Stockholm: Weighty Talk, Smaller Progress?

Abstract

What if 800 million Chinese decided they wanted automobiles? asked Harvard's Roger Revelle at a recent environmental session atAmerican University in Washington, D.C. Revelle's question was a rhetorical response to a participant who had suggested that consumption Americanstyle is an environmental disaster, and that worldwide environmental harmony will be achieved only if both developed and developing countries stop viewing superabundant consumer goods as the necessary definition of a high standard of living. Any answer to the question can only be speculative. But the question defines one of the key philosophical issues underlying the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, which begins in Stockholm June 5. The conflict has been near the surface ever since a name was assigned to the environmental crisis, and, in fact, it may have been only through the diplomatic skills of Canada's Maurice F. Strong that many of the lesser-developed countries (LDC'S) did not decide to boycott the conference altogether. Strong, United Nations under secretary for the environment, convinced these nations that the industrialized countries are not attempting to use the environmental issue as a neocolonial device to suppress economic development or population growth in the LDC's. But the issue is still very much alive, and doubts remain. A subtitle in the June HARPER'S over an article by Barry Commoner of Washington University, proclaims, Ecological crusaders are about to clash with seekers of social justice at Stockholm. The Commoner article itself is not nearly that simplistic. But, nonetheless, the view is common that environmental cleanup and man's achievement of harmony with nature will inevitably impose a cost so heavy that the world's poor may be locked into their poverty forever. Commoner himself certainly does not accept such an uncomplicated formulation of the choices, but at times it is difficult to know just what he does believe. On the one hand, he claims that the basic causes of the environmental crisis are not affluence and population growth, per se, but rather the peculiar characteristics of modern technology. For instance in a discussion