Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
to reassure the developing world that their interests would be represented
in Stockholm. The meeting articulated the concerns of the developing
world and produced one of the foundational documents of contemporary
international environmental politics, the “Founex Report.”
The meeting at Founex reminded observers that any regime of global
environmental protection required global political buy-in, and that buy-
in hinged on the traditional national and regional interests of individual
nations. The term
global
referred as much to the geopolitical interests at
stake as it did to a single unified geographical space. The developing world
was ready to commit to a common global effort to protect the environment,
but only if “the environment” could be made meaningful to a developing-
world political constituency overwhelmingly concerned with issues of
economic and social advancement.
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Not surprisingly, problems of the global atmosphere did not readily
appeal to a developing-world constituency. In fact, as dean emeritus of
American foreign policy George F. Kennan noted, for truly geographi-
cally global problems like atmospheric and climatic change, “subject to
the sovereign authority of no national government,” there was virtually
no committed political constituency at all.
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The problems involved in
interpreting CO
2
as a form of pollutant that Charles David Keeling had
articulated in 1963 persisted in the new international context of the U.N.
Conference on the Human Environment. Even among industrialized
nations, the vague and geographically boundless problems of the global
commons took a back seat to the tangible, geographically specific problems
that drove local and national environmental campaigns. Central as it had
been to defining the global environment scientifically, climate change thus
played only a marginal role in defining the global environment politically.
And yet, the politics of the global environment negotiated at Stockholm
would shape the landscape of climate change politics for decades to come,
and the proceedings themselves would shed light on the quirks of that
terrain.
the u.n. conference on the human environment
The U.N. Conference on the Human Environment was the international
community's first attempt to deal with the environment as a meaning-
ful global political issue, and it unfolded as a mix of the deadly serious
