John Elkington

Out of the blue today, I received an email from Turkey. It came from Murat Sayginer, an artist who in 2014, I learned, did a short film featuring Pisces volans, the flying fish – our totem at Volans.

The film, Volans, was a Vimeo Staff Pick. Spookily, it features many images that have been important to me over the decades, including skeletons, spirals, starfields, 2001-like tunnels, and my beloved flying fish. The style of imagery reminds me of LSD in 1969.

So I asked him how the film had done since it was released? He replied: “It screened at lots of festivals and received over 250.000 views. The community liked it a lot. The flying fish is like my alter-ego,” he explained, “and I got curious about the web domain and found you!”

Currently working as a freelance visual artist and filmmaker he has a project called Animals, consisting of 72 collages that he is selling as open edition prints. The Flying Fish print is the first of the two images above.

The short film Volans ends with one – and then a shoal – of flying fish heading in towards Planet Earth. Exactly the sort of imagery I would have liked to conjure when drawing in the 1970s.

Inspired me to go upstairs, and fish out one of the drawings I did in 1978, according to the dating. This one featured human and ostrich skeletons walking across the backs of a vanishing landscape of crocodiles, but doesn’t show what another in the series showed – a series of golden dolphins breaking through the tsunami front, like claws in a giant linear paw.

Weird what the human brain will conjure.

Very sorry to hear news of the death of ‘Winkle’ Brown, but his obituary in today’s Times makes utterly fascinating reading. Some of the statistics of his career can be found here, courtesy of the BBC. Tim this morning recalled Brown as a “hoot”.

It’s taken us a while to get to see Spielberg’s extraordinary film on the Cold War, but today (hot on the heels of Star Wars yesterday) we did – and found it stunningly well made. Makes me determined to get to The End of the Cold War, by Robert Service, which is one of my stacks of impending books to read.

I have clear memories of the Wall going up, Powers’ u2 coming down, and the subsequent Powers-Abel exchange. And the scene of the young boy preparing for an atomic bomb burst brought back memories of young nightmares, too. I also recall the moment in the late 1950s when we were living in Northern Ireland and Tim went off for many months to fly fall-out monitoring missions around the British bomb-bursts on Christmas Island.

But I had never heard of the parallel-to-Powers story around Yale student Frederic Pryor, nor about the Nuremberg Trials background to the involvement of James Donovan.

A brilliant conjuring of the atmosphere during one of the world’s recurrent periods of paranoia. How long before we’re there again? If President Putin has his way – and perhaps it’s a complete accident that one of the four interogators working over Powers looked rather like an extruded Putin – we will be trading new types of asset across a new generation of Glienicke Bridges or Checkpoint Charlies?

Can’t explain it, but when we went to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens today at the Odeon IMAX in Waterloo, I fell in love with Maz Kanata. I have always said I liked older women: but this must be the first time I have fallen for a 1,000-year-old steampunk smuggler

P.S. I wasn’t aware that Chewbacca was born here in Barnes.

‘The End of Ownership’ is the theme, but first let me wind back the clock to just before Christmas.

On 11 December 2015, I flew to Amsterdam for a session at THNK with some 20 people co-evolving a new system change platform.

Arriving at Schiphol, I went outside to catch a taxi to THNK, to find that maybe half of the taxis were now Teslas.  The odds worked out, I didn’t get a Mercedes, and my driver was a tall, distinguished man with a bow tie. As we sped into the city, and with no clues from me as to my interests, apart from my compliments on his Tesla, he began to give me an enthusiastic run-down on the sustainability agenda.

In full flow, he mentioned that he had recently seen an astonishing TV documentary featuring the architect Thomas Rau. After the THNK session, I sent an email to Thomas’s wife, Sabine Oberhuber, saying that Thomas seemed to be ubiquitous – and complimenting him on his popular impact.

But I hadn’t yet seen the documentary

Then, yesterday, Sabine came to lunch in Barnes, and this morning, back in Holland, sent a link to the documentary, The End of Ownership.

We sat down this evening to watch it – and, with no exaggeration, I think it’s one of the most powerful pieces of film I have ever watched on our agenda and on how Homo sustainabilis can rise to the eternal challenges of life on Earth.

As part of our new program of work with the United Nations Global Compact, we plan to develop a portfolio of key resources for business leaders – and for tomorrow’s sustainability champions – and The End of Ownership will be in pride of place.

There are many reasons to watch the documentary, including the 100th birthday party for a light-bulb that still burns brightly.

But other key takeaways include how we need to apply the deep principles of the funfair to tomorrow’s economy, how companies like Phillips and Bosch have responded to the provocations of this extraordinary market revolutionary, and how future materials will not only have passports  but also their version of human rights.

And then there is the woman in the red dress, about 35 minutes in. That’s the sequence where the irreducibly human dimensions of the coming transformation literally well up as old realities give way to the new.