Environment and Natural Resources

Abstract

Governments have been concluding agreements on matters relating to the conservation of the physical environment for over a century. International action to preserve ‘birds useful to agriculture’, for example, can be traced back to 1868 (Caldwell, 1990, pp. 17–18). A large number of international fisheries commissions were set up in the first half of the twentieth century and current international marine pollution law dates back to the 1950s. However, environmental issues were most definitely not considered to be part of the mainstream of world politics. Environmental politics were so ‘low’ on the international agenda as to be virtually invisible. In the most important textbook of the Cold War era, Hans J. Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations (1967), the only mention of the physical environment was as one element of national power (alongside decisive factors such as national character). Natural resources were, in Morgenthau’s words, ‘another relatively stable factor’ (1967, p. 109). The environment, then, was simply regarded as the unchanging context of international politics, and environmental issues the preserve of technical negotiations about fish stocks, wildlife preservation and the design of oil tankers.