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Maurice Strong (1929–2015) Oil Man Who Was First Director of the United Nations Environment Programme

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Maurice Strong (1929–2015) Oil Man Who Was First Director of the United Nations Environment Programme COMMENT OBITUARY Maurice Strong (1929–2015) Oil man who was first director of the United Nations Environment Programme. hat anthropogenic climate change scientist to his staff, which gave him a direct is now of mainstream concern has, line to negotiate with Moscow. And he asked paradoxically, a lot to do with an oil the developing countries to set the confer- Tman. Maurice Frederick Strong, fossil-fuel ence agenda. This would say explicitly that magnate, was the founding executive direc- they could protect their environments with- tor of the United Nations Environment Pro- out compromising their ability to industri- gramme (UNEP). He died on 27 November. alize, and that rich countries should help to Strong was among the last of a genera- finance poor countries to achieve that goal. tion of post-war scholar-administrators in To deal with objections from British scien- Canada that included former prime min- tists, Strong sought help from the team at ister Lester B. Pearson. Each lived through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Great Depression and the Second World Cambridge that had just published the book PHOTO USA/ALAMY STOCK PICTURES KEYSTONE War, determined that history must never be The Limits to Growth (Universe, 1972). repeated. Pearson positioned Canada as the He put Barbara Ward, former foreign world’s anti-poverty champion. Strong was editor of The Economist turned environ- one of Pearson’s army of nation-builders: mental advocate, on the conference staff to he helped to create the Canadian Interna- neutralize the influence of sceptical diplo- tional Development Agency in 1968 and the mats from rich nations. Somehow, Strong national oil company Petro-Canada in 1976. persuaded Indira Gandhi, then-prime It is thanks to UNEP that nearly every minister of India, to open the conference. government today has a dedicated depart- The 1972 United Nations Conference on ment that looks after the environment. The the Human Environment ended in practical body’s creation in 1972 can be attributed action. It led to a new UN body to monitor the directly to Stong’s unusual blend of skills. He companies. Sold companies. He acquired global environment, to be based in Nairobi, was adept at making complex science acces- unparalleled knowledge and experience of Kenya. Strong remained UNEP’s executive sible to non-specialists, and able to build the energy business; and he became rich. Oil director until 1975. Two decades later, the UN unlikely coalitions to support his cause. In wealth for Strong had a second purpose: it called on him again to steer the Earth Sum- 2009, he summarized his approach as, “never was his passport to Canada’s elites. His promi- mit in Rio de Janeiro and this resulted in three to confront, but to co-opt, never to bully but nence and ability to make money caught further agreements: the Framework Conven- to equivocate, and never to yield”. the attention of ministers, and that enabled tion on Climate Change, the Convention on Strong was born in April 1929 in Oak Strong to realize his public-service ambitions, Biological Diversity and, later, the Conven- Lake, rural Canada, to a family that had at home and on the world stage. tion to Combat Desertification. fallen on desperate times. As he wrote In 1969, Strong was running Canada’s aid Yet Strong’s diplomatic ability was not movingly in his autobiography, Where on programme when Sweden sought his advice universally appreciated. Many in the energy Earth Are We Going? (Knopf, 2000), the on how to rescue a global environmental industry saw him as a closet ‘green’; to envi- Great Depression “stripped my father of meeting. The conference was due to take place ronmental groups he represented Big Oil. his livelihood and his sense of self worth. It in Stockholm in 1972. Few wanted to come, The right, meanwhile, attacked him as the ruined my mother’s health and in the end and many of the nations that had signed up embodiment of Big Government. It is true it killed her”. In winter their clothes would seemed to wish the conference to fail. that UNEP and the environment conven- freeze stiff, and at times there was little to eat Developed countries were yet to be con- tions have made little progress in slowing beyond weeds and dandelions. The need and vinced that the environmental threat was climate change or reducing the rate of bio- hunger he witnessed haunted him for years. real. Solly Zuckerman, a former chief sci- diversity loss. Leaving school in 1943, Strong won a entific adviser to the British government, Such failures cannot be attributed to cash prize to help with the costs of univer- branded Strong an “extremist”, claiming that Strong alone. They point to a flaw in the sity but used the money to pay off his par- environmental degradation was reversible. global environmental architecture that he ents’ creditors. He did not join the ranks of Developing nations had different con- helped to draw up. The world’s green agree- young men headed for the front line. Wait- cerns. Some with ambitions to industrialize ments need leaders with an unusually broad ing to board a freight train near his home, he saw the conference as a conspiracy to keep mix of qualities. Maurice Strong was one of spotted a discarded copy of the local news- them poor. “The Third World is not merely the last. His passing is the end of an era. ■ paper. He read that Winston Churchill and worried about the quality of life, it is worried Franklin D. Roosevelt had decided that once about life itself,” said Pakistan’s former chief Ehsan Masood is editor of Research the war was over they would work to unite economist Mahbub ul Haq. And the Soviet Fortnight. His next book is The Great nations. Strong decided that he wanted to be bloc was threatening a boycott because Invention: The Story of GDP and a part of that project. the United States wanted communist East the Making and Unmaking of the For the next two decades he forged what Germany excluded from the meeting. Modern World. many saw as a contradictory career: that of Strong set to work. As the conference e-mail: [email protected] an oil tycoon. He built companies. Bought secretary-general, he appointed a Soviet Twitter @ehsanmasood 480 | NATURE | VOL 528 | 24/31 DECEMBER 2015 © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
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