Benjamin Franklin. Stock Montage/Archive Photos/Getty Images
Throughout history national governments have passed occasional laws to protect human health from environmental contamination. About AD 80 the Senate of Rome passed legislation to protect the city’s supply of clean water for drinking and bathing. In the 14th century, England prohibited both the burning of coal in London and the disposal of waste into waterways. In 1681 the Quaker leader of the English colony of Pennsylvania, William Penn, ordered that one acre of forest be preserved for every five acres cleared for settlement. In the following century, Benjamin Franklin led various campaigns to curtail the dumping of waste. In the midst of the Industrial Revolution, in the 19th century, the British government passed regulations to reduce the harmful effects of coal burning and chemical manufacture on public health and the environment.
Prior to the 20th century, there were few international environmental agreements. The accords that were reached focused primarily on boundary waters, navigation, and fishing rights along shared waterways and ignored pollution and other ecological issues. In the early 20th century, conventions to protect commercially valuable species were reached, including the Convention for the Protection of Birds Useful to Agriculture (1902), signed by 12 European governments; the Convention for the Preservation and Protection of Fur Seals (1911), concluded by the United States, Japan, Russia, and the United Kingdom; and the Convention for the Protection of Migratory Birds (1916), adopted by the United States and the United Kingdom (on behalf of Canada) and later extended to Mexico in 1936.
In the 1930s Belgium, Egypt, Italy, Portugal, South Africa, Sudan, and the United Kingdom adopted the Convention Relative to the Preservation of Fauna and Flora in their Natural State, which committed those countries to preserve natural fauna and flora in Africa by means of national parks and reserves. Spain and France signed the convention but never ratified it, and Tanzania formally adopted it in 1962. India, which consented to the agreement in 1939, was subject to the sections of the document prohibiting “trophies” made from any animal mentioned in the annex.
Fur seals were granted protection by the United States, Japan, Russia, and the United Kingdom in 1911. Joel Sartore/National Geographic Image Collection/Getty Images
Beginning in the 1960s, environmentalism became an important political and intellectual movement in the West. In the United States the publication of biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), a passionate and persuasive examination of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and the environmental damage caused by their use, led to a reconsideration of a much broader range of actual and potential environmental hazards. In the following decades the U.S. government passed an extraordinary number of environmental laws—including acts addressing solid-waste disposal, air and water pollution, and the protection of endangered species—and created an Environmental Protection Agency to monitor compliance with them. These new environmental laws dramatically increased the national government’s role in an area previously left primarily to state and local regulation.
In Japan rapid reindustrialization after World War II was accompanied by the indiscriminate release of industrial chemicals into the human food chain in certain areas. In the city of Minamata, for example, large numbers of people suffered mercury poisoning after eating fish that had been contaminated with industrial wastes. By the early 1960s, the Japanese government had begun to consider a comprehensive pollution-control policy, and in 1967 Japan enacted the world’s first such overarching law, the Basic Law for Environmental Pollution Control. Not until the end of the 20th century was Minamata declared mercury-free.
Thirty-four countries in 1971 adopted the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance Especially as Waterfowl Habitat, generally known as the Ramsar Convention for the city in Iran in which it was signed. The agreement, which entered into force in 1975, now has nearly 100 parties. It required all countries to designate at least one protected wetland area, and it recognized the important role of wetlands in maintaining the ecological equilibrium.
Following the United Nations (UN) Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972, the UN established the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) as the world’s principal international environmental organization. Although UNEP oversees many modern-day agreements, it has little power to impose or enforce sanctions on noncomplying parties. Nevertheless, a series of important conventions arose directly from the conference, including the London Convention on the Prevention of Pollution by Dumping of Wastes or Other Matter (1972) and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (1973).
Until the Stockholm conference, European countries generally had been slow to enact legal standards for environmental protection—though there had been some exceptions, such as the passage of the conservationist Countryside Act in the United Kingdom in 1968. In October 1972, only a few months after the UN conference, the leaders of the European Community (EC) declared that the goal of economic expansion had to be balanced with the need to protect the environment. In the following year the European Commission, the EC’s executive branch, produced its first Environmental Action Programme, and since that time European countries have been at the forefront of environmental policy making. In Germany, for example, public attitudes toward environmental protection changed dramatically in the early 1980s, when it became known that many German forests were being destroyed by acid rain. The environmentalist German Green party, founded in 1980, won representation in the Bundestag (national parliament) for the first time in 1983 and since then has campaigned for stricter environmental regulations. By the end of the 20th century the party had joined a coalition government and was responsible for developing and implementing Germany’s extensive environmental policies. As a group, Germany, The Netherlands, and Denmark—the so-called “green troika”—established themselves as leading innovators in environmental law.
When acid rain damaged German forests, the public rallied for environmental regulations. Shutterstock.com
During the 1980s the “transboundary effects” of environmental pollution in individual countries spurred negotiations on several international environmental conventions. The effects of the 1986 accident at the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) were especially significant. European countries in the pollution’s downwind path were forced to adopt measures to restrict their populations’ consumption of water, milk, meat, and vegetables. In Austria traces of radiation were found in cow’s milk as well as in human breast milk. As a direct result of the Chernobyl disaster, two international agreements—the Convention on Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident and the Convention on Assistance in the Case of Nuclear Accident or Radiological Emergency, both adopted in 1986—were rapidly drafted to ensure notification and assistance in the event of a nuclear accident. In the following decade a Convention on Nuclear Safety (1994) established incentives for countries to adopt basic standards for the safe operation of land-based nuclear power plants.
There are often conflicting data about the environmental impact of human activities, and scientific uncertainty often has complicated the drafting and implementation of environmental laws and regulations, particularly for international conferences attempting to develop universal standards. Consequently, such laws and regulations usually are designed to be flexible enough to accommodate changes in scientific understanding and technological capacity. The Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer (1985), for example, did not specify the measures that signatory states were required to adopt to protect human health and the environment from the effects of ozone depletion, nor did it mention any substances that were thought to damage the ozone layer. Similarly, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, or Global Warming Convention, adopted by 178 countries meeting in Rio de Janeiro at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (popularly known as the “Earth Summit”), did not set binding targets for reducing the emission of the “greenhouse” gases thought to cause global warming.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established by the World Meteorological Organization and UNEP to study changes in Earth’s temperature. In 1995 the panel concluded that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” Although cited by environmentalists as final proof of the reality of global warming, the report was faulted by some critics for relying on insufficient data, overstating the environmental impact of global warming, and using unrealistic models of climate change. Two years later in Kyoto, Japan, a conference of signatories to the Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted the Kyoto Protocol, which featured binding emission targets for developed countries.
