In this paper I show the development of the environmental protection movement in Poland and its influence on the process of democratization that occurred in the 1980s. I present the social and political landscape of Poland of the 1980s, focusing on the dynamics within the dissident sector. I shall later describe briefly the few most important campaigns of those times and present the actors that took part in them. In the second part of the paper I will analyze the input of the environmental movement for the democratization process of Poland and on the development of the NGO sector and grassroots social activism. The environmental movement in Poland managed to mobilize different cohorts of the society compared to the mainstream opposition, introduced novel repertoire of contention and brought issues that were not within the mainstream public discourse. In the last part of the paper I argue that the continuity of the environmental movement in Poland and its influence on the democratic consolidation after 1989. In the paper I focus mostly on the radical strain of the environmental movement in Poland that is under-researched within the transitional and social movement literature and that seemed to set the tone for the whole sector in terms of agenda and repertoires of action.