A Stockholm Notebook

Every day there were new committee meetings and new resolutions to consider, but many interesting aspects of the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment never came to any vote. As delegates from 114 nations prepared to leave Stockholm last week, TIME Correspondent Friedel Ungeheuer cabled some impressions:

Motherhood was almost a dirty word here--but it had its defenders. At the scientists' Environment Forum, Stanford Biologist Paul Ehrlich blamed half the world's environmental problems on increases in population. A woman biologist from Nigeria, aided by four burly colleagues, startled the audience by seizing Ehrlich's microphone and declaring that birth control was merely a way for the industrial powers to remain rich by preserving the status quo. Peace was restored only after Ehrlich conceded that the U.S. should curb its own consumption of natural resources before urging population controls on developing countries. Brazilian Economist Josue de Castro fumes at the very mention of birth control. "Genocide of the unborn!" he charges.

Uniformed guards with dogs kept a wary watch on the tent city erected by youthful environmentalists at the abandoned airport of Skarpnaeck, but the violent demonstrations the police feared never came. Instead, the students put on gentle "eco-skits" to dramatize "eco-catastrophes." In one, for example, a girl painted as a skeleton and accompanied by drums and cymbals danced a warning about the radioactive fallout from French nuclear-bomb tests in the Pacific. Total damage to property caused by such activities: one broken window.

At noon, many people gathered at the Grand Hotel, a pink elephant of a building with a view over the port (impressively clean) and the Royal Palace (depressingly severe). The reason was simple. The U.S. Population Institute served a delicious free lunch there: marinated river salmon with sweet mustard, herring in fresh cream, tiny meat balls, thick slices of rare roast beef. To ask an environmentalist to dine, however, is to ask for trouble. Dr. Samuel Epstein, the Cleveland toxicologist who first warned of the harmful effects of the detergent component nitrilotriacetic acid (NTA), contended that the beef was full of cancer-causing aflatoxins. "Don't know why the Swedes don't get rid of them," Epstein said. "They are so easy to detect--fluorescent."

Economist Barbara Ward on the trend of speeches: "Truth is moving to platitude with alarming speed."

The conferees fretted continually about the consequences of industrialization. Microbiologist Rene Dubos, generally the most optimistic of the U.S.'s major ecologists, said that modern farmers are putting more energy into the soil (in the form of mechanization, fertilizers and pesticides) than they are taking out in the form of bumper crops. By 1987, Dubos predicted, such practices will cause enough pollution and depletion of resources to limit further growth. He offered the odd analogy of the medieval church builders in France, who decided to end their rivalry after the highest cathedral, in Beauvais, twice collapsed. "Every technology has its limits," said Dubos.

But talk of slowing industrialization was anathema to the developing nations. The Chinese delegation, led by Tang Ke, Minister of Fuel, had an answer. The world's resources are "inexhaustible," he said, provided all nations follow the teachings of Mao Tse-tung.

There was less confidence in a special report signed by 2,200 scientists from 23 nations: "We do not really know the full dimensions of either our problems or their solutions."

The astonishing thing about the official meetings was that almost all the recommendations on the agenda were approved, though often watered down. There is very little that the U.N. can actually do to enforce them, however--to make Japan and Russia (whose delegation never appeared after all) stop killing whales, or to make France and China stop testing nuclear weapons. "Every country has the right to protect itself from imperialism," insisted the Chinese. No matter. The conferees urged creation of a new U.N. office to coordinate international environmental activities and a global system to monitor the spread of pollutants. What effect will that have? The image that comes to mind is of a man who is given a thermometer and a fever chart to see him through a serious illness.

Perhaps no more concrete accomplishments could have been expected from a meeting that was necessarily divided by so many conflicting interests: the rich v. the poor nations, East v. West, free v. Communist world. Yet the conference showed that a start could be made on a problem that has been too long ignored.

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