Ever wonder where the term “sustainability” came from? Well, wonder no more. It was the creation of Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the world leader who set us on a path to recognize that prosperity, human health and environmental sustainability were not three things, but one.
Gro Harlem Brundtland was born in Oslo, Norway, on April 20, 1939 (“Gro” is pronounced “grew”). Her parents were activists for social welfare in Norway, and when Norway fell to Hitler and things got dangerous for families like theirs, she was secreted to Sweden to wait out the war with her grandmother. After the war, she returned and her family picked up where they left off. Brundtland remembered, “On the bookshelves at home, classics like Marx stood next to Karl Evang’s Sexual Education and the Workers’ Lexcion.”
Her father, a physician, was an active part of the Norwegian political sphere, serving as doctor to the king and prime minister. Later he became the country’s Secretary of Defense. Brundtland followed in his footsteps, also becoming a physician, in her case specializing in public health. With her MD in hand, she worked with the poor and especially with women needing information and services about their reproductive health. She was a leading advocate for the right of women to choose the course of their pregnancies, including the availability of abortion.
So, when the prime minister asked to meet with her in 1974, she expected it was about her father’s work or her position on abortion. No, the prime minister said, nothing about that. He wanted her to become Norway’s Minister of the Environment. Initially shocked, she accepted, at 35 becoming the first woman environmental minister in the world.
She went to work with enthusiasm. Too much enthusiasm, some thought. She rankled the industrial community with new regulations and pollution fines, put more land into national parks than some thought advisable, and generally positioned the environment into the very center of the political landscape. When cajoled to moderate her views, she replied, “Nature could not afford any indifference.”
Read MoreApril is Keep America Beautiful Month
Back in 1971, The Keep America Beautiful organization teamed up with the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts to create Keep American Beautiful Day. It was expanded in 1982 to a week, and then to the entire month of April in 1984. As spring takes hold of the weather and the landscape awaken with the greening of trees and grasses, the blooming of wildflowers and the melodies of nesting songbirds, we, too, ought to take special notice of our beautiful environment—and do something to, as they say, keep it beautiful.
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