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A surprising call to action from a key business and environmental player at the dawn of the millennium.
From the Report to the Shareholders, Earth Inc., dated January 1, 2030 that begins Where on Earth Are We Going?: world hunger, ecological and environmental disaster, global warming, massive shifts in weather systems, the re-emergence of diseases long thought controlled, and political turmoil in a world where a barrel of water is more expensive than a barrel of oil.
Hard-headed, practical, impassioned, this is a call to action by a key business and environmental leader at the end of the twentieth century that cannot be ignored. To explain how he came by his beliefs, Maurice Strong chronicles his poverty-stricken beginnings as a child in the prairies during the Depression to his appointment as President of Power Corporation at 29, his appointment as Undersecretary of the United Nations at 40, and on the domestic front, as Chairman of Ontario Hydro.
That was my doing. I had insisted they come in by themselves, just the leaders of the world around a single big table. I wanted them to be able to sit down informally. Maybe for an hour or so they could look past their political problems, their national agendas, their opportunism, their mutual suspicions and paranoias, look past the alliances and trading blocs and leftover Cold War animosities to see what was really at stake here, in this summer of 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio.
Maybe, I thought, maybe they'll see how small the problems that preoccupy them really are compared with what they must now confront.
But I doubted it, even then, as I watched them move through the doors. Heads of nations, like the rest of us, are locked into the boxes of their experience, their pressing preconceptions and - unlike the rest of us - their own sense that what they do is important.
From the Report to the Shareholders, Earth Inc., dated January 1, 2030 that begins Where on Earth Are We Going?: world hunger, ecological and environmental disaster, global warming, massive shifts in weather systems, the re-emergence of diseases long thought controlled, and political turmoil in a world where a barrel of water is more expensive than a barrel of oil.
Hard-headed, practical, impassioned, this is a call to action by a key business and environmental leader at the end of the twentieth century that cannot be ignored. To explain how he came by his beliefs, Maurice Strong chronicles his poverty-stricken beginnings as a child in the prairies during the Depression to his appointment as President of Power Corporation at 29, his appointment as Undersecretary of the United Nations at 40, and on the domestic front, as Chairman of Ontario Hydro.
That was my doing. I had insisted they come in by themselves, just the leaders of the world around a single big table. I wanted them to be able to sit down informally. Maybe for an hour or so they could look past their political problems, their national agendas, their opportunism, their mutual suspicions and paranoias, look past the alliances and trading blocs and leftover Cold War animosities to see what was really at stake here, in this summer of 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio.
Maybe, I thought, maybe they'll see how small the problems that preoccupy them really are compared with what they must now confront.
But I doubted it, even then, as I watched them move through the doors. Heads of nations, like the rest of us, are locked into the boxes of their experience, their pressing preconceptions and - unlike the rest of us - their own sense that what they do is important.