How formative the year 1972 would be for humanity, how decisive it still promises to be, is long forgotten.

Repressed.

Fifty years ago, the world community began trying to be more respectful of nature around them and the planet below.

Fifty years of ecological relationship therapy.

A tragedy in fifty acts, say some, the long birth of a global environmental awareness, others.

The stage was provided by the Swedish capital Stockholm, exactly here where 1200 government delegates from 112 countries met at the "UN World Conference on the Human Environment" and where, in the middle of a hot spell four years ago, the then fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg appeared in front of the Swedish Parliament crouching on the ground and holding a sign, began their “school strike for the climate”.

Joachim Müller-Jung

Editor in the feuilleton, responsible for the "Nature and Science" department.

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Fifty years lost for the earth, that's what young activists said when ninety ministers and almost a dozen heads of state traveled to the anniversary conference "Stockholm+50" to conjure up and renew what politics has done in times of multiple crises like these always thinks to be particularly meaningful: the "turn of the era".

Since Stockholm 1972, environmental rhetoric has been peppered with meaningful terms like this.

And one of the most impressive testimonies to this found its way into the annals of German intellectual and political history four months after the start of the Stockholm World Environment Conference.

Gustav Heinemann, third Federal President, co-founder of the CDU and later a top-ranking social democrat, addressed himself with a variety of references and clearly under the impression of “the worldwide unrest of our day,

especially among the young generation”, on the occasion of the presentation of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade no less than to the world community.

“The fateful question of whether we are on the right track reaches far beyond us Germans and our special problems.

It affects the future of mankind as a whole and the coexistence or conflict of the generation living today in the face of the future." Heinemann also quoted the report "The Limits to Growth" published by the Club of Rome at the beginning of 1972 with the call for a " intellectual upheaval of Copernican proportions” to “take the necessary practical actions” to achieve a “state of equilibrium”.

Ecology as a concept was not yet socially acceptable, any more than the political color green.

But in terms of environmental policy, the Federal President at the time seemed grotesquely far ahead of his time in the Paulskirchen speech from today's perspective.

He recalled the warnings “with increasing urgency that we must stop the overexploitation of natural resources around the world, that we are at risk of suffocation from environmental and food pollution, that famine among millions of people is driving us into global conflicts will".

However, what concerned him most in his diagnosis of the times was how the deteriorating world situation was affecting the “unrest of young people”.

A fifteen-year-old Texan whose lawsuit was included in the famous American social researcher Margaret Mead's latest book quoted Heinemann in a long passage.

"Can we understand him when he says: