International Organizations and Environmental Protection: Conservation and Globalization in the Twentieth Century

By Wolfram Kaiser

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781785333637

Book preview

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