It is a sad
reflection, argues a prominent environmentalist, that many people would be more
concerned "if the Mona Lisa were slashed to piece by a madman" than
by "the disappearance of certain animal and plant species". No, it is not David
Attenborough speaking to
the Davos assembly in 2019. It is the Secretary-General of the International
Union for the Protection of Nature addressing a UNESCO conference on that
subject 70 years ago, in August 1949. The world was still struggling to repair
the devastation of the Second World War, while simultaneously plunging into a
new cold war of equally global dimensions. But the outline if not the detail of
the human threat to our environment was
already well understood, and spelt out
at this conference (the International Technical Conference on the Protection of
Nature) and at a parallel one held at the same time -- the UN Scientific
Conference for the Conservation and Utilization of Resources.
It
is often
said these days that we have wasted some thirty years since the end of the cold
war when the door opened for much more energetic measures to tackle climate
change and avert environmental disaster. Or the time frame is pushed further
back to 1972 when the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment produced
its wide-ranging 26-point Declaration --
the last point, we should notice, was that "weapons of mass destruction
must be eliminated". But it is worth going back even further to the 1949
conferences which are now largely forgotten or dismissed in a few lines, (with
the notable exception of the journalist and UN historian Linda Melvern whose
book The Ultimate Crime: Who Betrayed the
UN and Why, 1995, still stands on its own). Could the understanding
expressed then of the human potential to wreck our own environment have been
taken further, and why did this not happen? Was it just too early to grasp the
dimensions of the problem -- and some aspects of it still lay in the future
anyway (the sources of greenhouse gases were fewer and, to give an obvious
example, there were no plastic bags!) Was it our propensity to look on the
bright side, to insist on human perfectibility and believe that technical solutions
can always be found? Or was it that the need for post-war reconstruction and to
tackle the immediate challenges of poverty and under-development took precedence? All
three factors were in play, but we should
not overlook the wider context of a renewed arms race, the diversion of
peaceful technological research into military paths, and the intrusion of cold
war politics into the scientific community.
One
of the
most outspoken voices at both conferences was the US conservationist Henry
Fairfield Osborn, Jr, who had just published Our Plundered Planet (1948),
a fierce critique of humanity’s poor stewardship of the earth’s resources.
In that book he had warned that "parts of the earth, once living and
productive, have [already] died at the hand of man. Others are now dying".
The greatest danger, he told the UNESCO conference, was that technological
progress had blinded human eyes to our "essential dependence upon
nature". The British delegate was also outspoken: If humanity is to
survive, he said, it must "live in harmony with the human principles of
ecology. Otherwise the species will die out". And a UN official, the
senior economist Alfred Van Tassel, was a driving force behind the parallel
Conservation conference, in which seven hundred international scientists
discussed deforestation and its effects on drainage and soil erosion, the
problems involved with the control of water pollution, the possibilities of
hydro-power and the conservation of marine life, and proposed ways of achieving
more sustainable and equitable growth.
Yet
Van Tassel
soon fell foul of the McCarthyite purge along with many other UN officials accused
of usually imaginary connection with communism. UNESCO itself became a target
of hostility from the American Right, especially for its statements on peace,
race and human rights, and had to proceed with caution. And the 1949
conferences were boycotted by the Soviet bloc -- the bloc would also stay away
from the 1972 Stockholm conference. The malign doctrines of cold war crippled
international cooperation 70 years ago: it must not happen again.
|