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156 Chapter 6 The Limits of Growth and the New Environmentalism During the GDR’s lifetime, East Germany’s Ore Mountains (Erzgebirge) suffered from decades of sulfur dioxide poisoning from coal-fired electrical plants located in both the GDR and Czechoslovakia. In response, angry local residents wrote numerous letters of complaint (or Eingaben) to the Ministry for Environmental Protection (Ministeriat für Umweltschutz, or MfU). While Eingaben had channeled discontent into individual complaints throughout most of the GDR’s history, organized groups began to compose petitions in the 1980s. For example, in 1981, the evangelical church in Annaberg-Buchholz reminded authorities of the consequences of air pollution for parishioner health. The congregation’s leaders wrote, “Our forests are being destroyed, our water polluted, the air overwhelmed with noxious matter, insects and bird species go extinct, and the health of our people is endangered.” They warned, “Public anger is growing.”1 The dying Erzgebirge forest was just one example of the numerous economic and ecological problems plaguing East Germany by the 1980s. Despite its approval of the Landeskulturgesetz, the SED soon returned to repressing environmental reformers with renewed vigor. The SED Politburo, for example, ordered the Ministerial Council to discontinue its regular environmental reports and stripped the annual Land Improvement Week festivities and conferences to nearly nothing in 1974.2 The regime, even as it made gestures toward environmental protection, never seriously rethought production methods, and by 1982, the state ordered all environmental data secret and off-limits to public consumption. To the growing frustration of a younger generation of technocrats and party members, Honecker’s generation ignored Mikhail Gorbachev’s warnings to reform and continued business as usual right up to the peaceful revolutions of 1989. In part due to Erich Honecker’s continued need to appease consumer desires, state debt also continued to grow. Scarce financial resources The Limits of Growth 157 and rising oil prices meant that the regime had little money available to replace aging factories or to lessen its reliance on domestic supplies of sulfur-rich brown coal. Even the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986 did little to shake the SED from its lethargy; while the regime tolerated individual complaints, any organized critique of the regime’s economic or energy program led to harassment by the Stasi.3 As the above letter from Annaberg-Buchholz highlights, churches played an increasingly important role in environmental protests against the SED. At the heart of the new environmental movement of the 1980s was a small group of nonconformists who had found a home within the Protestant church. They advocated for human rights, peace, and environmental protection and demanded both democratic reform and a return to a simpler, less materialistic lifestyle. In their critique of consumerism, activists were seemingly at odds with the many East Germans who looked enviously to the wealth of the capitalist West. Rather than looking for early influences on the movement, most histories of this new environmentalism really only begin with the new opportunities and ideas emerging out of the Protestant churches in the late 1970s.4 Often scholars note the important connections between East German activists and their counterparts prominent in Western Green politics or at least highlight the ways that environmental literature from Western Europe made its way eastward.5 We thus know most about intellectuals such as Rudolf Bahro and grassroots activists organized around institutions such as the Environmental Library in Berlin.6 In his work, Nathan Stoltzfus has argued that a true public sphere only emerged inside East Germany when these young activists initiated local public demonstrations and mobilizations in the 1980s.7 While he points out that the regime and the church had already injected the environment into official discourse, the unintended implication here is that only a small nonconformist minority had the awareness and courage to critique East German industrial and environmental policy.8 Nikola Knoth similarly asserts that desire for material security among workers discouraged them from criticizing the regime’s use of nature.9 As shown in the previous chapter, however, desires for material security sometimes did lead to criticisms of environmental pollution. For Jan Palmowski, popular discontent with environmental decay escalated not because the regime ignored natural and cultural landscapes but, rather, because official attention to environment and socialist Heimat stood in stark contrast with the “individual experience of socialism in everyday life.”10 As Palmowski puts it, the public transcript of the socialist Heimat looked increasingly hollow in the face of environmental catastrophe.11 In Palmowski’s...

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