Focussing on the early period of environmental protection from the perspective of the Netherlands, this paper hopes to make four interventions in the historiography of European integration. First, the environment has not featured nearly as much as it should in studies of the European project, in particular in Anglophone academia. While the subject has received excellent attention by German scholars, outside of this circle the harvest has been rather poor. Second, the “minnows” are almost invariably ignored, as is the case for most well-known histories of European integration, being eclipsed by those of France, Germany and Britain. Third, writing on the 1970s still constitutes a “meagre spread”, and this article seeks to tip the balance of studies in the direction of the 1970s, rather than the overstudied 1980s. Focussing solely on the latter period risks diminishing the European project’s “social” character as it emerged in the 1970s. Finally, this paper will shed some long overdue light on the debates and processes that took shape within the Dutch government. It will illuminate the complications that arose from the unresolved tensions engendered by an anthropocentric vision of saving a planet under attack.
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