Utterly glorious day, blue skies throughout. Will and Carla (Rosenzweig) arrive early for breakfast - and then we drive out on the M25 and M26 to Kent, and to Sissinghurst. Abominable traffic jam headed clockwise as we head anti-clockwise, with people out of their cars for miles on end, but somehow we get through unscathed.... more >

Google's new game
Played at 2BP

Google's homepage sports a Pacman-style game today, which had Charmian and Sam in raucous raptures for a while this afternoon.  Having never played such games, I didn't want t be shown up and continued with my writing tasks, although couldn't resist a snapshot or two.... more >

Physic Ventures and Chelsea Physic Garden
Health, wellbeing and sustainable lifestyles

Early on Thursday evening, courtesy of Will Rosenzweig and his team at Physic Ventures, Amy (Birchall) and I made our way across to the Chelsea Physic Garden, by Tube and taxi. Arriving slightly early, we wandered around the paths, where we met the Curator Rosie Atkins, who very kindly took us under her wing and showed us a number of the Garden's delights. These included the difference between sweet cicely (edible) and hemlock (potentially fatal), a test I passed because we have sweet cicely in our garden; a grapefruit tree called - I think - Queenie, with fruit, that grew from a pip; the glazed containers in which early plant-hunters shipped their finds; and a cork tree festooned with corks. ... more >

Green Secrets Shared
Comment on cradle-to-cradle news

As I travelled around Germany this week, I was fielding calls from Peter Marsh of the Financial Times on the news that Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart were opening up their cradle-to-cradle product assessment and design methodology to others players in the market. Some of my comments made it into the final piece, here. Other recent media work can be accessed here.... more >

SAP Sustainability Events in Frankfurt
From push to pull

Took the Eurostar from London to Brussels yesterday, then an ICE train to Frankfurt, arriving late - but just in time for dinner with a number of people from SAP. Managed somehow to mislay the ticket I had printed off for the ICE train while still in London, and scrambled around Brussels to find a way of accessing and printing the ticket - trying first an internet cafe and then an Ibis Hotel, helped remotely by Sam. Luckily, we made it work - but I never came across the ticket again, suggesting some sort of Bermuda Triangle in my luggage.... more >

Cricket in the Rain
Smells of early summer

Elaine and I walked Hania across to Barnes station just before 5 this afternoon, breathing in the smells of the Hawthorn blossom and what may have been Queen Anne's Lace or Hedge Parsley. As we walked back, the cricketers came out to play, so we wandered in among the trees to watch, partly because the rain was starting fall.... more >

The Garden in Full Bloom
Bluebells and sweet cicely

Our garden is more or less at it peak at the moment, spilling over with bluebells and sweet cicely, and with all sorts of plants and vines filling the air with perfume - particularly something that has scrambled up the eucalyptus from a neighbour's garden. A fair number of bees around, particularly various types of bumblebee, but the fate of bees internationally is a growing concern. Their contribution to agriculture is part of the evolving ecosystem services space, something we cover in our latest report, The Biosphere Economy. Many years ago, I wanted to keep bees, even had a pair of hives and a honey extractor inherited from an uncle of Kerry Effingham's, but life intervened. Apparently there's a new type of hive, much simpler, which has had me musing again.... more >

If It's Saturday, It Must Be Bradford
Through acid yellow landscape to the School of Management

Travelled by train, via Leeds, to Bradford - to do a lecture at Bradford University's School of Management. Amazing to see the landscape taken over by the acid yellow colour of rape fields. Read a stack of magazines, including Newsweek, which foresees the end of the euro and a second great depression. Theme of my talk was the Phoenix Economy, the title of our report last year, which plays into the same space, with discussion of the implication of the work of long-dead economists like Nikolai Kondratiev and Joseph Schumpeter on long-wave economic cycles.... more >

Little Sister Treats Big Sister
Volans evening out with SustainAbility

Lovely evening at Vats in Lamb's Conduit Street with nine of us, from Volans (Amy, Charmian, Erica, Rafael, Sam) and SustainAbility (Alex, Gary, JP). Much discussion of the nodoubt apocryphal story of English archers' fingers and the origin of the V-sign. Nice that these days Volans can afford to treat SustainAbility. Afterwards, cycled home in a slightly light-headed state, though cool evening air helped no end.... more >

Back from Brazil
Instituto Ethos conference

Arrived in Sao Paulo on Sunday morning and then was immersed in several days of meetings with the Instituto Ethos Advisory Board. One of the things we discussed with Ethos founder Oded Grajew was the possibility of organising a parallel conference in 2012 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 UN Earth Summit in 1992. Later we all cascaded into the annual Ethos conference. I did a couple of sessions, chairing one with Pavan Sukhdev of Deutsche Bank and UNEP, Otto Scharmer, of MIT, who focuses on what he calls 'Theory U', and Vania Somavilla, who is Director of Environment and Sustainability at the mining company Vale. Will try and track down and post some photographs - I took very few this week. Alejandro (Litovsky) and I also did a session to launch our new report, The Biosphere Economy.... more >

WBCSD Spotlights Biosphere Economy Report
Second Volans survey launches

This month sees the launch of the second Volans survey report, the first having been The Phoenix Economy. This time, we are focusing on ecosystem services, in The Biosphere Economy - which has just been spotlighted on the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) website. Am currently in Brazil, where we will do a local launch of the report at the Ethos annual conference in a few days. Our third survey report, The Transparent Economy, will launch at the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) annual conference in Amsterdam later in the month.... more >

Proposition in the Park
Dawes Mean Street afficionado

As I cycled in this morning, heading north through Hyde Park towards Speaker's Corner, another cyclist overtook, then stopped dead. I overtook him, then he came up alongside. He said he had also once had a Dawes Mean Street of this vintage - I bought the bike in 1990, I think, but his had been wrecked in a traffic accident. He wanted to buy mine, but I had to declare my love for it - not least with its various scars and dents from accidents it has somehow carried me through. But a rather nice moment, nonetheless. A bit like having another rider admire one's horse, not least because I had just passed a couple of what looked like Buckingham Palace horse-drawn carriages about three minutes earlier. ... more >

Cameraman
The Life & Work of Jack Cardiff

Went to the NFT to see a special showing of Craig McCall's wonderful film Cameraman, on the life and work of cinematographer Jack Cardiff.  He shot films like A Matter of Life and Death, The African Queen and Black Narcissus. Martin Scorsese took the stage to introduce the showing, followed by Sanjeev Bhaskar. The film has been 13 years in the making - and Gaia helped at one point, so she got a credit. Afterwards, Elaine, Gaia, Hania, Jake, Tor, Steve, Sandar and I had dinner together, in a tented restaurant on the north side of the river, where the air was cold, the food was cold, but the company was wonderfully warming.... more >

BP's reputation oiled
Does black slick reflect oil giant's dropping of 'green'?

We haven't read much - if anything - about it in the press, but one of the things that Tony Hayward did when he took over as BP's CEO was to quietly drop one of the values that had been adopted and trumpeted by his predecessor, Lord John Brown. The value was green.... more >