This chapter offers a brief environmental history of modern Sweden. The focus is on identifying factors that can explain the role Sweden took as an early adopter of environmental conservation in the twentieth century and as a promotor of international cooperation and agreements. Environmentalism became a defining feature of civil society, and the political landscape from left to right absorbed environmentalism and climate change as relevant issues. This was propelled by a decisive “environmental turn” in the 1960s, where public intellectuals, artists, authors, and activists nurtured public support. A feature of Sweden’s environmental exceptionalism was “realist sustainability” in a corporatist tradition. The state made environmental reforms, while also protecting wealth-building industry, including extractivist industries central to the highly natural resource-based Swedish economy. Another key factor in the “Stockholm story” was the concentration of power – in politics, industry, organizations, science, and media – in the capital, which also started to cultivate its position in an increasingly globally competitive game where being green was a key component of success.

This chapter demonstrates how Sweden as a state, and in particular Stockholm as a city, has played an oversized role in the emergence of global environmental governance since the mid-1960s, with the 1972 Stockholm Conference on “the human environment” as a defining event. The chapter argues that “human” is a key word to identify the set of properties of Swedish society that can explain Sweden’s vanguard role, including strong popular movements, widespread social trust, robust social institutions, the high status of knowledge and research, and a rational positioning of Sweden as a progressive, nonaligned advocate of small state cooperation bringing advantages for both the country and its capital city. It is thus a counternarrative that is presented, in contrast to many conventional environmental narratives of decline, with theoretical and historiographical implications not only for environmental history but also for the understanding of what “environmental progress” might mean on the international level. The chapter identifies four “con”-words – contributing, connecting, convening, and contributing.

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.