Society for nature and the environment
The Society for Nature and Environment ( GNU ) was an association founded in 1980 in the Kulturbund of the GDR , which was supposed to steer the environmental movement of the GDR into state channels. Before that there was a department “Friends of Nature and Homeland” within the mass organization of the Kulturbund. Shortly after it was founded, the Society for Nature and Environment had 40,000 members who were organized in 1,600 working groups. The chairman of the company was Harald Thomasius . At times it grew to over 60,000 members.
It was a social organization in the GDR that dealt with environmental problems. In 1972 the Ministry for Environmental Protection and Water Management was set up in the GDR. The GNU was commissioned to provide practical environmental protection, but it was to remain apolitical. A discussion of the (economic) policy of the GDR was not planned. Thus, only the symptoms, but not the causes of the partially catastrophic environmental destruction in the GDR could be discussed. Since the mid-1980s, however, individual groups within the GNU became increasingly emancipated, especially the urban ecology working groups . During the upheavals in autumn 1989, some of the GNU activists joined the Green Party in the GDR or the Green League , including Matthias Platzeck , Klaus Schlueter and Reimar Gilsenbach . Other parts of the GNU joined the Friends of Nature after 1990 .
Single receipts
- ↑ Ehrhart Neubert : History of the Opposition in the GDR 1949–1989 , Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin, second, reviewed, expanded and corrected edition 2000, p. 453.
- ↑ Wolfgang Kühnel, Carola Sallmon-Metzner: Green Party and the Green League , in: From illegality to parliament. The career and concept of the new citizen movements , edited by Helmut Müller-Enbergs, Marianne Schulz and Jan Wielgohs, LinksDruck, Berlin 1991, p. 173.