Journal
Sunday, October 30, 2005
SHE SAT DOWN SO WE COULD STAND UP
Was reading Nine Horses, a slim volume of poetry by Billy Collins (Picador, 2002), this morning and idly musing over my long-standing appetite for obituaries. We get two daily newspapers, The Times and The Financial Times, and I always turn to the Times obituaries section first. In a poem entitled Obituaries, Collins has this to say:
But eventually you may join
the crowd who turn here first to see
who has fallen in the night,
who has left a shape of air walking in their place.
He argues that:
... all the survivors huddle at the end
under the roof of a paragraph
as if they had sidestepped the flame of death.
Well, maybe, but it's the power of the stories that I find irrestistible. And one this week, that for civil rights campaigner Rosa Parks, was just about as good as it gets (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1842813,00.html). Quoted in The New York Times, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said, "She sat down in order that we might stand up. Paradoxically, her imprisonment opened the doors for our long journey to freedom" (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/national/25parks.html?hp).
She will be the first woman to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda. For me, her act of defiance, more or less exactly 50 years ago on 1 December 1955, helped lay the foundations not only for the modern civil and human rights movements, but also for the environmental movement. The combination of widespread passive resistance with the political ability to find the allies needed to drive through major legislative changes in the 1960s was a model that would later be copied by the best environmental activists.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
HURRICANE SURFACES - AGAIN
Weird how it keeps happening. Had an e-mail last night from Crispin Whiting, who had found me via the blog, saying that part of Tim's Battle of Britain Hurricane (see September 14 entry) was being sold on EBay as item #6573315928.
Turned out that Crispin's great-uncle was a rear-gunner in WWII. I said I had always thought such people were incredibly brave, or innocents aloft, given that fighters generally went for the rear-gunner first. He replied: "Tail-end Charlie was indeed an unenviable post - particularly in a Wellington, when the only way in and out was on the ground. George was presumed lost by the rest of his crew on the first 1,000 bomber raid on Cologne. After the bomb run he opened his vacuum flask coffee only to have knocked out his hand by a close flak burst. The coffee went down the intercom and he spent the rest of a cold run home listening to the skipper first of all urgently calling 'George, George, are you OK?' and then the rest of the crew discussing how poor old George had bought it."
In a later e-mail, Crispin wondered whether the story hadn't got slightly exaggerated over the years, but it brought back those utterly grim missions in a very human way.
BHP BILLITON
Across to St Paul's area to facilitate a stakeholder session for BHP Billiton (http://www.bhpbilliton.com/bb/sustainableDevelopment/home.jsp) with Judy Kuszewski. On the BHPB side, one of those taking part was Mick Roche, who has played a central role in getting the 'Green Lead' initiative off the ground (www.greenlead.com). As he has long admitted, this is an oxymoron, but I'm impressed with what I have heard, and interested to see whether the same approach can be applied elsewhere in the industry. This is something BHP Billtion are already working on. Another initiative the company is involved in, designed to tackle ethical, social and environmental issues in the trade of diamonds and gold, is the Council for Responsible Jewellery Practices (http://www.responsiblejewellery.com).
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
WAL-MART'S GIFT HORSE
First General Electric, now Wal-Mart - who next? ExxonMobil? The number of major 'problem' corporations appearing to roll over in the US is growing, with Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott claiming to have had an epiphany on climate change and the wider environmental challenge (http://walmartstores.com/GlobalWMStoresWeb/navigate.do?catg=463). "This used to be controversial, but the science is in and it is overwhelming," he said. He also noted that "we should view the environment as [Hurricane] Katrina in slow motion." Wal-Mart now says it will invest $500 million a year in new technology, including renewable energy systems.
Well, I'm not usually one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I'll bet the Trojans wished they had. And there is something about the nature of Wal-Mart's pledges which suggest that this huge commercial predator is highly unlikely to change its political and commercial spots any time soon. Scott said that Wal-Mart was going to move on from its historic "defensive posture", but this still seems like little more than active defence, given the growing pressures brought to bear on it recently in such areas as healthcare provision for workers, the destruction of town centres (with some critics seeing it as a "retail cancer"), for destroying local jobs through outsourcing, a shoddy environmental record, and so ever on. The old phrase "Trust - but verify" comes to mind, but even though Conservation International is apparently backing the company (though I don't see anything on its website to that effect), I can't imagine trusting Wal-Mart this side of the next millennium.
Saturday, October 22, 2005
ECGD INTERIM RESPONSE ON BRIBERY & CORRUPTION
The Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD), where I now chair the Advisory Council, has just published its Interim Response to the consultation it has carried out on proposed changes to its anti-bribery and corruption procedures introduced in December 2004. The Interim Response, the representations received and the minutes of the three meetings involving ECGD officials and consultees, can be found at www.ecgd.gov.uk/index/pi_home/pi_pc/abc_int_resp.htm. The closing date for representations on the proposals contained in the Interim Response is 18 November 2005.
Recently came across an interesting report on the emerging agenda for export credit agencies like ECGD, produced by the World Resources Institute (WRI: www.wri.org). The report is titled Diverging Paths: What Future for Export Credit Agencies in Development Finance? One of the authors is James Harmon, a former Chairman of the US export credit agency, the Export-Import Bank. A key section of the report, pages 20-30, outlines a "Reform Agenda Supportive of Sustainable Development", with increased transparency in lending and measures to combat bribery and corruption seen to be central.
Friday, October 21, 2005
LSE SUSTAINABILITY FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM
Spoke early this afternoon at the launch of a new Sustainability Fellowship program at the London School of Economics (LSE). Part of a $8.6 million initiative by the Alcoa Foundation (see www.alcoa.com, under 'Community), the six-year program is designed to support and advance "exemplary work" in the fields of conservation and sustainability through fellowships for outstanding academics and leading NGO practitioners.
Through 2009, the program will support the research of some 30 academics and 60 sustainability practitioners from NGOs around the world. Shared the platform with folk like LSE Director Howard Davies, Yvonne Ryder (Director, LSE Environment), Andy Gouldson (Director of LSE's Alcoa Foundation Conservation and Sustainability Programme), Alcoa Foundation President Kathy Buechel, Philippe Royer - President of Alcoa Europe Mill Products and, from Insight Investment, Craiz Mackenzie.
Slightly sticky point when someone asked a question about defence-related sales of Alcoa's products, but overall a creditable showing by a company that most people would see as a sustainability leader, albeit in a sector with a prodigious energy appetite. (When Julia Hailes and I were elected to the UN Global 500 Roll of Honour in 1989, designed to acknowledge individual achievements in the environmental area, it was in the company of at least one business - Golden Hope Plantations, from Malaysia - and the following year Alcoa's Australian operations were similarly celebrated.)
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
30 YEARS OF UNEP'S PARIS OFFICE
Notre Dame-wards, along the SeineBy Eurostar yesterday morning to Paris, to speak at the 30th anniversary conference of the United Nations Environment Programme's Department of Trade, Industry & Economics (DTIE). Originally called the Industry & Environment Office, this was set up in Paris in 1975 - and was soon working intensively on such areas as ozone depletion.
In his speech, UNEP's current executive director, Klaus Toepfer(http://www.unep.org/Documents.multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=43&ArticleID=3174), recalled that the first executive director was Baron Leon de Rosen. De Rosen already seemed to me an old man when I first met him at the beginning of the 1980s, but he only died last year - and his story was an extraordinary one. Born in 1912, he started as a worked in a car factory, before ending up as the company's deputy director. He later managed several big companies and actively encouraged the adoption of environmental principles, making him an ideal candidate for the Paris office, to which he recruited by Maurice Strong.
De Rosen's successor was Dominique Larre (does anyone know how to do accents - Leon would benefit too - in Blogger?), who was instrumental in organising 1984's first World Industry Conference on Environmental Management (WICEM), held in Versailles. That helped shape my thinking for 1987's The Green Capitalists, published by Gollancz, and was also where I first met Gus Speth of WRI, who I saw again recently at Yale, and with whom I would do a series of reports on the implications and applications of emerging technologies.
But WICEM was also, I think, the first time that I consciously coined a new piece of language, environmental excellence. Working for UNEP at the conference, I worked with Peter Bunyard to pull together the WICEM report. Having read the Peters & Waterman bestseller In Search of Excellence on the plane across from London, and noting that it made no mention whatever of health, safety or environment, I dotted the phrase 'environmental excellence' through the report - and it promptly took wing. (I would also take part in WICEM II, held in 1991, and in a European version, EICEM, organised by the likes of Wouter van Dieren of IMSA, a long-standing colleague.)
But for me the real UNEP breakthrough came in 1987, when Dominique Larre was replaced by Jacqueline Aloisi de Larderel. She has often reminded me, sometimes in public, of the first conversation we had, in a London hotel, during which I was fairly critical of UNEP and the Paris office. But she - and they - soon became close allies in the emerging field of environmental (then sustainability, or non-financial) reporting. SustainAbility has produced over 10 major reports with UNEP in this area, most recently last year's third 'Global Reporters' benchmark survey, Risk & Opportunity (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/reporting-article.asp?id=128).
DTIE is now run by Monique Barbut, but I had been asked to do a special session at the end of this year's conference with Jacqueline. We had even been asked by Cornis van der Lugt of DTIE to do it in the style of Flash Gordon, though I toned that down to a couple of early slides - not least because Jacqueline didn't know who Flash was! In a precariously short, 15-minute fast-forward session, we focused on developments since 1987 (including things like the fall of the Berlin Wall - which also comes to mind now that Angela Merkel has taken over as Germany's first woman Chancellor, having grown up on the 'wrong' side of the Wall), on the future of reporting, and on the - slightly provocative - question of whether everything we have been doing is little more than rearranging trhe deckchairs on the economic equivalent of The Titanic?
That final possibility had been driven home for me by reading much of Andrew Simms' stunning book Ecological Debt: The Health of the Planet & the Wealth of Nations (Pluto Press), while scudding through Britain and France on the Eurostar.
And the photo? That was taken when I first arrived at the UNEP event, to find a bunch of parallel sessions under way. Rather than break in, I walked along the nearby Seine, towards Notre Dame. Apart from seeing a waterlogged baguette floating by, its underside a Punk-haircut-style-thicket of stabbing fish, I found myself the subject of interest for a number of men whose interests clearly weren't in the mainstream of fishing - so I tried to look heterosexual and soon beetled back to UNEP-land.
HENLEY MANAGEMENT COLLEGE
Two of a wall of masks at Henley Management CollegeOff to Henley Management College, to do a presentation as part of their eighth international conference on corporate governance. Initially I thought the session would be tough, since the 70-80 participants were at or around board level, many of them advisors to boards, and most were smartly suited. In the event, the discussion really began to take off But I was soon pressing up against the clock and had to race back to Reading in order to get to Lancaster House in time for an ECGD Advisory Council dinner with Ian Pearson, Minister for Trade. Would that there were more like him in politics.
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
UK-INDIA SD DIALOGUE
Across to Great George Street for signing of an agreement on sustainable development between UK and Indian governments. Then took part in roundtable with Elliot Morley (Minister of State, Climate Change and Environment) and Minister Raja (Indian Ministry of Environment & Forests) and his team. My brief talk on corporate responsibility seeemed to go completely over heads of the Indians, who kept asking questions like whether the UK has tribal peoples living in our forests - and how we cope with them. But they woke up when WWF asked them a question about tigers. As Jodie (Thorpe) suggested when I got back to the office, the session underscored the growing importance of South-South conversations, rather than North-South. As she pointed out, issues like tribal peoples and charcoal production are also a major issue in Brazil, so we ought to be doing more to help people from countries like Brazil and India to get together.
EMBANKMENT
This evening, Elaine and I went to the Unilever-sponsored opening of the Rachel Whiteread installation in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. Impressive in scale, with 14,000 plastic casts of boxes and cartons fused into heaps, hillocks, stacks and pyramids. But somehow it left me wanting more substance, wanting something to climb out of - or into - all these boxes. The main cultural reference that stuck in my mind was the apparent link in Whiteread's own mind to that astonishing last sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the crated Ark of the Covenant is wheeled off into an infinitely receding landscape of stacked crates, somewhere in the entrails of the US government. Embankment will certainly attract attention, but to my mind it suffers in the context of the Raiders iconography. Maybe best not mentioned?
Sunday, October 09, 2005
GAIA, HANIA & ALFRED HITCHCOCK
Top: Gaia Elkington, treed. Middle: Hania Elkington. Bottom: Perched on Hitchcock.
Much of the day spent working on client projects and on two book proposals. Plus read John Battelle's stunning account of the evolution of search engines and of Google, The Search. Very helpful and stimulating in terms of the basics of what constitutes a business model in the emerging economy. In the afternoon, Gaia and Hania arrive back from Dinard, Brittany, where they have been attending the British Film Festival, which awards the somewhat weirdly titled Hitchcock D'Or.
Saturday, October 08, 2005
WWF COUNCIL OF AMBASSADORS
A few weeks back, I agreed - with pleasure - to join WWF UK's Council of Ambassadors. My first contact with the organisation came in 1961, when I found myself raising money for them in their first year of existence, while away at prep school. Could never work out what had inspired me (particularly given that I was chronically shy) to stand up and ask the 80-some boys at Glencot for their pocket money for two weeks, but in any event I got it.
But then, in the late 1970s, I was driving down to WWF's HQ in Godalming with Max Nicholson, one of the organisation's founders - and the man with whom I had co-founded Environmental Data Services (ENDS) in 1978. He asked me how I had got into all of this and I told him the Glencot story. He then said he knew what had switched me on: WWF had managed to get a 24-page spread in a major newspaper. As soon as he said that I remembered walking into the school library and seeing the paper, reading it and resolving to do something.
Odd link: on the heels of the 'Full Disclosure' column that Mark Lee and I now do for Grist magazine (http://www.grist.org/biz/fd/2005/09/20/weee/), I have been asked this morning to help with a new newspaper targeted at the rising generation of US business executives. Given how important media were in switching me on, how could I say no?
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
AUTOSTADT
Up at 05.00 for flight to Hanover. Picked up from the airport by Dr Stefan Wolf of VW's AutoUni, the car company's experimental internal university, for the drive to VW's HW at Wolfsburg. This is the third time I have done one of these sessions: the first was in Prague, the second in Berlin. The Autostadt (http://www.autostadt.de/info/cda/main/0,3606,2~1,00.html), where the event is held, was built to celebrate 'automobility' - and I kick off the sustainable mobility module of the AutoUni's first proper course. Before and after I wander around the brand pavilions - displaying products by the likes of Audi, Bentley, Seat and VW. Three times during the day, I see a heron - which I always consider a sign of good luck. But, as usual, am appalled by the speed at which German drivers tail-gate one another.
And, while I was excited to have cress seeds planted in my name by a robot at VW, with the promise that in a few weeks I will be sent my own 'sunfuel' made from the resulting plants, part of my brain wondered whether it wouldn't make more sense to put governors on the engines of German cars, to regulate their speed? Was also told that to make enough sunfuel to satisfy just 10% of Germany's fuel needs, the country would need to plant fuel crops across a land area equivalent to the old East Germany.
View across to power plant
Autostadt in reverse
Main plaza
Seat wing mirrors
Flag in uncomfortable colours
Scarecrow birds and top of the Bentley Pavilion
Bentleys, old and modern - and I go for the old
Bugati
Sunfuel exhibition - where robots plant cress seeds to produce oil for you
And for him
The cress seeds are beneath their feet - and beneath glass
Relaxed
A world under glass (see August 24 entry on Worldprocessor and Ingo Gunther)
Other worlds
Words around the world for car
Saturday, October 01, 2005
BEL CANTO ERA OF WHALESONG
In the pile of newspapers, magazines and post when I got back this morning was a CD I had ordered from Living Music in Cougar Canyon, Santa Fe, a digitally remastered version of Roger Payne's Songs of the Humpback Whale - which features elsewhere on this site as one of my favourite pieces of music. The first of his original recordings appeared in 1970 and many years later I would sometimes play the whalesong to Gaia and Hania when they were very young, at night, in the dark. It was like being out in space with aliens nuzzling all around. For more on Payne, go to http://www.oceanalliance.org/oceanalliance/oa_rogerpayne.html.
One of the extraordinary things about these songs, according to Payne, is that he thinks he may have stumbled in on the 'Bel Canto' era of humpback whalesong. The songs change ever year and, he says, "none from recent years has been as beautifulk as those they sang in the 1960s." Was there really something in the air - or water - in that extraordinary decade that had both young people and whales singing such extraordinary songs? Payne suggests a Muse blowing "her magic dust over whales and Beatles alike." Or, my warped time-zone-warped mind whispers, just as cocaine is now turning up in considerable quantities in rivers in countries like Italy as its use spreads, just maybe some LSD made its way out to the whales?
WATER TABLE, SKULL & BONES, LABYRINTH
Spent the morning wandering around Yale with Monica (Araya) in glorious Indian Summer weather. Among other things, we took in the Beineke Library of Rare Books, which looks way better from inside than outside, but where I was thrilled to see the jottings that led to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Not far away, I was totally seduced by Maya Yin Lin's Women's Table, with its central source through which water constantly bubbles up and swirls across the spiralling numbers representing the numbers of women at Yale. had always thought her Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. one of the most appropriate and moving momuments ever produced. Atop the Women's Table, the statistical flow begins with a long stream of zeroes. The break point seemed to come in the 1870s. What a wonderful way of honoring generations of women at Yale (http://www.pbs.org/becomingamerican/ap_pjourneys_transcript5b.html), one of whom has been steering me around today.
And then the astonishing Sterling Memorial Library, with its fascinating stained glass. We also took in the music museum side of things, where it was passing strange to see my childhood and teenage musical tastes (from The Beatles and Stones through Frank Zappa) consigned to glass cases, almost akin to holy relics.
We also passed by the grotesque little home of the Skull & Bones secret society that has given succo(u)or to the likes of George W. Bush. And we browsed our way around a new bookshop, Labyrinth Books (http://www.labyrinthbooks.com/cb_view.aspx), which was truly wonderful - and I ended up buying a bunch of books, among them: Vincent Mosco's The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace, The Equations: Icons of Knowledge, by Sander Bais, Ecological Debt: The Health of the Planet & The Wealth of Nations, by Andrew Simms, and Transparency International's Global Corruption Report 2005.
Then we headed back to meet up with David Runnalls, who is at Yale currently as a Leopold Fellow - in memory of conservationist Aldo Leopold, whose A Sand County Almanac was one of my key texts in the 1960s (http://www.aldoleopold.org/). Good lunch at Miso. Normally, Dave is President of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD: http://www.iisd.org/about/StaffBio.aspx?bno=235). We first met at the tail end of the 1970s, when we shared Max Nicholson as a board director, he at the International Institute for Environment & Development (IIED) and I at Environmental Data Services (ENDS).
Then Dave and Monica wheeled their cycles back with me to the hotel, where another Town car was waiting, this time driven not by someone who looked like a member of Syria's Assad family but very much like - at least to my sleep-starved brain - Donald Rumsfeld. He even wore a Star & Stripes tie. We had a very interesting conversation as we sped back to JFK, ranging from the war in Iraq to Britney Spears, who I apparently was following into his rear seat. Then homeward, arriving into Heathrow at 07.00 this morning.
Sculptures below the Beineke Library
Detail of the Women's Table by Maya Lin
Corridor inside the Sterling Memorial Library
Detail, Sterling Memorial Library
Detail, Sterling Memorial Library
Detail, Sterling Memorial Library
Unholy relics
Monica with matching drain cover
Monica and a helmeted David Runnalls
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