Re-Interpreting West Germany’s Ecological Revolution: Environmental Politics, Grassroots Activism, and Democracy in the Long 1970s

Abstract

In looking at the ways in which the relationship between environmental matters and the political developed and changed in West Germany during the long 1970s, this article re-interprets the ‘ecological revolution’ that occurred at that time and rethinks the trajectory of German environmentalism. To get at the politicization of environmental concerns in the 1970s, the article compares two narratives: the ‘technocratic invention’ of environmental politics by government officials, and the career of grassroots anti-nuclear activism. It shows that though these two trends developed in relationship with one another, their protagonists increasingly came to speak past one other. Not only did they begin to understand environmental problems in different ways, they also drew different conclusions about where environmental matters were to be debated, and what ought to be done in order to resolve environmental concerns. By describing these developments and the approaches to environmental politics they brought forth, the article reconceives the ecological revolution as an extended period when conflicting interpretations of environmental affairs underpinned competing approaches to politics as such. While government officials sought to make the environment part of standard political praxis, grassroots activists used environmental concerns as a wedge to push open a wider debate about popular participation within parliamentary democracy. The long confrontation between these two perspectives gave way, during the 1980s, to an environmentalism that was not only level-headed and consensual, but also a seminal concern of German politics.