Global Pollution

Report Outline
Worldwide Scope of Pollution Ills
Special Problems of Poor Countries
Movement for International Action

Worldwide Scope of Pollution Ills

Coming U.N. Conference on Environment Ills

The world is awakening to a sense of crisis about the state of the environment. Dozens of countries, including the United States, have taken steps to control pollution. Scores of national and international meetings have examined in detail the deterioration of the environment. International agencies, ranging from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to the United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East, from the Organization of American States to the World Bank, have instituted environmental programs. “The environment,” remarks Barry Commoner, one of America's leading ecologists, “has just been rediscovered by the people who live in it.”

The rediscovery will culminate next year in “one of the boldest adventures in international cooperation ever attempted”—the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. In Stockholm, Sweden, for 12 days from June 5 to 16, representatives of some 131 countries and dozens of international organizations will gather to map a worldwide assault on the problems of pollution and depletion of the Earth's resources.

It will be an unprecedented and, in many ways, a very difficult conference. Developing nations are suspicious that concern about pollution may hinder efforts to promote economic growth. And noticeably missing from the agenda is any discussion of the mounting burden of world population growth. From the conference may come some mechanism to monitor what is happening to the Earth's environment, and some means to coordinate anti-pollution efforts both within and outside the U.N. To many officials, the conference represents a first step in the direction of rescuing the world from pollution. It is, at any rate, solid evidence that the environmental movement is not—as was once predicted—a passing fad.