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Cohen: Maurice Strong was the Earth's Mr. Fix-It

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On Wednesday, hundreds will gather across from Parliament Hill for an extraordinary commemoration. The Governor General, the Prime Minister, the Minister of the Environment, the former president of the World Bank – among other dignitaries, in and out office – will pay homage to one of the great Canadians of his generation.

They will celebrate the life of Maurice Frederick Strong, who died on November 27. His passing brought the obligatory obituaries and personal tributes. But in a country that often hides its light under a barn, Maurice Strong – and the feverish, consequential life he led at home and abroad – should not go uncelebrated.

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Which is why, at the initiative of John Ralston Saul and Adrienne Clarkson, friends, family, colleagues and admirers will come together to remember the man.

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If there was an imaginative Canadian at home in the last third of the 20th century, it was Strong. If there was an influential Canadian abroad, it was Strong.

He was an industrialist, conservationist, bureaucrat, diplomat, iconoclast. He was a success in business, government and diplomacy.

For a boy born into poverty in Manitoba who did not finish school, his résumé was dazzling in government, industry and philanthropy. Vice-President of Dome Petroleum. President of Power Corp. President of the Canadian International Development Agency. Chair of Petro Canada. Chair of Ontario Hydro. Head of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP).

But for all that life of service, there are two places where Maurice Strong had the greatest impact: poverty and the planet. From the union of development and the environment came sustainable development.

Strong was not the world’s first environmentalist, but he was among the early responders to a planet in trouble. He saw farther, earlier, than others. He knew the threat to world before it was called climate change, and he rushed to the ramparts, raising the alarm.

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Saul calls him “the St. Paul” of the environmental movement, a felicitous phrase. A conventional saint he was not; Strong was often difficult and impatient with bureaucratic infighting, delay and posturing.

What he really was – which Saul captures – was the “organizational genius” who got things done. When the United Nations talked about ways to sustain the health of the planet in 1969, he made it happen in Stockholm in 1972. To succeed, Strong prevailed over entrenched interests that opposed the conference. When the UN wanted to establish the UNEP in Africa, he did it.

He acted as much as he imagined, always governed by a sense of urgency. He was the earth’s Mr. Fix-It. For him, it was not enough to worry about climate change; he would recruit the army, find the resources, map strategy, devise tactics. Anxiety was not enough.

After Stockholm, there was Rio in 1992, with more hopes and targets. It was there that Désirée McGraw, then 21, came to admire Maurice Strong, who had named her one of two Global Youth Ambassadors. “He changed my life,” she says. On Wednesday, she will be among those paying tribute to him.

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She now runs Pearson College on Vancouver Island, and proudly notes that it was Lester B. Pearson who named Strong head of the newly created Office of External Aid. Eventually, he would head CIDA.

As Pearson was the best known Canadian in the world in the middle decades of the last century, so was Strong in the last decades. It is striking, really, how foreigners – some of whom will be present Wednesday – have lauded his contribution to the environmental movement.

Strong was the future’s choreographer. He conceived it, advanced it, directed it – and worried how bad things would go if we stood still. To global warming, he issued a global warning, as only he could.

He showed us what one man with ideas, confidence and ambition – a Canadian – could do in a beautiful, broken world.

Andrew Cohen is author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours that Made History. Email: andrewzcohen@yahoo.ca

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