Success Quote by Maurice Strong

Power, in Maurice Strong's telling, is a revolving door with a halo. The line is engineered to pre-empt suspicion: yes, he admits, he's embedded in the corporate machinery that helps produce environmental damage. But he pairs that confession with a counterweight - his NGO credentials - to recast proximity to the problem as proof of usefulness. It's not an apology so much as a credentialing move: only someone inside both rooms can broker the deal.

The subtext is the philosophy of 1990s environmental governance in miniature: climate and conservation as management problems, solved through negotiation among elites rather than mass politics. Strong, a businessman who became a central architect of global environmental institutions (Stockholm in 1972, Rio in 1992), is effectively describing the model he helped build: corporate participation isn't a compromise; it's the mechanism. The language "both... and..". doesn't merely acknowledge contradiction, it normalizes it. Pollution and remediation become two lines on the same ledger, two markets to be steered.

There's also a quiet assertion of legitimacy: being "on the board" and "on the NGO side" reads like moral arbitrage. Critics hear capture - that NGOs can be softened by access and funding, that solutions can be tailored to preserve corporate growth. Supporters hear realism - that the biggest levers sit with capital, and influence requires a seat at the table. Either way, the quote is less about personal biography than about an era's bet: that the institutions causing the crisis can be trusted to design the exit.