At the same time the state leaders of the Eastern Block themselves contributed in various ways to the gathering green 1989. Glasnost in the USSR freed sensitive environmental information and the 1987 amnesty for political prisoners in the Soviet Union allowed older dissenters to form the vanguard of the surge. By the time of the ‘Earth Day’ celebrations in 1990 there were branches of the interestingly named ‘Socio-ecological Union’ in over 100 Soviet cities and in 11 of the 15 Soviet republics.

Greening also took place at the very top. In his speech to the United Nations in December 1988 President Gorbachev warned that ‘the growth of the world economy is laying bare the contradictions and limits of the traditional type of industrialization. Its further expansion “in breadth and in depth” will push us toward an ecological catastrophe’. Gorbachev outlined a new vision for the United Nations as the guardian of environmental quality. His Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze (who died this year) penned an essay entitled ‘Ecology and Politics’ which stressed political and ecological interdependence: ‘There are seven basic colours in the spectrum, but the colour which lies on the border between warm and cold, which joins light and dark, is the green colour of life’, the Soviet apparatchik waxed lyrically.

Even before Michael Gorbachev came to power in 1985, however, new social movements had sprung up which Carlo Jordan, a GDR political and environmental activist who later founded the GDR Green Party, described as being essentially ‘green movements’. They highlighted ecological concerns while also encompassing other causes such as demilitarisation, liberation of women and of cultural, sexual and regional minorities and nationalism.

There was of course a strong element of opportunism in all this. Environmentalism was seen as the safest form of protest. Perhaps predictably Green parties and ‘anti-politics’ movements of the revolution withered quickly in multi-party elections and the realpolitik of the early 1990s. But the fact that green ideas were able to link intellectuals, local opposition groups and national and international civic rights campaigns – as well as linking democratic issues with quality of life ones, was significant. They also allowed a critique of state authoritarian socialism while avoiding accusations of capitalist propaganda. The environmental agenda turned out to be the thin end of a large wedge, which would eventually help dislodge the regimes from power in an unprecedentedly peaceful revolution in which populations demanded democratic rights, a more responsive form of government and better living conditions.

The revolutions of 1989 also coincided with the rise of globalism – discourse treating the world as essentially a single political arena – something environmentalism and its iconic images of ‘Spaceship Earth’ and the ‘Blue Marble’ have played a role in promoting. Discourses of environmentalism and globality continue to be strongly interlinked and post-1989 global social movements, often drawing directly on the mythologies of 1989, rely on pushing many of the same pressure points: growth economics, unaccountable state power and scepticism towards technologies/weapons (such as nuclear).

So while environmental issues may have been a convenient cover for other concerns, and 1989 surely did indeed mark the exhaustion of a particular utopian project, at the same time 1989 also pointed forwards. Rather than simply being a ‘rectification’ or burial of some other project, 1989 was a staging post in the relaunch of older concerns about resources and planetary limits. It brought a substantive critique of modern economics and politics – untrammelled material expansion and state power – into the history of European revolutions.

Instead, 1989 could be seen as the latest chapter of what Martin Albrow calls The Global Age and what Joachim Radkau has recently dubs the Age of Ecology in which the limits and sustainability of the modern project emerge as key bones of ideological contention. There is still a long way to go, but the direction of long-term travel is at least discernable with climate change representing just one aspect of a renewed concern with physical limits or ‘planetary boundaries’ as well as social limits to governability.