Throughout the history of the GDR, environmental activism played an important role in opposing the socialist economic system based around ecological harmful industries. Whilst the environmental movement may have had little impact on state policy decision making, the large array of groups enjoyed considerable successes in challenging industrial and economic policy on a local level.
Yet as the political opposition movement began to grow throughout the 1980’s, these fractured environmental groups began to play a key role in the critique of the East German State.
By the 1970’s, the economy had become highly dependent on the extraction and export of harmful fossil fuels, such as Lignite, Uranium and Coal. “[T]he list of serious problems is daunting: air and water pollution in industrial areas, forest decline, large-scale destruction of the countryside by coal mining, soil erosion and soil exhaustion by agriculture, and the radiation and other risks from atomic power stations and
uranium mining.” (Rink 2002, pg74)
In order to avoid state censorship, these diverse groups developed tactics to allow themselves to exist outside of formal state structures. Often, a protest movement would arise around a single issue and seek to mobilise in small-scale networks.
Environmental discussion groups and assemblies were often associated with church groups, Providing a safe meeting space whilst also benefiting from the same (limited) political privileges allowed by the church in the GDR. This relationship aimed to disguise the overtly political nature of environmental protest groups (Jones 1993).
(Hoyerswerda, Lignite coal plant. Image source: Digitale Bibliothek, Band 32: Enzyklopädie der DDR)
Increasingly, ecological mobilisations offered a way for protesters to build alliances with international organisations and NGO’s in the capitalist world. For instance, a large series of demonstrations took place in Dresden in 1987 against the pollution of the River Elbe in cooperation with Greenpeace and West German Green Party members. These were preceded by Greenpeace-coodinated protests against Nuclear Power in Leipzig in 1985.
As Rink (2000) argues, environmental activism increasingly played a unifying role in the growing political opposition to the East German state. Environmental concerns increasingly became prominent in the series of demonstrations in Leipzig every Monday, drawing focus to local ecological issues (such as the destruction of animal habitats nearby and the ‘death’ of the River Pleisse due to chemical pollution).
In this context of increased public protest, the destruction of the local environment became seen as a point of consensus, functioning to bridge considerable political differences.
Sources
Jones, M. (1993). Origins of the East German Environmental Movement. German Studies Review, May, 1993. 16 (2). 235-264
Rink, D. (2000). Environmental Policy and the Environmental Movement in East Germany. CNS, 13 (3), September, 2002. 73-91.