Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
delegation's major financial initiatives as well. The U.S. delegation's most
important proposal at the Stockholm Conference was a voluntary five-
year plan to raise $100 million for U.N. environmental programs, called
the U.N. Environment Fund. The administration designed the fund pri-
marily to support research, education, and environmental monitoring
within the international community, but the money was also meant to
strengthen individual nations' environmental management capabilities
through regional-level training and coordination. The administration,
however, specifically cautioned against allowing the fund to be diverted
into intranational economic or even environmental development pro-
grams.
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The fund would provide the financial and bureaucratic support
necessary for implementing Earthwatch, along with the U.S. delegation's
other institutional initiatives. But in a move that presaged later admin-
istrations' efforts to separate financial support for environmental goals
from support for development, Train and his colleagues segregated the
U.N. Environment Fund from geopolitical concerns over development
and international aid.
In general, Nixon and his aides sought to streamline and publicize the
United Nations' existing American-sponsored environmental programs,
but the president had no interest in empowering the body by creating new
or autonomous international agencies. Nowhere was this more evident
than in discussions about the management of the U.N. Environment Fund.
The fund both required and supported some sort of bureaucratic struc-
ture within the United Nations, and the U.S. delegation's proposal for a
“small coordinating unit” mirrored efforts to coordinate and streamline
the environmental bureaucracy at home.
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Within the United Nations,
a variety of agencies, including the Food and Agriculture Organization,
the World Meteorological Organization, and the World Health Organi-
zation, worked on aspects of environmental monitoring, protection, and
management. A number of conference delegates thought that the United
Nations should create an entirely new agency to deal with environmental
problems. The Nixon administration disagreed, fearing that a separate
agency would be costly and redundant. Instead, the United States favored a
permanent environmental secretariat that would coordinate existing agen-
cies' environmental activities, much as the domestic Council on Environ-
mental Quality coordinated the environmental activities of U.S. federal
and state agencies. The United States held the lion's share of the U.N.
