Picture a world in which we actually managed to arrest the climate crisis—a world in which a robust and binding regime of international law worked to rein in corporate polluters, rehabilitate the environment, and preclude the worst effects of global warming. When Maurice Strong took to the stage at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment on a gorgeous summer day in 1972, that world seemed not only possible but maybe even within reach.
More than a thousand delegates, representing most of the world’s countries, had gathered in the cavernous Folkets Hus, or House of the People, in Stockholm for the first global environmental summit in history. The conference offered an opportunity to establish an actionable plan and a legal framework for addressing a mounting ecological emergency: acid rain falling across Europe, industrial mercury poisoning in Japan, catastrophic drought in the Sahel, metastasizing deforestation from Brazil to Nigeria, smog killing thousands in London and Pennsylvania. Strong, a jovial Canadian oil magnate with luxuriant mutton chops, exhorted his audience to get down to business. He spoke of “target dates” for halting environmental deterioration, of new “institutional arrangements” for intergovernmental cooperation, of “all nations accept[ing] responsibility for the consequences of their own actions on environments outside their borders.” He acknowledged that the conference might not produce the “comprehensive code of international conduct” for which many had hoped, but he posited that “it does represent an important, indeed an indispensable, beginning.”
Strong was an unlikely messenger. Born on the eve of the Depression in a tiny speck of a Manitoba prairie town and raised in a series of rented houses without heat or indoor plumbing, he dove headfirst into the petroleum industry at just twenty-one, capitalizing on the Alberta oil boom to become a fabulously wealthy man. Soon enough, he was recruited to run one of Canada’s biggest holding companies and then the country’s External Aid Office. There, Strong built relationships with leaders at the World Bank and the UN; everyone liked him. Then, in 1970, the UN came calling—the planners of the conference wanted the well-connected Strong as its secretary-general. Over the next two years, Strong reportedly traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, visiting dozens of countries, to build support. He promoted the idea that the environment was an issue essentially above politics, something upon which all nations could surely agree.
Strong’s dream of unity was mostly realized: though the Soviet Union and a number of its allies were boycotting (because of the invitation of West Germany and the snubbing of East Germany, a UN decision with which Strong disagreed), delegates from every inhabited continent had converged on Sweden’s capital, arriving at the Folkets Hus in convoys of Volvos and Saabs (having mostly spurned the offer of free bikes). Yet such harmony meant little to the many groups and individuals excluded from the opening ceremonies. Indeed, just out of view, hundreds of cops, including mounted officers, were clashing with protesters holding signs like capitalism is the cause of environmental ravages; the police had dogs, and they halted the demonstrators before the procession reached the conference site.
The more significant exclusion, however, was less conspicuous. (It has, for instance, escaped the attention of most of the conference’s chroniclers.) The global working class had no true representation in Stockholm. Though labor unions had fought for years to shape the conference and play a direct, consequential role, no invitations had come their way. All of civil society, in fact, was relegated to the margins of the official proceedings, mostly dismissed as a sideshow or a distraction (or beaten by the police).
The Swedes were determined to combat what they saw as global apathy in the face of impending catastrophe.
The costs of this consignment were high. The legal regime that emerged from Stockholm—the treaties, the frameworks, the follow-up summits, the UN environmental body—was able only to delay, not to reverse, the twentieth century’s great planetary crisis. The fires, the floods, the droughts, the storms, the carbon in the atmosphere, the microplastics in our genitals—by most every metric, the environment is worse off than it was fifty years ago. Far worse is yet to come. Pacts supposedly binding almost every country on Earth, asserting “rights” to a clean, healthy, and just environment, have amounted to little in an economy structured by multinational corporations and a political order dominated by a handful of rent-seeking nuclear powers.
At first glance, this hardly distinguishes the law of the global environment from the broader international legal firmament. Generations of postcolonial, Marxist, and feminist critics have shown how the juridical order that emerged after World War II was colored by colonialism, shaped by and for global hegemons, and lovingly crafted to facilitate the relentless accumulation of capital. But unlike, say, the law of the sea, with its rich precedents dating back to ancient times, or the prohibition against war crimes, painstakingly constructed by jurists in Geneva, the Hague, Nuremberg, and Tokyo, international environmental law has a single birthdate (June 1972), a single birthplace (Stockholm), and a single midwife (Maurice Strong). It thus offers a singularly straightforward parable for the tragic limitations of the law.
Plunder, Famine, Poisoning
Few could have guessed that when a group of ardent Swedish diplomats first proposed an international conference on the global environment it would become a media firestorm or that it would birth a whole new field of law. But the Swedes were determined to combat what they saw as global apathy in the face of impending catastrophe. Theirs was a strong social democracy where the people expected much from the state, and ecological consciousness had been rising in the country since the 1950s. In the summer of 1967, Sweden established the world’s first environmental protection agency. That fall, a book titled Plunder, Famine, Poisoning—some consider it the Swedish equivalent of Silent Spring—further unsettled the populace.
Swedish delegates began stalking the halls of the UN headquarters in New York that winter, according to one account, angrily urging the General Assembly to convene a worldwide conference to address the growing crisis. At first the grandees in the U.S. State Department were skeptical, considering the idea a waste of money, but polluted waterways were catching fire across the heartland, fears of a “population bomb” were rising in U.S. cities, and by the time Swedish chatter crystallized into a formal resolution at the end of 1968, Washington had come around.
Hardly any observers anticipated that the conference would serve as a historic turning point—save, perhaps, for Walter Reuther. An erstwhile socialist, New Deal Democrat, and seasoned leader of the United Auto Workers (UAW), Reuther was still famous as the man who had led the 1936 sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, a weeks-long wintertime battle between autoworkers and armed police that ended up transforming labor relations across the United States. As president of the UAW, Reuther immediately saw the potential of the conference. As his brother Victor, another UAW leader, later recalled, scarcely a month after the UN voted to schedule the conference Walter “directed our interest and our support for this UN action.”
Attendees agreed on a set of conclusions that they conveyed to the UN Conference’s planners—and that read, at least today, as breathtaking in their ambition.
By this time, the UAW was one of the most pro-environmental unions in the country. It had recently established a conservation department to combat what the union’s international executive board called “the constant threat imposed by those individuals and corporations which exploit our natural resources for quick profit with little regard for the health and welfare of the community.” Members of this department swiftly recruited union members to serve as civilian “watchdogs” to report pollution and aggressively lobbied for stronger environmental laws. Indeed, the UAW’s conservation department may have recognized the significance of the UN conference even before Reuther; by January 3, 1969, they had drafted a message of support.
Four thousand miles away in Stockholm, plans for the conference were off to a rough start. A year passed without much progress. Yet the UAW was eager to help. The Reuther brothers traveled to New York to meet with UN Secretary-General U Thant and express their interest in leading the planning for the conference. They told Thant of the UAW’s recent experience bringing together Americans and Canadians to jointly address pollution in the Great Lakes. “Walter wanted to make certain that not only governments but the people themselves, through their lay organizations, could contribute to improving man’s environment,” Victor recalled. By November 1969, the union had extended a formal invitation to the UN to host a small symposium in advance of the main conference, convening world experts to discuss the “impact of urbanization” on the human environment. “This has never been done before,” Walter told a union meeting that winter. It was to be the first time “in which the U.N. and a labor union have joined in sponsorship,” the Washington Post agreed.
Walter Reuther and the UAW’s conservation department imagined a symposium international in scope, meaning it would have to include experts from behind the Iron Curtain. (“Air pollution and water pollution do not recognize ideological differences,” Reuther told the union. “It pollutes their air the same as it pollutes ours.”) They collaborated with allies in the Swedish labor movement, who soon offered to cohost the event at the UAW’s new recreation facility situated along Black Lake in Michigan. Invitations went out in April 1970, just as the first Earth Day raised environmental awareness to new heights. Ultimately, more than a hundred participants—labor leaders, academics, ambassadors, activists—hailing from two dozen countries agreed to attend.
Then, suddenly, less than a month before the symposium was set to open, Walter Reuther died. His small plane crashed en route to Black Lake. It was a debilitating loss for the UAW, and rumors swirled that Reuther had been assassinated. Victor stoically took over leadership of the upcoming symposium—and quickly became mired in a bitter fight with the U.S. government after the State Department refused to grant a visa to a significant Soviet trade unionist whom Victor had personally invited. It soon emerged that George Meany, the president of the AFL-CIO—who had repeatedly clashed with the Reuthers on the grounds that the brothers were inadequately anticommunist—had appealed to the Nixon administration to block the visa.
The UAW could escape neither the strictures of the Cold War state nor the narrowing horizons of the postwar labor movement, but the symposium nonetheless opened as planned on June 15. UN Under-Secretary-General Philippe de Seynes would recall arriving at the UAW’s sylvan, lakeside enclave and feeling “quite moved to see the UN flag flying at the entrance and to learn that it was there permanently.” Leonard Woodcock, Reuther’s successor as UAW president, told the assembled delegates that “much of what still passes for environmental concern in the United States is limited to a cosmetic approach: sweeping streets, picking up litter,” that kind of thing. “These are wholesome pursuits, but they do not go to the heart of the matter,” which is that “poverty and deprivation are among the most dangerous forms of pollution” and therefore belong “high on the agenda of the environmental campaign.” Ultimately, attendees agreed on a set of conclusions that they conveyed to the UN Conference’s planners—and that read, at least today, as breathtaking in their ambition.
Fundamentally, the symposium recognized that “most” environmental measures being advocated at the time could “at best only eliminate a percentage of pollutants by chemical or mechanical means,” yet the crisis demanded “measures which seek to remove the causes of degradation, rather than concentrating on the effects.” To this end, the symposium sought to address the structural sources of ecological injustice by proposing that the UN assert jurisdiction over certain stateless territories, facilitate public control of national land, and form an international inspectorate to enforce global pollution standards. Further, the attendees agreed that, because of the
increase in the influence of international conglomerate corporations and other powerful investors on the utilization of resources and environmental factors in many countries of the world, a concern of international trade unions . . . it has become necessary to create a system of international law, as well as appropriate international judiciary processes particularly relevant to environmental cases.
This echoed the calls of other U.S. activists at this time, many inspired by the civil rights movement, who were coalescing around a lofty if legalistic vision: the UN should pronounce the existence of environmental rights, just as it had declared universal human rights in 1948. In Detroit, for instance, an official in the World Peace Through Law Center proposed that freedom from environmental damage was “a fundamental human right” and that any person deprived of said right—directly or indirectly—should be able to bring suit in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which would have the power to grant immediate injunctions and award damages or other restitution.
Finally, the symposium’s attendees “forcefully” suggested that “it is only through the participation of people”—including working people—that the many problems on the agenda at Stockholm could be resolved. They noted that unions were beginning to raise environmental concerns “at the bargaining table in discussions with employer groups” and urged the UN to involve “workers, students and . . . all citizens.” Such suggestions reflected the demand of American environmental activist Barbara Reid, who declared at the symposium: “It is vital that the United Nations, in preparing for the 1972 conference in Stockholm, open lines of communication with diverse groups of citizens and individuals,” from the “international and national trade union movement” to “poor people” the world over. “There are too many people who cannot or will not wait.”
More than half a century later, this symposium has been largely forgotten. Virtually no history of international environmental law, or even of the UN Conference, so much as mentions it. Such disregard, such erasure, would swiftly become a theme. No one from the UAW would participate in Stockholm.
Instead, even as Detroit unionists and their international counterparts were preparing with such ardor, the original Swedish champions of the conference decided that the preparations, the real preparations, had hopelessly stalled. A savior would be needed. They turned to Maurice Strong. He, in turn, launched an international charm offensive, beseeching nations to send delegations. And national governments began strategizing.
In the United States, the country’s new ambassador to the UN, George H. W. Bush—a wealthy Northerner who had moved south to make his name in the Texas oil industry—spoke vaguely at a preparatory meeting about the international community’s “shared and transcendental interest” in the environment but was conspicuously silent about new funds or obligations of the sort envisioned by the UAW and its allies. As the conference approached, the Nixon administration ordered U.S. delegates to vote against any increase in aid to poorer countries—or, indeed, any increase in funds for UN-led environmental cleanups. Such an approach echoed the demands of industrial lobbyists, who dominated the U.S. secretary of state’s advisory committee for the conference, as well as the National Industrial Pollution Control Council, a consultative body that gave the CEOs of the nation’s largest polluters a direct line to the White House. Behind the scenes, U.S. officials partnered with counterparts from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom to form the Brussels Group, which secretly strategized to minimize the impact of Stockholm. A “new and expensive international organisation must be avoided,” reads one surviving document in a British archive (uncovered decades later by New Scientist), as should “universal guidelines.”
By 1971, the grandest ambitions for the UN Conference had already begun to fade. In February, the UN’s official Preparatory Committee reported that the “prevailing view” among surveyed countries was that a Declaration on the Human Environment, the conference’s keystone document, “could outline broad goals and objectives,” but it should not set out “a detailed action programme,” much less “legally binding provisions.” A year later, the Intergovernmental Working Group charged with crafting the declaration reported such difficulty settling on consistent international environmental standards that its final text omitted “entirely any mention of standards.”
Bombs, Bulldozers, and Bureaucrats
It took more than two years for thousands of diplomats to arduously negotiate the UN Conference’s agenda. It took mere days for much of it to be cast aside. The trouble started on June 6, 1972, just the second day, when Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme denounced the defoliation of Vietnam—the bombs, the bulldozers, the flesh-stripping herbicides—and demanded that “ecological warfare cease immediately.” Although Palme did not name the United States, Russell Train, chairman of the U.S. delegation, took offense and issued a statement lamenting the “injection of a highly emotional issue,” which threatened to destroy the “spirit of positive cooperation.”
“The big corporations in North America have taken our land by force, but we are trying to get it back.”
Not long after Palme’s objection, Tang Ke, chairman of the Chinese delegation, introduced a resolution calling for a wholesale reconsideration of the final draft of the declaration. The proposal, China’s first, landed like a bomb, and the major powers frantically sought to contain its blast; within a day, however, China’s pitch had won support from most African and Asian nations. Reluctantly, organizers created a special working group that would meet behind closed doors and reopen the draft declaration. By the next day, the Chinese delegation seized on its advantage and unveiled a ten-point agenda that the declaration should reflect, including calls for the world’s wealthiest nations to fund the development and environmental efforts of the poorest—a principle known as “additionality”—and condemnations of capitalism and imperialism, especially the war in Vietnam. The U.S. delegation was flabbergasted. Torn between a desire to respond and a fear of imperiling the goodwill generated by President Richard Nixon’s recent visit to China, the Americans regrouped. Unity, it seemed, was dead.
As the conference’s careful choreography deteriorated, Maurice Strong strove desperately to keep the major players on the floor. He met every morning with the Chinese delegation, which he later reflected “maintained a very tough line.” He assured developed and developing nations alike that environmental protection could be paired with continued industrialization, a position shared with what the Wall Street Journal labeled his “wide contacts in the American oil industry.”
In fact, representatives of the oil industry, not wanting to take any chances, were present in Stockholm, holding unpublicized meetings with delegates and passing out reams of stylish literature boasting of their environmental bona fides. Industry lobbyists present in Stockholm nonetheless whined of their marginalization to the New York Times, which quoted World Bank president (and Vietnam War architect) Robert McNamara reassuring the business community that “in every instance” environmental goals have been accomplished “either at no cost to the project or at a cost so moderate that the borrower has been fully agreeable.”
Across town, thousands of activists, students, and other groups genuinely marginalized from the official proceedings countered with their own conferences. In a colorful array of gatherings that attracted bemused press attention, hippies, pacifists, communists, and liberal academics sought to raise verboten topics (“ecocide,” land redistribution) and lamented the sidelining of civil society. The Pit River Tribe of California, for instance, schlepped to Stockholm without an official invitation in a longshot bid for allies: “The big corporations in North America have taken our land by force, but we are trying to get it back,” their spokesman declared.
The closest thing to “official” counterprogramming was the Environment Forum, held at the National School of Art, which was so poorly managed that its staff reportedly threatened to mutiny unless its executive director, a Swedish sex educator, learned more about the environment. At one panel, Anthony Mazzocchi, the legislative director for the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, charged that the UN Conference did not want to talk about workers. Noting the impunity of multinational corporations, Mazzochi called for “an alliance between workers and environmentalists against their common enemy,” as one observer recounted.
Months earlier, a representative of the Seafarers’ International Union of Canada had sent a similar message straight to Strong, mailing him the union’s policy statement on pollution, which declared that “we cannot rely upon profit-oriented private enterprise to institute strong action,” nor can pollution control “be left to government alone. It is imperative that we, as the national voice of organized labour, develop a concerted demand for governments to enact without further delay effective and enforceable legislation that will prevent, under severe penalties, the continuance of destructive practices which endanger our environment.” Despite such pleas, organized labor—that is, the workers powering the polluting factories and enduring the ecological consequences—played virtually no role in the conference.
The language of “environmental rights” pervades, but concrete commitments remain vanishingly rare.
Though Strong privately believed in the necessity of “some radical changes in the whole basis on which our society sets its priorities and uses its resources,” as he wrote in a letter to an acquaintance, he had little time for the demands of labor. He had instead focused his efforts on recruiting national delegations and shoring up an essentially symbolic declaration quite unlike the one envisioned by the unions—and one that was increasingly described by the press as “in shambles” or simply “dead.” And Strong’s efforts notwithstanding, just one active head of state (other than Sweden’s prime minister) ended up attending.
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India, in what has become the conference’s most enduring moment, spoke to the delegates on June 14. Implicitly countering Western conservationists who directed so much ire and revulsion at India’s fast-growing cities, she insisted that it was the wealthiest countries—those that consumed and burned the great bulk of the world’s resources despite containing a relative sliver of the world’s population—that bore most of the blame for the ecological crisis. “Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?” she asked. Without knowing it, Gandhi used almost the same words that the UAW’s Leonard Woodcock had two years before.
Gandhi’s speech was a powerful one, and it won plaudits across the globe. Yet despite condemning colonial exploitation and calling for additionality in development aid, Gandhi did not suggest enforceable pollution-control mechanisms, much less any challenge to the power of polluting corporations or their place in the global economy. In the end, the delegates did much the same.
Following a wrenching, all-night meeting just hours before the conference’s conclusion—at one point, Strong unplugged the electricity supply enabling simultaneous translation in order to “jolt” the delegates into action—they agreed to a declaration that contained soaring rhetoric and no binding obligations. The declaration’s very first principle asserted a “fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being” and denounced apartheid, segregation, and colonial oppression, a significant symbolic victory for the developing countries, as was a call for additionality and a recognition of the “sovereign right” of states to “exploit their own resources.” But the wealthy nations, led by the United States, succeeded in blocking language demanding a ban on nuclear weapons and any mention of Vietnam. On the final day, the declaration was adopted by consensus. “The Stockholm Conference had moved into the history books as a major landmark,” Strong would reflect years later, “launching a new era of international environmental diplomacy.”
Yet from the moment the final gavel came down in Stockholm, the conference’s fundamental limitations were apparent. “All features of the program are voluntary,” one journalist wrote on the front page of the New York Times. “Any suggestion that the wealthier states mean to carry out all the recommendations made here,” added the Washington Post, in a bizarrely racist aside, “would strain the credulity of even a delegate from the Central African Republic or Fiji.” For their part, the delegates from wealthy nations weren’t hiding anything. One UK delegate bluntly told the press that his country would not follow the conference’s vote on additionality, explaining, “I don’t think the UN would last very long if every majority vote in the UN were taken to be binding on every nation.” Indeed, a French delegate announced that his country did not consider itself bound by any resolution it had voted against. Chairman Train of the U.S. delegation pronounced himself “exceedingly pleased,” adding that the United States got “everything it wanted.”
Omission Impossible
Looking back fifty years later, the legal scholar Rebecca Bratspies lamented that the Declaration on the Human Environment “did not even hint at duties and responsibilities held by commercial actors, by corporate entities, or by businesses.” This omission became a hallmark feature of the emergent environmental legal regime.
The political scientist Steven Bernstein noted that, when thirty-three delegates from developing nations gathered in Mexico in 1974 for a follow-up meeting, they produced a declaration calling for redistribution and insisting that, in their words, environmental policy “not be left to the automatic operation of market mechanisms.” By 1990, though, many of these same countries had “moved toward a stronger support of market mechanisms and away from international aid and domestic regulatory approaches.” This fit with a broader rise in the power of corporate actors and a global turn away from state intervention in the economy. Bernstein observed that, while the original Clean Air Act, passed by the United States in 1970, featured “command-and-control regulation,” in 1990 Congress reconfigured the law to promote “market-based incentives.” Domestic legal regimes the world over were undergoing similar makeovers. Even the UAW lost its ambitious environmentalism in an age of austerity, union busting, and offshoring.
Today, the language of “environmental rights” pervades—since 1972, eighty-eight countries have enshrined such a right in their constitutions, and the UN Human Rights Council recently voted unanimously to endorse the right ahead of the Stockholm Conference’s fiftieth anniversary—but concrete commitments remain vanishingly rare. The 1992 Earth Summit, scheduled to celebrate Stockholm’s twentieth anniversary, affirmed the “right to development” and the “sovereign right” of states to exploit their resources but produced only nonbinding, nonspecific frameworks to address the crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an emissions reduction agreement, relied on a system of “cap and trade” that effectively allowed rich countries to pay to pollute as usual, and, in any event, the United States refused to ratify it. The 2016 Paris Agreement, its stronger and more widely adopted progeny, has been called “legally binding” but again lacks an enforcement mechanism; almost a decade on, all of the major polluters have failed to meet their agreed-upon benchmarks, the much-touted “loss and damage” fund (a manifestation of the long-deferred dream of additionality) remains embryonic, and the United States has now withdrawn. Twice.
No true international environmental inspectorate exists; no tribunal adjudicates the greatest suffocations, desiccations, and inundations that mark our age; no global obligations fetter the wealthy industrialists, feckless bureaucrats, or deranged autocrats who are doing their best to incinerate the planet. While some post-Stockholm international agreements oblige states (at least in theory) to rein in corporate pollution, the agreements themselves fail to do so—nor do they ensure that their second-order obligations are fulfilled. Indeed, a 2019 UN review found that many domestic environmental laws “exist mostly on paper because government implementation and enforcement is irregular, incomplete, and ineffective.” Further, as the legal scholar Martti Koskenniemi recently argued, “the most important part of international law” today is the body of over three thousand treaties in which countries have agreed to resolve disputes with foreign companies in secretive international tribunals. When a state fails to maintain the legal conditions that existed at the time a company invested there—say, by passing an environmental law—the company can bring that state before a tribunal and collect lost profits. “More than 1,400 cases have been initiated,” Koskenniemi wrote, and, citing a Guardian investigation, he added that “more than $120 billion of public money has been awarded to firms through investor-state dispute settlement courts, including at least $84 billion to fossil fuel companies. The latter are even using the 1991 Energy Charter Treaty to sue states if they take action to decarbonize.”
Today, international law is in tatters.
Workers, such as those of the UAW, were sidelined at Stockholm and remain so to this day. Last July, for instance, the ICJ issued a unanimous advisory opinion on climate change, affirming that the Paris Agreement (among other international agreements) created “legally binding” emissions obligations and, further, that states have only “limited” discretion in coming up with ways to fulfill those obligations. The decision is a massive moral victory for the nations most vulnerable to climate change, albeit one determined by one of its own authors, Judge Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf, to be lacking in “practical significance.” And it fails to address the concepts of just transition or decent work as explicit components of state climate obligations. This failure came despite extensive comments from the International Trade Union Confederation, representing nearly two hundred million workers, and the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), the world’s first global union, on those very topics.
It’s hard not to see some quantum of original sin in Maurice Strong’s leadership. Within weeks of the conference, he was writing fawning letters to fellow oilmen and attending a dinner in his honor hosted by the investment bank Salomon Brothers. Months later, he was nominated to lead the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), a new international body tasked with coordinating global environmental efforts. Developed nations refused to adequately support UNEP, so Strong placidly turned to “private sources,” in the words of a Sierra Club bulletin. He resigned from UNEP in 1975 to run Petro-Canada, calling himself “a bridge” between industry and the environmental movement. At the same time, he became involved in a plot to transport groundwater from beneath the environmentally delicate San Luis Valley to fast-growing urban centers—though he hastily exited the venture after a groundswell of public opposition. In his memoirs, he would gratuitously praise billionaires for their environmental philanthropy, including the Rockefellers, a family of literal oil barons.
It would be indefensible to claim that international environmental law has not accomplished anything—international pacts did, for instance, succeed in greatly reducing acid rain and saving the ozone layer—but it has undeniably failed to effect systemic change or, for that matter, stymie the increasing accumulation of global pollutants. Despite the ICJ’s powerful recent articulation of “legal consequences arising from wrongful acts,” it’s hard to see such consequences actually arising short of some sort of supranational police authority with either nuclear or supernatural coercive powers.
The struggles that dominated debates in Stockholm—between the right to development and the necessity of environmental protection—were impossible to overcome absent a robust attempt to rein in private enterprise and allow for the flourishing of genuine social democracy. Because the delegates at Stockholm, having excluded so much of civil society from the substantive negotiations, did not in fact provide for the latter, they failed to resolve the former tension and instead called for both development and protection. They created neither the strong international pollution authority nor the public control of natural resources demanded by the UAW’s symposium. The agreements that emerged in Stockholm’s wake—the treaties and accords that make up this thing called international environmental law—likewise exhorted more growth and more care without addressing the conditions necessary to reconcile these goals.
Today, international law is in tatters. Clear violations are there for all to see—the Russian shelling of Ukrainian civilians, the systematic sexual violence perpetrated by the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces, the continuing abuse that the military of Myanmar is inflicting on the Rohingya, the U.S. murders of fishermen and other civilians in the Caribbean, the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza—with little sign that any authority can or will do anything about it. “We have to speak of this regime of rights and laws in the past tense—it existed for eighty years, but no longer,” the journalist James Robins told Jacobin last year. In other words, the risk of impunity is not uniquely environmental. But it is acutely environmental. While there once was adherence, however uneven, to postwar international commitments, the system that arose from Stockholm never imposed true obligations on the principal polluters.
Still, the UAW may have been onto something half a century ago: in the absence of meaningful state action, solidarity can be an impediment, and perhaps a counterweight, to environmental degradation. In the years before the oil shock neutered the UAW’s environmental activism, its members and staff allied with environmentalists to picket polluters and even used the threat of work stoppages to directly negotiate for stronger pollution control. Starting in the 1970s, the ITF, after years of unsuccessfully demanding that states police substandard ships, created its own extralegal regulatory regime to inspect vessels, enforce wage and standard minimums, and use the threat of boycotts to ensure compliance—a regime that remains in force to this day. The solidarity of dockworkers, who routinely join seafarers in strategic ship boycotts, has been integral to the ITF’s success in winning better wages, conditions, and security.
It is the hope that solidarity could lead to real change that recently led some two million Italians to take to the streets in protest of the Israeli assault on a flotilla of boats carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza. Dockworkers were vital to the initiation of this action, too, with one presciently telling a crowd of forty thousand, “If we lose contact with the boats, even for twenty minutes, we’ll shut down all of Europe.” It is this same hope that compelled a newly energized UAW to urge other unions to align their contracts to expire on the same day in 2028, with the goal of sparking a general strike ahead of the next presidential election.
Such hope is, frankly, a far more attractive prospect than continued faith in a system that was compromised from the start and remains debilitated to the end. Still, hope can be hard to muster these days. “The old order had to die,” the human rights attorney Jake Romm recently wrote in The Nation of the international legal order more broadly, “but the timing is inauspicious—the forces opposing the burgeoning fascist-international are relatively weak and disorganized; our task now is to build them where they don’t exist and to support them where they have already taken up the fight.”
More than fifty years ago, one environmental activist, en route to Stockholm, found himself beaten by the Paris police at a protest against nuclear testing. Amid their punches, the gendarmes kept asking if he was a “red.” “No,” the activist insisted, “I’m a green.” It is the height of irony that the cops, failing to distinguish between the two, apparently possessed a far broader conception of solidarity than did the environmentalist. It is high time that changed. The punches keep coming; we need as many allies as we can get.