The chapter provides a broader comparative view of the League’s environmental concerns. The main aim of the discussion in this chapter it to weave these different initiatives (which are described separately in each chapter) into a coherent and broad regime, ones that has a common ground, continuity, and certain dynamics. As each chapter explains the role played by central theories, ideas, conflicting interests, environmental challenges, and scientific or professional concerns, this chapter puts them together and explain some of the differences and common patterns. Moreover, this analysis also revises the League’s different endeavors from contemporary environmental perspectives, and assesses their relevance to current dilemmas where nature protection conflicts with human needs.

Each of the chapters explores a different dimension of the League’s environmental policy. They focus on the environmental impacts of pollution of the sea by oil, the growing whaling industry and endangered whales, rural hygiene and sanitation problems in the periphery, and timber production and fears of spreading deforestation. There may well be other interwar concerns that also involved environmental perspectives. However, I present a sweeping legal-historical overview of several of the central environmental challenges that the interwar world faced, in order to understand the notions behind the League’s leadership and to explain its shortcomings and achievements.

The chapter explores the League’s “rural hygiene” campaign. During its work on different reflections of sanitary problems that put local, national, and global public health at risk, the League invested substantial scientific, comparative, and professional effort while it was considering possible policies with which these dangers could be faced. These suggested policies, articulated in terms of international law, focused on the eradication of a variety of environmental-sanitary risks and spreading diseases, which the League believed to be plaguing the countryside in Eastern Europe and across the “Far East”. Among the international community’s concerns were the need to protect water resources from human and nonhuman pollution, to treat refuse, to fight spreading diseases in rural areas, to limit fly breeding, to control rats and pests, and more. Citing these concerns as threats to local and international communities, the League conceptualized agricultural peripheries as a rural frontier from which humanity could better protect itself, using various means of sanitary engineering, special medical services, and political awareness.

This chapter tracks two main events that took up much of the League’s attention. First, it assembled the European Conference on Rural Hygiene (1931) and, later, parallel to its main agenda, the Intergovernmental Conference of Far Eastern Countries on Rural Hygiene, held at Bandoeng, Java in August 1937.