Berlin's love affair with the Love Parade is over and it looks like it will be a bitter break-up. Since 1989 the Love Parade has grown from a small gathering of 150 techno music lovers to become the world's largest open-air techno dance party. Close on 1.5 million ravers descend on Berlin each July and Berlin tourist chiefs reckon the event generates £100 million for the city each year. Most Berliners hate the event but have resigned themselves to avoiding the city centre on the Love Parade weekend. Real techno fans say the parade has become over-commercialised and each year they organise their own counter-demonstration, the "F. . k Parade", playing hardcore techno music and attracting a few thousand diehards to the eastern half of the city. But the loudest critics of the Love Parade are Berlin's environmental lobby who bemoan the trail of destruction the ravers leave in their wake each year. On top of 300 tonnes of rubbish, love paraders leave behind a few thousand litres of urine and trample 3,000 square metres of grass and plants in the Tiergarten park in the centre of the city. The park has scarcely recovered before another million ravers descend.

Each year their protests have fallen on deaf ears and love paraders like to write off the environmentalists as killjoy muesli-eaters. But this year the muesli-eaters got their revenge. They got permission from the city to hold a demonstration in central Berlin on the second Saturday in July, traditionally the day of the Love Parade. Later, when the Love Parade organisers applied to hold their event on the same day, permission was refused. All other Saturdays in July have been booked by other environmental groups so Love Parade organisers have tentatively booked the Friday and Sunday on either side of the Saturday they wanted. But it is unlikely the city would agree to block the central artery of the city to weekend traffic. In previous years, the Love Parade organisers have more than once threatened to move the parade to Paris. Unless they can reach a compromise with the environmentalists they once mocked, the love paraders might have to come good on their idle promise and relocate.

No one would be happier to see the end of the Love Parade than the keepers at Berlin's city zoo, located near the parade route. "It was probably due to the extremely loud Love Parade that one of the Somalian wild donkeys was stillborn," said zoo keepers in a report last year, adding sadly: "On the parade weekend the three pretty striped ground squirrels disappeared without a trace."