NUCLEAR CRISIS SHIFTS GERMAN POLITICS

GREENS TOOK POWER IN BADEN WÜRTTEMBERG
A BULWARK OF RULING PARTY FOR 58 YEARS

www.csmonitor.com - When Germany’s left-leaning Green party was born 30 years ago, former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt dismissed them outright. “They’re just environmental idiots who will have disappeared again soon,” he said.  They didn’t. In fact, in a turn of events reverberating across the nation, the Greens on Sunday ended six decades of conservative rule in one of Germany’s wealthiest states, completing their transformation from a radical protest party to a mainstream force shaking the traditional political order.  For the first time ever in Germany, and only the second time in European history, a Green will be prime minister of a major regional state. “It’s a new political era,” says German Green party leader Claudia Roth.  Capitalizing on nuclear aversion, the Greens stole power from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU). 

Green leader Winfried Kretschmann, 62, described the result as “an historic victory” and pledged an immediate push to “change things”. Germany’s antinuclear, environmentalist tradition has deep roots.  In the 1970s, Freiburg became the cradle of Germany’s anti-nuclear movement after local activists killed plans for a nuclear power station nearby. The battle brought energy-policy issues closer to the people.  Freiburg also revolutionized behavior by making its medieval center more pedestrian-friendly, laying down a lattice of bike paths and introducing a flat rate for tramways and buses.  Environmental research became a backbone of the region’s economy, with some solar-research and renewable energy centers.

The German Green party was born in the late 1960s with young, rebellious students trying to shake the political establishment.  In the 1970s, the Greens became a platform for antinuclear protests.  In the 1980s, they embraced the antiwar movement.  Over the years, they won mayoral battles in significant German cities and returned politicians to parliament.  Long before, the ecological value system reflected in the life and message of Mahatma Gandhi and the provisions of the Republican Constitution of India of 1950 had derived their spiritual and moral inspiration from the ancient Vedic culture.

WHAT DO THE VEDIC TEACHINGS TELL US? 

Long before ecology became the refrain of the global song at Stockholm and Rio, the ancient Indic heritage had already provided a spacious spiritual home for the environmental ethos. In the West, the term ‘ecology’ was coined only in the latter half of the 19th century from the Greek word Oikos, meaning ‘home’. But India has, throughout trackless centuries, provided an ample expanse of friendly space for an open and ongoing discourse of ideas. The Jain, Vedic and Buddhist traditions established the principles of ecological harmony centuries ago - not because the world was perceived as heading for an imminent environmental disaster or destruction, nor because of any immediate utilitarian exigency, but through its quest for spiritual and physical symbiosis, synthesized in a system of ethical awareness and moral responsibility.

 

H. E. Dr Laxmi Mall Singhvi
Former President of the World Congress on Human Rights
“The East is green” - August 1996.
http://www.ourplanet.com/imgversn/82/singhvi.html
http://www.hinduwisdom.info/Nature_Worship.htm