154 FRANK UEKÖTTER
years, at least when it came to directives from above, the GDR looked
more energetic and enthusiastic on the environmental policy front than
the Federal Republic.
There was no confl ict between the values underscoring environmental
policy and growing consumption in the 1950s. As it stood, environmental
protection was a complement to mass affl uence, rather than a counter-
vailing trend. Many problems were still apparent even for lay people at
the time. It did not take any scientifi c equipment to see the smoke and
dust in the air, the heaps of foam on rivers and streams, or the make-
shift landfi lls. Protests were typically driven by individual concerns over
living and working conditions, although one might rightly ask whether
this changed all that much over subsequent decades. Scholars have em-
phasized the trend toward “postmaterial” values, but that must not ob-
scure the persistence of protests that grew out of property interests. Even
Ronald Inglehart had to admit in his path-breaking study on the “silent
revolution” in affl uent Western societies that he could not detect the di-
chotomy between material and postmaterial values quite as clearly when
it came to environmental issues.^24
The rise of environmental policy in the two German states was typical
of transnational developments in the years after 1970. The creation of
new institutions, such as the Ministry for Environmental Protection and
Water Management in the GDR (1972), and the Expert Council for En-
vironmental Questions (1971) and the Federal Department for the Envi-
ronment (Umweltbundesamt, 1974) in the Federal Republic, were part of
a general trend: never before had so many institutions been established
with the word “environment” in their names in such a short period of
time. The United States was a pioneer in the booming environmental
movement, especially after millions of protesters took part in the nation-
wide Earth Day demonstrations on 22 April 1970. The United Nations
proved to be another beacon of light, hosting its fi rst Conference on the
Human Environment in Stockholm in June 1972.^25 The goal to accumu-
late environmental credentials was a transnational concern in the run-up
to the UN conference, though the Soviet bloc countries ultimately boycot-
ted the event due to a confl ict over the status of the GDR in international
law. With twelve hundred delegates from 114 countries, the Stockholm
summit remained the largest event of its kind until the legendary Rio de
Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992.^26
Thus, from the very beginning, reasserting state authority was a pow-
erful factor in the range of political motivations that underpinned the
boom of environmental policy. The mythology of environmentalism sug-
gests that it was fi rst and foremost the protests of outraged citizens that
forced the powers that be to make concessions. The West German envi-