David Larsson Heidenblad
David Bowie released his seminal album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars 50 years ago, on June 16, 1972.
It was an artsy and ambitious rock album which captured the time’s sense of being on the cusp of new technological and cultural frontiers.
In the early 1970s, the US Apollo programme was, briefly, making men visiting the moon seem routine. The possibilities of computer power were beginning to unfold, and the countercultural youth revolt was challenging prevailing values and norms. Bowie’s fictional alter ego encapsulated these groundbreaking developments: an androgynous rockstar from outer space.
But coupled with its playful fascination for space technology, the Ziggy Stardust album also described a dread of the Pandora’s box that might be opened as a result. Its opening track, Five Years, warned listeners that “Earth was really dying”. During the cold war, the prospect of man-made armageddon through nuclear war was never far away. And by the early 1970s, fears of an ecological crisis and overpopulation were starting to take on similar apocalyptic proportions.
Indeed, the day of Ziggy Stardust’s release coincided with the final day of a landmark gathering in Sweden to discuss the future of the planet. The Stockholm Conference, which began on June 5, 1972, was the first United Nations conference on the human environment, and the starting point for global environmental governance.
Today’s global climate summits, most recently COP 26 in Glasgow in November, are its direct descendants.
Bowie’s obsession with outer space predated the creation of Ziggy Stardust. In June 1969, what would become his first major hit single, Space Oddity, was released. It told the story of an astronaut losing contact with Ground Control while gazing at the Earth from afar in his “tin can”.
It was during the manned moon expeditions that Earth was first photographed from space. The most iconic image, Earthrise – taken over Christmas 1968 with a Hasselblad camera by the crew of Apollo 8 – shows our planet rising over the lifeless landscape of the moon. It has become one of the most widely shared and reproduced photographs of all time.
New satellite technology also made it possible for astronauts’ space adventures to be followed on television.
In the words of historian Robert Poole: “It gave people a picture to think with.” Other scholars talked about the “overview effect”: by seeing the Earth from space, people became aware that life on their planet was interconnected, limited and vulnerable – giving impetus to the emerging survivalism movement.
Five Years also echoes some of the survivalist debate’s darker sentiments, with its weeping “newsguy” confirming the end of the world is nigh.
In Sweden, the pivotal moment for the awakening of environmental consciousness came in 1967. At that time, a choir of prominent Swedish scientists publicly warned of an impending global environmental crisis. Foremost among them was the chemist Hans Palmstierna, whose book Plundering, Starvation, Poisoning became an instant best-seller.
Palmstierna argued there was an urgent need to act “before the hourglass expires for humanity”. He linked environmental destruction to other global issues, including world poverty, war and overpopulation – thereby emphasising that environmental hazards were just as severe a threat to humankind.
The impact of Palmstierna’s and other scientists’ collective intervention was powerful. The national press, radio and television reported on mercury-poisoned fish, biocides and acid rain with unprecedented intensity.
In the words of the Swedish historian Lars J Lundgren, it was as if a “new continent of problems” had been discovered. Where, previously, environmental hazards had been regarded as individual problems to be solved in isolation, more and more people were beginning to see them as connected – and constituting a severe crisis.
From an international perspective, Sweden’s breakthrough of environmental concern occurred remarkably early. Intrinsic to this reorientation was the very concept of “the environment” (in Swedish, miljö).
The word had not been used in the early 1960s – for example, during the intense debate sparked by Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, which awakened public understanding of the links between industrial pesticides and the die-out of insects and wildlife in the US. At that point, people discussed nature, conservation and the threat modern industrial civilisation posed to wild birds and animals. But the environmental debate which arose in Sweden in the late 1960s put the threat to humankind at the forefront.
Swedish diplomats suggested to the UN that a large environmental conference should be organised. Their initiative set the ball rolling towards what would eventually become the 1972 Stockholm Conference, the UN’s first global Conference on the Human Environment.
A key voice was Gösta Ehrensvärd, professor of biochemistry at Lund University, who calculated that the depletion of the planet’s limited resources, combined with accelerating population growth, would lead to a global crisis in about 2050 – followed by centuries of famine and anarchy.
The discussions in Stockholm went on for two hot June weeks, based on a growing realisation that humans were on the verge of destroying their own living environment. While the assembled world leaders sought to spark international commitments, some environmental activists objected that the conference excluded the public.
Two concrete results of the conference were the Stockholm Declaration, which laid the groundwork for international environmental jurisdiction, and the foundation of the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP). Based in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, UNEP became responsible for co-ordinating international responses to environmental issues, and was the first UN body located in the developing world.
Much of the conference’s focus ended up being on the global north-south divide. The western world’s efforts to deal with environmental degradation and overpopulation were pitted against developing countries’ desire for industrialisation and prosperity.
To an observer in 2022, with last year’s COP26 still fresh in the memory, the dividing lines of Stockholm 1972 look eerily familiar. Then, as now, young environmental activists viewed the conference as a slow and insufficient way of dealing with urgent problems.
Greta Thunberg’s famous “blah, blah, blah” speech could have been spoken by protesters in 1972. Fifty years on, we have grown accustomed to recurring meetings, declarations, goals, bleak scenarios and calls from scientists and environmental activists to change the system. Much of this was present at the birth of global environmental politics.
This June 2-3, the 1972 event will be commemorated in the Swedish capital during Stockholm+50, a UN conference jointly organised by Sweden and Kenya. Its organisers are seeking to highlight the importance of multilateralism in tackling what they call “Earth’s triple planetary crisis”: climate, nature and pollution. But just as collective action proved difficult at the original Stockholm Conference, is it possible for the nations of the world to act any more decisively now?
The final day of the Stockholm Conference – June 16, 1972 – was the day Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars was released to the world. Fifty years on, the hopes and fears evoked in this album, like the conference, still feel disturbingly relevant.
This November’s COP 27, in Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt, will be the first such conference to be held on African soil. The continent, despite contributing a mere 4% to global emissions of greenhouse gases, is bearing the brunt of their impacts, with the combined effects of severe drought, flooding and pestilence – along with conflict in Africa and Ukraine – now threatening a “full-scale catastrophe” across East Africa. | The Conversation
- Heidenblad is associate professor of history at Lund University in Sweden.
The Independent on Saturday