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

68 Chapter 4
the Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization (predecessor
of the International Maritime Organization), the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO), and the World Meteorological Organization—had
been involved in various aspects of ocean pollution since the
1960s (Gardner 1972). 28 In the words of a U.S. Department of State official:
“A number of international organizations—in fact, I dare say almost every
one of them—all simultaneously discovered the environment. All decided
that they in turn want to be the sole organization or the principal organization
dealing with it.” 29 A pronounced tendency among international public
officials to make ocean pollution, as well as the environmental “crisis,”
a serious international issue was also obvious. 30 But none of these international
agencies had success in getting governments involved in ocean dumping
control. Neither did they play an influential role in the construction of
the global ocean dumping regime.
UNESCO’s so-called Biosphere Conference, held in Paris in September of
1968, marked the beginning of the new era of international environmental
concern. The official name of this conference was “Intergovernmental
Conference of Experts on the Scientific Basis for the Rational Use and
Conservation of the Resources of the Biosphere.” The conference was organized
in cooperation with other UN organizations and with several nongovernmental
agencies, including the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (an organization aimed at
furthering the ecological point of view). 31 Earlier conferences on environmental
issues, often sponsored by the United Nations, had tended toward a
technical rather than an ecological orientation and had been single events. 32
The Biosphere Conference concentrated on the scientific aspects of conservation
of the biosphere and marked the first appearance on the international
environmental agenda of the biosphere approach to human-environment
relationships. The conference was well attended; representatives from 63
nations and a number of international organizations were present. As at the
1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (the so-called
Stockholm conference), prominent and vocal ecologists, mostly American,
attended and contributed to conference reports.
The final report of the Biosphere Conference included this recommendation:
“In the place of single-purpose actions in disregard of their associated
consequences, both public and private, there is need to substitute