Geoscience Reference
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and the patently absurd. A bizarre episode captured by
New York Times
science writer Walter Sullivan is telling.
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In a field on the outskirts of
Stockholm, the United States' most prominent hippie group, the Hog Farm
Commune (founded by Wavy Gravy), hosted not a sit-in or a teach-in or
a hunger strike but a self-described “whale-in,” protesting whale hunting
and supporting an international whaling moratorium. The event, which
entailed what Sullivan described as “the lugubrious cry of whales across
the pine-studded landscape,” generated by both tape recordings of actual
whales and human imitations, drew a surprising assortment of conference
delegates and government officials.50
50
Maurice Strong himself gave a speech
supporting a whaling moratorium, which was followed by a brief poem,
“ostensibly written by a whale, with prolonged moans and groans.” Stuart
Brand, the flamboyant acid-test veteran of
Whole Earth Catalog
fame, then
mounted the stage in a “plumed top hat” to introduce former secretary of
the interior and occasional bugbear of environmentalists Walter Hickel,
who gave another speech. The next day, the Hog Farm hippies used plas-
tic bags to dress their bus up as a whale and then followed it through the
streets of Stockholm, making whale noises and shouting the Swedish word
for whale, “val.” In the end, the conference passed a serious-minded whal-
ing accord, a compromise agreement resulting from hard-nosed negotia-
tions among high-level diplomats.
The circus notwithstanding, the framework for environmental gover-
nance established at Stockholm has guided discussions about the global
environment for four decades. When the conference finally got underway
after three years of careful preparation in June of 1972, it involved two types
of discussions about the environment. The first kind revolved around
establishing practical international mechanisms to monitor and control
environmental degradation, and here, the United States took the lead.
Emphasizing institutional coordination, cooperative scientific research,
and a few key environmental issues that resonated with President Nixon's
domestic constituents, the U.S. delegation introduced six limited but prag-
matic initiatives for building an international environmental bureaucracy
much like what Nixon had established at home.
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As the president had
already learned, nothing could take the air out of 1960s-style environmen-
tal idealism better than a 1970s-style environmental bureaucracy.
Despite a dearth of professional scientists in the delegation, the
administration's proposals included significant support for international
