John Elkington

Yesterday saw the (very) successful completion of our second Basecamp, this one hosted by UBS and focusing on the confluence of money, data and trust. Our hosts were Howard Kemp and Giles Sibbald.

I had worried that we would fail to match the excitement and impact of our Carbon Productivity Basecamp at the RSA on 14 June, but – in slightly different ways – they both worked wonderfully well.

The images above capture the spirit of the latest event. But it’s hard to take images when you’re one of the facilitators, which I was – kicking off with a session featuring three giants in the space: Mark Campanale, Nick Robins and Tessa Tennant. I have known  all three for pushing 30 years – and between them they have helped create many key initiatives in the space.

The previous evening we hosted a dinner for 24 of the participants at Somerset House, in the Drawing Room restaurant. Extremely hot, with London temperatures and humidity pushing all our envelopes. Some  sense of the space can be found here, though we had it arranged with two long tables. Great food – and the energy in the room could have powered a small city.

During the Basecamp, the Atlas of the Future team filmed a series of interviews with selected speakers, who included Mark, Tessa, Nick, UBS Global Chief Economist Paul Donovan, Jamie Arbib and Henrik Olsén of Rethinking Capital, Jeremy Openheim of SYSTEMIQ, Steve Waygood of Aviva, and Sacha Romanovitch of Grant Thornton.

Key content on the event, including edited versions of the filmed interviews, will be published shortly.

After the reception that followed the event, held in one of the UBS atriums overlooking things like a bulldozer being hoisted by a crane into a difficult-to-reach part of a nearby construction site, a group of us went off to have a celebratory dinner.

We stumbled upon The Holy Birds which, as Jacqueline put it, ticked pretty much all my boxes. Great food, including a fondue made with Hoxton Gin, delightful service, a great acoustic environment (because the place was virtually empty apart from us) and a stream of wonderful music from the Sixties (e.g. Cream, Donovan, Stones, Them, Yardbirds). And great conversations, including with Kaye Allen, who joined the Volans team on Monday.

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.