|
Journal
- Latest
entries
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
Archive
Journal entries prior to May 2008 can be found in the old archived site here
|
|
Journal: October, 2009
Display brief entries | Display full entries
A Week on Wings
London - Singapore - Adelaide - Melbourne - Singapore - London
29 October 2009
Adelaide Convention Centre, detail
Turtle skeleton in Museum of Southern Australia
Mock-up of plesiosaur in pursuit of lunch
Knapped flints - exquisite
Railway tracks, looking from my room south into sunset - conference centre roof, fountain and sea
Back this morning from a whistle-stop tour of Australia, mainly focusing on Adelaide, where I keynoted the annual sustainable development conference organised by the Minerals Council of Australia. My panel was chaired by Sue Sara of Xstrata, and was made up of Mike Rann, Southern Australia's Premier, and John Strongman, ex-World Bank.... more >
Pete, Gus & Hank
Three smugglers in a war-surplus Walrus
24 October 2009
One of the stories my mother has told over the years (and we went through again this morning, at my request) is that of her oldest brother, Peter Adamson, who was part of a smuggling trio in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Known to insiders as 'Pete, Gus and Hank', they flew somewhere between one and three old Walrus seaplanes back and forth across the Channel, bringing back perfume and various sorts of alcohol.... more >
Citizen of Hopenhagen
My third passport
24 October 2009
Travelling to Singapore and Australia this evening, so visas have been on my mind. Have two passports, to facilitate getting visas while travelling, but no visa needed for Singapore. Nor, it turns out, to become a citizen of Hopenhagen, so I signed up to the latter last night. This is an international movement to drive action on climate change at the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen this December. ... more >
Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 148?
A bit of a s-t-r-e-t-c-h
21 October 2009
Did a fascinating session today with a US company that will be 200 in 2097, when I would be 148, exploring what the world will be like then. One exercise involved going back to 1921 and trying to think how one might have foreseen then such subsequent events as the Holocaust, the atomic bombing of Japan, the invention of antibiotics, the Ozone Hole, the Internet, a black President of the USA, and so on. Taxing, but fun.... more >
Time Machine
22 years in boxes
20 October 2009
Elaine, Sam and I headed across to Hammersmith this morning to check through SustainAbility's storeroom in a repository that used to be a Ford factory. Weird going through crate after crate of files, papers, reports and books dating back up to 22 years.... more >
&samhoud
A day out in Utrecht
19 October 2009
Did a flying visit to Utrecht today to keynote a entrepreneurship session at &samhoud. Great fun - and met a fair few people I knew from around Holland. Nice to be celebrated as the 'Father of the 3Ps', People, Planet & Profit, even if it seems a lifetime or two ago.... more >
Sri Lankan campaign gains traction
Noam Chomsky and others join up
17 October 2009
There are moments when history shows that a failure to protest human rights abuses led on to worse abuses on a much greater scale. This was true of the treatment of many groups of people in Germany and the USSR ahead of WWII, for example. And with two emerging 21st century superpowers currently deeply involved in the Sri Lankan crisis, I believe that it is crucial that we signal international disapproval and rejection of what is happening there in the wake of the defeat of the Tamil Tigers.... more >
Champions of the Earth
Three weeks to nominate
16 October 2009
In 1989, Julia Hailes and I were elected to the UN Global 500 Roll of Honour, awarded for extraordinary environmental achievements - the highlight of which was meeting so many others around the world who had been spotlighted in the same way. Now, against a tight deadline, nominations are being invited for the successor scheme, Champions of the Earth. Any ideas?... more >
Can (this) man live by social entrepreneurship alone?
15 October 2009
Vote now and he'll try. See here.... more >
Comment on Novartis and animal welfare activism
In today's FT.online
14 October 2009
I comment on the attacks by animal welfare activists on Daniel Vasella of Novartis in today's FT online.... more >
Into the Void
Courtesy of Unilever
13 October 2009
Exhibition of past Unilever Series installations
Thanks to Unilever, Elaine and I have seen a number of the Unilever Series installations at the Tate Modern, including those by Rachel Whiteread (2005), Carsten Holler (2006) and Doris Salcedo (2007) efforts, of which we liked the second and third best. Today, we were invited to see the tenth commission for the series, 'How It Is', by Miroslaw Balka. A sense of what it's like can be had here.... more >
Which came first ...
... the double or the triple bottom line?
11 October 2009
Talking to Sean Harrigan this week, at the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Board meeting in Amsterdam - he used to be President of CalPERS - we got into the question of which came first, the double bottom line - or the triple bottom line?... more >
Generation A and the Bees
Who Ordered Colony Collapse?
10 October 2009
VERY few books keep me abed until I have finished them, but Generation A did this morning. One of the things that held me was the way a sequence of stories told by people who had been stung by bees after these and other insects had disappeared from the planet accumulated to create a spooky bigger picture. Few things have nagged at my worry centres more in recent years than what has been labelled Colony Collapse Disorder.... more >
One Stone ...
... Six Birds
09 October 2009
Delighted to welcome One Stone Advisors, featuring a number of my favourite women. The name goes back to 1997, when The Environment Foundation (now The Foundation for Democracy & Sustainable Development), which I chair, and SustainAbility, which I then chaired, organised a conference at the Kensington Roof Gardens. The theme was 'Three Birds, One Stone', and we were exploring early efforts to address the triple bottom line.... more >
Rethink. Rebuild. Report.
Theme of the 2010 GRI Conference
09 October 2009
View of Moon on my walk back to the hotel last night
Spent past three days in Amsterdam, with the Board of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). Among other things, we discussed the agenda for the GRI 2010 Conference, whose theme is Rethink. Rebuild. Report. More anon.... more >
Shaking Hands With My Inner Viking
Dupuytrens Contracture has me by the right hand
09 October 2009
Some time ago, I went to see the doctor about nodules that were forming on the ring finger tendon of my right hand. I now find that it seems to be linked to Northern European ancestry - and particularly, at least by tradition, to Viking ancestry. I seem to be a marauder at heart.... more >
International Day of Climate Action
Conversation with Bill McKibben of 350.org
08 October 2009
My interview with Bill McKibben of 350.org has been posted today here, with a parallel piece by Gary Kendall, SustainAbility's Director of Energy and Climate Change, due to be posted on the SustainAbility site shortly. The theme: October 24, which will be the first International Day of Climate Action.... more >
A $35 million round trip
Social entrepreneur clowns around in space
03 October 2009
It is a couple of years since an X-Prize Foundation team came to visit us at SustainAbility's London offices, but I already knew of them through magazines like Wired and Fast Company - and have since kept a fairly close eye on their doings. Still, they were brought forcefully back to mind when Alejandro (Litovsky) and I met people from Concordia 21 at Richard Branson's HQ in Hammersmith a few months back - the walls were blazoned with an evolutionary tree beginning with Homo volans and topping out with SpaceShipOne (see above). See also July 6 entry here.
Branson is now helping to fund further work through Virgin Galactic, with a typically saucy picture of their Eve launch vehicle (or 'Mothership', with the Virgin maiden often said to represent Branson's mother) shown below.
A short, hyperlinked update on the latest Prizes developed by the X-Prize Foundation can be found here. Among other things, it talks about the $35 million fare paid by Cirque du Soleil billionaire Guy Laliberte for an almost-out-of-this-world experience, flying to the limits of Earth's atmosphere. Given Laliberte's origins as a social entrepreneur, there's a neat set of connections here somewhere, but I'll work on them later.
... more >
|
|
