ENTANGLED ECOLOGIES 175
Jürgen Trittin’s infamous move to put a deposit on cans drew on a decree
that was drafted more than a decade earlier under Klaus Töpfer.
The red-green government abandoned traditions in agricultural policy
in dramatic fashion when it touted “changing agriculture as we knew it”
(Agrarwende). Renate Künast became the fi rst Green Minister of Con-
sumer Protection, Food and Agriculture. It would have been impossible
without the BSE crisis. If mad cow disease had not been looming on
the horizon, the government’s agrarian policy would likely have contin-
ued with “business as usual,” as indicated by the appointment of Karl-
Heinz Funke as the fi rst Federal Minister of Agriculture under Gerhard
Schröder. In terms of an ecological taxation, Germany was a European
latecomer. By the time Schröder was sworn in as chancellor, ten states
had already reformed their tax systems accordingly.^119 Nevertheless, the
eco-tax turned into a political football.
If the CDU/CSU and FDP had won the federal election in 2005, it might
have changed the course of environmental policy at the federal level. Neo-
liberal reformism was at the core of the opposition’s campaign, which
could have inspired a policy overhaul. But with a coalition of social dem-
ocrats and the CDU/CSU under Merkel, the new government stuck to a
cross-party consensus regarding environmental problems. Staunch anti-
environmental rhetoric could be heard in the United States and Great
Britain, and from the Czech Republic and its president Václav Klaus, but
it never made much ground in Germany.^120 At the moment, it is hard to
imagine a backlash against the environmental progress made in Germany
since the 1970s. The problem facing environmental activists today is rather
one of success, marked by the loss of atomic power as a rallying cry in the
wake of the government’s decision of 2011 to do away with nuclear power
plants as well as the confl icts from the expansion of renewable energy.
The majority decision within the Bundestag to eliminate nuclear
power in Germany on the heels of the Fukushima catastrophe bears the
hallmarks of a “green” Sonderweg (special path). No other country re-
acted to the nuclear accident in Japan with as much resolve as Germany.
But new reactor projects are few in numbers in Western countries, and
perhaps the German decision is just the more determined version of a
general farewell to nuclear power. Even in France, Europe’s poster child
for atomic power, there is only one current nuclear construction project
underway—in Flamanville in Normandy—although at least forty reactors
of this size need to be built in order to keep the country’s nuclear power
capacity at current levels. Contrasts between East and West Germany
are fading. The environmental problems of factory farming in Mecklen-
burg-Vorpommern resemble those in the Oldenburg region in Lower Sax-
ony, and the same holds true for the brown coal and chemical industries.