Brief by Central Staff
Politics – June 1995 – Colorado Central Magazine
A recent edition of National Review reports that Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, secretary-general of the United Nations, has endorsed Maurice Strong as a potential successor when his five-year term expires in 1997.
The magazine identified Strong as a Canadian oilman and organizer behind the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil, but Strong may be better known hereabouts as one of the developers of the Baca Grande subdivision just south of Crestone.
Strong’s UN connections go back more than 20 years, when he was UN Commissioner for the Environment in Nairobi. In 1980, he bought into Arizona Land & Cattle Co., the largest land developer in the Southwest, and one project was the Baca, an old Mexican land grant.
In 1984, Arizona Land sold the Baca Ranch (several dozen square miles extending from Crestone to the Sand Dunes) to TOSCO — The Oil Shale Company — but two years later, he formed American Water Development, Inc., which bought the Baca ranch from TOSCO.
AWDI’s unsuccessful efforts to develop and export groundwater from the San Luis Valley have been amply chronicled elsewhere, and at last report, Strong was back in Canada, developing some hydropower.