John Elkington

In the space of just eight months the sustainability movement has lost three leading lights: our own Pamela Hartigan, then earlier this month Malcolm McIntosh and now Ernst Ligteringen.

Pamela didn’t tell me how ill she was until perhaps 5-6 weeks before she died. Malcolm did some years back when he came to see us in Barnes, but we thought he had recovered. The news about Ernst came as a complete surprise to everyone concerned.

I had close working relationships with all three, over extended periods, and it’s amazing how such relationships so often mutate into friendships. But these were three – in Shaw’s sense of the word – unreasonable changemakers.

While there’s a strong sense of loss in terms of the inspiration, conversations and support there might have been, one can only be intensely grateful for the opportunities to get to know and learn from such extraordinary people.

Delighted with this short video on our latest thinking, thanks to our friends Atlas of the Future and as part of our evolving Project Breakthrough initiative with the UN Global Compact.

The electoral upset, for all it may, just possibly, open up prospects of a softer stupidity in terms of Brexit, has once again amped up the uncertainty. That said, the skewering of the Hard-Brexit-as-our-first-and-obvious-choice camp gives me a modicum of hope.

Once again, a strong sense of an old order coming apart at the seams – and new ones struggling even harder than normal to be born. Am reading Stephen D. King’s Grave New World at the moment, which also amps up the sense of impending something. Britain a nation at sea and at odds with itself. But at least young people are voting, even if they’re now yet reading the small print on the pack.

In  the midst of all this, a few photos that sum up my June to date:

On the subject of books, one I read and enjoyed recently was The Adventures  of John B lake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship, by Philip Pullman, with art by Fred Fordham. Great fun – and interesting to see something in the news within the past few days about the new breed of autonomous vessels, a new form of ghost ship.

And then this morning, I stumbled across Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s book, Sputnik’s Guide to Life on Earth, published last year. Love the central idea that we have to think of 10 reasons why Earth should not be destroyed by aliens. Working on it …

Delighted to see UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner using our Waves 5-to-6 diagram from our recent Breakthrough Business Models report. With thanks for the heads to Kevin Moss of WRI, who co-hosted our Breakthrough session in Washington, DC in January, see 29 January entry.

Then when I did a short report for Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute in  the late 1970s, while I was still with John Robert’s TEST, I forecast four big environmental issues in the early 21st century. The first, now largely under control, we are told, was stratospheric ozone depletion. The second climate change. The third new forms of genetic toxicity. And the fourth revolved around the health of the World Ocean.

Talking with the CEO of a major environmental NGO a week or two back, I focused on the fourth of these again – arguing that the oceans are make or break for the rest of the planet. Then The Economist ran its ‘Ocean Warning’ front cover, plus other coverage, a few days later.

Then today I came across the Radical Ocean Futures #ArtScience project developed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Am hoovering bring it up. Have long found sci-fi fascinating – and particularly when accompanies with powerful visualisations. That’s exactly what we get here.

I love the Lovelace idea in the first of the four scenarios, in which the oceans are hauled back from the brink. And here’s some the text explaining how that future plays out:

It all started with Lovelace – an outstanding innovation in artificial intelligence. Lovelace was based on a neural network created by a wily collective of hackers and whistle-blowers but very soon supported by tech companies, progressive governments, and ordinary citizens from 100 countries. Lovelace ripped through corporate empires and their shell companies within shell companies within shell companies exposing their rotting cores, one by one.  For the first time the world had fulfilled the promise of big data in support of citizenship. Lovelace achieved the improbable, near total transparency of information.

Unsurprisingly, there are dark scenarios, too. One, The Rime of the Last Fisherman, is accompanied by the image below. We really don’t want to go there.

Rime of the Last Fisherman. Source: Radical Ocean Futures/Simon Stålenhag