#geoffrey lean

Beekeepers and communists: how environmentalists started a global conversation

It all began with Högertrafikomläggningen, Swedish for “the right-hand traffic reorganisation”.

On 3 September 1967, Sweden switched from driving on the left to driving on the right. The change mainly took place at night, but in Stockholm and Malmö all traffic stopped for most of the weekend while intersections were reconfigured.

So sweet was the resulting city air that weekend that environmental enthusiasm went sky high. It was a moment that would change the world.

Three months later Sweden, citing air and other pollution, asked the UN to hold the first-ever international environmental conference, initiating a process that would lead to a groundbreaking gathering in its capital in 5 June 1972, the 50th anniversary of which will be marked next week. This was the beginning of a long and slow struggle to find and agree global solutions to these newly understood global environment problem. Twenty years later, the Rio conference would follow in the same month, kicking off UN climate summits, the most recent of which was held in Glasgow last autumn.

And yet critical mistakes were made at this early juncture. Progress, as we know, has been glacial in the years since. Now, looking back at the first steps on that journey, it’s hard not to see that, although in there were so many issues the conference got right, there were also some crucial issues it got wrong.

The Stockholm conference – held in the city’s Folkets Hus the site of both a former prison and a theatre specialising in farces – gave green issues international import. In the 1960s, environmental issues had seemed local, not global. In Britain, for example, the last of the great London smogs killed 750 people in 1962, while tragedy struck four years later in Aberfan, Wales, with the collapse of a colliery spoil tip. In Japan, people wore masks against air pollution. There was drought in the Sahel. And in 1969 a passing train ignited oil in Ohio’s Cuyahoga River, setting it ablaze.

But this was also a decade in which there were early stirrings of revolt against the environmental destruction. The World Wildlife Fund launched in 1961 with a special issue of the Daily Mirror carrying the front-page headline “DOOMED”. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring savaged pesticides the next year, and in 1969 an undergraduate Prince Charles first entered the fray, lobbying the then British prime minister, Harold Wilson, about Atlantic salmon at an event at the Finnish embassy.

But these were isolated voices, denounced and dismissed by the powerful. Carson said the US chemical industry wanted to return to “the dark ages” where “insects and vermin would once again inherit the Earth”. The then US agriculture secretary wrote to former US President Dwight Eisenhower, saying that since Carson was unmarried, despite being “attractive”, she was “probably a communist”.

The plan for an international conference in Stockholm initially had so little support that it was dismissively called “the Swedish matter” at the UN. It took two years of lobbying, against UK and French opposition, before the general assembly backed the proposal. As it happened, this (January 1970) was when I was told by a far-sighted editor at the Yorkshire Post that we needed to be covering this stuff and my long stint on the environment beat – the longest in the world as far as I am aware – began.