Woodstockholm

If we all live on one spaceship planet, as environmental thinkers like to proclaim, then its temporary center this week is Stockholm. From the site of the United Nations' first global Conference on the Human Environment, TIME Correspondent Friedel Ungeheuer reports:

Stockholm is a battlefield of conflicting reports, recommendations and manifestos. It is a jumble of diplomats (1,200 from 112 nations), scholarly experts (several thousand from 550 nongovernmental organizations), and environmental enthusiasts of every variety. They all are here for one purpose: to save the world--their way.

The official delegations are considering 120 basic recommendations ranging from the protection of endangered animals to the preservation of islands like the Galapagos for scientific study. The measures that are approved in Stockholm will go to the U.N. General Assembly for ratification in the fall. To the more militant environmentalists, however, the official agenda offers only what some of them call "Band-Aid solutions" to dangerous problems. In a separate Environment Forum, they are focusing on population growth and wasteful technology, which the agenda hardly mentions. The U.S.'s most articulate ecologist, Barry Commoner, urged a near Utopia. "To solve the environmental crisis," he said, "we must solve the problems of poverty, racial injustice and war."

Invocations. While all this earnest discussion goes on (in five official languages and a dozen meeting places), the conference is also earning itself the nickname of "Woodstockholm." Students have set up a tent city complete with a movie theater for kids too hopped up on amphetamines to s]eep--at the abandoned airport of Skarpnack, just south of the city. Chief Rolling Thunder, an honorary Shoshoni medicine man, chanted invocations while 50 members of the Hog Farm, a peregrinating U.S. commune, threw tobacco into a camp fire, a ritual that is supposed to ward off violence.

Other groups are doing their thing in town. Alternate City and Pow Wow, two radical Swedish organizations, are conducting tours through the run-down parts of Stockholm. The tour vehicle: an old bus that runs on a form of "recycled" energy, methane gas emanating from horse manure. There are endless parades, one of which featured a large plastic whale to represent that overhunted species. Traffic barely creeps around the main conference halls in the old and the new Parliament buildings. Specially painted bicycles offer a quicker and more environmentally respectable way of getting about, and even Maurice Strong, the conference's secretary-general, took one out for a spin.

The conference itself often seems more political than environmental. Russia, together with Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, started by boycotting the conference because it had failed to invite Communist East Germany as a full participant. At week's end, Soviet delegates were found holed up in a Stockholm hotel, waiting for word on whether to attend the meetings. But if the U.S. delegates' experience is any indication of the problems the superpowers can encounter within the environmental movement, the Russians may come to wish they had stayed away altogether.

Dumping. "I'll be happy if we just get out of this thing alive," complained one U.S. delegate. Part of the problem is that the U.S., with less than 6% of the world's population, consumes 40% of the world's goods and necessarily causes by far the most pollution (although most other industrial nations, including the Communist ones, make far fewer efforts to curb pollution). Another trouble is the U.S. role in Viet Nam, which most delegates oppose. In addition to deploring the terrible toll in human life, they accuse the U.S. of "ecocide" for causing long-term damage to the Vietnamese land itself by both bombing and the use of defoliants. Sweden's Prime Minister Olof Palme condemned such tactics as "shocking" and an "outrage." U.S. officials answered that they were "deeply disturbed" by Palme's "extraneous" speech and that he is "apparently unmoved by the naked aggression of others."

Aside from East-West conflicts, the different interests of each participating nation make the approval of any resolution difficult to achieve. The most important single proposal--a pact to limit the dumping of toxic wastes into the oceans--was itself dumped because legal experts from 17 nations could not agree on a list of toxic substances or a definition of territorial waters. Even a proposal to develop international standards for the use of DDT provoked outrage from nations that need the pesticide to prevent malaria or to protect cereal crops.

The most basic dispute at Stockholm, however, involves money. The 78 poor nations participating in the conference do not want to pay (and cannot afford) the costs of cleaning up a global mess that they had little part in creating. They are also well aware that any cleanup is likely to penalize them, directly or indirectly. Intensive recycling of used goods, for example, will cut the demand for their raw materials. So will new environmental restrictions on imports of products like Ecuadorian tuna. On the other hand, pollution controls on factories in the industrial countries will inevitably raise the cost that the poor nations must pay for finished goods.

The only answer, according to the underdeveloped nations, is the familiar one: more aid from the rich to the poor. Most of the Western powers endorsed that idea in Stockholm and promised to increase financial assistance. The U.S. did not follow suit; its economic-aid program will remain at $1.2 billion this year. It did pledge $40 million over the next five years toward a U.N. environmental fund, but a spokesman explained that this amount would be the only new money that the U.S. would give the U.N. Otherwise, payments are going to be held to present levels, which means that the U.S.'s total share of contributions will drop.

> Though the difficulties of getting international agreement appear to be great, there has been some progress:

> A united appeal for all nations to minimize the release of toxic metals and chemicals into the environment.

> Establishment of a global system of 110 stations to monitor the spread of pollution.

> A resolution to reduce the production of synthetic materials, such as plastics, while increasing natural, non-polluting substitutes.

How effective any of these measures will be remains to be seen. Meantime, one observer offered this summary of the conference so far. Each delegation, he said, consists of an environmental minister, and behind him sits a scientist telling him what to say and a diplomat telling him not to say it.

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