Success Quote by Maurice Strong

Strong’s genius here is the bait-and-switch: he sells ecological restraint in the language that boardrooms can’t dismiss as sentiment. Calling the planet "Earth Inc". isn’t just a cute metaphor; it’s a hostile takeover of corporate logic. If executives and finance ministers insist that only spreadsheets are real, then fine - put ecosystems on the balance sheet and watch the numbers start to scream.

The intent is pragmatic persuasion. Strong, a businessman who helped architect the modern global environmental agenda (from Stockholm 1972 to Rio 1992), understood the political problem: environmentalism was treated as a moral luxury, not a management necessity. By invoking depreciation and amortization, he reframes pollution, deforestation, and biodiversity loss as something more damning than "harm": they’re write-downs. The subtext is a critique of conventional growth economics, which counts extraction as profit while treating the depletion of forests, soils, fisheries, and atmosphere as free. That’s not prosperity, Strong implies; it’s accounting fraud.

"Keeping the asset whole" is the line doing the moral work while pretending to be neutral. It smuggles in an ethic of stewardship, but wraps it in fiduciary duty: you don’t get applause for maintaining capital, you get fired for failing to. Natural capital becomes the ultimate principal, and sustainability becomes less a lifestyle preference than a solvency requirement - the minimum condition for staying in business on a finite planet.