Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
organizations like the World Meteorological Organization, they would not
have the data to make their science possible. In 1972, however, the poli-
tics of systems science went beyond the long-standing support for what
Edwards calls “making global data.”
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Systems scientists presented the
global environment in a way that all but demanded a paradigm of coop-
erative global governance outside of the realm of science. The borderless,
interdependent global systems that scientists described contrasted sharply
with the competitive, state-centered politics of the Cold War.
Indeed, the leader of the U.N. Conference on the Human Environ-
ment, Maurice Strong, and many of his U.N. colleagues hoped that the
conference in Stockholm would mark a transition away from divisive East-
West politics toward a “new globalism” that revolved around a robust and
democratic system of international politics. When scientists like Dennis
and Donella Meadows and Carroll Wilson described the earth as a deeply
interdependent whole, they supported this global vision. In an intercon-
nected world, actions by any one nation or even one industry affected the
world's predicament as a whole. Conversely, the earth's systemic limits
applied to all nations and groups in all circumstances. Cooperation repre-
sented the only “rational” response to “a set of decisions that could govern
the future habitability of our planet.”
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Borders, key points of control for
the globalizing forces of trade, migration, and disease, had little meaning in
the face of transnational environmental problems like air pollution, extra-
national problems like ocean dumping and fisheries depletion, and truly
global problems like ozone depletion and climate change. “The world” as
imagined by the graphs and tables in
The Limits to Growth
had no borders.
In fact, the world had no political geography at all. As U.N. Secretary-Gen-
eral U Thant suggested in his foreword to
The Limits to Growth,
unilateral
decisions, belligerent nationalism, and Cold War posturing had no place in
a finite world composed of deeply integrated social, political, and environ-
mental consequences.
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SCEP, SMIC, and
The Limits to Growth
thus backed
up the “Only One Earth” slogan of the upcoming U.N. Conference on the
Human Environment with a “we're all in this together” form of science.
“a neW kind of gloBalism”
Built upon global environmental concerns that included CO
2
, scientists'
vision of the global environment implicitly supported cooperative forms
