Strong Tactics : He’s an Industrialist; He’s an Environmentalist. Can the Head of the Rio Earth Summit Exploit That Contradiction to Save the World?

MAURICE STRONG LAYS DOWN HIS FORK in the National Portrait Gallery’s great hall and heads determinedly to the podium. Around him, at circular tables arranged beneath a stained-glass dome, about 80 Washington insiders, corporate executives and Bush Administration officials push back from their poulet en croute and wait politely. Scattered among the dinner guests are members of the American delegation preparing for the upcoming United Nations Conference on Environment and Development--the “Earth Summit”--in Rio de Janeiro. Strong, the summit’s secretary general, is here to pay court and to deliver a diplomat’s nudge to these representatives of the world’s most environmentally destructive player. * Nothing about him, except perhaps the rumpled quality of his otherwise ordinary blue business suit, marks the Canadian-born Strong as out of place in this crowd. After all, he has been a captain of industry and a major figure in world politics for nearly 40 of his 63 years. But then he opens his mouth. The planet Earth, he declares, is headed for an environmental holocaust, and the time has come for world leaders to intercede. * Given the setting, this is radical stuff. The United States government is not known for its unwavering support of either of these notions. This is a country that didn’t believe the ozone layer was thinning until the evidence was overwhelming. Even now, the Bush Administration doesn’t buy into the theory of global warming, choosing instead to declare that all of the data is not yet in. * Strong launches into his favorite theme. The United States, he says, has two choices: It can encourage the creation of environmentally sound technology, which can be sold or donated to the rest of the world, or it can hold fast to the oil-guzzling status quo, miss a chance to dominate the industry of the future and experience economic disaster first and environmental ruin later. * “I do believe,” he says, “that if the U.S. doesn’t get into the lead in terms of environmental issues, that the consequences will be severe in economic terms for the United States as well as environmental terms for the world.” At a table in the back, a high-ranking State Department official and a foreign-aid functionary break into giggles. * If Strong knows his act is bombing with some members of this audience, he doesn’t show it. In typical style, he soldiers on, dramatizing his straight talk with dire predictions and practical antidotes--just what you might expect from a self-made businessman who pulled in his first million by the age of 23. * Strong, who never uses notes when he speaks, finishes with a sweep of his hand and an excited tone in his voice. Still, he seems to have moved only himself and a handful of sympathizers in the room. The applause that follows is no more than polite. The next day, the American summit delegates in the audience will attend a Smithsonian-sponsored seminar in which economists and scientists pick up Strong’s theme. The delegates--even those who appeared to be paying attention during Strong’s speech--will voice objections at every turn.

By then, Maurice Strong is back at United Nations headquarters in New York, neither surprised nor disheartened by the mixed response in Washington. He is, instead, persistently, even relentlessly, optimistic. What Strong doesn’t say outright, but what his actions, his demeanor, and in fact his whole life make clear, is this: If you’re going to save the planet, you have to maintain a positive attitude.

ON JUNE 3, ABOUT 100 HEADS OF STATE WILL GATHER IN THE foothills of Rio’s Serra do Mar mountains for 12 days of debate and decision. If all goes according to plan--Maurice Strong’s plan--they will put their signatures on resolutions that will chart a course for preserving nature and achieving “sustainable development” through the 21st Century.

Strong, who was appointed head of the Earth Summit in 1989, is the prime mover behind the conference’s grand ideas: linking the problems of the environment to the need for economic growth and finding ways to accommodate both. He hopes the summit will move the environment “into the center of economic policy.” Strong has been the world’s most indefatigable cheerleader for these ideas for the past 20 years.

At stake, he says, is nothing less than the future of the planet. “All the evidence makes abundantly clear that we are on a pathway that is simply not viable,” Strong said at a press briefing at the United Nations in December. “It is behavior and conduct that need to change, and it must change first and foremost in the industrialized world.”

In his sparsely decorated office on the United Nations’ 30th floor, Strong elaborates on the theories that underlie the summit. Sinking his round figure into a chair, he spills out sentences quickly, losing an occasional word in a great exhalation of breath. His hands swoop up and down for emphasis.

Strong’s intensity hints at a deep well of moral and spiritual outrage, but what he talks about is economics. In his view, the first step in establishing the vital environmental-economic link is to put a price tag on the elements of nature. Strong puts it in business terms: Depreciation of natural resources has to be taken into account, literally, by nations all over the world. The loss of a country’s natural resources must be subtracted from its GNP. When businesses have to pay for the loss of living things, they have a powerful incentive not to pollute or over-consume.

“Here we are, in effect, running the most important business of all--Earth, Incorporated--without a depreciation, maintenance and amortization account,” Strong says. “That doesn’t make sense. In fact, much of the wealth that we believe we are creating comes from using up our natural capital, which means if we were in fact doing a balance sheet and a profit-and-loss account on the Earth, we’d be in liquidation.”

But the greatest environmental threat, Strong continues, is posed not by the negligent bookkeeping of the First World but by the poverty of the Third World. In poor countries, he explains, the depletion of natural resources and the creation of dirty industries can’t be stopped easily because they augment national incomes, however temporarily. This dubious prosperity, in turn, helps subsidize the same trappings of progress enjoyed by the industrialized world--Freon-dependent appliances that help destroy the ozone layer and cars that spew greenhouse gases.

Strong’s goal for the Rio conference is to create a blueprint that will fundamentally change these dynamics: The industrialized world must fund environmentally sound development in Third World nations. The conference would initiate this primarily through a single, complex action plan. Named Agenda 21 after the century through which it would serve as a guide, the plan details more than 1,000 objectives and how to achieve them.

It’s an outrageously tall order and a shockingly expensive one for the industrialized world to consider underwriting. Strong himself acknowledges that there is little chance that all its aims will be met--especially in light of the United States’ recalcitrance. But at the same time, he is pleased with the unprecedented scope of issues on the table and with the historic size of the Rio gathering--the largest meeting of world leaders ever, he is fond of telling audiences. Strong sees progress in the fact that so many presidents and prime ministers could be persuaded to gather to discuss not international trade or strategic missiles, but the problems of the environment. Jim Barnes, head of the international department of Friends of the Earth and a Strong supporter, is less sanguine. “I think he’s hoping that by getting a whole lot of heads of state down there, maybe something miraculous will occur,” he says.

Still, there is little question among summit watchers that if anyone could make the conference a success, it is Strong. “His life history is a record of achievement marked by deep commitment to certain values,” says Jim MacNeill, a Canadian environmentalist who was secretary general of the World Commission on Environment and Development in the mid-1980s. “He has a real understanding of the problems that the economic world faces in addressing these issues.” Jane Wilder Jacqz, a senior adviser at the U.N. Development Program, assesses Strong this way: “He’s not just an idealist without any practical side. He always has concrete plans in carrying out whatever objective he has. And he just drives himself remorselessly.”

MAURICE FREDERICK STRONG IS THE PARADIGM OF THE SELF-MADE man, a millionaire whose fortune is matched only by the depth of his early poverty. Born in rural Oak Lake, Manitoba, he was the first child of a railroad worker struggling through the Great Depression. Frequently unable to pay the rent, the family was forced to move from one shack to the next, often making do without electricity, plumbing or adequate heat during the frigid Canadian winters. Strong recalls periods when he was sent out to the woods with his brother and two sisters to pick berries and pull weeds for food. And he remembers well-to-do parents refusing to let their children play with him. “I learned what it was like to be at the bottom of the heap,” he says.

But the young man had his allies, including Clarence Heapy, principal of the school Strong attended. Heapy lent Strong books on history and politics and urged the boy to talk with him about what he read. With Heapy’s encouragement, Strong skipped four grades in the tiny Oak Lake school, but still he landed in a class that left him bored. The woods, on the other hand, held undiscovered mysteries. So Strong would play hooky for days on end, watching rabbits and deer and reading books in a cave he dug out of the side of a hill.

Occasionally, he would hop a freight train and venture far from home. During one such expedition in Broadview, Saskatchewan, he first learned of the United Nations. Sitting by the tracks, he noticed a yellowing newspaper; he picked it up and read about Churchill and Roosevelt’s plans to create an international forum after the war. “From then on, I just had a fixation that I must somehow align myself with that, and that it was in my future,” he says.

If this premonition seems a little too convenient, the reality is even more startling. After finishing high school at the age of 14, Strong joined the Hudson’s Bay Co. as an apprentice fur trader. He left after a year to start an unsuccessful mineral prospecting company, then made his way to New York and the fulfillment of his prediction. At 18, Strong went to work for the United Nations, albeit as supervisor of a staff that handed out pencils to delegates and filled their water glasses.

It didn’t take long for Strong to figure out that he wasn’t going to go much further without either a university degree or an independent income. Strong left the United Nations and set out to make his fortune. (His college education never went beyond a few night school courses.)

“I didn’t want to be a businessman, really,” he says now. “But I decided that I might as well try to do the best I can and view it as a means rather than an end.”

At a Canadian brokerage, he became one of the country’s first oil- and mining-securities analysts, and he proved to have a rare talent for sniffing out rich oil fields and ore veins. Three years later, he parlayed his talent into his first executive post, as assistant manager of Dome Exploration, a western Canadian oil company.

But Strong was developing a bad case of wanderlust. He soon departed the oil fields for East Africa. Though he intended to see the world, he ended up staying in Africa and falling back into the very businesses he thought he was escaping. He set up a gas station in Zanzibar and a graphite mine in Tanzania. Two years later, in 1954, he returned to Canada and was welcomed back by Dome. At the age of 25, he became the company’s vice president.

All the while, Strong was growing more and more troubled by the ecological harm his businesses were causing. “I didn’t initially see a problem in extracting minerals that had been put there by nature,” Strong says now, “because nature had put us there, too, and given us needs. But in practice, I began to see that we were careless of nature and that we did a lot more damage than we needed to do.” He began talking to colleagues and friends about the responsibility industry has to protect and preserve nature. “He was interested in the environment long before the rest of the world got green,” says Paul Martin, who drove a truck for Strong in those days and is now a member of the Canadian Parliament.

Not surprisingly, Strong never saw industry as the enemy. He didn’t leave the petroleum business for another six years. Instead, operating from inside Dome’s corporate offices, he began steering his workers away from drilling in delicate ecosystems. When a deposit was tapped, he insisted that more planning be done so a muddy mess wouldn’t be left behind.

In 1962, Strong was offered a lucrative post as vice president of a Montreal-based investment company called Power Corp. of Canada. It took him out of the oil and mineral business and into the world of high finance.

By then, Strong had begun traveling in powerful circles, and in 1966, Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson set Strong on the path that would lead to his becoming as much a power in public service as in private enterprise. Pearson asked him to head the Canadian government’s foreign-aid program. Strong’s first move was to travel to every country and examine each program that received Canadian aid. When he returned, he restructured his small government office, creating the Canadian International Development Agency, which became a big-budget player in international aid.

His creation of CIDA put Strong on the world stage and got the attention of the secretary general of the United Nations. The year was 1970, and preparations for the U.N. World Conference on the Human Environment, the first international environmental summit, were not going well. Though Strong’s reputation at this point was as an expert on economic development, not on ecological matters, Strong was asked to take over the conference. When it was held in Stockholm two years later, the conference sparked an ecological movement worldwide, and Strong was widely credited with the diplomatic feat of getting 112 nations to agree unanimously on a global environmental plan.

Strong stayed with the United Nations for another four years, heading its permanent environmental program. Then, in 1976, in the middle of the world energy crisis, Strong advised his friend Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to start a semi-national oil company capable of negotiating directly with OPEC nations. Trudeau founded Petro-Canada and put Strong in charge. No sooner did Strong move back into an oil-business executive suite than he set up an environmental department and required that all new projects receive that department’s approval. That same year, he jeopardized his job by refusing to approve drilling in the ecologically vulnerable Arctic.

After getting Petro-Canada up and running, Strong moved on again. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Strong’s name was attached to numerous business deals, from Third World oil development to land development in the American Southwest. But he kept coming back to the United Nations: in 1985-’86, as the head of the African famine relief effort, and again in 1989, when the United Nations tapped him for the Rio summit.

The fact that Strong shuttled back and forth between highly profitable private enterprise and highly idealistic public service never fails to elicit surprise--or even suspicion. “How can you justify being an environmentalist and having been in the oil business?” asks Strong’s 29-year-old son, Kenneth, vice president of Strovest Holdings Inc., a Strong family holding company. “That’s a question a lot of people ask. Well, the only way you’re going to do anything, change anything in a real sense, is being inside and operating.”

Maurice Strong obviously agrees. “Environmentalists can’t manage the environment,” he says. “The people who have to manage the environment are those who manage all the activities that have an impact on the environment.”

AT 8:30 A.M. ON A FRIDAY IN MARCH, STRONG HURRIES INTO A U.N. conference room for his daily staff meeting. Thirty men and women chatter in a dozen languages as they settle into their seats. With a businesslike “OK,” Strong calls for order. He asks one staff member for a summary of negotiations on the dumping of garbage in the ocean, but he interrupts her five minutes later with a hurried “Thank you. We have to move on.”

For the past two weeks, the United Nations has been aswarm with teams of summit delegates from its 175 member nations. This is the last of four formal drafting sessions for Agenda 21. Guiding them has required all the diplomatic finesse Strong could muster.

From the start, virtually all of the participating nations divided themselves into north and south interest groups--an alignment that roughly follows the line of demarcation between industrialized and developing nations. Then they proceeded to bicker. In broad terms, the southern bloc resented being expected to halt its own incipient industrialization in the name of environmental preservation. The northern bloc, for its part, resisted demands for financial and technological aid, even while insisting that the environmentally destructive practices of the south be replaced with clean industries. The only developed nations willing to commit funds and technology to the Third World were Japan, the Scandinavian states and the Netherlands.

By March, the delegates’ mutual recriminations were threatening one of Strong’s major goals for the summit. He had envisioned an Earth Charter--a planetary Bill of Rights setting forth the inalienable right of the world’s people to a healthy planet. What was shaping up instead was a mere declaration that blandly affirmed that poverty should be eradicated and that those who pollute ought to clean up.

Meanwhile, another of the conference’s major aims had been derailed, this time by the United States. In an effort to curb global warming, Japan and members of the European Community had agreed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000. But America refused to go along, fearing that such a restriction would be too costly.

On this day in March, if Strong is upset about these setbacks, he doesn’t show it. The specialists on his staff report on the negotiations of the day before--keeping him abreast of the most threatening stumbling blocks for Agenda 21. Indeed, with only three weeks of formal negotiation time left, the delegates are reaching dead ends on every front, and the United States is almost always in the role of troublemaker.

In later meetings, staffers would report that U.S. negotiators, led by Assistant Secretary of State Curtis Bohlen, were insisting that a key section of Agenda 21 be deleted. The provision sets forth ways to curtail the use of natural resources by industrialized nations. Another issue was the United States’ flat opposition to a ban on dumping radioactive waste into the oceans, though it has not exercised this option since 1970.

There is only so much Strong can do about the problems cropping up. As secretary general, his job is to shape the outline of the summit, but once the delegates take over, he must step back. “I work for the delegates, they don’t work for me,” he tells reporters.

But Strong’s hands are not entirely tied. He is actively working to push at least one major roadblock out of the path to Rio. The heads of state of nearly all of the industrialized nations have promised to attend the conference, but not George Bush. In fact, the President has gone so far as to say that his reelection campaign will probably keep him at home. Already, Strong has been called to the White House several times to answer questions about the summit from Bush’s closest advisers, and each time he has pushed for the President to go.

And as the March negotiations proceed, Strong presses on, greasing the wheels. He meets separately with delegations and tries to keep discussions going between warring factions. Before he closes this staff meeting, Strong inquires about the 1,200 environmentalists who have descended on New York. Are they getting enough access to the delegates? he asks. Strong had advocated bringing them into the negotiations and to the Rio conference itself. He hopes they will pressure their governments to sign more rigorous agreements, and he is counting on their vigilance after Rio to see that the promises are kept.

Strong knows that the environmentalists have begun predicting that the conference is doomed. The bickering, they say, has created resolutions rich in rhetoric but devoid of specifics. “We’re very concerned that the whole Earth Summit will become a grand, international ‘greenwash,’ ” says Joshua Karliner of Greenpeace.

No one is more aware of such a possibility than Strong. “The worst thing that can happen at Rio is a failure that masquerades as a success,” he acknowledges without hesitation. “We want to succeed, and all our efforts are bent on success. But if it does fail, I am not going to be party to any process of presenting it to the world as a success.”

“DID MY WIFE CALL?” STRONG pops his head out of his office between an interview and his next appointment, with African delegates.

Strong hasn’t seen his wife, Hanne Marstrand, in several weeks. Before the negotiating session began in New York, he was living in Geneva, where the United Nations set up Earth Summit headquarters. But he has spent no more than half his time at his Switzerland base. The other half he has spent visiting more than 100 countries in an effort to spread the word about the conference. “He’s pretty much his own time zone,” Kenneth says of his father.

Hanne, meanwhile, chose to wait out the 2 1/2 years of summit preparations at their ranch in southern Colorado, with monthly trips to Geneva. But now that Strong has been in New York for a rare five weeks, his wife is on her way to the city to spend the month with him. He is clearly anxious to see her.

While the sacrifices in his personal life are difficult, Strong thrives on his dizzying schedule. Late last year, Kenneth recalls, his father was scheduling a four-day trip to Malaysia, where he planned to visit seven or eight counties. His staff expressed concern that the proposed calendar would be too rigorous, but Strong dismissed their worries. Pointing to a gap in his itinerary, he said, “I have 12 or 16 hours to spare here. How about Singapore?”

Colorado is the Strongs’ spiritual base. The house they keep there is a model of environmentally conscientious architecture: Triple-glazed windows face south to collect the sun’s rays, and extra-thick adobe walls keep out the winter chill. Down in the cellar, Hanne preserves seeds from plants she fears are nearing extinction.

At Baca, as the Strongs call the 120,000-acre ranch, there is room for a large extended family. Both of the Strongs have been married before. He has five children--two sons and three daughters--from his first marriage; Hanne has two daughters. Her children, a sister, a cousin, two nieces and seven grandchildren live on the property.

The Strongs have also donated parcels of their land to various religious groups. Carmelite nuns, Hindu priests and Zen masters have built retreats at Baca. Strong calls himself “culturally Christian,” but not religious, and he says he shares with his wife a sense that spirituality, like wilderness, is vanishing from the world.

The Strongs also have a house on a huge parcel of forest and farm land off Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. Over the years, Strong has given three-quarters of his original Costa Rican holdings to the Nature Conservancy.

Strong no longer has a home in Canada, but each of his children does. Even in the busy month of March, Strong tears himself away from the United Nations to pay a weekend call on his family in Ottawa. The snow outside his daughter’s two-story suburban house is two feet high, but inside the mood is warm and celebratory, with balloons hanging from the kitchen ceiling to mark the birthday of one of Strong’s grandsons.

Strong has a hard time keeping business from his mind. He asks for the latest news from each of his children, but his conversation drifts back to the Earth Summit. Later, he spoons takeout Chinese food onto his plate and sits down with his grandchildren at the kitchen table. With the obsessiveness of an evangelist, he launches into his anti-pollution message. “Who wants to hear a story?” he asks and, encouraged by the reply, starts to spin a fable about an elf and a pollution-enshrouded globe.

The story is not meant to be funny, but like the Bush Administration officials at the portrait gallery in Washington, the children begin to giggle. Their giggles get louder, and, goading each other on, they finally collapse in a fit so disruptive Strong cannot go on.

He smiles and, with a wave of his hand, at once renounces the attempt at storytelling and forgives his laughing grandchildren. He can, at last, drop his characteristic persistence; this defeat does not have global consequences.

JUST A FEW WEEKS BEFORE THE Rio conference is to begin, the problems are still far from over. The Earth Charter has been formally downgraded to a declaration, most of the provisions of Agenda 21 are still up in the air, and it is no longer clear whether treaties on global warming and biological diversity will be signed in Rio.

But Strong remains optimistic. Sitting on the sofa in his daughter’s family room, he turns the discussion to the resilience of the soul. “It’s amazing how the human spirit can find hope,” he says. He is referring to the genuine smiles he’s seen on the faces of the world’s most desperately poor. But, looking at him, one wonders if he isn’t also alluding to his own optimism as he heads for Rio.

Three weeks earlier, as March preparations had begun, he told reporters that he considered the Earth Summit the chance of a lifetime. “When will we get another opportunity to examine these issues at that level?”

Now, at his daughter’s house, he offers another reason not to give up on the conference: the fear that a dying planet will be left to future generations. “I don’t think there’s any question that in the remainder of my life I’m not going to be particularly affected by some of the problems that I’m trying to deal with,” he says. “But I think we all want to leave a decent world to our kids.”

THE RIO PROGRAM

Rio Declaration. Meant to be an Environmental Bill of Rights, this resolution has been downgraded to stating a simple goal: People have a right to a healthy planet.

Climate Convention. A treaty calling for a cap on carbon dioxide emissions by the year 2000. At press time, the United States had refused to sign.

Biological Diversity Convention. This treaty seeks to conserve the Earth’s “genes, species and ecosystems” by expanding protected areas and establishing monitoring programs.

Agenda 21. An 800-page global plan containing environmental/developmental programs and goals of varying specificity. Unlike the climate and biodiversity conventions, Agenda 21 is not a treaty and does not have the force of law. It provides for, among other things:

* Ocean protection, including control of land-based pollution, overfishing and waste dumping.

* Waste management and the safe disposal of radioactive and toxic wastes, solid wastes and sewage.

* Desertification prevention through the control of over-farming, excessive grazing and deforestation.

* Technology “trades” from the First World to the Third World.