The lecture takes up the 1972 UN Human Environment conference: the first example of the attempted global governance of environmental issues and climate change that foundered on the challenges of development and North-South antagonisms. That history connects Delos, the ancient capital of the Athenian League, with the Club of Rome, and the New International Economic Order.The talk's specific aim is to recover the importance of business and intellectual networks, in all their problematic historical messiness and stir them back into our understanding of the changing character of ‘global’ imaginaries. This is a history that reconnects debates about the environment and development, as well as the interdisciplinary not always visible connections between scientists, humanists, women activists, and businessmen. It evokes the longer history of the international governance of economic problems, and of economic actors in international politics.