The Age of Global Warming: A History

by Rupert Darwall

  He believed the best form of conflict resolution was conflict avoidance. ‘I had learned never to confront but to co-opt, never to bully but to equivocate, and never to yield ... The oblique approach can often be the most direct one.’[10] Strong was the right man for the job, as the Stockholm environment conference was threatened by two sets of global divisions, between East and West and between North and South. Strong could not overcome the former. If East Germany was invited, the US and West Germany wouldn’t attend. If East Germany wasn’t invited, the Soviet Union and its main Warsaw Pact allies wouldn’t show up, which is what happened. Nonetheless, Strong insisted on having a Soviet on his staff (he ended up with two) and at the conference itself he met the Soviet ambassador to Sweden almost daily to brief him on the conference.

  The division between North and South was a bigger threat. In March 1971, Strong received a signal from Yugoslavia of a potential boycott by developing countries. It galvanised him. He decided he had to win over India and Brazil as the most important members of the G77. In June he went to New Delhi hoping to arrange a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. It was a long shot as rising tension with Pakistan would lead to war six months later. He got his meeting and persuaded Mrs Gandhi to deliver the keynote address to the conference.

  Brazil felt its sovereignty threatened by environmentalists claiming the Amazon as a global preserve. Although Strong started a dialogue with the Brazilian government, it continued to lobby the rest of the G77 to back its hard line text at the UN emphasising national sovereignty, more additional aid and the curtailment of Strong’s authority. A Swedish text supportive of Strong was adopted by a large majority while Brazil’s position received the support of a smaller majority (the US and the UK voting against).

  A split was averted due to Strong’s recognition that bridging the divide required more than diplomatic skill. It needed something he did not possess: the intellectual creativity to devise a formula that would turn the conflict between the North’s environmentalism and the South’s ambitions for economic development into a new synthesis. Barbara Ward was the person he needed.

  Although she did not have the instant fame Carson experienced with Silent Spring, it could be said that of the two, Ward’s contribution was the more important. Few today take seriously the science in Silent Spring but Ward’s concept of sustainable development has grown to be one of the dominant policy doctrines of our age.

  The New York Times described Ward as a ‘synthesiser and propagandist’.[11] She was much more than that. Perhaps the closest comparison is Harry Hopkins’ relationship with Churchill and FDR. Whereas Hopkins lived and worked in the White House, Ward’s arena was global, projecting her ideas through the numerous political leaders who trusted her. At a White House meeting between the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Lyndon Johnson in February 1968, Johnson gave Wilson a note on the economic situation. Two and half pages of quarto, single spacing. ‘It was drafted in terms which would appeal to him – the pure Roosevelt approach to the dangers of another 1931,’ Wilson recalled. ‘For the rest, I did not agree with the analysis. But, I said, I could trace a feminine hand in its drafting, English at that. He roared with laughter. No one knowing Washington would underrate the importance nor fail to recognise the handiwork of Barbara Ward.’[12]

  Ward took her father’s Quaker earnestness to improve the world and her Roman Catholicism from her mother. After graduating from Oxford, she lectured extensively and wrote her first book at the age of twenty-four. The next year she became assistant editor of the Economist, becoming its foreign editor four years later. She used to write the Economist leaders from her bed without effort or correction, what she called her ‘fatal facility’.

  Such was her remarkable talent as a speaker and broadcaster that in 1943 the British government sent her to the United States to win support for Britain’s war effort. She stayed five months, lunching with Eleanor Roosevelt, dining with Vice President Wallace and amassing a circle of American admirers. In the 1945 election, she campaigned for Labour, escorting a young American naval officer, John F. Kennedy, whom Ward had come to know through his sister Kathleen. A speech she gave on full employment reduced the hard-bitten Ernest Bevin, Britain’s most powerful trade union leader, to tears.

  The next year she struck up a life-long friendship with J.K. Galbraith (a woman of rare and slender beauty, Galbraith recalled), who got her a post at Harvard’s department of economics. Later she was appointed Albert Schweitzer Professor at Columbia (Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York, was also one of her circle) and her work received substantial backing from the Carnegie Foundation. Friendship with Adlai Stevenson opened doors to the leading figures in the Kennedy administration. She became a confidante of Robert McNamara, with whom she retained a strong influence during his time as president of the World Bank. Although she found Kennedy a cool personality who always kept his distance, the same was not true of his successor.[13] Ward fascinated Johnson. Her books were the only ones he ever read, Johnson once said.[14] She contributed to his speeches, including the 1964 Great Society speech. Two days before leaving the White House, Johnson wrote to her: ‘Whatever mark we have made in these last five years clearly bears your stamp too.’[15]

  In the 1950s, she lived in Africa and was friends with the first generation of African leaders – Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda – whose economic policies helped ruin their countries. Visiting India in 1952, she met Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had better things to talk about than five-year plans, and met his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who became a life-long admirer, a relationship crucial in persuading Gandhi to come to Stockholm.[16]

  She lobbied the Second Vatican Council on Third World development. In 1967, Pope Paul VI established the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace, with Ward as one of its members. The encyclical, Populorum Progressio, ‘The Development of the Peoples’, with its criticism of ‘unbridled liberalism’, its call for ‘concerted planning’ and the creation of a ‘World Fund’ are evidence of Ward’s imprint.*[17] It’s no wonder that, for Strong, the prospect of working with Ward was ‘a dream come true’.[18]

  Like Strong, Ward believed world government was necessary and achievable. ‘We live physically and socially in a post-national order. But we still worship the “idols of the tribe,”’ she wrote in a 1973 paper for the Vatican.[19] The urgent economic problems of the day required policies which could only be achieved at a ‘planetary level’.[20] Underlying the debate on Third World development was the ethical issue of world distribution of income and resources, a debate sharpened because of the unsustainability of ‘the reckless economic expansion of the last three hundred years’.[21]

  The belief that without massive aid transfers, developing countries could not improve their living standards was central to Ward’s worldview.

  The market alone cannot begin to accomplish the scale of readjustment that will be needed once the concept of unlimitedly growing wealth, mediated to all by a ‘trickle down’ process, ceases to be a rational possibility for tomorrow’s world economy.[22]

  In an Economist article on the eve of the Stockholm conference, Ward argued that the pursuit of ‘destabilising growth’ was not the answer because it didn’t reduce the gap between the rich and poor nations. ‘It has no built-in tendency to redistribute the surpluses and tends on the contrary to skew still further the patterns of income it creates’ – a view that has not withstood the test of time in a new era grappling with the implications of China’s huge trade surpluses.[23]

  The Marshall Plan should be the model for the whole world, a case she made in 1957 from the same podium on the tenth anniversary of General Marshall’s speech, when she became the first woman to give the Harvard commencement address. Five years later in The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations, Ward argued that high income countries should allocate on
e per cent of their national income to aid programmes. Selected by the Book of the Month club, the New York Times called it ‘wise and inspiring’.

  It was imperative, Ward argued, to manage the future. Collectively, human beings must know where they’re going and what the world will look like in twenty years’ time, she said in her 1966 paper Space Ship Earth. ‘It is surely inconceivable that we should turn the whole human experiment over to forces of change which we can neither master nor even fully understand.’[24]

  Marx and Engels have been heavily criticised for claiming to have discovered the scientific laws that govern history. Forecasts of environmental doom also depend on a deterministic view of history, in particular that the values and state of human knowledge of future societies are knowable by the present. In doing so, they presume the social organisation of the anthill or the beehive and the curtailment of individual freedom and initiative – forces we can never fully understand or predict.

  Strong commissioned Ward and the microbiologist René Dubos to write a book summing up the ‘knowledge and opinions’ of leading experts Strong had selected on ‘the relationships between man and his natural habitat at a time when human activity is having profound effects upon the environment’.[25]

  Only One Earth couldn’t hide the divide between experts from First World and Third World. One from the former argued that societies should retreat from industrialisation to agriculture. Representatives from the Third World argued the opposite. Industrial development should have priority over worries about future environmental damage and ‘dreams of landscapes innocent of smokestacks’, as one of them put it.[26]

  Global warming made a somewhat tentative debut in 1972. Small changes in the planet’s balance of energy could change average temperatures by two degrees centigrade, ‘downwards, this is another ice age, upwards to an ice-free age. In either case, the effects are global and catastrophic’.[27] The greenhouse effect could mean that temperatures rise 0.5oC by the end of the century. But if developing countries consumed energy at levels in the developed world, might that risk temperatures rising uncomfortably close to the catastrophic two degree centigrade threshold?[28]

  At that stage, global warming was not considered the main threat to mankind’s survival. What was? ‘Pockets of urban degradation in affluent countries provide us with a foretaste of what could become man’s greatest environmental risk,’ the authors of Only One Earth wrote. ‘Spreading urban misery, city quarters of unrelieved ugliness and squalor in which imaginative life of young children may be as systematically starved as their bodies are undernourished.’[29] Catastrophe was just around the corner.

  Although living things had survived ice ages, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and typhoons of ‘our unstable planet’, they served as a warning. ‘Like the giant reptiles of the Jurassic ages, some species have gone the “way to dusty death.”’[30] What was the lesson of the extinction of the dinosaurs, given that it wasn’t caused by the human activities that were risking the planet’s viability? ‘A need for extreme caution, a sense of the appalling vastness and complexity of the forces that can be unleashed and of the egg-shell delicacy of the arrangements that can be upset,’ was the answer.[31]

  The more immediate eggshell was Third World hostility to the promotion of environmental concerns at the expense of their development agenda. Strong convened a group from the development movement in New York. He would assess progress with Ward at one-to-one dinner meetings, always over a bottle of Dom Perignon, her favourite champagne.[32] The message was simple and devastating. As expressed by Pakistan’s Mahub ul Haq, industrialisation had given developed countries disproportionate benefits and huge reservoirs of wealth, at the same time causing the very environmental problems that they were now asking developing countries to help resolve. Those who had created the mess in the first place should pay the costs of cleaning it up.[33] Strong realised more needed to be done to save the conference.

  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 5th 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]