1987 - The year of relaxation and ecology 7/9
Audio 48:30
The Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
Reuters
By: Cécile Poss
53 mins
1987, Wall Street experiences big crashes, Andy Warhol dies of a heart attack, and Reagan and Gorbachev sign a nuclear disarmament agreement, the missile crisis is over.
Publicity
This is the end point of a major episode of the Cold War, the Euromissile crisis. There is great relief among the population, especially in Europe. Because throughout the decade, the threat of a nuclear conflict between the USA and the USSR is real, and weighs on the continent. This arms race will be dubbed “star wars”.
In 1985, the arrival in power of Mikhail Gorbachev is a sign of a new hope of relaxation. The man has understood that the economy of his country will not survive this star wars. He wants to dialogue with the West. But more deeply, he intends to reform the foundations of communism. Gone is the austere bureaucracy led by omnipotent old men. He wants to give a human face, and definitively bury the dictatorial regime. Two words can sum up its policy, "glasnost" and "perestroika", transparency and reconstruction. Westerners are seduced. The time has finally come for the second relaxation.
The Euromissile crisis triggered several pacifist demonstrations, and it was also in the 1980s that we began to denounce the harmful effects of nuclear power, as well as human activities on the ecosystem. Several disasters have marked the decade, the most notorious of which will be that of the Chernobyl power plant. The total number of deaths from Chernobyl irradiation is estimated to be around 4,000 at term. There are also 5,000 thyroid cancers in children. This catastrophe is a global awareness. Nuclear power, even civilian, is an unprecedented threat to the planet and to the survival of the human species. The pollution created by the explosion made the region uninhabitable for several thousand years.
But Chernobyl was not the only major ecological disaster that marked the 1980s. Off Alaska, the sinking of the oil tanker Exxson Valdez in 1989 caused a devastating oil spill for biodiversity.
Before that, it was in India, in Bhopal, that what was then the greatest industrial disaster of all time took place, on December 3, 1984. A gas leak in an insecticide factory caused a toxic cloud that s tore down the city, causing nearly 4,000 deaths in a matter of seconds.
In 1987, the UN World Commission on Environment and Development published a report entitled “Our Common Future”.
Our common future.
This is the Brundtland report named after the Norwegian Gro Harlem Brundtland who chaired the committee.
This is the first time we have talked about sustainable development.
The 1980s also saw the invention of the term “biodiversity” and the first awareness of global warming, especially when Yellow Stone National Park was devastated by fire due to a heat wave. New green, ecological parties are emerging all over the democratic countries. If the decade is undeniably that of the ultra-capitalist neoliberalism of Reagan and Thatcher, we still see the beginning of the birth of a political and economic ecology.
With:
Nicole Bacharan,
political scientist specializing in the United States -
Phillipe Chassaigne
, historian specializing in Great Britain -
Olivier De Schutter
, professor at UCLouvain and at Science-Po Paris, United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights -
Pierre Marlet
, journalist responsible for news on La Première (RTBF) -
Laurent Rieppi
, journalist and rock historian -
Thomas Snégaroff
, journalist and historian specializing in the United States.
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