ENTANGLED ECOLOGIES 153
tal devastation was part of what came across as history’s fi nal verdict on
socialist rule.^19 Furthermore, environmental devastation was one of the
few indictments that did not undergo critical refl ection as the GDR moved
into perspective. While enthusiasm about capitalism, consumerism, and
democracy was fading, the GDR’s environmental toll looked even more
dramatic as the full extent of devastation became clear. As a 2014 article
on GDR environmental policy put it, “from an ecological perspective, the
GDR was a failed state.”^20 It is high time to move this conventional wis-
dom into perspective: perhaps we remember the GDR’s environmental
sins so well because the promise of capitalism and democracy looked
rather ambiguous in the twenty-fi rst century.
For a capitalist system that did not treat the environment terribly well,
it was deeply gratifying to discover a system of production that performed
even more poorly. But many environmental problems did not grow into
dramatic proportions until the last decade of the GDR, exactly the time
when West German environmentalism took off. If the GDR had collapsed
in 1980, retrospective criticism would have shown far less of a green tinge.
The Rise of Environmental Policy
Conventional wisdom has it that the years around 1970 were a transna-
tional turning point for environmental policy. However, it is rewarding to
look at events around 1970 against the background of older traditions.
There was no “zero hour” (Stunde Null) in environmental policy. We can
trace an interplay between new environmental problems and the search
for new policies since the earliest days of industrialization. Most Western
countries, including Germany, saw a fi rst wave of institutional change
with lasting repercussions in the two decades before World War I.
The environmental policies of the 1970s were thus embedded within
longer-term reform trends. As early as the 1950s, both Germanys at-
tempted to strengthen regulatory policies. The Federal Republic showed
a clear preference for the evolutionary development of existing practices
and approaches.^21 In 1954, the GDR passed a new nature protection law,
which was followed by a law on the planned development of the Social-
ist landscape (Gesetz über die planmäßige Gestaltung der sozialistischen
Landeskultur) in 1970. As of 1968, environmental protection was also en-
shrined in East Germany’s constitution.^22 In the 1950s, the GDR launched
a major assessment of the environmental state of the land (Landschaftsdi-
agnose) that covered the entire country; there was nothing comparable in
the FRG. The project fused the trend toward landscape management that
had been thriving since the 1930s with socialist planning.^23 In the early