Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
That the U.N. Stockholm Conference endeavored to address the human
environment provided only the slightest inkling of further specificity. The
conference itself was in part an attempt to define this nebulous global envi-
ronment in a historically specific moment.
The original inspiration for the Stockholm Conference arose out of a
Swedish challenge to nuclear development in the U.N. General Assembly
in 1967. Inga Thorsson, a Swedish diplomat, and Sverker Åström, Sweden's
permanent representative to the United Nations, objected to a proposal for
a conference on the peaceful use of atomic energy, on the grounds that it
would benefit only a limited number of nations that had nuclear industries.
The Swedish delegation suggested an alternative conference that would
“focus the interest of member countries on the extremely complex problems
related to the human environment.” 2 The Swedish government, apprised of
the initial proposal after the fact, launched an initiative on the issue within
the U.N. Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in 1968, proposing that
a conference on the human environment be held in 1972. 3 Sweden offered to
host the conference in its capital city and to provide a significant financial
contribution. ECOSOC, in turn, submitted the proposal to the General
Assembly, which unanimously approved the measure on April 2, 1969. 4
From the beginning, U.N. leaders recognized that any regime of inter-
national environmental governance would necessarily include a broad pro-
gram of scientific research and environmental monitoring. If the earth was,
as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson pronounced
in 1965, “a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and
soil,” it was up to scientists to find out exactly what kind of shape the ship
was in before politicians could make a plan to save it. 5 Scientists, for their
part, saw the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment both as a
way to create the monitoring infrastructure that would enable study of
the environment at a global scale and as a way to make that new global
research relevant to the broader world. They anchored their efforts in the
most “authentically global” environmental problem they could imagine:
the problem of atmospheric change. 6
Like most U.N. conferences, the Stockholm Conference involved a
long run-up to a very short meeting. During that three-year prelude, sci-
entists produced four major collaborative reports on the earth's large-scale
environmental systems: the Study of Critical Environmental Problems and
its follow-up, the Study of Man's Impact on Climate; Global Environmental
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