Project thoughts – Environmentalism and Chernobyl

I was born exactly fifteen years after the Chernobyl nuclear explosion happened in 1986, and so it is always something that has intrigued me. Why did it take several days for the USSR to announce the explosion? How did people in Western Europe react differently to those in Eastern Europe and within the USSR?

My interest made me look into doing my long-essay on transnational environmentalism of some kind. If possible, I could look at these different reactions to Chernobyl. This week I read a chapter by Julia Ault in her book Saving Nature Under Socialism: Transnational Environmentalism in East Germany, 1968 – 1990. The chapter was titled Coming Out from behind the cloud: Environmentalism after Chernobyl. It made me realise that, I knew nothing about environmental movements outside of the UK. In fact, I knew all about the Greenham Common Women’s Protests, but nothing about wider movements, or the movement of information between Eastern and Western Europe about environmentalism.

What I found most intriguing about this chapter, which took a transnational stance by considering Eastern Germany and Poland together, was that it shed light on how many people found out about the incident. They found out through western European media…about an issue that occurred in Eastern Europe! 

On the scale Ault uses – the local, Eastern German – Chernobyl had extremely significant impacts. The explosion, alongside SED’s terrible response to it, motivated East Germans to join existing environmental groups, but more importantly establish new ones. In fact, by 1988, ‘the KHF estimated that fifty-eight environmental groups with an average of ten to thirty individuals existed in the GDR, though specific events could mobilize larger crowds.’

So, if East Germans joined existing environmentalist groups after Chernobyl, despite there not being a very large environmental, or, more specifically, antinuclear sentiments, where did these existing environmentalist groups come from? Did they reform and change after Chernobyl? 

As well, it was interesting to read about the underground environmentalist newspaper Umweltblätter. Ault states that, ‘thanks to the Umweltblätter, western news, and other venues, fears of nuclear disaster from civilian sources such as power stations skyrocketed after Chernobyl.’ I have never considered writing about how environmental news and ideas spread from Western Europe to Eastern Europe, but reading about these underground newspapers was interesting.

So, I want to read more into transnational Environmentalism. More importantly, the spread of information between West and East in Europe, especially after Chernobyl. Will this niche end up being what my long essay is about? God only knows. But, I know I find this topic extremely interesting, and intend to look deeper into it to find more questions I would like to answer.