UN. – UNITED NATIONS. – MacLeish, William (ed.):

MAN’S HOME. New York Geneva Stockholm: United Nations Conservation Foundation, 1972 for United Nations Conference on the Human Environment Stockholm, Sweden. Small sqaurish 8vo. Five booklets in original slipcase. Slipcase edgeworn, rubbed at corners but complete and is not damaged, no loss and is also clean. The folders all excellent, sharp and clean and beautiful. More photos available upon request

Stockholm, 1972. Five years after the Summer of Love, four after the Paris riots; the Cold War is in full swing. The Club of Rome has just projected a future in which the demands of a growing human population outstrip the Earth’s capacity to provide. The blue whale, the biggest animal that ever lived, has been hunted almost to extinction. Atom bomb tests continue to garnish the world in strontium-90; and from Japan to Europe to North America, man-made poisons are affecting plants, animals and people. Economically, the world has never had it so good. But governments are beginning to realise that nature is paying a price. On 5 June 1972, in the Swedish capital, they began to build their response, in the form of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment – the first UN summit on the environment, and the event that really put the issue on the global political agenda. (…) no country in the world had a ministry of the environment before Stockholm, as the first the Norwegian delegation raced back to Oslo and established a ministry. Stockholm started something; it put the environment on the political agenda.” Internationally, that agenda would lead in 1987 to the Brundtland Commission and its famous definition of a sustainable society as one that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. It would lead to the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992, which gave birth to UN conventions on climate change, biodiversity and desertification, and the Agenda 21 “roadmap” to sustainable development.

This is the original UN publication from 1972 complete with 5 pamphlets (in portfolio) illus. 16 x 21 cm. [1] Resources: used and abused / John Ludwigson. [2] Pollutants: poisons around the world / Jeremy Main. [3] A world of cities / Frederick Gutheim. [4] A watch on the earth / G. M. Woodwell. [5] The art of progress development and the environment / Anthony Wolff. With photographs by Cornell Capa, Rene Burri, Ansel Adams, George Rodger, Bruce Davidson, Henri Cartier-Bresson, NASA, Andre Kertesz, Eugene Smith, Marc Riboud and others. (#56250) DKK500.00