The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2017

42 JULY-AUGUST 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL NATO’s environmental projects have included comparative studies of city air pollution and of industrial effluents into a river shared by two countries, experiments in low-powered autos, conservation, earthquakes, and geothermal energy. Its program is known to participants as CCMS—the Committee on Challenges of Modern Society. On balance I believe these big programs, as well as many others handled routinely by EPA and the State Department, were worth the taxpayers’ investment. These activities have resulted in considerable publicity each step of the way. They directly involved thousands of foreigners. …When American and overseas environ- mental experts share their know-how on the spot, the effect can be immediate. For example in a 1976 meeting between Japanese and American experts held at the State Department inWashington, our people acquired disposal information on PCBs (polychlorinatedbi- phenyls) that could be copied directly and promptly. An International Movement Although the Americans are leading in post-Stockholm care of the environment, the movement is prospering inmany countries. Indeed, a majority of both developed and developing nations have rapidly established legislative, scientific, political and administra- tive safeguards over the dwindling supplies of usable air, water and soil. During an almost flash-fire reaction to the “ecology revolu- tion,” nations have come to a growing planetary consensus on the following axioms. • It is more practical to industrialize with built-in ecological safeguards at the beginning than to install retrofit machinery to clean up the mess later, as we are having to do in the United States. • Some corrective steps are expensive, such as stack-gas scrub- bers to scour the outflows from fossil fuel-fired power plants; sewage treatment works; or devices to purify automobile exhausts. (Expense has already slowed the abatement of pollution inmany poorer countries.) •The chronic fuel shortage may retard advances in environ- mental control, but the need to conserve energy goes hand in hand with good ecological stewardship. New energy enterprises like offshore drilling, extraction of oil from shale, or stripmining of coal can be done withminimal disruption of natural surroundings. • Since the earth has but one reservoir of air, water and soil, manmust strive to save it in concert with his fellows—through bilateral andmultilateral cooperation in research, interchange of technology, and setting mutually satisfactory standards of environmental quality. This last point is a reminder that no nation wants to have another nation’s standards jammed down its throat. This doesn’t rule out the possibility that one nationmay voluntarily choose another's criteria. The Japanese, for example, have incorpo- rated word for word the automobile provisions of the United States Clean Air Act of 1970. • Finally, many countries now embrace the “polluter pays” principle as the fairest way to fund the repair of ravaged environ- ment. This principle has been promoted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which includes 24 industrialized nations, but not the Soviet Union or China. … This summarizes the thinking of political leaders supported by the scientists and engineers of EPAs everywhere. The politicians inevitably keep leaving the public stage, but the technical people keep their act going for the duration of their careers; in the brief seven years we have been dealing with foreign EPAs we have found this to be true in all countries. So the relationships that blossom at the professional level are the important ones (not those among the summit types) for they will form the basis for enduring coopera- tion. Without them, nations would be hobbled in the difficult and complex arrangements that must be made in the years ahead. LDCs Get on Board Looked at globally and nationally in this spring of 1978, the environmental movement shows some new color and form, particularly in the less developed countries. The euphoria which followed Stockholmwas sadly diminished by the energy short- age which has acted, as World Bank President Robert McNamara predicted, as a dangerous brake on industrial development in the needy nations. Nevertheless, a solid interest has grown up in the LDCs because they are realizing at last that environmentalismmeans concern for basic human needs such as potable water, breathable air, livable land space—all of which can be ruined by industrial pollution. This is a big change in attitude since the pre-Stockholmdays when many LDCs feared that the fad for pollution reduction was a sur- reptitious device of the “have” nations to inhibit the growth of the “have-nots.” UNEP has encouraged this new view of the LDCs by stressing their programs above others in its worldwide budget. Another cheery note to keep the LDCs in the ranks of enthusi- astic environmentalists has been an increased U.N. focus onmore sophisticated and broader environmental issues. This has been sig- nalized by the 1976 U.N. conference of human settlements called “Habitat.” Habitat spawned a pledge that member states should somehow provide a glass of clean drinking water for every human being from 1990 on; in turn the U.N. Water Conference of 1977 examined practical schemes to bring this dream to reality. The U.N. Conference on Desertification and increasing studies about defor-