The Age of Global Warming: A History (12 page)

In June 1971, Strong held a week-long seminar at Founex, fifteen minutes’ drive from Geneva airport. ‘One of the best intellectual exchanges I have ever participated in,’ Strong recalled. ‘It had a profound influence both on the Stockholm conference and on the evolution of the concept of the environment-development relationship.’
[34]
Founex produced a three-part deal which gave developing countries what they sought. In turn, it gave Strong what he wanted – the presence of Third World countries at the conference.

The first part was the assumption that the Third World would not emulate the developed world’s path to industrialisation, expressed as a non-binding aspiration on the part of the Third World. Developing countries would ‘wish’ to avoid the patterns of development of industrialised countries.
[35]
 

The second related to national sovereignty. Suppose this turned out to be wrong? Where environmental objectives conflict with development objectives, each country had the right to decide the trade-off for itself.
[36]
  

The third part was about money: ‘If the concern for human environment reinforces the commitment to development, it must also reinforce the commitment to international aid. It should provide a stimulus for augmenting the flow of resources from the advanced to the developing countries.’
[37]
  

The Founex deal was packaged in a formula that bound together a contradiction – the environmental problems of developed countries are caused by too much development but the Third World’s environmental problems are caused by too little. A political compromise lacking internal consistency or empirical validation, its second half contains an important truth. As societies get wealthier, they can afford to spend more and place a higher value on a clean environment and unspoiled nature. When Bjorn Lomborg produced evidence suggesting that far from getting worse, environmental indicators had been improving as wealth had increased, he was attacked for demonstrating the validity of one part of the Founex formula – only it was the wrong half. As a political formula, Founex did the trick.

On 5
th
June 1972, the first session of the world’s first environmental conference took place in Stockholm’s Royal Opera House. Traffic delayed the opening ceremony. None of the communist states turned up apart from China, Romania and Yugoslavia. But the Third World nations did come. Kurt Waldheim, the new UN secretary-general, warned against man’s unplanned, selfish and ever-growing activities. ‘While the environment is an emerging, new and very serious problem, we must not forget that development is still the highest priority,’ Waldheim said, acknowledging the position of the largest bloc in the UN.
[38]
  

At times, the conference was chaotic. ‘There is a strange sensation here of large groups of people wandering aimlessly about looking for someone else,’ a reporter wrote.
[39]
In addition to a fleet of Saabs and Volvos, the Swedish government provided two hundred bicycles painted in the UN’s blue and white. Not enough, delegates complained. By the conference’s second day, half had disappeared, most ending up in hotel rooms.

The sense of disorganisation was partly a result of one of Strong’s masterstrokes. His most important allies in prosecuting the environmental agenda were the NGOs that had helped generate the political momentum for the conference in the first place. Despite resistance from the UN bureaucracy, Strong enlisted volunteers, led by the secretary-general of League of Red Cross Societies and Baron Axel von dem Bussche (a former member of Germany’s anti-Hitler resistance) to encourage NGOs to come. More than four hundred NGOs did, attending a parallel Environment Forum at Hog Farm just outside the city. 

Ward shuttled between Hog Farm and the main conference, arranging briefing sessions and tickets. According to one government insider, the NGOs had little discernible effect on ‘the real action’. That wasn’t why Strong wanted them there. It was to hold governments’ feet to the fire after the agreements had been signed and everyone had gone home.
[40]

The NGOs and prominent experts also helped generate press interest. Biologist Paul Ehrlich showered praise on Strong. It was an ‘absolute miracle’ that Strong had said that poor countries could not close the gap with rich countries.
[41]
It was just ten years before the start of China’s growth spurt.* For Ehrlich’s fellow biologist Barry Commoner, the culprits were capitalism, colonialism and especially the US. The environmental crisis ‘wrenched open’ the brutality of racial competition for survival. Producing for the common good, not for private profit, would solve it.
[42]
Colonialism had caused the population explosion, Commoner claimed. Rich countries should now pay reparations for it.
[43]

Inside the conference, host Prime Minister Olof Palme also attacked the US, demanding the conference examine the environmental impact of the Vietnam War ‘ecoside’. Even so, the Nixon administration managed the conference with considerable skill. On the conference eve, the EPA announced its DDT ban, leaving other countries to play catch up. Shortly before it ended, President Nixon announced a $100 million fund to finance new environmental activities, while France and China came under attack for jointly opposing a resolution calling for a halt to nuclear testing. 

In her keynote address, Indira Gandhi blamed the profit motive for wrecking the environment and keeping people poor. The West’s affluence had been achieved at the price of the domination of other countries, the wealth of the few coming about ‘through sheer ruthlessness’. Modern man, she said, must re-establish an unbroken link with nature.
[44]
There were limits to how much should be done to protect the environment. India did not wish to impoverish the environment further, but could not forget its own people. ‘When men feel deprived, how can we speak about preserving animals?’
[45]

Barbara Ward, the conference’s other star, addressed delegates in her sunglasses; it was unsustainable if two thirds of humanity stayed poor so that one third could stay rich. Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank, claimed that the evidence was ‘overwhelming’ that a century of very rapid growth had contributed to a ‘monstrous assault on the quality of life in the developed [sic] countries’.
[46]

China, making its first appearance at a major international conference since taking its seat at the UN, used the conference to attack imperialism and colonialism. It tried to turn the proposed Preamble to the Declaration on the Human Environment into a Maoist diatribe. The environment had been endangered by ‘plunder, aggression and war by colonialists, imperialists and neo-colonialists’. Theories of over-population were attacked along classic Marxist lines (‘the notorious Malthusian theory is absurd in theory and groundless in fact’).
[47]

As the conference drew to a close, it was touch-and-go whether it would end in failure. Exhausted delegates haggled about the final wording of a draft declaration and argued what had been achieved during the eleven days of the conference. Strong had to deal with the prospect of a walk-out by the Chinese, as Beijing hadn’t instructed them how to vote on the final declaration. He astutely suggested that instead of leaving the room, they should just stand behind their seats. That way, they’d neither vote, nor abstain, but be reported as present. It enabled the conference chairman to declare the resolution passed by consensus.

‘What came out of Stockholm is about what we expected – not much,’ said Brazil’s Carlos Calero Rodrigues.
[48]
In his speech to the conference, Strong admitted that the draft declaration was less than the inspirational and comprehensive code of international environmental conduct that was needed. It was, he claimed, an indispensable beginning.
[49]

The Stockholm declaration enshrined the Founex contradiction, that the economic development of advanced nations caused environmental problems; in developing countries, the same process reduced them. It then went on to set out twenty-six principles. These included a condemnation of apartheid and all foreign and colonial domination (principle one); that natural resources should be subject to ‘careful planning or management’ (2); the benefits from finite resources should be shared by all mankind (5); the need for the transfer of ‘substantial’ financial and technological aid to developing nations (9); that schools and the mass media should disseminate information on the environment (19); and that international policy should be decided cooperatively by all countries ‘on an equal footing’ (24), i.e., making it more difficult for the West to impose its environmental priorities on the rest of the world.
[50]

The conference also agreed nearly a hundred recommendations ranging from the need for genetic cataloguing to measuring and limiting noise emissions. These included half a page of recommendations concerning the atmosphere. Governments should be ‘mindful’ of activities in which there is appreciable risk of effects on climate. Ten baseline stations should be established in remote areas to monitor changes in the atmosphere that might cause climatic changes. The World Meteorological Organisation should continue to carry out its Global Atmospheric Research Programme to understand whether the causes of climatic changes were natural or the result of man’s activities.
[51]

Compared to the half page given to global warming, the oceans and marine pollution took four and a half pages. Lured by the prospect of near limitless supplies of minerals on and beneath the seabed, in the first decade after Stockholm, the environmental and developing world agenda focused on the oceans. Attention only switched to the atmosphere and global warming from the mid-1980s. 

The G77 backed Kenya’s bid to host the new UN Environment Program based in Nairobi and Strong became its first head. Stockholm’s most important legacy was the twinning of global environmentalism with the Third World’s aid and development agenda as a way of managing their inherent contradictions. 

The first environmental wave had risen with great suddenness and force. A decade separates
Silent Spring
and the Stockholm conference. Even more sudden was the speed of its apparent collapse.

When Barbara Ward died in 1981, obituarists ran out of superlatives, the
Guardian
calling her one of the most brilliant contributors to economic and political thought since the 1930s.
[52]
Her contribution to the forging of global environmentalism and her role at the world’s first conference on the environment barely rated a mention.

*  The encyclical also gave the Catholic Church’s sanction to the expropriation landed estates in the name of the ‘common good’ – a position espoused by Catholic distributists such as G.K. Chesterton earlier in the twentieth century. Ward, like Schumacher, was a successor to the distributists.

*  Ehrlich has a record of making predictions that turn out spectacularly wrong. In 1970 he said that if he was a gambler, he would take even money that England would not exist in the year 2000. Quoted in Julian L. Simon,
The Ultimate Resource
(1981), p. 101.