Introduction
Much of our current architecture for international environmental policymaking, including international organizations and programmes, originated in the 1970s and 1980s, turbulent decades marked by public demands for stricter environmental regulations, calls for economic reform, and a rethinking of the global political order. Events like the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in 1972 in Stockholm, have been seen as watershed moments for international and natural environmental politics, defining the playbooks for future UN environmental conferences.Footnote 1 Nonetheless, looking at the same period, economic and environmental historians have often pointed out how this rise in environmental awareness inconveniently coincided with the neoliberal economics that have been blamed for delaying environmental and climate action.Footnote 2 In this article, however, I argue that to understand the shortcomings of past and current environmental regimes, we need to look more broadly. This article shows that the roots of flexible interpretations of environmental limits emerged from a variety of quarters, and not solely from proponents of free-market approaches.
This article focuses on key figures in the emergence of early forms of ’global environmental governance’, a post-war mode of ‘world politics’ that extends beyond national governments to include a widening range of non-state actors, such as scientific experts, international organizations, social and economic institutions, and public intellectuals, in addressing environmental issues.Footnote 3 In particular, this article looks at Maurice Frederick Strong and some of his close allies, including his second wife Hanne Marstrand, whose views were influenced by their diplomatic and corporate engagements in both the Global North and South, as well as by the North American counterculture. As a central figure in global environmental governance from the 1970s through the early 2000s, Strong has been a person of interest for scholars in the field of global and international history. His role as secretary-general of both the 1972 Stockholm Conference and the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio twenty years later made him a key figure in the North–South dialogues about the environment and international development. As the first president of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), and as a member of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) (Brundtland Commission) in 1987, he helped shape the UN’s approach to resource development and environmental protection, as well as the international sustainable development agenda.Footnote 4 Yet, so far, the ambivalent aspects in the background of the oilman and environmental advocate Strong, business-oriented yet a left-leaning liberal, and with strong religious views, have not been in the focus of the academic literature. Through their various networks and affiliations, Strong and Marstrand were friends with philanthropists, Latin American development thinkers, members of the North American New Age movement, and leading cyberneticists.
While the work by authors such as Ben Huf, Glenda Sluga, Sabine Selchow, and Cyrus Mody has looked at Strong’s role in economic thought and his links to philanthropy, how Strong and his many and diverse acquaintances made sense of the relations between the themes of environment, social justice, international development, corporate interest, and technology has not been discussed.Footnote 5 Sketching the heterogeneous and sprawling connections that linked high-level UN officials with alternative development thinkers, business executives, is the first aim of this article. The second aim is to analyse the type of environmental imaginaries, or forms of ‘world-making’, that these networks produced. Environmental imaginaries have been loosely defined as including the discourses, norms, and metaphors, often linked to perceptions of local environments, that governance groups might represent.Footnote 6 These imaginaries are not rigid policy agendas but rather evolving frameworks that help actors navigate approaches to complex themes such as the environment, economy, and technology. As I will show, the emerging environmental imaginaries developed by Strong, Marstrand, and others in their network were rooted in a form of ‘economic humanism’ that integrated elements of deep ecology and techno-optimist approaches, alongside a reimagining of corporate roles in international politics. Based on my analysis of Strong’s personal archives and the couple’s correspondences and publications, I show how the Strongs connected acquaintances from the worlds of business, development banking, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from the preparation period of the Stockholm Conference with like-minded New Age environmentalists, Schumacherian economists, and cybernetic and Buddhist philosophers. These networks facilitated a growing role for businesses in environmental governance by the late 1980s and 1990s, while contributing to flexible interpretations of sustainable development and environmental limits.
By discussing the Strongs’ networks and the personae these contained, this article adds new insights on early environmental governance and its repugnancies to the literature in global history, the history of development, and the history of economic thought in the second half of the twentieth century, while making new links to histories of science and technology. Strong was part of a larger collective of administrators and thinkers that tried to navigate the changing and densifying international institutional landscape of the post-war period, while pursuing alternative ideas about economic and environmental development, related to local land-use traditions. As such, the focus of this article links in with literature in the history of development that has looked at alternative metrics and new approaches to world politics, including contested, yet popular concepts such as ‘basic human needs’.Footnote 7 In this regard, the Strongs and members of their network can be seen as part of the scattered critique of modernization theory and the emergence of alternative ‘world orders’ that authors like Daniel Immerwahr, Sara Lorenzini, David Ekbladh, and Quinn Slobodian have identified for the 1970s.Footnote 8 Like many of their contemporaries, Strong, Marstrand, and their circle of friends shared a strong trust in new approaches to development and international relations based on advances in the social sciences.Footnote 9 At the same time, they were deeply interested in alternative forms of environmental ethics inspired by Christian, Buddhist, indigenous, and New Age philosophies, as well as by cybernetic ideas about human–environment interactions. As such, there are similarities to forms of humanistic thinking that historians have identified amongst leading intellectuals of the period in fields as diverse as psychology to economics, who also shared an interest in principles of self-organization and interconnectedness.Footnote 10
Methodologically, too, this article draws on approaches in both diplomatic and science history. Studying heterogeneous governance networks like the Strongs’ necessitates analysing private settings and informal gatherings, in addition to official meetings, documents, and statements. Strong and Marstrand frequently invited business leaders to official environmental governance fora, a practice that ultimately led to Strong’s resignation from all UN posts in 2005.Footnote 11 Yet, to fully understand the couple’s approach, it is necessary to examine the connections they fostered in private. Private settings have long been recognized as important spaces of study in fields such as the history of science and, to some extent, diplomatic history. Historians of science have shown that recognizing alternative spaces of knowledge production allows for a more symmetrical reflection of who participated in the making of science and ideas. In this context, ‘the home’ and other domestic spaces have been recognized as important places of knowledge production, showcasing the social aspects of knowledge making, including networking and entertaining.Footnote 12 Next to these discussions of undervalued forms of, often gendered, academic labour, historians have highlighted the role that domestic partners have played in the production of knowledge, for instance, in the work of collaborative couples.Footnote 13 Similarly, within diplomatic history, domestic settings have been recognized as important in the making of politics, while the recognition of informal actors, such as diplomatic wives, has been linked mostly to the home.Footnote 14 In recent years, domestic partners, especially in intellectual partnerships, have received additional attention.Footnote 15 This article brings this approach to global history, expanding recent work in the field that has emphasized the diverse spheres of political influences outside of international organizations in the post-colonial era.Footnote 16 Private gatherings and informal networks, from Crestone to Geneva, functioned not merely as retreats or think tanks but as arenas complementary to official UN settings, where participants cultivated environmental imaginaries that blended spiritual, ecological, and business-oriented world views. In this, the physical location, close to international institutions in Switzerland, the seemingly remote setting of Kenya’s expat community in the 1970s, and the North American desert landscapes played a role. So did the unstructured, unbureaucratic, and informal nature of these meetings.
In what follows, I first outline the environmental ideas articulated by Strong and members of his network during the early to mid-1970s, a period in which Strong assumed a central role in building up UNEP. I then examine Strong and Marstrand’s efforts to translate these ideas into practice through the development of a model sustainable community in the desert town of Crestone, Colorado. Finally, I analyse the environmental imaginaries that emerged from these initiatives and trace their influence in Strong’s contributions to environmental policymaking from the 1980s through the early 2000s, including their resonance in foundational documents on sustainable development, and subsequently within the UN’s Agenda 21. I do not deny that the history of oil actors’ involvement in environmental policymaking is contradictory or conflicting, and from today’s point of view, literally incredible. Yet I argue that the environmental imaginaries promoted by actors like the Strongs were influential and widely shared. While initially positioned against the market environmentalism that emerged in the context of early 1980s neoliberal politics, they did, however, introduce flexible interpretations of environmental limits and a role for businesses as environmental agents. This, in turn, helped forge early connections between institutions like UNEP, the oil industry, international banking, and techno-optimist futurists, linkages that remain relevant today.
Stockholm, Nairobi, Banff, Geneva: Forging connections
To understand Strong’s and Marstrand’s initial environmental thought, it is first necessary to trace the heterogeneous connections that the couple entertained in the early 1970s. It gives insights into their initial environmental thought. Much has been written about Maurice Strong’s background, much by himself. Growing up poor in rural Canada during the 1930s and 1940s, yet clever and with a high regard for education, Strong was ambitious and resourceful, leveraging opportunities in the fur trade and fossil fuel industries before moving into politics and international development.Footnote 17 Hanne Marstrand, a Danish journalist with a background in interior design, had met Strong during the preparations of the Stockholm Conference. The two formed a couple shortly after and would marry in 1981 after Strong’s divorce from his first wife, Pauline Olivette, the mother of their five biological and adopted children. In 1973, Marstrand and Strong moved to Nairobi, where he was responsible for establishing UNEP.
It is worth spending a bit of time on the early UNEP and the ‘environment’ as a new domain for UN politics. As Etienne Benson has shown, around 1970, the notion of the environment was still relatively loosely defined.Footnote 18 The Stockholm Conference of 1972 played a big part in catalysing a common understanding. For Strong, such a definition needed to serve a second objective – namely, bringing estranged governments together while restoring their trust in the international importance of the UN system.Footnote 19 On the one hand, conference delegates had to engage with the politics of decolonialization, independence, and shifting international relations, including calls for reforms in international development and aid. On the other hand, the conference itself had been a reaction to increased concern about the state of the natural world and new ecological ideas about planetary interdependencies, natural resources, and growing human populations. In particular, the publication of the contested The Limits to Growth report to the Club of Rome in 1972 strongly influenced the conference preparations.Footnote 20
The report’s overall message of ecological constraints to development has received criticism from both industrialists in the Global North as well as governmental leaders in the Global South.Footnote 21 Strong, himself a member of the Club of Rome, had at first been eager to have the study as background material for the Conference, yet soon worried about the many renunciatory reactions to the report. In 1971, Strong had convened a meeting in Founex, Switzerland, in an attempt to recruit supporters for the UN’s environmental agenda at Stockholm amongst intellectuals and politicians from the Global South.Footnote 22 At the many UN events where he presented the plans for the Stockholm Conference, his rhetoric had always linked in with the goals of the Second Development Decade to improve international economic relations.Footnote 23 In this, the conference’s key concept of the ‘Human Environment’ could help redefine the relations between science and policymaking by providing a managerial framework for the environment that incorporated local, regional, and national development objectives.Footnote 24
Strong himself did not oppose the idea that there were external limits to the development of natural resources or that the Earth should be treated as a planetary system. He explained that natural resources made up the ‘principal basis’ for development.Footnote 25 In fact, Strong had chosen the work of the systems thinker John McHale, husband of designer and futurist Magda McHale, to support his argument.Footnote 26 According to McHale, the main environmental problem was not the inevitable physical limits of the environment. It was the ‘software’, or ‘social thinking’ in development approaches that was ‘less than adequate’ and in immediate need of ‘reevaluation and redesign’.Footnote 27 These concerns also influenced Strong during the staffing of UNEP’s secretariat. Rather than ecologists, Strong believed that the experts needed were manager types, ‘generalists with the integrative grasp, broad technical base, systems training and international orientation needed to understand complex trans-disciplinary problems’.Footnote 28 According to Strong, the main purpose of UNEP, after all, was to ‘extend the limits of social capacity to cope with environmental problems’.Footnote 29
These were some of the ideas that Strong took to Nairobi and which would shape his network-building during the programme’s early years. In this period, the Strongs’ homes in Kenya and Europe became informal yet strategic gathering places, where private meetings blended personal relationships with official environmental and economic discussions. These gatherings, while less documented, were instrumental in shaping the networks Strong cultivated and in laying the foundations of some of the environmental imaginaries they advanced. Examples of this type of networking are plenty. Many of these meetings were meticulously planned, with guest lists tailored to strategic objectives.Footnote 30 A telling one is a 1974 meeting, when UNEP under Strong, together with members of the United Nations Trade and Development organization (UNCTAD), was planning a symposium on Patterns of Resource Use, Environmental and Development in Cocoyoc, Mexico, based on one of the recommendations from the 1972 Stockholm Conference. While visiting Europe during the preparation phase of the symposium, Strong convened an ‘off-the-record’ weekend retreat in La Bettex, near Geneva, where he owned a chalet, inviting a select group of economists, bankers, and development experts to exchange views on the future of the global economy in the years after Stockholm.Footnote 31 Attendees included representatives from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, the World Bank, and the Centre for International Environment and Development in Paris, alongside business leaders from international banking firms such as Schroders and Dresdner Bank, the Japanese Overseas Economic Co-operation Fund, the Club of Rome, and the Centre d’études industrielles (CEI) of which Strong himself was a member and future chairman. All invitees were asked by Strong to prepare short, informal presentations on a topic in their expertise, ranging from international trade perspectives from the Global South to the Canadian energy landscape and the European financial sector.Footnote 32 Through meetings like these, UNEP’s work on the environment, from the programme’s inception, was linked to corporate and business interests. Such intellectual exchanges in unofficial settings also exemplify what Strong had in mind when describing UNEP as a ‘catalyst’ rather than an engine for new ideas about complex ‘concepts of growth and development’, while such ideas had to come from ‘outside’ of the UN system.Footnote 33
Meetings like these, where Strong solicited the insights from political, financial, and industrial sparring partners in private, highlight that in the delicate negotiations between environmental considerations in the context of UNEP and other types of social and economic demands, relationships were never simple. In 1975, for instance, the Strongs invited Justice Thomas Berger to Nairobi. Berger had been commissioned by the Canadian government in 1974 to evaluate various possible impacts of a proposed gas pipeline, potentially extended by an oil pipeline along the same route through the Northwest Territories. Berger would advise against the pipeline plans that were backed by corporations such as Exxon, Shell, Conoco, and Imperial Oil, based on a combination of environmental and social reasons, including the potential disruption of indigenous communities’ ways of life, a decision that presented a landmark moment in North American environmental policy.Footnote 34
The Strongs’ engagement with Berger is important because it evidences Strong’s complex positioning within both the oil industry and environmental advocacy. Earlier in 1975, Strong had met with Berger in Vancouver during the Mackenzie Valley pipeline hearings, just after UNEP had opened its Industry and Environment office in Paris to address the environmental impact of industrial activities like oil and gas extraction. Strong was particularly interested in how environmental and social arguments shaped the discussions about the Mackenzie Valley pipeline and the resulting environmental impact report.Footnote 35 He supported the idea that industrial partners, especially from the energy sector, were important ‘influences’ on ‘governments in their framing of environmental legislations’.Footnote 36 In fact, in 1975, Strong had accepted Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s offer to help launch the consolidated energy corporation Petro-Canada. Yet, in 1977, even as Petro-Canada, under Strong, partnered with Mobil and Texas Eastern to drill for oil in Nova Scotia, Strong congratulated Berger on his negative report, calling it a ‘real milestone in integrating environmental and social considerations into economic decision-making’.Footnote 37 The meetings with Berger, then, underscore that for Strong, the cultural and social dimensions of resource development were as crucial as its ecological implications, while both could trump industrial interests.
Private meetings from the late UNEP period also point to the Strongs’ involvement with the cybernetics community and their stance on environmental limits. Already during the Stockholm Conference, Strong had taken a position on environmental limits that acknowledged ecological boundaries to development, but at the same time highlighted the room for technological innovation to sustain economic growth. In 1975, Strong and Marstrand invited Geoffrey Oldham of the Sussex University Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), who chaired the Unit’s Institute of Development Studies, in the context of the Pugwash conference on Technologies for Self-Reliance held in Dar es Salaam.Footnote 38 Participants at the conference critiqued traditional aid models and advocated for nationally adapted technological solutions to development challenges.Footnote 39 SPRU had been instrumental in shaping Strong’s approach since the Stockholm Conference. The unit had formal links to Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), where Strong had been a governor in the early 1970s.Footnote 40 In 1970, Oldham had co-authored a report to the UN in the context of the Second Development Decade.Footnote 41 The report, which would become known as the Sussex Manifesto, had been influential in Strong’s approach during the preparation phase of the Stockholm Conference, especially in his attempts to integrate Global South interests into the conference discussions. Together with Marc Nerfin, a Swiss development thinker and contributor to the Jackson report on the UN Development Programme, Strong continued to work on the ‘inner limits’ of development. These had been defined in 1974 in the Cocoyoc Declaration as basic human needs, such as shelter, food, health, education, and clothing. These discussions on the inner limits, including meetings with economic thinkers such as Ignacy Sachs, who, too, had contributed to the Tanzanian Pugwash meeting, had a strong focus on technological self-reliance, as suggested by Oldham at SPRU.Footnote 42
As has been shown, the concept of basic human needs that emerged in the context of UN development reforms in the late 1960s and early 1970s needs to be seen as an attempt to reconcile ideas for alternative development from the left and early neoliberal interventions.Footnote 43 Here, we see how the concept was moreover linked to discussions on global environmental limits and alternative, computerized world models and forecasting technologies in which Strong and researchers at SPRU were involved. The Sussex group, under the directorship of Chris Freedman, another co-author of the Sussex Manifesto, had been involved in discussions regarding the notion of environmental limits as captured in The Limits to Growth.Footnote 44 At the time that the Strongs were meeting with Oldham, Strong had been part of discussions with Freedman that criticized the World 3 Model devised by Jay Forrester at MIT, which underlay the report. In contrast to the model used by Meadows et al., the Sussex group suggested that the ecological limits to development were sociopolitical in nature and hence could be renegotiated in the future, similar to Strong’s approach at Stockholm that had been influenced by the work of the McHales. As important as determining these physiological limits, so Strong and Nerfin thought, was the development of alternative world models that allowed for a comprehensive definition of planetary limits that was linked to an ethics of redistribution.
In this, Nerfin and Strong were trying to liaise UNEP with the Swedish and the Canadian International Development Agencies under the aegis of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, while sounding out the interest of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in working on such a model in the place of MIT.Footnote 45 In their plans, Nerfin and Strong referred to Hollis Chenery, Montek Ahluwalia, C. L. G. Bell, John Duloy, and Richard Jolly’s Redistribution with Growth, which demanded an alternative measure of development other than GNP, which would play a role in the work of Mahbub ul-Haq, another attendee of Strong’s La Bettex weekend, on the Human Development Index in the 1990s.Footnote 46 Despite his links to the oil industry, Strong embraced the work by the Sussex group on appropriate technology and renewable energy, exemplified, for instance, by the Nigerian promoter of local solar energy projects, Abdou Moumouni Dioffo. Nerfin and Strong were moreover actively engaging with cybernetics groups such as Fundación Bariloche in Argentina, whose Latin American world model, similar to the thinking represented in the Sussex group, suggested that technological innovation could increase global resource stocks. The Latin American model was particularly outspoken about the assumption that planetary redistribution of both resources and political power was key to future development, while social and political limits needed to be challenged.Footnote 47 Strong and Marstrand met Oldham shortly after Nerfin and Strong had brought their proposal to the UN General Assembly’s special session in September 1975.Footnote 48 The proposal was eventually rejected by the World Bank, as it was perceived to rival the bank’s own programme to reduce urban poverty.Footnote 49 Yet, the project and meetings in this context provide further insight into the Strongs’ understanding of environmental limits as existing, but defined at least in part by social factors.
While Strong negotiated with development banks, he and Marstrand cultivated relationships with rising elites who bridged the private sector, international organizations, and global politics. Again, private meetings rather than official gatherings give insights into these contacts. In January 1976, the Strongs co-hosted a retreat at Lake Turkana with the palaeontologists Richard and Meave Leakey. The guests included Diego Arria, a Venezuelan politician with extensive industrial ties.Footnote 50 Arria, who would pursue presidential ambitions as an independent candidate in the elections of 1978, and his wife had extensive links to the OPEC country’s industrial sector and had managed the private investors of Caracas’s infrastructural renewals during the 1970s. Similar to Marstrand, Arria was a proponent of indigenous land rights.Footnote 51 Other invitees were James Wolfensohn and Pehr Gyllenhammar, both of whom had long-standing affiliations with Strong through organizations such as the CEI in Geneva.Footnote 52 Members of the CEI, especially Strong, and Gyllenhammar, who would succeed Strong as the CEI’s chairman, saw the centre as complementary to the structure of the UN, reinforcing links between industry and governance, actively seeking ‘council’ from and ‘establishing new relationships’ with recruited like-minded partners from UN bodies, such as, for instance, the Japanese economist Saburo Okita.Footnote 53 It is then not surprising that during the 1970s, Strong used UNEP funds to sponsor CEI training seminars on environmental management and education for industrial leaders.Footnote 54
This pattern of network-building extended beyond Nairobi, taking an even more strategic form in the second half of the 1970s. While such meetings might have been common practice in energy business circles, for Strong, private meetings were also a way of bypassing UN bureaucracy.Footnote 55 Scripted private meetings, then, not only become important moments to investigate if we want to understand the making of governance networks that transgressed the domains of politics, business, and environmentalism. They also provide insights into some of the interconnected topics that the Strongs and their various affiliations pursued. These included alternative visions for international development that reconciled environmental limits with economic adaptability, technological self-reliance, and partly romanticized ideas on indigenous ways of living. This would become even more important in the years to come.
Crestone: Building a model village
In 1978, the couple bought property in Crestone, Colorado. This section discusses how, in Crestone, the Strongs’ environmental imaginaries took a more concrete form, presenting in a miniature format the type of approach that the Strongs pursued for environmental governance. Strong had left Petro-Canada in 1977 to pursue private investments, partnering with Paul Nathanson, heir to the Odeon cinema group, in real estate ventures in Toronto. These investments helped finance the purchase of Prochemco Inc., a Texas-based agricultural development firm. After merging with Arizona Land and Cattle, Strong rebranded the company as AZL Resources, shifting its focus to oil development.Footnote 56 In 1978, the Strongs bought the Luis Maria Baca Ranch near a large landholding belonging to AZL in Crestone, Colorado. In the same year, Marstrand moved in with her mother, her sister, and her daughters. Correspondence from the time shows that Strong left most of the management of Crestone in the hands of Marstrand. She became a driving force behind Crestone’s transformation from a private landholding into a centre for alternative models of sustainability and spirituality. Marstrand later recalls a mystical experience meeting a local who prophesied the Strongs would build a community in Crestone near the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range.Footnote 57 While the account is hard to reconstruct, much of the couple’s work in Crestone would indeed relate to community building. Crestone became a microcosmos for the environmental imaginaries of the Strongs, demonstrating the role played by technological innovation, social reform, and more spiritual ideas about planetary connections.
In the following years, the Strongs, in the name of AZL, made a number of land donations to environmentalist, humanist, and spiritual groups, such as the Lindisfarne community in 1979, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies in 1980, and a Carmelite and a Tibetan order in 1981.Footnote 58 These donations were not only philanthropic gestures but part of a broader vision Marstrand helped shape and that would turn Crestone into a site where alternative forms of knowledge, ecological sustainability, and spirituality could converge. It is important to unpack these connections one by one. Strong was connected to Aspen through his work for the Stockholm Conference, for which the Aspen Institute had run a series of preparatory meetings in 1971, and through Aspen’s chairman, his fellow oilman Bob Anderson, who, too, was a member of the CEI. Another active CEI member was Harlan Cleveland, at the time the Aspen Institute’s director of international affairs and a friend of Richard N. Gardner, who had advised Strong at Stockholm.Footnote 59 While Strong’s business allies, such as Aspen’s chairman and oil executive Bob Anderson and his banking friend and Aspen member Hans Wuttke, brought corporate support, Marstrand’s connections linked Crestone to a more experimental intellectual and spiritual landscape. Her sister, for instance, worked as a secretary for a Tibetan Zen centre, while Hanne had long-standing ties to Buddhist and ecological thinkers.Footnote 60 The Lindisfarne group brought together thinkers interested in science, technology, and culture, including Small Is Beautiful author E. F. Schumacher and cybernetics theorist Gregory Bateson.Footnote 61 The group was connected to the Strongs through common acquaintances and Lindisfarne fellows such as the New Alchemists and solar energy promoters Nancy and John Todd, as well as through connections that the Lindisfarne organization had with various Zen Buddhist centres. This mix of corporate and alternative New Age influences shaped the ‘Baca project’, a planned summer institute and retreat centre funded by both the Strongs’ wealth and contributions from Strong’s business contacts, including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Boettcher Foundation, and Anderson’s oil firm Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO).Footnote 62 These – at first sight rather different – organizations, tied in with some of the discussions that the Strongs were already a part of, especially their interests in reforming international development politics and alternative views on environmental limits.
Similar to the members of the CEI, Aspen members saw a strong role for companies in international politics, establishing a corporate leadership committee in the late 1970s. Strong was asked to serve on this committee alongside Gyllenhammar, ARCO’s Thornton Bradshaw, IBM’s Frank Cary, and Gulf Oil’s Jerry McAfee.Footnote 63 While business elites dominated these networks, Aspen was also deeply embedded in international development debates. In 1979, the institute was asked to develop a new theoretical framework on development and knowledge for the UN Conference on Science and Technology for Development. Cleveland, himself a critic of Limits to Growth, argued that environmental constraints were not absolute but instead shaped by ethical, distributional, and managerial factors.Footnote 64 At Crestone, Strong and Cleveland corresponded much about Cleveland’s The Third Try at a New World Order, suggesting a ‘pluralistic world community’, depending on multilateral agreements shaped, in part, by NGOs and corporations.Footnote 65 Strong, who held comparable ideas about how energy companies played a big role in international diplomacy, praised the book for its approach and synthesis, and hoped it would be picked up by the Carter administration.Footnote 66
At the same time, Crestone became a centre for blending alternative economic and spiritual thinking. Crestone’s proximity to both the Lindisfarne Association and the Crestone Mountain Zen Center reinforced this direction.Footnote 67 Strong and Marstrand were both spiritual. Strong, before Stockholm, had been active in the YMCA and the World Council of Churches.Footnote 68 While at Crestone, he was on the board of directors of the Interreligious Peace Colloquium, which approached international relations through calls for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), and addressed ideas around development and basic human needs from an ecumenical perspective and with a strong focus on the economies of the Global South.Footnote 69 Marstrand, in the late 1970s, made headlines with her involvement in native spiritualism.Footnote 70 At Crestone, the Aspen Institute hosted Buddhist seminars, while Baker Richard Roshi of the Crestone Mountain Zen Center joined Lindisfarne’s board. Lindisfarne had been founded in 1972 by art historian William Irwin Thompson. Thompson, an ex-MIT scholar, had met Strong and Marstrand in 1979 at a conference on solar villages organized by Nancy and John Todd. Like Strong and Cleveland, Thompson rejected The Limits to Growth’s rigid environmentalism, advocating instead for a new ‘mythical age’ that harmonized science, technology, and spirituality in line with Schumacher’s ideas for a ‘planetary culture’.Footnote 71 In 1980, Strong and Thompson discussed using Crestone as a model village for sustainable communities, drawing on Thompson’s concept of a ‘meta-industrial village’.Footnote 72 Inspired by Schumacher and alternative technology advocates like Oldham, and envisioning a solar-powered village demonstrating self-reliant, sustainable technologies, Thompson suggested ‘we could say: this is the future, and it works’.Footnote 73
Next to the Todds, the Crestone Lindisfarne fellows included Dana and Wes Jackson of the Land Institute and the economist Hazel Henderson, who permanently moved to Crestone in 1981. Henderson, too, belonged to the futurist circles of which the McHales were members. These expanded to other influential counterculture thinkers, such as Stewart Brand, author of the Whole Earth Catalogue, equally influenced by both cybernetic and Buddhist ideas.Footnote 74 In 1978, Henderson had argued in The End of Economics that traditional economic models failed to account for emerging alternative energy systems and ecological constraints to traditional ones. Instead, she promoted the creation of markets for solar energy and highlighted the social responsibility of companies in the energy and resource sector.Footnote 75 Another notable fellow who linked various interests represented in the groups at Crestone was the atmospheric scientist James Lovelock, most known for his work on planetary – partly self-regulating – chemical cycles. Lovelock, like the Strongs and Anderson, had links to big oil. He had worked with Shell and, as Leah Aronowsky has suggested, in this context his work can at least partly be seen as having paved the way for climate change denialism.Footnote 76 At Crestone, we see how his Gaia hypothesis resonated not only with oil executives but also with a group of environmental and economic thinkers, concerned with energy politics, global interdependencies, and rethinking society and the environment as a larger unity. In fact, both Cleveland’s and Thompson’s writings show influences of earlier intellectual work on planetary systems and self-regulation, linked to, for instance, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of the noosphere as planetary consciousness, and Lewis Thomas’s work on the Earth as a one immense organism, with self-regulating chemical signals, as well as more recent interpretations of the biosphere as composed of planetary interconnected ecosystems. All of these were writings that, too, influenced Lovelock’s Gaia.Footnote 77 Ideas about planetary consciousness and self-regulation, in turn, resonated with the thinking of some of the members of the Buddhist community at Crestone.Footnote 78 In 1981, Lindisfarne, together with the Zen Center San Francisco, a sister organization of the Crestone Zen Center, hosted a conference on these concepts, with presentations by Henderson, John Tood, Lovelock, the cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster, and Francisco Varela, one of the promoters of autopoiesis, a contemporary theory on self-sustaining life.Footnote 79
As a utopian model village, Crestone remained a rather isolated community.Footnote 80 By the mid-1980s, the project almost unravelled amid controversies over water extraction in the San Luis Valley, in which the Strongs were implicated.Footnote 81 While the Baca Ranch was sold in 1995, Marstrand remained in Crestone, continuing aspects of their work through her Manitou Foundation. Into the 1990s, Strong, Marstrand, and Thompson were able to use it to draw funds from oil philanthropists like Laurance S. Rockefeller for their environmental model project.Footnote 82 In combination with private meetings, the links that the Strongs built with different communities at Crestone can shed light on some of their less well-known associations and influences. At Crestone, business executives, New Age thinkers, cyberneticists, Buddhist philosophers, and environmentalists collectively envisioned a future where technological innovation, ecological sustainability, and corporate engagement were not opposed but intertwined. The community at Crestone, then, reflected a broad reimagining of planetary governance, blending aspirations for self-regulating ecosystems, planetary consciousness, and alternative visions for development. By networking figures like Thompson, Cleveland, Henderson, and Lovelock, the Strongs helped cultivate an intellectual climate that challenged rigid environmentalism and market orthodoxy alike, promoting instead a seemingly more flexible vision of global change.
Rio and beyond: Enacting imaginaries, economic humanism, and flexible limits
What does tracing these private gatherings, both in Geneva and at Crestone, tell us about the form of environmental imaginaries that the Strongs advanced in their official roles and how was this representative of larger networks? The private meetings, organized by the Strongs in African national parks and remote North American environments, fostered a collectively imagined future, which I discuss in this section. In this future, business, decentralized governance, and technological adaptation could balance environmental and economic needs without imposing rigid ecological constraints. The ways in which industrial, fossil, and conservative interests have consciously undermined environmental and climate agendas of the post-war period have been shown.Footnote 83 Here we see a heterogeneous and sprawling alliance that included religious, business, and counterculture members, promoters of renewable energy, and alternative development schemes, resulting in an imaginary that encouraged rethinking GNP, decoupling growth through renewables, and prioritizing conservation and redistribution.
At the core of this imaginary was a vision we might call ‘economic humanism’, a model of planetary governance that combined faith in corporate and technological actors with commitments to social equity and environmental stewardship.Footnote 84 Three interrelated themes structured this outlook. First, Strong and his allies sought to rethink the current world order in response to post-war shifts, advocating reforms to international organizations, elevating alternative institutions and corporations in global politics. Second, they promoted technologies as essential for locally adapted development as well as for extending global resource limits, positioning technical innovation centrally in environmental governance. Third, they stressed the need for a strong ethical commitment to environmental governance. This perspective shaped not only the networks they built from UNEP to Crestone, but they were also embedded in Strong’s work on the Brundtland Commission between 1983 and 1987, the Rio Summit of 1992, and policy efforts into the 2000s.
A central tension in Strong’s career lay in his simultaneous fascination and disillusionment with, international organizations, especially the UN. As early as the Stockholm Conference, he envisioned UN reform as a key, if implicit, objective.Footnote 85 His connections to the Pearson Commission reinforced his scepticism toward the development strategies of the UN and World Bank, which often fell short in addressing poverty and environmental degradation in the Global South.Footnote 86 At UNEP, Strong, along with thinkers like Nerfin, positioned poverty alleviation and economic development as preconditions for effective environmental policy, aligning in part with NIEO discussions.Footnote 87 Yet the Strongs’ networks resisted the NIEO’s structural critique of global capitalism. Instead, influenced by figures like Cleveland, they embraced decentralized models of development that emphasized local adaptation and resource self-sufficiency, rather than large-scale redistribution. Footnote 88
This orientation meant a shift in global governance toward networked, decentralized authority, privileging new forms of organizations outside the traditional UN framework. Strong’s involvement in initiatives such as the CEI and the Aspen Institute illustrates this approach: networks of states, corporations, NGOs, and humanist think tanks were imagined as intermediaries capable of steering global environmental and developmental agendas.Footnote 89 These ideas were further crystallized in Strong’s work for the Brundtland Commission. In 1985, for instance, he and his fellow CEI member Okita co-chaired a WCED working group on corporate roles in development, concluding that ‘transnational actors, in particular transnational corporations’, would be indispensable in achieving sustainable development.Footnote 90 Strong consistently argued that systemic challenges, such as environmental and development issues, demanded cooperation between corporations, financial institutions, and governments, insisting that global sustainability agendas would only gain traction when embedded in community and corporate practices. By the 1990s, he was urging the UN to become more ‘business-like’, and to draw on private-sector expertise to better meet the needs of ‘developing’ and the ‘least developed’ countries.Footnote 91
Strong’s faith in corporate actors was closely linked to his belief in technological solutions. For him and his associates, the scale of sustainable development challenges necessitated heavy reliance on technological innovation, with the private sector as a primary driver. Rejecting the rigid ecological ceilings seemingly proposed in The Limits to Growth, the Strongs and their allies, such as the McHales, Henderson, Oldham, and the Todds, instead advanced alternative forms of systems thinking, portraying planetary boundaries as flexible and adaptable through social and technological intervention.Footnote 92 This emphasis aligned with their advocacy for renewable energy to counterbalance OPEC countries’ political leverage through sustainable energy independence. Strong carried this agenda into the Brundtland Commission, where he stressed the importance of locally appropriate technologies and renewable energy as ‘a key importance for the resolution of many environmental and national resource dilemmas’, themes later enshrined in Agenda 21, a global action plan adopted by UN member states at the Rio Summit.Footnote 93 In this broader vision, engineers became some of the most ‘important agents of change’.Footnote 94
Importantly, these corporate and technological emphases were underpinned by a moral commitment first visible at Crestone. In the Strongs’ network at Crestone, this normative appeal had been linked to humanist ideals of Thompson’s new planetary culture, to New Age ideas about planetary consciousness as captured in Buddhist ideologies and inspired by second-order cybernetics by Mead and von Foerster, and in biochemical terms, to Lovelock’s Gaia. Strong, too, framed environmental governance as inseparable from ethical responsibility. Survival required a collective redefinition of growth, guided by new values and an ‘integrated view of the international dimensions of environmental management and development’. Footnote 95 This moral dimension aligned with emerging calls to rethink GNP, decouple growth from fossil dependence, and pursue conservation and redistribution, for instance, by ul Haq, the McHales, and Henderson.Footnote 96 It also underlay the basic human needs approach formalized under Strong’s UNEP successor, Mostafa Tolba, later incorporated into the Brundtland Commission’s work. Strong was one of the Commission’s members, stressing that structural changes in the North needed to accompany the development efforts of the South. Only then could growth be redefined to meet global basic needs. Footnote 97 Against this backdrop, Strong’s calls for a ‘new eco-industrial civilization based on fundamental changes in economic behavior and in relationships between rich and poor’, made in the context of Agenda 21, attains significance beyond mere rhetoric. It needs to be seen as the ultimate expression of the future envisioned by the Strongs and the many influences that helped shape their vision.Footnote 98
Yet, while this ‘economic humanism’ was meant to reconcile international development and environmental stewardship, it carried contradictions. The Strongs’ environmental imaginaries allowed for differentiated approaches, tailor-made solutions, and locally adapted forms of technological and development aid, giving seemingly more agency to Global South countries and their needs. But in practice, it also maintained Western economic hegemony, offering a vision in which nations did not all need to reach the same level of industrial development, as long as their basic needs were met. This, in turn, reduced the threat posed by ecological limits to the lifestyles of wealthier nations. Similarly, the approach was based on blunt generalizations. It did not engage critically with the problems of existing injustices and inequalities on international and subnational levels, as had been demanded by the authors of, for instance, the Latin American World Model.Footnote 99
Some in the Strongs’ networks were truly committed to environmental protection. At the same time, the flexibility of their approach allowed for the continued flow of oil money into environmental projects. This had been evident at Crestone, where Strong’s oil wealth helped fund experimental sustainability initiatives to which Marstrand’s New Age planetary spiritualism provided the ideological backdrop. In the context of the Lindisfarne Association and the Aspen seminar centre, for instance, Strong not only financed Thompson’s salary but actively sought funding from ARCO and the Rockefeller Foundation for seminar buildings and a library for Gregory Bateson’s papers.Footnote 100 Laurence S. Rockefeller, in turn, funded Lindisfarne with Apple Stocks, while loaning oil-based funds to Marstrand for her private and her Manitou Foundation business. Similarly, Thompson sought Rockefeller’s help to attract funding from Mobile Oil, Exxon, and Chevron to finance Lindisfarne education projects on sustainable living that also involved Lovelock.Footnote 101 Strong himself remained deeply invested in oil throughout his career, privately and professionally, even as he became one of the world’s most prominent environmental advocates.
It is clear that this was not outright climate change denialism. As early as the Stockholm Conference, Strong had been involved with the Man’s Impact on the Climate project at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.Footnote 102 Similarly, people in the Strongs’ surroundings had been involved in climate research early on. In 1976, the Aspen Institute organized a conference on ‘climatic change’ together with the MITRE Corporation, a US military think tank, at which climatologists agreed that ‘the fact of increasing climatic variability’ was ‘more important than the uncertainty whether the trend will result in warmer or cooler climate’.Footnote 103 Yet, already at the same conference, Walter Orr Roberts of the Aspen Institute emphasized the potentials of geoengineering and climate adaptation, while Cleveland reframed planetary limits not as constraints on growth, but on ‘thoughtlessness, unfairness, and conflict’.Footnote 104
By the 1992 Rio Summit, Strong himself had become a leading voice on climate change.Footnote 105 In the 2010s, he took an openly pessimistic stance, distancing himself from climate denialism.Footnote 106 Yet, the elasticity of the environmental limits discussed in the Strongs’ networks, as well as the more or less explicit belief in self-regulatory environmental cycles, allowed for a pragmatic coexistence of oil wealth and environmental advocacy, as demonstrated by the heterogeneous, private networks of both Marstrand and Strong. And while the Strongs might have been sincere in their approach to living within alternative limits, it is not hard to imagine how some of the Strongs’ corporate allies preferred their ideas on flexible, business-friendly approaches to sustainability over rigid environmental restrictions.
Conclusion
‘It is a mistake to see Maurice Strong as an environmentalist. The environment was but a component of his systemic vision of the world, as he was able to put it in the context of development, of policy, and into the international agenda’, UNEP’s former senior officer Paolo Bifani writes in a volume published on the occasion of Strong’s passing in 2015.Footnote 107 While such a view may easily arise from Strong’s many contradictory investments and involvements, I have shown in this article that it is essential to engage with the heterogeneous networks of the Strongs, and with the type of environmental thinking they helped to shape. Their environmental imaginaries influenced an impressively diverse set of actors while facilitating the emergence of flexible forms of corporate environmentalism in the late 1970s.
The networks in which Strong, Marstrand, and their allies were entangled were important influences on environmental imaginaries held by actors in UNEP and other international organizations from the 1970s onwards. By examining the Strongs’ networks beyond official meetings and fora, we see how they integrated environmental concerns with economic development, policy innovation, and global governance. During the UNEP period and later in the North American Rockies, Strong’s and Marstrand’s private networks blended development thinking with spirituality and second-order cybernetics that enabled a flexible understanding of ecological limits and, in turn, facilitated a fusion between environmental advocacy and business interests. Through these collaborations, they crafted a form of economic humanism that reconciled fossil capital with ecological futurism. This vision relied on flexible imaginaries of environmental limits, spiritual cosmopolitanism, and decentralized governance, defining sustainability not as a constraint on capital but as an approach to its ethical reinvention.
This article highlights the role of alternative settings, such as the domestic spheres of the Strongs’ homes in Nairobi and Crestone, in shaping environmental thought. Likewise, it shows the importance of recognizing the contributions of alternative actors, such as that of Marstrand and other members in the Strongs’ network, which can be found there. By tracing the influence of these private gatherings and intellectual exchanges, we gain a deeper understanding of the tensions inherent in the Strongs’ approach to environmental governance. The Strongs and their networks facilitated a discourse in which environmental limits were not absolute constraints, but flexible parameters, stretchable by technological progress and socioeconomic reform, and influenced by intellectual schools that proposed regulatory systems on a planetary scale, similar to Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis.
The economic humanism at the core of the Strongs’ environmental imaginaries, then, did not reject environmental limits but redefined them, embedding environmental concerns within an economy-driven framework that accommodated corporate and political elites, while seemingly preserving a vision of shared and interconnected planetary stewardship. And while not part of and partly opposed to environmental leave-it-to-the-market approaches, their network’s links to resource-producing industries possibly laid some of the earlier foundations for the flexible market environmentalism of the 1980s. Such framing blurred the lines between environmental urgency and economic pragmatism, allowing for interpretations that could accommodate both environmentalism and the preservation of existing power structures. Even as the Strongs’ network worried about Reagan’s election in 1980 and the challenges it posed to their Crestone project, their flexible interpretation of planetary limits was already connecting environmental policymaking to economic elites.Footnote 108 The interconnections they fostered in the process linked institutions such as UNEP with the oil sector and international banking.
Overall, then, this article extends interpretations of environmental governance as either a product of institutional frameworks or of corporate influences, interpretations often linked to simple notions with complicated histories, such as environmental greenwashing.Footnote 109 Instead, it reveals a complex and heterogeneous set of networks and intellectual approaches to development, environmentalism, and international politics that underlay the environmental imaginaries that the Strongs and their acquaintances tried to shape behind the scenes of official UN gatherings. These official gatherings were perceived as unsuitable for the generation of new ideas and approaches to international relations. The resulting flexible interpretations of environmental limits seemed to have laid some of the foundation for contemporary approaches to sustainability that continue to navigate the tensions between ecological responsibility and economic imperatives, extending to the oil-backed techno-utopian and post-humanist environmental visions of present-day elites.
Acknowledgements
This article is part of the project ‘Intimate Allies: Collaborative Couples, Global Environmental Governance’ with file number 406.XS.03.014, which is partly financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). I thank Cyrus Mody, Odinn Melsted, Joe Litobarski, Max Bouttell, John Harbord, and Taylor Dingman for their comments on different versions of this piece. I thank the staff of the Environmental Science and Public Policy Archives, George Clark, in particular.
Financial support
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek: 406.XS.03.014
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Simone Schleper is an environmental historian at Maastricht University. Her research focuses on the history of biology, environmental governance regimes, and the intersection of science and politics. She is the PI of the NWO OC XS project ‘Intimate Allies’ and the upcoming NWO VENI project ‘Between Field and Fora’.
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