Canada and Australia - Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries - page 142

understand scientiic and ecological issues. He wrote topics to popularize
the problems, including many for children, and appeared on television
and radio. His radio broadcasts stimulated so much response that in 1990
he organized the David Suzuki Foundation. Besides climate change, the
foundation concentrates on forests and oceans.
Maurice Strong is another man with a long and influential career as an
environmentalist. Born in Oak Lake, Manitoba, in 1929, his family suffered
during the Great Depression. After completing high school at the age of
15, he worked for the Hudson Bay Company as a fur trader in Chesterfield
Inlet in the Northwest Territories, where he learned the Eskimo language.
At 17 he formed his own mining exploration company. In the late 1940s,
he worked for the fledgling United Nations. his whetted his appetite for
international organizations, but his lack of a university degree barred
him from promotion. He moved to Calgary, where he became a mining
and oil stock analyst. Still restless, he and his bride traveled the world,
spending time in Kenya, where he learned to speak Swahili. By the age
of 25 he was back in Canada, where he worked for the Dome Petroleum
Company, eventually becoming vice president. In 1962 Strong was hired
as head of the giant Power Corporation of Canada. Three years later he
became the director-general of the Canadian International Development
Agency. 5 His dynamism, UN experience, language ability, and Canada's
status as a midsized diplomatic power made him a natural choice to head
the Stockholm conference in 1972. Twenty years later he headed the Earth
Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
Australia was not discovered by Europeans until the 17th century and
was barely explored until Captain James Cook visited Botany Bay in 1770.
His name for the bay reflected the scientific mission of his voyage. Sailing
north, he accidentally discovered the Great Barrier Reef by running his
ship aground on it and nearly perishing. Only 17 years later (and with
amazing confidence since there had been no further visits), the British
government sent a fleet of eleven ships to colonize the continent. The
pioneers were largely convicts from English jails. Settling in present-day
Sydney, the new colonists struggled. They were not farmers but city people,
and the soil was poor. An early environmental problem was to keep the
water in the Tank Stream safe for drinking. In 1805 the governor decreed
that people who polluted the creek would have their house torn down.