SUPERVISOR: Martin SCHMID

PROJECT ASSIGNED TO: Sophia RUT

The history of the modern environmental movement in Austria has hardly been researched. Social debates about a future energy system, disputes about power plants and power plant obstructions played a central role in the formation of this environmental movement. Sophia’s dissertation project examines protests against power plants in the 1970s and 1980s as places of origin and “memory” of the environmental movement. In these conflicts over the construction and commissioning of power plants, the future energy system of the country and its social metabolism was also implicitly disputed, so the hypothesis.

The dissertation understands these historical social conflicts over the Austrian energy system as attempts to negotiate the socio-ecological nature of the material basis of society. Tracing the beginnings of an Austrian “era of ecology”, the dissertation is dedicated to the formation phase of the environmental movement, which was also strongly linked to conflicts in dealing with rivers. The Danube at Hainburg in 1984 was to a certain extent a high point of this formation phase and only the most prominent of several conflicts over power plants that are analyzed. 

On the one hand, the dissertation examines the actors involved in the conflicts over the energy system in Austria’s “long 1970s”, focusing on opponents of power plants: their perceptions of reality and conflict, motivations, energy policy goals and agendas. Qualitative methods of Oral History and a call to write carried out together with the “Documentation of Life History Records” of the University of Vienna (https://schreibaufruf-energie.at) as well as work on written sources from the environmental movement are used to answer these questions.

 On the other hand, it examines the actual material and above all energy flows of this period from a socio-ecological perspective. Combining a discourse-historical approach with a view of the “energetic realities” informed by social ecology integrates both material and cultural environmental history to gain a new interpretation of this decisive phase of Austria's industrialization process.