\"UN Under-Secretary\" Maurice Strong Hand Signed FDC Dated 1967 For Sale

Up for sale "U.N. Under-Secretary General" Maurice Strong Hand Signed First Day Cover Dated 1967. 

ES-4250E

Maurice Frederick 1929 – November 27, 2015) was a Canadian oil and mineral businessman and a

diplomat who served as Under-Secretary-General

of the United Nations. Strong

had his start as an entrepreneur in the Alberta oil patch and was President

of Power Corporation of

Canada until 1966. In the early 1970s he was Secretary General

of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and

then became the first executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme. He returned to Canada to

become Chief Executive Officer of Petro-Canada from 1976 to 1978. He headed Ontario Hydro, one of North America's largest power utilities,

was national president and chairman of the Extension Committee of the World

Alliance of YMCAs, and headed American Water Development Incorporated. He served as a

commissioner of the World Commission on Environment and

Development in 1986 and was recognised by the International

Union for Conservation of Nature as a leader in the

international environmental movement. He

was President of the Council of the University for Peace from

1998 to 2006. More recently Strong was an active honorary professor at Peking University and honorary chairman of its

Environmental Foundation. He was chairman of the advisory board for the

Institute for Research on Security and Sustainability for Northeast Asia. He

died at the age of 86 in 2015. Strong

first met with a leading UN official in 1947 who arranged for him to have a

temporary low-level appointment, to serve as a junior security officer at the UN headquarters in Lake Success, New York. He

soon returned to Canada, and with the support of Lester B. Pearson, directed the founding of the Canadian

International Development Agency in 1968. In 1971, Strong

commissioned a report on the state of the planet, Only One Earth: The

Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet,[24] co-authored by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos. The report summarized the findings of 152 leading

experts from 58 countries in preparation for the first UN meeting on the

environment, held in Stockholm in 1972. This was the world's first "state

of the environment" report. The Stockholm Conference established the

environment as part of an international development agenda. It led to the

establishment by the UN General Assembly in December 1972 of the United

Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), with headquarters

in Nairobi, Kenya, and the election of Strong to head

it. UNEP was the first UN agency to be headquartered in the third world. As head of UNEP, Strong convened the first

international expert group meeting on climate change. Strong was one of the

commissioners of the World Commission on Environment and Development, set up as

an independent body by the United Nations in 1983.