The Colloquium in International Security Studies presents
Megan Black, author of The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power and historian of U.S. environmental management and foreign relations in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries:
“AMAX on Spaceship Earth: Multinational Malaise at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment.”
In June of 1972, the executives from the multinational mining company AMAX, Inc, became mere observers to the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. This paper reflects on the UN conference, a known origin of international environmental governance, from a new angle, asking what corporate leaders perceived in the debates unfolding in Stockholm—in official halls and in the streets—and how they responded with a plan to protect business as usual.
Her book analyzes the surprising role of the U.S. Department of the Interior in pursuing minerals around the world—in Indigenous lands, formal territories, foreign nations, the oceans, and outer space. This work garnered four prizes in different subfields, including the American Society of Environmental History, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Western History Association, and the British Association of American Studies.