Chapter 6 - Growing Together? The Environment in the Collapse of Communism

Summary

Chapter six interrogates the place of the environment and environmental movements in the end of communism and then in the double transitions to democracy and capitalism. First, the chapter charts the end of communism in Poland—where the dismantling of the Soviet bloc began—and considers how the environment fit into these transformations there and across eastern Europe. Next, the chapter shifts to the GDR, demonstrating the environment’s position as a source of protest and then mutually agreed upon tenet of unification. Participation in that environmental decision-making was uneven, however, often minimizing earlier activists as West German influence waned. The spread of environmental consciousness destabilized communism, but capitalism and democracy introduced powerful new actors which diminished the old structures that had shaped the environmental movement in the 1980s.