December 2, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – Maurice Strong, widely considered the creator of the global environmental movement and its attendant population control agenda, died aged 86 on Saturday as world leaders prepared to converge on Paris for the UN COP21 climate change summit.
That 10-day meeting to draft an international treaty on climate change began Monday, and arguably, is the direct result of Strong’s decades-long, relentless, behind-the-scenes lobbying.
Indeed, in the UN environmental agency’s announcement of Strong’s November 28 death, executive director Achim Steiner stated that: “Strong will forever be remembered for placing the environment on the international agenda and at the heart of development.”
Former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson quipped on his 85th birthday that Strong “invented the environment,” while her husband, philosopher John Raulston Saul, in a glowing memorial in Canada’s Globe and Mail filed November 30 from Paris, described Strong as “the St. Paul of the environmental movement.”
But Strong’s lifelong cause has a dark and sinister side, summed up succinctly by Campaign Life Coalition president Jim Hughes: “This whole environmental movement is about depopulating the earth.”
Indeed, in the 1960s as a deputy minister in the Canadian government, Strong caused an uproar by suggesting there may come a need to require permits for bearing children. “That was controversial and I’ve been used to controversy ever since,” he told the Guardian in 2012. “Over the years I’ve noticed that this is one way of getting attention.”
Marked by poverty
By his own admission, Strong’s impoverished Depression-era childhood in Manitoba, and the influence of a confirmed socialist teacher, left him “frankly very radical,” as he is quoted by Ronald Bailey in the September 1997 National Review.
“This became a theme in his life, the need to deal with poverty,” noted Raulston Saul. “Mr. Strong had been brought up in poverty, and over the years he had seen its effects in the world.”
Maurice Strong discusses the environment agenda and population control in a 1972 interview:
But while in a 1976 Macleans interview Strong described himself as “a socialist in ideology,” he added that he was “a capitalist in methodology.”
He was a remarkably successful one by all accounts, becoming a self-made millionaire. By age 35, he was CEO of the Montreal-based Power Corp, and thereafter ran a handful of other oil and energy companies, including a three-year stint piloting Ontario Hydro in the early 90s.
Strong was adept at switching focus from his corporate affairs to his public sector endeavors, which began in earnest in 1966. By 1968, he oversaw the founding of the Canadian International Development Agency under Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
He leapfrogged from there to organizing the UN’s first environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972, where in his opening address he hinted at the need for “national population policies.”
Later that year, he was appointed head of the newly formed United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), headquartered in Nairobi.
In 1976 Trudeau summoned Strong back to Canada to run the country’s newly founded Petro-Canada, which he did for two years.
He returned to the UN in 1984, and by the time he organized the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Strong was the undisputed “leading force in creating a complex web of international agreements and expectations that we identify as international environmentalism,” according to Raulston Saul.
“He was in many ways the Canadian most listened to in the rest of the world.”
Abortion, occult, and pagan nature worship
He was also in a unique position to push his agenda, which, as Jacqueline Kasun points out in The War Against Population, included abortion, openness to the occult, and pagan nature worship.
But that was hidden behind euphemisms and disguises, including the term “sustainable development.” As pointed out by Raulston Saul, Strong was able “to conceptualize and explain sustainable development when no one knew what it was.”
Perhaps that’s because by design, it’s meant to represent an infinitely elastic concept that could morph to include whatever measures allegedly were needed to curb population growth for the sake of the environment.
Indeed, the UN’s Brundtland Commission, of which Strong was a member, issued the 1987 Our Common Future Report which “promoted sustainable development” according to Peter Foster in the National Post. He described it as the notion that “(relatively) free markets were unsustainable.”
The term came up over and over at Strong’s Rio Earth Summit, where, writes Kasun, “the environmental population controllers hit the big time.”
The Earth Summit issued Agenda 21, a 40-chapter manifesto that called repeatedly for “sustainable development,” but which, Kasun wrote, it did not define. It did, however, state clearly that “the growth of world population” caused “increasingly severe stress on the life-supporting capacities of our planet.” And it called for “measures to bring about demographic transition” – code for reducing births, Kasun observed.
Strong recognized the “strategic significance of the radical feminist movement,” Kasun notes, and among his prominent appointments in Rio was feminist Bella Abzug and her Women’s Environment and Developmental Organization. Agenda 21 was replete with references to “empowering women,” and “reproductive health” – code for access to contraception and abortion and sex education.
According to Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute, Strong pushed Agenda 21 aggressively as assistant to the UN secretary general. As a result, 1,500 cities and towns around the world adopted its measures.
Agenda 21 also called for global governance, as will be seen later.
Gaia and the New Age mecca
Meanwhile, Gaia-worshippers joined radical feminists and environmentalists to complete Rio’s unholy trio, and Strong again took a leadership role.
Strong and his wife Hanne bought a 200,000-acre Baca Ranch near Creston, Colorado in 1978, and created the New Age Manitou Centre, which Kasun calls a “huge cult mecca for New Age devotees.” The Creston/Baca community is described by the Creston Institute as the “largest intentional interfaith ecumenical community in North America,” while Hanne Strong, according to Creston’s website, calls it a “demonstration project” where “[w]e focus on the human spirit, consciousness and sustainability.”
Moreover, the Earth Charter, which Strong launched in 2000 with former president of the USSR and founder of “Green Cross International” Mikhail Gorbachev, further underscored the “religious basis to environmentalism,” according to Kasun.
The Charter called for “sustainable … reproduction” and “sexual and reproductive health” – euphemisms for access to abortion, contraception and sex education.
Pagan religions worshipped nature and engaged in human sacrifice, she pointed out, adding: “Some see a re-play of ancient pagan practices in the modern marriage of ecology and abortion.”
Push for global governance
Strong organized the Earth Council Institute the same year as Rio, bringing on board members of the Club of Rome, of which he himself was a member, according to the National Review’s Bailey.
Among its many polemics, the Club of Rome’s 1972 paper Limits to Growth warned that the earth’s population would be unsustainable by 2030 unless “drastic measures for environmental protection” were adopted.
Strong himself echoed this dire prediction in his 2001 book Where On Earth Are We Going? Therein he said the idea that two-thirds of the world’s population could perish by 2031 was “a glimmer of hope for the future of our species and its potential for regeneration.”
The Club of Rome also floated the idea of “global governance” in its 1991 report The First Global Revolution, which called for “a greatly enhanced importance to the United Nations and other national systems” to deal with the coming environmental and population crisis.
Strong, at the time secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, reiterated that sentiment the same year, pointing out that, “Current lifestyle and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and workplace air-conditioning and suburban housing – are not sustainable. A shift is necessary which will require a vast strengthening of the multilateral system, including the United Nations” (emphasis added).
A year later, the Commission on Global Governance was established with the support of the UN secretary general, and with Strong as a founding member. In its 1995 report Our Global Neighborhood, the commission called for a carbon tax to be used to fund UN activities, and urged an eventual phase-out of the veto power of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.
Bailey wrote that this report formed the basis of Strong’s 1997 proposal to restructure the UN, promoted by then Secretary General Kofi Annan. The Strong/Annan proposal for UN restructuring did not occur, but the attempt added to Strong’s reputation as an advocate of global government.
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Certainly PRI’s Mosher echoes this, noting in an email to LifeSiteNews that Strong was “one of the leaders of the global elite who believed that ordinary people cannot be trusted with either energy or access to the environment, and must be micromanaged.”
Indeed, Strong’s final admonition in Rio’s Agenda 21 warns that:
The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental co-operation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of global environmental security (emphasis added).
As a founding member of the Commission on Global Governance, and chairman of the Earth Council, Strong was “eager to see a global government set up with the power to tax, a standing army, and its own judiciary,” Mosher said. “All of which would mean the end of democracy and human rights as we know them.”
Or as Strong himself put it in his 2009 article “Facing Down Armageddon”: “Our concept of ballot box democracy may need to be modified to produce strong governments capable of making difficult decisions, particularly in terms of safeguarding the global environment.”
The New York Times' published this video critiquing population control and climate change hysteria earlier this year. See commentary on it by LifeSiteNews' Steve Jalsevac: Astonishing New York Times video: population/ climate panics exposed.
The National Post’s Foster observed that “as a lifelong socialist, he saw the potential of the environmental movement to fight capitalism and introduce a system of ‘global governance’ that would co-ordinate all human activity.”
“We must devise a new approach to co-operative management of the entire system of issues… We are all gods now,” he quoted Strong as saying.
Strong denied the global governance charge in the Guardian interview. “I am not in favor of world government,” he said. “It’s not even feasible.”
But he added: “The combination of population growth and growth in consumption is a danger that we are not prepared for and something we will need global cooperation on. … I really believe our future is in doubt.”
Foster, who wrote that he had interviewed Strong “numerous times over a 20-year period,” commented that Strong’s “answer was always more power,” noting that Strong wrote: “The single greatest weakness of the existing international legal regime is the almost total lack of capacity for enforcement.”
China, Strong’s natural home
Perhaps most telling is Strong’s choice of refuge after his thirty-plus year career pulling the environmental levers at the UN came to an inglorious end. After he resigned when he was implicated in the 2005 UN oil-for-food scandal, Strong fled to Beijing for good.
Evidently he admired China, with its brutally enforced “one-child policy” that includes enforced abortion.
“China is one of the best managed countries in the world today,” Strong told the left-leaning Guardian. And while its “one child policy is not a perfect policy by any means,” the country has “done a remarkable job in increasing the well being of one of the largest populations of the world, but it’s not easy.”
And despite his erstwhile fall from grace, Strong, aged 82 at the time of the interview, insisted he was “still very active. I have close relationships at the UN” and “I’m still quite cooperative with a number of UN activities, in particular to China and that region.”
Paris and beyond
Certainly, many acknowledged Strong’s great influence following the announcement of his death (the details of which have not been released) on the eve of the Paris summit, the timing of which Raulston Saul noted was “a strange dramatic irony somehow characteristic of the man.”
Among those lauding him was newly-minted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who said Strong “used his remarkable business acumen, organizational skills, and humanity to make the world a better place.”
Many invoked the “ghost” of Strong to add urgency to the Paris Summit deliberations, where global leaders are expected to draft a treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which came out of Rio’s Framework Convention on Global Climate Change.
Foster pointed out that Strong will be represented at Paris through the lobbying of “radical environmental non-governmental organizations, ENGOs.” Strong’s sponsorship of these groups by facilitating their “government funding and entry into international meetings,” was a key “strategic element” in his environmental agenda.
Raulston Saul wrote that the Paris Summit, “the direct outcome of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972,” is the “latest, increasingly desperate attempt to force a serious deal on global warming,” and “the latest reluctant attempt by world leaders to rise to the challenge of saving their citizens and the planet.”
“It is up to Heads of State to take up his call in the next two weeks,” wrote fellow environmentalists, Felix Dodd and Michael Strauss in the Guardian. “There couldn’t be a better way of celebrating the life of Maurice Strong than securing a great deal in Paris on climate change.”
Such rhetoric is typical of those pushing the environmentalist cause. According to CLC’s Hughes, the inconvenient truth – that the global green agenda is intent on curbing the world’s population, either through outright coercion or through societal pressure – seldom, if ever, comes up.
“The United Nations wants countries that have laws against abortion to remove them, so that abortion becomes an international human right,” Hughes said.
“They never talk about fewer people on the face of the planet,” but “use bafflegab so that the average person doesn’t really see their agenda,” he told LifeSiteNews, adding that even church leaders, including Pope Francis, may not see the whole picture.
“So many have drunk the Kool-Aid,” Hughes concluded.
And, in this instance, that is Strong drink indeed.