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In the early 1990s Canadian author, researcher and journalist Elaine Dewar had the chance to meet and interview Maurice Strong for her book, Cloak of Green: The Links between Key Environmental Groups, Government and Big Business. Today she joins The Corbett Report to discuss Strong’s career and her discovery of the business and political interests behind the NGOs shaping the environmental movement.

SHOW NOTES:
ElaineDewar.blogspot.com

Cloak of Green (available from Lorimer for C$22.95)

Meet Maurice Strong: Globalist, Oiligarch, “Environmentalist”

TRANSCRIPT: (thanks to Corbett Report member “phreedomphile”)
James Corbett: Welcome friends, James Corbett here, corbettreport.com, today is the first of February 2016 and today we are going to talk about something that I wrote about recently on the website, namely Maurice Strong, and you will be forgiven if all of your knowledge of Maurice Strong comes from the recent coverage of the memorials that were taking place for him in Ottawa. You may be forgiven for thinking he was simply an environmental leader in a straight forward sense and simply concerned with the planet or something along those lines and certainly we have seen a lot of people paying tribute to him as a visionary who was interested in changing the world for the better, but there is a much, much more interesting, much more detailed, much more nuanced story that paints an altogether, I think, different picture of the modern environmental movement and, more specifically, the international institutions and organizations that have been created to forward that movement.

And on that note, again, people who read my recent article will be familiar with Elaine Dewar, a journalist, a Canadian journalist who wrote a book a couple of decades ago called Cloak of Green which I mentioned in that article and which I would highly recommend as an interesting source on the environmental movement and its development and also Maurice Strong who she also had the opportunity to interview for that book. She is at elainedewar.blogspot.com and you can check out some of her other books including Smarts: The Boundary Busting Story of Intelligence, and The Second Tree of Clones, Chimeras and Quests For Immortality but today we are going to be asking her to stretch her memory back a couple of decades to talk about Cloak of Green. Elaine Dewar, thanks for joining us today on the program.

Elaine Dewar: Well, thanks for asking me.

JC: Well, as I say, you did write this book a couple of decades ago and I understand that this was an extension of your own experience in the late 1980s being concerned, as most of the planet was at that time, with some of the types of stories we were hearing the destruction of rain forests and the depletion of the ozone layer and that led you on a personal journey that took you in places that perhaps you weren’t expecting to go. I would love to hear about how the Cloak of Green came together and what really propelled you towards writing it.

ED: Well, it got started in the strangest way; actually, I was looking for an escape. I’ll just quickly tell you this in background that prior to this story I’d been working on a very large and complex story about a developer family which ended up in a huge lawsuit and it was consuming and I really needed a story that would take me away from my daily concerns. And the story presented itself was about the dangers of the expansion of Brazilian society and the building of a large series of dams on the Xingu River system in the Amazon and what that might mean to the global climate, to the atmosphere, to all of us.

The theory then was that the major CO2 sink in the world was in fact the forest and the forest was being destroyed by development and the only people who stood in the path of that development were a group of native people from Brazil called the Kayapo.

So I attended a major fundraiser that took place at a church in downtown Toronto and I believe it was 1989, perhaps 1988, in which Paiakan, one of the leaders of that group, was presented to the crowd as a representative of who would take the money, put it to good use, defend the rain forest, and protect us all from a massive and dangerous impact on the global environment.

I should point out to you that I found it very strange that in Canada where we have had a very complex and unkind relationship to native people that so many people would have turned out to support a native person from another country. I mean it was great to see and it was also very odd. What was also odd was as it transpired the native group in question was in fact trying to use changes in the Brazilian political structure to afford a kind of sovereignty to themselves to delineate their territory to prevent people from coming in and out and in fact to take a kind of sovereign control that had been taken away from them by an encroaching Brazilian state.

So that was where the story started and I followed it down and I was surprised to find a number of Canadian environmental organizations that I had reasons to rely upon in the past as a reporter who were suddenly turning their attention away from Canadian environmental issues to the Amazon rain forest and they were all trekking down there, going to conferences, raising money, and, in any case, slowly and carefully, layer by layer, I was dragged down to an understanding that these groups that I thought I knew and thought I understood and thought were democratic and related to the community, turned out to be groups that, in effect, took direction and took certainly large whacks of money from the corporate interests that they were decrying in public and from governments which were organizing towards what’s called the Rio Summit. And that introduced me to Maurice Strong.

JC: Exactly.

ED: I had, in fact, met Mr. Strong years before at a dinner that was given by a colleague of mine and had always been sort of interested in what he had done with the formation of Canada’s national oil company, which is called Petro Canada. I had reason to do a piece about Petro Canada after Mr. Strong left the organization and it was run by someone else. So I had sort of bits and pieces of information about him and I knew a lots of people in common who knew him and so connected but not connected and the Kayapo story took me to the preparatory conference for the Rio Summit, which Mr. Strong was organizing for the UN.

JC: Now, I think that’s extremely important background and it does help to elaborate the point this book is about the bigger picture of these environmental organizations and their connections. But I think Maurice Strong is the perfect microcosmic example of that from his own biography and to give people a sense of Maurice Strong and the organizations he was involved in I mean it’s so almost laughable that when you actually try to line them all up and just enunciate them and I pulled this from his official website talking just about post Rio Summit years of his career where he

“continued to take a leading role in implementing the results of Rio through establishment of the Earth Council, the Earth Charter movement, his chairmanship of the World Resources Institute, membership on the board of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, the Stockholm Environment Institute, the African American Institute, the Institute of Ecology in Indonesia, the Beijer Institute of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and others, also, Strong was a lifetime founding director of the World Economic Forum, a senior adviser to the president of the World Bank, and member of the International Advisory of Toyota Motor Corporation, the advisory council for the Center For International Development of Harvard University, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the World Conservation Union, the World Wildlife Fund, the Resources for The Future, and the Eisenhower Fellowships.”

And that’s just a slice of a couple decade of his biography. It’s…

ED: It’s missing a lot of stuff like the Ethiopian famine, et cetera. No, this is a very, very, very interesting human being. I don’t know if your listeners care to know about how he grew up but you know he was born in Oak Lake Manitoba, very small community not far from Brandon, which is not far from Winnipeg. His parents really suffered during the Depression. His mother apparently died in a mental institution. There was a lot of hunger. Life was really bloody tough. He ran away from home, I think he was in grade 9 or grade 10 and got himself on lake boat, got himself onto the Coast Guard, this was all during world war two and eventually you know finished grade 11 and then went up to Chesterfield Inlet which if your listeners are familiar with Canadian geography is on the coast of Hudson’s Bay, way up north and went to work for a Hudson Bay Company factory at a very, very interesting time when the government of Canada was trying to figure out if it could actually defend our northern borders by moving troops up to the north up to the Copper Mine River and then down to Edmonton and when they were also searching for uranium. As you may recall uranium became a strategic material because of the Manhattan Project and everybody from 1945 on was trying to find uranium and uranium was, in fact, found at Baker Lake.

So, Mr. Strong enters the big world through a guy by the name of ‘Wild’ Bill Richardson who was a sort of prospector married into an oil family called McColl whose company was called McColl-Frontenac, it was a major importer of oil from the middle east that had been taken over long since by the Texaco Company through a brokerage house called Nesbitt Thomson. In a way, Mr. Strong was introduced to the world of big oil and the world of resources at a very young age. He was picked up as a very smart kid taken under the wing of a man named Paul Martin Sr. who was a cabinet minister and whose son would go on to become the Prime Minister of Canada and introduced to the oil patch though people at the very top and that would include David Rockefeller.

So, his life story is a story of layers of understanding how networks work and introduced at the very top rung of the, I guess you would say, the industrial and resource developers who were advancing the American empire at the end of World War II. That’s where he gets his start and he very quickly became a very significant figure in the Liberal Party, the dominant political party in this country for many years became very active in the oil patch in Calgary. [Strong] was allowed to run an oil company by the time he was 31, backed effectively by Rockefeller owned or Rockefeller controlled independent oil companies and became a very active player in the Y network. The YMCA in the immediate postwar period was a very interesting organization both nationally and internationally. It had outlets in places on the other side of the cold war boundaries so it had outlets in China, it had outlets in Russia, and a great deal of the political discourse that went on postwar happened in unofficial and informal places likes the Y(MCA) so Mr. Strong was extremely well placed in all three: politics, business, and what we call civil society at the same time and advanced himself through those networks very quickly.

JC: Now I think an important aspect of this story is the types of organizations that Strong himself really spearheaded or set up or was the founding director of that appear on first glance to be governmental or at least quasi-governmental organizations but when you scratch the surface are much different entities underneath and I think one example of that from relatively early in his career would be after he was appointed to Canada’s external aid program and developed the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the International Development Research Center (IDRC) which probably not a lot of Canadians have heard about but continue to function to this day.

Of course, set up as ostensibly a program extending Canadian aid to developing nations but, as you note in your book really an interesting way of peddling political influence in the developing world that, of course was…

ED: Yeah, and for Canada that was particularly important because you know we had going on back in the early 60s something called the ‘Quiet Revolution’ in which the strictures of a very conservative Catholic church were being overthrown by a population that was for the first time getting access to higher education in big numbers.

Mr. Strong, at that point, was working as the vice president and then the president of Power Corporation, another one of those layered organizations that had huge political influence as well as huge business influence. Power Corporation ended up having a huge pile of cash deposited in its lap when its hydro operations in, I believe, Manitoba British Columbia in Quebec were taken over by those provinces and suddenly with cash to spend (it) sort of turned itself away from being a power operation into being a different form of power operation with a great deal of political influence.

So Mr. Strong left Power Corporation when his colleague and partner Mr. Paul Martin Sr., who was head of external affairs, the Minister of External Affairs, took on external aid which had in those days a very small budget and almost no staff turned it into the Canadian International Development Agency again with almost no money and almost no staff and so he made a deal with SNC, which is now known as SNC-Lavalin, a huge engineering firm to hire people that he approved of, not hire people he didn’t approve of, and take on contracts in francophone Africa.

The concern at the time was that a French Gaullist government would stir the pot in Quebec and that it would stir that pot by one of its colonies in Africa suddenly recognizing Quebec as a sovereign state.

That was the fear so the question for the government of Canada was how do we forestall that and the answer turned out to be go and do a bunch of aid deals make them nice and sloppy allow people to be as corrupt as nature allows them to be and meanwhile do some good in the world but keep your ear to the ground in French Africa and keep control of events.

So Maurice Strong basically led that effort.

JC: Such a remarkable political coup and yet it only represents again just a tiny fraction of what Strong was involved in but I think gives a sense of the way that he used the various organizations that certainly he leveraged a lot of the power that he was given or appointed.

ED: He saw business as the answer to how he would get power. He didn’t have an advanced degree he wanted to be in external affairs and they wouldn’t take him. They wouldn’t even let him apply because he didn’t have any university education so he decided okay business is my entry point and he used it pretty brilliantly, very smart man.

JC: Indeed, well, let’s talk about another extremely important organization that he helped to found after first chairing the first major global environmental conference, the United Nations Conference On The Environment in Stockholm which led to the development of the United Nations Environment Program which was situated in Nairobi, Kenya and as you write in Cloak of Green, Nairobi was Strong’s old stomping ground having, I believe, lived there in the 1950s briefly. Placing UNEP in Africa was…

ED: Working for Caltex.

JC: Yes, a Rockefeller company…

ED: ….he was working for an oil company stomping all over the east Africa.

JC: Yes, and then you go on to say “Placing UNEP in Africa was explained as a sop to the developing countries, who had been suspicious of Western intentions. But it was also useful for the big powers to have another international organization in Nairobi. After the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Nairobi became the key spy capital of Africa.” Which again I think lends another intriguing layer to the possibilities of someone like Strong and his involvement in organizations like the Y.

ED: Right, his major gift is information. Using it, finding it, sharing it and leveraging it.

JC: And, yes, using narratives to help paint pictures that will help place him in positions of other power.

Well, then let’s project this forward we could talk about the Brundtland Commission and other things he was involved in but, as you say, this leads towards the 1992 Earth Summit Rio Conference which is I would assume for anyone who was at least alive at that time will probably remember that conference and all of the media coverage that surrounded it and it still is today cited as one of the major touchstones of the environmental movement and, of course, it was chaired by Maurice Strong. Let’s talk about your relation to that conference and as you say the preparatory work for that conference where you actually got to meet with Strong and interview him for the book.

ED: Right, and he was very helpful. I mean naïve Canadian reporter who really doesn’t really understand the way the world works go to see Mr. Strong, that would be me, and he opened every single door there was to open, he asked every question that…every question I put to him he answered. Had I not prepared I’m sure the answers would have been different but you know what I was looking at was how is it that all these environmental groups which are supposedly located in locales, that would be Canada in the cases of the groups I was following most closely, but also have all these international connections. How is it that all of these groups are getting funded by governments and by really large oil and gas interests and shipping interests and whatever?

How did that work and what are they doing at this conference in the case of the Canadian organizations actually appearing on the Canadian delegation on the one hand and on the other hand, when they are meeting in a private room or a room they hope to remain private, which I sort of busted my way into. How come these NGOs are being organized by people who are in fact being paid by the government of Canada to organize it?

I mean it became a kind of exercise for me to see who was connected to who and how they all ended up in Maurice Strong’s lap and they all did, they all had either funding or governmental help or were reporting back to the government when they were presenting themselves to the world as non-governmental organizations which is to say representatives of the grass roots. There was nothing grassy or rooty about any of them.

JC: Which I think lends itself to the question, the fundamental question of what this is about because Maurice Strong obviously had his own interests to peddle and he had his own power, influence, and money and things of that nature but this is clearly about something more than one man or his vision.

ED: Sure, this is about shaping political opinion and about shaping political opinion in places where you know where one man cannot make a difference so if you are trying to shape the political opinion of the United States of America there better be lots and lots and lots of people out there carrying that message, the message that you are trying to shape in the public eye. One guy standing on a soap box is going to make no difference.

Thousands of organizations with their own advertising campaigns and their own local impact are going to make a difference and he understood that from I would say the early part of the middle sixties when, for example, Pierre Elliott Trudeau became Prime Minister in 1968 didn’t just get visited upon the Canadian public from nowhere but in fact had been groomed for a public role by Power Corporation years before so he understood the power of the right phrase being carried out of the right mouth and appearing on the right television show at the right time.

In the conference in Rio his major ally for that conference for getting his message out was Ted Turner who covered the thing on CNN right, left, and center, and whose people at CNN were working with the Kayapo from Brazil trying to raise funds and trying to bring attention to the Amazon issue long, long, long before the conference actually took place so he started organizing for that conference in, I believe, 1986 – 1987 when the Swedes asked him to take it on and the conference took place five years later so that’s five years of relentless organizing, relentless fund raising, large corporate interests to NGOs, NGOs funding other NGOs. It was an incredibly complex bit of business, which he orchestrated brilliantly.

JC: Well, let’s talk about what they were ultimately hoping to leave as the impression for the general public if this was an operation to influence public opinion. What was that geared towards and let me just point out this passage from your book that I thought was particularly important in that regard:

“Rio was publicly described as a global negotiation to reconcile the need for environmental protection with the need for economic growth. The cognoscenti understood that there were other, deeper goals. These involved the shift of national regulatory powers to vast regional authorities; the opening of all remaining closed national economies to multinational interests; the strengthening of decision making structures far above and far below the grasp of newly minted national democracies; and, above all, the integration of the Soviet and Chinese empires into the global market system. There was no name for this very grand agenda that I had heard anyone use, so later I named it myself–the Global Governance Agenda.”

Can you tell us about that agenda?

ED: Well, I think if you think about what was going on at the time you’ll sort of have it. I mean, Brazil was chosen or self-chosen, chose itself as the site for this conference as it was coming out of its last throes of the military dictatorship. It was becoming a new democracy and it was trying to control the shape of that democracy and many parties who had interest in Brazil, Canada being one, were attempting in their own way how to shape how that democracy would function.

The Canadian Embassy was very active with the Brazilian government, on the one hand, and with Brazilian NGOs on the other. Funding NGOs with the “right views” and those NGOs because of the rules in Brazil were putting money into the political process. In other words, giving money to political candidates and helping them get elected. I mean that kind of thing was legal in Brazil, it’s illegal in Canada, it’s illegal in the United States, but, you know, different rules for different folks.

So, at the same time, things were very strange in China, it was going down the opening of its economy road while also repressing a democratic movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989. So they wanted to have political control with an expansion of a more and more capitalist based economy.

Russia was going through a collapse, I mean, in effect, Gorbachev’s democratic and perestroika reorganization of the way the Soviet state conducted itself had basically become unstuck and it was transiting very, very quickly from a totally authoritarian state to something entirely different, everything was up for grabs and it’s a huge oil state so people with interests in oil and gas were very concerned about the political structures that would ensue in the Soviet Union or the post-Soviet Union at that time.

The World Economic Forum, which Maurice helped to found, was a place where all of these groups came together to have discussions out of the public eye. So, if you were a Chinese official and you were trying to open up your economy but you were afraid of going too far and losing political control, there were lots of people at the World Economic Forum at Davos who would sit and talk with you about how you might manage these transitions and there were lots of corporate interests who were happy to tell you they were happy to help and, you know, who knows maybe your kid could be educated at Harvard and you could have a nice house in Vancouver five years down the road.

So, all of these places, these sites that Maurice organized were organizing towards a larger open global economic system, where local political authority would have less control and larger possibly non democratic authorities would have more control over the shape of things to come. The European Union was coming into existence, I mean, when you think about the amount of political change that was going on, say, from 1986 to 1996 it was absolutely bloody staggering and he was sitting in the catbird seat for a lot of that change.

JC: And in a way you were riding shotgun for that ride, perhaps sneaking in the side door. As you alluded to, perhaps they weren’t necessarily expecting someone like yourself in the midst writing about this. What was your sense with Maurice Strong? Was he guarding and defensive with his questions and answers or was he quite open about this?

ED: Nope, very open. One of the things that interested me was the question of whether he set up an intelligence system for this country that functioned abroad that was informal. I put that question to him and he basically said to me I really didn’t think about it that way but, you know, now that you mention it, well, yes, I guess.

He also described his situation at the UN, he loved working at the UN because he said he had more unfettered political power at the UN than any Canadian cabinet ministry, even a Prime Minister would have. He was able to fund his own office, he was able to fund his own officials, he could do it without being audited, he could move money here, there, and everywhere without anybody asking him any questions, I mean, he had unfettered power. And he also described the UN system as an open leaky ship in which everybody was watching everybody else. So, he assumed that the KGB or the follow on organization, the FSB, was watching him. He assumed that MI5, and MI6, and CIA, and everybody was watching everybody else and they often gave him information or shared information with him that might be of use. And, yes, he was open about that, he did not back off one bit when I asked those question.

JC: That is fascinating and perhaps, I mean, again, it doesn’t seem like he was very secretive about this he was just, no one paid attention to was he was doing in the general public for the most part despite the extraordinary number of connections that he had in the business and civil society world.

ED: Actually, quite a few people paid attention to him here. You can’t do this kind of, how should I call it, weaving of interests without running into trouble and he ran into several problems, especially in the later course of his career when things began to pile up. I mean, people noticed that he had acquired the ownership of a ranch in Colorado sitting on top of a huge aquifer and that there was a business plan that he was a part of to sell the water from that aquifer while he was running the Rio Summit and people said what the hell, you know, what’s going on here? How can an environmentalist be selling off the aquifer that all these people rely on? What’s going on?

There were many moments in Mr. Strong’s career when he was close to the line and people thought he went over the line and there was a hue and cry. Plenty of them.

JC: And yet he had nine lives until the oil for food scandal.

ED: He did.

JC: And that…

ED: Even there, what happened to him? Nothing!

JC: Nothing legally.

ED: He was a happy boy.

JC: He ran away to China. Did you maintain any kind of contact….

ED: He ran away to the largest economy in the world and he seems to have had significant influence over the shape of things in China.

JC: Fascinating, especially given the historical influence of the Rockefeller family in China as well. Maybe just a continuation of things earlier.

ED: And the Desmarais family in China.

JC: Indeed, the Canadian Rockefellers.

Again, so many different aspects to this. I guess the final question, did you maintain any sort of contact with Strong over the years or did you follow his career after that point?

ED: I followed his career as best I could from a distance, obviously I went on to other stories. In Canada…I don’t know where you are from James. Are you from here?

JC: I am from Calgary.

ED: From Calgary. So, you understand that this is a smallish place and especially if you are in the media you are going to know lots of people who know lots of people so you’ll be in a kind of milieu where there are lots of connections so, for example, Mr. Strong’s protégé John Ralston Saul is a very active, politically active writer in this country and I would run into him on other issues for years after this book was published.

One of his friends and associates was Adrienne Clarkson, the Governor General, and I would run into her, so it’s like…. it’s not as if I looked for Mr. Strong after this but there were lots of sort of crossovers that continued on.

JC: His influence is difficult to miss I guess if you’re moving in high circles in Canada.

ED: Well, it’s not high circles, it’s media circles. If you do this kind of work you are going to cross paths over and over again with people who are making decisions because it’s a small number of people making decisions in this country.

So Stephen Lewis lives a few blocks from me. Stephen Lewis and Maurice Strong were working together on the conference in Rio and worked together on African issues and, you know, you’re going to keep crossing paths.

JC: Well, then I guess my final question may be a bit unfair since you haven’t looked at this issue for a couple of decades now but I guess I would be interested in your take on whether you believe that these organization that you’re covering in Cloak of Green, do you think they’ve fundamentally changed since the time you were covering them or are they operating under the same principles?

ED: No, they’re operating under that same principles, they’re not democratic organizations, this is the thing that I found most staggering. You know, I operated under the assumption that since people came to my door and asked me for money that they were voluntary based organizations with, you know, huge numbers of people supporting them. In fact, when I went back after that prep com and started to actually look at these organizations, just look at what they published about themselves, interviewed the people who ran them, it became staggeringly obvious that they were not membership organizations in that memberships control their behaviors, control their agendas, they were very small organizations that raised large sums of money and used those sums of money to have political influence.

That’s what they were about and I’m talking about World Wildlife Fund, I’m talking about Pollution Probe, another spin off from a pollution front called Energy Probe – small organizations with a large political reach.

JC: Fascinating issue and probably one that there is still a lot of meat left on that bone to pick at.

Hopefully, you or someone can be recruited to do that at some point in the future but I guess we’ll leave that….

ED: The question you haven’t asked, though, is whether they were correct in their arguments about the environment. I mean, to me, the really important thing, the thing that drove me to this story in the first place was did generating air conditioning, you know, we’re breathing stuff that’s crap, is global warming real or is it not and there are a number of questions that were very alive in the late 1980s early 1990s, and the question is whether they were right. Were they right that the global environment is degrading, that the climate is changing and changing radically and that human beings have a large role in those changes?

And, to me, the answer is yes, human beings do have a large role in those changes and we need to do something about it. The question is what and how?

JC: Well, exactly, if every single organization of any political influence is controlled in some way then what is the ultimate aim of this and how do you go about changing the way that it’s structured?

ED: Well, nothing stops us from starting our own organizations that nobody controls but us.

JC: Tall order. I think you put a tall order on the plate for the listeners out there who are concerned about these issues. Alright, I think we will leave it there, but as I say Cloak of Green we’ve talked about that book quite a lot throughout this conversation. I’ll obviously link to your website but I am dismayed to note that the only actual copies of that book that I can find online are used copies since it’s out of print and the cheapest one that I could possibly find was seventy plus dollars and the most expensive one was twelve hundred dollars….so.

ED: Yeah, I think the thing to do is to go to the Formac site, the publisher’s name is Lorimer, and ask for a copy and I am sure they will send it to you.

JC: Any chance there will be an E-book re-release of this book at some point?

ED: This book was done long before, you know, digitization became ubiquitous and the only thing I can think of is for awhile there when Google was basically grabbing all books in libraries and making them available online without permission, it was available then, you could click right through and read the whole thing online. Since then, it’s been taken down but I’m sure that a book can be purchased from Formac which is the name of company that does the printing for Lorimer out of Halifax.

JC: Alright, well once again we’ll direct people to ElaineDewar.blogspot.com and I understand you are writing a new novel but you’re putting it online for free. Tell us about that.

ED: Yeah, the novel I wrote a few years ago but there is another one that follows on after that so I’ve been having fun.

JC: Interesting stuff, well Elaine Dewar, I do genuinely thank you for taking the time to talk about this today it’s an important subject and your book was very important on breaking a lot of that ground so thank you for your time.

ED: Thank you.