John Elkington

 

Have been working through the day on the proposal for the new book – and on the latest round of six columns, with three CDs mainly in the background. Rufus Wainwright’s Poses was one, which I bought this week after reading of the death of his mother, Kate McGarrigle. Sam has often played his music when we are working late and I like it tremendously. Even more invigorating, though, have been two other CDs I bought at the same time – The Birth of Surf, a collection of early US surf music, and Board Boogie, accurately billed as “Surf ‘N’ Twang from Down Under”.

Bands I had never heard of, among them The Aztecs, The Joy Boys, The Nocturnes, The Surf Riders, The Resonets, The Vibratones, The Sunsets, Laurie Wade’s Cavaliers, The Dee Jays and The Playboys.  Could scarcely be more different from Poses, but found myself enjoying quite as much as Dick Dale & The Del-Tones, Duane Eddy & The Rebels, Link Wray & His Raymen, The Ventures and The Surfaris. Those really were the days, before Beatlemania struck like a musical tsunami, wiping out many of the surf music bands.

Thank heavens for recording technology, in all its infinite variety. One of the books I bought recently is Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever, the story of recorded music. One of the things that has always fascinated me is the difference between music as experienced live and as recorded and reproduced. The band that, for me, showed the difference most dramatically in the 1960s was Fairport Convention.

And, just maybe, the extraordinary volume of their concerts could have contributed to the hearing loss and tinnitus that took me to see a specialist in Harley Street this week. On the list of technology I have so far refused I can now add a hearing aid to a pacemaker. Which puts me in mind on another Sixties band of Liverpudlians.

Two French friends from decades back came to lunch today – he is a psychologist and has been working in two prisons in Provence for around seven years, focusing on murderers and sexual offenders. Says he enjoys it – and has been fighting for the rights to health of such prisoners. 

Separately, it’s sad how thoughtful people see France becoming increasingly right-wing and intolerant under the current regime.

Then, in the evening, Elaine and I went across to Charlotte Street to have dinner with another friend, Will Rosenzweig of Physic Ventures at Roka. Wonderful evening – and the trains and Tube worked quite spectacularly well, with a maximum wait of all four connections happing within a minute or so. I took as book, Physics for Future Presidents by Richard A. Muller, but didn’t get a chance to start it.

Image of the Barnes wetland centre

I always loved grandparents – and engaging with their generation of friends. So when it came to environmentalism, which I fell backwards into in the early 1960s, raising funds for the embryonic WWF in 1961, it was perhaps only natural that the likes of Gerald Durrell, Max Nicholson and Peter Scott felt like adoptive (but distant) grandparents. I recall reading Durrell’s books when very young and impressionable (coincidentally, BBC4 re-ran a film version of My Family & Other Animals last night, after a stunning film by Professor Armand Leroi exploring the lagoon off Lesvos where Aristotle practically invented biology) and visiting the Scotts’ Slimbridge wildlife reserve when at prep school at Glencot in Somerset.

Much, much later, I came to work with Max in founding Environmental Data Services (ENDS) in 1978, with the late David Layton. I met Durrell at a preview of one of Phil Agland’s films sometime in the mid-1980s – and found him delightful. Sir Peter I had met when he was one of the judges for the Sir Winston Churchill Memorial Fellowships, one of which I was awarded in 1981. He was wonderfully supportive. I met him again in Guiting Power, shortly before he died, with Lady Scott – who was enchanting. I remember her telling me that my presentation had left her “fizzing with energy”, but then I suspect that was her default setting.

Her obituary appears in The Times today, along with a couple of tremendously evocative photographs. This mentions the book, The Art of Peter Scott, a copy of which I was recently sent by WWF, which he co-founded with Max and others in 1961, and where I am now a member of the Council of Ambassadors. The book has been in the Volans office for a month or so, on one of our new book stands, open on a double-page spread that features a glider – which, alongside all those graceful wildfowl winging through Scott-rendered skies, nicely captures the sense of uplift and possibility that we stretch towards at Volans.

Apart from the book, I think of the Scotts every time we wander round the corner in Barnes to the wetland wildlife reserve that he played such a key role in creating. What an extraordinary couple they were!

Piccard’s solar plane

My last blog entry, on Avatar, triggered a number of responses via various channels, with Claudia Gonella responding via Facebook – and suggesting that I take a look at Bertrand Piccard‘s TED speech from last year. I did, over breakfast this morning, and was completely blown away. Fascinating that his father, Jacques, and grandfather, Auguste, were both explorers – whose adventures inspired me as a boy, though my fear of heights and enclosed spaces made it extremely unlikely that I would follow in either of their footsteps.

Bertrand Piccard, however, did – though while his grandfather went up into the heavens and his father went down into the depths of the Mariana Trench, he has chosen to go sideways, around the world in balloons. I love his use of the ballooning metaphor to spotlight and discuss the challenge our civilization faces in weaning itself off fossil fuels – and plugging into renewable energy. Will be watching closely the next steps with his innovative solar plane.

With my transfer to Volans in the past couple of years, I resonated strongly with his comments about the need to jettison certain types of ballast as you try to find the right altitude to pick up the winds that can carry you in the right direction and, hopefully, at the right speed. Happily, the past week has seen much more joint working between Volans and SustainAbility, with a strong updraft now building under both sets of wings.

Control room Avatar eye Neytiri Roger-Dean-like landscape of floating mountains

Although I adored Up, for me Avatar has been the ultimate in 3-D experiences. Elaine, Gaia and I went to see it on Thursday evening – and I haven’t been able to get it out of mind since. And Sigourney Weaver, one of my all-time favourite actresses, is only part of the story. For more, see here and here.

Like Star Wars (1977) or Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), the film broke through to the treasure store of storylines and images I had accumulated through childhood and younger years, not least from reading science fiction books like Dune. Indeed, there was much of the film that forcefully reminded me of Dune‘s author, Frank Herbert, who I met in the 1980s. The tanks in which the avatars are grown are straight-line descendants of the axolotl tanks in which mentats were grown in the Dune series.

The landscape of floating mountains in which the final battle is fought reminded me inexorably of the work of Roger Dean, whose painting I have long loved and had about the house–and who I met way back in the early 1990s at a Green exhibition where we were both involved.

The control room on the planet of Pandora is exactly the way I’d like the Volans offices to look like a year or two hence, with the addition of a bunch of comfy sofas and bookshelves. The entrepreneurial way in which a small group of principled heroes adapts the problem technology to new, positive uses is a wonderful illustration of the Power of Unreasonable People.

And the eyes have it: I loved the eyes of the Na’vi–and, also, the bio-botanical neural network. The social variant of that is what Paul Hawken has been monitoring and championing in his book Blessed Unrest and in the work of WiserEarth.

Can’t wait to see the film again.