Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Environmental Fund's purse strings, and the conference eventually backed
the plan and created the U.N. Environment Programme, an environmental
secretariat based in Nairobi, Kenya, with Maurice Strong as its head.
59
The U.S. delegation also supported three international initiatives that
resonated with environmentalists at home: a convention on ocean dump-
ing, a ten-year moratorium on whaling, and the establishment of World
Heritage Sites, modeled after the American National Park System. Each
of these international initiatives spoke to widely held domestic concerns;
and alongside Earthwatch and the U.N. Environment Fund, discussions
about these issues at Stockholm enabled the U.S. delegation to capitalize
politically on America's environmental leadership at home and abroad.
60
In Stockholm, however, the U.S. delegation's achievements were
quickly overshadowed by a second set of discussions about the global
environment that the Nixon administration had explicitly hoped to avoid.
Initiated by Sweden and China and then taken up by developing nations,
these were philosophical and diplomatic discussions that put environ-
mental protection in the context of development, nuclear disarmament,
and international peace. Much as Nixon's aides attempted to address envi-
ronmental issues in terms favorable to broader U.S. domestic and foreign
policies, so too did U.N. members seek to redefine “the environment” to
fit their own economic and political interests.
61
And just as Nixon had
feared, these interests frequently collided with the geopolitical priorities
of the United States.
For the most part, the geopolitical concerns associated with the global
environment were already on the table when the delegates arrived in
Stockholm. Four preparatory meetings in 1971 and 1972 brought most of
the main issues to the fore long before the conference began, and drafts
of the “Declaration on the Human Environment,” slated for release at the
close of the conference, were also largely complete. The Founex Report
had made it clear that the relationship between environmental protec-
tion and Third World development would be a central concern of many
conference participants. Negotiations over language dealing with nuclear
weapons and weapons testing in the spring of 1972 presaged a discussion
about disarmament in Stockholm, and tensions between “superpowers,”
nonnuclear nations like Japan and Sweden, and the less developed coun-
tries of South America, Africa, and Asia promised to pervade discussions
about international environmental protection.
