Choose your wrapper carefully and you can move almost anything past almost anyone. The men running the wilderness congresses in the late 1980s were not stupid. They had run the empire in khaki, they had run it in Sunday school clothes, they had run it in central banker grey. By 1987 the wrapper they reached for was green.
The reasons were obvious if you sat where they sat. Environmental concern was the only argument in the western world strong enough to override national sovereignty without firing a shot. A government that would not permit a foreign army on its soil would willingly sign a treaty surrendering jurisdiction over its own forests. A population that would riot if the prime minister sold the post office would cheer if the prime minister signed an agreement to save the planet. The cause was real. The cause was also exploitable.
And exploitation does not require cynicism on the part of the foot soldiers. Most of the people who do the day to day work of the green apparatus, the local biologists, the conservation officers, the climate scientists, the NGO administrators, are sincere. That is the design. A platform that runs on sincere people at the bottom and contracts at the top is far more durable than one that requires everyone to be in on the trick. Lang said it himself in Denver. Sell it not through a democratic process. Use the cause to do the lifting. The contracts arrive afterwards.
Maurice Strong, the convener of the Stockholm conference in 1972 and of Rio in 1992, ran on this logic for forty years. He was a Canadian oilman who became a senior United Nations official without ever holding elected office, who chaired commissions and advisory boards across both, and who shifted seamlessly between the language of pollution control and the language of capital markets. He served the Rockefellers and he served the Rothschilds. He served the United Nations. He served himself last, but always well. When you read about Earth Summits, climate conferences, sustainable development goals, planetary boundaries, you are reading the long shadow of Strong's playbook.
The playbook is still running in 2026. The vocabulary has updated. The wrapper is no longer wilderness, it is climate, biodiversity, sustainability, ESG, net zero. The chassis underneath is identical to what Hunt watched being assembled in Denver in 1987. Same families. Same banks. Same legal mechanism. Debt swapped for title. Title pooled in collateral. Collateral leveraged in capital markets. Population trained, by sincere people, to applaud.
A platform that runs on sincere people at the bottom and contracts at the top is far more durable than one where everyone is in on the trick.