Stockholm and 1972 – capital of environmental memory Sverker Sörlin and Eric Paglia
A stone’s throw from the Stockholm Opera House, where Prime Minister Olof Palme delivered the opening address of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) on 5 June 1972, 16-year-old schoolgirl Greta Thunberg in August 2018 began her “school strike for climate” outside the Riksdag, the Swedish Parliament building. Her solo protest soon catalyzed a global “Fridays for Future” youth movement. A distant relative of Stockholm University physical chemist Svante Arrhenius, who in 1896 first calculated the greenhouse effect, Thunberg was in December 2018 in-
Svante Arrhenius. Photogravure: Meisenbach Riffarth & Co. Leipzig [Public domain]. Greta Thunberg. Photo: Anders Hellberg [CC BY-SA 4.0]
vited to speak before the COP 24 meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, an institution that represents perhaps the most prominent political legacy of the 1972 Stockholm Conference.1 By September the following year, after sailing to New York on a carbon neutral voyage that attracted widespread media coverage, Thunberg, now “Greta” for the whole world, addressed the UN Climate Action Summit, admonishing world leaders for having failed to manage the climate crisis.
A site of memory
Stockholm’s status as an international site of memory for climate and environment thus spans well over a century and encompasses a lasting tradition of scientific research, political initiative and institution building. With UNCHE representing a pivotal event, Stockholm is closely connected to the emergence and evolution of global environmental governance, and hence on the emergence of a new narrative of the world we live in and the fate of humans in it. Decades-long intersections of individuals, institutions, ideas, and international networks in which Stockholm has served as a primary node. Tangible manifestations of these interactions, including several seminal reports that helped structure international networks and steered the trajectory of scientific fields while influencing political thinking on emerging environmental imperatives, are also part of this analysis. Bert Bolin, as a prolific science organizer who from the 1950s, was actively engaged internationally at the interface of science and policy while leading the Meteorological Institute at Stockholm
1. Damian Carrington, “‘Our Leaders are Like Children,’ School Strike Founder Tells Climate Summit,” The Guardian, 4 December 2018. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/04/leaders-like-children-school-strike-founder-greta-thunberg-tells-unclimate-summit • Svante Arrhenius, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground,” London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 41 (April 1896): 237–75.
Stockholmskonferensen 50 år – att länka samman vårt gemensamma ansvar
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