Time & Perspective Quote by Maurice Strong

There is a wink buried in Strong's politeness: "Not to say that corporations are perfect today" is a throat-clear meant to disarm, a ritual nod to critics before he pivots to what he actually wants to normalize - the idea that environmental damage is best "solved" when it becomes a revenue stream.

The sentence is structured like a concession wrapped around a sales pitch. "Even grand corporations like Dupont" invokes a company with an especially heavy environmental reputation as a proof point: if a chemical giant can pivot, the logic goes, anyone can. It's reputational judo. By choosing Dupont, Strong isn't praising innocence; he's praising adaptability, the capacity to metabolize scandal into strategy.

The subtext is classic market-environmentalism from a man steeped in boardrooms and global conferences: regulation and moral pressure matter, but the real engine of change is profit. "Translating" is doing quiet work here. It turns past harm into a kind of raw material that can be reformatted - not necessarily repaired, not necessarily atoned for - into "new profit opportunities". Accountability is reframed as innovation. The future isn't pictured as less corporate; it's pictured as better-aligned corporate.

Context matters: Strong was a central figure in modern international environmental governance (Stockholm, Rio), operating in an era when "sustainability" was being engineered into a language business would accept. The intent isn't to absolve companies; it's to recruit them. The risk, which the quote also inadvertently reveals, is that ecological protection becomes credible only when it pencils out - and the parts of nature that don't monetize cleanly get left behind.