A meeting with The Wizard

Past is prologue in green dreams and schemes

Maurice Strong (Apr. 29, 1929 -Nov. 27, 2015) Wiki Commons

I came across an intriguing anecdote in rereading Edward R. Griffin’s controversial 1994 work, The Creature From Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve. It involved Maurice Strong.

Who?

You may have never heard of Strong, but given his international profile he should have been a household name. Though he was hardly without press attention - both positive and negative - in his time.

Griffin:

He is one of the wealthiest men in the world. He lives and travels in great comfort. He is a lavish entertainer. In addition to having great personal wealth derived from the oil industry in Canada – which he helped nationalize – Maurice Strong was the Secretary-General of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio; head of the 1972 UN Conference on Human Environment in Stockholm; the first Secretary-General of the UN Environment Program; president of the World Federation of United Nations; co-chairman of the World Economic Forum; member of the Club of Rome; trustee of the Aspen Institute; and a director of the World Future Society.

In other words, an insider’s insider.

“At the global level, where he's better known than in his own country, he is considered one of the world's leading environmentalists,” wrote Vancouver journalist Daniel Wood in 1992. Pretty respectable green creds for someone who began his professional life as a Canadian oil and mineral businessman, and was CEO of Petro-Canada from 1976 to 1978. At the age 31, he became president of the Power Corporation of Canada, a Quebec company highly influential in Canadian Liberal circles. In the eighties he headed Ontario Hydro, one of North America’s largest power utilities.

In the late seventies, Strong and his wife Hanne purchased a 50,000 hectare ranch in the Colorado desert with big plans in mind, described by reporter Miro Cernetig in a 1990 story for The Globe and Mail:

Their plan is to be ready for the beginning of a new Dark Age, says Mrs. Strong, a self-styled visionary whose apocalyptic vision of the future involves the Earth's population shrinking to about 400 million people in the next few years as the result of environmental degradation. “AIDS will be nothing next to the things that are coming," says Mrs. Strong.

Vancouver journalist Daniel Wood, who had a nose for a good story, hotfooted it out to Colorado two years later to interview the Canadian rainmaker and his mystical-minded spouse for a story in West magazine called The Wizard of Baca Grande.

Wood sat down with the wizard at one point to talk about the latter’s idea for a novel. Here’s the money quote from the article (and reproduced in Griffin’s book):

Each year, he explains as background to the telling of the novel's plot, the World Economic Forum convenes in Davos, Switzerland. Over a thousand CEOs, prime ministers, finance ministers, and leading academics gather in February to attend meetings and set economic agendas for the year ahead. With this as a setting, he then says: “What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? ... The group's conclusion is `no.' the rich countries won't do it. They won't change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about? ...

“This group of world leaders,” he continues, “form a secret society to bring about an economic collapse. It's February. They're all at Davos. These aren't terrorists. They're world leaders. They have positioned themselves in the world's commodity and stock markets. They've engineered, using their access to stock exchanges and computers and gold supplies, a panic. Then, they prevent the world's stock markets from closing. They jam the gears. They hire mercenaries who hold the rest of the world leaders at Davos as hostages. The markets can't close. The rich countries...” And Strong makes a slight motion with his fingers as if he were flicking a cigarette butt out the window.

I sit there spellbound. This is not any storyteller talking, this is Maurice Strong. He knows these world leaders. He is, in fact, co-chairman of the Council of the World Economic Forum. He sits at the fulcrum of power. He is in a position to do it.

“I probably shouldn't be saying things like this,” he says.

Perhaps you’re saying, ‘and this is proof of what, exactly’? Precisely nothing. But I find it intriguing that an insider like Strong would entertain a conspiratorial scenario in fiction for a real-world organization - the World Economic Forum - in which he was co-chairman.

From Boca to Beijing

So much of Strong’s past now feels like prologue. In 1994, long before Agenda 2030 was a twinkle in Klaus Schwab’s eye, he petitioned to have Ontario Hydro buy 12,500 hectares of forest abutting Corcovado National Park in Costa Rica. The idea was environmental preservation via offsetting the company’s carbon emissions. It was a peculiar proposal by the Hydro chief, considering the company had an alternate and more immediate opportunity to combat emissions by planting trees on Ontario soil. Along with retreating from building coal-fired generating plants in already polluted China.

Smaller minds may have mused that the wizard‘s Costa Rica initiative was somehow connected with his ownership a hotel complex on 300 hectares of land in Costa Rica, and an alleged spot of trouble with the Costa Rica government and a local Indian band which claimed he had built on their property.

“Absolutely infinitesimal minds might argue that Strong's adopt-a-rain-forest policy is a form of blood money - maintain trees far away so you can pollute with impunity at home,” Thomas Walkom wrote in The Toronto Star.

In any case, the Costa Rica scheme never materialized.

Strong’s final years were darkened somewhat by a controversy involving the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food-Programme. Evidence found by federal investigators determined that while working for UN Secretary General Khofi Annan in 1997, he had endorsed a check for $988,885, made out to "Mr. M. Strong," issued by a Jordanian bank.

Wikipedia:

It was reported that the check was hand-delivered to Mr. Strong by a South Korean businessman, Tongsun Park, who in 2006 was convicted in New York federal court of conspiring to bribe U.N. officials to rig Oil-for-Food in favor of Saddam Hussein. Mr. Strong was never accused of any wrongdoing. During the inquiry, Strong stepped down from his U.N. post, stating that he would "sideline himself until the cloud was removed."

The affair was said to have arisen from "the tangled nest of personal relationships, public-private partnerships, murky trust funds, unaudited funding conduits, and inter-woven enterprises that the modern U.N. has come to embody" in which Strong had a major role. In reply, Strong stated that "everything I did, I checked it out carefully with the U.S."

Shortly after this, Strong moved to an apartment he owned in Beijing, where he appeared to have settled.

All very curious.

From saving the planet to stockading the sheeple

Forty years ago The New Yorker magazine lauded Strong as the man upon whom "the survival of civilization in something like its present form might depend." The burgeoning green movement and the liberal left viewed the hyper-connected paper pusher as an avenging angel for Gaia, while the far right and the US militia movement pegged him as the spear tip of their globalist bête noire, the United Nations.

That was some years back. However, in our COVID era re-acquaintance with the World Economic Forum and other agenda-building bodies that outlast and outwit (and even outfit) elected administrations across the world, Strong might be seen now through a different lens: a figure deeply entrenched in the public/private sphere who worked above and beyond election cycles and the parochial labels of right and left.

Maurice Strong certainly was instrumental in alerting the world to a global environmental crisis, for which he deserves credit. That was then. Today, with climate activism hijacked by carbon credit greenwashing, “15 minute city” social engineering and woke-crazed ESG stakeholding, it appears Strong’s successors are less about saving the planet than stockading the sheeple. Unless of course these are thought by some to be one and the same thing.

In any case, my mind returns to that peculiar quote from 1992 about Strong’s idea for a novel involving a conspiracy against the developed countries, launched through the World Economic Forum. How crazy is that?

Crisis! Peril! Alarm! Breaking!

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