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Activities
- Publications  Brussels airport, after Toyota visit,
2003. |
Projects: ArchiveSo how did I get into this line of work? Well, I desperately wanted to get involved in the environmental world from the late 1960s, but not in an NGO (non-governmental organisation). I loved what NGOs were doing, but I wanted to be involved in building a new order, not critiquing the old one. My M. Phil. degree at UCL was really an excuse to push out and talk to lots of people, aided and abetted by a traveling fellowship. When my 80,000-word thesis, Rooting Among Ruins, was reviewed by the examiners, they were baffled: what, they wondered, had it got to do with town planning? The subject I had chosen to focus on was the way people and communities related to their built environments and the ecological, psychological and sociological syndromes that followed mismanaged urban redevelopment. Luckily, the thesis was accepted—and only missed being published by Heinemann by a whisker. Then a couple of weeks after the M. Phil course ended, at a time when I still hadn't got a clue about what I would do next, I found a note in my pigeon-hole from John Roberts. Shortly afterwards, I walked straight into a job with TEST. When I look back at the work I have done since the early 1970s, it seems to fall into two main periods: during the first, from 1973 to 1978, I mainly focused on what governments could do to tackle environmental problems. From 1975, however, I also wrote a good deal for New Scientist and increasingly focused on business. That led to the five years I spent with Environmental Data Services (ENDS), which I co-founded in 1978. That, in turn, inaugurated what to date has been a 25-year period of focusing mainly on trying to achieve sustainability with business, through markets. For a number of years in the mid-1980s, John Elkington Associates employed several people and we did some fascinating projects. But almost all the project work I have done since 1987 has been done through SustainAbility, with the book projects tending to straddle between SustainAbility and John Elkington Associates. To begin with, when I started taking an interest in the positive aspects of what business was doing on environment in the late 1970s this was a pretty thinly occupied piece of territory. There were people like Michael Royston with his book Pollution Prevention Pays, but I was lucky to be in fairly early. And what did the NGOs think of all of this? Well, it varied. Some, like WWF, were interested in building bridges, although they were massively conflicted internally. Schizophrenic, you might say. Some people wanted to explore ways of working with business, while others were utterly opposed. Some of the more radical groups told me it was fine to experiment, but they felt the only way forward was to pin industry down with an ever-more-constraining set of laws, rules and standards. The image of Gulliver and the Lilliputians sprang readily to mind. By contrast, I have always been interested in how we can harness people's better instincts, coupled with basic self-interest and the profit motive, to drive change. That's what books like The Ecology of Tomorrow's World (1980), The Green Capitalists (1987), Green Pages (1988), The Green Business Guide (1991), Cannibals with Forks (1997) and The Chrysalis Economy (2001) were all about. In terms of actual clients, I have probably most enjoyed working with Novo Nordisk since 1989, Shell since 1997 and, more recently, it's been fascinating developing a new food project with Unilever. But, while most of the work has been with companies, by choice, I have also enormously enjoyed working at different stages with clients like the OECD, USAID and Greenpeace. People used to talk about our steering a middle path between fiercely opposed interests. It's not really like that. At least in my experience the middle path rarely exists in areas which are unfolding as fast and extensively as the sustainable agenda. You can't be wholly pro-business or pro-NGO. You have to take different ideas, proposals and initiatives on their merits. But the fundamental evolutionary principle has to be that we should encourage experiment, celebrating successes - and learning fast from failures. My consulting work has been carried out for three main types of clients: 1. Government agencies: 2. NGOs: - Amnesty International: 3. Companies: In addition, I have worked with a number of socially responsible investment funds and organisations: - The Merlin Ecology Fund - The National Provident Institution (NPI) - Storebrand - ING - Sustainable Asset Management (SAM) - The Dow Jones Sustainability Group Indexes (DJSGI)
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©2009 John
Elkington. All rights reserved. |