From the chaos of wartime youth in Belgium, Christian de Laet set out on a journey searching for the truth about the world, sharing his beliefs with everyone he met on the way. His enthusiastic and diligent devotion to a greater understanding of the global environment - from grassroots to the stratosphere - was expressed in a vigorous advocacy of individual and social change, so that personal behaviour and corporate conduct address the reality of the global human condition. ‘This is urgent for the sustainability of civilisation,’ said de Laet.

A Man for All Seasons

As a teacher, scholar and scientist, counsellor, consultant, and communicator, de Laet was in continuous motion, always observing, discovering and exchanging insights, ideas and information of growing significance to strengthen and sustain the human community. His journey took him to the furthest corners of the earth, into classrooms and boardrooms, farms and villages, cities and countries on every continent. ‘We must all be ready to attempt the bridge between science and personal responsibility’, he told the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome in an April 2000 address.

Christian de Laet was born in Brussels 12 years before the start of the Second World War. During the course of his life he learnt French, Flemish, German, English, Italian, Spanish and Russian as well as, eventually, Hindi. He joined a course of advanced level mathematics at the Ecoles Speciales of the University of Louvain in 1944 and of engineering at the Polytechnical School of the University of Brussels when it re-opened in 1945.

Arrival in Canada

When de Laet first came to Canada in early 1949, he combined part-time study with executive training at ALCAN, the aluminium company. His timely switch to applied mathematics and computer systems, while serving as an Operation Research Officer with Sir Robert Watson-Watt and Partners, led to his becoming a technical and management consultant to private and public-sector organisations.

Early Environmental Pioneer

In 1964, Christian de Laet was elected the secretary general of the Canadian Council of Resources and Environment Ministers (CCREM). He spent nine years traversing the vastness of Canada’s provinces and territories, building an informed consensus within that forum designed to make joint policies more possible in a federal state. The national conference on ‘Pollution and Our Environment’ permitted him to test the importance of the qualitative rather than the quantitative aspects of resource use, as benchmarked by the founding of ‘Resources for Tomorrow’s Conference’ in 1962. His work with CCREM raised Canadian awareness of environmental concerns and empowered wider citizen involvement - including the First Nations - in local, national and global affairs. The 1968 ‘Water Seminar’ was in many ways a determinant of the way water policies could be structured in the future, in terms of resources with multi-layered responsibility.

Advising UN Agencies

In the years following the UN Stockholm Conference of 1972, when he was invited to monitor and advise on the natural resources sector (a rare experience in itself in inter-governmental conflict management), Christian de Laet became a consultant to International NGOs, as well as IGOs, and specialised UN agencies such as WHO, UNESCO, UNU, UNEP and UN/ESCAP. Over the years, he participated in many of the key UN conferences and carried out assignments in all the major five continents, as well as remote and far-flung places across the globe. One of his key objectives during this period was to correlate development, or mal-development, with the substantial list of culture and site-specific parameters. He traced many environmental concerns to values, attitudes and to levels of technical maturity which oscillate between progress and retrogress. Being in India gave de Laet the opportunity to discover some deep cultural roots; this led him to garner an understanding of the many ways environmental challenges could be met through re-interpreting traditional knowledge systems and folk cultures.

Commonwealth Science Council

In 1977, de Laet was invited by the Commonwealth Secretary-General Shridath Ramphal to become his science advisor, a position which extended to becoming the secretary of the Commonwealth Science Council, head of the Commonwealth Science Division of the Secretariat, and adviser to the Commonwealth Fund for Technical Co-operation. Beyond the Commonwealth network of nearly 50 countries, he also represented the Secretary-General abroad and developed working contacts with other IGOs, such as the Francophone counterpart, l’Agence de cooperation culturelle et technique (ACCT). In those years, he travelled the highways and byways of the world and found other ways to correlate concerns common to all human cultures such as architecture, proverbs, fables, songs, dancing and mime. The Commonwealth Secretariat itself was a world in a microcosm which permitted him to encompass a wide variety of assignments ‘always,’ said Ramphal, ‘characterised by originality, wit and creativity. Christian de Laet,’ continued the Secretary General, ‘successfully oriented the work of the Commonwealth Science Council toward the more practical tasks of development.’ After traversing the world and advising the Commonwealth for over five years, de Laet arrived first in Sri Lanka and then in India, where he contributed to Ashok Khosla’s pioneering work in setting up the Society for Development Alternatives (DA).

Development Alternatives

For de Laet, the Indian experience was critical to his achieving a better and more profound understanding of the role of the individual ‘self’ in a globalised world. At the same time, he was also pursuing his association with Tony Judge in Brussels at the Union of International Associations (UIA), where he learned firsthand the potential of organising world knowledge in practical form. In Christian’s view, the breakthroughs achieved in the preparation of the many editions of UIA’s Encyclopedia rank as an all-time high ‘window’ to manage the twenty first century successfully. He feels that the UIA relationship thus developed was a keystone in his own apprenticeship in relating the parts and the whole. From his Saskatchewan base, Christian de Laet was also able to follow his earlier work in the restructuring of the Athol Murray College of Notre Dame and also to assist in the setting up of the Saskatchewan Science Center.

From Science to Conscience

At the crossroads of his quarter century of environmentalism, in 1990, Christian de Laet was named the Canadian Environment Achiever for both his national and international projects. De Laet was a life fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London, a past president of the Canadian Association for Futures Studies, a Senior Fellow of the Club of Athens and, more important in his view, a persistent mentor of graduate students and a friend of First Nations in both Canada and Australia. In his speech to the Canadian Association of the Club of Rome, de Laet declared, ‘It is time to move from science to conscience,’ adding, ‘None of us has a private 1-800 line to truth and righteousness.’ And then he said, ‘We can’t afford to go on being counter-productive, nor even counter-intuitive for any sustainable length of time.’

de Laet’s conviction that the real work of saving the planet must be the responsibility of each of the world’s citizens led him to battle on the front lines of humanity, in the civic trenches of community, hand in hand with small groups of people in whatever culture or country he might be found on any given day. While some of those whom he advised are busy in boardrooms planning policies and strategic war on a grand scale, de Laet moved from front to front, sharing people’s concerns and finding solutions.

Global Citizen

Christian de Laet was the ultimate ‘Global Citizen’, taking responsibility for the knowledge which he continues to accumulate by constant devotion and concern, seeking the truth within himself and in the personal lives and environmental context of all those he encountered and whom he invariably challenged to enjoy the beauty and blessings of this life and to share them with future generations. One might consider granting the Global Environment Leadership Award for consistent effort in a single cause, or one might take a longer, broader view and honour a lifetime devoted to a diversity of efforts at preserving global sustainability. Christian de Laet was a mover of many causes, a catalyst among colleagues, a leader whose over-arching vision of potential solutions to environmental problems enlisted others to the cause and fired them with optimism and determination.

In his adopted nation Canada, or in any and all of the world’s nations or commons, Christian de Laet exemplified leadership for the global environment. q

Wayne Kines
wmi@earthlink.net
 

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