Conservation as information management: environmental internationalism before 1945

From the outset the internationalisation of nature protection provided an arena for displaying hegemonic power interests, the intention by the so-called civilised nations to create a set of shared scientific standards and values and a common agenda. One of the most important vehicles connecting inter and post-war initiatives was the International Office for the Protection of Nature (IOPN). It provided the human and scientific resources UNESCO would resort to after the end of the Second World War.

Inter and transnational networks and institutions concerned with nature conservation, species extinction, environmental degradation and sustainable resource utilisation beyond the boundaries of their respective nations emerged gradually and in different contexts before 1945. One such context was European imperialism and colonial rule overseas.Footnote ¹⁰ Another one was the growing exchange of information on nature protection as a part of modern nation-building and as a feature of modern civilisation.Footnote ¹¹ Both theory and practice concerning the establishment of national parks, designed for preserving not only sites and species but national pride, was widely discussed.Footnote ¹² Perhaps the most important effort to combine these initiatives and internationalise the protection of nature on a global scale prior to the First World War had been made by the Swiss naturalist Paul Sarasin, who submitted a programme for the global protection of nature (Weltnaturschutz) in 1910.Footnote ¹³ He appreciated the endeavours of colonial powers in setting up reserves for migrating animals and signing international conventions regulating hunting and trade, but insisted that a global net of reserves was necessary to incorporate so-called no-man's-land. Moreover, he touched on delicate issues such as the regulation of whaling and the establishment of reserves for native tribes to protect them from violence and eviction.Footnote ¹⁴ His proposal was integrated into the Swiss efforts to use internationalism as a diplomatic strategy, and in 1913, an international conference was convened in Berne to establish the World Commission for the Protection of Nature.Footnote ¹⁵ The First World War curtailed these efforts severely, but Sarasin renewed his campaign for global nature protection and approached the League of Nations to put his Commission under the League's auspices in 1920. However, the continuing hostilities and the deep mental gap running across the European scientific communities not only isolated Sarasin, but also deprived the League of Nations of a specialised agency that could have dealt with general questions of human-nature relations.

Nevertheless, due to pressure of national NGOs and evolving debates on the exploitation of common goods, the League's technical organisations became involved with problems concerning specific environmental issues, such as the regulation of whaling and oil pollution of the seas. Here, the League's work provided the basis for conventions still relevant today.Footnote ¹⁶ The direct precursor of the later UNESCO, the League of Nations’ International Committee on Intellectual Co-operation (CICI), was involved with issues of international conservation. It had set out to analyse the state of natural beauty spots world-wide in an effort to encourage and standardise the establishment of reserves. This was part of its endeavour to find issues fit to support the building of an identity of humankind and a common heritage.Footnote ¹⁷ But the debates lacked coherence. The initiatives to understand nature protection as a political issue in its own right and to create a frame for coping with the overexploitation of nature had not gained momentum.

Sarasin's visions of concerted action and adequate infrastructures were not forgotten, however. During the inter-war period a tightening web of international liaisons and co-operation evolved. In 1928, a resolution was adopted by the General Assembly of the International Union of Biological Science to establish a clearing house for international nature protection. The organisation set up to address this issue, the IOPN, was the brainchild of the Dutch preservationist Pieter Gerbrand van Tienhoven (1875–1953), ‘a believer in informal, unofficial, groups of the like-minded’.Footnote ¹⁸ Staffed only with a secretary, IOPN was a rather modest project.Footnote ¹⁹ It functioned as an interface between the pre and post-war communities and as the motor for the growing relations between American and European networkers. The IOPN did not attract much public attention, but its influence should not be underestimated, as it served as an exclusive marketplace for exchanging information among a small and ambitious circle of American and European men, who were soon to influence the policy-making of the future environmental regime.Footnote ²⁰ The General Council consisted of nineteen men, most of them scientists, from the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, Poland, Belgium, Switzerland and the USA. The IOPN mirrored more than just ambitions to consolidate colonial interests. Resource management, agriculture, the sustainable management of wildlife and forestry, acclimatisation, and so on, were all problems shared by most European colonial powers. Science was the cultural practice that was applied to their solution, and overseas colonies provided a particularly fertile field for an ecological understanding of resource management.Footnote ²¹

Imperialism thus produced a distinct form of environmental internationalism, which was issue-related, not very institutionalised, and keen to prevent international regulation from curbing the sovereignty of imperial decision-makers. For countries that were on the periphery, defeated or relatively new, and striving for better international standing, such as Switzerland, Germany and Poland, it offered a chance to (re)enter the international scientific community. Delegates were sent to the Office by the most influential of the pre and post-war elite of preservation, such as the London-based Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire (which had masterminded the conference and convention for the protection of African fauna and flora 1933), the young and ambitious American Committee for International Wild Life Protection (which was to give substantial financial support to the meagre budget of the office), the Państwowa Rada Ochrony Przyrody (Polish State Council on Nature Conservation), the German Reichsstelle für Naturschutz (Central Office for Nature Protection), the Société Nationale d'Acclimatation de France (French Society for Acclimatisation), the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (Natural History Museum) in Paris, or the Institut des Parcs Nationaux du Congo Belge (Institute for National Parks in Belgian Congo).

Many of these men had worked and travelled together and shared some of their intellectual and geographical training. Two of them – who made their first appearances immediately after the Second World War within IUPN and at the Conference at Lake Success respectively – were the Polish botanist and professor Wladyslaw Szafer, who had been responsible for setting up the first binational reserve along the Polish-Czechoslovakian border,Footnote ²² and the French ornithologist Jean Delacour, a key figure of the influential International Council for Bird Protection, founded in 1922. Delacour had travelled extensively in Indochina and led an Anglo-French-American expedition to Madagascar in 1929.Footnote ²³ The Belgian Victor van Straelen belonged to the core of the colonial preservationist community. In 1919 he had teamed up with the American conservationists John C. Merriam and Fairfield Osborn to lobby King Albert for the establishment of national parks in the Congo, then Belgian territory.Footnote ²⁴ He became head of the Musée Royal d'Histoire Naturelle de Belgique and chairman of the Institute for National Parks in the Belgian Congo, Brussels – another platform for scientific networking concerning ecological research in the tropics. The Congo turned into one of the most important laboratories of the young scientific elite of ecologists. Among the younger members of the Council was the primatologist Harold Jefferson Coolidge, who had travelled with the Harvard Medical Expedition to Africa in 1926–7 and was actively involved with establishing the American Committee as a bridgehead between European and American initiatives.Footnote ²⁵

An analysis of the fabric out of which this network was made reveals a blend of suit textiles, lab coats and khaki shorts worn on expeditions in the jungles and savannahs. All of these came from the men's department. The protagonists of the evolving epistemic community of preservationism shared some key characteristics. Most of them came from an upper or middle-class milieu, they shared the same methodological background and analytical terms, they were members of the scientific establishment, they were paid by the state and thus deemed to be loyal to their governments. Almost all of them had experienced their ecological initiation rites in the tropics and in a colonial setting. This left an imprint on the ‘global’ agenda of IOPN: among the subjects discussed in the 1930s and to be revived after 1945 were, inter alia, the inquiry into and the scientific study of the disappearance of ‘outstanding mammals’ – the forerunner of today's Red Data Books – and questions dealing with soil erosion and forest conservation.Footnote ²⁶

John McCormick has argued that IOPN was ‘doomed to fail; without an international authority it could lobby, or a quorum of mature national groups, it had nowhere to go’.Footnote ²⁷ The group of men that made up the membership of the Office, however, never thought of any public campaigns or even action but concentrated on compiling knowledge and networking.Footnote ²⁸ Thus, the Office served as an important stepping-stone between the pre-, inter and post-war communities of nature protection. It provided the human resources for the future environmental regime and the skills to draft a road map for the internationalisation of nature protection.

Linking world politics with ecology: Julian Huxley, UNESCO and IUPN

Another member of the Council of IOPN soon become one of the principal architects of institutionalised environmentalism: Julian Huxley.Footnote ²⁹ In 1946, he was propelled into global politics, when he became the first Director-General of UNESCO and gave the hitherto peripheral issues of preservation, conservation and ecology a more prominent place on the global agenda. Moreover, he helped to revive the former IOPN and thus to create an affiliated NGO, the IUPN. Huxley personifies the crossover of the old school preservationists and a younger generation of ‘imperial ecologists’.Footnote ³⁰ His attitudes and concepts are essential for understanding the ‘ecological twist’ signalled by the conference of Lake Success in 1949. Here we find how rather traditional ideas of preservation merged with the war-time experience of scarcity and planning, imperial experience and grand-scale development schemes.

The British biologist Julian Huxley (1887–1975), grandson of the famous evolutionist Thomas Huxley and brother of the well-known author Aldous Huxley, supplied UNESCO with ‘an intellectual head of steam and a restless sense of enquiry’.Footnote ³¹ In his curriculum vitae, we find many hints about the places of his ecological initiation: as a student he had spent month in the international hotspot of marine and ecological research, the zoological station of Naples, and on the Spitsbergen archipelago.Footnote ³² He was one of the promoters of the African Research Survey. This project of colonial standardisation and modernisation had pursued more effective colonial control by applying scientific knowledge and collecting ecological data.Footnote ³³ Huxley had travelled extensively on the African continent, where he discovered his passion for African wildlife, like so many of his colleagues.

Huxley was an ecstatic nature lover. His vision of the future UNESCO, written during a trip to the picturesque coast of Pembrokeshire, contained highly controversial aspects.Footnote ³⁴ This was not only because Huxley endorsed population control and the study of the so-called eugenic problem, but it was also due to his efforts to promote humanism as a universal code for world politics.Footnote ³⁵ His methodology of deriving ‘moral principles and policies from the science of evolution’ was rather doubtful, however.Footnote ³⁶Huxley envisioned a kind of all-inclusive-deal. International co-operation should operate to ‘promote better health, and full employment, and adequate food for all, and safety and ease of travel, and the spread of knowledge’.Footnote ³⁷ The general philosophy of UNESCO should be one of ‘scientific world humanism, global in extent and evolutionary in background’.Footnote ³⁸ His allegedly cosmopolitan concept mirrored not only his biological interpretation of a future world society, but also nineteenth-century conceptions of evolution and empire.Footnote ³⁹ His evolutionary understanding of society and the human relationship with nature cut to the core of his definition of UNESCO's mission. UNESCO's first Director-General was looking for the common ground on which to build a new community of mankind. The protection of nature played an important role in this concept. According to Huxley, UNESCO should care about ‘enlarging the emotional capacity of mankind and increasing the possibilities of emotional satisfaction’ through drama, painting, architecture, good planning – and national parks and nature preservation.Footnote ⁴⁰ Traditional preservationism teamed up with technocratic utopia and planning euphoria.

Julian Huxley had been part of the small international nature protection circle of the inter-war period, which was more of a virtual network than an efficient agency. While the General Assembly of UNESCO agreed to adopt the programme of ‘Fundamental Education’, which dealt among other issues with better methods of cultivation, delegates hesitated to accept conservation of nature as a subject relevant to UNESCO's agenda. They asked Huxley what to him seemed ‘silly questions: why should UNESCO try to protect rhinoceroses or rare flowers?’ Again, with the ‘aid of a few nature-lovers, I persuaded the Conference that the enjoyment of nature was part of culture, and that the preservation of rare and interesting animals and plants was a scientific duty’.Footnote ⁴¹ Apparently, being the first Director-General of UNESCO, Huxley found himself in a position of political power – essential for making weak networks actually work.

In 1947, Huxley sought non-governmental support from outside the UN system to strengthen the general position of preservation. By reactivating the inter-war networks he created an ‘independent’ environmental NGO. Plotting joint ventures turned into a characteristic feature of Huxley's UNESCO work. His strategy was to ‘discover a needy area within one's map of the whole, stimulate someone to set up a corresponding NGO; move on to the next needy area.’Footnote ⁴² Huxley apparently judged nature protection to be one such ‘needy area’. When Swiss activists set out to reactivate Sarasin's plan to institutionalise international co-operation, Huxley ‘energetically embraced the project’.Footnote ⁴³ These efforts did not remain uncontested for long. Shortly after the war, many of the former protagonists were neither able nor willing to get involved in any serious international activity. The British Colonial Office, for instance, feared the trend of such fast internationalisation, which threatened its authority in its African territories.Footnote ⁴⁴ Behind the scenes, there was a good deal of plotting to make sure that the Swiss would not dominate the future IUPN, but activists from the US and European states with an imperial outreach.Footnote ⁴⁵

Only one year later, a conference was convened in Fontainebleau to launch an official international organisation for nature protection.Footnote ⁴⁶ This all happened in a rush.Footnote ⁴⁷ Huxley had helped to stimulate the founding of IUPN and thus established a small but influential organisation which was to provide UNESCO with environmental and ecological expertise. IUPN was not a non-governmental organisation in the classic sense, as it invited anybody in who showed interest: individuals, societies, institutions and governments. It was a hybrid in organisational terms, but also in the sense that is combined issues concerning both preservation and conservation. The protagonists were few, but they were ambitious. The British activist Max Nicholson described the chaotic, yet euphoric beginning of IUPN: ‘Its first impulse was to meet, with unrealistic frequency, at a widely spread series of cities, and to pass with carefree abandon a copious set of urgent resolutions calling for action on varied controversial issues by bodies who were in no way obliged to give heed to them.’Footnote ⁴⁸

The experience of the Second World War had changed the tone of nature protection debates. The mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and the Holocaust had proved the destructive potential of modern societies and technologies. Many activists had themselves suffered badly from the war.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the wake of the war, starvation and poverty turned into common problems not only in the southern hemisphere but also in Europe. The dawn of decolonisation altered the world-view of the community. Disturbing forecasts such as Fairfield Osborne's Our Plundered Planet and William Vogt's Road to Survival (both published in 1948) struck a new chord. Discussions on nature between members of staff of UNESCO and the small nature protection community were structured by ambivalent feelings: the strong will to change the world for the better and deep apocalyptic fears. Nature protection was now not only about rare species, lovely landscapes and beauty spots, but it also had to provide answers to the basic question of how life on a rapidly changing planet could be guaranteed, facing so-called overpopulation, big-scale planning and loss of biodiversity. Moreover, post-war reconstruction meant an enormous acceleration of modernisation, mechanisation and industrialisation.

The International Technical Conference on Nature Protection, 1949

The whole debate was pushed forward when the Economic and Social Council of the UN (ECOSOC) set out to convene an international conference ‘on the conservation and utilisation of natural resources’ (UNSCCUR) and asked UNESCO for organisational support. With the highly controversial debate on resources, the apparently peripheral question of safeguarding species and sites entered the realm of power politics. The harsh critique of UNSCCUR by UNESCO's scientific staff illustrates how UNESCO set out to challenge, influence and alter the mainstream discussion of resource utilisation. When opening the floor of the embedded ‘Technical International Conference on Nature Protection’ to experts dealing with social, educational and cultural aspects of preservation and conservation, it seemed to anticipate the wide scope environmentalism would develop over the next decades. In its application of scientific ecology to these problems, the conference anticipated many of the concerns that are commonly associated with the environmental turn in the wake of Rachel Carson's best-selling book on the detrimental effects of pesticides on the environment, Silent Spring (1962), and the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm.

In 1947 the General Assembly of UNESCO accepted ECOSOC's invitation to the forthcoming UNSCCUR and to convene a concurrent international conference.Footnote ⁵⁰This simple request for administrative help forced UNESCO to be clear about its environmental vision. The staff of Huxley's office challenged ECOSOC's biased approach as tending towards a purely technical interpretation of natural resources. Indeed, the ECOSOC conference had been kicked off by US president Harry Truman who intended to put an end to armed conflicts caused by resource scarcity. The Swedish historian Björn-Ola Linnér describes the political background of this campaign:

The UNESCO's scientific section deemed the limited focus of UNSCCUR on the utilisation of natural resources short-sighted. To its members, it appeared to be not only a product of what they regarded as ‘Yankee imperialism’ and control, but of the expansion of a consumerist lifestyle. One of UNESCO's scientific staff members, Dr Yeh Chu-Pei, commented:

With Huxley, a small scientific entourage of Left-wing internationalists had come to Paris, among them Joseph Needham, a biochemist, head of the Natural Sciences Section from 1946 to 1948, and a strong exponent of the ‘idea of the universality of science and its subsequent internationalism’.Footnote ⁵³

This internationalist spirit set the tone for UNESCO's analyses of the proposed agenda of UNSCCUR. Instead of just supplying addresses and expertise that ECOSOC had asked for, the Unescians emphasised the cultural and social aspects of the resources issue. ECOSOC's one-dimensional policy encouraged them to design a new multiple approach. One of the staff members, the British socialist and science correspondent James Gerald Crowther, was commissioned to examine the ways UNESCO could possibly participate in this conference.Footnote ⁵⁴ He travelled to Mexico City, New York and Washington, D.C., where he talked to various experts and ECOSOC people. When reporting back he left no doubt that from his point of view the project lacked central aspects:

Saving resources meant more than sharing ores and coal deposits. Crowther concluded that there was much more at stake than just the question of resource security: ‘The world after all was one and the survival of man himself was the question. The holding of conferences of a limited nature on technical problems served merely to emphasize the lack of understanding of the implications of the thing to the human being [sic]’.Footnote ⁵⁶ This first generation of scientists working for UNESCO pleaded for a new social role for science. The new concept of ‘ecology’ seemed to offer systematic and comprehensive methods to deal with both biological and social phenomena. ‘Ecology’ was not just a scientific term. It was also a concept that could be applied to explain and understand the complex structure of society and politics.Footnote ⁵⁷To the protagonists of nature protection, ecology offered a new and effective term for explaining what they were actually doing. Moreover, the concept ‘ecology’ lent a scientific aura to a subject which had always struggled with the stigma of being peripheral, romantic or even esoteric.

The scientific staff of UNESCO were determined to offer an alternative perspective on how the global community should look at the issue of resources. Huxley commissioned the embryonic IUPN to organise an alternative conference. The rather provisional structure of the nature protection organisation was somewhat overburdened with this task. Hence, the core of the former protagonists felt able to comment on ecological issues, but not on global legislation. One of the éminences grises of the inter-war community, Victor van Straelen, for instance, pleaded for small-scale projects and commented, ‘that it was absurd for a biologist to talk in these circumstances of legislation for the protection of nature . . . It would often be preferable if we took experimental steps at the risk of making mistakes which would only be found out a century later.’Footnote ⁵⁸ But ECOSOC's thrust to discuss the resource issue left no time for reasoned debate. By organising its own nature protection conference, UNESCO signalled that it wanted a say in the resources debate. IUPN and UNESCO were well aware that they ‘took the risk of deliberately breaking away from the traditional practice of devoting most of their discussion at such gatherings to questions of perfecting conservation legislation and of managing reserve areas’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The coalition of IUPN and UNESCO was determined to fill the gap UNSCCUR had left: the resource debate would lack lasting effects unless it talked about education and ecology.

UNESCO and IUPN set out to ‘infiltrate’ ECOSOC's conference agenda and sent their experts to talk on the ecological, cultural and educational aspects of resource conservation.Footnote ⁶⁰ Additionally, it insisted on organising a corresponding International Technical Conference on the Protection of Nature at the same time and the same place as the ECOSOC conference in Lake Success in 1949. The network of IUPN had drafted the agenda. In agreement with UNESCO it invited institutions and organisations from all over the world, ranging from the Argentine National Parks Administration, the Chinese Forest Conservation Service, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bombay Natural History Society to animal protection societies from Nicaragua. UNESCO and IUPN wanted to open the floor to protagonists of civil society and to make the voices of new actors heard. In the end, more than 150 official delegates and several dozen other experts gathered for ten days in the temporary UN Headquarters at Lake Success to discuss the environmental problems of the world.

The list of speakers at the meeting resembled a Who's Who of international preservationism. It was still dominated by white male European and American key players of the nature protection network. But some new actors representing the scientific community of the south entered the stage. India, for instance, sent seven delegates,Footnote ⁶¹ Cuba had delegated two experts, and Mexico, Argentine and Venezuela were also represented. Moreover, at least 10 per cent of the speakers were female. The conference provided an opportunity actively to forge networks, and offered the chance to construct a new identity – that of a world-wide community. As the secretary-general of the conference, Jean-Paul Harroy, put it: ‘there was a feeling of kinship among the men and the women from the five continents whose parity of interests brought them together to synchronise their love of nature, their uneasiness about the abuses of modern economy and also their courageous hope for the future.’Footnote ⁶²

The scope of the conference's agenda was unparalleled. UNESCO energised the earlier nature protection debates by emphasising the importance of education and ecology as the basis for environmental politics. Sections would deal with the world-wide environmental education of the public, international co-operation to promote ecological research, the threatened balance of nature, the danger of the uncontrolled introduction of exotic species, the problem of extinction for large mammals in Asia and Africa, and so on. Last but not least, a World Convention on Nature Conservation was discussed. Some parts of its ambitious programme were familiar, such as emergency action plans for rescuing charismatic mega fauna – large animals with popular appeal such as elephants, pandas, lions and oryx. But other parts were rather avant-garde. By integrating topics such as education on conservation, for instance, local experience and knowledge were taken into consideration. The audience learned that Mexico had apparently the most advanced and effective education system in the world as far as the protection of nature was concerned. Poland also presented its education scheme, which touched on everyday aspects of preservation and conservation.

The discussions of Lake Success did not result in ready-made recipes – the experts fought hard to find the right way. There was no simple top-down approach. How should one guarantee that education programmes would make sense to local populations, in the context of local experiences? Would mass media be of any help? How should local knowledge about the given conditions of soil, natural cycles and climate be used? And how should such information be disseminated? The experts invoked the possible role of film, manuals, lectures, loudspeaker propaganda and slide shows, they discussed environmental education for children and adults, engineers and farmers, males and females, tourists and journalists. They suggested conservation pledges and field trips. Diversity of life could only be sustained if education itself developed aligned strategies.

Another section dealt with the consequences of the expanding use of pesticides in agriculture. This issues touched on core competencies of more powerful agencies, such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO).Footnote ⁶³ From the point of view of the FAO and the WHO such chemicals were an integral part of the advancement of the quality of life for all. When discussing the possible consequences on nature's equilibrium of the generalised use of pesticides, deep concern was raised about the negative effects of the ‘miracle insecticide’ DDT. Some of the detrimental consequences of the generalised use of insecticides and herbicides mentioned were hazardous effects on man, cattle, mammals and birds, fish, crustacea, insects, plants and the microfauna of the soil. But representatives of the WHO and the FAO pointed out the importance of the use of insecticides in agriculture and of DDT application to control malaria and other diseases.

The other participants in the section did not yet dare to condemn their use completely, but insisted that the effects of heavy use of pesticides had to be scrutinised and controlled – and thus cooled down the chemical euphoria. The WHO and the FAO consented to a close collaboration between the agricultural and biological sciences. But in the long run they ignored these early warnings and in the late 1960s the WHO Malaria Eradication Programme ‘collapsed when its keystone – DDT – crumbled’, leaving behind vast tracks of unbalanced local ecosystems and an poisoned environment, including the human populations in it.Footnote ⁶⁴ That the WHO and the FAO should thus disregard advice is in a way characteristic of relations between the big and small players in the early phase of the United Nations’ involvement in world politics. The FAO seemed to be willing to co-operate in the first place and emphasised that ‘permanent use means conservation in the widest sense – “preservation through wise use”’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Moreover, many resolutions of the conference decreed the close collaboration between the Specialized Agencies of the UN.Footnote ⁶⁶ Within the UN System, however, UNESCO proved to be one of the weaker agencies. The Conference on Nature Protection provides many examples of how environmental issues remained confined to smaller circles of experts before being subjected to public debate. It took more than a decade for the general unease with the chemical-industrial complex to turn into a striking and far-reaching narrative.

Another example of the progressive and ambivalent approach of the community represented at Lake Success is the critical assessment of the grand-scale planned enterprises. At the meeting, it was not yet clear how to judge projects such as the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme.Footnote ⁶⁷ The British government had planned the cultivation of tracts with peanuts, as Britain suffered from a severe cooking fat shortage. This project took off in 1946 and it was intended to cultivate 150,000 acres (607 km²) of scrubland in six years. After two years, only 2,000 tons of groundnuts were harvested and apparently the project fell short of expectations. The optimistic report of the Joint General Manager of the then responsible Overseas Food Corporation, John Phillips, himself a trained biologist, was criticised by other ecologists because of the damage being inflicted on the environment in Tanganyika. Some experts insisted that this enterprise was obviously having detrimental effects on the local environment and communities. After the natural vegetation had been cleared away for planting peanuts, the entomological fauna of the region had been destroyed and the pollination of the plants disrupted: ‘The very fact that some of the consequences of the original plan were unfavourable and unforeseen indicates how important it is to make an intensive preliminary ecological study before defining any final programme.’Footnote ⁶⁸ The experts in Lake Success criticised such megalomaniac development and recommended that planning should proceed at a cautious pace when conducting grand-scale experiments within natural circles.Footnote ⁶⁹

Members at the section discussing the issue of planned enterprises insisted that ecological expertise was needed to prevent such deleterious effects, that UNESCO should finance a mission of ecologists to observe such projects, and that the public must be empowered. One American delegate stated, ‘that the construction agencies usually cannot evaluate all aspects properly and that we cannot continue to permit them to go ahead on their single-track development programmes.’Footnote ⁷⁰ This comment was typical of the kind of demand made at the conference, which clearly wanted to establish an open forum in which a variety of stake-holders could be heard: ‘There is an imperative need for an informed public to defend the values in question’.Footnote ⁷¹ The discussion sheds light on the contradictory character of UNESCO. The organisation had apparently been involved in drawing up the scheme in the first place,Footnote ⁷² yet while it encouraged agricultural modernisation, it provided simultaneously a forum for voices of dissent. At Lake Success, the process of integrating various strands and networks of preservation and conservation, of imperial and internationalist experiences, of engaged individuals and national and economic interests was looming.