Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
environment did not play a greater role in defining its politics. Along-
side the U.N. leaders they supported, systems scientists found that their
vision for cooperative scientific and political approaches to world-scale
environmental problems conflicted with a geopolitical system that privi-
leged national- and regional-scale economic concerns. The regime of global
environmental governance established at Stockholm ultimately reflected
the interests of these established constituencies at least as much as it did a
collective concern for humanity's impact on the whole earth.
Then again, maybe this was not such a bad thing, especially in the
short run. After all, a new framework for global environmental politics
was established at Stockholm, and it was established with some success.
As Anthony Lewis of the
New York Times
reported in his recap of the event,
“One Confused Earth,” the very occurrence of the conference— especially
after the repeated confrontations between East and West, rich and poor,
communist and capitalist in the preceding months— was a victory for
international environmental consciousness. The event drew more than a
hundred nations together to discuss a relatively new set of disconcerting
global issues for the first time, and it achieved a good deal of real politi-
cal success.
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U.N. member states established benchmark regulations for
ocean dumping, whaling, and toxic wastes, and the conference provided
twenty-seven ambitious guiding principles for future international envi-
ronmental agreements. The meeting also established the machinery for
developing and implementing international environmental policy within
the new U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).
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The conference did little to lessen the dominance of nation-states'
interests in international politics, but the concept of nonrenewable
“world resources” began to resonate with delegates from both developing
and developed nations. Growing Third World political interest helped to
buoy First World environmental initiatives, both within UNEP and related
U.N. agencies like the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World
Health Organization. By incorporating developing nations and their con-
cerns about the social and political ramifications of environmental deg-
radation and protection into an international political process, the U.N.
Conference on the Human Environment helped to establish the global
environment as a significant geopolitical interest.
The scientific community may have been overshadowed at the con-
ference by the development issue, but they did not exactly lose out at
