John Elkington

Kasteel Marquette 1 Kasteel Marquette 2 Jeroo at Kasteel Marquette Princess Maxima kicks off Partial view of mobile home park from conference room window Child finance visuals Sunset Unusual windbreak, made of 45s, LPs and CDs Trainers in Haarlem Audrey (Tan) and Min Xuan (Lee) Yellow car 1 (Tintin and Captain Haddock) Yellow car 2 Statue of L.J. Coster, inventor of movable type Roofline The most basic form of art known to humanity Self-portrait

Arrived at Schiphol on Sunday afternoon – and took the train across to Zandvoort. Drizzling when I arrived – and that later turned to rain, which persisted for much of the time I was there. Was taking part in the first international meeting of what is billed as the ‘ChildFinance‘ movement, though there are still some different views on what the name should be. That first evening centred around a dinner at the Kasteel Marquette, which was romantically surrounded in low mist, with a heron soaring past my head as we came out later into a surprisingly light evening.

Zandvoort made my heart sink a little as I walked through it to the hotel. Afterwards, Pamela Hartigan would send me an email suggesting the town should be levelled, though that’s exactly what the German did in WWII to the original fishing village. They burrowed into the surrounding dunes (much of which is now a national park) to create a network of bunkers and launch platforms for their V1 rockets, something I noted in my introductory speech, expressing the hope that we would launch something a little more constructive. I helped launch a report Volans helped Aflatoun put together for the event, The Word on the Street: Views on Finance for Children and Youth. 

Spent a fair amount of second day in my room, doing a range of work for Volans. But in the sessions that I did take part in there were many pointers for a new project we are starting on behaviour change. Some wonderful dinners during the event, with some fascinating people, including a very nice walk around Haarlem in light rain with Audrey Tan of Project Moolah, based in Singapore. She and her colleague Min took me through what they are doing on the last morning – very exciting.

Proud to be part of all this, not least because if we can encourage children and young people generally to be more financially literate, the chances are that we will also be teaching them to trade off today’s immediate interests for tomorrow’s priorities, which could help build a larger constituency for sustainability.

Lowest moment was in Haarlem, when I was encouraged not to waste a bottle of mineral water left over after a dinner at a very nice Greek restaurant. So put it in my bag, where somehow it cracked, and flooded everything – including my much-loved Leica D-Lux 3. It died. Despite my best efforts later on with a hairdryer, it showed only fitful signs of life. But, having taken out the (sodden) battery and memory stick and left them to air, a couple of days we finally achieved a resurrection moment, with pretty much full function restored by the time I arrived in Athens,

Thais and I Char’s bump Group 1: Char, Sam, Alex, Amy, Thais, me, Rafael, Tim, Amanda, Erica Group 2: Rafael, Char, Sam, Amy, Sam, Thais, Erica, Tim, Amanda, Alex, me Amanda, Sam, Erica, Char Tim, Amanda, Thais A bit of a blur Sam, Rafael, Amy Sam nurses Alex’s cycling accident wounds Amanda says goodbye – for the moment Farewell Tim and I   Lovely evening, extending into dinner for some, at 2 Bloomsbury Place – celebrating the work of our interns, represented today by Amanda (Feldman, LSE), Erica (Barbosa, LSE), Rafael (Morais Chiaravalloti, Escola Superior de Conservacao Ambiental e Sustenabilidade, ESCAS) and Tim (Barrow-Williams, Imperial College). Rafael’s last working day, so spotlight on him. The sound-track was the playlist I put together for my sixtieth birthday party last June, so at least I was happy. What a privilege it is to work with such motivated, talented and generously spirited young people.    Group 3: Alex, Tim, Sam, Amy, Rafael, Amanda Char and Alex Accidental still-life, with salt

John Manoochehri reminded me today of the piece I wrote in Time magazine about John Browne in his heyday at BP.  Mea culpa.

Richmond Park 1 Richmond Park 2 Rafael and Elaine

We went for a two-hour walk in Richmond Park this afternoon with Rafael (Morais Chiavalloti), who sadly is coming to the end of his internship with Volans – and returns to Brazil next weekend. These days the parakeets seem to outnumber the deer at times, adding a suitably tropical note to our trek, but overwhelming native birds.

 

Just finished reading Dave Eggers’ novel Zeitoun, which follows the story of a real family – the husband of Syrian extraction – through the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans. What a horrible indictment of what can happen to a modern democracy under the stress of a viciously narrow-minded regime which finds itself under assault, as was the case with the Bush-Cheney Administration.

Then read the June 7 issue of Time, and was struck by the ‘Junk Shot’ column by Joe Klein, who argues that instead of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster being Obama’s Katrina, it is, in fact, “actually George W. Bush’s second Katrina”. Klein notes that former Vice President Dick Cheney came to office hot-foot from Halliburton, also now complicit in Deepwater. More to the point, Cheney then “presided over the weakening of drilling regulations, including the exclusion of remote-shut-off switches (commonly used in the North Sea fields), which might have prevented the disaster.”

Read Klein’s article here.