Gods and Devils in the Details: Marine Pollution, Radioactive Waste, and an Environmental Regime circa 1972

Abstract

Contentious environmental issues confronting us today, such as the ratification of a global agreement on greenhouse gas emissions, have a policy lineage through the United Nations back to the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm, Sweden. There are deeper roots of environmental consciousness in intellectual thought, political activism, and international treaties to protect natural resources,1 but for many historians and policymakers, global environmental governance began at Stockholm. The United Nations Environment Programme, with its mantra of sustainable development, the Earth Summit of 1992, and the Framework Convention on Climate Change can be considered further stages in this history. In fitful bursts along the way, legal “regimes” were established by treaty to act as custodians of the environment on a regional or global scale.2 One of the Stockholm meeting's tangible outcomes, the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter (also called the London Dumping Convention), stands prominently among these regimes. The convention for the first time placed radioactive waste dumping under international law: it banned dumping high-level waste at sea, ostensibly enjoining countries such as the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and many others.3