Success Quote by Maurice Strong

A “shift” is a deliberately bloodless word for something that, in practice, is political dynamite: asking affluent societies to want less. Maurice Strong, a businessman who became one of the key architects of modern global environmental governance (Stockholm 1972, Rio 1992), frames the problem in the language of systems rather than sin. No sermons, no villain monologues. Just “lifestyles” and “consumption patterns,” as if the market has habits the way people do, and those habits can be nudged.

That managerial tone is the subtext. Strong is trying to make deprivation sound like modernization. By avoiding “austerity” or “limits,” he offers a softer sell: not sacrifice, but reorientation. The phrase “less geared to” matters: it implies we’ve been engineered toward damage by design choices, incentives, advertising, infrastructure. If consumption is “geared,” it can be re-geared. Responsibility shifts from individual moral failing to collective architecture, which conveniently opens the door to policy, regulation, and international coordination.

Context is the late-20th-century collision between postwar consumer abundance and a rising scientific consensus about ecological limits. Strong is speaking to a world where environmentalism can’t stay stuck at “stop littering” scale; it has to grapple with cars, energy, housing, meat, and the prestige economy that sells status as stuff. The intent is not just to reduce emissions; it’s to normalize the idea that prosperity may need to be decoupled from throughput. The provocation is subtle: the environmental crisis isn’t an accident of a few bad actors, it’s baked into the default setting of modern life.