David Bowie released his seminal album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars 50 years ago, on June 16, 1972. It was an artsy and ambitious rock album which captured the time’s sense of being on the cusp of new technological and cultural frontiers.
In the early 1970s, the US Apollo programme was, briefly, making men visiting the moon seem like a routine event. The possibilities of computer power were beginning to unfold, and the countercultural youth revolt was challenging prevailing values and norms. Bowie’s fictional alter ego encapsulated all these groundbreaking developments: an androgynous rockstar from outer space with, in the words of the album’s title song, “a god-given ass”. Bowie-Ziggy wore heavy makeup, dyed his hair red, and dressed in clothes inspired by Japanese kabuki theatre.
But coupled with its playful fascination for space technology, the Ziggy Stardust album also described a dread of the Pandora’s box that might be opened as a result. Its opening track, Five Years, warned listeners that “Earth was really dying”. Indeed, the day of Ziggy Stardust’s release coincided with the final day of a landmark gathering in Sweden to discuss the future of the planet.
Today’s global climate summits, most recently COP 26 in Glasgow last November, are its direct descendants. And like Bowie’s album, the Stockholm Conference began amid conflicting emotions: hopes of a new dawn of environmental awareness and technological possibility set against fears of global conflict and planetary collapse.
Moonage daydream
Bowie’s obsession with outer space predated the creation of Ziggy Stardust. In June 1969, what would become his first major hit single, Space Oddity, was released. It told the story of an astronaut losing contact with Ground Control while gazing at the Earth from afar in his “tin can”. In July 1969, the BBC used the song in its broadcast of the first moon landing, apparently unaware of the tragic lyrics.
As Bowie clearly grasped, the Apollo space programme was central to the birth and early growth of the global environmental movement. It was during the manned moon expeditions 
that Earth was first photographed from space. The most iconic image, “Earthrise” shows our planet rising over the lifeless landscape of the moon, like a sun at the horizon. It has become one of the most widely shared and reproduced photographs of all time.
In Swedish history, the pivotal moment for the awakening of environmental consciousness came in the autumn of 1967. At that time, a choir of prominent Swedish scientists publicly warned of an impending global environmental crisis. Foremost among them was the chemist Hans Palmstierna, whose book Plundering, Starvation, Poisoning became an instant bestseller. Palmstierna argued there was an urgent need to act “before the hourglass expires for humanity”.
Five years
From an international perspective, Sweden’s breakthrough of environmental concern occurred remarkably early. Intrinsic to this reorientation was the very concept of “the environment” (in Swedish, miljö).
The word had not been used in the early 1960s – for example, during the intense debate sparked by Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, which awakened public understanding of the links between industrial pesticides and the die-out of insects and wildlife in the US. At that point, people discussed nature, conservation and the threat modern industrial civilisation posed to wild birds and animals. But the environmental debate which arose in Sweden in the late 1960s put the threat to humankind at the forefront.
Inspired by the debate at home, Swedish diplomats suggested to the United Nations that a large environmental conference should be organised. Their initiative set the ball rolling towards what would eventually become the 1972 Stockholm Conference, the UN’s first global Conference on the Human Environment.
It ain’t easy
Half a century ago, in the summer of 1972, the future of humanity was looking increasingly precarious in many other ways, too. In the US, the racial divide and ongoing Vietnam war spurred civil unrest. On a global scale, in addition to the cold war, the process of decolonisation highlighted stark differences between the global north and south. Threats of overpopulation and dwindling natural resources were made real by catastrophic famines in India and Biafra.
Two concrete results of the conference were the Stockholm Declaration, which laid the groundwork for international environmental jurisdiction, and the foundation of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP).
Starman
Göran Bäckstrand had not long been working at the Swedish foreign ministry when a telegram from the Swedish delegation to the United Nations landed on his desk. They had just put forward the idea of a UN-led conference focused on the environment. Over the next five years, Bäckstrand was directly involved in the preparation and organisation of the 1972 Stockholm Conference.
Now in his mid-80s, Bäckstrand remains a vigorous and politically engaged figure. Over the last five years, we have discussed environmental history and contemporary concerns both in-person and over the telephone. He is a joyous soul who does not seem to despair – even though the road ahead has proven “far longer and more complicated than we imagined in 1972”.
Blackstar
The final day of the Stockholm Conference – June 16, 1972 – was the day that Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars was released to the world. Fifty years on, the hopes and fears evoked in this album, like the conference, still feel disturbingly relevant – particularly amid the heightened nuclear tensions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
So what would Bowie have made of the way things have turned out for the planet? He may have left some clues in his final album, Blackstar, released two days before his death in January 2016. The music videos for the title song and second single, Lazarus, were directed by another Swede, Johan Renck. At the centre of the Blackstar video is an empty space suit, blinking back to the Major Tom character in Space Oddity and Ashes to Ashes – a distinctly gloomy echo of that groundbreaking time when men first walked on the moon.
Bowie’s death coincided with a renewed interest in outer space. In our time, however, it is not superpower states that are leading the way to the final frontier, but superwealthy individuals such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who have made their billions through the digital revolution of the 21st century. (The Conversation)