Geoscience Reference
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concerns. In 1970, real power within the United Nations was divided
unequally among three main groups: the five permanent members of the
U.N. Security Council (France, the United Kingdom, China, the United
States, and the Soviet Union); the so-called Bretton Woods institutions,
a set of ailing international financial institutions responsible for financ-
ing development and maintaining stable monetary exchange rates; and
the all-inclusive General Assembly.
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Despite its size, the General Assem-
bly was the least powerful of the three. Like many of his colleagues from
“third-party” countries in Scandinavia, South America, and parts of Asia,
Strong objected to the U.N. Security Council's dominance of U.N. politics.
Nations with no nuclear weapons and no representatives on the Security
Council criticized this small governing body as undemocratic. They feared
that the superpowers' central concern over “peacekeeping” and interna-
tional security undermined the other functions of the United Nations.
Strong presented the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment
as a way to strengthen the General Assembly and revitalize the “soft side”
of the U.N. mission at a critical moment in international relations.
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The
crisis of the global environment— a crisis made up of interrelated threats
to the air, water, land, and people of nations around the world— offered the
United Nations an opportunity to transcend East-West political tensions
by working toward the common objective of environmental protection.
“If the member governments of the United Nations can find the politi-
cal will to do so,” Strong proposed, “they can make the conference on
the human environment the starting point of a world mobilization for the
future of man.”
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Cooperation, he argued, lay at the very foundation of the
United Nations' mission. And so too, he suggested (echoing the systems
science creed), did cooperation underpin a healthy environment. “The
entire global system on which all life depends,” he pronounced in 1971,
“must inevitably and inexorably lead us back to a new kind of globalism.”
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defining the environmental crisis
Strong's “new globalism”— a vision of cooperative international politics
led by a reinvigorated, more democratic United Nations focused, at least
at first, on environmental issues— meshed almost seamlessly with systems
scientists' holistic image of a fragile, solitary earth made up of complex
and deeply interconnected environmental systems. As the Stockholm
