History's biggest diplomatic gathering ended much as it had begun-with talk of children, and of children to come. "I'm at a stage of my life where probably none of this is going to affect me personally," said Maurice F. Strong of Canada, the then 63-year-old chief UN organizer of the Earth Summit. "But it will affect my children, and your children, and all of our grandchildren."
Eleven frenetic days earlier, on an earth-toned dais adorned with gigantic Amazonian potted plants and twin video screens, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had opened the summit on a similar note. "Never in history will so much depend on what you do or not do, for yourself, for others, for your children, for your grandchildren, for life in all its varied forms," he told hundreds of ambassadors, who had filed into the hangar-sized Plenary Hall in their pin-striped, dashikied and sari-draped best. It was June 3, 1992.
The Secretary-General, his address punctuated by the whir of motor-driven cameras and the otherworldly chirp of cellular telephones, predicted that the Earth Summit would mark not only a turning point for the planet but "a new point of departure for the United Nations system," one in which its specialized agencies would become the organization's cutting edge in the new world emerging from the rubble of the Cold War.
Officially, the meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was called the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, UNCED, in the alphabet soup of UN acronyms. Headline writers soon dubbed it the Earth Summit. To the delight of Maurice Strong, who had dreamed up the name long before, it stuck.
In keeping with its mandate, the summit was gargantuan: 178 governments and 30,000 participants, of whom 9,000 were accredited journalists and 3,000 were citizens representing nearly 1,500 nongovernmental organizations accredited by the United Nations. Thousands of others came to Rio without special credentials.
There were 108 national leaders-the largest such gathering until 1995 (when the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen drew 117). There were seven vice-presidents; two princes; an emir (of Kuwait); the Holy See's secretary of state; two ruling chairmen-of Lesotho and Belarus-and a governor-general, Sir Wiwa Korowi of Papua New Guinea. Assembled on risers for a group photograph, implacable enemies like Presidents George Bush of the United States and Fidel Castro of Cuba rubbed elbows with counterparts they had rarely, if ever, seen-people like Prime Minister Tofilau Eti Alesana of Western Samoa and President Vigdis Finnbogandottir of Iceland. A bystander remarked later that it looked like a college graduation ceremony. As flashbulbs popped, President Franìois Mitterrand of France, Prime Minister John Major of Britain and Premier Li Peng of China traded quips with President Suharto of Indonesia and Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao of India. Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany exchanged pleasantries with President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti and Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala of Nepal.
A separate galaxy of famous people was also in Rio for the summit, many of them at Maurice Strong's invitation. A multimillionaire businessman as well as a diplomat, Strong had created his own private public relations network to augment the UN's. The celebrities included Shirley Maclaine, Olivia Newton-John, Roger Moore, John Denver, the Beach Boys, Jane Fonda and Placido Domingo. Even the Dalai Lama showed up. The painter Robert Rauschenberg, deeply moved by the goals of the summit, contributed a poster, painted in bold greens and yellows, whose image was also used on T-shirts. At the top was an oath: "I pledge to make the Earth a secure and hospitable home for present and future generations."
By: David E. Pitt, (excerpt from Safeguarding the Environment), from: A Global Affair: An Inside Look at the United Nations, published by Jones & Janello, copyright 1995, all rights reserved.
