Louis Proyect is right about early Soviet environmentalism and why it disintegrated. He is also right that the origins of environmentalism in Germany come from early in the nineteenth century and are associated with both the right and the left, although he prefers to downplay how strongly the right was into it also. He is also correct that German romanticism had a lot to do with it.
On the right I note that the Nazis emphasized "blood and soil" as major shticks which was easily fit into a racist/environmentalist kind of approach. I also note that Ernst Haeckel, the neologizer of the word "ecology" was a thorough-going racist and reactionary of the mystic sort.
However another factor here goes deeper, dense population and the German desire for order in its small duchies and local governments, many of them quasi-feudal. The older forests in Germany were feudally owned and run. The first person to formulate the correct formulation for an optimal forest rotation formula was the German, Faustmann, in 1848, doing so as a policy adviser. And the very origins of land-use theory, largely developed by Germans, was Johann Heinrich von Thunen's _Der Isolierte Staat_, published originally in 1826. His estate was later a school in the GDR. Barkley Rosser
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu