My first article appeared in 1974. Elaine reminds me that I
had had so many rejections by that time that I sent the piece off to the Architectural
Association Quarterly saying to her that if they didn't take it I'd give
up on writing. The threat, though silent, seems to have worked. Having now
written many thousands of articles, it has all become a bit of blur. But digging
through the boxes at home, I surfaced a number which were important to me
at the time - and they are a key part of the Articles section here.
There is little point in listing the literally thousands of
articles I have written for publications like Biotechnology Bulletin,
Earthlife News, The ENDS Report and The Guardian - let
alone the many occasional pieces written for the likes of BP Shield,
Director Magazine, Glaxo World, ICI Magazine, The
International Herald Tribune, Management Today, New Scientist,
The Observer, Resurgence, The Sunday Times and so on.
Worth mentioning, though, are the columns I wrote for publications like Tomorrow,
Nikkei Ecology and The Guardian - notably, in the latter case,
'From the Top' (1996-2000).
I also regularly interview leading figures in the CSR and SD
areas for SustainAbility's newsletter, Radar. Recent interviews have profiled
Ed Gibson (Microsoft UK's Chief Security Advisor),
Al Gore (former US vice-president), Kevin Kelly
(Chief Maverick, Wired magazine, among many other things), Jed
Emerson (originator of the 'Blended Value Proposition'), Sara
Fox (new Building Director for Swiss Re's London HQ, the 'Erotic
Gerkin'), Paul Rice (President and CEO, TransFair USA), David
Stubbs (Head of Environment, London 2012 Olympics bid) and Angela
Wilkinson (Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS). See
www.sustainability.com/radar for details. See also the monthly 'Full
Disclosure' columns I contribute to Grist magazine with Mark Lee (http://www.grist.org/biz/fd).
The first decade
Winding the clock back, pieces that stand out in my memory from the first
decade of writing include:
1974: 'Paolo Soleri: A Flight from Flatness,' Architectural
Association Quarterly, vol 6, no 1. The 6-page article also featured 10
of my photographs of Arcosanti.
1975: 'Strangers in the Playground,' New Behaviour,
18 September. A report on some of the school playground greening projects
I had been involved in around London.
1975-on: 'Beware the Wrath of Osiris,' New Scientist,
11 December 1975. This 3-page article was high-risk, exposing problems with
a major development project I had been involved with in Egypt. In the event,
however, it led to a restructuring of the work in Egypt - and to New Scientist
commissioning dozens of contributions over the next 5 years. One early article
in which I switched from international issues like desertification back to
UK issues, was 'Breathing Life into the Thames,' which appeared in the 24
March 1977 issue of New Scientist. A longer treatment of the subject
appears in the book The English Landscape, 2000.
An unusual set of contributions was commissioned by then-Editor
Dr Bernard Dixon. It focused on the role and contributions of the ecologists
who were increasingly being employed by planning authorities. The 3 articles
in this series were co-authored with John Roberts
of TEST. They were: 'Who Needs Ecologists?', 27 October 1977; 'Is There an
Ecologist in the House?', 3 November 1977; and 'The Ecology of Tomorrow's
World,' 17 November 1977.
These articles, in turn, led to a series of articles in which
I explored the ways in which business was adapting to the environmental challenge.
One of these was 'Reclaiming the Cornish Moonscape,' focusing on English China
Clays (5 January 1978). And the New Scientist writing, done while I
continued to work with TEST, led directly to my being invited to be a co-founder
of Environmental Data Services (ENDS) in 1978 - and the founder-Editor of
The ENDS Report.
1977: 'The Impact of Development Projects on Estuarine
and Other Wetland Ecosystems,' Environmental Conservation, vol 4, no
2, Summer 1977. Commissioned by Professor Nicholas Polunin, this was probably
the most widely referenced piece of work of mine in the scientific world.
It built on the New Scientist article on Egypt's Lake Manzala (1975), but
went much wider. Among other things, it led to my being invited to Nicholas
Polunin's Second International Conference on the Environmental Future, held
in Reykjavik in 1977. I wrote a 3-page article on the conference on the flight
back to London, which appeared as 'The Reykjavik Imperative' in Is 23 June
1977 issue. This was also the event where I met people like Teddy
Goldsmith, Editor of The Ecologist (we shared a bedroom for a number
of days) and Buckminster Fuller, a long-time
hero.
1978: 'Red Herrings in the Inner City,' The New Ecologist,
no 3, May/June. A direct follow-on from the meeting with Teddy Goldsmith.
Although I have prioritised publication in business media, I have also enormously
valued such opportunities to publish in what would once have been viewed as
'alternative media'. A case in point has been my writing through the 1990s
for Resurgence.
1978: A key piece in the development of my own thinking
appeared in New Scientist on 7 September 1978, in which I reviewed
the various handbooks produced by Social Audit. Much later, in the mid-1990s,
Social Audit founder Charles Medawar would
become a member of SustainAbility's Council. The notion of auditing companies
was to resurface both at ENDS and in SustainAbility's work from 1990 on.
1980: 'The Environmental Pressure,' Management Today,
January. The first of several contributions to the magazine, as part of an
effort to mainstream the environmental agenda. Management Today gave
a full-page review to my first book, The Ecology of Tomorrow's World,
in its February 1981 edition. Another major piece - 'Making Money out of Sunshine'
- appeared in Management Today in December 1981.
1985: Outside the first decade horizon, but building
on earlier work, Director Magazine published my piece 'Please: No More
Bhopals' (their choice of title) in its March 1985 issue.
The last decade
While continuing to write Biotechnology Bulletin until a few years
ago, a project that started in 1983, I also did regular columns for publications
like The Guardian, Tomorrow and Nikkei Ecology. In addition,
I have been a regular contributor to magazines like Resurgence and
to SustainAbility's own Radar,
available on SustainAbility's website.
As an illustration of the nature and diversity of current articles,
here are several pieces written during 2003:
— An article on
the World Economic Forum's Davos 2003 event appeared in Director magazine's
April 2003 issue.
— A column for
Forbes magazine's special issue on sustainable development.
— My second
piece of the year for the openDemocracy website (www.opendemocracy,net),
this time on biotechnology and sustainable development.
— A profile
of Jed Emerson and his Blended Value Project for the October-November issue
of Radar.
— My October piece
for Nikkei Ecology, which focused on the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
— An obituary
of Max Nicholson for Resurgence magazine.
