Kai F. Hünemörder

From a Network of Experts to Environmental Politics. Early Conferences to Protect the Environment and the Widening of the Public Interest in Environmental Issues in Europe 1959 - 1972

The essay analyses early conferences to protect the environment, that is, from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. On the basis of important conferences of the British National Society for Clean Air, the European Council, UNESCO, and the UN, the author looks at the role of informal and international networks of experts on air pollution, hygienic medicine and nature conservation and their contribution to the development of environmental politics as an independent field of political activity. Already in the late 1950s there was a strong increase in the amount of dialogue among international experts in the field of air pollution. Whereas experts from many industrial nations agreed at many conferences on the most important problems such as fighting sulphur dioxide, they differed in their assessment of the role of public opinion in cleaning up the air. Until the late 1960s, many experts in the Federal Republic, unlike experts in Great Britain, viewed air pollution as properly the domain of scientific-technical experts; in other words, the topic should be kept out of the "battle of opinion." At several conferences during the late 1960s, experts pointed with increasing urgency to the interrelationship among various "dangers to civilisation." Alongside the efforts of the European Council for a sectoral convention on air pollution, water purity and nature conservation, there were impulses from UNESCO for ecological research on the overall relationship between man and the environment.

Parallel to the initiatives of many European states, public interest in environmental questions increased in the early 1970s. At the same time, as a result of the social-critical climate and on the basis of an integrated definition of the problem many environmental groups broke with the dominant technical view of the problem. Alternative networks of concerned scientists appeared alongside the older circle of experts.