ABSTRACT
This chapter explores environmental anxieties in Athens, the capital and largest city in Greece, during the 1980s. It is largely organized around nefos, a toxic smog which often covers the city, threatening the health of its inhabitants. These issues increased in the second half of the decade interacting with other environmental issues such as the Chernobyl nuclear accident, which provoked nutritional panic in the city, and the fatal 1987 heatwave, which was largely seen as a result of the degradation of the urban environment in the post-war years. Environmental issues and anxieties attracted significant attention from established media, such as newspapers, but also from new outlets such as lifestyle magazines, who approached ecology as a novel, positive, post-materialist form of political expression. “Ecologist” started to be discussed as an alternative, “European” political identity in a period of growing debates about Europeanization. All these developments driven by the Greek ecological movement led to the formation of Ecologists Alternatives, the first green party, which gained representation in parliament. Nevertheless, this enthusiasm for ecology was ephemeral: environmental anxieties lessened in the early 1990s and ecology gradually attracted far less media attention.
