Wyhl: the birthplace of energy democracy
Yesterday, the village of Wyhl came together to award its Klaus Bindner Future Prize to Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rettig and German Günter Richter. The former helped launch a cross-border campaign for energy democracy 40 years ago, while the latter was the local pastor who intervened to protect his protesting "sheep" from authoritarian police. Renowned researcher Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, author of Factor Five, held the keynote address.
Those who believe that the switch to renewables does not go hand-in-hand with economic growth and industry are in for quite a shock when they enter the village of Wyhl, where locals successfully prevented the construction of a nuclear power plant in the 1970s. Drive into the village today, and you will be overwhelmed by the number of solar roofs in between numerous production businesses, including a metalworks firm and a large quarry. The villagers now get around 50 percent of their energy from solar alone, and that's just what's visible – the energy conservation measures are harder to see.
"I now live in a Passive House," said von Weizsäcker, "so space heating is no longer even an issue for me." He called on everyone not to forget how important energy conservation and efficiency are in the switch to renewables – and said "I am tired of waiting for North Americans to get on board. We have to move on without them, and maybe they will get on the bandwagon at some point."
Von Weizsäcker was "only a student" in nearby Freiburg, not on the front line, when the protest began in the 1970s. Villagers went out to the site where a nuclear plant was to be built next village and squatted. The police responded with authoritarian force, which enraged a large part of the population in surrounding communities. The more force the police used, the more people turned out to squat. The plant was never built.
"It wasn't about a fear of nuclear disasters in the beginning," explained Dietrich Elchlepp, a retired member of Parliament for the SPD, who proposed the first solar legislation in the Bundestag way back in 1976 (it was not adopted). Instead, Pastor Richter told the audience, it was about "resisting this arrogant authoritarianism" that had come in to "turn the Upper Rhine Valley into a new industrial Ruhr Area."
The event offered a number of insights for international onlookers. The international press often portrays Germans as having "panicked" after Fukushima and of having a "fear" of nuclear, but it turns out that these scaredy-cats are freedom fighters who put their bodies on the line against their own police force. Pastor Richter pleaded with the police on one occasion in the 70s until late in the night to keep them from going in and forcibly removing the crowd, which included plenty of people from his congregation – clearly, the push for energy democracy in Germany has never been a partisan issue.
Furthermore, where you might expect the Germans and the French to clash over energy policy, the events in and around Wyhl show that both sides have always extended a hand to each other. Frenchman Rettig, who said his family always made a distinction between Nazis and Germans during the darkest hours, recalled (in impeccable German) the words of a German protester from the 1970s: "Authoritarian states have repeatedly managed to force us to fight against each other, but they're not going to succeed again." Numerous members of the crowd wore buttons reading "Amitié franco-allemand."
But perhaps the biggest lesson to be learned was summed up by a local politician: "Our award winners today show young people that you don't have to do what you are told." Today, the technocrats no longer determine German energy policy, and the German public has tamed its police force considerably. While the international press still believes that the Greens won the state elections in Baden-Württemberg after Fukushima because of "fear" of nuclear, in fact the bigger issue was police force used against peaceful protesters at the side of the Stuttgart21 project. The police have since apologized, and the Christian Democrats who ruled the state without interruption since World War II are out of office – not primarily because of nuclear, but because the public felt they were too authoritarian. (Craig Morris)
