One of the spooky aspects of Googling your own name, as I did this morning in search of a column that appeared in yesterday’s issue of Le Monde, is that you come across references you didn’t know existed. Today it was a Wikibook chapter on ‘The Ones Who Made History’.
There I found myself in pole position in a listing of sustainability pioneers, identified as ‘The Father’, with the others being Stephan Schmidheiny (The Visionary), Bill Drayton (The Prophet), Anita Roddick (The Provocateur), Ray Anderson (The Revolutionary), Oded Grajew (The Benchmark), Yves Chouinard (The Explorer) and Antonio Luiz Da Cunha Seabra (The Philosopher).
While it’s nice to appear in such lists, if someone asked me who I see as the Father of the sustainabilty movement, I would come up with a list of other, stronger candidates for the tag. They would include Maurice Strong and Max Nicholson. Success has many fathers, they say, but these two were among those who influenced my choice of priorities and trajectories. And don’t get me started on mothers.
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