Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the weekend. As an alternative, Herter called a news conference for that
afternoon, but he had to cancel at the last minute because the delegation
had not come up with an acceptable message for the press. Train's rebut-
tal, finally delivered the following Monday, only led the press to revisit
China's criticisms, and it contained little of substance. As it happened,
the Chinese had already walked out of the conference, during a speech by
delegates from what the Chinese called the “puppet clique” of South Viet-
nam, before Train had a chance to present his case.
72
A photo of diplomat
and former child star Shirley Temple Black applauding Train showed row
upon row of empty seats.
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the limits to “gloBal”
It is easy to lament, as Russell Train did in his 1972 evaluation of the U.N.
Conference on the Human Environment, the “politicization” of the global
environment that occurred at Stockholm. In the years since, many sci-
entists studying climate and the global environment have echoed Train's
sentiment, complaining that political chicanery has continually infringed
upon rational, science-based plans for environmental management and
protection. But this is a misguided lament. Like the problem of climate
change, the global environment as a concept has always been political,
thanks in large part to the scientists who first helped to describe it. The
SCEP and SMIC studies, after all, were undertaken with the express
intent of informing a nascent political discussion about the global envi-
ronmental crisis.
The Limits to Growth
was nothing if not politically prog-
nosticative. Scientists' idea of a world made up of complex, interrelated,
large-scale systems helped to buttress Maurice Strong's “new globalism”
in inter national politics by highlighting mutual interest and the necessity
of international cooperation in dealing with global problems. Scientists
themselves explicitly framed their approach in such internationalist terms.
It is unfair to impugn the actual scientific work involved in these reports
as somehow biased or nonobjective, but the projects themselves arose self-
consciously from a desire to put the global environment on the political
agenda in the 1970s, and it would be naïve to ignore the political motiva-
tions of those involved.
For the scientific community, perhaps a more honest lament than
Train's would be that the scientists who studied and described the global
