Toward Socialist Environmentalism? Scientists and Environmental Change in Modern Hungary

Abstract

This article discusses state-socialist Hungary’s approach towards environmental protection from theoretical, institutional and practical perspectives. It discusses the genesis of a holistic and complex scientific approach to the environment in the 1950s and 1960s and its impact on the formation of the country’s environmental protection system (including environmental legal framework; environmental institutional system; and daily practices of environmental protection). Its aim is to find out why the teachings of the holistic and complex school of environmentalism were implemented only vaguely in Hungary; instead, beginning from the 1960s, the government turned away from Soviet science and gradually implemented Western methods of environmental protection (pollution levy fees; discharge permit system; subsidies for energy saving products; and end-of-pipe solutions). The article asserts that, although a large body of environmentally focused social sciences research suggests the opposite, state-socialist Hungary developed its own school of environmental thinking, partly based on Soviet environmentalism, in which humanity and nature are interconnected and interdependent. That scientific approach was developed by some of the leading environmental scientists of Hungary – Dénes Börzsöny, Ede Kertai, Imre Dégen, András Madas, István Oroszlány and József Mantuánó – who understood natural resources as the primary actor and determiner for the human condition and who focused on finding the equilibrium between society’s needs and natural resources via attentive and complex planning.