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

122 Chapter 7
and dynamism of you three [Commoner, Heyerdahl, and Hugh Downs]
here this morning getting the attention of the American public and in turn
of our colleagues here in the Congress to move in the right direction” (Sen.
Ernest Hollings, International Conference on Ocean Pollution, p. 26).
Members of Congress were keenly aware that Cousteau, Heyerdahl, and
other articulate science celebrities and prominent, vocal scientists and ecologists
played a critical role in identifying the need for regulation and establishing
new norms for ocean protection. In short, they performed a crucial
norm-setting role.
Ecologists and environmentalists originally produced the ideas and concepts
that bound together the transnational coalition of policy entrepreneurs.
But politicians were not passive consumers of ideas. Politicians
themselves were actively involved in spreading policy-relevant ideas, and
it is difficult to distinguish in a meaningful way among producers, consumers,
and communicators of ideas. For example, Senator Gaylord
Nelson, who first proposed U.S. ocean dumping regulation in Congress in
February of 1970, wrote an article titled “Stop Killing Our Oceans,” which
was published in Reader’s Digest (February 1971) and reprinted in the
Congressional Record (Senate, February 8, 1971, pp. 2035–2036). 18
The case of ocean dumping confirms the claims made in chapter 3 about
the significance of the intellectual and contextual characteristics of ideas.
Policy entrepreneurs chose to push an idea and target a problem that corresponded
with broad environmental concerns, whereas ideas that questioned
the seriousness of the marine pollution problem were relegated to
political obscurity and survived only among scientists and in their professional
journals. 19 The “dying oceans” idea was a strong value statement
favoring a general need for protecting the marine environment. It expressed,
in capsular form, a more comprehensive environmental value and belief
system.
It was a combination of intellectual and contextual characteristics that
made the “dying oceans” idea pervasive and powerful.
First, the idea was (or at least could be) used to portray a large number
of very different instances and degrees of contamination and pollution.
Rivers, lakes, estuaries, straits, seas, and oceans were repeatedly described
as “dead” in this period. 20 In addition to the examples mentioned earlier, a
part of New York Harbor was called “the Dead Sea,” 21 the Santa Barbara
Channel was described as “a sea gone dead” after an offshore oil well