Kimon Valaskakis was an academic, an executive, a consultant, and a diplomat. He was a professor of economics at the University of Montreal for more than 30 years and Ambassador of Canada to the OECD from 1995-1999. He was also president of the Club of Athens, an international initiative involving world leaders from the public and private sectors, and senior advisor to the G8 Research Group. He headed the Gamma Institute at McGill, an international think tank specializing in forecasting and planning studies. From 1974-1980 he was Director of The Conserver Society Project, the first major Gamma Institute Project co-funded by fourteen agencies and departments, including the Science Council of Canada. This project led to the 1979 publication of The Conserver Society. Valaskakis published 8 books, more than 100 scientific papers, and 20 book length monographs. He was an extremely active public speaker, giving about 500 public speeches in the 1990s alone.
Valaskakis’ lecture focused on the process of developing the Conserver Society as a policy option in Canada. At the Gamma Institute, a team of 15 experts from 10 different fields conducted research into Canadians’ relationship with the environment and produced four reports outlining both the dangers of continuing with our current mass consumption society, as well as several concrete ways to move towards a more responsible society. Since the immediate postwar period, the affluent society had put forward two commandments: thou shalt consume and thou shalt grow. The danger of this growth and consumption-oriented mindset, Valaskakis explained, was that it led easily into what he called the “squander society,” where resources were used so inefficiently that over time we came to do less with more. The Conserver Society sought to reorient this – to do more with less. In the remainder of his talk, Valaskakis outlined three potential scenarios for the implementation of the Conserver Society paradigm. Ultimately, the Conserver Society proposed by Gamma attempted to move beyond the negativity of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth to make a positive statement about the potential of conservation, to make environmental responsibility exciting, interesting, and a desirable insurance policy for the future.
Listen to his lecture below.
