Member of Green Party

You are a 38-year-old ranking member of the Greens, and your role is to recruit new members for your party in the East. As a feminist who has been active in the West-German women's movement for years, you are against the restrictive West German laws on abortion. You are a single mother of a five-year-old son. While you are away on party business, your mother takes care of your child. This arrangement is complicated by the fact that you live in Bonn, while your mother lives 90 minutes away in the countryside. Once your son reaches school age, it will be impossible to take him to your mother's house.

You feel very strongly about environmental protection. You yourself do not have a car, avoid gas guzzling air travel, and use as many recycled products as possible. Like many West Germans, you do not buy soda in cans, since the production of recycled tin cans uses up more energy than the recycling of plastic or glass. You are appalled at the state of air and water quality in industrial areas such as Halle and Leipzig. Under the former regime in the GDR, companies were not required to install filters and tons of sulfur dioxin were emitted straight into the air. Ninty-seven percent of all lakes in the former East are so polluted by chemicals that the water is not safe to drink. Runoff from over fertilization of agricultural fields and unrestricted flow of unfiltered industrial waste have polluted the ground water in many areas. To stop this pollution and to fix these problems will require major investments. (See: impact of planned economy on the environment).

At first you were radically opposed to the swift pace of unification. You are sad to see the GDR simply cease to exist, with its progressive policies on women's rights and its opposition to Western-style capitalism. Also, you are concerned about the privatization and liquidation of the industries of the East. You are afraid that West German businesses, among them some pretty serious industrial polluters, will be given free reign in the East by a government desperate for private investment, which will make the already catastrophic environmental problems in the East even worse.

You believe that unification should have brought about a rewriting of the constitutional basis of the Federal Republic, since there is a clause in the Basic Law of the Federal Republic which states: "This Basic Law will become invalid on the day that a unified German parliament meets."

Your task is to offer support to those unhappy with the social injustices of unification and to recruit new members for your party. Make sure that the members of your group don't forget even for a second what a rotten deal unification is: for the constitutional basis of the republic, for women, for day care, for the environment, for social justice on both sides of the border. In addition, you have committed yourself to ensuring that as much money as necessary will go toward environmental cleanup and that West German standards for environmental protection are adhered to.


*Additional off-site links -

Greens

• The Greens, Facts and Figures
  
• More information on the philosophy of the Greens
  
• The Greens position on women’s issues both East and West
  

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