Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
pollution, uncontrolled urban development, and toxic-waste management.
These issues, alongside concerns about wilderness and open space, also
disproportionately affected highly developed, industrialized nations. In
short, the LDCs complained, the chief environmental problems identified
for the Stockholm Conference were problems of economic success.
If the industrialized world understood the global environmental crisis
as a consequence of unchecked industrial development, the LDCs, who
had yet to experience industrialization, focused instead on the environ-
mental consequences of underdevelopment. Unlike the “quality-of-life"
issues facing the developed world, the LDCs' concerns over poor water,
poor sanitation, poor nutrition, and poor public health involved the main-
tenance of life itself.
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These were the problems of poverty. LDCs worried
that international environmental regulations would exacerbate these envi-
ronmental problems by upsetting trade and stifling development. Leaders
from Latin American nations and the recently independent countries of
Africa had little interest in participating in a conference focused on First
World concerns about urban growth, recreational open spaces, endan-
gered species, and industrial air pollution. They were even less keen if the
resulting environmental regulations might interfere with their own eco-
nomic development. Some suggested cynically that environmental con-
cerns “were a neat excuse for industrialized nations to pull the ladder up
behind them.”
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The LDCs had a morally compelling argument. For once, they also had
a compelling political advantage. Leaders in the developed world had by
1970 already committed to using the United Nations to create a framework
for international environmental regulation, and these leaders realized that
such an effort would succeed only with the participation of the developing
world. LDCs were the majority of U.N. members and produced many of
the material resources potentially subject to regulation. In a purportedly
democratic United Nations, the human environment that U.N. leaders like
Strong and Thant sought to outline would have to reflect visions of the
environment from both sides of the industrial divide.
In June of 1971, a Panel of Experts on Development and Environment
met at Founex, Switzerland, to “consider the protection and improvement
of the environment in the context of the urgent need of the developing
countries for development.”
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Worried that some LDCs might choose not
to participate in the planned 1972 conference, the informal panel sought
