The Environmental Challenges in Eastern Europe

Abstract

Alvin Tofler’s discussion of accelerated rates of change in his prophetic 1970 book, Future Shock, now seems almost pedestrian when compared to the actual pace, scale and pervasiveness of the revolutionary political, social, psychological, religious, artistic, moral, economic and environmental changes and events currently sweeping Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.¹ Few predicted the relative ease and lightning speed with which nearly 70 years of Soviet/Stalinist authority could be and has been eroded. Only slightly more than a mere seven years after US President Reagan labelled the Soviet Union ‘the evil empire’, the world witnessed, on 3 October 1990, the final dramatic and symbolic end of the Cold War, namely, the formal reunification of East and West Germany. As the political and military clouds associated with East-West Cold War hostilities have rapidly dissipated from the European (and global) landscape, they have revealed a seriously disturbed, polluted and endangered environment throughout most of Eastern Europe, including the USSR. On the tragic side, Chernobyl has become the global symbol of this human/technological induced environmental disruption. On the positive side, true ‘glasnost’ began only after and, in no small measure, as a direct result of this acute technological accident, which had immediate and could possibly have long-term international, ecological ramifications.