| This book is more than I intended it to be. In 1990, as I was completing a book about the American environmental movement, I recognized that it did too little justice to the contributions and significance of environmental activists around the world. I resolved to follow up with a second book, on international environmentalism. |
| Then, in the summer of 1990, Maurice Strong, who was visiting in Washington, asked me to join him at breakfast. Strong, a Canadian businessman and diplomat who had been secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, had recently been appointed to fill the same role at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. That meeting soon came to be called the Earth Summit because it would be attended by heads of state and government gathering to discuss the future of the planet and its inhabitants. Strong invited me to join his secretariat as a historian of the process, to be a fly on the wall at the preparatory committee meetings, staff meetings, informal negotiations, his private diplomatic initiatives, and, of course, the summit in Rio itself. I would be given full access to him, his staff, and all conference documents. |
| To a journalist who had been observing news events from the outside for decades, this offer of an inside view of a major diplomatic conference was an extraordinary opportunity. Even more important, the Earth Summit would bring into sharp focus most of the significant environmental issues facing the global community, as well as assemble representatives of environmental organizations, government officials, scholars, and others who are closely engaged with those issues. Such an arrangement would make my research and interviewing much more compact and manageable. Or so I thought. |
| I did not, however, wish to join the secretariat. That would have made me a part of the story I was covering, to me a violation of the journalistic ethic. Moreover, I did not want to be in the position of having to submit what I had written to an employer for editing and change. So I requested that I be given the promised access unconditionally. To Strong's great credit, he agreed immediately and kept to his word to the end. I raised money from several foundations (acknowledged elsewhere in these pages) and was able to pursue the research and writing independently. |
| It became apparent very quickly that if I was going to focus on the Earth Summit process there was no way I could possibly write about environmentalists and environmental issues without also writing about economics and development. Indeed, as I progressed in my research, it became apparent to me that in my years of covering environmental issues I had paid far too little attention |
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