John Elkington

And this morning it’s Singularity University, out in Mountain View, specifically at Moffett Field. We have to pass armed guards to get into the Ames Research Centre, where SU is based, within spitting distance of Google’s expanding headquarters. Knew that SU had recently become a B Corp, but nice sense of sorority as we pass the (new) sign in their reception area.

A great session with Nick Haan, on many different aspects of Singularity University agenda and activities – exploring the degree to which there is overlap between their 11 Global Grand Challenges and the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Answer: though not an exact fit, they are highly aligned. And the spirit of SU is exactly what is needed to bridge the gap between where we are on the SDGs and where we need to be by 2030.

Delighted to take a way a printed copy (I am unreconstructed) of their Impact Report,which I had only seen online to date.

Then back to Palo Alto, past Hangar One – a skeletal monument to an earlier round of grand visions. In its heyday, this was used to house the naval airship, Macon. So big that, back in the day, fog would form under its ceiling. In recent years, it has been the preserve of NASA, which has been struggling with some of the materials used to build the original structure, including asbestos and PCBs.

Later in the day, we meet Stefan Heck of Nauto and, up in the hills, a,on the lemon trees Thomas Odenwald – formerly with SAP. Targeted at the insurance industry, NAUTO aims to be a “Google for the outdoors.” Its connected camera network and artificial intelligence-driven smart cloud is designed to help prevent accidents before they happen, reducing false liability claims and providing coaching to improve driver performance.

Intriguingly, Stefan’s book Resource Revolution speaks of a Third Industrial Revolution, in contrast to Klaus Schwab’s ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ and my own preference for the ‘Sixth Wave’ advocated by Carlota Perez. A fascinating conversation about a broad spectrum of emerging technologies, their benefits, and their unintended externalities (both positive and negative). Stefan spoke of “bimodal impacts,” justifying both “utopian and dystopian” views of the future.

Then up into the hills to see Thomas Odenwald, among other things of Fronesys, who twice led SAP’s green IT activities, working on the ‘Boardroom of the Future.’ We discussed the perils of the early adopter. Developing a suite of sustainability-oriented software tools, Odenwald and SAP thought that it would be a case of “build it and they will come.” But, he said, they didn’t come. At least not yet.

Fascinating to hear how he is working on a project to bring similar technology to bear on problems like elephant poaching in Africa.

Then back into San Francisco to meet Morgan Clendaniel, Editor of Fast Company‘s Co-Exist platform, meeting up in the restaurant that Joel Makower had suggested on our first evening in town – which seems light years ago. He had been suggested as a contact by Fast Company‘s UK Editor, Bob Safian. Great suggestion, great conversation.

At the end of the day, we Ubered across the Golden Gate for supper with Paul Hawken at the Poggio Trattoria, over a bottle or two of Planeta Etna Rosso wine. Always glorious to walk along the Sausalito waterfront, taking in boats old and new. Among the oldest was The Sealark, a battered old tug whose colours were radiant in the evening sun.

On the language front, love the idea that Sausalito has gone under so many different names through history: Saucelito, San Salita, San Saulito, San Salito, Sancolito, Sancilito, Sousolito, Sousalita, Sousilito, Sausilito, and Sauz Saulita. The last one (spuriously) chimes with the area’s history in edgy activities like bootlegging and rum running.

It’s always an immense privilege to talk to Paul – as it is to Janine Benyus, a shared friend and colleague, who we will (serendipitously) meet in Menlo Park later in the trip.

We catch up on: Project Drawdown, designed to move us from “complacency to agency” on climate change; on another new book Paul is writing; and on his work with Interface (very exciting). Plus a number of the breakthrough companies he sees as particularly interesting, including Tri Alpha Energy and GrapheneNano.

A perfect end to another extraordinary day.

A day spent oscillating between San Francisco, Palo Alto and Sausalito (the subject of a separate post). The morning kicked of with a visit to Hampton Creek Foods, whose motto is “What would it look like if we started over?” Their product range started with plant-based substitutes for egg and egg-based food ingredients.

We were met by their Chief Happiness Officer, a large Golden Retriever. One interesting part of the conversation was around language – and how they avoid mentioning the fact that their products are vegan/vegetarian, even thought they are. This was a theme we encountered often during our California trip.

Then across to Palo Alto for a session with Marina Gorbis, Executive Director of Institute for the Future. Have long admired their work, back to the days of Paul Saffo’s time there, and it was great to catch up on some of the work they are now doing. Intriguing to dig a bit deeper into their 10-year forecasting cycle.

Among other things, Marina described the multiplicity of cultures in the Silicon Valley area, from the tech-obsessed through to the counter-cultural and humanistic. And what is striking is how these worlds can blur, as in people like the late Steve Jobs.

We also discussed the critical role of investigative reporting, with the Panama Papers, deservedly, getting a good deal of attention in the media at the moment.

Then into a great session with Gil Friend, who I have known and admired for many years – both at Natural Logic and now in his role as Chief Sustainability Officer at the City of Palo Alto. He has introduced us to a number of the people we are seeing on this trip. I don’t envy him the politics in his current work, but he is part of a growing movement of CSOs and similar in the world of local government. He referenced the work of the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN.org).

As an example of the sort of dilemmas that people like him have to wrestle with, he noted that if Palo Alto pushes ahead with its plans to ensure the overwhelming majority of cars in the area are electrically-powered, companies like Tesla will do well – but poorer people (for example gardeners and maids) who can’t afford electric vehicles and have to commute in long distances will be disadvantaged.

We didn’t discuss it, but maybe the EV drivers will respond by buying robots to do the house and garden?

Then back to San Francisco for a session with Kavita Gupta and Chantal Buard of Amplifier Strategy. We met at The Battery, here it was interesting to hear about the evolving social innovation platform, Battery Powered. A great initiative – and one wonders how much of a following wind it may have been given by recent protests against companies like Google, as captured in Douglas Rushkoff’s book Throwing Rocks At The Google Bus.

His sub-title nicely (if uncomfortably) distils the issue: ‘How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity.’

Disruption was on the menu again this evening. A couple of Tony Seba’s books are in the stacks back in our London office, waiting to be put into the digester. Among them: Solar Trillions and Clean Disruption (of Energy and Transportation).

Not sure what I expected from this meeting, but we were blown away. Here’s a man who knows how to rise – and bend – the S-curves.

Hadn’t been impressed by the design of his books, but his response was that he wanted them “ugly,” based around basic spreadsheets and cost curves – which speak to bankers and other numbers folk. His approach to business leaders: “It’s going to happen whether you like it or not, with you or without you – and here are the data. Get over it!”

Like Carl Page, Seba spoke of the “capture” of government by incumbent, threatened industries. Governments, though, feel they must “feed the bullfrog.” Corruption, he notes, comes in many forms: “Money changes hands in different ways to protect the status quo.”

A powerful champion of what, many years ago, we dubbed the “future quo”. If we can pull back breakthrough from 2050 to 2030, he says, we can “save 100 million lines.” That said, he doesn’t like the implication in the word ‘breakthrough’ that we are talking about miracles. This is going to be tough, with plenty of downsides – he noted how the Fukushima nuclear disaster had turned the ocean into a “cess pool.”

Struck me today that if any one city could claim to be my alma mater, it’s got to be San Francisco.

After an Uber ride south to Woodside, through teeming rain and brilliant green landscape with streaks of cloud snagged in the tree tops, we had breakfast (with Carl Page of the Anthropocene Institute) in the legendary Buck’s of Woodside this morning.

Our table is the one shown in the Wikipedia image above, a table which, among other things, boasts a Braille edition of Playboy signed by Stevie Wonder.

One intriguing project at AI involves exploring the use of robots to kill the lion fish that are having such a devastating impact on key fisheries. An odd eddy of the push towards an autonomous future. But Carl’s analysis of where the world ocean is headed made grim listening.

In the afternoon, back in San Francisco, and still in heavy rain, headed across to the City Lights bookstore, which I love. There I bought seven books:

• Jeremy Caradonna’s Sustainability: A History, 2014. Slightly odd to see myself mentioned in the history books, already.
• Edward O. Wilson’s Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, Liveright Publishing 2016. Talk about bold: Wilson suggests setting side half the planet for Nature.
• Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilisation, City Lights Books, 2015. Billed as a Ginsberg-like Howl on what we’re doing to the world, it reads brilliantly well. And Scranton promptly retweeted my tweet to that effect.
• The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, Verso 2016. “Anthropo-what?” they ask at the outset, before giving a pretty comprehensive answer.
• Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, Scribner 1971/2008. I read this back in the 1970s, but adore her writing – and her theme here of “a future world racked by violence and environmental catastrophes” chimes with so much else that I have been absorbing as part of my background reading for our Exponential Futures mission to SF and LA.
• Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Ways of Curating, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Obrist is billed as the most influential curator of our age, having staged more than 250 art shows internationally. A useful guide, I’m hoping, to the best ways to promote generative conversations across cultures and across time.
• And then how could I go to City Lights and not come away with poetry? Stumbled across a newish book (albeit prominently displayed) by probably my favourite poet, Gary Snyder. This Present Moment is published by Counterpoint, 2015.  And, despite his warning to the reader not to read the poem, I started at the end with Go Now. Probably the grisliest and most beautiful love poem I have yet read.

A nice Newsweek piece of Snyder as the “Poet Laureate of Our Continent,” can be found here. Intrigued to see him recall his epiphany around age 7, when told his heifer couldn’t go to Heaven with him. So, he said, he didn’t want to go to Heaven. Exactly my reaction, in relation to nature more generally, and at pretty much exactly the same age, back in Northern Ireland in the 1950s.

Sad to think this could be his last book, but better to have loved Gary Snyder and lost, than …