Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
onto real geographical spaces controlled by mayors, governors, dictators,
presidents, parliaments, community leaders, and bureaucratic agencies of
all stripes. Pitched as global, these geographically specific environmental
problems all also fit, albeit sometimes awkwardly, into an international
politics centered on the economically interested nation-state.
The global atmosphere, by contrast— fluid, dynamic, and borderless—
had no such attachment to local or regional politics. Changes in climate
or atmospheric composition might affect environments anywhere and
everywhere, and in 1972 the interests at stake were still unclear. In a battle
to define the global environment in terms of competing development and
natural resource interests, a global-level phenomenon not rooted in any
specific national or even regional space had no interested constituency.
So while climate change certainly fit into scientists' vision for a coopera-
tive global research effort administered by a revitalized United Nations,
it remained a relative nonissue in international environmental politics
until the 1980s. The U.N. Conference on the Human Environment in that
sense was a failed attempt to include CO
2
in global governance. Only after
another decade of effort would scientists succeed in making climatic and
atmospheric change relevant to the regional- and national-scale interests
at the heart of international politics. And by that time, the battle to define
the global environment— reincarnated in the post- Cold War economic
terms of “sustainable development”— had seen dramatic changes in the
geopolitical landscape in which it was waged.
