162 FRANK UEKÖTTER
lishment fi gures, globe-trotting charismatic celebrities such as Petra Kelly
and dedicated local nature enthusiasts who took care of neglected grass-
lands. One cannot help but wonder what they had in common.^60
But for all the divergences in political styles and worldviews, it is clear
that diversity contributed greatly to the liveliness and persistence of the
environmental movement. With topics ranging from the building of new
highways to global climate change, from the protection of the horseshoe
bat to protests against nuclear power plants, and from calls for a speed
limit of one hundred kilometers per hour on the German Autobahn to
combating the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, the new environ-
mentalism had plenty of entry points for concerned citizens. During the
boom years of environmentalism, mutual support was key among activ-
ists: people were happy to go to a rally when the others were circulating
one’s own petition. These reciprocal relationships fl ourished best within
what is referred to as the “alternative” or “counterculture” milieu.
This chapter does not allow for a comprehensive discussion of the un-
derlying causes of the environmental revolution, but two points deserve
special attention. First, West German environmentalism took off in the
wake of the second oil price shock of 1979/80, an economic crisis that
changed political lines of confl ict in many Western countries.^61 To put it
bluntly, while the British and the Americans discussed neoliberalism, and
the French debated Mitterrand’s brand of socialism, the Germans were
up in arms over forest dieback. The enthusiasm with which West Ger-
man citizens from diff erent directions suddenly subscribed to the green
movement bore the marks of sociopsychological evasion. It helped that
debates over a fundamental shift in economic policy remained rather the-
oretical in the Federal Republic as long as the social-liberal coalition was
in its death throes.
Unlike mass unemployment, people found some quick solutions for
environmental problems. The 1970s upswing in environmental policy
had fostered the development of new technologies, but many innovations
were delayed due to costs. The technology for fl ue gas desulphurization
in coal-fi red power plants, for example, had been available since the early
1970s. Likewise, catalytic converters for automobile exhaust systems had
been around for a while, but they were only being routinely built into Ger-
man automobiles destined for the American market. When environmental
concerns fl ourished in the early 1980s, the powers that be aggressively
pushed for the use of such technological innovations, leaving the green
movement to bask in the aura of success for a while. In hindsight, this
was really nothing more than clearing a policy backlog, but in the con-
temporary context, the new environmental policy off ensive seemed to be