Acid rain and romanticism: East German forestry, 1945-1989

East German forest history offers a metaphor for political, economic and ecological life in East Germany. It is titled "Acid Rain and Romanticism" because of the significance of pollution and industrial forestry as symptoms of the Party leadership's extreme materialism and its antithesis in close-to-nature forestry and political romanticism. Conflict between materialist and romantic values in German forest management serves as the leitmotiv for this analysis. As much an economic as a scientific or political dialectic, this continuous debate since the nineteenth-century reached its most dramatic expression in East Germany.;The Party leaders' informal orientations determined forest policy rather than formal rhetoric, economics or forest science. Four attributes proved valuable in estimating the disparity between official forest policy and practice: attitudes towards complexity and levels of risk aversion, the degree to which control was pursued at the expense of productivity and preferences for radical change. Practical manifestations in the forest of the leaders' political philosophy were also evaluated. These four attitudes serve as telltales for the quality of East German forest management and its rural economic and social policies.;Throughout East German history forest and pollution data reliably reflected the irrational intellectual constructs behind policy formation and the underlying economic chaos better than published data. Yet most analysts failed to forecast East Germany's collapse. As an alternative the author suggests a policy science approach to studying evolving international security and economic problems which integrates geographic and environmental factors with historical analysis. Although environmental issues may not be either of primary importance or immediacy their data are often the most accessible and reliably estimated and reveal the leadership's fundamental attitudes and informal policy orientations. Finally, the author suggests that Laswell's core analytic task of "self-orientation" may best be performed within an ecological context. Analysts should examine their personal orientations towards change and complexity and their preferences for control and risk. One's political philosophy should be explicit, the degree to which one is determinist and believes in the possible perfection of political truth and how one understands the value of individuals in their various environments.