This prologue sets out the rationale of a book-length study of Stockholm as a central place in the rise of global environmental governance. The main reason is necessity. Ever since the 1970s, the importance of the 1972 UN Conference on “the human environment” has been underscored in the scholarly literature. However, precisely how this importance grew and why and how it was linked to Stockholm and Sweden have never been very well articulated. The prologue explains how the book intends to fill this gap with a rich “Stockholm story” based on primary sources. It also elaborates on the rationale of the book’s title. “The human environment” is a play on the multiple meanings of the words “human” and “environment.” Stockholm institutions and Swedish politics provided a human environment for work in science, diplomacy, and activism that engaged a highly international community of insightful human beings and their institutions and networks. Sharing many humane values, these actors have been turning threatened nature into planetary governable objects and hence a prerequisite for global environmental governance.

Chapter 1 sets the scene for this book, providing the requisite background for the chapters that follow. It begins with a short overview of the military regime, focusing on repression and the gradual restoration of democratic freedoms, highlighting the role the latter played in facilitating the country’s burgeoning environmental movement. It then turns to the dictatorship’s plans for industrial growth and energy production. The chapter closes with an overview of the symbolism that surrounds big dams and an introduction to the influential generals and engineers responsible for orchestrating the dictatorship’s dam-building campaign. This chapter also lays the groundwork for the book’s first argument, that political pressures encouraged the military regime to build big dams quickly and with little regard for their social and environmental impacts.

This chapter seeks to fill a lacuna in our developing understanding of Global South climate litigation concerning how such litigation emerges. The focus is the different, prototypical modes of legal action in the Global South and how they are shaped by particular actors, including local activists, global nonprofit foundations, and lawyers. We propose a theoretical framework to explain these modes and their implications for the emergence of climate litigation in the Global South. The overarching objective of our enquiry is to provide insights for both scholars and practitioners about the key drivers that make climate litigation more or less likely, as well as the conditions that support or obstruct the emergence of climate litigation in developing countries.

Since the 1970s, the campaigns of animal protection advocates have been met with increasingly draconian government response, reflected in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s post-9/11 classification of animal rights activists as the “number one domestic terrorism threat.” Animal advocates—who have never harmed a human being—have been targeted by expanded federal and state anti-terrorism legislation, disproportionate prison sentences, sweeping new surveillance powers, and experimental prison units, among other attacks. This article explores how, and why, the civil rights and civil liberties community have largely ignored—and in some cases even embraced— the carceral logic of criminalizing animal rights activists as “terrorists.”

Ethics and the Anthropocene need to be actively engaged with each other in order to facilitate our sense of what responsibilities we hold. This chapter analyses this issue in three contemporary Malaysian novels: Keris Mas’s Jungle of Hope (2009), Zakaria Ali’s The Dam (2009) and Chuah Guat Eng’s Days of Change (2010). These are informed by three areas of ethical enquiry in the Anthropocene: reassessing present norms, raising novel concerns and rethinking traditional concerns (Schmidt, Brown and Orr). The chapter argues that the ethics of activism can be traced in these novels – explored through the representation of diverse groups of people and how they exert and negotiate power when environmental governance and decisions are defined and constrained by the state, the capitalists and the ideology propagated by both, and when limited space is provided for civil society participation.