This paper examines the history of the attempt to launch an ambitious international project, the “Global Network for Environmental Monitoring,” initiated within the International Biological Program in 1969. The project entailed the establishment of a world-wide network of monitoring stations in order to collect data on the physical and biological environment. In this paper I will discuss the ways in which this project, envisioned during the Cold War, epitomized some of the deep Cold War concerns and sensibilities, in a somewhat counter-intuitive way. The negotiations and the discussions on this project at the meetings of its planning committee, which included the representatives of the USA, USSR, and Sweden, show how the Cold War geopolitics provided incentives for dissolving various boundaries: national boundaries, through the establishment of the "global network" of stations, as well as disciplinary boundaries, through the aspiration of its founders to blur the boundary between the physical and biological environmental sciences. The history of the planning, transformation and ultimate implementation of this project in a form very different from the one planned originally, provides an opportunity to discuss the complex relation between knowledge about the globe and global politics, in the age of the Cold War.