Maurice Strong: Godfather of the international environmental
movement

By Neil Hrab
web posted December 24, 2001

While unknown to the general public, the name "Maurice Strong"
elicits strong emotions from people who understand the politics
of the environmental movement.

To his fellow environmentalists, the septuagenarian Strong is a
noble, unceasing activist for the "green" cause. Strong played a
major role in organizing the path-breaking United Nations
Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm,
Sweden in 1972. Two decades later he was center-stage at the
1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where he helped lay the
groundwork for the Kyoto global warming treaty that mandates
reductions in carbon dioxide emissions to combat an unproven
global warming threat. This year the Bush Administration
rejected the treaty citing its drastic impact on Western industrial
economies and the unsettled science on global warming.

Strong continues to aggressively advocate the treaty's ratification.
As a leader of government and non-governmental organizations,
he has rallied elite and popular opinion to support international
environmental regulation. For a time, Strong led Ted Turner's
Better World Society, a foundation promoting the United
Nations, and he has served as chair or director in a variety of
pro-environmentalist organizations, including the United Nations
Foundation, the Commission on Global Governance and the
Stockholm Environment Institute.

Strong has also had a major influence in helping set philanthropic
giving priorities for environmental causes. Most notably, Turner
named Strong a director on the board of the United Nations
Foundation

that the media mogul established in 1998. The Foundation has
assets of $125.4 million and has made a total of $227.7 million in
grants. In this and other positions, Strong has encouraged
international agencies to steer funding support to non-
governmental environmental organizations.

A sympathetic biographer has observed:

Strong has not been a typical environmentalist. He hasn't made
scientific discoveries like those made by Jane Goodall while
observing the chimps in Africa. He hasn't started any
organizations like Friends of the Earth. The idea of sustainable
development isn't even his.

But his role has been no less important. Before ideas like
sustainable development can change the world, they must first be
brought to its attention. And that is what Maurice Strong has
done…He has been a tireless worker for planet Earth.

This April, Strong published Where on Earth Are We Going?
With a foreword by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and
dust-jacket blurbs from World Bank president James
Wolfensohn and former Colorado senator Tim Wirth, now
president of Turner's United Nations Foundation, the book
parades the company Strong keeps. The memoir recounts years
of personal environmental activism. But, more importantly, it
describes the political strategies of the international environmental
movement and is a scorecard on their achievements.

Publicist for International Environmentalism

How has Strong promoted concepts like sustainable
development to consume the world's attention? Mainly by using
his prodigious skills as a networker. Over a lifetime of mixing
private sector career success with stints in government and
international groups, Strong has honed his networking abilities to
perfection. He can bring presidents, prime ministers and
potentates from the world's four corners to big environmental
conferences such as the 1992 Rio Summit, an environmental
spectacle organized by Strong and attended by more than 100
heads of state.

But the talent for networking that endears Strong to his green
allies also attracts scorn. To many American conservatives,
Strong is almost a sinister figure – a shadowy individual flitting
endlessly from one gathering of world leaders to another, all the
time promoting ominous concepts U.N. "global governance." An
1997 piece on Strong in National Review expresses this
suspicion well:

"[Maurice Strong is] dangerous because he's a much smarter and
shrewder man [than many in the UN system]," comments
Charles Lichenstein, deputy ambassador to the UN under
President Reagan. "I think he is a very dangerous ideologue, way
over to the Left."

"[Strong] is kind of the global Ira Magaziner," says Ted Galen
Carpenter of the Cato Institute, comparing Strong to President
Clinton's chief advisor for his failed socialized medicine proposal.
"If he is whispering in Kofi Annan's ear this is no good at all."

In Where in the World Are We Going?, Strong scoffs at "the
right-wing media in the United States" for claiming that he is "a
dangerous leader of a conspiracy to establish a world
government that would subvert the sovereignty of the United
States."

Strong may be right to complain about mere suspicions. What's
truly alarming about Maurice Strong is his actual record. Strong's
persistent calls for an international mobilization to combat
environmental calamities, even when they are exaggerated
(population growth) or scientifically unproven (global warming),
have set the world's environmental agenda. That the Bush
Administration has been forced into a feud with our European
allies over the Kyoto treaty is only the most recent example of
Strong's amazing influence.

An Amazing Life

Maurice Strong was born on April 29, 1929 in Oak Lake,
Manitoba, Canada. His family was hardly wealthy. "We were the
poorest of the poor," Strong once recalled during an interview.
"When we went for groceries, the storekeeper would say, ‘Is
this going on your bill again?'" Despite a difficult early life, Strong
showed great promise—he claims to have skipped four grades
during his schooling and qualified for university entrance at age
14. But education bored the precocious Strong, and so in 1943
he left home and worked at odd jobs, including as a fur trader in
the Canadian far north, before joining a stock brokerage firm in
Winnipeg.

Some believe Strong's early experiences – especially memories
of growing up during the Great Depression – help explain his
Leftist politics. As Peter Foster of Canada's Financial Post has
written:

"[From a young age Strong] was haunted by the spectre of an
economic "system" that — as conventional leftist wisdom would
have it — had "broken down." For many leftists, the Depression
has always been one of the treasured rationales for government
intervention (although it was in fact created by government
policies), but Mr. Strong perhaps cleaves to this rationale more
than most because he lived it. As a boy, he ate dandelion and
pigweed. He saw his father wrap his feet in rags before going out
to the bush to cut wood. He saw his educated mother lose her
mind [to severe depression]. It would be impossible not to be
moved by such a tale."

Ironically, a fair chunk of Strong's early resume has him working
for the oil industry. In the 1950s, he worked for Dome
Petroleum, traveling throughout Africa to set up a network of
service stations and recruit locals to run them. In the 1960s, he
re-built an ailing oil firm called Ajax Petroleum into a
powerhouse renamed Canadian Industrial Gas & Oil Co.
Strong's expertise in the energy field was highly respected. When
Canada's Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau set up a state-owned
gas company called Petro-Canada in 1975, he made Strong its
president.

Subsequently, Strong combined his private sector experience
with tours of duty in government and international agencies. In
1966, thanks in part to his ties to Canada's then-ruling Liberal
Party, Strong became chief of the Canadian International
Development Agency. He held that post for four years before
leaving to immerse himself in United Nations activities. Strong
was secretary-general of the 1972 UN Conference on the
Human Environment and later served as executive director of the
UN Environment Program. During the African famine of the mid-
1980s, he was Executive Coordinator of the UN Office for
Emergency Operations.

During these years Strong developed his passion for
environmental policy. In Where on Earth Are We Going?, he
writes: "I knew there was a role for me to play here [in the
environmental movement]…I also began to sense one of the
great underlying truths of environmental politics. The environment
is supranational. It transcends the nation state. At the very least it
has to be dealt with multilaterally."

A Major Force in Environmental Philanthropy

Strong has had great success in using his industry and
government contacts to generate funding for the environmental
movement. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his association
with Ted Turner.

In 1985, Turner established the Better World Society to
promote two of his pet issues: environmentalism and the UN. In
Where on Earth Are We Going?, Strong describes how in 1991
Turner persuaded him to lead the organization: "Midway through
lunch, [Turner] abruptly put down his knife and fork and got
down on his knees… ‘Maurice,' he said, ‘I'm down on my knees
because I want you to become president of the Better World
Society, and I beg you not to say no.'" Strong didn't.

The Better World Society was only the beginning. In January
1998, Turner donated $1 billion to the new United Nations
Foundation. Its goal is to distribute $100 million a year for the
next ten years to U.N. programs dealing with poverty,
malnutrition, peacekeeping and the environment. Turner named
Strong to the founding board of directors.

UN Foundation environmental grants since 1999 have included a
$900,000 grant for a joint one-year project of the UN
Development Program and World Resources Institute to help
China develop policies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions,
alleged to be responsible for dangerous global warming. The
Foundation also has contributed $520,000 to teach young
people about the environment and it made a similar-sized grant
so that a U.N. task force could study the environment in relation
to human settlements.

Turner and Strong have a mutual admiration society; they
effusively praise one another for all they do on the world's behalf.
Turner's penchant for insult and bombast seems not to bother
Strong. In August 2000, Turner spoke to the U.N. "World
Peace Summit" and denounced Christianity as "intolerant
because it taught we were the only ones going to heaven. That
confused the devil out of me since that would have left heaven a
very empty place." Turner went on to praise "indigenous"
religious faiths and all the things humans have in common,
including "love of birds, butterflies, wives and flowers." Strong
had enthusiastically introduced Turner, saying he had done more
for peace and understanding, the environment, and the U.N. than
any other person.

Strong has raised money for environmental organizations in other
ways. In his book Global Greens (Capital Research Center,
1998), James Sheehan describes how Strong used his personal
connections to transform the World Bank from an enemy to an
ally of environmental groups – and a donor to them. Until the
mid-1990s, environmentalists charged the World Bank with
financing the destruction of Brazilian rainforests, and they
accused it of making loans to Third World governments that
forced the poor from their homes. Environmentalists were so
irate with the World Bank that they called for its elimination.

Then in 1995, a new president, James Wolfensohn, took charge
of the agency. A Wall Street investment banker, Wolfensohn
was critical of Bank projects he considered environmentally
harmful. He was also a Strong protégé. Strong watched
approvingly as Wolfensohn instituted environmentalist-friendly
policies, including the appointment of environmental NGOs to
World Bank advisory committees. Many of these organizations
received World Bank grants to implement biodiversity and global
warming projects in developing nations. Says Sheehan, "The
World Bank has done an excellent job of co-opting the
environmental movement by re-packaging itself as a ‘sustainable
development' agency." Strong was pivotal in this dramatic
transformation of the Bank from foe to friend.

Strong's Environmental Philosophy

Strong's environmental views are distilled in a speech he gave as
head of the United Nations Environment Programme more than
25 years ago. The Feb. 13, 1974 address at Iona College in
Windsor, Canada contains what is still the core of his thinking.

At the outset Strong noted: "I speak to you as a layman – one
who has had the great privilege of receiving the help and advice
in my work [at the UN] of a significant cross section of the
world's scientists and environmentalists. I would not pretend that
I have been able to assimilate all of it or to draw the soundest
conclusions from it [italics added]."

The problem as Strong saw it was not the threat of
environmental cataclysm, but the danger of "a series of more
limited catastrophes affecting large segments of the world's
population and posing an acute moral, economic and political
dilemma to the whole global community."

Their source was Western Man and his abiding "preoccupation
with the physical, the material, the quantitative aspects of our
lives – an obsession with the notion that more is better in all
things…The relentless application of purely economic criteria to
decision-making has grossly distorted allocation of resources in
favour of the areas of highest economic return rather than of
social priority."

Strong reviewed the assorted environmental dangers: "Scientists
advise me that there is a possibility that we may already be in the
beginning stages of a major shift in the dynamics of the earth's
climate system." Next he worried about "forcing the oceans to
bear an impossible burden as final global reservoirs of waste"
and then shifted to population – "…the headlong pace of mass
migration from rural areas to the cities, the rapid growth in
unemployment, and escalating pressure on already overstrained
resources and services, particularly in the developing world, will
almost surely get worse before they can get better."

Strong said the right policies could prevent ecological disaster.
"We urgently need an anti-disaster strategy. We need to find and
repair to a safer course."

· Population growth had to be curbed "by improving the
incentives to reduce family size by spreading the benefits of
[economic] development more widely and by developing
improved techniques of family planning for those with the
incentive to use them."

· "The ethic of abundant resources must give way to the ethics of
scarcity and conservation."

· Incentives should be created to move industry from the
developed to the developing world—a giant job redistribution.
The imperative here is "the need to avoid overburdening the
environment in any particular area [of the world]…" The
developed world must tighten its belt in other ways – people
dwelling there must embrace "alternative life styles and patterns
of consumption, oriented more to quality and non-material
satisfactions and less to quantity."

What Strong's sweeping call for "non-material satisfactions"
meant for American consumers is now discernable in many
environmentalist policy proposals. Environmental organizations,
echoing Strong's criticisms, frequently condemn the American
lifestyle as wasteful and ecologically unsustainable. To "reform"
public behavior, they argue for coercive laws and regulations to
force people out of their cars and into mass transportation, out of
single-family homes in spacious suburbs and into smaller
apartments in congested cities, and out of jobs in industries like
fossil fuels that they consider threats to the environment.

But restrictions on domestic living standards are only the
beginning. Strong's speech asked the U.S. and First World
nations to commit to an additional sacrifice – they should
dedicate themselves to "a much larger flow of resources between
rich and poor countries with heavy emphasis on the provision of
basic social services to the poorest sectors." In other words,
Strong would have the U.S. spend billions on international aid
programs.

Key Environmental Strategy: Strengthen the U.N.

Twenty-five years ago Strong sketched out a global political
framework that would curtail the sovereignty of nations and
expand the power of the U.N. and other international
organizations. Strong's downpayment on this vision have been
the policies he subsequently has helped advance at a series of
U.N.-sponsored conferences from Stockholm and Rio to Kyoto
and, next year, Johannesburg.

Strong appears to rule out a formal world government when he
suggests that "the technological society [his shorthand expression
for life in a globalized world] cannot be managed by traditional
systems of hierarchical control." Instead, "it requires a network
of institutions, governmental and non-governmental, local,
regional, national and international, to perform the wide variety
tasks and functions necessary to the operation of that society."

This new network does not exactly end nation-state sovereignty.
Instead, it should lead to the creation of a formalized "system of
international organizations" whose purpose will be to "provide
the instrumentalities for carrying out those common tasks which it
is either not feasible or advantageous for [individual nation-
states] to carry out themselves."

There's no need to describe the peril of handing over U.S.
sovereignty – a sovereignty that guarantees the freedoms of U.S.
citizens – to a centralized and often corrupt foreign bureaucracy
whose agenda is frequently at odds with U.S. policies and
values. Strong's enthusiasm for the U.N. completely ignores its
history of failure in numerous policy areas. In the years since
Strong's 1974 speech the U.N. has failed to alleviate poverty –
and ecological devastation – in Africa and other developing
nations. And its peacekeeping efforts in Somalia, Rwanda and
Bosnia failed to deter aggression in the 1990s.

Global Warming Alarmism

Critics say Strong and other environmentalists are transfixed by
disaster scenarios built on junk science. Nowhere is this more
apparent than Strong's attitude toward global warming.

Global warming is the theory that rising man-made carbon
dioxide emissions from power plants, autos and other industrial
activities will cause a dangerous increase in temperatures that will
wreak havoc on the planet's climate in myriad ways, from melting
the polar ice caps to causing powerful storms and severe
droughts.

In Where on Earth Are We Going? Strong presents a fictional
"Report to the Shareholders, Earth Inc." bearing the date Jan 1,
2031 and built around the imagined impact of global warming. In
Strong's telling North America will be a hell on earth. The
Midwest will be struggling through a tenth straight year of
drought, and New Orleans will be ravaged by tropical diseases
to such an extent that it becomes little more than a "shrinking
fortress held only with poisonous amounts of lethal pesticides." In
Los Angeles, "water vendors with armed guards roam the
streets…" Both cities are better off than the state of Florida,
which will have fallen under the sea.

Strong advocates ratification of the Kyoto treaty to stop the
impending crisis. Negotiated by the Clinton Administration in
December 1997, the treaty requires the U.S. to cut carbon
dioxide emissions by 30 to 40 per cent by 2010. But according
to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, that could cost the
economy $400 billion per year, raise electric utility rates by 86
per cent, hike the cost of heating oil by 76 per cent, and impose
a permanent "Kyoto gasoline tax" of 66 cents per gallon. In total,
each U.S. household would have to spend an extra $1,740 per
year on energy. WEFA, an economic information and consulting
firm, reports that 2.4 million jobs would be lost and
manufacturing wages cut by 2.1 per cent.

This gives Strong no pause. Indeed, he seems to want to inflict
economic damage on Western industrial democracies. When it
comes to environmental policy, Strong says, "Economic growth
is not the cure, it is the disease."

Strong supports Kyoto despite the scientific evidence. The U.N.
has repeatedly scaled down its prediction of rapid temperature
increases in coming decades. In 1990, for instance, the United
Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
predicted that global temperatures would rise six degrees
farenheit by 2100. Just three years later, the IPCC adjusted its
projection downward to a rise of less than two degrees farenheit.
NASA satellites, the most accurate measure of global
temperature, show that the Earth has slightly cooled since 1979,
contradicting doomsayers who predicted global warming should
have caused the temperature to increase six-tenths of a degree
by now.

Scientists who once strongly believed in the theory are now more
skeptical. Dr. James Hansen, the NASA scientist who
inaugurated the global warming debate in 1988, said then that
rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would cause the
temperature to increase and lead to increased drought by the end
of the 20th century. In 1998, Hansen candidly admitted his
predictions had not come true because he didn't know enough
about the climate system. In 2000, Hansen went further and said
carbon dioxide is not responsible for global warming. Hansen still
subscribes to the global warming theory but he believes the
treaty should be abandoned because it targets the wrong
greenhouse gas and harms international relations by turning
developing and developed nations into "adversaries."

Conclusion

Environmental politicians like Maurice Strong don't follow the
science. They push for power. Strong has devoted his life to
establishing international legal procedures to enforce his vision.
And his imagination is haunted by a parade of environmental
horribles. Scientists doubt they may ever come to pass, but
Strong, like many contemporary environmentalists, is motivated
more by fervent conviction than scientific evidence. Paul Ehrlich's
"population bomb" never exploded, and the Club of Rome's
reports on the limits to growth are famously wrong. Not one
catastrophe hypothesized by Strong and other environmentalists
has occurred. But that hasn't stopped them from building the
environmental movement.

Neil Hrab is a graduate of the University of Toronto and served
as a Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow at Capital Research
Center.

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