The sorcerer of Baca Grande

We are in southern Colorado, in the United States, in a desert valley at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. It is one of those places that seem like the end of the world. But unexpectedly, on the gigantic Baca Grande ranch, in the municipality of Crestone, we find a whole series of religious centers that seem absolutely out of context: Zen Buddhists, Tibetan Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and, even, a space for followers of the New Age, that spiritual current that was so successful decades ago. What is the meaning of all this? The story begins in 1979, when the Canadian millionaire Maurice Strong and his wife, the Dane Hanne Marstrand, decided that they would organize the epicenter of the planet's new spirituality in those lands.

Rich from childhood, Hanne used to have visions of angels and claimed to remember past lives. The trigger for the Baca Grande adventure was the appearance in Hanne's life of a man named Glen Anderson who claimed to have had visions where the world's religious leaders all united at Baca Grande to create a new world order that would save the planet from collapse. The immediate result will be the couple's purchase of a large tract of land where they will invite all sorts of religious entities. A key person in the project's dissemination was actress Shirley MacLaine, a friend of both and closely linked to the New Age and spirituality in general.If Hanna had been born into a wealthy family, Maurice Strong had come into the world in a completely opposite environment, the son of parents with great economic difficulties. But with little more than 10 years he decided that he would not only escape poverty, but also leave his mark on this world. His voracity for success led him to complete his compulsory studies very early and to falsify his age to start working as soon as possible. He enlisted in the merchant navy and sailed from a very young age along the coasts of British Columbia, an activity that led him to work as a fur trader in the Arctic and even to live with the Inuit. In 1943, he had what can be considered a revelation, because he read on the front page of the newspaper that Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to create the UN as soon as the war ended. He felt challenged by this, with the certainty that one day he would be part of it.In the early fifties, he settled in a prosperous Alberta to work as a financial analyst specializing in natural resources. This job allowed him to become friends with an oil entrepreneur, Jack Gallagher, with whom he began to work. At twenty-five, he was already vice president of Dome Petroleum, his friend's company. Investments in oil and natural gas prospecting provided him with his first million, while Power Corporation of Canada, a leading energy investment firm, hired him as president. At thirty-one, he was already at the top. Later, he would still be president of PetroCanada and Ontario Hydro. But there was something missing: his mother had told him that if he tried hard, he could change the world.The turning point occurred in 1965, when the Prime Minister of Canada summoned him to entrust him with directing the Canadian International Development Assistance program, which grouped all the country's external aid. He left his job and threw himself into it, as he would also do with the next Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau. In 1972, he organized the first world conference on the environment and shortly thereafter directed the UN's environmental programs. In 1987, he was the ideologue of the Brundtland Report, which proved to be transcendental in the evolution of the green movement. The last decades of his life were dedicated to this type of policy, to the point of being a mentor to Klaus Schwab, creator of the Davos Forum, and a key influence on Al Gore in his fight against climate change.A journalist who in 1990 visited the religious facilities of Baca Grande interviewed Strong and he made a series of quite unsettling confessions that were supposedly the basis of a novel he was preparing: “Rich countries will always refuse to reduce their impact on the environment. But a group of world leaders, who function as a secret society, have felt that the only hope to save the planet is for industrialized civilizations to collapse. And they will cause this collapse”.