Environmental Engineering Reference
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then rhetorically examined the policy intent of each segment. He described his job as being
the “director of a ballet of elephants”! It is a perfect metaphor because it is very difficult
for all delegations to stray far from the positions agreed on in their home capitals. Just as
important as John were Jim Willis and John Whitelaw, the director and deputy director,
respectively, of UNEP Chemicals. They were everything you would not expect to see in
an archetypical UN organisation: innovative, unconventional, very knowledgeable about
POPs, inexhaustible and, most importantly, capable of attracting funding to support the ne-
gotiations. They left UNEP Chemicals soon after the completion of the agreement. Their
loss greatly impoverished our lives.
Some of the delegations also included outstanding participants, but for many, the
star on the floor was Sheila Watt-Cloutier (from the eastern Canadian Arctic) who at the
time was president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council of Canada. At the second negoti-
ating session, she presented an Inuit carving of a mother and child to Klaus Töpfer, the
then-executive director of UNEP. The carving sat beside John Buccini for the remainder
of the negotiating sessions - a powerful reminder of why we were all there. Sheila is a
very remarkable person. She is a born leader who thinks carefully before she speaks and
never strays from the moral high ground. She somehow leads by mediation. When others
try the same approach, you are usually left with a weak hybrid that no one is happy about.
This is not the case with ideas nurtured under Sheila. They are offspring that everyone can
be proud of. Here is a little example: DDT remained in the “toolboxes” of public health
agencies trying to control malaria, especially in Africa. A nongovernmental organisation
(not representing any health agency or regional indigenous organisation) took the floor and
stated that if the Stockholm Convention removed this tool, it would be responsible for the
deaths of millions - many of them children. It was an old, tired and unfounded notion that
resurfaces periodically in association with attacks on the work of Rachel Carson and of
government regulatory agencies. It could have driven a rift through the negotiations. In
their 2010 topic
Merchants of Doubt
, Oreskes and Conway pointed out that the same ac-
cusation was resurrected in 2007 from several libertarian think tanks and lobby groups in
the United States. In fact, no draft of the convention had ever proposed removing DDT for
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