International Organizations and Environmental Protection

Conservation and Globalization in the Twentieth Century

Wolfram Kaiser, Jan-Henrik Meyer, Wolfram Kaiser, Jan-Henrik Meyer

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785333637
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Pollution, resource depletion, habitat management, and climate change are all issues that necessarily transcend national boundaries. Accordingly, they and other environmental concerns have been a particular focus for international organizations from before the First World War to the present day. This volume is the first to comprehensively explore the environmental activities of professional communities, NGOs, regional bodies, the United Nations, and other international organizations during the twentieth century. It follows their efforts to shape debates about environmental degradation, develop binding intergovernmental commitments, and—following the seminal 1972 Conference on the Human Environment—implement and enforce actual international policies.

CHAPTER 1

From Nature to Environment

International Organizations and Environmental Protection before Stockholm

Jan-Henrik Meyer

International political efforts to deal with what we consider environmental issues today began in the early years of the twentieth century – a period commonly considered to be one of extensive transnational exchange among scientists and activists, of internationalism and early forms of globalization.¹ It was also a period of growing awareness, in Europe and North America, of the impact that modern humanity, equipped with the new technology of the age of steam, had on nature, notably on its animal species. Two examples loomed large in the contemporary debate: the mass killing of the vast herds of the American bison and the extinction of the once seemingly indestructible American passenger pigeon, with the last specimen dying in a zoo in Cincinnati in 1914.² The period before the First World War was also characterized by European colonial rule over large swathes of the world, including regions featuring what many contemporaries (often erroneously) considered to be pristine, Eden-like places of nature so far untouched by man.³ These perceptions influenced which kinds of natural environments first made it onto the international agenda.

To discuss the preservation of animal species, the British Foreign Office invited representatives of the colonial powers of Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the Congo Free State (then in the private possession of the Belgian King Leopold) to the International Conference on the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa held in London from 24 April to 19 May 1900. Its purpose was to address a problem that is still making news today: the protection of African ‘charismatic megafauna’ including lions or elephants.⁴ African elephants were hunted for ivory that was traded across colonial borders throughout the continent. Harvesting and selling ivory was a sizeable industry that left its mark on elephant populations across different African colonies already in the nineteenth century.⁵ At a time when big game hunting was a prestigious sport among European and American elites, it was not only colonial officers who worried about the survival of their most favoured game species, but also upper-class hunters, naturalists and zoologists in the metropolis.⁶

Initially British and German colonial authorities in Africa had developed the idea of holding such an international conference. They realized that their own efforts at preservation and introducing European-style ‘ethics’ into African hunting were doomed to fail as long as they could not get the other colonial powers on board. Hence, conference participants discussed proposals for common rules aiming both at preservation and conservation. They included trade restrictions, such as a minimum weight of elephant tusks for export to protect immature animals, establishing reserves and closed seasons, and licences both for European and African hunters. In the spirit of colonialism, access by indigenous people to ammunition would be restricted. The negotiating parties severely watered down the proposals. The convention was never ratified by all its signatories and never entered into force. Nonetheless, the event itself and the convention are still widely considered an important precedent for international environmental rule making,⁷ and they served as a model for regulation in other parts of the world, such as in British Malaya.⁸

A second major international event actually led to the foundation of the first international organization (IO) dealing with environmental protection. The Weltnaturschutzkonferenz, or ‘Conference for the International Protection of Nature’, took place thirteen years after the London conference, in November 1913 in Bern, the capital of landlocked Switzerland. The Swiss government supported the event as part of its internationally oriented foreign policy that had contributed to facilitating international cooperation across different sectors, such as in railway transportation.⁹

Nearly sixty years elapsed between the Conference for the International Protection of Nature in Bern and the Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, when the United Nations (UN) decided to establish its own environmental programme, commonly known by its acronym UNEP, as a separate UN organization located in Nairobi, Kenya. This chapter traces international debates about and the institutionalization of environmental protection beyond the national level during this period in order to provide background and context for the remaining chapters in this book that focus on the period around and beyond the Stockholm Conference.¹⁰ It does so chronologically, focusing especially on the issues that IOs decided to take up and place on the political agenda; the solutions they promoted, notably with a view to establishing new institutions; and the actors who pushed for environmental action.

Between the conference in Bern in 1913 and the 1972 Stockholm Conference, the way in which a variety of actors, from governments to IOs, scientists as well as nationally based non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and newly created international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) understood, talked about and framed environmental issues changed quite fundamentally. This changing language of environmental protection is crucially important for understanding the transformation of IOs and environmental protection during the roughly sixty years until 1972.

The Language of the Environment

The term ‘environment’ as a political concept, relating to both a bounded set of problems and the policies and measures developed to resolve these problems, is a rather recent arrival to modern politics. For almost the entire period until 1972, no one understood or called these problems ‘environmental’. A variety of actors treated them as problems of protecting animals and animal species or, more generally, nature and natural beauty, or they conceived of them as issues of pollution, waste or public health. While some of these issues seemed related, they were not commonly considered to be part of one global, comprehensive problem.

Ecological thinking, which spread among biologists during the postwar period, acted as a catalyst in this respect. Ecological ideas encouraged thinking in large systems, and the conception of the environment as global in scope.¹¹ Ecology’s basic assumption was – and is – that all life on this planet is interrelated in a complex manner.¹² All substances brought into the system of life – including the toxic ones – do not simply decompose, dissolve and disappear, as many scientists and policy makers routinely assumed, for instance, when they authorized the dumping of nuclear waste at sea.¹³ Rachel Carson’s scathing critique of the reckless use of pesticides such as DDT in her 1962 book Silent Spring did not simply scandalize these practices, but by highlighting their – often unintended – environmental consequences, she popularized some of the central insights of ecology.¹⁴ These tenets included, as Barry Commoner famously put them in 1971, ‘everything is connected to everything else’ and ‘everything needs to go somewhere’.¹⁵ Indeed, DDT – as well as heavy metals or nuclear isotopes – accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals, and came back with unforeseen and harmful side-effects, such as disturbing the buildup of birds’ eggshells. Increasingly, the impact of new technology was understood as leading to new risks to human health and ultimately to human survival. In the course of the 1960s, this ecological thinking progressively turned political.¹⁶

The ‘environment’ became a hallmark term and was increasingly used to signify the entire array of issues relating to humanity’s problematic relations with nature, including the older issues of nature conservation and animal protection, as well as the newer concerns about air, water and noise pollution and land use issues. Moreover, as scientists’ prestige and presence grew in nature protection NGOs, government administrations as well as the public in general, rational science supplanted aesthetics as the single legitimate criterion by which problems were to be judged and addressed. Solving these issues seemed urgent, given the apparent size and scope of the human impact on nature in an age of technology, prosperity and mass consumption. The environment was a political term right from the start. In an era of state activism, it seemed self-evident to scientists, governments and the nascent environmental movement that environmental protection was to be achieved by collective, political means.¹⁷

From the late 1960s onwards, policy makers introduced measures that were explicitly called environmental policies, first in Sweden¹⁸ and the United States,¹⁹ and then more widely, even east of the Iron Curtain.²⁰ The environment became a category of local, national and international practice. The term was routinely translated into different languages, as states introduced environmental policies. For instance, in the case of Germany, the responsible minister literally translated the American terminology of environmental protection into Umweltschutz.²¹

Views and priorities concerning their goals and preferred instruments differed between the various groups and NGOs that emerged since the late nineteenth century in Europe and North America to promote environmental issues. This is reflected in the terminological distinction between preservation, conservation and protection, and the movements they represented. Preservation aimed at keeping scenic landscapes, places and wild animals in as much of a natural state as possible, protecting them against destructive human intervention. Preservationists – who played an important role in setting up national parks – admired nature primarily for its beauty. Next to aesthetics, moral and recreational values played an important role.²²

Conversely, conservationists had a more utilitarian approach to nature. Their goal was to prevent wasteful exploitation of nature and to support the rational use and management of nature and natural resources, for example through scientific forest management or the multifunctional use of watercourses.²³ Conservation’s central standards of judgement were utility and science. Conservationist ideas were politically very influential, with many conservationists working for the U.S. government until the 1960s, for example. The main bone of contention between both camps was dam building, which seemed a rational practice to conservationists, to harness the forces of water for electricity generation, flood prevention and providing cities with clean fresh water. However, preservationists opposed the flooding of beautiful river gorges as the home and breeding grounds of fish and pristine wildlife.²⁴

In Europe, this ideal-typical juxtaposition seemed less relevant than in the U.S. Moreover, the usage of these concepts varied across different languages. What Europeans mostly called nature protection or even nature conservation (e.g. Naturschutz, protection de la nature) was closer to the preservation camp. During the first six decades of the twentieth century, aesthetic motivations remained very important along with patriotic, touristic and scientific ones.²⁵

The struggle over meaning was also reflected in the naming of international bodies and programmes. Originally, upon its creation in 1948, the postwar IO dealing with nature was called the International Union for the Protection of Nature (IUPN). During the course of the 1950s, conservationists and ecologists alike criticized protection as erroneously suggesting ‘a more limited and perhaps more defensive or sentimental image’ of their organization’s work.²⁶ Hence, in 1956, the IUPN was renamed the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN).²⁷ Nevertheless, protection was still the term of choice to describe the new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) founded by the Nixon administration in the United States in December 1970 ‘to protect and safeguard public health and the environment’.²⁸

The most common current usage in both environmental politics and environmental history is to speak of nature conservation or nature protection when referring more narrowly to nature,...