This chapter elaborates upon the latter part of the Stockholm Conference preparation period, including key Swedish science diplomacy interventions and the production of three landmark scientific reports on climate change, acid rain, and environmental monitoring. It also recounts the efforts of Maurice Strong and Barbara Ward to reconcile the emerging North–South divide ahead of Stockholm by organizing a meeting of development economists in Founex, Switzerland. The drafting of the Stockholm Declaration, as well as other aspects of the actual Conference, its parallel events, and its final outcomes, are examined. The chapter also explores other important early-1970s developments in Stockholm related to the Conference and the ongoing institutionalization of international climate science. These include the environmental turn at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences embodied by the launch of the journal Ambio in 1972, a large donation to the Academy by a Swedish industrialist that led to the establishment of the influential Beijer Institute, and the convening of another major GARP Conference in Stockholm in 1974.

Chapter 3 covers the period in the 1970s and 1980s when the military regime finished its big dams and their reservoirs filled. During this time, the rise of international environmentalism pressured the military government’s dam builders to undertake environmental impact studies and design environmental mitigation programs. This chapter argues that the environmentalism that the military regime’s energy sector practiced was deficient and narrowly organized around two goals. The first was protecting power plant infrastructure from environmental threats such as sedimentation. The second was to showcase environmental care without fundamentally altering project designs or slowing down construction. For example, the military regime funded environmental impact studies, but did so belatedly, after committing to particular high-impact dam sites, and followed the studies’ recommendations selectively. Most dramatically, the military regime carried out animal rescue missions, which it hoped would showcase its environmental consciousness. These actions were “pharaonic environmentalism”: protection measures designed to bolster the image of the military dictatorship as a regime that could build durable mega dams while simultaneously protecting the environment.