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NUCLEAR JUSTICE

Environmental injustices hurt the same groups in Germany as elsewhere. Immigrant and poorer communities have the waste of affluence dumped upon them. This is well known, and a shocking documentary, "At Rock Bottom", proved it beyond doubt some 15 years ago. Journalist Günter Wallraff pretended to be Turkish-German for a year. He soon discovered that he was forced to work in unsafe conditions and to live "where people don´t get old".

And yet environmental justice is not a word widely used or understood in Germany. Even environmentalists involved in the struggle for environmental human rights do not think of what they are doing as "campaigning for environmental justice". Those concerned with overuse of the world´s resources by the industrialized North call for "development policies for Germany", turning the development debate on its head. Those fighting environmental injustices locally will describe what they do simply as struggles for the public good.

The groups fighting permanent nuclear waste storage at Gorleben are a case in point. Gorleben is a classic marginalized community. Gorleben, like many other nuclear waste storage sites around the world, was chosen for its remoteness, its sparse population and its weak local economy. Though Gorleben is now in the middle of united Germany, it was close to the former border between the two Germanys and thus in economic no-man´s land. Politicians assumed that the locals would jump at the jobs that nuclear storage would bring.

They were wrong, as the March protests against all waste transports to Gorleben showed yet again. Ask anyone in Gorleben about environmental justice and they will ask: "What? We are just fighting for a safe, clean and decent local environment - and against the juggernaut nuclear industry". Well, precisely!

Daniel Mittler, FoE Germany

First published in "Catalyst", FoE Scotland's environmental justice newsletter.