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- [00:01]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians.
- [00:10]
Gordon Caddick
These are things people say about drivers.
- [00:12]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
- [00:28]
Marshall Po
Hello, everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk.
- [01:30]
Gordon Caddick
Hello, New Books Network, My name is Gordon Caddick and I have a very brief message before we get going. If you're hearing this, it's because you've discovered cited syndicated across the nbn. Now cited is a reference to academic citation. So I think this is a show that you're going to like. We have a whole new season and it is called Green Dreams. Green Dreams is telling stories about influential environmental theorists and exploring the impact that they have had on environmental movements, sometimes for good and other times for ill. You're gonna find the episodes across the network, but if you like this, I really recommend that you subscribe to our main feed. That way you won't miss an episode. You can find that wherever you find your podcasts or@sightedpodcast.com that's citepodcast.com okay, on with the show. I'm Gordon Caddick and this is. You're going to hear about a lot of ideas on Green Dreams that are truly utopian or maybe dystopian. Depending on who you ask. But this episode couldn't be more mainstream. We're going to be talking about sustainable development. Sustainable development is part of a broader set of ideas that you might call liberal environmentalism. It's hard to notice liberal environmentalism because it's just the water that we now swim in. But as we'll see in this episode, that wasn't always the case. Now, the promise of liberal environmentalism is that we can protect our environment while preserving the existing economic framework. In fact, those two things are supposed to be mutually reinforcing. So this comes with a whole set of policies that I'm sure are familiar to you, like carbon taxes, cap and trade schemes, subsidies for green technology, and other market based solutions. That's liberal environmentalism. But as we'll learn on this episode, liberal environmentalism came out of a unique political and intellectual history. In the late 60s and early 70s, there were much more radical political political currents swirling like degrowth environmentalism and movements for environmental and economic justice. These currents created a political and intellectual maelstrom. And from that maelstrom, a new way of thinking was born a new green dream. This was all guided by two unlikely dreamers. Two Canadians, in fact, a socialist policy wonk from Saskatchewan named Jim McNeil, and an Albertan oilman and globetrotting elite named Morris Strong. If you've never heard of them, you're not alone. But despite their relative anonymity, they are arguably the most important environmental thinkers. Well, maybe ever. Because this is the story of our reigning green dream. This is the story of two people who convinced many of us that capitalism and environmental sustainability could indeed be made compatible. But maybe that is actually a pretty utopian green dream. After the break, Mark Apolloni and I bring you episode two, the Green the Birth of Liberal Environmentalism.
- [05:27]
Catherine McNeill Hodgins
The climate is changing. So are we. I'm Laura lynch and I host what on Earth? That's CBC's Climate Solutions podcast. Twice a week, we take you around the world to find the people who are trying to build a better future for all of us. We explore indigenous science, new technologies. We talk openly about mental health and climate anxiety. We also take your smart questions all the time. Come find what on Earth Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [05:57]
Gordon Caddick
Our story about liberal environmentalism starts in an unexpected place, the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. And it starts with a socialist policy wonk named Jim McNeil. Unfortunately, McNeill is no longer with us and we weren't able to find much audio. But McNeil did leave an unpublished memoir and his daughter will be our guide through the story found in those pages.
- [06:27]
Catherine McNeill Hodgins
So it was in 1933. He thinks he would have been about five years old. And they're driving south in the Model A Ford with his dad at the wheel.
- [06:37]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Catherine McNeill Hodgins is talking about her father's earliest memory. His family was on a road trip just south of Moose jaw, Saskatchewan. Jim McNeil reminisces about that trip in his unpublished memoir.
- [06:57]
Catherine McNeill Hodgins
Talks about the prairie sky being bright and blue, and the countryside is barren after several years of drought. And the normally boundless horizon is interrupted by rolling sand dunes which have buried the road. And as they go along, his dad is navigating past broken fence posts and tilting telephone poles. And they're getting shorter and shorter as the dunes get bigger and bigger. So the telephone poles, that iconic Saskatchewan view, they're disappearing. And finally his mom says to his dad, are we lost? And he says, yes, Helga, I'm afraid we are. And then he points out to the dunes, and he says, their house has got to be out there, but it's buried. And my grandmother starts to cry.
- [07:57]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
McNeill was born in 1928 in the community of Mazenode in the south of Saskatchewan, a part of the country devastated by the biblical disasters of the Dust Bowl. Plagues of insects, drought, dust storms, economic and ecological collapse.
- [08:14]
Catherine McNeill Hodgins
That generation of people from the prairie were forever, I think, marked by living through that depression. The homeless, the jobless, the hungry, the ecological devastation.
- [08:28]
Elizabeth May
How Jim became an environmentalist. I don't think you have much choice when you live through an ecological disaster as significant as a Dust Bowl.
- [08:37]
Gordon Caddick
That's Elizabeth May. If you live in Canada and you have any interest in politics, you surely know her. She is leader of the Green Party of Canada.
- [08:47]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Her relationship with McNeil started in the mid-1980s, when they were both hanging out in the same policy circles. But they became close, and eventually they became like family.
- [08:58]
Elizabeth May
Well, Jim and Phil McNeil were almost adoptive parents. I mean, Jim and Phil's daughter Kath, refers to me as her sister. Jim had a very challenging childhood, including being laid up for more than a year with polio. His father was a genius. Had an instinct for how to keep his son's muscles from atrophying when no one else did. Massaged his limbs with olive oil. Where he heard this, I don't know. But nobody else was taking care of a child with exactly the degree of attention care.
- [09:41]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Jim McNeil's father was a teacher, and he scored his family a way out of the Dust bowl by landing the job of Vice principal in a school 400 km away in the town of Sturgis, Saskatchewan.
- [09:53]
Catherine McNeill Hodgins
And so they moved, what dad used to say it was from the Dead Sea to the Garden of Eden as they moved north to Sturges.
- [10:02]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
McNeil was only a toddler at the time, but he carried the significance of that move with him his whole life.
- [10:10]
Catherine McNeill Hodgins
And he often said in his speeches that he was an ecological refugee at.
- [10:15]
Elizabeth May
The age of three.
- [10:15]
Catherine McNeill Hodgins
That's a phrase that comes up a lot with D.
- [10:23]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
McNeil's childhood in Sturgis was a happy one, despite the polio leaving him with a lifelong limp. His youth was physical and out of doors, where he worked on nearby farms, delivered the local paper, and eventually worked as an assistant carpenter.
- [10:38]
Gordon Caddick
After high school, McNeil went off to the University of Saskatchewan. While studying there, he also got involved in politics, and specifically with the party that led Saskatchewan at the time, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, better known as the ccf. The CCF formed the first ever socialist government in North America. That party is a precursor to today's New Democratic Party. That's the most left wing of the mainstream Canadian political parties.
- [11:06]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
After his undergrad, McNeil went to Sweden to get a graduate degree in economics and political science from the University of Stockholm.
- [11:14]
Gordon Caddick
Upon his return to Canada in 1952, McNeill wrote a series of articles for the Commonwealth. That's the official paper of the ccf. His articles applauded the Swedish approach to labor relations.
- [11:32]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
And the right person saw them. A senior CCF bureaucrat read the articles and then called up McNeil and offered him a job.
- [11:42]
Gordon Caddick
By the time that McNeil landed his job in 1952, the CCF had been in power for eight years. Their premier was a charismatic prairie populist, a former youth boxing champion Baptist preacher, and a passionate champion for farmers and for working class Saskatchewanians. His name was Tommy Douglas.
- [12:03]
Archive/Documentary Narrator
We would provide health care for every man, woman and child, irrespective of their color, their race, or their financial status. And by God, we're going to do it.
- [12:14]
Gordon Caddick
Douglas is widely celebrated in Canada for being the father of Medicare. But that came many years later, back in the early 50s. McNeil had just become one of Douglas policy wonks, and the two quickly became inseparable.
- [12:30]
Elizabeth May
He never called him Tommy T.C. he came back to work for T.C. douglas and became one of his senior echelon policy mandarins, civil service geniuses, but, you know, ate lunch with him every day, knew him inside and out. He was one of his trusted, trusted people.
- [12:50]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
McNeil would be running a massive new infrastructure operation the largest multipurpose water development project in the country's history.
- [13:01]
Catherine McNeill Hodgins
I remember dad talking about the South Saskatchewan Dam project that he was involved in when he worked for Tommy Douglas government.
- [13:09]
Gordon Caddick
In 1959, the provincial and federal governments partnered on the South Saskatchewan River Dam project. This was a project that would create two massive dams and a whole lot more. This effort was all ultimately about bringing water to an otherwise arid region.
- [13:29]
Catherine McNeill Hodgins
They would have this dam, they would have these water reservoirs that was born out of the depression and the drought of the depression. They would prevent the 1930s from happening.
- [13:43]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Again, and it would be McNeil who would make sure of it. He oversaw all the province's responsibilities in this project, and he reported directly to Tommy Douglas.
- [13:52]
Gordon Caddick
McNeil was the right man for the job because the South Saskatchewan River Dam project was a huge success. To this day, it's considered a monumental achievement in Canadian engineering, and it had a profound impact on the development of Saskatchewan's economy. So McNeil and Douglas were literally building the physical infrastructure for a modern state, a state committed to social welfare, conservation, and environmental sustainability.
- [14:20]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
In his memoir, McNeil raves about the dam. He sees it as emblematic of the CCF and their socialist vision.
- [14:26]
Jay Coburn (voice actor for Jim McNeil)
We established three provincial parks and made possible another four regional parks.
- [14:31]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
This is producer Jay Coburn playing the role of Jim McNeil.
- [14:35]
Jay Coburn (voice actor for Jim McNeil)
We planted millions of trees in the park areas, and during my visits over the following decades, I took great joy in watching these forests grow to maturity. The project has achieved many of its planned objectives, and I believe its potential for ensuring the future of this increasingly arid area looks promising.
- [15:01]
Gordon Caddick
The lessons that McNeil learned here were formative because that dam is emblematic of the political vision we'll see throughout the rest of this story. Jim McNeil's political vision or his theory of political change. It puts socially responsible policy wonks at the center. It suggests that their big plans can solve our big problems so long as they have the backing of a political visionary.
- [15:29]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
But in the 1964 provincial election, McNeil would lose his political visionary. After 20 years in power, Tommy Douglas and the CCF lost by the narrowest of margins to the provincial liberals. So McNeil, he needed a new gig.
- [15:44]
Elizabeth May
When the T.C. douglas government, after all of its wonderful successes, was defeated, a whole lot of very talented Saskatchewan senior civil servants moved to Ottawa and more or less took over Ottawa. Obviously, they didn't take every single government position, but there was a very strong cadre of highly respected CCFers trained under TC Douglas's government, who became, well, legendary, brilliant senior civil servants. It was called Saskatchewan Mafia.
- [16:28]
Gordon Caddick
When the Saskatchewan Mafia arrived in Ottawa, they were greeted by a federal government that was quite unlike the Prairie socialism they came from. The prime minister at the time was Lester B. Pearson, a Liberal.
- [16:41]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
But despite a different party ruling in Ottawa, the Saskatchewan Mafia became popular in the civil service. And people took an immediate liking to Jim McNeil in particular.
- [16:50]
David Runnels
He had the best policy brain I've ever seen. If you gave Jim a problem and said, you know, what is the government going to do about X? He would parse it through and figure it out, and he would figure out how to get it done.
- [17:02]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
This is David Runnels, an environmental policy researcher who frequently worked alongside McNeil in Canadian government and later became president of the International Institute for Sustainable Development.
- [17:13]
David Runnels
He was a young guy, a hit from Saskatchewan in allegedly sophisticated Ottawa, so there was a real edge to him.
- [17:22]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
What kind of personality did Jim McNeil have?
- [17:26]
David Runnels
Crusty. I mean, Jim was individually, was a very warm man with a very good, wonderful sense of humor and made fun of himself fairly regularly. But he was tough as nails. He knew how to run a bureaucracy and he knew how to deal with politicians and he knew how to speak truth to power. And he also was a socialist, like all the NDP types. So he believed in equality and income distribution, proper income distribution, and so on and so forth.
- [18:00]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
McNeil's first gig in Pearson's Liberal government was to oversee policy at the Federal department in charge of the country's natural resources.
- [18:08]
Gordon Caddick
That meant that McNeil spent his days launching new programs to manage oil and gas production.
- [18:14]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
It's a position that forces McNeil to prioritize economic growth by facilitating the development of the country's abundant oil wealth. But this ecological refugee saw himself as a young environmentalist. So during this time, as he wrote in his memoir, he was conflicted.
- [18:32]
Jay Coburn (voice actor for Jim McNeil)
Every politician I knew ran on a platform of increasing growth. Not to do so would be inconceivable, a form of political suicide. At the same time, I was more familiar than any of my colleagues with the problems of increasing air and water pollution, thanks to my student days in Europe, as well as my work on water resources. Before long, I was one of the few environmentalists in the Canadian public service, at least one of the few who came out. How many chose to remain in the closet, I cannot say. Sometime after arriving In Ottawa in 1965, I became gradually more outspoken about what I saw as the unsustainable pressures on the environment resulting from population growth, urbanization and industrialization. In doing so, of course, I ran counter to the heavy weight of respectable opinion. In most of the senior bureaucracy, upwardly mobile civil servants are expected to act and speak broadly in support of the status quo. On a couple of occasions, I was given a friendly warning that it would be in my own best interests to cool it on the environment.
- [19:57]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
But McNeil didn't cool it. And as the political winds changed, they made things better and better for the young environmental policy junkie. In 1968, there was another election, and the Liberals won again. This time it was Pierre Elliot Trudeau.
- [20:14]
Gordon Caddick
In 1968, the burgeoning environmental movement was growing louder and louder. Prime Minister Trudeau did actually listen. He eventually established Canada's first federal department of the environment. That was in 1971, but before that, Trudeau made Jim McNeil his special environmental advisor.
- [20:35]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
While working for Trudeau, McNeil wrote a cabinet review paper on the country's environmental policy. Shortly after, that paper was published as.
- [20:42]
Gordon Caddick
A book with the salacious title Environmental Management. It's a wonky document, but it does have a clear environmental vision. In other words, the this book lays out McNeil's green dream.
- [20:56]
Jay Coburn (voice actor for Jim McNeil)
I believe that the basic goals of economic growth and environmental management are the same. A better quality of life for mankind. I also believe that both are required to achieve it. This assumes, of course, that a greater proportion of the nation's product will be allocated to environmental management measures. It also assumes a greater degree of social guidance of research and technology.
- [21:27]
Gordon Caddick
McNeil's green dream was that we could have a win win. We could have economic growth within a market economy while still protecting our environment. So long as governments invest in environmentally conscious technocrats who can develop a prudent policy architecture, One that nudges economic and technological development towards a green direction.
- [21:55]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
But for McNeil, it's obvious. For this to work, this green dream has got to be global. One environmentally conscious nation won't cut it.
- [22:03]
Jay Coburn (voice actor for Jim McNeil)
Unless the nations of the world perceive this and act in concert respecting it, the future of man and his global habitat may well be in jeopardy.
- [22:23]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
So how was McNeil gonna take his green dream to the nations of the world? For that, it would be helpful to have another political visionary by his side. This time it wouldn't be the socialist preacher Tommy Douglas. It would be the globe trotting businessman and diplomat, Morris Strong.
- [22:41]
Gordon Caddick
His little black book is a catalog of the rich and powerful, from the World bank to the United Nations. Accused by critics on the right of being a Marxist and by those on the left of being another fat cat, Maurice Strong refuses to be pigeonholed. I'm basically a socialist by ideology, but a capitalist by methodology. Because I believe to quite an extent, the methods of capitalism can actually be utilized to achieve the goals of socialism. His dual ambitions of wealth and social justice were forged in the Great Depression. And he rose from the Manitoba Dust bowl to become the ultimate insider, an international wise man with a genius for making connections. Can Maurice Strong save us from ourselves? As that 1994 report from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation suggests, Morris Strong was a globe trotting elite. But he actually came from very modest beginnings. He was born in Oak Lake, Manitoba in 1929, just a year after McNeil was born in neighboring Saskatchewan. During the Depression, Oak Lake was also hit by drought.
- [23:48]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Strong dropped out of school at 14 to travel the country. He stowed away on trains and worked as a deckhand on ships. But on one particular day, his life was changed by a wayward newspaper.
- [24:01]
Elizabeth May
And this is a story I do recall of Morris Strong being out on a wind blown Manitoba landscape and a piece of newspaper blew up against the fence where he was sitting or leaning and got caught in the, in the barbed wire. And it was a newspaper story about the creation of the United Nations. And as a very young man, Morris Strong read that and thought, I will go to the United Nations. That's where I should work.
- [24:25]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Through a series of unlikely personal connections, Strong got a lucky break. He was put in touch with someone connected to the un.
- [24:33]
Gordon Caddick
He landed a job as a security clerk at the UN headquarters in New York City. And within a few months, this 17 year old charmed his way into a friendship with One of the UN's early financial backers, the Rockefeller family.
- [24:50]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
This connection is yet another catalyst propelling so Strong into the global political and economic jet set. But he realizes to really make it in these circles, he's got to be rich.
- [25:01]
Elizabeth May
I better go out and make myself a multimillionaire because otherwise I'm never going to be able to have an impact here. I don't have the right stuff to have an impact here.
- [25:12]
Gordon Caddick
Strong heads back to Canada to make his millions. And specifically to the booming province of Alberta, which is of course course known for its massive oil and gas industry. Strong wanted to get a piece of the action and indeed he did. Actually, Strong is something of a money making wonder kid. He's a millionaire before he reaches the age of 30.
- [25:36]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
It started at one of Canada's largest oil companies, Dome Petroleum. By 25, Strong was president. A few years later he moved to Montreal to work at the enormous Financial Holdings Company Power Corporation. There too, he became president. Today that company's worth more than half a trillion dollars.
- [25:56]
Gordon Caddick
Power Corp. Is kind of like Canada's Goldman Sachs. It's an investment company that's sort of a training ground for promising young politicians, especially young liberals.
- [26:08]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
In the midst of this stratosphere atmospheric rise through corporate Canada, Strong just hits the pause button for a few years to travel the world with his wife. As he travels, he takes an interest in foreign aid work being performed by the ymca. Not long after that, he was overseeing much of the YMCA's international aid efforts.
- [26:29]
Gordon Caddick
So Morris Strong was an oil tycoon and an investment guru with connections of the UN deliberately party. And in the world of foreign aid, all those connections set him up for the next chapter of our story. In 1968, the UN announced that it was planning the first ever world Conference on the environment. It would happen in Stockholm, Sweden, June 1972. And the UN turned to Morris Strong to run the show.
- [27:08]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Strong then had to assemble a team. As he searched for cutting edge environmental thinkers, someone told him about a young Canadian civil servant with new ideas on Environmental Policy, Jim McNeil. Strong reached out and McNeil sent him a copy of his book Environmental Management.
- [27:24]
Jay Coburn (voice actor for Jim McNeil)
Thus, the Canadian who would soon become the world's foremost environmental leader became one of the first readers of my book.
- [27:33]
Gordon Caddick
Again, this is cited producer Jay Coburn playing the role of Jim McNeil. Jay is reading portions of McNeil's unpublished memoir.
- [27:41]
Jay Coburn (voice actor for Jim McNeil)
A year later I met him at his office in New York. Among many other things, he thanked me again for my book, which he was using as a constant reference for the conceptual framework of the environmental problem, global, regional and national.
- [27:55]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Strong made McNeil one of his key advisors on the road to the Stockholm conference.
- [28:00]
Gordon Caddick
So now we have our dynamic duo. There's Jim McNeil, the ideas man. He's our clever policy wonk with the heart of gold. And then there's Morris Strong, the hype man. He's our jet setting millionaire and international diplomat and the two of them are ready for prime time. But that's after the break.
- [28:24]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
The ocean is vast, beautiful and lawless. I'm Ian Urbina, back with an awesome new season of the Outlaw Ocean. The stories we bring you this season are literally life or death. We look into the shocking prevalence of forced labor, mind boggling overfishing, migrants hunted and captured. The Outlaw Ocean takes you where others won't. Available on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [28:53]
Gordon Caddick
Welcome back to Sighted. My name is Gordon Caddick and today Mark Apollonio and I are bringing you the story of Jim McNeil and Morris Strong. And the birth of liberal environmentalism. Before the break, we learned that Morris Strong would serve as the Secretary General of the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment that would take place in Stockholm, Sweden.
- [29:14]
Archive/Documentary Narrator
For 11 days in June 1972, Stockholm was a magnet for everyone concerned with the environment.
- [29:20]
Gordon Caddick
And with the help of this UN produced documentary, we'll pick up our story at the conference itself.
- [29:28]
Archive/Documentary Narrator
1200 official delegates from 113 nations were in Stockholm for the first international conference on the Human Environment.
- [29:36]
David Runnels
This conference in Stockholm had 25 or 30,000 people. That never happened before in a UN meeting. It was attended by more press than went to the Munich Olympics that year.
- [29:49]
Archive/Documentary Narrator
In September, the eyes and ears of the world were indeed trained on Stockholm. Radio and television reports from the conference reach millions around the world. On the first day, the official delegates assembled for the opening ceremonies in the Royal Opera House. They listened to the Secretary General of the United Nations, Mr. Kurt Waldheim. Ladies and gentlemen, everything is of concern to everybody. In our deeply interdependent world today, the iron rule remains. Our world is one inseparable and interdependent. It is this world that is threatened by the impact of man's unplanned, selfish and ever growing activities. The preparatory committee had chosen six major areas of human settlements, Resource management, identification and control of international pollutants, development and the environment, education and information and future organizational needs.
- [30:56]
Gordon Caddick
So these ecological refugees from the prairies were looking for nothing less than a global consensus on how humanity should transform its relationship to our planet.
- [31:08]
Archive/Documentary Narrator
As the first order of business, the delegates elected a president by acclamation. They chose the head of the Swedish delegation to the conference, Mr. Ingeman Bengtson. The attention of the world is now directed at us in stucco. Let us therefore fulfill the justified expectations of the peoples of the world that this conference will lay a lasting foundation for the continuing efforts which we must undertake to ensure a better quality of life for all.
- [31:40]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
But humanity was very much not in consensus. Remember, this was the Cold War. Warsaw Pact countries pulled out of the conference before it even began. And developing nations like India and Brazil threatened to pull out too. These tensions between the global north and south underlaid much of the event. In the north, the burgeoning environmental movement was especially fixated on the Earth's biophysical limits.
- [32:06]
Gordon Caddick
That was the kind of argument that you'd find in blockbuster books like Limits to Growth. Limits to Growth came out just three months before the conference began. And at the conference, the book's publishers were there and actively promoting it.
- [32:19]
David Runnels
So the specter of Limits to Growth was loomed very heavily over the whole conference. It was dragged out all the time. Limits to growth. Limits to growth. Limits to growth. So if you're a country that's kind of desperate to get on in the world and get its development process going and so on, this thing sounded quite scary.
- [32:40]
Archive/Documentary Narrator
The developed countries must understand that countries engaged in an all out struggle to improve the well being of their people and which are deeply concerned with problems of development tend to see strict environmental controls as a luxury which they cannot afford.
- [33:00]
Gordon Caddick
Through a translator that was Gallo Plazo, the Secretary General of the Organization of American States. And basically he was saying we need to grow. We cannot hamper our own development.
- [33:12]
Archive/Documentary Narrator
The major problems of the physical environment in Ghana are not those caused by industrial pollution or the spoliation of pleasure beaches by oil from huge tankers.
- [33:24]
Gordon Caddick
This is KB Asante from the Ghanaian delegation and he was saying the Global North's environmentalism, it focuses on these boutique issues like spoiled beaches. In other words, these are just first world problems. In Ghana environmental concerns are much more stark.
- [33:42]
Archive/Documentary Narrator
But the simple elementary ones of biological pollution such as the disposal of human excreta and the removal of disease bearing organic matter from drinking water.
- [33:56]
Gordon Caddick
But the Prairie Boys had an answer. It's something that Strong had been doing in the, in the run up to the conference and he was doing it with McNeil and with David Runnels. So to understand what happened at Stockholm we have to back up a little bit. About a year before the conference they organized a series of internal seminars. They invited 27 international experts to meet in Phonet Switzerland. At this conference they would hammer out a new framework to address the perceived conflict between environmental protection and economic growth.
- [34:34]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Strong invited some of the loudest critics from the Global South. Economists who saw this new anti growth environmentalism popular in rich countries as a way to oppress the developing world. He also invited prominent economists who'd been working on reconciling economic growth and environmental sustainability.
- [34:52]
Gordon Caddick
And over one week in June 1971 they fought it out.
- [35:02]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
They didn't close the gap completely, but the gap was narrowed. And they did so by splitting the discussion into two different types of environmental problems. One in the Global north, one in the Global South. As Strong laid it out, the degradation.
- [35:16]
Gordon Caddick
Of the environment in industrialized countries derived from production and and consumption patterns. But the environmental problems in the rest of the world were largely the result of underdevelopment and poverty.
- [35:33]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
So the north is overdeveloping and that might need to be reined in. But in the Global South Underdevelopment is the environmental issue because developing countries just don't have the technologies to industrialize in a way that's environmentally sustainable. The slogan there is poverty is pollution. So Funey's final report argued that we need to integrate global development policy with environmental policy. And it argued that rich nations would need to provide money to enable poor nations to achieve their goals. Strong gave this type of thinking a name, Eco Development. For him, this was a breakthrough.
- [36:10]
Gordon Caddick
I regard this report as a milestone in the history of the environmental movement and an absolutely seminal document.
- [36:26]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
So at Funet, in this hotel in Switzerland, Strong and McNeil found a way to reconcile economic development with environmental sustainability. But it required that rich and poor countries have differential responsibilities.
- [36:39]
Gordon Caddick
That idea paid off because the very same month that phonet ended, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi committed to participating in Stockholm.
- [36:49]
Archive/Documentary Narrator
Stockholm, Sweden June 12, 1972. Mrs. Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, arrived today to address the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment.
- [37:00]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
So now we're back to the conference itself.
- [37:02]
Archive/Documentary Narrator
She was met by the Secretary General of the conference, Mr. Maurice Strong, who escorted Mrs. Gandhi to the rostrum.
- [37:10]
Gordon Caddick
It is clear that the environmental crisis which is confronting the world will profoundly alter the future destiny of our planet. No one amongst us, whatever our status, strength or circumstance, can.
- [37:25]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Gandhi called on rich nations to help poor nations develop, and she championed that notion of a differential responsibility. Rich countries would have to shoulder more of their responsibility and they'd have to help poor nations grow in an environmentally sustainable way. After 11 long days and nights of deliberation, the participating countries finally decide on a declaration.
- [37:53]
Archive/Documentary Narrator
In its final form, the declaration contained a preamble and a set of 26 principles, stating, among others, that man has a right to an environment of quality and the responsibility to protect and improve that environment for future generations. That environmental deficiencies caused by underdevelopment could best be cured by development. May I consider that in view of the spontaneous approval of the representatives, it is the wish of the conference to adopt the draft resolution by acclamation. It is so decided.
- [38:33]
Gordon Caddick
I think the lasting message of the Stockholm Conference will be the realization that man has come to one of those seminal points in his history.
- [38:43]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
This is Morris Strong at the Stockholm Conference itself, reflecting on the lessons of the event.
- [38:49]
Gordon Caddick
Where his own activities are the principal determinants of his own future and where he realizes that he has got to subject those activities to a much more responsible management and control than he has in the past. And I think the awareness of this and the beginning of a program of international action to Deal with this will be one of the most durable effects of the Stockholm conference. So with Strong's help, Jim McNeil's green dream became the reigning environmental governance orthodoxy. Stockholm essentially codified the win win that he had proposed back in those reports for Pierre Trudeau. Remember, he had this idea that policymakers could ensure that economic growth and environmental protection would be mutually beneficial.
- [39:37]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
And it made that green dream global. Because now you need to do more than simply guide your own national economy. You need to develop international aid systems to guide developing economies too.
- [39:48]
Gordon Caddick
But Stockholm gave no sense of what that might actually look like. Its proposals were hopeful but extremely vague. There were no concrete policy prescriptions for how we would radically transform our global environmental and economic governance systems.
- [40:10]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
After his success at Stockholm, McNeil got another very fancy job. In 1978, he was hired by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
- [40:19]
David Runnels
The OECD in Paris, which is kind of the mother church of economic orthodoxy, had appointed Jim McNeil as the director of their Environment Division.
- [40:32]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
The OECD is an international think tank focused on global trade and economic development. McNeil himself called it the rich Man's United Nations. Neoclassical economics are, at its heart, the environment, much less. So McNeil was convinced he could change that.
- [40:49]
David Runnels
Remember, Jim was an excellent bureaucrat. I mean, he really did. And he operated within a bureaucratic system, and he understood where power was, and he understood that if you could get the OECD to change its stripes, you could make a lot of changes quite quickly.
- [41:06]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
At the OECD, MacNeil argued that environmental degradation is bad for the bottom line and that green policies can be good for profits. These ideas hardly seem novel today, but back then they were new. And then McNeil worked on policy tools to put this thinking into action. Tools like pollution pricing, carbon taxes, and cap and trade schedules.
- [41:27]
David Runnels
And what Jim did, which was very clever. Along with another Canadian, Sylvia Austry, who was effectively the chief economist of the oecd, Jim organized this big conference on environment and economics in Paris and brought in every conventional economist you ever heard of and some greeny economists. And it basically legitimized the role of environment in economics at the oecd. And that is a bit like getting the Pope to change some basic doctrine.
- [42:02]
Gordon Caddick
By the end of McNeil's tenure in 1984, the OECD proclaimed that the environment and the economy could be made mutually reinforcing. So McNeil had succeeded in getting leading economists to take his environmentalism seriously, at least in theory.
- [42:21]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
But changing the minds of leading economists was not the ultimate goal. The goal was of course, protecting the environment. On that front, McNeil's green dream was far from a reality.
- [42:32]
Gordon Caddick
By the early 80s, it became clear that the state of the environment was worse than ever.
- [42:38]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Each year, millions of hectares of arable land were turning into desert.
- [42:42]
Gordon Caddick
Acid rain was destroying lakes.
- [42:44]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
The ozone layer had growing holes in it.
- [42:47]
Gordon Caddick
And then there's, of course, climate change. This was an era when people were just starting to realize the rapid warming of our planet.
- [42:55]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
The UN General assembly called for the creation of an expert commission to address the continued environmental slide. They needed a trusted public figure to head this thing up. So the UN turned to Dr. Gru Harlem Brundtland. She'd been Norway's Prime Minister just a few years before. In addition to being the youngest person and first woman ever to head the country's government, Brundtland was also a medical doctor.
- [43:19]
Gordon Caddick
Environmental policies, our public health policies for.
- [43:23]
Archive/Documentary Narrator
People at large, you know, it's really the same thing.
- [43:26]
Gordon Caddick
You know, we don't take care of nature only because we love the birds.
- [43:32]
Archive/Documentary Narrator
But we do it because it's best for humanity.
- [43:36]
David Runnels
And so Mrs. Brundland agreed to be the chair. And Mrs. Brundland is a truly remarkable person. She's a GP, trained at the University of Chicago. So she's very practical. She's a socialist, but she's very practical and very pragmatic and quite tough as well. She reminds me a lot of Jim McNeil. They got along quite well.
- [43:56]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Brundtland appointed 22 commissioners from around the world. They would become the World Commission on Environment and Development, better known today simply as the Brundtland Commission.
- [44:07]
David Runnels
There was a, you know, a Russian communist academic, a Hungarian Communist Academy of Sciences, a Chinese communist, et cetera, et cetera, plus an American Republican, amongst other things, Bill Ruckelshaus and Morris, of course, who appeared yet again as the Canadian representative.
- [44:28]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Brundtland made McNeil the Secretary General. His job was to plan the commission's rollout and be the lead author of the report. Over the course of three years, these 22 international commissioners made trips to eight countries around the world.
- [44:42]
David Runnels
For example, they all went to Brazil and went to the rainforest and had hearings with the rubber tappers. They went to the Soviet Union and went to Siberia and met with local people about environmental problems there. They went to Indonesia. One of the members of the commission was a remarkable Indonesia called Emil Salim. And Emile was the first Environment Minister for Indonesia. He just said, when you think about this and you think about climate change, my country, which is a bunch of islands, could disappear. They were profoundly affected by it. Bill Ruckelshaus said it was the most profoundly changing moment of his career. I think a lot of people came out saying, geez, I didn't know that. And they got the sort of immutable proof that there were huge problems.
- [45:44]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
For those three years, McNeil and his team collated the findings of the commissioners and worked on a report titled Our Common Future. When the report landed in October 1987, it was big.
- [45:56]
Gordon Caddick
4, 400 pages big. This was a bleak account of the global situation in the late 1980s. Our common future said that inequality between nations was rising, that a majority of developing countries were poorer now than they were a decade earlier, and that many nations were hawking their natural resources at fire sale prices to service their crippling foreign debt. So there was just more environmental degradation, more poverty, more social unrest, on and on and on.
- [46:28]
David Runnels
It was about global equality. It was about reducing global inequalities. You could not have sustainable development when you had, you know, 2 billion people earning less than $2 a day.
- [46:39]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
So how do you deliver growth and address environmental issues with sustainable development? And the report laid out what is still today the most prominent definition.
- [46:49]
Gordon Caddick
Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
- [46:59]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Our Common Future frames the global economy, ecology and the socio political world as inherently intertwined. It proposes an effort of enormous international cooperation to bend all these processes towards sustainable development.
- [47:15]
Gordon Caddick
Jim McNeil saw this as a document that could fundamentally transform our world.
- [47:21]
David Runnels
This is all about a revolutionary change in the global economic system. And he and most of the rest of them viewed this as a revolutionary document, not a sort of greenwash exercise in which, you know, every company can define what it means by sustainability. It doesn't mean very much.
- [47:41]
Gordon Caddick
Our Common Future went on to become the most widely read UN report in its history. It sold over a million copies.
- [47:50]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
But many environmentalists didn't agree that it was revolutionary.
- [47:54]
David Runnels
David Suzuki went nuts. David Suzuki hated sustainable development at the beginning. And he and Jim had these huge not shouting matches, but intellectual shouting matches.
- [48:05]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
The guy who goes nuts, David Suzuki. For people not living in Canada, he's our David Attenborough, a hugely beloved environmentalist TV presenter who had his own show, the Nature of Things, on the Canadian broadcasting corporation for 44 years. But he's always been more radical than Attenborough in his public criticism of government and corporate failings. His response to Harlem Grub Brundtland's commission and its report in 1987 was no exception. As he explained it to me, Sustainable development just wasn't serious enough.
- [48:37]
Gordon Caddick
The shocking thing to me out of the Rutland report was that she really believed if you did everything that she outlined in the book, the economy could be kept growing.
- [48:47]
Archive/Documentary Narrator
She didn't address the issue that the.
- [48:51]
Gordon Caddick
Economy was the destructive agent and that it had to be wrestled under control.
- [48:57]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
It was too big.
- [48:58]
Elizabeth May
Suzuki and I have had this argument over the years.
- [49:00]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Elizabeth May still defends our common future. For her, it was a radical document, a document about ending global poverty and the assault on ecology, not one about propping up the existing economic order.
- [49:13]
Elizabeth May
There's nothing in our coming future that's predicated on market capitalism. I know that Jim always corrected people. He'd say, there's a thing called. He would talk about sustainable development. He would say sustainable growth is an oxymoron. The report was not pro growth, it was not pro economic growth, it wasn't pro growth. It was that you're going to have a sustainable development. I remember Morris Strong used to describe it and say, as a human being, as a small baby, of course they're going to grow. But there's a point at which, by 18 years old, you've stopped growing, you're a mature adult. That doesn't mean you stop developing. You develop maybe artistic skills, you decide you're going to go off and train to be a doctor, whatever you. You don't cease developing. So we used to talk about a lot between Morris and Jim McNeil and others. The throughput of growth reduce the amount of energy and raw material that feeds into economic activity dramatically reduce them, so the impact on the biosphere is survivable.
- [50:16]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
David Suzuki and Elizabeth May. It's like they read two different reports. For Suzuki, our common future looked like a fatal compromise with our current political economic order. For May, it was a document that suggested a radical overhaul.
- [50:31]
Gordon Caddick
It's not surprising that you could have these two different interpretations of our common future. This whole thing was about bringing together disparate players in a politically and economically fractured world. The Commission bent over backwards to get different people to just come together and agree on something before. Before it was too late. So in its hope to please everyone, our common future was somewhat vague and intentionally not prescriptive. The introductory chapter reads, we do not offer a detailed blueprint for action, but instead a pathway by which the peoples of the world may enlarge their spheres of cooperation.
- [51:11]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
But again, what does that really mean?
- [51:14]
David Runnels
That's the ultimate criticism of it. It doesn't go far enough. It has too many loopholes and it's so loosely defined that almost anybody can say they're doing something sustainably. And that's, I think, a valid criticism. I mean, this was an idea passed on to societies and governments to implement as they saw fit.
- [51:35]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
To the credit of McNeil and his team, the ambiguity paid off. Sustainable development went mainstream.
- [51:42]
Catherine McNeill Hodgins
It captured the world within a year. You see the un, the oecd, Commonwealth, World bank, all sorts of people adopting the results. Within two years it began to reshape curriculum in universities and graduate schools again.
- [52:00]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
This is Catherine McNeill Hodgins reflecting back on her father, Jim McNeil.
- [52:06]
Catherine McNeill Hodgins
I do remember him talking about that, that for a period of time it seemed that it was going to catch on and be substantive and people were making changes and industry was making changes. And I think it was a very hopeful time. From the Brundtland Report. You know, for the next five or six years.
- [52:35]
Gordon Caddick
This became a golden era for the idea of sustainable development. It was an era in which a growing chorus of corporate, educational and political leaders were all coming together to sing from the Brundtland hymn book, including the.
- [52:50]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Canadian conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. He went big on sustainable development. In direct response to our common future, he created the National Roundtable on On the Environment and the Economy, a roundtable that would advise the federal government on sustainable development policy.
- [53:06]
Gordon Caddick
He also went to the UN General assembly and declared that Canada would be a global sustainable development champion. And in 1988, Mulroney also helped launch the International Institute of Sustainable Development.
- [53:18]
Archive/Documentary Narrator
I want to announce today that Canada will establish a center which will promote internationally the concept of environmentally sustainable sustainable development. This center will be located in Winnipeg, Manitoba and will work closely with the United Nations Environment Program and other like minded international institutions and organizations. The global challenges we face are great, but we are proving that they can be met and they can be resolved.
- [53:55]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
In 2006, a survey of Canadian environmentalists determined that Mulroney was Canada's greenest prime minister. The survey was conducted by Corporate Knights, a magazine that encourages sustainable development in the business world.
- [54:07]
Gordon Caddick
Mulroney was certainly a champion of sustainable development, but sustainable development is an idea that is open to quite a bit of interpretation. So it's worth pointing out a thing or two about Brian Mulroney's interpretation.
- [54:21]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Mulroney is widely considered to be Canada's first neoliberal Prime Minister. He followed his American and British counterparts Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in pushing privatization and deregulation in the name of freer markets. He's best known for bringing the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA to Canada, a deal that led to a strengthening of corporate power and a weakening of environmental safeguards.
- [54:45]
Gordon Caddick
So this is the guy calling himself a champion of sustainable development. To be fair, he clearly did score some wins for the environment, things that no conservative prime minister would do today. But at the same time, isn't sustainable development predicated on reducing inequalities? Mulroney was no champion of equality. And also, by chipping away at the state itself, he reduced Canada's capacity to address its environmental problems. So during Mulroney's tenure, the country's emissions continued to rise.
- [55:21]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
It is an ambiguous record. And Jim McNeil's own feelings about Brian Mulroney were equally ambiguous. In a 2012 CBC article, he praised Mulroney's environmental legacy. But in a footnote from his memoir, he says that Mulroney initially accepted his responsibility to lead, but ultimately he didn't act.
- [55:41]
Gordon Caddick
Still, even this ambiguous champion of sustainable development, that was something. It was a sign of the excitement around the idea. But thing is, soon that excitement would pass.
- [55:57]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
In January 1990, a recession hit much of the Western world. Canada was hit particularly hard.
- [56:04]
David Runnels
And then the roof fell in.
- [56:07]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
The roof fell in on the sustainable development craze in particular.
- [56:12]
David Runnels
In some cases, you just got either shareholders or hedge funds or CEOs or whatever. That said, enough of this damn stuff. It cost too much money and it's slowing everything down.
- [56:26]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Runnels says some Canadian business executives were pushing for greener operations. Then very suddenly, they were very unpopular. Many of them were pushed out.
- [56:37]
David Runnels
And so these guys were then replaced by number crunchers and beam counters. You know, cut, cut, cut, eliminate these programs. Get rid of all this stuff.
- [56:48]
Gordon Caddick
In Canada. This recession had serious political consequences. Brian Mulroney resigned as prime minister in.
- [56:55]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
1993, and his successors, like in much of the rest of the world, only doubled down on the regulatory free market ethos he championed. Since the 80s and 90s, climate change and environmental degradation have just kept going.
- [57:10]
Gordon Caddick
But that didn't stop the ambitious global conferences.
- [57:14]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
In 1992, five years after the release of Our Common Future, the UN held its second ever Global Climate Conference. It was held in Rio de Janeiro.
- [57:24]
Gordon Caddick
The Secretary General of this conference was guess who? Morris Strong. He kicked off the proceedings by declaring that the Rio Conference would define the state of the political will to save our planet.
- [57:38]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
But Rio was a flop.
- [57:40]
Elizabeth May
Jim and I both agreed that the Rio Earth Summit was a failure. It did not achieve what we wanted it to achieve.
- [57:48]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
The Rio Conference was widely celebrated for producing the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. But panned as a showcase for everything that was to come. Lofty speeches by international leadership with very little follow through.
- [58:02]
Catherine McNeill Hodgins
He then sees around Rio, sort of around 92, things sort of shifted. He talked a lot about political courage and lack of leadership. And I think that's what he saw as the problem that the winds had changed and the political leadership required to make the changes that needed to happen just wasn't there anymore. He would say that he was not surprised, but deeply disappointed.
- [58:41]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
After Rio, MacNeil and Strong would continue acting as environmental advisors to major international organizations. In 2002, the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, presented MacNeill and Strong a candlelight award for their role in promoting and advancing sustainable development. Morris Strong passed away in 2015, and Jim McNeil passed away the next year.
- [59:20]
Gordon Caddick
What are we to make of this story? What lessons might we take from McNeil and Strong's green dream? Well, in 2007, the University of Ottawa invited McNeil to reflect back on his work forging the concept of sustainable development. McNeil recounted a lot of the story that we just told you, but also much of his talk was a lament.
- [59:43]
Jay Coburn (voice actor for Jim McNeil)
In my view, the journey to a more sustainable world is barely underway. Many say we've lost two decades in endless talk and virtually no action. Time we can never recapture.
- [59:55]
Gordon Caddick
So why did we lose those years? This socialist policy wonk comes up with an explanation that to me, feels rather unsocialist. McNeil laments the lack of political courage from world leaders.
- [60:11]
Jay Coburn (voice actor for Jim McNeil)
Most politicians, however, don't lead. They follow. That has certainly been the case on environmental issues since the 60s.
- [60:19]
Gordon Caddick
But McNeil then praises some world leaders and many business tycoons, including former CEOs of oil companies, bank executives, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, and other elites who at some point sang from the sustainable development hymn book. McNeil certainly mentions the people and their popular pressure, at least in the abstract. He talks about radical change, at least in theory. But the real focus here is on persuading political and economic elites. McNeil was clearly a bureaucratic creature, a technocrat through, through and through, somebody who believed that when competent experts come up with a good idea, they should expect that idea to come to fruition.
- [61:14]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
In Saskatchewan, it actually did happen. McNeill teamed up with a charismatic left populist preacher who led a small province. Tommy Douglas was perhaps the most extraordinary politician of the modern era in Canada, and he did indeed marshal the political support necessary to actually realize the ideas of McNeil and the rest of his brain trust.
- [61:35]
Gordon Caddick
But maybe that was an aberration. Maybe that was an experience that just couldn't repeat itself at a global level. Yet for whatever reason, McNeil and Strong both continued to focus their energies on convincing the powerful to accept their ideas. Right up until the very end that seemed to be the focus of their politics.
- [61:57]
Jay Coburn (voice actor for Jim McNeil)
We must hope that politicians will emerge with the courage and vision to marshal the national will, and that Canadians will support the strong measures needed.
- [62:05]
Gordon Caddick
And that might be the most utopian green dream of all. Like other thinkers that we focus on in this season, McNeil and Strong both assumed that expert knowledge could solve our environmental problems. But here it does so through ambitious policy, policy documents championed by political elites who could forge a global consensus that everyone could get behind. It was a win win even for the companies destroying our planet.
- [62:37]
Narrator/Host (possibly Gordon Caddick)
Defenders might say they were pragmatists cobbling together a necessary compromise. Critics might say their ideas were just compromised from the outset because political and economic elites are never going to deliver radical change. And because to tackle the climate crisis, we'd need more than good policy. We'd need grassroots political mobilization that would force trade offs. And unlike the way it's played out with sustainable development, the trade offs necessary for a radical shift mean there would be winners, but also losers.
- [63:11]
Gordon Caddick
Whatever the case, today most every respectable actor sings from the sustainable development hymn book. So in that sense, perhaps their green dream has indeed become a reality. Because we're living in the world that Jim McNeil and Morris Strong helped create. But it's not an environmentally sustainable world just yet. And that's it for this episode of Green Dreams. The lead producers on this episode were Mark Apollonio and me, Gordon Caddick, with additional editing from AC Rowe. Our technical producer is Jay Coburn. Dakota Coop is a graphic designer and Sighted's theme song was composed by Mike Barber. We have many thank yous for this episode. Thanks especially to Katherine McNeil Hodgins for sharing bits of Jim McNeil's memoir. Also, three scholars were instrumental to helping us grasp this story. Dr. Simone Schlepper of Maastricht University is a historian of science, technology and the environment. And she helped us with her extensive knowledge of Morris Strong and Jim McNeil. Plus, Dr. Stephen Bernstein of the University of Toronto helped us understand the broader political, economic and intellectual context. I recommend his excellent book, the Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism. Finally, thanks also to James Ratigan, a PhD student at the University of British Columbia. Ratigan did some preliminary research on this topic for cited years ago. That early research helped shape this episode. Cited is a project in collaborative academic journalism. We partner scholars, students and journalists together in co production on this episode and in this series. We had research and consulting from Professors Imra Zeman and Tanner Murlies. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided funding to support this partnership. My own time was also underwritten in part by a grant from my Tax Canada. Sighted is distributed on two podcast the Harbinger Media Network and the New Books Network. Thanks also to our other media partners on this episode including including Outlaw Ocean and what on Earth. Check them out on CBC Listen or wherever you find your podcasts. For more and for a complete list of credits visit the series page to Greendreams. You can find that@sightedpodcast.com and also linked in the show notes. Thanks for listening. We'll have a new episode next week and we've got some info about that already on our website. This has been a production of Sighted Media, the academic podcasting company. For more go to sightedmedia Cat.