The limits of the global community: The Nixon administration and global environmental politics

This article presents the rise and decline of the Nixon administration's commitment to international environmental policies. It argues that administration officials pursued environmental issues to garner domestic political support and to revive interest in institutions in the wake of 1968. Though common interests among Western industrialised nations helped to promote cooperation on new environmental programmes, serious divisions arose between the industrialised North and the developing South. These divisions were most evident at the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, where issues of wealth distribution, power in the international system, and ideology suffused environmental politics. In the end, Nixon and Kissinger's waning commitment to environmental protection coupled with their repudiation of the global South's concern for increasing developmental aid ultimately limited the breadth and scope of the United States' role in attempting to reconcile the tensions between desires for continued economic growth and the imperatives of environmental protection.