Originally published on the CGS blog on December 4, 2015.
Just on the eve of the Paris Climate Conference (COP 21) and the coming discussions on climate change and a sustainable world society, Maurice Strong died (November 29, 2015).
More than any other person in the UN system, Strong had been the driving force to put environmental action on the “world agenda” for both governments and NGOs. For Strong, to protect the earth’s environment, its biodiversity and life support system was a cause for cooperative action to transform society—a cause for which government and business leaders could rise above their disagreements and act together to protect the planet.
Before a topic becomes the focus of the world agenda, there is a good deal of intellectual preparation needed, and it usually begins outside of governments. Kenneth Boulding, a Quaker, economist, and peace researcher started writing what is now called “ecological economics.” Boulding helped develop the concept of “Spaceship Earth,” stressing the need to modify education in light of ecological realities. He wrote,
…the principal task of education in this day is to convey from one generation to the next a rich image of the total earth, that is, the idea of the earth as a total system…What formal education has to do is to produce people who are fit to be inhabitants of the planet.
This has become an urgent necessity because for the first time in human history, we have reached the boundaries of our planet and found that it is a small one at that. This generation of young people has to be prepared to live in a very small and crowded spaceship. Otherwise they are going to get a terrible shock when they grow up and discover that we have taught them how to live in a world long gone.
The first step to having an impact on the UN conference was to draft a statement setting out in broad terms the challenges faced and some of the steps to be taken. The statement had to be drafted and signed by individuals who had some expertise in ecology, which was then a relatively new field.
Six environmental scientists were gathered in 1970 by Dai Dongat Menton, France, a summer resort. The Menton text is called “A Message to our 3.5 billion neighbors on Planet Earth.” Although we have now seven billion neighbors, the document is still worth reading. It was published in the UNESCO periodical Courier and co-signed by over two thousand biologists and others whose name carried weight on the issues such as Thor Heyerdahl and Margaret Mead.
Dai Dongrepresentatives met a year later with UN Secretary-General U Thant, a Burmese Buddhist sensitive to the same vision of a delicate equilibrium between humans and nature.
The UN Secretariat started its efforts for the Stockholm conference in Geneva in the Palais Wilson, the original League of Nations headquarters just across the street from my office in the Graduate Institute of Development Studies. I often talked with the UN staff who would eat in our building (since we had a cafeteria and they did not). Maurice Strong was the head of the preparatory secretariat and became the Secretary-General of the Conference itself.
Strong was a Canadian who made a great deal of money dealing with oil fields in Canada, and spent the rest of his life in lower-paid UN-related activities. Strong was an intense, self-motivated person and the people who worked with him were driven by the same energy. There are, no doubt, people who did not appreciate Strong, but they faded from the scene, and those who were left with him would not be surprised to see Strong walking across Lake Geneva.
Since Strong came from the business world and not from the regular governmental diplomatic service, he had the necessary respect for government representatives, but not much more. Rather, he had a high regard for “the people” — at least those organized in non-governmental organizations and willing to try out new ideas and methods. In Geneva, there was a group of us—UN Secretariat, university teachers and NGO representatives—united by the desire to place ecological issues at the center of the world agenda, despite a rather timid response from national governments.
It was natural for Strong and his team to reach out to Alfred Hassler and the Dai Dong effort. Thus began what has become an institution with UN conferences: a parallel conference held a few days earlier in the same city with representatives of NGOs—now called “civil society”—who write a statement of what governments should say if they had the intelligence and courage of NGOs. Now the NGOs work on their statement and alternative plan of action for many months in advance.
In 1972, however, the process had not yet been established, and Hassler and Dai Dong organized a first parallel conference of 31 people in Stockholm. Dai Donghad already prepared the statement and, as is often the case in such efforts, people unrelated to the original drafting process can object to certain paragraphs but can rarely propose new ideas. Thus at the Dai Dong–sponsored independent conference, conflicts predictably arose over population issues.
At all international meetings going back to the League of Nations debates, when population questions are mentioned, there are those who suspect family planning as being a way to limit the number of the poor (usually seen as being of a different color or ethnicity than the rest) or as a way of promoting teen sex. Ten of the 31 attending the Dai Dongconference wanted to take some distance from the short paragraph on population without presenting any alternative to unrestrained population growth.
Once the Dai Dongstatement was written, Alfred Hassler read the text to the governments assembled in the UN conference. In many ways, the Dai Dong“Independent Declaration on the Environment” is well worth the text of the governments—largely drafted by the UN Secretariat, since expertise among government representatives was generally low.
The 1972 Stockholm Conference led to the creation within many governments of a “Ministry of Ecology” or a sub-section of an existing ministry. The United Nations created the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), of which Maurice Strong was the first Director.
Basically, Dai Dong’swork finished with the 1972 Stockholm conference. Ecology with a focus on broad poverty reduction, social justice, and harmony with nature was on the world agenda.
After his retirement from UNEP, Strong continued to be a strong voice for ecological action. He was asked by the UN to be Secretary-General of the Rio Conference of 1992, often called the “Earth Summit,” which started to popularize the idea of sustainable development. Maurice Strong is in many ways the model of the world citizen, deeply rooted in his Canadian experience and open to the world, an active agent at the world level for ecologically sound development.
