John Elkington

After my final meeting as a member of the Social Stock Exchange board, from which I volunteered to stand down to ensure greater diversity, I headed back to the office for a session with the Carbon Productivity Consortium.

Then Lorraine (Smith) arrived with her mother at the same time as (Professor) Adam Sulkowski turned up. We split a birthday cake between us. Six candles, which meant I was only missing 62.

Adam, of Polish extraction, is probably the only reader of Cannibals With Forks, which he remindeed me was published 20 years ago this year, who knew where the title came from. A Polish poet by the name of Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, 1901-1966, who asked the question whether it was progress if cannibals learned to eat with forks?

Adam brought me a copy of A Treasury of Polish Aphorisms, dedicated to the memory of Lec. And one of the aphorisms that immediately caught my eye, particularly in the context of Polish liberation struggles, was this:

Not every boomerang returns.

Some choose freedom.

Then a great Skype call with Jed Emerson in San Francisco, before heading across to Zédel in Piccadilly, for dinner with Elaine and a long-standing friend, Svenja Geissmar, General Counsel at Arsenal Football Club.

First met Svenja many years ago through Fran(cesca) van Dijk, a longtime colleague at SustainAbility – and one of three ‘pod-mates’, in the sense that she, Andrea Spencer-Cooke/Henman and I worked closely together in a small team and all shared the same birthday, even if we are of very different vintages.

Back from Basel with Richard Roberts early this afternoon – and then I took Paddington Express to see Nissan at their creativity studio in the Rotunda, aka ‘The Battleship’. Accompanied by another Volans colleague, Jacqueline Lim.

On the flight in across London, I spotted the burned-out stump of Grenfell Tower. Horrifying – and reminded me of the theme of my 1974 M. Phil. urban planning dissertation at UCL – the idiocy of tall towers for rehousing poorer communities.

And that’s even when they are reasonably well designed and managed, which this one clearly wasn’t.

High heat and humidity during the two-hour session with Nissan environmental team, but a very productive exchange. Impressed by how far their thinking has come on since last year, when I did a similar session. Much talk of electric cars and autonomous vehicles, alongside Circular Economy trajectories.

At this distance of time, I genuinely can’t recall when I first met Ernst Ligteringen—it could have been this century or the last, in any one of a dozen countries. While trying to find out, I stumbled across this photograph taken during a GRI event in Amsterdam in 2010, but even then I felt I had known Ernst forever.

He was always there, friendly, calm, with a benign sense of humour and uniformly well dressed, quietly holding the centre of the conversation in the interests of the wider world and of the future.

I shared with Ernst a sense that our embrace of the sustainability cause and agenda often came at a cost—to ourselves but, much more importantly, to others. Time that could—should—have been devoted to family and friends was invested in bettering the life chances of others, sometimes geographically remote and sometimes remote in time, including the not-yet-born.

Who really knows where that calling comes from—or what sustains it through the highs and lows of a life spent trying to change the world for the better? But without the loving support of his family it would not have been possible, let alone sustainable.

Like a torch held to others, Ernst sparked deeper awareness and commitment in people from every sector and every corner of the globe. As our mutual friend Bob Massie recalls it, he was a man “who could speak many different languages, both culturally and linguistically, and a leader who could handle a thousand details and relationships without ever losing sight of our long-term goals.”

To say I will miss him is both trite and true. But I am sure I speak for a multitude in saying that something of Ernst—variously son, husband, father, friend and global phenomenon—will burn on in memory and in love.

Nice profile by Atlas of the Future. No pigeon steps on my watch, apparently.

Have been working flat out to prepare presentations (both subjects to NDAs) for Novartis (in Basel) and Nissan (in London) this week, plus preparing for Aviva meeting tomorrow and Social Stock Exchange Board session on Friday.

But thrilled to be still receiving glowing feedback from those who came to our ‘Reimagining Carbon’ Carbon Productivity Basecamp at the Royal Society of Arts on Wednesday 14 June.

We caught the wave. The opening session with Paul Hawken (on Project Drawdown) and Erin Meezan (on Interface’s ‘Climate Take Back‘ campaign) went down a storm. Will fill in details when the photographs are available. The main session were also filmed by Atlas of the Future, so we will have excellent content for the new website planned for a few weeks from now.

Great dinner the night before at the Impact Hub in King’s Cross.

Now preparing for the next Basecamp, this time on money, data and trust, hosted by UBS on 7 July. Richard Roberts is leading that one – and came across to Barnes on Friday, where I was working, to discuss.

Part of the reason I was at home that day was to prepare the way for the men who were meant to be arriving this morning to sand off the American oak floor downstairs that two of laid 40 years ago. But, in keeping with the endless saga that has run like the old Flanders & Swann song, ‘The Gasman Cometh‘, the sandmen’s arrival has been postponed to Wednesday – when, if all otherwise goes well, I will be in Basel.