Fights over power plants: the environmental movement and the energy system in Austria's long 1970s

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 their obstructions played a central role in the formation of this environmental movement. This project examines Austrian power plant obstructions in the period from 1968 to 1984 as places of origin and memory of the environmental movement. These conflicts implicitly involved disputes about the country's future energy system. The project thus also searches for traces of the beginnings of an Austrian “era of ecology”, which was and is strongly linked to conflicts in dealing with rivers. The Danube at Hainburg in 1984 was to a certain extent a high point of this formative phase and only the most prominent of several case studies analyzed in this project. Qualitative methods of oral history such as interviews and writing appeals and work on sources from the environmental movement are confronted with quantitative socio-ecological data on material and energy flows in the “long 1970s”. What socio-metabolic realities were these social conflicts over power plants embedded in? How realistic were the utopias and dystopias of a future energy system used? Such an innovative approach, integrating material and cultural environmental history, promises a new interpretation of this decisive phase of Austria's industrialization and environmental history.