John Elkington

Last few days have been spent intensively writing the report for the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), which is now beginning to go out for comment.  Too much time spent at the keyboard, tapping away. Tired – and my cough of the past 5-6 weeks isn’t going away.  But weird form of good news yesterday when the Financial Times Weekend Magazine carried a story about the Somali pirates.  Their depredations have been so great that the outside world – including fishing vessels – now shy away from regional waters. Since it is said that foreign overfishing was one factor creating the piracy problem in the first place, it’s interesting to read that fear has created effective ‘no-take’ areas. In the areas affected, fish catches have doubled.

Mark (Lee), Valerie (Lee), Seb (Beloe), Geoff (Lye), Sam (Lakha), Yasmin (Crowther) Seb, Geoff, Sam, Yasmin, Alex (Hammer) Valerie, Seb, Geoff, Sam, Yasmin, Alex, Frances (Buckingham), Amy (Birchall) Nadine (Mendelbaum) shows Geoff a book on her childhood After the downturn, SustainAbility gets its mojo back – Gary Kendall’s thumb

Wonderful evening at SustainAbility, with mix of SA and Volans team members, to mark Mark and Valerie’s move back to San Francisco. Emotional, but overall very upbeat. Afterwards, Elaine and I went off for supper with Alois Flatz, ex-Sam and now with zouk ventures, and for many years a member of SustainAbility’s Faculty.

Hare Cord and bottles

A couple of the images I too around the kitchen, in hope of stimulating Caroline in her current painting marathon.

Arriving for BASE Cranescape 2 Eco-sentiive driving training at BASE Washing down the Excel Centre Statue of window-washer on my way to the Hilton, Edgeware Road

A whirlwind week, this one. But almost over the pestilential cough that has haunted me for a month, thankfully.  Elaine in Edinburgh, tidying up her aunt’s estate, for much of the week.  Small highlights from the Barnes front: our mimosa tree is in blossom, with wonderful scent, and – a less attractive natural input – I discovered that a flock of birds, probably seagulls, had bombarded our glass-roofed kitchen during the night with the most insane quantities of liquid guano. Took quite a while to hose off. Could have done with the hosing mechanism I saw when leaving the Excel Centre in Docklands earlier in the week (see penultimate photo above).

A ferocious amount of writing to be done at the moment. Today has been spent writing the latest round of articles and columns, this time on social networks after the Just Means conference on Friday, and yesterday was largely devoted to doing an essay for the next issue of McKinsey’s What Matters. Fingers crossed on that front, because I took the brief – to be provocative – fairly literally. First time we have been able to sit out for lunch, though it got quite cold as soon as the sun went behind the clouds.

The week has seen a stream of visitors coming through 2 Bloomsbury Place, among them Jill Huntley and Jessica Wilson of Accenture, Richard Cree of Director magazine and Patrice Thramer of Nike’s GreenXchange. On Tuesday, I had a very interesting dinner in Covent Garden with Nick Parker of the Cleantech Group and his son, Sanjay.

Among speaking events there was a panel session at the BASE conference in Docklands and an hour-and-a-half event with Charmian in the Hilton Metropole,  this one with a study group from the National Bank of Australia. Rather got into my stride at both, with energetic feedback.

With Spectator business editor Martin Vander Weyer in the chair, my co-panellists at BASE were: Business in the Community chief executive Stephen Howard; Paul Turner, head of sustainable development at LloydsTSB; Peter White, global sustainability director at Procter & Gamble; and Jeff Whittingham, director of business solutions at British Gas. had a productive coffee with Martin Chilcott of the 2degrees network, where I’m on the Advisory Board.

Then, on the evening of 17 March, Geoff (Lye), Sam and I went across to The Perseverance, near SustainAbility, to have a drink with Chris Guenther and other SA team members, before I shot up north to Highbury for a dinner on social innovation at Charlie Leadbetter’s house, with people like Geoff Mulgan of the Young Foundation, John Grant of Abundancy Partners and Molly Webb of the Climate Group – where we helped think through a new initiative, Bethnal Green Ventures.

Two among a series of obituaries that resonated powerfully this month were those for Wing Commander Bob Doe, who Tim flew with in, I think, India and Burma during WWII, and Charlie Gillett, one of the key figures in the world music movement from the late 1980s. I wrote many of the books of that period late into the night listening to Gillett on Capital Radio, in the days when you listened to the radio on the radio. In my mind he’s up there alongside John Peel in terms of DJs – and alongside Chris Blackwell and Ry Cooder in terms of being an ambassador for world music.