Maurice Strong believes his efforts to help China deal with pollution will help the world, he tells Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
Maurice Strong has been many things. From a background in business (he was president of the Power Corporation of Canada and later of Petro-Canada) he went on to head the Canadian International Development Agency before becoming the first executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).
Strong was secretary-general of the UN Conference on the Human Environment, whose Stockholm gathering in 1972 was the first major forum to put the environment on the international agenda. But he's chiefly remembered as secretary-general of its successor, the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED).
It was under UNCED's umbrella that the Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Strong was in the thick of it, and believes the event marked a "major milestone" in bringing together more world leaders, more media and more non-governmental organisations (NGOs) than any other shindig before or since.
"There's no question that it elevated sustainable development, giving it political legitimacy, and signalled a transition from the narrower environmental movement," he says. "Agenda 21 [ the action plan it adopted] was a practical programme of action, agreed by all the world leaders - though that doesn't mean that they've done it."
But Strong never expected that a single conference, even one enveloped by media hype, would solve all the problems.
"What's needed is fundamental change, and that kind of change doesn't occur overnight," he says. "There are the beginnings of that, but we're a long way from it. It can happen by an act of will, or a great scare. Unfortunately, you don't get fundamental change without something triggering it.
"I've seen immense changes in my lifetime - for example, in the attitude to smoking - but even there, a lot of people who smoke and know they should give up cigarettes for the sake of their health, even their survival, aren't doing it."
President George W Bush's admission that the US "is addicted to oil" was significant "because he's at least admitting it". As Steve Sawyer, climate change expert at Greenpeace, said: "The first step in curing an addiction is recognising that you have a problem." But Strong thinks it's "terrible" that the US won't engage on the issue.
"We need the US as an enlightened world leader," he says. "But its current position is very dangerous. It was seen as a great world leader, morally and otherwise. But today there is scarcely a country that accepts its world leadership. And even where some governments do, their own people are in revolt against it."
By focusing on terrorism to the exclusion of the much more serious threats posed by climate change, Strong says the US "has paid a huge price because its position in the world has been damaged. And when it's not able to lead, all of us pay a price. We need a US that is committed to the values that made it admired in the past".
However, he sees evidence of a real grassroots movement among Americans to change the political paradigm.
"There's an old saying that the US government always does the right thing, but only after it's tried everything else," he says. "I believe in the essential good sense of American people, so I can see the US doing a major shift."
This will come about, he believes, as a result of natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the immense cost of dealing with their aftermath.
"They'll realise that what's happening is hurting them and will become the champion of reducing emissions," he says. "We need that US leadership to bring others along - no one can substitute for it".
Those "others" include China, which Strong knows well. He first went there as long ago as 1953, just four years after Mao Zedong came to power, and has been dealing with the Chinese off and on since then. He now lives mainly in China and is professor of environmental studies at Beijing University - at the age of 77.
THE UNIVERSITY HAS just asked him to head a sustainable development forum for peace and security in north-east Asia. He is also honorary chairman of the Beijing-based Oriental Environmental Management Institute, which is training practitioners in the field, and he describes himself as being "very active" in the environmental movement in China.
"I decided that's where my little efforts can make most difference, because what happens in China makes a big impact on the world," he says.
He also recognises that it's a "big and complex" country, so any one individual's contribution can't be decisive. "But I have a very good input there - and they're doing a lot".
With the Olympic Games coming up in 2008, they need to.
"The most heavily polluted cities in the world are in China, and there is a huge commitment to improve the environment - or what they call taking a 'scientific approach to development'. The issue is discussed widely in the media, because everyone is experiencing the problem," he says. "Concrete measures include setting targets for a reduction of waste disposal in the cities, the percentage of water that has to be treated, etc. The regulations are there, but they've been lax on enforcing them. But they've closed a lot of inefficient, polluting industries and are phasing out more to encourage concentration."
He shrugs when I ask if it is true that a new coal-fired power station is commissioned in China every other week.
"The scale and speed of development is so fast that it's an immense challenge to keep up with it," he says. "When someone recently asked me if I was an expert on China, I said, 'No, I've been away for three weeks'."
What Strong finds paradoxical on climate change is that some of the major countries not covered by the Kyoto Protocol - China, India, Australia and the US - have huge coal reserves.
"All of them are using coal, which underscores the importance of giving priority to developing cleaner coal technology," he says. "They're working on it in China now. They realise that pollution is the biggest single danger to their future, although they still have a long way to go [ in dealing with it]."
What's needed, he says, is "massive international commitment, backed by big incentives to develop clean energy technologies while at the same time developing viable alternatives to fossil fuels".
Despite its smog and his "restaurant Chinese", he loves living in Beijing, he says. "I like Chinese people. The important thing is to relate to them culturally. They are finding their place in the world and that cannot be denied to them. The average person is far better off than ever before, and they've made immense advances on human rights."
In tackling the threat of climate change, he says "there are certain things we can all agree on - for example, that technological solutions are part of the answer". But he resents those who "invoke science to support their already determined positions. We really need to heed science and listen to what the scientists are saying."
Way back in 1974, Strong's contribution to an issue of the Saturday Review on the future of the planet was an article called 'The Case for Optimism'. Dealing with the risks to survival from over-population and the depletion of natural resources, he wrote: "If we change course, there are probabilities of a decent life."
Is he still so optimistic? "Deep down, I'm pessimistic, but operationally I'm an optimist," he says. "Maybe we have to realise that life on earth is not the normal condition. We've only been here for a relatively short period in geological terms. But we're affecting the parameters, and it's foolish to imagine that this is not going to have any effect."
ASKED ABOUT JAMES LOVELOCK'S latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, with its grim prognosis that the earth is heating up and there's little we can do about it, he says: "We may end up as a cosmic aberration, the only place that we know of where a human form of life has emerged and proven to be self-destructive." But Strong doesn't agree withLovelock's thesis that sustainable development is nonsense.
"We need to concentrate on accommodating changes in the system that are inevitable, such as rising sea levels," he says. "Some of the effects of climate change we are not going to be able to counter. But I think we can still mitigate the consequences."
He's working on a novel based on a "conspiracy to save the world" by bringing down industrial civilisation as we know it. "In the end, it concludes that we're not going to make it. But a wilful transition to the sustainable development pathway is the only viable one. We still may not succeed, but without it we are certainly going to fail."
It's about "managing our own survival", he says. "It doesn't matter to me at this stage, but it does matter to my kids and to my grandchildren. This is a very precious place. Look out into the cosmos, and there's just this little speck with life on it. That's very rare and precious, and it needs to be protected by all of us."