This post introduces Simone Schleper’s recently published Journal of Global History article, “Private parties for a new world order: Maurice and Hanne Strong, global governance, and environmental imaginaries since 1970.”

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In 1980, William Irwin Thompson wrote a letter from the high desert of southern Colorado. Thompson was an art historian and founder of the Lindisfarne Association, an experimental think tank bringing together scientists, artists, and spiritual thinkers to explore cultural, technological, and ecological futures. In his letter, he suggested that Crestone, could become a “meta-industrial village”: a living demonstration that solar energy, ecological self-reliance, and spiritual renewal could offer an alternative to both industrial excess and environmental collapse. “We could say,” Thompson wrote, “this is the future, and it works.”¹ This letter was not sent to a grassroots commune or an environmental NGO. It was sent to Maurice Strong, a man who had recently left the presidency of the energy company Petro-Canada, one of the largest Canadian energy corporations, remained deeply invested in oil, and was simultaneously one of the most powerful figures in global environmental politics. The village Thompson imagined was financed in part by oil money, supported by corporate philanthropy, and populated by Buddhist teachers, cyberneticists, development economists, and renewable-energy advocates. And it was only one node in a wider network of private gathering places maintained by Strong and his second wife, Hanne Marstrand. These ranged from hotels in Geneva, to private homes and ranches in Nairobi, and the North American Rockies.

Defining Global Environmental Governance

The term or concept of global environmental governance has been around since the late 1980s, though it has attracted increasing scholarly attention over the past decade or so.² While it has become more prominent in the work of historians, the first wave of literature using the term consciously came from political science, especially more constructivist camps, building on earlier work on international environmental regimes in international relations, but with a new emphasis on the role of non-state actors. Daniel Compagnon, for instance, has focused particularly on the entry of business actors into public-private partnerships and sustainability initiatives from the 1990s.³ Others, such as Frank Biermann and Philipp Pattberg have shifted attention to relatively young environmental NGOs and scientific bodies such as the IPCC as important players on the international stage.⁴ More recently, international relations scholars such as Ken Conca or Maria Ivanova have used the concept to look at the environmental work of various bodies and agencies in the UN system.⁵ What unites this literature is a recognition that global environmental governance involves a wide range of actors, such as NGOs, expert bodies, social movements, businesses, trade unions, local governments, cities. And that all of these participate in what Karin Bäckstrand and others have called “hybrid multilateralism,” put simply, the idea that global environmental problems are now governed by a mix of state and non-state actors working out shared sets of rules, goals, and strategies.⁶

Global Environmental Governance Beyond the Usual Arenas and Suspects

Historians, meanwhile, have started to use the concept of global environmental governance as an analytical lens to understand particular periods of international environmental policymaking. Iris Borowy traces its roots to the interwar period and the League of Nations, itself an extension of colonial environmental governance from at least 1900.⁷ Sverker Sörlin and Eric Paglia highlight the 1972 Stockholm Conference, the first UN conference on environmental issues, and as such the playbook for all the other ones to follow, as a decisive moment.⁸ Ben Huf, Sabine Selchow, and Glenda Sluga focus on the years between 1972 and the 1990s as the key period in which business actors moved into the making of international environmental politics.⁹

Here the term global environmental governance is a useful one that helps us single out and track changing developments in international politics and discourse formation. But we should be careful not to overestimate its novelty. Non-state actors of various kinds have, of course, always played a role in environmental politics and international relations, and most global environmental governance scholars have acknowledged as much. Historians of international relations, like Kate O’Neill, Peter M. Haas, or Oran R. Young have long mapped the diverse actors in global environmental politics without developing the concept of global environmental governance.¹⁰ Environmental historians looking at international organizations, such as Stephen Macekura and Perrin Selcer have traced the rise of environmental politics and sustainable development, the formation of ideas and policy regimes, without necessarily using the global environmental governance label.¹¹ And science scholars, notably Sheila Jasanoff and Marybeth Long Martello in their 2004 work, have examined the relationship between knowledge and power in local and global environmental governance, unpacking different approaches to governance.¹² So when we see global environmental governance gaining traction as an explicit concept, we are really watching an attempt to give a name to something, to make a particular set of processes newly visible, not to discover them for the first time.

“When we see global environmental governance gaining traction as an explicit concept, we are really watching an attempt to give a name to something, to make a particular set of processes newly visible, not to discover them for the first time.”

In contrast, in my work I do not use the concept to describe the international governance system that emerged after 1945, or after 1972. I think it is more fruitful to look at governance as a practice and an aspiration. Something that individuals and groups actively imagined, contested, and tried to bring into being. Because even when global environmental governance scholars insist on the importance of non-state actors, they tend to look for them in the usual arenas: official conferences, recognized stakeholder groups, formal moments of public deliberation. The actors under discussion had a recognized stake in the debate and acted in an explicitly environmental capacity. They belonged, in other words, to the usual suspects. What I want to do is, to explicitly look at the actors that emerge if we follow governance practices and ideas outside of the usual arenas into alternative sites.

Environmental Governance in Alternative Spaces and Informal Networks

Like many other researchers in the field of environmental history, the study of how humans, human ideas, and the non-human natural world have affected one another over time, I arrived through a site entrance. In my case, that was the history and sociology of science. And the history of science has long been occupied with the spaces and settings in which science takes place. For instance, when we think of places where science takes place, we often think of designated, isolated, clean environments. The laboratory, the observatory, the operating theatre, the natural history collection. But from the history of science, we know that these are not the only places where science takes place. In fact, alternative sites of knowledge production have long been recognized. Let’s start with the laboratory itself. Before the 19th century, laboratories were often located inside the home, and we know that the domestic as a setting for knowledge making never really disappeared with the professionalization of the natural sciences in the 19th century. It remained a crucial site of networking, exchange, and intellectual labor. Recognizing this also means recognizing different kinds of work, and different kinds of workers. The labor of spouses, assistants, and collaborators becomes visible in the domestic space.¹³ And as soon as we look into different environments that are recognized places for knowledge production, such as the field site in biology, we see that the private and the professional are often blurred. In biology and other field disciplines, the field becomes a kind of home, and, as many historians have discussed.¹⁴ Here we see again how domestic partners become research collaborators and field assistants, and blur the lines of professional hierarchy.

In the context of global environmental governance, we often think of international fora as laboratories. Clean and isolated spaces for the usual suspects. Also here, it is useful to look beyond that confined space. Looking at these private spaces of global governance as pursued by the Strongs, I make three claims. First, governance happens in the informal as much as the formal: the private gathering, the personal network, the emerging worldview in these alternative spaces are political infrastructure, too. Second, governance is done by actors at the margins as much as the center: non-elite, non-metropolitan, and non-environmental actors have shaped the terms of international environmentalism in ways that a history confined to conference rooms cannot capture. Third, and most consequentially, the dominant narratives we have inherited about why global environmental governance takes the shape it does, so why it is hospitable to corporate actors, why it has historically sidelined global South interests, and why we still fail to turn around the multiple environmental crises we are witnessing today, are incomplete without these ‘elsewheres’ or alternative settings.¹⁵

Maurice Strong, Hanne Marstrand, and the Spiritual Hub of Crestone

Maurice Strong and his second wife Hanne Marstrand occupied a unique position in both official and unofficial fora. Strong, who is the better-known figure, had been the first president of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), established in 1972 to coordinate international environmental efforts and support policy development in UN member states. He had also been the Secretary-General of both the 1972 Stockholm Conference and the 1992 Rio Summit, the UN Conference on Environment and Development, which produced Agenda 21, a first global sustainable development action plan. Marstrand, through her social and spiritual connections, extended these networks to include New Age thinkers, Buddhist scholars, and alternative economists. Together, they imagined energy and environmental governance not as constraints to be obeyed but as challenges to be managed and ethically optimized.

The most concrete expression of Strong and Marstrand’s environmental governance ideas emerged in the desert town of Crestone, Colorado. It is also here that Marstrand’s influence becomes most visible. In 1978, Strong and Marstrand purchased land near the Luis Maria Baca Ranch through Strong’s own oil development company.¹⁶ While Strong continued to provide funding and strategic direction, correspondence shows that Marstrand assumed primary responsibility for Crestone’s day-to-day development. She, together with her mother and sister, coordinated land donations, spiritual communities, and educational programs, turning the area into a hub for experiments in alternative sustainability.¹⁷ Donations were made to a striking range of organizations: the Lindisfarne Association, the Aspen Institute, and Buddhist and Carmelite orders.¹⁸ These were not simple acts of philanthropy. These rather different organizations, tied in with some of the discussions that the Strongs were already a part of, especially their interests in reforming international development politics and alternative views on environmental limits. The Aspen Institute, and members such as the American diplomat Harlan Cleveland were involved in international development discussions, suggesting the need to focus on NGOs and corporate actors. Strong was connected to Aspen and Cleveland through from the preparation phase of the Stockholm Conference, where he had drawn on the Aspen Institute. He knew Cleveland through his membership in the Centre d’Etudes Industrielles (CEI) of which Strong himself would become the chairman. Both Marstrand and Strong were religiously interested. Through Aspen, Crestone was also connected to the oil executive Robert O. Anderson of Atlantic Richfield Corporation. And while Marstrand had links to Buddhism and first national communities, through the World Council of Churches, Strong had for instance been part of discussions on international development reforms and a new international economic order.¹⁹ This spiritualism, as well as the couple’s interest in alternative energies and solar projects, was shared by William Irwin Thompson, art historian, and leader of the spiritual group of the Lindisfarne community.

In addition to Thompson and Cleveland, the participants in the Crestone project included some of the era’s most creative and perhaps unlikely minds: There were Nancy and John Todd, followers of the futurist Buckminster Fuller and pioneers in solar architecture and ecological design. Then there was Hazel Henderson, an economist advocating markets for renewable energy and corporate responsibility, who had been a student of E.F. Schumacher, the author of Small is Beautiful, and who permanently moved to Crestone in 1981. Stewart Brand, whose Whole Earth Catalogue had been the bible of the North American counterculture. And there was the atmospheric chemist James Lovelock, who proposed the Gaia theory, the idea of Earth as a self-regulating planetary system.

Lovelock is an interesting figure, like the Strongs and Anderson; Lovelock had links to big oil. He had worked with Shell and, as the historian Leah Aronowsky has suggested, in this context his work can at least partly be seen as having paved the way for climate change denialism, by proposing the self-regulatory behavior of biochemical cycles. At Crestone, something similar, yet slightly different was happening. We see how his Gaia hypothesis resonated not only with oil executives who hoped to downplay the impact of emissions on the atmosphere. But also, with a group of environmental and economic thinkers, concerned with energy politics, global interdependencies, and rethinking society and the environment as a larger unity. Ideas about planetary consciousness and self-regulation, in turn, resonated with the thinking of some of the members of the Buddhist community, and Native American spiritualism at Crestone.

In 1981, Lindisfarne and the San Francisco Zen Center hosted a conference at Crestone on planetary systems, featuring Lovelock, Henderson, the Todds, and the cyberneticists Heinz von Foerster, and Francisco Varela. Discussions integrated ecological, technological, and spiritual frameworks, and thoughts on international development in discussions about planetary systems and global economic dependencies between development and developing countries.²⁰ Oil executives, Buddhist monks, solar architects, and systems theorists, together in a Colorado desert town, thinking about a blue print for sustainable living, that was ecologically influenced but not characterized by hard ecological limits, but by a new ethical awareness and consciousness for environment and development. This is what Crestone was about.

All in all, then, the community at Crestone, reflected a broad reimagining of planetary governance. By networking figures like Thompson, Cleveland, Henderson, and Lovelock, the Strongs helped cultivate an intellectual climate that challenged rigid environmentalism and market orthodoxy alike, promoting instead a seemingly more flexible vision of global change and allowing for differentiated development and local adaptation through technology.

Economic Humanism and the Contradictions of Planetary Governance

These core ideas cultivated at Crestone did not remain local. At the core of this environmental governance project was a vision that I call “economic humanism,” a model of planetary governance that combined faith in corporate and technological actors with commitments to social equity and environmental stewardship.²¹ Three interrelated themes structured this outlook. First, Strong and his allies sought to rethink the current world order in response to postwar shifts, advocating reforms to international organizations, elevating alternative institutions and corporations in global politics. Second, they promoted technologies as essential for locally adapted development as well as for extending global resource limits, positioning technical innovation centrally in environmental governance. Third, they stressed the need for a strong ethical, or even religious commitment to address environmental issues and development needs. During the 1980s, Strong carried these assumptions into his work on the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). In 1985, he co-chaired a WCED working group on corporate roles in development with the Japanese industrialist Saburo Okita with whom Strong entertained close ties since the Le Bettex weekend. Their report concluded that transnational energy corporations were indispensable for achieving sustainable development.²²

This orientation meant a shift in global governance toward decentralized authority, privileging new forms of organizations outside the traditional UN framework and away from the intergovernmental model in which the global North no longer held a majority. Strong urged the UN to become more “business-like,” insisting that sustainability agendas would only gain traction if embedded in corporate practices.²³ Strong emphasized renewable energy, especially solar, as tried at Crestone to counterbalance OPEC power and as a tool for locally adapted development, particularly in the Global South. These ideas were later reflected in Agenda 21. Both these elements were inseparable from ethical commitment. Strong was one of the members of the Brundtland Commission who stressed the need for new definitions of growth and North-South relations, similar to what Henderson had proposed.²⁴ When Strong called for a “new eco-industrial civilization based on fundamental changes in economic behavior and in relationships between rich and poor” we should hear this not as mere rhetoric.²⁵ They need to be seen as the ultimate expression of the future envisioned by the Strongs and the many influences that helped shape their vision in places like Le Bettex and Crestone.

But this governance vision, this economic humanism was not without contradictions. On first glance, the moral dimension of the economic humanism, which was also reflected in sustainable development after Brundtland in the form of the social pillar of sustainability and the emphasis on justice, aligned with emerging calls for a New International Economic Order by representatives from the Global South, to rethink GNP, decouple growth from fossil dependence, and pursue conservation and redistribution, for instance, by Mahbub ul-Haq, other leading development thinkers from the global South whom Strong knew personally.²⁶ The Strongs’ approach to environmental governance allowed for differentiated approaches, tailor-made solutions, and locally adapted forms of technological and development aid, giving seemingly more agency to Global South countries and their needs. Yet the Strongs’ networks resisted the NIEO’s structural critique of global capitalism. Instead, influenced by figures like Cleveland, they embraced decentralized models of development that emphasized local adaptation and resource self-sufficiency, rather than large-scale redistribution.²⁷

This, in turn, reduced the threat posed by ecological limits to the lifestyles of wealthier nations. The vision did not engage critically with the problems of existing injustices and inequalities on international and subnational levels, as had been demanded by the G77, so the coalition of developing nations that had demanded a fundamental restructuring of the global economy, not just development aid on Western terms.²⁸ In practice, the Strongs’ vision offered the Global South the right to develop differently, but not equally. The Strongs might have been sincere in their approach to living within alternative limits. Yet it is not hard to imagine how some of the Strongs’ corporate allies preferred their ideas on flexible, business-friendly approaches to sustainability over rigid environmental restrictions.

Informal Infrastructures and the Techno Optimist Legacy of Environmental Governance

What this history reveals, then, is not simply the origins of corporate environmentalism and its understudied links to alternative counterculture communities rather than conservative politicians. It reveals the formation of a particular global governance strategy in the postwar, postcolonial, and globalized world. And crucially we see this when investigating the more private spaces of the Strongs’ networks. It reveals an informal infrastructure of governance, including a complex and heterogeneous set of networks and intellectual approaches to development, environmentalism, and international politics that underlay the environmental governance that the Strongs and their acquaintances tried to shape behind the scenes of official UN gatherings. In fact, these official gatherings were perceived as unsuitable to generate the new ideas that they were after. 

“The somewhat more flexible environmental approach that the Strongs and their networks shaped, including limits as manageable, technology as the answer, corporate actors as key players, governments as less important, private networks as the real engine of change, did not disappear.”

If we follow governance practices to private settings, then the role of more marginal figures such as Marstrand’s becomes more important. And so does that of the different and perhaps unexpected counterculture, political and business influences that these private governance practices bring to the fore. And while this approach was ambitious, as we have seen, it was also easy to hijack by businesses that did not feel the moral obligation that the Strongs and others foresaw for them and that preferred techno-fixes instead.

Let me end with provocation: The somewhat more flexible environmental approach that the Strongs and their networks shaped, including limits as manageable, technology as the answer, corporate actors as key players, governments as less important, private networks as the real engine of change, did not disappear. They mutated. Mars colonies, geo- and solar-engineering proposals, oil-funded climate tech fund, they bear ancestral similarities to the tradition I describe here. And while Strong and Marstrand would not necessarily have agreed with Musk, Zuckerberg, and Altman, the governance infrastructure and traditions that makes these people possible was partly built by people like the Strongs and their network. In any case, understanding this governance practice can contribute to explanations about how, from the start, business interests were firmly integrated into the environmental politics at UN level, and how concerns about strictly ecological concerns about the limits to growth were reshaped into limits stretchable with technology and better consumer and corporate behavior.

Feature Image: View of the Crestone Ziggurat in Crestone, Saguache, Colorado, United States. 13 July 2021. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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Notes

1. William Irwin Thompson to Maurice Strong, 17 December 1980. Box 184, Folder 719 ‘VII Alpha Lindisfarne/corr’, PMFS. ↩︎
2. Google Ngram ↩︎
3. Daniel Compagnon, “Les acteurs privés dans la gouvernance environnementale globale:Un rôle croissant mais difficile à mesurer,” in Annuaire français de relations internationales (Éditions Panthéon-Assas, 2023), https://doi.org/10.3917/epas.ferna.2023.01.0219. ↩︎
4. Frank Biermann and Philipp Pattberg, “Global Environmental Governance: Taking Stock, Moving Forward,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 33, no. 1 (2008): 277–94, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.environ.33.050707.085733. ↩︎
5. Ken Conca, An Unfinished Foundation: The United Nations and Global Environmental Governance (Oxford University Press, 2015); Maria H. Ivanova, The Untold Story of the World’s Leading Environmental Institution: UNEP at Fifty (MIT Press, 2021). ↩︎
6. Karin Bäckstrand et al., “Non-State Actors in Global Climate Governance: From Copenhagen to Paris and Beyond,” Environmental Politics 26, no. 4 (2017): 561–79, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2017.1327485. ↩︎
7. Iris Borowy, “Global Environmental Governance,” in A Companion to Global Environmental History (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2025), https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119988229.ch32. ↩︎
8. Sverker Sörlin and Eric Paglia, Stockholm and the Rise of Global Environmental Governance: The Human Environment (Cambridge University Press, 2025). ↩︎
9. Ben Huf et al., “Business and the Planetary History of International Environmental Governance in the 1970s,” Contemporary European History 31, no. 4 (2022): 553–69, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777322000546. ↩︎
10. Kate O’Neill, The Environment and International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Oran R. Young and Gail Osherenko, Polar Politics: Creating International Environmental Regimes (Cornell University Press, 1993); Peter M. Haas, Epistemic Communities, Constructivism, and International Environmental Politics (Routledge, 2015). ↩︎
11. Stephen J. Macekura, Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century, 1st ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139680509; Perrin Selcer, The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth (Columbia University Press, 2018). ↩︎
12. Marybeth Long Martello and Sheila Jasanoff, Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Gover-Nance (MIT Press, 2004). ↩︎
13. Graeme Gooday, “Placing or Replacing the Laboratory in the History of Science?,” Isis 99, no. 4 (2008): 783–95, https://doi.org/10.1086/595772. ↩︎
14. Robert E. Kohler and Jeremy Vetter, “The Field,” in A Companion to the History of Science (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118620762.ch20; Simone Schleper, “Naturalizing Collaboration: Women, Lions, and Behavioural Field Research in East Africa during the 1970s,” in Gender and Animals in History, vol. 42, ed. Sandra Swart et al. (Amsterdam, 2024). ↩︎
15. Ruth A. Morgan, Climate Change and International History: Negotiating Science, Global Change, and Environmental Justice (London, 2024). ↩︎
16. Cyrus Mody, “Maurice Strong, Conspiracy Theories, and the Pitfalls of Environmental Diplomacy,” Text, NiCHE, May 21, 2024, World, https://niche-canada.org/2024/05/21/maurice-strong-conspiracy-theories-and-the-pitfalls-of-environmental-diplomacy/. ↩︎
17.  “In Conversation with Hanne Strong,” Global Peace Initiative of Women, August 3, 2022, https://www.gpiw.org/blog/in-conversation-with-hanne-strong. ↩︎
18. William Irwin Thompson to Steven Rockefeller, 2 January 1982. Box 184, Folder 719 ‘VII Alpha Lindisfarne/corr’, PMFS; Molly Ivins, ‘Expansion Blocked, Aspen Institute Is Leaving Its Namesake City’, The New York Times, 5 September 1979. ↩︎
19. See Harlan Cleveland to Hans Wuttke, 3 May 1979. Box 232, Folder 2184 ‘VII Aspen Correspondence mid-1970s’, PMFS. Jack Austin, for instance, recalls how Hanne was a strong promoter of Buddhism and how both couples visited Bhutan in 1981. Federico Mayor et al., eds. Remembering Maurice F. Strong. Tributes and Reminiscences. (European Center for Peace and Development, n.d.); William Irwin Thompson to Maurice Strong, 23 January 1982. Box 184, Folder 719 ‘VII Alpha Lindisfarne/corr’, PMFS. Maurice Strong, ‘Speech to be delivered at Bloomsfield United Church on Sunday, April 28^th, 1963.’ Box 6, Folder 55 ‘II Prayers and Sermons’, PMFS. ↩︎
20. Lindisfarne Association, Gaia, a Way of Knowing : Political Implications of the New Biology, ed. William Irwin Thompson (Great Barrington, MA : Lindisfarne Press ; [Rochester, VT] : Distributed by Inner Traditions International, 1987), http://archive.org/details/gaiawayofknowing00thom. ↩︎
21. And I am taking inspiration here from Glenda Sluga, who has described a type of “scientific humanism” dominating the work within UNESCO in its early years. Glenda Sluga, “UNESCO and the (One) World of Julian Huxley,” Journal of World History 21, no. 3 (2010): 393–418. ↩︎
22. World Commission on Environment and Development. Fourth Meeting, São Paulo, Brazil, 25 October–4 November 1985, 22, IDRC Digital Library. ↩︎
23. “Making the UN More Businesslike,” accessed August 25, 2025, https://mauricestrong.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=102:un-reform&catid=27&Itemid=52. ↩︎
24. Maurice F. Strong, ‘Agenda 21: Sustaining the Spirit of Rio’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 139, no. 3 (1995): 233–39; World Commission on Environment and Development. Fourth Meeting, São Paulo, Brazil, 25 October–4 November 1985, 12, 24. Hazel Henderson, The Politics of the Solar Age: Alternatives to Economics, Rev. ed (Knowledge Systems, Inc, 1988), xxi; Hazel Henderson, Creating Alternative Futures: The End of Economics (New York, 1978), 57–59. ↩︎
25. Maurice F. Strong, ‘Agenda 21: Sustaining the Spirit of Rio’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 139, no. 3 (1995): 233–39. ↩︎
26. Giorgos Kallis et al., “Research On Degrowth,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 43, no. Volume 43, 2018 (2018): 291–316, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-102017-025941. ↩︎
27. Harlan Cleveland, The Third Try at World Order: American Self-Renewal in an Interdependent World (World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, 1976). ↩︎
28. Sara Lorenzini, Global Development: A Cold War History (Princeton University Press, 2019). ↩︎