Making the Global Environment - Behind the Curve - page 65

backward in time to demonstrate an exponential increase in atmospheric
CO 2 that reinforces the dire environmental predictions of the larger work.
The Limits to Growth gives CO 2 all of one paragraph in its more than two
hundred pages, but when it does it frames rising atmospheric CO 2 as part
of a crisis of industrial capitalism, wherein human activities threaten to
outstrip the resource capacity of the earth.
Ultimately, though they differed in approach, both studies were parts
of a larger effort to reframe CO 2 in light of a threatened global environ-
ment— to reinterpret CO 2 in terms of a global scientific infrastructure
and an emerging international political framework built to deal with new
global problems. The making of this global environment was a complicated
process, however. This chapter is about where the study of CO 2 fits into
the story of its making.
The seminal event in the making of the global environment as we know
it today was the 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Environment held
in Stockholm, Sweden. For scientists, environmentalists, and some U.N.
leaders, the Stockholm Conference represented the center of an effort to
promote and codify a broader science-based understanding of humanity's
global, collective relationship with nature. The “global environment” that
scientists and diplomats envisioned addressed the phenomena of the natu-
ral world in terms of specific scientific methodologies and political ideals.
Many scientists— particularly atmospheric scientists— focused on build-
ing more robust and cooperative global networks for scientific research.
But scientists' interest in the interdependence of the earth's large-scale
systems also implicitly— and sometimes explicitly— meant supporting
continuing efforts within the United Nations to foster global political
cooperation on environmental and nonenvironmental issues alike. Here
was a new form of science-first advocacy, rephrased in explicitly environ-
mental terms and retooled to fit within a specific vision of the global politi-
cal arena.
The U.N. Conference on the Human Environment was more than just
a scientific affair, however; it was also geopolitical event held at a particular
moment in Cold War history that reflected the historically and geographi-
cally specific environmental, economic, and political concerns of nations
and people from around the world. International preparations for the
conference made it clear that the politics of the world's threatened global
spaces would reflect the concerns of constituencies tied to local, regional,