Existoval chartistický environmentalismus?
Did Chartist Environmentalism Exist?

Charter 77 and Environmental Reflection

Summary/Abstract: The question of ecological critique is an important research area in the study of Czechoslovak dissent and Charter 77, yet it has not received any systematic research attention. Scholarly literature has privileged research on (semi)official ecological movements or expert forms of ecological criticism and reflection on the state of the environment in the so-called grey zone, which became increasingly visible in communist Czechoslovakia during the period of normalization. The author raises the question of how Charter 77 related to environmental issues, and shows that the primary emphasis on human and civil rights initially side-lined their reception within the Charter. As environmental issues resonated more in society and among experts, Charter 77 also addressed them in its documents, albeit within a broader human rights framework. The author draws attention to the importance of mutual cooperation and personal connections between emerging ecological initiatives and parts of the Charter 77 community it this effort. This perspective relativizes the notion of sharp boundaries between dissent and “mainstream society”. At the same time, by analysing texts from the Charter milieu, she concludes that from the beginning a distinctive philosophical and political ideological current was formed, influenced by existentialism, phenomenology, and especially the ideas of the philosopher Jan Patočka (1907–1977), which she calls Chartist environmentalism. In this context, the criticism of the communist regime was part of a more general critique of modern rationality, industrial civilization and human alienation. Ecology, the plundering of natural resources and environmental degradation were thus seen as one aspect of a complex structural problem that could not be solved by mere legislative regulations of man’s relationship to nature, but only by a profound change in thinking based on an existential shattering that challenged the principles of modern objectivism. The study traces how the efforts to democratize the internal work of the Charter, the birth of a number of new independent initiatives, and their generational transformation in the second half of the 1980s spurred the articulation of an environmental platform within the Charter, which resulted in the founding of the samizdat "Ecological Bulletin" (Ekologický bulletin) and the establishment of the independent Ecological Society (Ekologická společnost). However, “Chartist environmentalism” developed ideologically and personally to a large extent separately from ecological activism. An exception was represented by the dissident and later Minister of Environment Ivan Dejmal (1946–2008), who attempted to combine “small ecology” with the Charter 77 critique of modern rationality and to formulate a position of philosophically grounded political ecology within Czechoslovak dissident movement.

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