John Elkington

Take a peek at the history behind this flag by running the 3-minute video below

I sometimes struggle to explain to people who don’t follow Twitter why I find it so useful. But it’s a bit like living alongside an eAmazon , a great outpouring of information, on which all sorts of interesting things are borne along with the flow. At one level, it appeals to the beachcomber in me. So, for example, one of today’s treasures was this video mapping of European country borders over the past 1,000 years. All in 3 minutes. The music is tiresome, but you can always turn it down, or off.

I have always loved History, but this is ridiculous. And I confess it makes me feel more pro-European. It also gives a sense of just how fragile the Eu project may prove to be in the longer term.

I was pondering anniversaries this morning, my 65th on Earth on the 23rd, 40 years in the environmental and sustainability fields this year, 20 years of the triple bottom line this year, and it occurred to me to wonder when Gaia – or life on Earth – first managed to take a ‘selfie,’ as we now seem to call photographic self-portraits?

I had been thinking of the NASA Gemini or Apollo missions, whose images I recall being wonderfully inspired by.

So I dug around a  bit – and found that it had happened considerably sooner than I had thought, indeed before I was born, in 1946. Scientists used a V2 rocket fired from the White Sands Missile Range to take a series of far-from-full-Earth photographs, but exciting, nonetheless. The image shown came from a camera on V-2 #13, launched on October 24, 1946. (Photo: White Sands Missile Range/Applied Physics Laboratory)

If being able to see yourself as others see you is a key step in self-actualisation, this was in important moment for all of us. That said, we still have a long, long way to go. But then perhaps the multi-millionaires and billionaires who, one day, will be rocketed into space in vehicles operated by the likes to Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic will come back transformed, in the same way many astronauts would be.

I wrote my first report on climate change (among three other emerging environmental issues) for Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute way back in 1978.

And the first blog in this series recorded a 2003 visit to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, where we learned just how systemic the crisis we are facing now is.

Even so, the way things are headed continuously takes my breath away. So, for example, two images I have come across in the past few days, while convalescing, brought home the sheer scale of what we are facing in the coming decades with climate change – and threw an uncomfortable light on where a growing proportion of the problem is now coming from.

The first image, above is from NASA, and shows that current carbon dioxide trends are, whatever the skeptics may choose to believe, unusual. The second came via Twitter, is equally shocking and shows that China used more cement in the three years from 2011-2013 than the United States did in the entire twentieth century.

This is not so much to point the finger as to underscore the extent to which China has clicked on and dragged across an obsolete industrial model from the West. If I try to put an optimist’s hat on, the best I can come up with is the notion that biomimicry might help inspire novel ways to produce cement and concrete – perhaps based on the way that the world’s coral reefs do it.

(Photo courtesy of FT)

How much of the world’s fossil fuel reserves will eventually be burnt? That is the critical question that Martin Wolf asks in his insightful article in today’s Financial Times. His view is that, on current assumptions, ExxonMobil probably has it right in arguing that the oil industry won’t suffer from stranded assets, because the world won’t act on climate change in time. But one of the most interesting voices in this space is the Carbon Tracker Initiative.

My own bet in the climate casino is that Carbon Tracker are right to argue that investors will be hit – and that means our pensions will be hit – in a shorter timescale than many imagine. As for ExxonMobil, they may be perfectly within their rights to argue as they do. But it is very likely that future generations will treat companies that did the heavy duty anti-climate-change lobbying in recent years in the same way that they have treated the tobacco industry. Anyone investing for the long term should therefore be wary of backing those who produce coal, oil and tracked gas.

A decade or so ago, I had a very energetic exchange on this subject with ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, over the heads of 300 or so oil industry executives gathered in Stavanger, Norway. He denied his company was lobbying to stall climate change initiatives. I think the record shows different – and the picture will look grimmer still when the deep historical analysis is done.

If you have found me difficult to track down in the past couple of weeks, here’s why.

The fact is that I have always had an allergy to hospitals, but the past couple of weeks took that from bad to worse. Some time back, I had a catscan at Roehampton Hospital, and ran a massive allergic reaction to the iodine in the imaging dye they injected into me. But that proved to be the least of my worries.

When I was referred to Kingston Hospital, the idea was that I would have an exploratory procedure to see what was wrong with my kidneys and the like. I was warned that there was an outside chance of an infection, but hadn’t expected to feel quite so bad immediately after the procedure. Allowed to go home, I felt somewhat better on the following day, Tuesday, so I went in to a dinner with Zouk Capital at Hyde Park Corner. Leaving later in the evening, having had no alcohol, I found my legs giving way beneath me, and could hardly climb into a taxi home. My teeth chattered all the way back to Barnes.

A doctor came out in the middle of the night and I was told in no uncertain terms I needed to be in hospital and on an intravenous drip of antibiotics. Both Elaine and the ambulance team found that I was running a high temperature. But after 5-6 hours at the hospital, during which time a paediatric nurse (“I don’t normally take blood from adults”) managed to sluice my blood over the floor, I was released in the early hours of the morning with a box of laxatives.

Elaine was horrified and rang the GP, where I presently headed for an emergency check-up. I virtually collapsed with pain in her office, at which point she also insisted that I needed to be on an intravenous drip. So back to Kingston Hospital. It took ages to be checked in, then they seemed to forget to insert the drip. The entire  experience left me loving the NHS more in theory than in practice. A small example of the problem: a doctor told me on the second day that I would be going home later in the day, once they had got me the right drugs. After 3-4 hours, I got dressed and went out of the ward to ask how things were going, to find that they had no record that I was being discharged.

Since then I have been at home, on antibiotics. But the cherry on the icing on the cake was that the day after I got home I woke up to find I had labyrinthitis. I don’t recommend it. It was like having 27 energetically malevolent monkeys all pulling away at me from different directions at the end of elastic tethers. I would turn over on the bed and the room would continue revolving around me for quite a while. A different GP came and a different set of drugs were prescribed. After several days, that problem began to recede, thanks heavens.

Yesterday, finally, I was able to go into the office for the first time, which was wonderful. But I still find that my energy levels really aren’t what they should be. It’s as if someone has poked a stick into the dynamo that keeps me rattling along in normal times. And there is still an operation to have. But I won’t be having it at Kingston, having refused to go back there. On Friday I will be heading across to Charing Cross Hospital to meet a surgeon who has been recommended by my sister Tessa and her husband, himself a surgeon.

On the upside, though, this has been an excellent opportunity to catch up with myself ahead of my 65th birthday next week, and to consider how I best use my energies, assuming that they return. It has also proved to be an extraordinarily timely opportunity to edit and update this website, and to begin to get this blog series back on the rails.

My thanks to all the NHS people who have helped me to date. Almost without exception, they have been wonderful. But aspects of the NHS system, at least at Kingston Hospital, seem to be creaking at the seams. I have written a long letter to the CEO of the Hospital, itemising the different things that went wrong, and getting to eleven mishaps with ease.

But then, as Tessa told me, if I had this particular condition 50 years ago it would have been a death sentence, so once again I’m thrilled to have born when I was and to be alive when I am.