classification of surface water in Lithuania, 40–43, 47–50, 48, 49; monitoring and treatment of wastewater in Lithuania, 43–47, 47, 51, 243n45; scholarship on water management in BSR, 36–37; Soviet internal struggle for, 21–25, 30–31; and technocratic environmentalism, 34–35; in Yugoslavia, 178–80 Water Resources Research Act (1964), 26 Weber, Otto, 177, 279n49 Wegener, Uwe, 226–27 Weinberg, Alvin, 205, 207, 216 Weiner, Douglas, 17, 34 Wellock, Thomas, 117, 118, 132 Western Environmental Trade Association (WETA), 123 Western Montana Scientists’ Committee for Radiation Information (WMSCRI), 119 West European Socialists, 97–98 West Germany: colonial status of, 194–96; criticism of pollution in Czechoslovakia, 148–49; development 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

Westinghouse Electric Corporation, 121, 128, 131 White, Gilbert, 19 Wicks, Gary J., 121 Wiesner, Jerome, 207, 212 Williams, Larry, 129 WiP (Wolność i Pokój; Freedom and Peace), 162–63 Wohlstetter, Albert, 292n55 Wolę być (I’d rather be), 162 Wolfowitz, Paul, 292n55 Woods, George D., 217 World Federation for the Protection of Life (Weltbund zum Schutze des Lebens, WSL), 94 World Health Organization (WHO), 226 Wyhl occupation, 93–98, 254n33 Yablokov, Aleksey, 33 Yanshin, Aleksandr, 31, 32–33 Yugoslavia: development of environmental movement in, 173–74, 177–81; environmental legislation in, 170–73, 175, 278n35; as federation, 169, 276n1; independence of, 4, 173; international environmental cooperation, 175–77, 278nn40– 41; scholarship on environmental movement in, 170, 276n2; Slovenia heritage, 277n17 Zalygin, Sergey, 33 Żarnowiec, 163 Zelikin, Mikhail, 31 Zvonkov, Vasilii, 19–21, 22

Index