Biologist Brings Down the Berlin wall: Green Chain reaction

The fall of the Berlin Wall was part of a chain reaction started by biologist Janos Vargha and his campaign to stop construction of a dam (Sipa Press/Rex Features)

THE story behind the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 began nine years earlier, when Janos Vargha, a biologist from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences began a new career as a writer with a small monthly nature magazine called Buvar. In an early assignment, he went to a beauty spot on the river Danube outside Budapest known as the Danube Bend, the site of an ancient Hungarian capital, to interview local officials about plans for a small park.

Hum-Drum
It was humdrum stuff - until one official mentioned in passing that this tree-lined curve in the river, a popular picnic spot for Hungarians, was to be drowned by a giant hydroelectric dam being planned in secret by a much-feared state agency known simply as the Water Management.

Green Issues

Green issues seemed to be east European communism's soft underbelly in its final years. Under the auspices of the Young Communist Leagues, a host of environment groups had become established during the 1970s. Party officials saw them as a harmless outlet for youthful idealism - a cross between Boy Scouts and natural history societies.

Green Idealism

This green idealism gradually became a rallying point for political opposition. In Czechoslovakia, the human rights organisation Charter 77 took up environmentalism. Polish and Estonian greens joined Friends of the Earth International to protest against air pollution. Bulgarian greens formed an opposition group called Ecoglasnost, which held huge rallies in 1989. Big water engineering projects were especially potent symbols of the old Stalinism and when Mikhail Gorbachev began his reforms in Russia, one of his first acts was to cancel a huge project to divert Siberian rivers south to irrigate cotton fields around the Aral Sea.