Article ID: CBB001201238

Dueling Visions for the Postwar World: The UN and UNESCO 1949 Conferences on Resources and Nature, and the Origins of Environmentalism (2014)

unapi

In 1946, at the behest of President Harry S. Truman, the United Nations (UN) announced that it would hold a conference to consider the conservation and effective utilization of natural resources. The impetus was the belief that among the primary causes of World War II was Germany's and Japan's desperation to secure scarce materials and a growing postwar fear that other industrialized nations---including possibly the United States---would soon find themselves in similar straits. The real or exaggerated fear of resource shortages and declining standards of living has in the past involved nations in warfare, said Truman in a letter calling for the conference, sent to the U.S. representative to the UN's Economic and Social Council. He concluded that conservation can become a major basis of peace. Three years in the making, the United Nations Scientific Conference on the Conservation and Utilization of Resources (UNSCCUR) was finally held in 1949 at the UN's temporary headquarters in Lake Success, New York.1 UNSCCUR was, however, not alone in its occurrence. The conference was challenged when another UN agency, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) decided to hold its own conference in Lake Success at the same time. The International Technical Conference on the Protection of Nature (ITCPN) made obvious how UNESCO defined its gathering in contrast to UNSCCUR. In the wake of the war UNESCO found the UN's economic focus based on traditional conservation inadequate, and the organization urged a more comprehensive and robust protectionist ideology that embodied the expanded environmental consciousness beginning to take hold during the postwar era.2 [from Text]

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Authors & Contributors
Sandvik, Pål Thonstad
Schleper, Simone
Espen Storli
Mainz, Vera V.
Andreas R. D. Sanders
Uekoetter, Frank
Concepts
Conservation of natural resources
Science and politics
Environmental protection
Natural resource management
Environmentalism
Environmental history
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, late
18th century
Places
United States
Canada
Antarctica
Norway
Germany
Finland
Institutions
UNESCO
United Nations
International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN)
United Nations Environment Programme
World Health Organization (WHO)
United States. National Park Service
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