Radioactive Waste Disposal at Sea: Public Ideas ... - IMO

116 Chapter 7
century” (Maddox 1972, p. 117). The prominent economist and ecologist
Barbara Ward vividly described the same change in ideas in one of a series
of lectures 9 held in Stockholm during the UN conference: “One of the fascinating
things about the present moment is the speed with which truth is
moving toward platitude. There are ideas and concepts which, when I wrote
them in our preliminary draft last year, made me wonder how far out I
could be. Yet today Ministers of the Crown are saying them and that is
surely about as far in as you can get. . . . In today’s debate . . . delegates
talked above all of the vulnerability of the oceans. Yet only a year ago, this
was an entirely new idea. Now it is a lieu commun, a near-platitude. . . .
The new ideas are penetrating human consciousness with incredible rapidity.”
(Ward 1973, pp. 21–22)
Ocean dumping in particular was seen as essentially an indivisible international
public “bad” because ocean currents were thought to mix wastes
and transport them great distances. As an insider in the U.S. marine scientific
community noted, a new international view on this issue emerged
about 1970: “There unfolded an awareness that waste of national origin
dumped at sea may be distributed globally. While such threats were not
regarded as immediate or of crisis proportions, the pervasiveness of the fluid
media potentially exposed all nations to the same risk and uncertainty. So
whatever the geopolitical and geoeconomic considerations in debate, no
matter how parochial the arguments, participants came to recognize that all
questions shared a central core of scientific, technical, and economic facts
not constrained by political or institutional boundaries or ideology.” (Wenk
1972, p. 425) In another example, one senator said immediately before the
Senate passed the ocean dumping bill: “The oceans have currents, just like
the rivers, as we know, so the debris and waste going into the oceans from
Western European countries, Japan, and any industrialized nations, finds its
way to the shores of this land, just as the debris and waste which we put in
the oceans along our coast finds its way to London, Stockholm, and other
parts of the world.” (Congressional Record: Senate, November 24, 1971,
p. 43071) This idea bound states together; no state could solve the problem
alone. Realism’s self-interest, as opposed to common or shared interest, cannot
satisfactorily explain this process of regime formation. In short, powerbased
explanations are unable to account for the United States’
environmental interests, concerns, and priorities with respect to the ocean
dumping regime.