Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
environmental politics since the 1972 Stockholm Conference: the 1992 U.N.
Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), which became
known as the Rio Earth Summit. The Earth Summit was built upon the con-
cept of sustainable development articulated in the Brundtland Report, and
one of the event's major objectives was the introduction of an international
treaty on global warming: the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate
Change. To understand the relationship between sustainable development
and the politics of the global warming treaty, however, it is necessary to first
explore the extent to which both the conference and the treaty reflected the
changing geopolitical context at the end of the Cold War.
Nothing underscored the atmosphere of geopolitical change surround-
ing the Rio Earth Summit more clearly than the rapid and unexpected
global events that occurred during the third UNCED preparatory meeting,
PrepCom III, held in August of 1991 in Geneva, Switzerland. On Wednes-
day, August 14, Russian premier Michael Gorbachev announced that the
Soviet Union strongly supported the goals of UNCED and that he would
personally attend the conference— a move widely perceived as a challenge
to the Bush administration, which had hesitated over committing to presi-
dential participation.
12
When the Soviet delegation to PrepCom III arrived
at the conference table the following Monday, they had a strong commit-
ment from their nation's leader and a reinvigorated role in UNCED nego-
tiations. In what Flora Lewis of the
New York Times
called “an astonishing
reversal of Soviet attitudes about international relations,” the Soviets had
“seized the moment on [the] global environment.”
13
When they came to work on Tuesday morning, however, the Soviet
delegation did not know whether there was a Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics left to represent.
14
Gorbachev had been detained and put under
house arrest by a cadre of conservative party officials and military leaders,
and he remained cut off from the capitol, then under a surreal, nonshoot-
ing siege. The government was in disarray, and it was unclear who, if any-
one, had control in Moscow. When the dust finally began to settle during
the final weeks of the year, the Soviet Union— and the Cold War— existed
no longer. As Colorado senator Tim Wirth reflected dramatically in July
of 1992, “The Cold War sort of stopped on one side of Rio, and something
else new, different, very exciting, and certainly enormously challenging
occurred on the other side.”
15
Wirth was by no means wrong, but he did not capture the whole picture
