ENTANGLED ECOLOGIES 171
Changing ideas of health and disease where another realm where
environmentalism reshaped everyday life. While fears of infectious dis-
eases waned in the postwar decades, cancer became the defi ning con-
cern. Most Germans have found themselves confronted with the death of
friends or relatives from cancer. For Petra Kelly, the loss of her half-sister
Grace to cancer was a traumatic experience that her biographer Saskia
Richter has identifi ed as a “point of departure for her involvement in pol-
itics.”^99 Kelly was not the only one to draw connections between cancer
and environmental pollution, which was refl ected by a whole discourse
on this issue that cannot be boiled down to a simple dichotomy between
material and postmaterial values. To many, it now seemed that pollution
poisoned the human body. After the Wende, for example, a poll of leading
doctors in East German hospitals revealed that the number of respiratory
illnesses among children more than doubled between 1974 and 1989, de-
spite a dropping birth rate.^100 As a result, a new sense of urgency seeped
into the debates over pollution because it was no longer just about dirt
and odors. Pollution was now about human survival.
This discursive shift was quite obvious in West Germany, but it could
also be found in East Germany. A poll conducted in 1971, for example,
indicated that more than 90 percent of those questioned believed that
there was a link between air pollution and health.^101 After the Chernobyl
incident, the fear of exposure to radioactivity was felt equally by East
and West Germans, although it was expressed diff erently: the insistent
questions about milk and sandboxes that West German parents posed
to the authorities could not be asked in the GDR public.^102 Likewise, a
German-German analysis of the fears associated with industrial chemi-
cals, which came to a head in the FRG following the accidents in Seveso
in 1976 and at Sandoz in 1986, would also be a worthwhile endeavor for
future scholarship.^103 Such a project would bring together aspects of a
cultural history of the environment and the yet unwritten history of the
body within an environmental history perspective.
Of Wolves and Hens: The Subversive Power
of Environmental History
According to West Germany’s agricultural census of 1989, there were
5,368,577 milk cows, 14,659,627 pigs, and 38,226,140 laying hens in
the country.^104 These fi gures mirror a trend with severe ethical and so-
cioeconomic repercussions. Ever since factory farming began to change
food production in the 1950s, most animals have seen a drastic reduction
of the space in which they can move (including the infamous cages for