John Elkington

Reflection Barnes Common Local Nature Reserve Path Cricket starts As the rain begins

Elaine and I walked Hania across to Barnes station just before 5 this afternoon, breathing in the smells of the Hawthorn blossom and what may have been Queen Anne’s Lace or Hedge Parsley. As we walked back, the cricketers came out to play, so we wandered in among the trees to watch, partly because the rain was starting fall.

We gradually made our way home, at one stage standing under a Horse Chestnut across from Chris Patten’s home as the rain thumped down. I watched it blur a distant Poplar – and found myself thinking of how the men in the WWI trenches would have experienced such downpours. Wonderful feeling, to be sheltered by a great tree.

Have spent much of the day wading through the newspapers from the past week – and, at one stage, booking a Eurostar ticket for tomorrow, in case my flight to Frankfurt is grounded by the incoming ash. Some geologists say that we are possibly heading into a period where some much larger Icelandic volcanoes begin to erupt. Time to explore videoconferencing more seriously?

Rain 1 Rain 2  

Barnes 1 Barnes 2

Our garden is more or less at it peak at the moment, spilling over with bluebells and sweet cicely, and with all sorts of plants and vines filling the air with perfume – particularly something that has scrambled up the eucalyptus from a neighbour’s garden. A fair number of bees around, particularly various types of bumblebee, but the fate of bees internationally is a growing concern. Their contribution to agriculture is part of the evolving ecosystem services space, something we cover in our latest report, The Biosphere Economy. Many years ago, I wanted to keep bees, even had a pair of hives and a honey extractor inherited from an uncle of Kerry Effingham’s, but life intervened. Apparently there’s a new type of hive, much simpler, which has had me musing again.

 

 

School of Management 1 School of Management 2 Professor Arthur Francis kicks us off Kyoko Fukukawa and her husband And their daughter

Travelled by train, via Leeds, to Bradford – to do a lecture at Bradford University’s School of Management. Amazing to see the landscape taken over by the acid yellow colour of rape fields. Read a stack of magazines, including Newsweek, which foresees the end of the euro and a second great depression. Theme of my talk was the Phoenix Economy, the title of our report last year, which plays into the same space, with discussion of the implication of the work of long-dead economists like Nikolai Kondratiev and Joseph Schumpeter on long-wave economic cycles.

Very much liked the School’s new extension, shown in the first two photos, on the back of the old building, shown in the fourth. Was hosted by, among other Kyoko Fukukawa, whose book on CSR in Asia I did a foreword for some time back. Lively discussion with School of Management alumni, and others, after which I took a bus back to Leeds and then headed south, getting home around 21.30.

Amy and Sam at Vats JP, Sam, Rafael, Charmian Charmian, Alex Amy and Sam

Lovely evening at Vats in Lamb’s Conduit Street with nine of us, from Volans (Amy, Charmian, Erica, Rafael, Sam) and SustainAbility (Alex, Gary, JP). Much discussion of the nodoubt apocryphal story of English archers’ fingers and the origin of the V-sign. Nice that these days Volans can afford to treat SustainAbility. Afterwards, cycled home in a slightly light-headed state, though cool evening air helped no end.

Aron Cramer at Advisory Council meeting Oded and Tabata Brazier in restaurant

Arrived in Sao Paulo on Sunday morning and then was immersed in several days of meetings with the Instituto Ethos Advisory Board. One of the things we discussed with Ethos founder Oded Grajew was the possibility of organising a parallel conference in 2012 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 UN Earth Summit in 1992. Later we all cascaded into the annual Ethos conference. I did a couple of sessions, chairing one with Pavan Sukhdev of Deutsche Bank and UNEP, Otto Scharmer, of MIT, who focuses on what he calls ‘Theory U’, and Vania Somavilla, who is Director of Environment and Sustainability at the mining company Vale. Will try and track down and post some photographs – I took very few this week. Alejandro (Litovsky) and I also did a session to launch our new report, The Biosphere Economy.