International Environmental Policy: From the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century
496
International Environmental Policy: From the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century
496eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822378211 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/09/1996 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 496 |
| File size: | 710 KB |
About the Author
Lynton Keith Caldwell is Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science Emeritus and Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. The first edition of International Environmental Policy received the 1985 Harold and Margaret Sprout Award from the International Studies Association.
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International Environmental Policy
From the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century
By Lynton Keith Caldwell
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1996 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7821-1
CHAPTER 1
Comprehending the Environment
Before there could be an international environmental policy, there had to be nation-states and a better understanding of the relationships between human society and the planetary environment. Comprehension of an environment that interacts with the behavior of people and nations took shape slowly over many decades and centuries. Major advances in science and science-based technology were necessary before the human environment could be realistically defined and comprehended. There are still many people who not only fail to comprehend the significance of the environment but also deny that it has significance beyond its utility to serve humankind's material needs. Nevertheless, there is sufficient awareness of the importance of the environment to human life in all respects, including our ethical and spiritual values, that governments have begun to develop, however imperfectly, laws and institutions for safeguarding its viability and hence protecting and enhancing human life itself.
Humanity lives in two realities. The abiding reality is that of the earth—the planet—independent of man and his works; the other reality—the transient reality—is that of the world, which is a creation of the human mind. The earth and its biosphere form a grand synthesis of complex interactive systems within systems, organic and inorganic, animate and inanimate. The world is the way humanity understands and has organized its occupancy of the earth: an expression of imagination and purpose materialized through exploration, invention, labor, and violence. Oceans, islands, species, and ecosystems are integral parts of the earth, but the world is not integrated—its cultures and their values do not comprise a unity. All living people may be of one species, but their cultures are diverse. Physically, humans belong to the earth, yet intellectually they may transcend it—a dangerous liberty when dissociated from regard for the necessities of life on earth. It is an arrogant conceit that whatever we can imagine, we can one day do.
The so-called environmental crisis of the modern world derives from this physical and intellectual duality. Unlike the environmental disasters encountered by prehistoric and primitive people (e.g., ice ages), the modern crisis is largely man-made—a consequence of the failure of human insight and ingenuity to foresee and prevent the ill effects of human purpose and action. Yet this shortcoming of perception does not appear to be inherent in human mentality; more likely, it is evidence of unsubstantiated assumptions and beliefs in human culture. Some individuals have been able to foresee and forebear. The remedy for humanity's failure to assess the needs for continued life on earth lies in the exercise of the human capacity to observe, to learn, and to apply, with action and restraint appropriate to the circumstances.
The constructive achievements of civilization have demonstrated humankind's ability to learn from experience. The environmental movement described in this book is, from one viewpoint, a history of such social learning—a process joining experience, information, interpretation, communication, and action. Learning occurs when there is congruence between what is believed in the mind and what actually happens on earth. People may recognize the danger to their own futures in soil erosion, deforestation, species extinction, and environmental pollution when "seeing is believing." When they do not see, they may not believe. Yet people nonetheless do believe things that the experience of life on earth does not confirm; perception may be "virtual reality."
Humanity's environmental relationships thus comprise a profound problem in human psychology. The problem, in essence, is the reconciliation of the human view of life on earth, expressed through culture, with nature's ultimate ground rules for continuing existence. It has been a problem addressed by anthropologists, behavioral scientists, philosophers, and theologians. It has now also become a problem for national policymakers, educators, and politicians. These political efforts to restrain and redirect human behavior toward a continuing coexistence with the rest of the biosphere provide the subject matter of this book. It is, in effect, a study in the history of social learning.
The growth of the environmental movement to international and global proportions has been a historical development, which contemporaries cannot easily evaluate. The development has been without clear precedent—but with antecedents, as are recounted in the chapters to follow. Understood in its full context, it may be seen by subsequent generations as a major change of state in human affairs—an awakening of modern society to a new awareness of the human predicament on earth.
Science has played an indispensable role in this enlarging of perception. The environmental movement has itself been powerfully affected by the consequences of science misused to the detriment of the living world, and even more importantly by what advancing science is revealing about the structure and processes of nature. These two effects of science upon society explain the emphasis throughout this book on the organization and undertaking of environment-related scientific inquiry. Traditional society could rely upon experience for policy guidance to a degree wholly unsafe today. It may be that most of humankind neither comprehends nor trusts science. Nevertheless, its findings and technological applications indirectly as well as directly permeate modern culture. Science clearly influences the policies of governments and international agreements. Its ability to produce substances and effects previously unknown on earth means that policy must now anticipate experience.
This need to foresee the probable consequences of human activities has generated new techniques for monitoring environmental change and for assessing the impact of present and proposed actions upon the natural and social (i.e., cultural) environment. Comparable analytic techniques have been developed for innovations directly affecting health and safety. In addition, an "earth-watch" has necessitated the formation of new linkages and relationships among scientific associations, national governments, and international and nongovernmental organizations. Few people, including scientists, are aware of the extent, diversity, and complexity of the emergent environmental science, as it is addressed especially through the International Council of Scientific Unions and the United Nations specialized agencies. In its degree of scope and complexity this global network of scientific investigation is something new in the world. There is little reason to doubt that it will continue to affect the future of international environmental policy. However, before describing the emergence of the environment as an issue for public policy, it is necessary to take a closer look at the term "environment" and its implications.
The Meaning of "Environment"
As commonly used, "environment" usually means surroundings. In fact, the term is more complex. In one of the better dictionary definitions, "environment" is "whatever encompasses; specifically the external and internal conditions affecting the existence, growth, and welfare of organisms." Thus "environment" includes both that which environs and whatever is environed—in this book more precisely the living world or biosphere including the human species. Thus "environment" most accurately denotes the relationship between the environing and the environed. The more we learn about environmental relationships, the more complex and numerous they appear. The entities or forces that comprise an external environment do so only in relation to other entities and the forces on which they impact. Objects "out there" are environment only in relation to whatever they surround or environ.
A French physiologist, Claude Bernard, recognized the complex relational character of environment a century and a half ago when he distinguished the milieu exterieur outside the human body from the milieu interieur comprising the body and its interior organs. The human body, and all living things, are incontinuing interaction with this exterior environment, which conditions their existence but which to some extent they modify. Indeed, James E. Lovelock in his book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979) develops a hypothesis that the advent of life on earth has in fact modified the physical attributes of the planet, making it more hospitable for life. Clearly, "environment" should not be understood as "just those things out there" but the interactive totality that comprises the planet, its biosphere, the individual species and organisms that live in it, and the human habitat and infrastructure.
For millennia humans took their environmental relationships for granted, adapting to external change when necessary. The "discovery" of the planet and the envelope of life that surrounds it occurred in relatively recent times, notably through advances in technologies of measurement, navigation, and observation. These developments permitted the voyages of exploration and discovery undertaken by Western Europeans and contributed to the advancement of sciences descriptive of the earth. And so began the conscious effort of humans to understand their environment and very often to modify or attempt to modify it to suit human purposes. But comprehension of the environment is still incomplete. Modern society has not yet learned how to achieve a sustainable relationship with its external environment.
Discovering the Biosphere
The roughly five hundred years between the European discovery of America in 1492 and the landing of the Apollo XI astronauts on the moon will surely appear in retrospect as a distinct and decisive era in the history of man and the earth. In our times, this half-millennium is called modern—whatever name future eras may give it. The earth can never again be what it was when the era began, nor can prospects for the era to come be forecast by precedents that have given reliable predictions in the past. Nevertheless, cause-effect circumstances that have occurred in the past may recur in the future. To this extent and in a limited way history may be instructive.
"In the twentieth century, man, for the first time in the history of the Earth, knew and embraced the whole biosphere, completing the geographic map of the planet Earth, and colonized its whole surface. Mankind became a single totality in the life of the Earth." Thus the Russian scientist V. I. Vernadsky in 1938 summarized the end of a process of discovery that began at least five thousand years earlier when humans began to leave behind records of their impressions and descriptions of the natural world.
At the beginning of modern times, large areas of the world had no permanent human settlements. The major areas of human habitation were isolated and had developed distinctive cultures. Farming and herding relied largely upon the behavior of natural systems, modified only marginally by public works for water supply, flood control, and irrigation. Today large urban concentrations are absolutely dependent for survival on the continuous operation of artificial systems. Without a steady flow of electricity and fossil fuels, millions of present-day people could not exist. As the human population has grown, the world's peoples have become increasingly homogenized physically and culturally. Nearly all major "premodern" cultures have been extinguished or acculturated by the dominant civilization that we call "modern."
The modern age has been characterized not only by an explosive increase in human population but also of knowledge, especially in technology. Through technology, the impact per human individual upon the biosphere has increased exponentially, accelerating toward the end of the twentieth century. Distinctive among the many forms of human dominion is the nation-state, which has been the characteristic structure for extending human preemption of the earth. It was developed in Europe and accompanied the expansion of European peoples into the Americas, into South Africa and Australia, and across northern Asia to the Pacific Ocean.
The unifying and distinguishing work of this era has been the human preemption and discovery of the biosphere. This is a simple way of stating a complex paradox: the biosphere was occupied and its exploitation well advanced before its true nature—vulnerable and finite—was even vaguely perceived. Before A.D. 1500 knowledge of the nature of the earth or its relationship to the rest of the universe was very limited, and much of what was believed was wrong. By the end of the era, humanity had won an experiential knowledge of the earth and its place in space, and had gathered many clues as to its evolution over time.
The discovery of the biosphere in the latter half of the twentieth century has come none too soon for the survival of human civilization. By the late 1960s, it was becoming evident that the uncontrolled impact of human activity upon the biosphere could not long continue without endangering the basis of life itself. Although opinions differed about the imminence of danger and the prospects for avoiding it, few who read the evidence could discount the potential catastrophe foreshadowed by existing trends.
To understand the changes in attitudes and institutions required for the defense of the earth, it may be useful to trace the discovery of the biosphere as an evolved living system with tolerances and limitations that human exactions cannot exceed without risking or, in some cases, causing disaster.
Locating and Measuring the Earth
To the best of our knowledge, humans alone among the animals are aware of themselves in relation to their environment and able to make objective observations to discover their place in it. The search to locate themselves and guide their journeys has been a major factor in the development of many sciences and technologies. The list includes astronomy, geography, geology, navigation, astronautics, cartography, and surveying.
The first records of our extending knowledge of our environment are maps. The oldest ones known were found on Sumerian and Babylonian clay tablets in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. The Greeks seem to have been the earliest to try to ascertain the shape of the world: first they thought the earth was circular and, subsequently, an elliptical plane. Pythagoras (c. 532 B.C.) and Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) appear to have believed that the earth was a sphere, but the first globe that we know of appears to have been made by a Greek named Crates of Mallus in about 145 B.C. The science of geodesy may be said to have been founded by Eratosthenes of Alexandria (c. 276-194 B.C.), the first man known to have measured the size of the earth. Relatively accurate measurements were also made by the Arabs, but Eratosthenes' calculations were not substantially improved upon until A.D. 1615 when the Dutch scientist Willebrord Snell measured the earth by triangulation.
The ancient geographer, Ptolemy of Alexandria, author of a geography in eight books (c. A.D. 150), established the concepts of the world that prevailed into early modern times. Maps of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries generally followed the Ptolemaic projections, and, in 1492 in Nuremberg, Martin Behaim constructed one of the first modern globes following the Ptolemaic concepts.
Toward the end of the Middle Ages, collections and translations of the astronomical and geographical works of Greek and Arab scholars were made available through the Sphaerarmundi by an Englishman named John of Holywood, writing under the name of Sacrobosca (c. 1250); and by the eighteen Libros delsaber de astronomia compiled under the direction of the Spanish king, Alfonso X, el Sabio (c. 1284), an enormous work containing the translation into Spanish of all the contemporary theoretical knowledge of astronomy and descriptions of such scientific instruments as astrolabes, quadrants, armils, and clocks.
The great European voyages of discovery during the latter half of the fifteenth century and after spurred the development of techniques of location and measurement. Successful navigation on the high seas depended on them, and between 1500 and 1600 the sciences of astronomical navigation and cartography developed rapidly. In 1569 the Flemish cosmographer Gerard Mercator published his famous projection, which was further refined by the English mathematician Edward Wright in 1599; it is still regarded by some as "the most useful map of the world in the practice of navigation." Nevertheless, the problem of maritime navigation continued to be so great that in 1713 the English government appointed a special Commission for the Discovery of Longitude at Sea and offered substantial rewards for useful inventions. The invention of the marine chronometer by John Harrison followed in 1735, and he was eventually (1773) awarded the equivalent of one hundred thousand dollars for his instrument.
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Excerpted from International Environmental Policy by Lynton Keith Caldwell. Copyright © 1996 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiDefense of Earth in a Changing World: An Introduction 1
1. Comprehending the Environment 11
2. Growth of International Concern 32
3. The Road to Stockholm 48
4. The Stockholm Conference 63
5. Post-Stockholm Assessment 79
6. Rio de Janeiro and Agenda 21 104
7. International Structures for Environmental Policy 121
8. Transnational Regimes and Regional Agreements 158
9. International Commons: Air, Sea, Outer Space 202
10. Sustainability: Population, Resources, Development 242
11. Enhancing the Quality of Life: Natural and Cultural Environments 278
12. Strategies for Global Environmental Protection 323
13. A Changing World Order: Into the Twenty-First Century 350
Appendixes
A. Abbreviations 361
B. Representative Listing of International Organizations and Programs 370
C. Events of Significance for Protection of the Biosphere, 1945-1995 375
D. Selected Treaties of Environmental Significance, 1946-1995 380
E. Environmental Soft Law: Declarations, Resolutions, Recommendations, Principles 384
Notes and References 389
Index to Topics and Institutions 469
Index to Authors 483