Environmental Affairs and the Emergence of Pluralism in Poland: A Case of Political Symbiosis

Abstract

In Poland, intensive industrial development and severe ecological deterioration came together to produce environmental activism and force the restructuring of an unbalanced economy. The environmental conditions behind this phenomenon affect a significant segment of the country and place a substantial share of its people and land in danger. Twenty seven regions, comprising 11.3 percent of the country’s land area and 35.5 percent of its population, had been officially identified as “areas of ecological hazard.” Five of these regions — Gdansk Bay on the Baltic, the Legnica-Glogow copper district in western Poland, and the contiguous Krakow-Katowice-Rybnik coal and steel belt in the south — experience degradation and pollution so acute as to be classed as “areas of ecological catastrophe” (Kassenberg and Rolewicz, 1985). Losses resulting from the degradation of the environment and waste of natural resources have been estimated at over ten percent of the country’s annual national income. Official sources in the late 1980s came to refer to the “ecological barrier to the development of the country” (Kassenberg, 1990; Kostrowicki, 1988; Symonowicz, 1985).