July 19, 1971
Page 25968
AN ALLIANCE FOR SURVIVAL
(Remarks by Senator EDMUND S. MUSKIE, at the Conference on International Organization and the Human Environment, New York City, May 21, 1971)
Mr. Secretary-General, Mr. President of the General Assembly, Judge Jessup, ladies and gentlemen:
On various occasions, the Secretary General of the United Nations has spoken positively – and prophetically of the need to see this entire globe as a habitat that must serve the needs of mankind. I know of few men in the world today who more fully exemplify Plato's ideal of statesman-philosopher than U Thant. It is a privilege to be his contemporary, and an honor to share this platform with him.
I am pleased, too, to have been able to meet Mr. Maurice Strong, Secretary-General to the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment to be held in Stockholm. The fact that Mr. Strong was willing to give up his distinguished career in government in Canada in order to take on this assignment is a tribute to the persuasive powers of the Secretary-General – just as it is an authoritative assurance of the high quality of the preparatory work going into the Stockholm meeting.
Today, we meet in the forum of man to discuss the survival of man.
In other times, people have come to the same place for the same purpose.
But today's crisis is different from most the United Nations has seen.
No ultimatum signaled its coming – and no bugles summoned its contestants. What is at stake is no one's security and everyone's life. Ally and adversary, we all share the pain and the danger of the environmental crisis.
A wall may keep freedom out and people in – but no wall could be high enough to keep the smog out of Potsdam or inside West Berlin.
Artillery and aircraft once turned the peaceful Ussuri River into a tense borderline – but bullets and bombs cannot deter the bacteria in the water that separates China from Russia.
Israelis and Arabs have fought over Sharm-el-Sheik – but war and the threat of war will not avert a disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Aqaba.
Americans cannot travel to North Korea – but Americans breathe the same air the jet stream carries here from there.
The simple truth is that no place on our planet lives alone – and no place can deal alone with the pollution of the planet. We are far from one world politically but, by necessity if not by choice, we are one world environmentally. And the crisis of the environment has made us common victims of a common adversity.
Together, we must create something better. Together, we must build an alliance for survival – an alliance beyond our separate ambitions to serve our shared interests – an alliance that includes all nations and excludes no nation. That is our only decent chance – and our only real choice.
People are the issue. States have sovereign rights – but so do people. People have a right to clean air and clean water. They have a right to the international resource we call the ocean – which gives us food and even the atmosphere itself.
So much hangs in the balance. We cannot rely on the political habits of the past to save our environment for the future. We may be tied to habit when we take up the issue of war and peace. We must free ourselves from it when we turn to the problem of pollution. And I believe that now is the time to try.
Our best hope for initial success is the Stockholm Conference next year. The composition of the conference should be equal to the * * * of the conference. It should be as universal in 1972 as the United Nations should become in 1971. The General Assembly should ask every government in the world to a meeting called to consider pollution everywhere in the world. And the most essential addition to the conference is the People's Republic of China.
China is too large and too populated to be left out. It has the world's greatest river system and one of the world's longest coastlines. It is a growing industrial power and a maturing consumer power. Its present and potential impact on our human and physical environment is comparable only to the number of its people. We simply cannot expect to create an environment that will work for man if our efforts ignore one-fifth of mankind.
And the General Assembly should not refuse China an invitation to Stockholm out of fear that China would reject it. That might happen but it might not. A time of ping pong diplomacy holds out at least some hope for the success of environmental diplomacy. If China is willing to let its athletes compete with the rest of the world, China might also be willing to let its scientists help the whole world survive. It is worth finding out – and it is vital to find out.
If China will not participate in 1972, the United Nations should issue similar invitations in the years to come. I believe that, in the end, China must say yes to the invitations – and yes to a safe future for our fragile environment. An alliance for survival is in China's interest because it is in the human interest.
It may take time to convert that simple perception into international policy. But we cannot just sit back and wait. An alliance for survival incomplete at its inception would still be an infinite improvement over no alliance at all. And we must begin now. The crisis in the environment commands our immediate attention and our best efforts. In 1971, every concerned nation must become a partner for environmental protection. Every concerned nation must cooperate to create a multilateral attack on pollution.
If we can spend billions for our security from each other, then surely each of us can spend some of our wealth and some of our power on the common security of man.
Four specific steps deserve the highest priority.
First, we must more effectively co-ordinate current international policy toward the environment.
No one believes that present international arrangements can alone resolve the crisis. But we must make sure that we are doing as much as we can with what we already have. Co-ordination should be centralized at a high level in the United Nations to direct priorities, to avoid wasteful duplication, and to assure comprehensive action. The exact design of a co-ordinating mechanism and the role of U.N. agencies, new or old, are matters for intensive study and prompt action. And the resulting structure must reach beyond the U.N. – to take advantage of the promising efforts of other multilateral and regional organizations.
Second, we must set international standards and norms for environmental behavior. Some very serious offenses – like dumping certain toxic substances into the ocean – should be flatly prohibited. That is something the Stockholm conference should accomplish next year. In less troublesome areas, we may be able to rely on recommended uniform practices. But whether standards are mandatory or voluntary, we must speed up the process of setting them. We must assure that the best scientific opinions are taken into account as knowledge and circumstances change. And we must minimize the competitive disadvantages in world trade of acting responsibly toward the world environment.
Setting standards is, of course, a national as well as an international duty. For example, the United States can – and should – move against American firms for the environmental excesses of their foreign subsidiaries. No company should ever be permitted to export its pollution.
Third, we must establish an international system for environmental control.
We do not know enough about the trouble the world is in – and consequently we cannot do enough about it. The remedy is to identify, analyze, and disseminate relevant information about the global environment. We have seen a hopeful beginning in limited sectors – the prime examples are the world weather watch and the reports on threatened animal and plant species by the international union for the conservation of nature and natural resources.
But we cannot stop there – or even with an expanded version of monitoring physical data.
Equally vital is the monitoring of national environmental policies. American law requires America's government agencies to submit detailed statements before they do anything that might impair the quality of the environment.
I believe those statements should be passed on to the United Nations. I believe other countries should adopt a similar policy. And I believe that the U.N. should apply the same standard to the conduct of its own agencies.
This system would let every government review and comment on what every other government was doing. I doubt that any country is yet prepared to grant a veto over all its decisions about the environment. But every country should be prepared to consult in good faith – as a first step toward an institution with the power to prevent the pollution of resources which belong to people everywhere.
We must learn a hard and fundamental truth: The atmosphere – which is essential to life – and the ocean – which is the source of life itself and of the renewal of life – are in jeopardy because of man himsel. We can save them from man and for man only if they are brought under effective international jurisdiction.
We have a treaty to protect the empty blackness of outer space. At the very least, we should agree to full disclosure and due process about what happens here on earth – to the air we breathe and the water we drink and the land that sustains us.
When some scientists tell us that five hundred SSTs could destroy the ozone in our atmosphere and leave us exposed to deadly radiation, we cannot afford to let one nation decide for all mankind. Every interested country's voice should be heard – and such voices should be heeded. The international community must determine the truth about its environmental dangers before the SST is allowed to fly.
Pending the development and release of such information, I would hope that all the nations now engaged in the manufacture of supersonic transports would consider suspending such manufacture and development.
And that principle must prevail across the sweep of the world environment.
I took the view in the Senate of the United States that no measure can be regarded as a national good if there is a serious danger that it would run counter to the human good.
If this view is to have any validity in any one place, it must have validity every place. Our concerns are not confined, of course, to the world's atmosphere.
We read of mercury levels in swordfish. In the United States, the Government has acted to protect the health of its people by banning sales of swordfish.
What about other peoples? Other peoples throughout the world eat swordfish. If the United States is right in its analysis of contamination levels in swordfish, then are not other people entitled to the same protection?
It isn't just swordfish that ingest mercury. All seafood exposed to mercury are contaminated.
The entire chain of ocean life is affected. Again, what I am asking is whether this is really a matter that can be responsibly left to the separate determination of individual nations.
Are we acting sensibly to protect the human habitat unless we set up effective world agencies that can act in the human interest?
Is there any rational approach to this problem unless a world agency sets world health standards and can apply them effectively in the human interest?
In the years just ahead, we will hear more and more about the harm one country has inflicted on the ecology of others. The construction of large dams may flood a nation upstream and dry up the irrigation system of a downstream neighbor. The disposal of wastes in rivers and estuaries can hit another country hard – and so can efforts at weather modification. In all these areas, men must find and face the facts together – and then men must decide together.
Fourth, the nations that have shared the financial benefits of environmental anarchy must now share the financial burden of environmental control.
We must beware of the voices that are urging the third world to settle for stunted development in the name of the environment. That advice is self-defeating – it will never be taken. And it is also wrong. We cannot sacrifice the human environment to the physical environment. We are against pollution – but we are not against people. We cannot begin an environmental crusade by telling primarily the poorest nations among us to ask what they can do for the world.
Before we who are lucky enough to live in a wealthy society start lecturing deprived societies, we should look to our own backyard. When I was a boy in Rumford, Maine, my friends and neighbors used to sniff the odor from the mill and say – "That's the smell of money." Why should we expect Asians and Africans to react differently?
What we should expect of them is what we expect of ourselves – a readiness to control the impact of industry and agriculture on the quality of life. But we cannot ask them to pay every cent of their own bill. They lack the profits we have already made from pollution. We must now use some of those profits to help them help the environment.
Economic aid should give the developing countries the chance to install anti-pollution devices at the outset of industrialization. We should be willing to pay more for less damage to the environment. We should also be willing to give international lending agencies the power to grant low interest development loans – loans that would prevent pollution now and would have to be repaid only in prosperity. If the advanced nations now believe that a product like DDT is a threat, they should provide the third world with any cost difference between it and a safer alternative.
It would be a crime to stop progress in the developing countries. And it would also be a crime to lose their unique opportunity for progress without pollution. Decent development and a decent environment are one and the same. That should be their goal – that should be our policy – and we should put our money where our advice is – and our interests are. After all, it is our environment as well as theirs.
All of this will require tough, tedious nuts and bolts work. But that is the only way to build an alliance for survival. That is the only way to succeed in the essential adventure of saving the earth God made – and the world man has remade.
But direct action to save the physical environment cannot be the sole aim of our alliance. There would be little consolation in saving every endangered species except people. And even in the best of all possible physical worlds, man could still disappear.
We could be engulfed by the weight of our own numbers – numbers too great for any miracle grain or any land use.
We could destroy ourselves in a quarrel over the vast gap between the majority that is poor and the minority that is well-off.
We could destroy ourselves in a quarrel that is in doubt or a negotiation that has broken down.
So ultimately, an alliance for survival must move beyond the physical environment. It must encompass the total environment. And it must provide support for effective U.N. peacekeeping, enough population planning, more development capital, and real arms control. An alliance for survival will finally fail if our countries continue to stagger under an arms spending burden of $200 billion a year.
Let us begin to put the alliance together in the fight against pollution.
We can bring governments like China into the effort without pushing other differences into the foreground.
We can make ideological adversaries environmental allies.
We can make men and nations see their shared interest in defeating the shared danger.
And from there, with luck and commitment, we can turn to the other assorted agonies of the human condition. If we once learn to work together to reclaim our physical environment, perhaps we can then create the environment of tranquility and justice.
Your conference can point the way – to Stockholm in 1972 and to a more decent future in the twentieth century.
You can teach us to do the work of peace and avert the terror of war.
You can help us to realize the political renewal of the United Nations, which President Kennedy called "our last, best hope."
Then, some day, we will no longer have to come to the forum of man to struggle for the survival of man. We will instead debate and decide how to make the most progress for people.
That seems a distant dream-and it is. But I believe we can make it real in a universal United Nations committed to the total human environment.
Thank you for trying.