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 chapter considers post-independence writing from the urban South Pacific, focusing on the capital of Fiji, Suva, and its association with the birth of Oceanian modernism in the 1970s. Elaborating first on the ‘swamp to city’ narrative surrounding the construction of the capital on reclaimed land, it examines the amphibious themes that appear in narratives of gendered walking by writers including the Fijian environmental activist Vanessa Griffen and Indo-Fijian writer Subramani, alongside fiction and essays by the Fijian/Tongan writer Epeli Hau‘ofa. Drawing on the critical framework structuring previous chapters, the chapter shows how each of these writers interrogates colonial narratives in the Pacific port city by linking the reappearance of its terraqueous past to issues of ecological precarity and the colonial legacies that have exacerbated them.