Acknowledgments

This book is in part the result of many years of immersion in the human environment of Stockholm. This includes the countless conferences, meetings, and seminars on environment and sustainability issues that we have taken part in, as well as our engagement in numerous research projects, the Swedish public debate, and various governmental processes. At events we have attended over the years, visiting scholars or officials from outside Sweden have often made reference to key meetings held in Stockholm that had served as turning points in the development of a particular scientific discipline or some important political process that was directly connected to the Swedish capital.

As environmental historians, we have previously written about a wide range of institutions, individuals, and events centered on Stockholm, for example, Carl-Gustaf Rossby and the establishment of the International Meteorological Institute at Stockholm University; the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE), including the Swedish science diplomacy of its crucial preparatory period; and the history of the international journal Ambio, published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Moreover, in our academic as well as journalistic work producing environmental radio programs and podcasts, we have had the opportunity to interview and document the oral histories of scores of scientists, activists, diplomats, and other public officials, from Sweden and elsewhere. Despite their disparate backgrounds, many told a similar story on the outsized role Stockholm has played in advancing understanding of the planetary environment and in promoting international action on sustainability issues.

At some point, perhaps a decade ago, it became clear to us that Stockholm has, over the course of some seventy years, indeed punched far above its weight in the evolution of what is today referred to as global environmental governance (GEG). That realization inspired us to write this book. It aims to bring together the histories of an array of parallel processes of institution building, scientific innovation, and political engagement, both before and after the landmark 1972 Stockholm Conference, into a single comprehensive narrative. Given its central place in an otherwise complex international history, it is our hope that the “Stockholm story” told here can serve as a converging lens. Aided by it, we believe, readers will be able to perceive and perhaps appreciate well over a half century of history – perhaps even progress – in a realm of global governance that was critical for the future of humankind in 1972 and is even more so today.

People are central – as they should be in a book about “the human environment” – and we have had the privilege to interview many of the main protagonists that animate the pages of this book. Sadly, some of those have since passed away. The American–Australian Earth system scientist and world-class science communicator Will Steffen, who served as Executive Director of the Stockholm-based International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme from 1998 to 2004, was one of them. Will was a colleague and friend, an endless source of insight and inspiration, a tireless Anthropocene entrepreneur, and a diplomatic voice seeking to combine a sound human–Earth relationship with fair sharing and justice among societies and between humans. He was also one of our primary sources of insight into the institutionalization of Earth system science and other processes connected to Stockholm, including the emergence of the Anthropocene concept. For all of this, and much more, we have chosen to dedicate this book to the memory of Will.

The late Swedish diplomat Lars Björkbom shared with us his experiences in helping to establish the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution, and the American physicist Jack Hollander, who has also since passed away, provided valuable details on the founding of the Beijer Institute, where he served as a chairman of the international board during the entire duration of the institute in its original form from 1977 to 1989.

Lars Kristoferson, who served as Deputy Director of the original Beijer Institute as well as the Stockholm Environment Institute during its first few years, has been an important source of information on and insight into institutional development in Stockholm. Phone interviews were conducted with two of the key actors, climate scientists Jill Jaeger and Michael Oppenheimer, who worked at or collaborated with the Beijer Institute in arranging and documenting the seminal Villach and Bellagio climate meetings in the latter half of the 1980s. Over the course of many years and many interviews, Ambassador Bo Kjellén, Sweden’s former chief climate negotiator who took part in creating the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, has been an invaluable resource for our comprehension of climate diplomacy. Ambassador Lars-Göran Engfeldt has more than anyone been an essential source due to his firsthand experiences and deep understanding of environmental diplomacy. He can safely be called the world’s first career environmental diplomat due to his instrumental role in the Stockholm Conference preparatory period, a trajectory he continued up through Rio 1992 and Johannesburg 2002. The former Swedish foreign ministry official Göran Bäckstrand, closely involved with preparations for Stockholm 1972, also made important contributions to our understanding of that event. Policy expert Bob Munro provided insight into events and international networks connected to Stockholm, including the 1982 Rättvik Conference and its influence on environmental governance well beyond Sweden.

Scientists who have been engaged in the development of disciplines and institutions are a major theme of this book. Thomas Rosswall, Founding Executive Director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, among many other science leadership positions, and Henning Rodhe, a pioneer in the study of acid rain and climate change across many decades at Stockholm University’s Meteorological Institute, greatly enhanced our understanding of a wide range of issues and international processes that they have been deeply involved with. The Lund University ecologist Sören Svensson was another source of insight into Swedish contributions to international scientific networks. Uno Svedin and Måns Lönnroth, who operated at the interface of science, policy, and research funding during their long careers in government-related institutions, provided us with valuable information and perspectives on many of the main themes of this book. Several staff members at the Academy of Sciences in Stockholm were helpful, including Bo Söderström, Editor-in-Chief of Ambio, who directed us to the journal’s archives, and Carl Folke, Director of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics.

In addition, we had previously had the privilege of interviewing many of the individuals appearing in the pages of this book for the radio program and podcast Think Globally Radio, as well as for earlier research projects. These interviews, dating back as far as 2002, have also informed our understanding of the issues and events elaborated on in the chapters that follow. Those that have provided insights, perspectives, and oral histories both inside and outside the parameters of this book project include the late Sverker Åström, Maurice Strong and Malin Falkenmark, Anders Wijkman, Lennart Daléus, Mark Lynas, Johan Rockström, Owen Gaffney, Lars Ingelstam, Kevin Noone, Jan Mårtenson, James Hansen, Anders Turesson, Alexander Crawford, Libby Robin, Leah Aronowsky, and Julia Adeney Thomas. We have presented material from the book in seminars, workshops, and invited talks in multiple institutions, for example: History and Philosophy of Science, and the Center for History and Economics, both at the University of Cambridge; Political Science, Stockholm University; Social Anthropology, University of Oslo; Political Science, Umeå University; History, Roskilde University; Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS), Uppsala University; University of Bergen; University of Adelaide (online); Luigi Einaudí Foundation, Turin (online); the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (online); the European Society for Environmental History 2022, Bristol; and the American Society for Environmental History 2023, (Boston) and 2024, (Denver). We are grateful for inspiring meetings and constructive comments.

Valuable comments on earlier versions of the book’s chapters were received from Åsa Persson, Henning Rodhe, Jill Jaeger, Lars-Göran Engfeldt, Thomas Rosswall, Uno Svedin, Johan Rockström, Lars Kristoferson, Göran Bäckstrand, Paul Warde, Lars J. Lundgren, Arne Kaijser, and Markus Larsson. Members of the Study of the Planetary Human–Environment Relationship (SPHERE) research project, Sabine Höhler, Jasmin Höglund Hellgren, Erik Isberg, Gloria Samosír, Thomas Harbøll Schrøder, Vanessa Ogle, and Glenda Sluga have provided useful feedback on both the foundational ideas and during the writing of this book. Glenda also spurred our thinking by inviting us to contribute, in 2019, a Stockholm chapter for her volume, coedited with Kate Darian-Smith and Madeleine Herren, Sites of International Memory (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).

Institutionally, we have benefitted enormously from our fabulous colleagues and PhD students in the Division of the History of Science, Technology and Environment and the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, both at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. In this vibrant, interdisciplinary setting, SPHERE has been the home of this book project since its start (see: spheregovernance.org). The SPHERE project on the history of GEG has been hosted by the Division from 2018 to 2024 and financed through Sverker Sörlin’s Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. In addition, Eric Paglia’s work has been supported by a grant from Formas, the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development. During the academic year 2022–2023, Sverker worked on the book with a generous grant as a long-term fellow under the Environmental Humanities program at SCAS in Uppsala University. Thanks are also due to the Marcus and Marianne Wallenberg Foundation, which funded a large earlier program (until 2017) on the history of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. In this project, Sverker studied the breakthrough years of “the environment” in the Academy around 1970, research that ignited additional thoughts about the potential of a book on the history of Stockholm as a global environmental node.

Finally, it brings us tremendous pleasure to thank Lucy Rhymer and Rosa Martin at Cambridge University Press and the coeditor of the series that this book is part of, John McNeill, for trust and support in the project from the very start, and to Cambridge University Press’s anonymous reviewers for useful comments. Whatever errors remain are exclusively the responsibility of the authors.