Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden - Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries - page 86

time they had heard of environmental protection. For others like Britain,
France, and the Low Countries, it was the occasion when Sweden con-
fronted them about acid rain. For the European Community, it was the
impetus for its first Environment Action Program that set forth a num-
ber of principles that have been adopted worldwide: prevention is better
than remediation, prevention at the source, the polluter pays, integration
among air, water, and groundwater, and precaution. In preliminary talks
about the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, Germany led the world in pledges
to reduce greenhouse gases, proclaiming it would cut 30%. Three years
later Germany hosted the Conference of the Parties leading to the Berlin
Mandate, and it provided a permanent home for the secretariat in Bonn.
These northern leaders learned about environmental protection from
each other, and from the United States, and other Europeans. They read
Silent Spring and watched films by Jacques Cousteau. They had untold con-
nections to other countries. All read the Club of Rome Report . These four
countries earned the label of leaders by setting the example and by deliber-
ate leadership. Swedish sponsorship of the Stockholm summit put it at the
forefront. Germany, in the period coming up to the Kyoto Protocol, pledged
massive cuts in its greenhouse gases. The US Green Party was a direct copy
of the German Greens. Dutch rewilding in Oostvaardersplassen makes it
the first in Western Europe to act on a large scale.
NOTES
1. Heinrich Heine, “ Lorelei.” Translated by A. Z. Foreman, Poems Found in Translation ,
We b.
2. William H. Rollins, A Greener Version of Home (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1997), pp. 70-71.
3. Rollins, A Greener Version of Home, pp. 72, 77.
4. Raymond H. Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 42, 43.
5. homas M. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard,
2004), pp. 32-33.
6. Rollins, A Greener Version of Home, pp. 87, 92, 97.
7. Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany, pp. 53-55, 47-49.
8. PSM, “Weimar Constitution,” Web.
9. Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany , p. 98.
10. Anna Bramwell, Blood and Soil: Richard Walther Darré and Hitler's Green Party
(Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, UK: Kensal, 1985), pp. 91, 171.
11. Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany , p. 106.
12. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature , p. 153.