Petra Kelly and the Making of the Global Green Movement
Thursday, December 19, 2024
Online Event
11:30 AM New York l 5:30 PM Vienna
Open Society Hub for the Politics of the Anthropocene at CEU presents a hybrid discussion with Stephen Milder, an environmental historian at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, on "Petra Kelly and the Making of the Global Green Movement."
Green parties have frequently been studied as distinct national cases. Petra Kelly, co-founder of the West German Greens, understood Green politics differently. A globetrotting activist, she supported grassroots struggles everywhere she went and played a part in the formation of Green parties in many parts of the world. Following Kelly on her travels within Western Europe, East Germany, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia, as well as the United States, Australia, Japan, and India, Milder's talk shows how a global green movement emerged in the 1980s, and positions Kelly and the West German Greens within that development. In showing Kelly’s seminal role in the making of a “Global Green Movement,” the paper also raises questions about how her ideas influence the Greens in the present.
Milder received his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012, and has worked at Duke University, Rutgers University, and the University of Groningen before coming to Munich. He is the author of Greening Democracy: The Antinuclear Movement and Political Environmentalism in West Germany and Beyond, 1968-1983 (2017). Currently, he is writing a history of the emergence of climate politics at the end of the Cold War and editing a source edition of documents related to Petra Kelly’s international travels.