Stockholm: The Clean (But Impossible) Dream

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Stockholm: The Clean (But Impossible) DreamAuthor(s): Edward P. MorganSource: Foreign Policy, No. 8 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 149-155Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLCStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1147821 .

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STOCKHOLM: THE CLEAN (BUT IMPOSSIBLE) DREAM

by Edward P. Morgan

The day after President Nixon announced the mining of Haiphong harbor in a major escalation of the war against North Vietnam on May 8, a shaken, angry government official- a senior civil servant-told a friend he feared the moves would doom not only the Moscow summit but also the Stockholm conference.

"How can we now go to the United Nations conference on the human environment," he asked in anguish, "and conduct civil dialogues with other nations under these circumstances?"

Astonishing observers as well as some participants, both Moscow and Stockholm sur- vived and indeed were hailed as successes. However, the U.N. conference contained so many explosive ingredients besides Vietnam that skeptics half expected Stockholm to self- destruct, almost up to the closing gavel. The inventory of divisiveness was long. Protesting the non-eligibility of East Germany, the Soviet Union was boycotting the conference. China, attending her first world gathering since en- tering the U.N., was a troubling unknown quantity. The rest of Africa was closing on South Africa over apartheid. France would certainly be challenged on impending nuclear tests in the Pacific. India was distressed (and Brazil delighted) that population was not on the formal agenda. A convention on ocean dumping, originally posed as the Convention's most likely tangible accomplishment, had been sidetracked, partly by a row over offshore limits of national sovereignty. A major con- frontation loomed between the have and have-not nations over the responsibility and cost of preserving the global environment. And small armies of environmental activists, pacifists and miscellaneous malcontents were

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expected to lay siege to the proceedings. Yet this jagged range of impediments was so

well surmounted in two weeks of lengthy sessions by delegates of 114 nations that the conference's chief architect, Canada's Maurice Strong, jubilantly predicted that the work started at Stockholm should now help bring "dynamic harmony" to all life on earth, and nobody wanted to dispute him.

What happened? Instead of the fractious hordes feared, the protesters came in orderly handfuls, wearing their idealism like a badge. Softening the abrasive differences between the developed and developing nations was the mutual recognition that the world was in fact a neighborhood which everybody bore some responsibility to tidy up and preserve.

The official American contribution to this inspiration was singularly and painfully lack- ing. There was--or might have been-oppor- tunity for the world's richest nation to lead the way in shaping this new struggle. But the Nixon Administration studiously shunned the challenge. It was neither in the mood nor position to take it up.

Vietnam put the United States on the defensive at the outset. The issue was inescap- able. But when it surfaced, in the plenary session address by the head of the host government, Sweden's Prime Minister Olof Palme, the White House reacted as if one of the Ber- rigan brothers had stink-bombed a Billy Graham service in the East Room. The Ad- ministration seems utterly unable or unwilling to grasp how deeply Vietnam has damaged the American image abroad.

The huge American entourage, led by Rus- sell Train, head of the President's Council on Environmental Quality, might have borne this cross more lightly if the White House had not insisted on weighing it down with the in- vective of reprisal. Reportedly, Train and his urbane vice chairman, the State Department's Christian A. Herter, Jr., opted to ignore Prime Minister Palme's allusion to the "outrage" of bombing and ecological warfare.

But the White House had other ideas. "Nix-

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Morgan

on hates Palme," one delegation source said flatly. Sweden had long provoked the Presi- dent for tilting her neutrality, in his view, to- ward Hanoi, and welcoming American desert- ers and draft dodgers as well. So Train was ordered to issue a scathing attack on Palme's "gratuitous politicizing" of the U.N. meeting. Nixon's Law

That unbending watchman of the Nixon inner circle, John Ehrlichman, had been pres- ent when Palme spoke. Maybe he nudged the President to react, but Mr. Nixon, who doesn't suffer opposition gracefully, hardly needed a nudge. A State Department spokesman de- nounced Sweden before Train released his statement to the press. Then the Swedish Am- bassador in Washington was called in for a blistering dressing down. The circle of vicious- ness was completed when the Swedish Foreign Office read the riot act to Ambassador Holland for U.S. hypersensitivity to Palme's remarks.

So, while the Stockholm sessions were not sunk by Vietnam, the miasma from the war corroded the opportunities for U.S. states- manship. It was applied in the negative, mid- way in the conference, when China attacked, tracing American "imperialism" and "aggression" back to World War II, climaxed now in "barbarous atrocities" and "unprecedented and serious destruction of the human environment" in Indochina. The United States said nothing for more than 48 hours. Then Train delivered the answer in less than 60 seconds, urging the conference to shun "extraneous" matters and get on with its environmental tasks.

The contrasts between the reactions to Swe- den and China inspired the unofficial promul- gation of Nixon's Law: the intensity of protest is in inverse ratio to the importance of the deliverer of the outrage protested.

The agenda kept the United States on the defensive. The LDC'S (less developed countries) were far more tractable, far less suspicious than many of the DC'S (developed countries) had feared, thanks to the tireless

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persuasiveness of Maurice Strong, who had visited nearly every participating nation and several non-participants, some repeatedly, months before the conference began. But the LDC's had a price for their environmental cooperation. As they industrialized, it would cost them more to add anti-pollution equip- ment to their plants. For this they wanted outside financial help-labeled in dazzling bureaucratese as "additionality." Also, they argued, if their export trade suffered because their products did not meet environmental standards of a developed country, the DC'S should pay an "indemnity."

The United States, unsuccessfully, opposed both these provisos, maintaining they were wrong in principle and would be a "disincen- tive to environmental responsibility." At first glance, the Americans appeared on firm ground. Imagine, a delegation briefer said, how Congress would vote if Peru claimed damages for a drop in her lead exports to the U.S. because we had banned leaded gasoline.

Nevertheless, the Americans were not on very solid ground. Delegation spokesmen clung to the hard White House line that nothing the United States was committing herself to at Stockholm required her to "change aid policies or increase the amounts thereof." Given drastic congressional mauling of the foreign aid program and cuts even in U.S. contributions to the U.N., this might be smart short-term politics, but it intensified the image of the richest nation in the world in a posture more miserly than magnanimous.

One of the conference's oddest notes, in a way, was struck by its modest ovation for Robert Strange McNamara, an architect of the escalation in Vietnam. He appeared, of course, as president of the World Bank and though he used statistics he touched the sen- sitivities of the LDC's by declaring that three- quarters of the human race are living at levels of deprivation "that simply cannot be recon- ciled with any rational definition of human decency." He scolded the LDC'S for "not moving decisively enough to reduce the severe so-

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Morgan

cial and economic inequities among their own peoples." But he scored the rich countries for "not moving decisively enough to reduce the gross imbalance between their own opulence and the penury of the less-privileged nations."

It was a speech one would have wished a President of the United States could give. But the pragmatic Richard Nixon was not disposed to assert such leadership. The honors for nourishing the human spirit were left not for an American but for India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to collect. She touched the plight of common people with the grace of understanding when she asked, "How can we speak to those who live in villages and in slums about keeping the oceans, the rivers and the air clean when their own lives are contamina- ted at the source? ... People who are at cross purposes with nature are cynical about man- kind and ill-at-ease with themselves." She got a standing ovation.

Nixon, cynical? He made it hard for many not to think so. Ehrlichman said privately the President "didn't give a damn" about the international impact of the conference because it would be minimal but he wasn't about to alienate the growing domestic constituency of conservationists. Asked about reports that Ehrlichman was riding the delegation hard, one U.S. source said, "yes, but he's not interested in substance. He's interested in arrange- ments for the Republican fat cats aboard."

There were several of these, on a delegation that numbered not including wives, children or Stockholm embassy personnel, upwards of 125-though only some 60 were "accredited." Given such a delegate explosion, hassles over conference passes, protocol and transport were inevitable. Such hangups drew Ehrlich- man's ire but, ironically, they were largely caused by White House insistence on such an unwieldy delegation in the first place.

Pettiness, however, did not prevent important American contributions to success at Stockholm. Key delegates were determined not to see two years of hard preliminary work by the United States and Sweden (who invented

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the conference idea) go down the drain in a squall of bickering. Train, Herter, William Ruckelshaus, head of the Environmental Pro- tection Agency, Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, such experts as geophysicist Gordon J. F. MacDonald (who negotiated the environmental pact with Russia), Robert White, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and others spent countless hours seeking compromise.

If the Americans had credibility trouble, the Chinese had more. They came determined in Russia's absence to seize the leadership of the Third World and simultaneously protect their status as a growing nuclear power. These goals, in effect, cancelled each other out. China sounded as if only she could justify nuclear testing because of the evil designs of the "superpowers" (the United States and the U.S.S.R.). This didn't wash, and in the end China lost all her Third World support, including Tanzania. At a final session of the ad hoc committee on a declaration of man's environmental rights and responsibilities, which lasted until 5 A.M. of the day of adjournment, the Chinese were bleakly isolated. One of Secretary General Strong's U.N. aides, a Latin American, approached them and said, "with ail the Chinese wisdom and experience, perhaps you could clarify what you want." A Chinese delegate replied, "Yes, China has wisdom but we are inexperienced in these matters." What China wanted was a declaration blaming all the world's ills on imperialism and the nuclear superpowers and promising the solution lay in Marxism as taught by Chair- man Mao. They lost, thoroughly. Yet when the conference adopted a reasonably balanced declaration by acclamation, the Chinese reg- istered objections but they did not walk out.

Minuses and Pluses

The conference fell short in many areas. The International Whaling Commission ar- rogantly rejected its request for a 10-year mor- atorium on the commercial killing of whales. France defied a demand to halt nuclear testing

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in the Pacific. There was little discussion of one of the world's most critical problems, the supply of energy. The population crisis was dealt with only tangentially. And the seed money proposed for the U.N. Environmental Council, to be formed when the General As- sembly approves the Stockholm proceedings, is pathetically small-$100 million for five years. President Nixon suggested the U.S. share be 40 percent of that.

Despite these depressing negatives, Stock- holm was a plus, even an inspiring plus. There had to be an international beginning in con- fronting the damage man was doing to the only known habitable planet in the solar sys- tem, and Stockholm was it.

Perhaps its most important achievement was the declaration that nations must assume responsibility for pollution damaging other states. Strong sees this as the beginning of international law, which says, in effect, pollution traveling from one country to another is an "invasion," making the offender guilty of aggression.

Pressure at Stockholm to ban using the seas as a cesspool may hasten passage of an ocean dumping convention at a November conference in Britain. Measures were taken to tight- en international law on oil pollution at sea. An "earthwatch" will be mounted, not only to detect pollution, but to exchange data on the preservation of ecosystems-forests, river basins, wetlands. Genetic banks will be estab- lished to conserve plant and animal species threatened with extinction. And, possibly most significant in the long range, a spirit developed at Stockholm in which rich nations and poor alike said, now that we know the magnitude and complexities of the problem as never before, let's get on with solutions.

Before the conference convened, when Soviet opposition seemed likely to wreck it in advance, Maurice Strong, who is expected to head the U.N. Council, said: "When you see man take a step on the moon, and you see Nixon take a step on the Great Wall of China, you know this is the era of the impossible."

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Documents

Stockholm: The Clean (But Impossible) Dream