Conservation Experts and the Environmental Age: IUCN and the Rise of International Environmental Policymaking During the 1960s and 1970s
By Simone Schleper
In the post-war decades, advances in medical research, antibiotics for example, as well as agricultural innovations linked to the Green Revolution, contributed to a rapid growth in world population numbers, from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 4 billion by 1970. While urban areas grew, air and water pollution spread, and forests and wildlife populations rapidly declined. In many ways, the wave of new environmentalism that emerged in the 1960s was a reaction to post-war economic growth, globalization, and a new planetary concern over environmental degradation. ¹ The 1960s and 1970s, the so-called ‘environmental age’, saw the emergence of a new environmental discourse on the limits of the planet’s carrying capacity, triggering the rise of international environmental politics.
Among those who welcomed and promoted the new discourse, were the established groups of naturalists, such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). In 1960 the members of IUCN were old hands in the conservation game. Founded in 1948 as the International Union for the Protection of Nature, IUCN was in many ways a continuation of conservation efforts in pre-war Europe and North America. ² Ten years after the Union’s founding date, its members had built up a sprawling network. Now they could hope to integrate the study and the protection of nature into international policy-making.
IUCN conservationists saw themselves as well-suited to deal with the concerns of the environmental age. Promoting ecosystem ecology as the scientific answer to questions on global environmental governance and natural resource development, scientists at IUCN lobbied for a strong advisory position in international environmental affairs. Ecosystem ecology, the scientific study of the interaction between species and their natural environment, provided the scientific foundation for a broader understanding of conservation in reference to resource management around the globe. In the early 1960s, this definition of conservation work as active management, not passive preservation, was crucial to the self-identification of IUCN members.
Members of IUCN were actively involved in ecosystem research. In the early 1960s, the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) announced plans for an International Biological Program (IBP) to study the productivity of ecosystems around the world. In 1964, IUCN member Edward Max Nicholson took up the role of convener of the IBP Section on Conservation of Terrestrial Communities. For Nicholson’s small avant-garde, the protection and the use of natural resources were closely interrelated, and so were social and natural systems. Through his section, this kind of systems thinking, relevant for social questions and calculable, received a significant push within IUCN conservation circles. In 1971, IUCN’s IBP research provided the groundwork for the Man and the Biosphere Programme by the United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). ³
Around 1970, it became known that the United Nations (UN) was planning an international conference on human-nature relationships, to be held in Stockholm in the summer of 1972. Ideas behind this first UN Conference on the Human Environment focused on the maintenance, reasonable use and distribution of environmental resources, and were closely linked to the Second Development Decade.
Development agendas had already been important for IUCN members during the IBP. During the conference’s preparation phase, conservationists not only liaised with development experts, they also began to address planners and political leaders of developing countries in their publications, promoting the conservation and study of ecosystems as the precondition for successful development. According to IUCN scientists, a successful and sustainable modification of natural systems was possible only if developers understood the natural workings of different types of ecosystems. In this line of reasoning, development projects around the world were dependent on the ecological expertise provided by scientific organizations such as IUCN.
When in 1972 the leaders of the developed and the developing world gathered to discuss global levels of environment degradation, additional research into the natural mechanisms of ecosystems was, however, only a small point on the agenda. Overall, discussions soon honed in on the relationship between pollution and poverty, and on Southern countries’ entitlement to technological and economic assistance, rather than to ecological surveys. ⁴
Rather than drawing on the ecological expertise from the conservation community organized in IUCN, the decision made in Stockholm was to establish a new UN bureau with a focus on environment and economic development in the Global South. In 1973, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was founded; a loose, intergovernmental body quite different from IUCN, with a strong focus on local development rather than global ecologies.
After the foundation of UNEP, IUCN’s self-profiling as experts on the global environment was furthermore complicated by a general change in ideas about scientific expertise. IUCN promoted an image of political neutrality, grounded in scientific universalism. This profile had previously allowed IUCN scientists to avoid Cold War politics. In the mid-1950s IUCN had been accepted as a platform to discuss environmental topics across the Iron Curtain. During the 1960s and 1970s, however, the environment-development discourse centred not on neutrality, but on the integration of the Third World.
By the mid-1970s, Southern governments – by now the majority within the UN system — demanded a shift from top-down technical assistance to regional support, including local experts and know-how. IUCN, rooted in colonial traditions, received regular criticism for the lack of representatives from the Global South in its conservation network. ⁵ Despite attempts to include additional Southern members in executive functions after 1975, the dominance of Northern conservationists decreased only slowly. UNEP, on the other hand, headed by the Egyptian biologist Mostafa Tolba and headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, symbolized a new, inclusive UN development and environment agenda and would continue to do so during the 1980s and 1990s.
Today, IUCN remains the largest international science-based conservation organization and is actively engaged in ecological research, linking biodiversity protection to climate change prevention and the Sustainable Development Goals. During the 1970s, however, the decisive decade for international environmental policy making as we know it, IUCN conservationists struggled to make their global ecological vision a central part of environmental policy within intergovernmental organizations. Insisting on the all-encompassing relevance of ecosystem ecology, their claims for environmental expertise bore the mark of technocratic elitism that seemed irreconcilable with post-colonial sociopolitical reforms.
Notes
[1] Robertson, Thomas. The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012.
[2] Boardman, Robert B. International Organization and the Conservation of Nature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.
[3] E.g., see IUCN, ed. Proceedings of the Seventh General Assembly, Warsaw 1960, vol. no. 7. Morges: IUCN, 1960.
[4] Schleper, Simone. “Conservation Compromises: The MAB and the Legacy of the International Biological Program, 1964–1974.” Journal of the History of Biology 50, no. 1 (2017): 133–67.
[5] Macekura, Stephen. Of Limits and Growth. The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015; Holdgate, Martin W. The Green Web: A Union for World Conservation. Gland: IUCN, 1999.
Simone Schleper is a postdoctoral fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz. This blog post is based on her dissertation research at Maastricht University, which was financed by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, NWO (grant number 276–69–002).
