ENTANGLED ECOLOGIES 155
ronmental movement shows the value of civic activism from the Green
Party to Greenpeace, but in the early 1970s, pressure from public protest
was weak. There was the social dynamism that culminated in the student
movement of 1968, but it showed little interest in environmental issues.
Likewise, there was no event in West Germany that was comparable to
the American Earth Day celebrations that had been taking place since
- Quite tellingly, the buzzword “environmental protection” (Umwelt-
schutz) was coined by the Federal Ministry of the Interior under the lead-
ership of Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who had received jurisdiction for a
division for water protection, air pollution control, and noise reduction
when a new federal government was formed in 1969. Genscher trans-
formed this “Division U” (“U” for Umweltschutz) into the engine behind
an ambitious reform of environmental policy. Rather than being the rally
cry of outraged citizens, the word Umweltschutz was actually “a bureau-
cratic creation par excellence.”^27
In the interplay between government policy and civil society that typ-
ically stands at the core of environmental policy, political insiders had a
head start in the Federal Republic in the early 1970s. Remarkably, even
the initial calls for powerful civic associations came from within the ad-
ministration. As early as 1961, an enterprising civil servant working at
the Ministry of Labor in North Rhine-Westphalia, which was responsible
for emissions control at the time, asked in a meeting held with represen-
tatives of the city of Duisburg “whether an umbrella organization of citi-
zens’ associations might be willing to become a committed proponent of
emissions reduction that could take up the fi ght against polluters.”^28 Sim-
ilarly, Genscher’s Ministry of the Interior set about building networks,
and it had a hand in the creation of the National Association of Citizens’
Initiatives on Environmental Protection (Bundesverband Bürgerinitia-
tiven Umweltschutz or BBU), whose leaders leaned toward Genscher’s
liberal party, the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP). If one can speak of an
environmental party in West Germany in the 1970s, then it was the FDP
and specifi cally its left-liberal wing—a legacy that is all but forgotten due
to the party’s subsequent development. The BBU, for example, received
fi nancial support from the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung.^29 But as citizen’s
initiatives fl ourished during the 1970s, and particularly in the wake of
radicalization over nuclear power, the role of the Federal Ministry of the
Interior changed from puppet master to sorcerer’s apprentice. The FDP’s
infl uence all but collapsed in 1977, when Hans-Helmuth Wüstenhagen,
an FDP member, was forced to step down as the chairman of the BBU
under pressure from leftist groups.^30
Genscher was one of the fi rst politicians to recognize the potential of
environmental issues. These topics were full of opportunities for politi-