Environment and peace were united in 1972

The demonstration against the US ecocide in Vietnam Stockholm 1972. Photo Björn Gustafsson

There is a lot to learn from previous experiences as we now face significant global threats. Not least how this awareness was brought about by a popular commitment. As World Environment Day 5 June is celebrated in memory of the opening of the first day of the UN conference on the environment in Stockholm in 1972, there is reason to see what lessons we can learn from history.

A popular movement for survival emerged in the 1940s and 50s. Awareness arose about that the nuclear bomb posed a global threat to humanity. A type of threat of total extinction that humanity has not previously known. Soon enough, the world citizen movement was able to hand over a shovel to the high guard in Stockholm in 1957 and the chairman of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Association, Per-Anders Fogelström, spoke about the same thing. Turn over military costs to end world hunger and poverty.

In 1972, at the first UN conference on the environment in Stockholm, the connection between peace and environment was clearly expressed. Ecocide became a word in use. Olof Palme used it inside the conference to the great anger of the United States. Outside on Sergels Torg, 7,000 demonstrated against the poisoning of Vietnam’s forests with agent orange. The damage was extensive in this war against nature, in order to defoliate the forest so that no one could hide from US helicopters and aircraft. The US didn’t care about the genetic damage to women who was sprayed with poison. The children born to the mothers who were sprayed still fill the hospitals in Vietnam today.

The popular movements’ demonstrations and alternative forums became a turning point for the environmental movement. Until then, the environmental movement had accepted the framework set by the current development model. Changing social power relations in society wasn’t even imagined. Instead, it was a matter of choosing the right technology so that everything would work out. That is why organizations such as the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation and the Field Biologists were for nuclear power. How else would the last rivers be saved from being exploited? Another view was only found in small marginal groups such as the Working Group against Nuclear Power and the Association for Health Promotion.

The alternative activities surrounding the UN conference changed this. The driving force behind these was the Powwow group, which took its name from the Indians' concept of meeting where the peace pipe goes around. This small group of 12 people took the initiative one year in advance to distribute leaflets, call for local actions internationally, for information meetings and for the cooperation organization People’s Forum. In response, the Environmental Forum arose from the initiative of Anglo-American strategists in the secretariat of the UN conference. It was governed by the National Council of Swedish Youth Organizations and the Swedish UN Federation with its chairman Ingrid Segerstedt-Wiberg in the leadership of the entire forum.

The Anglo-American environmental movement with its close ties to the states, large corporations and a depoliticized hippie culture where drugs replaced social criticism came to suffer major defeats. Until then, it had dominated the international debate. The population issue was said to be the big problem. In the book Population Explosion, Paul Ehrlich pleaded for forced sterilization of men in third world countries such as India. In the book, initiated on American initiative by the Friends of the Earth before the conference, commons were seen as the great threat to the environment. A widespread view that eco-fascist Garret Harding has responded to through the concept of ”the tragedy of the commons”. The solutions to the environmental issue was considered as consisting of population , at least of poor, better morals of the individual and that private ownership advanced at the expense of the commons.

An alliance between Swedish popular movements of all kinds and people from the third world and occasional American peace and environmental activists such as Barry Commoner stopped the Anglo-American mix of large companies’ private profit interests and the view that the poor are the cause of environmental destruction. The international network of young theosophists was used to invite many environmental activists from the third world with the help of Ingrid Segerstedt-Wiberg. The head of the Swedish Statistical Central Bureau showed that the view that it is not the consumption of the rich that is the problem, but the poor who must be forcibly sterilized, is plainly false. The Powwow group’s initiative, which criticized the entire UN conference for being a curtain of service to those in power, did its part. The Swedish United FNL Groups made sure that there were thousands in the streets and squares willing to protest against the US managed ecocide. The dominant position the pro-capitalist and sometimes eco-fascist ideas put forward by the Anglo-American environmental movement never regained the central dominance they had before the UN conference.

It took some time until a more unified alternative to the Anglo-American environmental ideology emerged. But it was in its infancy. In 1973, Alternativ Stad published the booklet Lågenergisamhälle, men hur? (Low energy society, but how?) Here, the view was presented that the climate must be saved without nuclear power, which could only be done by changing the balance of power so that we have a society that needs less energy. An approach far more radical than most that is promoted today by the climate movement in Sweden, but prominent among Friends of the International Earth and global campaigns that demand climate justice.

Unlike the environmental movement in 1972, many people today seem to have illusions that UN conferences will be the starting point for everyone to solve the global social and ecological crisis. The message for many nowadays is that if we only trust cooperation between business, the state and what is now called civil society, win-win solutions will save us. Sometimes with civil disobedience actions on occasional issues such as pressure and dissemination of local alternatives.

What became a more immediate effect of the alternative activities in 1972 was that the fight against nuclear power became central in both Sweden and internationally. Not least Ingrid Segerstedt Wiberg, chairman of the International Women's Association for Peace and Freedom and a driving force in helping the environmental movement o realize that peaceful nuclear power was a myth, contributed to this.
But the Friends of the Earth in the USA had also begun to take nuclear power seriously, which now came more into its own when the dominant Anglo-American environmental ideology was questioned by Swedish popular movements and third world environmentalists. From the Powwow group grew a study circle with Annika Bryn as the driving force that in 1973 published the booklet Alternatives to nuclear power and influenced members of parliament. In the Riksdag, the center-right party member Birgitta Hambraeus had a central role in getting Sweden as the first country in the world to introduce a unanimous moratorium on continued nuclear power development in new locations that took the arrogant nuclear industry unaware. In the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency's National Association, the Liberal Party member Anita Lövgren from Tyresö Environmental Protection Association pushed a broad interest among the country's many environmental groups on the nuclear power issue.

1972 showed in this way that the peace and environmental movements need each other. What happened also showed that power relations must be challenged and the question of how the whole of society is organized must be placed at the center. It still applies.

Tord Björk,
once active in the Powwow group as a teenager and today in the Friends of the Earth, Activists for Peace and the People and Peace Network.