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David Bowie launched his seminal album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars 50 years in the past, on June 16, 1972. It was an artsy and bold rock album which captured the time’s sense of being on the cusp of latest technological and cultural frontiers.
Within the early Nineteen Seventies, the US Apollo programme was, briefly, making males visiting the moon appear to be a routine occasion. The chances of laptop energy had been starting to unfold, and the countercultural youth revolt was difficult prevailing values and norms. Bowie’s fictional alter ego encapsulated all these groundbreaking developments: an androgynous rockstar from outer house with, within the phrases of the album’s title tune, “a god-given ass”. Bowie-Ziggy wore heavy make-up, dyed his hair purple, and wearing garments impressed by Japanese kabuki theatre.
However coupled with its playful fascination for house know-how, the Ziggy Stardust album additionally described a dread of the Pandora’s field that is likely to be opened because of this. Its opening monitor, 5 Years, warned listeners that “Earth was actually dying”. Through the chilly warfare, the prospect of synthetic armageddon via nuclear warfare was by no means distant. And by the early Nineteen Seventies, fears of an ecological disaster and overpopulation had been beginning to tackle comparable apocalyptic proportions.
Certainly, the day of Ziggy Stardust’s launch coincided with the ultimate day of a landmark gathering in Sweden to debate the way forward for the planet. The Stockholm Convention, which started on June 5, 1972, was the primary United Nations convention on the human atmosphere, and the start line for international environmental governance.
In the present day’s international local weather summits, most not too long ago COP 26 in Glasgow final November, are its direct descendants. And like Bowie’s album, the Stockholm Convention started amid conflicting feelings: hopes of a brand new daybreak of environmental consciousness and technological chance set in opposition to fears of world battle and planetary collapse.
Moonage daydream
Bowie’s obsession with outer house predated the creation of Ziggy Stardust. In June 1969, what would change into his first main hit single, House Oddity, was launched. It informed the story of an astronaut dropping contact with Floor Management whereas gazing on the Earth from afar in his “tin can”. In July 1969, the BBC used the tune in its broadcast of the primary moon touchdown, apparently unaware of the tragic lyrics.
As Bowie clearly grasped, the Apollo house programme was central to the start and early development of the worldwide environmental motion. It was throughout the manned moon expeditions that Earth was first photographed from house. Probably the most iconic picture, “Earthrise” – taken over Christmas 1968 with a Hasselblad digicam by the crew of Apollo 8 – reveals our planet rising over the lifeless panorama of the moon, like a solar on the horizon. It has change into probably the most extensively shared and reproduced images of all time.
Astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders had change into the primary people to enterprise exterior the Earth’s orbit. New satellite tv for pc know-how additionally made it attainable for his or her house adventures to be adopted by way of tv broadcasts. On Christmas Eve, they learn the opening verses of Genesis and despatched festive greetings to an estimated one billion folks watching all over the world. Six months later, the primary moon touchdown drew a good higher viewers, providing these watching additional spectacular views of the Earth.
Such pictures resonated among the many new breed of environmentalists. Within the phrases of historian Robert Poole, “It gave folks an image to assume with.” Different students talked in regards to the “overview impact”: by seeing the Earth from house, folks grew to become conscious that life on their planet was interconnected, restricted and weak – giving impetus to the rising survivalism motion.
The opening monitor of Ziggy Stardust, 5 Years, echoes a number of the survivalist debate’s darker sentiments, with its weeping “newsguy” confirming the top of the world is nigh. But simply 5 years earlier, throughout 1967’s utopian summer season of affection, this message would hardly have resonated in widespread tradition.
This story is a part of Dialog Insights
The Insights group generates long-form journalism and is working with teachers from completely different backgrounds who’ve been engaged in tasks to deal with societal and scientific challenges.
In Swedish historical past, the pivotal second for the awakening of environmental consciousness got here within the autumn of 1967. At the moment, a choir of distinguished Swedish scientists publicly warned of an impending international environmental disaster. Foremost amongst them was the chemist Hans Palmstierna, whose e-book Plundering, Hunger, Poisoning grew to become an on the spot bestseller. Palmstierna argued there was an pressing must act “earlier than the hourglass expires for humanity”. He linked environmental destruction to different international points, together with world poverty, warfare and overpopulation – thereby emphasising that environmental hazards had been simply as extreme a menace to humankind.
The affect of Palmstierna’s and different scientists’ collective intervention was highly effective. There was discuss of a common environmental awakening in Sweden, because the nationwide press, radio and tv reported on mercury-poisoned fish, biocides and acid rain with unprecedented depth.
Within the phrases of the Swedish historian Lars J Lundgren, it was as if a “new continent of issues” had been found. The place beforehand, environmental hazards had been considered particular person issues to be solved in isolation, increasingly folks had been starting to see them as related – and constituting a extreme disaster.
5 years
From a world perspective, Sweden’s breakthrough of environmental concern occurred remarkably early. Intrinsic to this reorientation was the very idea of “the atmosphere” (in Swedish, miljö).
The phrase had not been used within the early Nineteen Sixties – for instance, throughout the intense debate sparked by Rachel Carson’s e-book Silent Spring, which woke up public understanding of the hyperlinks between industrial pesticides and the die-out of bugs and wildlife within the US. At that time, folks mentioned nature, conservation and the menace trendy industrial civilisation posed to wild birds and animals. However the environmental debate which arose in Sweden within the late Nineteen Sixties put the menace to humankind on the forefront.
The invention of acid rain was of explicit significance. The discovering that it was being attributable to sulphur dioxide emissions from throughout Europe was first reported in October 1967, in an article in Sweden’s largest morning paper, Dagens Nyheter, by the scientist Svante Odén. The story brought about a right away stir and frantic political motion.
Impressed by the controversy at dwelling, Swedish diplomats prompt to the United Nations that a big environmental convention ought to be organised. Their initiative set the ball rolling in the direction of what would ultimately change into the 1972 Stockholm Convention, the UN’s first international Convention on the Human Surroundings.
Over the intervening 5 years, the Swedish public grew to become aware of the Earth’s environmental disaster – a series of occasions I study in my e-book, The Environmental Flip in Postwar Sweden: A New Historical past of Information. A key voice on this nationwide debate was Gösta Ehrensvärd, professor of biochemistry at Lund College, who calculated that the depletion of the planet’s restricted sources, mixed with accelerating inhabitants development, would result in a worldwide disaster in round 2050 – adopted by centuries of famine and anarchy.
Ehrensvärd was accused by his opponents of being a dark doomsday prophet. However he noticed it in a different way: “Planning to wash up the Earth’s affairs in the long run is realism, not pessimism.” What was wanted, he mentioned, was to steer improvement in new instructions, and to take precautions in opposition to overexploitation and pure destruction. This is able to require “an array of technological experience, knowledge, humanity and foresight” – and he hoped the Stockholm Convention could be a step in the appropriate route.
It ain’t simple
Half a century in the past, in the summertime of 1972, the way forward for humanity was trying more and more precarious in lots of different methods, too. Within the US, the racial divide and ongoing Vietnam warfare spurred civil unrest. On a worldwide scale, along with the chilly warfare, the method of decolonisation highlighted stark variations between the worldwide north and south. Threats of overpopulation and dwindling pure sources had been made actual by catastrophic famines in India and Biafra.
Regardless of the Stockholm Convention’s concentrate on humankind’s shared future, it – just like the world – was deeply polarised. With East Germany barred from collaborating as a result of it was not a member of the UN, many of the Japanese Bloc introduced they’d boycott the occasion. (The one communist international locations to attend had been Yugoslavia, China and Romania.) The convention was additionally sharply criticised by rising environmental actions who argued it was a top-down, insufficient and purely symbolic occasion. Parallel environmental conferences had been organised in Stockholm, similar to the unconventional left-wing Folks’s Discussion board.
The principle convention’s inaugural speech by Sweden’s prime minister, Olof Palme, was additionally controversial. He highlighted the “large destruction attributable to indiscriminate bombing” and “the large-scale use of bulldozers and herbicides”. Though not said explicitly, there was little question his remarks had been geared toward US conduct in Vietnam, which included use of chemical herbicides and climate modification applied sciences that had been elsewhere described as “ecocide”.
Palme’s speech was not appreciated in Washington. A spokesperson for the US state division mentioned that “deep unease” was felt over the best way the prime minister of the host nation had raised this situation, which (in US eyes, not less than) had nothing to do with an environmental safety convention.
The discussions in Stockholm went on for 2 sizzling June weeks, based mostly on a rising realisation that people had been on the verge of destroying their very own residing atmosphere. Whereas the assembled world leaders sought to instil hope and spark worldwide commitments, some environmental activists objected that the convention was excluding most of the people. It solely existed, one wrote, in order that “the true decision-makers” may meet and focus on “the issues they themselves have brought about”. On a diplomatic stage, nonetheless, there have been causes for optimism, with the Folks’s Republic of China – having been admitted to the UN in October 1971 – making its first look on the worldwide scene.
Two concrete outcomes of the convention had been the Stockholm Declaration, which laid the groundwork for worldwide environmental jurisdiction, and the inspiration of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). Based mostly in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, UNEP grew to become accountable for coordinating worldwide responses to environmental points, and was the primary UN physique positioned within the growing world.
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A lot of the convention’s focus ended up being on the worldwide north-south divide. The western world’s efforts to take care of environmental degradation and overpopulation had been pitted in opposition to growing international locations’ need for industrialisation and prosperity. Information of an ongoing environmental disaster was circulating globally by now, however it was understood and dealt with in very other ways by the convention’s numerous energy blocs and international locations.
To an observer in 2022, with final yr’s COP26 nonetheless contemporary within the reminiscence, the dividing strains of Stockholm 1972 look eerily acquainted. Then, as now, younger environmental activists seen the convention as a sluggish and inadequate manner of coping with pressing issues. Greta Thunberg’s well-known “blah, blah, blah” speech may have been spoken by protesters in 1972. Fifty years on, we now have grown accustomed to recurring conferences, declarations, targets, bleak eventualities and calls from scientists and environmental activists to alter the system. A lot of this was current on the start of world environmental politics.
Starman
Göran Bäckstrand had not lengthy been working on the Swedish overseas ministry when a telegram from the Swedish delegation to the United Nations landed on his desk. They’d simply put ahead the concept of a UN-led convention centered on the atmosphere. Over the subsequent 5 years, Bäckstrand was instantly concerned within the preparation and organisation of the 1972 Stockholm Convention.
Now in his mid-80s, Bäckstrand stays a vigorous and politically engaged determine. Over the past 5 years, we now have mentioned environmental historical past and up to date considerations each in-person and over the phone. He’s a joyous soul who doesn’t appear to despair – although the street forward has confirmed “far longer and extra sophisticated than we imagined in 1972”.
“My vocation for worldwide relations bought a vital new twist by being a part of the Swedish group making ready the substantial scientific enter for that convention,” Bäckstrand not too long ago informed me. “At one level, Professor Bert Bolin [who later became the first chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)] introduced a preliminary report back to our minister for the atmosphere. He requested Bolin if he was 100% certain in regards to the predictions within the report. Bolin mentioned ‘no’ as there have been too many variables to think about, and the minister remarked that he had at all times to be 100% satisfied in proposing political motion.
“To me, this illustrates why decisive political motion on local weather change has been uncared for.”
Trying again, Bäckstrand thinks a very powerful results of the Stockholm Convention was serving to to construct a “international environmental consciousness”. It additionally created a framework for environmental governance at a world stage, and not directly led to the founding in most states of nationwide environmental authorities.
This June 2-3, the 1972 occasion will likely be commemorated within the Swedish capital throughout Stockholm+50, a UN convention collectively organised by Sweden and Kenya. Its organisers are looking for to spotlight the significance of multilateralism in tackling what they name “Earth’s triple planetary disaster”: local weather, nature and air pollution. However simply as collective motion proved troublesome on the unique Stockholm Convention, is it attainable for the nations of the world to behave any extra decisively now?
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Bäckstrand’s expectations are set low – hardened by recurring experiences of gruelling worldwide local weather negotiations. Pondering the developments of the final 50 years, he informed me: “In 1972, there existed some sort of concord between sure elements of science and politics, and there was a light confidence among the many collaborating nations of the environmental disaster as a unifying mission.”
In the present day, he says, the connection between politics and science is far more problematic, and the atmosphere has change into polarising. “There are two parallel processes of the final 50 years: the exploitation of pure sources has accelerated, and belief within the worldwide system, and the constructive function of the UN, has step by step disintegrated.”
Earlier than our newest dialog ended, I needed to ask yet another query of this lifetime civil servant and globally minded environmentalist. “Did you hearken to the brand new Ziggy Stardust album when it got here out that yr? And did you are feeling any resonance with the messages you had been discussing in Stockholm?”
“No,” Bäckstrand confessed. “Actually, I’ve by no means heard of it till you informed me about it now. However I’m glad you’ve got made the connection to music historical past. I feel it is a crucial one.”
Blackstar
The ultimate day of the Stockholm Convention – June 16, 1972 – was the day that Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars was launched to the world. Fifty years on, the hopes and fears evoked on this album, just like the convention, nonetheless really feel disturbingly related – significantly amid the heightened nuclear tensions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
So what would Bowie have product of the best way issues have turned out for the planet? He might have left some clues in his ultimate album, Blackstar, launched two days earlier than his demise in January 2016. The music movies for the title tune and second single, Lazarus, had been directed by one other Swede, Johan Renck. On the centre of the Blackstar video is an empty house swimsuit, blinking again to the Main Tom character in House Oddity and Ashes to Ashes – a distinctly gloomy echo of that groundbreaking time when males first walked on the moon.
Bowie’s demise coincided with a renewed curiosity in outer house. In our time, nonetheless, it isn’t superpower states which can be main the best way to the ultimate frontier, however superwealthy people similar to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who’ve made their billions via the digital revolution of the twenty first century – and whose corporations and private fortunes arguably epitomise the staggering inequalities that new applied sciences rising within the Nineteen Seventies have enabled.
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Environmentally, the image feels equally bleak. This November’s COP 27, in Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt, would be the first such convention to be held on African soil. The continent, regardless of contributing a mere 4% to international emissions of greenhouse gases, is bearing the brunt of their impacts, with the mixed results of extreme drought, flooding and pestilence – together with battle in Africa and Ukraine – now threatening a “full-scale disaster” throughout East Africa.
The challenges dealing with these following within the footsteps of Bäckstrand and his fellow attendees of the 1972 Stockholm Convention seem daunting, to say the least.
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