Revenue Streams - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 123

was to hire a young consultant from Denver named Bob Moran to assist in evaluating
the quality and quantity of water in the Baca, and to interpret satellite images of the val-
ley. Moran explained to AWDI's lawyers that while there was plenty of water there, it
had spent so much time working its way through heated rock deep underground that
it was infused with dissolved salts and other pollutants. Moran's recommendations to
AWDI were confidential, but Strong clearly considered questions about water quality a
mere bump in the road.
“It was a very interesting project, and Strong was a very mysterious man,” Moran told
me. “He never said much. He had this little smile. You could never tell exactly what he
was thinking, but, clearly, he was thinking big.”
Maurice Strong grew up in the Depression years in Oak Lake, Manitoba. According
to legend, he graduated from high school at age fourteen, hopped a train, then worked
for the merchant marine along the Canadian coast. In Alberta, he worked as a financial
analyst for the oil and gas business. By twenty-five he was vice president of Dome Petro-
leum. By thirty-one, he was president of the Power Corporation of Canada. By forty, he
was a millionaire. Later, he founded the Canadian International Development Assist-
ance program and led Petro-Canada.
Strong has aged into a short, plump, silver-haired eminence with a soft voice, an oc-
casional stutter, and a deferential manner—“a kind of negative charisma,” as one ac-
quaintance put it. A self-declared environmentalist, Strong organized the first Earth
Summit, in Rio de Janeiro, for the United Nations, in 1992. It was the largest summit
in history at the time, and its purpose was to convince delegates from 178 nations to
embark on “a new era of collective security” by replacing military buildups with envir-
onmental protections. At the UN, Strong worked as senior adviser to former secretary-
general Koi Annan until 2005 , when Strong resigned in the aftermath of the Iraqi oil-
for-food scandal.
One evening in 1978, a gray-bearded shaman appeared at Hanne Strong's door at
Baca Ranch and introduced himself as Glenn Anderson . “I've been waiting for you,” he
said. “I predicted in the sixties that a foreigner would come here and build an interna-
tional religious center. What took you so long?” Mrs. Strong listened carefully. She had
been raised in a moneyed family in Copenhagen. During the Second World War, her
mother helped the Danish Resistance smuggle Jews out of Germany. From childhood,
Hanne believed she could see angels and recall past lives. She sensed she had once been
a Native American, and so she had traveled to the United States to find her ancestral
home.
After hearing Glenn Anderson's prophecy, Hanne decided to turn Baca Ranch into
an interfaith religious sanctuary. According to accounts she has given reporters, Hanne
believes that a new Dark Age is coming, and that thanks to environmental degradation