The Greenest Nation?: A New History of German Environmentalism

Foreword

Foreword Michael Egan It is hardly hyperbole to assert that we live in a state of environmental crisis. Human-induced climate change is already threatening plant and animal biodiversity and human habitats. Globally there is an uneven distribution of environmental amenities and hazards. Our food and our bodies are increasingly burdened with a cocktail of toxic chemicals. Despite our advances in science, technology, and medicine, more rather than fewer children are diagnosed with asthma and leukemia. Human population growth is seriously challenging the planet’s carrying capacity. And we are consuming more natural resources at an unsustainable rate. This environmental deterioration has a history that is ingrained in a human social, political, and technological past that we have yet to fully understand. The History for a Sustainable Future series seeks to shed light on this history as a means of better focusing contemporary debate. It is a bit of a funny name and a peculiar concept (looking backward to look forward), but History for a Sustainable Future is predicated on the idea that in order to fully understand the social, political, economic, and ecological context of contemporary environmental problems, we need to be conscious of their histories. Resolving local and global environmental quandaries requires careful thought and planning; future success viii  Michael Egan depends on a deeper appreciation of the past. This is the point: historicizing sustainable and unsustainable futures is based less on the notion that we should learn from past mistakes, but rather on the premise that solving the environmental crisis will demand the most and best information available, and history provides valuable insight into the creation and proliferation of the environmental ills we hope to curb. Frank Uekötter’s The Greenest Nation? A New History of German Environmentalism offers a particularly important perspective for this larger project, especially with respect to how green initiatives have been integrated into national policy practices . Throughout the twentieth century, Germany has been at the forefront of the global green movement. For North American readers, the history of environmentalism is predominantly a chronicle of conflict and opposition. Indeed, in an insightful reading of environmentalism past and present, the historian Donald Worster remarked: “When contemporary environmentalism first emerged in the 1960s and ’70s, and before its goals became obscured by political compromising and diffusion, the destination was more obvious and the route more clear. The goal was to save the living world around us, millions of species of plants and animals, including humans, from destruction by our technology, population, and appetites.” In reading through The Greenest Nation? the surrender of that grand goal might largely be a North American phenomenon. The only solution to the environmental crisis, Worster claimed, involved the radical recognition that limits to population, technology, and appetite were necessary.1 Through the twentieth century, a deeper appreciation of the limits to growth has received considerable attention in many parts of Europe. In Uekötter’s treatment, the German case is more about cooperation and collaboration. Yes, tensions exist, but the oppositional “us versus them” that typifies North American environmental debates over conservation, pollution, public health, and energy is comparatively absent. Foreword  ix Uekötter is quick to further stress the distinction between the German example and the traditional environmental narrative that is almost cookie-cuttered into many national histories . German environmentalism was not a knee-jerk reaction to some environmental catastrophe, which spurred the country into a green awakening. Certainly, there is a rich German literature on green issues, but there is no Silent Spring that transformed the intellectual and political landscape. Nor were charismatic leaders central to the rise of German environmentalism ; Uekötter points out that Germany’s most internationally recognized environmentalist, Petra Kelly, “was much despised and ridiculed among fellow activists and isolated within Germany’s environmental community years before her violent death in 1992.”2 That is not to say that Germany’s green movement simply was (the greenest nation was not built in a day). Rather, its historical development might sound familiar to those well acquainted with green initiatives in other countries, though one might ascertain that Germans practiced a more sensitive response to risk. According to Uekötter, Germany’s green narrative had three catalysts.First,that old chestnut post-materialism played some role, though Uekötter seems less convinced than many of his environmental history colleagues. Where previous generations struggled for material security and balance, Ronald Inglehart’s “silent revolution...