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

Power-Based Regime Analysis 85
Pollution, a negotiation group established by the Preparatory Committee
of the Stockholm conference.
Conclusions
In the late 1960s, several spectacular mishaps and incidents of pollution
had attracted American attention to pollution of rivers, lakes, and harbors.
Attention to pollution of the ocean from dumping, however, was provoked
by the problem of dumping dredged spoils into the Great Lakes and by the
U.S. Army’s dumping of nerve gas off the coast of Florida. Although no
severe damage had been inflicted on the ocean environment, ocean dumping
was singled out for regulation. This approach of (in President Nixon’s
words) “acting rather than reacting” to prevent marine pollution from
dumping also made political sense to politicians who were under pressure
to demonstrate willingness to act against conspicuous pollution threats.
Public concern about the health of the oceans was new in the late 1960s.
It was a fortunate combination of a series of focusing events, a new influential
public idea, and a group of determined legislators and environmentalists
acting as policy entrepreneurs that resulted in regulation of ocean
dumping in the United States. This combination of elements had been mentioned
in the opening remarks at one of the congressional hearings on ocean
dumping in 1971: “It seems that no one knows the volume—and I think
that is really an understatement—of wastes that have been dumped in the
oceans in the past years. In fact, until recently, the question was scarcely
asked and then only by an obscure group of scientists, known as ecologists.
Fortunately, however, in the last few years the entire question of ocean disposal
of waste material has been thrust into prominence, and I think appropriately
so, by the recently disclosed dumping of nerve gas and oil wastes
off the coast of Florida, by the dumping of sewage and other municipal
wastes off New York Harbor, and a number of other and similar
instances.” 52
In the wake of a series of spectacular environmental accidents in the ocean
and examples of dumping causing “death” in Lake Erie and other large
water bodies, the idea of pollution of the ocean from dumping, which had
started among an insignificant group of scientists, was used by a group of
congressmen and prominent international ecologists and environmentalists