The chapter provides a broader comparative view of the League’s environmental concerns. The main aim of the discussion in this chapter it to weave these different initiatives (which are described separately in each chapter) into a coherent and broad regime, ones that has a common ground, continuity, and certain dynamics. As each chapter explains the role played by central theories, ideas, conflicting interests, environmental challenges, and scientific or professional concerns, this chapter puts them together and explain some of the differences and common patterns. Moreover, this analysis also revises the League’s different endeavors from contemporary environmental perspectives, and assesses their relevance to current dilemmas where nature protection conflicts with human needs.

Each of the chapters explores a different dimension of the League’s environmental policy. They focus on the environmental impacts of pollution of the sea by oil, the growing whaling industry and endangered whales, rural hygiene and sanitation problems in the periphery, and timber production and fears of spreading deforestation. There may well be other interwar concerns that also involved environmental perspectives. However, I present a sweeping legal-historical overview of several of the central environmental challenges that the interwar world faced, in order to understand the notions behind the League’s leadership and to explain its shortcomings and achievements.

The chapter traces the joint effort to reach an agreement on the International Convention Relating to the Pollution of the Sea by Oil. Several organs and officials of the League were involved in the complex legal consultations surrounding the promotion of an international convention that aimed to put a stop to oil discharge from ships – pollution that threatened shores and communities in various countries. The League’s campaign was intense and dealt with the conflict of interests between the shipping industry and those parties that wished to protect the sea and nature from pollution. This legal-environmental effort stands as a case study of the evolution of environmental voices who chose to turn to international law for help.

Although the campaign ultimately failed, it is nevertheless important given the many relevant threads it weaves together: the joint effort of several states and agencies; the deep involvement of various NGOs, who advocated for the protection of migrating birds that were dying in their thousands as a result of poisoned sea water; supportive public opinion with wide media coverage; questions of international law and inquiries relating to international relations; and the battle between the environmentalist agenda and competing industrial interests with their political lobby.

The chapter covers the intensive diplomacy related to whaling, one of the central campaigns the League was leading. As technological developments in the field of whaling rapidly increased, scientists became concerned that whales were about to become extinct. The League became the center for a fierce battle between whaling powers (who were reluctant to accept any external intervention in “their” profitable industries) and scientific associations and “neutral” voices (who urged the League to prevent a version of the tragedy of the commons on the high seas).

This chapter compares the negotiations and proposals for the first international whaling conventions, in order to control the boom in whaling expeditions. These had begun to travel farther and farther in the oceans, bringing the species to the brink of historical disaster.

The story of interwar whaling follows on the consideration of maritime pollution (covered in Chapter I). As both of these case studies entangled in the webs of waves, seas, and international law, it seems as they should follow each other, as they depict a certain sense of water security. Based on both chapters together, one can interpret the ways in which the League and other participants saw the sea as a legal world.

The chapter explores the League’s “rural hygiene” campaign. During its work on different reflections of sanitary problems that put local, national, and global public health at risk, the League invested substantial scientific, comparative, and professional effort while it was considering possible policies with which these dangers could be faced. These suggested policies, articulated in terms of international law, focused on the eradication of a variety of environmental-sanitary risks and spreading diseases, which the League believed to be plaguing the countryside in Eastern Europe and across the “Far East”. Among the international community’s concerns were the need to protect water resources from human and nonhuman pollution, to treat refuse, to fight spreading diseases in rural areas, to limit fly breeding, to control rats and pests, and more. Citing these concerns as threats to local and international communities, the League conceptualized agricultural peripheries as a rural frontier from which humanity could better protect itself, using various means of sanitary engineering, special medical services, and political awareness.

This chapter tracks two main events that took up much of the League’s attention. First, it assembled the European Conference on Rural Hygiene (1931) and, later, parallel to its main agenda, the Intergovernmental Conference of Far Eastern Countries on Rural Hygiene, held at Bandoeng, Java in August 1937.

The chapter uncovers the problem of timber following the Great Depression, and the increasing concerns of spreading deforestation around the world.

The Kingdom of the Forests gained particular attention during the interwar period. International bodies were interested in coordinating the production and supply of different raw materials to the international market, both in regular times and during crises. Immediately after the Great War, the League became interested in timber in particular. When the Great Depression started to affect international commerce, timber production was at stake as well. Accusations against a dumping policy of the Soviet Union have been heard too. This alleged policy applied pressure of its own and put other national timber industries at risk. The League wished to support these industries and encouraged the development of an international regime of mutual cooperation between exporting and importing countries.

With the merging of economic and industrial threads, environmental considerations were woven into the plot, coloring the dilemma with urgent calls to restrict forest harvest in order to stop deforestation from expanding. In the late 1930s, different voices started to advocate for the protection of trees and forests, and encouraged the League to fight back against deforestation.

These dimensions added another layer to the economic incentives and industrial interests surrounding the timber issue.

This part concludes several of the key patterns in the League’s environmental regime. I use this opportunity to discuss some of the broader implications of this study for international environmental policymaking.

Next to the techno-environmental and legal questions covered in each chapter, the environmental story reveals the complex institutional framework of the League. I claim that the shift to internationalism was not only reflected in the substantive issues that were at stake. The interwar environmental regime was primarily based on a procedural and legal routine that supported the environmental challenges that confronted the League. The League brought something completely different into the table. The environmental law missions that I uncover show how and to which extent the League shifted these discussions and kept them going, thanks to its regular institutional routine. It was the League’s systematic – almost bureaucratic – institutional work that triggered these discussions, squeezing them into different modes of operation. In this way, these issues developed their own dynamic as part of international law.

Moreover, and although the League failed in many of its actions, including the environmental challenges, I will argue that given the layered structure of international environmental law (and its history), the interwar period should not be overlooked: not in terms of comparative legal history, and not in terms of its influence and links to the current issues of the ecological crisis.