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Up for sale "U.N. Under-Secretary General" Maurice Strong Hand Signed First Day Cover Dated 1967.
ES-4250E
Maurice Frederick 1929 – November 27, 2015) was a Canadian oil and mineral businessman and a
diplomat who served as Under-Secretary-General
of the United Nations. Strong
had his start as an entrepreneur in the Alberta oil patch and was President
of Power Corporation of
Canada until 1966. In the early 1970s he was Secretary General
of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and
then became the first executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme. He returned to Canada to
become Chief Executive Officer of Petro-Canada from 1976 to 1978. He headed Ontario Hydro, one of North America's largest power utilities,
was national president and chairman of the Extension Committee of the World
Alliance of YMCAs, and headed American Water Development Incorporated. He served as a
commissioner of the World Commission on Environment and
Development in 1986 and was recognised by the International
Union for Conservation of Nature as a leader in the
international environmental movement. He
was President of the Council of the University for Peace from
1998 to 2006. More recently Strong was an active honorary professor at Peking University and honorary chairman of its
Environmental Foundation. He was chairman of the advisory board for the
Institute for Research on Security and Sustainability for Northeast Asia. He
died at the age of 86 in 2015. Strong
first met with a leading UN official in 1947 who arranged for him to have a
temporary low-level appointment, to serve as a junior security officer at the UN headquarters in Lake Success, New York. He
soon returned to Canada, and with the support of Lester B. Pearson, directed the founding of the Canadian
International Development Agency in 1968. In 1971, Strong
commissioned a report on the state of the planet, Only One Earth: The
Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet,[24] co-authored by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos. The report summarized the findings of 152 leading
experts from 58 countries in preparation for the first UN meeting on the
environment, held in Stockholm in 1972. This was the world's first "state
of the environment" report. The Stockholm Conference established the
environment as part of an international development agenda. It led to the
establishment by the UN General Assembly in December 1972 of the United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), with headquarters
in Nairobi, Kenya, and the election of Strong to head
it. UNEP was the first UN agency to be headquartered in the third world. As head of UNEP, Strong convened the first
international expert group meeting on climate change. Strong was one of the
commissioners of the World Commission on Environment and Development, set up as
an independent body by the United Nations in 1983.