John Elkington

To Cambridge and a 6-hour Skype call

Jorgen Randers on left And on right Paul Gilding lsitens to Tom Gladwin’s ‘Sustainability Blues’ Ditto Ditto ditto

Despite my wilting blogging output, it’s time to catch up on  a busy week, as the rain continues to gurgle in the gutters outside. It has been a week of highs and a low. T

he low was when I attempted my first-ever PechaKucha presentation (20 slides, with the computer giving you just 20 seconds per slide) at a green entrepreneurs event and left feeling it had misfired.

But a wave of highs soon had me cheering up. Maybe I had been tired: the previous day, Monday, I had ended off with a 6-hour Skype call to New York for the final judging of this year’s Buckminster Fuller Challenge awards. The session ended at 22.00 and I confess Skype isn’t my favourite environment, but will try almost anything in memory of the hallowed Bucky.

Also among the ups were two days in Cambridge, the first with Jorgen Randers and perhaps 20 other contributors to his book 2052. Great to catch up with Jorgen, and with other contributors (and friends) like Paul Gilding, Tom Gladwin, Nick Robins, Mathis Wackernagel and Peter Willis. On the evening before the session, picking up a thread of deep pessimism in Jorgen’s analysis in the book, I asked what the average age (and sex) of we contributors had been? The answer, in essence, was older white males – and my reaction was that, even if the outlook is dire, the mood and creativity would have been significantly improved had we had more women and more younger voices.

One set of images that sticks in my brain came from Australian David Butcher, a former CEO of WWF Australia and Greening Australia, He lives on an Illawarra property which is 30 percent tropical rainforest, and described to me seeing (I think from a bridge across a river on the property) a red-bellied black snake catching and eating an eel, and (separately) a large python dangling from a tree to catch passing birds on the wing. He only rumbled what was going on in the latter case when he saw the explosion of feathers.

The following day, Paul, Tony Juniper, Karl Wagner and I did an all-day session with some 12-15 chief sustainability officers, and similar, for the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership. A wonderful opportunity to take the temperature of a sample of these key change agents. They came from companies like Jaguar-Landrover, Lend Lease, Nestle, Sainsbury and Unilever. My sense is that many of them have been banging their head against some fairly dense walls and ceilings, but there were many examples of great work being attempted.

The first time I had been at the Moller Centre, part of Churchill College, which turned out to be an excellent venue for both meetings. A nice link back to Winston Churchill’s support for Denmark in the Second World War. He apparently borrowed the Maersk fleet for the duration and, if I was correctly informed, made good the losses (which must have been pretty substantial) after the war.

Another great thing this week: Jo(sephine) Living, our new OnPurpose Fellow, has joined the team for six months. Still recall Susie Braun, our first OnPurpose Fellow, with huge gratitude and affection. Checking the Volans website, it strikes me that we need to update her entry – she went on to become a senior strategic planner at Comic Relief.

Visit to Science Museum

Image 1 Image 2 Image 3 Image 4 Image 5

Started the day with a visit to the new Media Space at the Science Museum, getting a guided tour of the wonderful exhibition of photographs by Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr, and then of the Universal Everything & You space, where you can sketch on iPads and the system takes over and elaborates your doodles into the most amazing, swirling animations – which I noted to William Waldegrave and a few others was almost as good as LSD. Was then asked by the curator if she could quote me?

10 years on the blogging front

Chez Zedel

Just back from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, with Elaine and American friends Jim and Heather Salzman. The original book was published 10 years ago, in May 2003, and it struck me that I began this blog series exactly 10 years ago, in September 2013, with an entry on our visit to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod. And, as chance would have it, Heather asked us earlier this evening about a painting by Caroline (Elkington) in the kitchen of Elaine walking along the seahore near Wellfeet, on Cape Cod, that same year.

A few days off, with clippers

Cutty Sark 1 The distant Shard from the deck of the Cutty Sark Rigging Hullscape 1 Hullscape 2 Emily Young 1 Emily Young 2 Emily Young 3 Church of St John, Clerkenwell St John’s: floorscape St John’s Gate Museum: galley St John’s Gate Museum: helmets St John’s Gate Museum: the other side

Took a few days off this week to recuperate. Went to Greenwich for the first time, on a Thames clipperwith Elaine, to see the Cutty Sark, and various other delights–including the National Maritime Museum and the extraordinarily beautiful exhibition, Visions of the Universe. Not sure which is my favourite nebula, but a number of them features. Dropped into Waterstones to buy some books, and among other things came away with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which I had been meaning to read for ages. Dived in and haven’t surfaced since. Overwhelming.

Among other things, we went to the exhibition of work by one of my favourite sculptors, Emily Young, at the Fine Art Society. We had a wonderful lunch at The Modern Pantry in St John’s Square, Clerkenwell, and then dropped into the Church of St John across the way, where I loved the 12th century Crypt. Fascinated to see physical evidence of the history of the Knights Hospitaller, aka the Knights of St John. We also visited the Museum of the Order of St John, at inside nearby St John’s Gate, which brought back an extraordinary era that still sends out its repercussions today.

But time to blog

Less than an hour before the Iberia flight back to Madrid, and thence to London, was due to take off, someone came to say that the plane had been withdrawn, due to mechanical problems. We would have to stay over until tomorrow. So I found my way to a different Hotel Camino Real, this time at the airport, and checked in.

With nothing much to do,  except to listen to the hum of the air conditioning competing with my tinnitus, and unable to go back into the city to hear Paul Hawken speak at the Walmart event because the airline was going to call at some undetermined time to announce its plans, I caught up with blogging for this site-. This is something that had pretty much stalled on while doing the latest version of the new book. But sad to miss Paul–he told me a few days ago that he was going to be even more radical than usual …