Strong Couple : ‘Mystical’ and ‘Manifester’ Team Up

CRESTONE, Colo. — Hanne and Maurice Strong come from a faster, more international track than just about anyone else around Crestone.

Maurice’s early years sound like a Jack London story. Born in Manitoba in 1929, he ran finished high school five years early and ran away from home at 13. He stowed away on a ship to Alaska where, at 17, he became apprentice to a fur trader.

He soon started his own mining company, and his business interests proliferated. By age 23, he had made his first $1 million.

Strong was the first head of the Canadian International Development Agency, from 1966 until 1970, and the first head of Petro Canada (1976-78).

He soon began augmenting his business expertise with environmental experience, and served as executive director of the United Nations environmental program, based in Nairobi, in the mid-1970s. In 1985, he was named executive coordinator of U.N. African relief operations.

An unusual mix of capitalist developer and, as The New York Times called him in 1975, “Custodian of the Planet,” he believes there are important links between business and concern for the environment.

“I believe you have to be in the middle of these things,” he said. “In our system, the market system, you affect the environment, and the only way to affect the environment positively is to make sure that you have environmental considerations built right into your business.”

When Maurice Strong first came to the Baca in 1978 after acquiring an interest in AZL Resources, which owned it, he knew he wanted to save it from routine development.

“We were attracted by the qualities that make it so special now--the beauty, the space, the fact that it’s not a ski resort,” he said.

Strong does want to develop the water, however. He and a group of investors are embroiled in a heated dispute with valley water users over the investors’ claim to what they say is a huge, untapped aquifer.

Valley residents are skeptical of Strong’s claim that the valley would benefit if his company sold the water to outside cities.

Hanne Strong’s interests are closer to the Baca. She says she and Maurice complement each other.

“I’m the mystical one,” she said. “He’s the manifester. He gets things done.”

She was born Hanne Marstrand in Copenhagen in 1941. Her father ran a fleet of salmon ships, and both her parents were active in the Resistance to the Nazis, she said.

A Lutheran raised as a Roman Catholic, Hanne said she had mystical experiences early on, including seeing angels.

“I knew from a very young age that I wasn’t Danish, that I was Indian,” she said. “And I knew that one day I would be with my people.”

After studying industrial and interior design in Denmark, she moved to New York City in her early 20s and set up a design firm.

In 1972, Hanne left her business and moved to Nairobi, where she had been hired to design Kenya’s United Nations headquarters. There she met Maurice Strong.

The couple moved to Calgary, Alberta, in 1972, where Hanne became involved in Indian political issues.

When she first came to the Baca, she says, “I knew I was home.”

Hanne believes she and the Baca are creatures of both luck and destiny.

“I like luck--I feel I’ve got a lot of it,” she said, “but far greater forces are at work, and I know it will happen. It was meant to be. We’re just tools, and we have to perfect ourselves.”