Delighted to welcome One Stone Advisors, featuring a number of my favourite women. The name goes back to 1997, when The Environment Foundation (now The Foundation for Democracy & Sustainable Development), which I chair, and SustainAbility, which I then chaired, organised a conference at the Kensington Roof Gardens. The theme was ‘Three Birds, One Stone’, and we were exploring early efforts to address the triple bottom line.
Shaking Hands With My Inner Viking
Some time ago, I went to see the doctor about nodules that were forming on the ring finger tendon of my right hand. I now find that it seems to be linked to Northern European ancestry – and particularly, at least by tradition, to Viking ancestry. I seem to be a marauder at heart.
International Day of Climate Action
My interview with Bill McKibben of 350.org has been posted today here, with a parallel piece by Gary Kendall, SustainAbility’s Director of Energy and Climate Change, due to be posted on the SustainAbility site shortly. The theme: October 24, which will be the first International Day of Climate Action.
A $35 million round trip
It is a couple of years since an X-Prize Foundation team came to visit us at SustainAbility’s London offices, but I already knew of them through magazines like Wired and Fast Company – and have since kept a fairly close eye on their doings. Still, they were brought forcefully back to mind when Alejandro (Litovsky) and I met people from Concordia 21 at Richard Branson’s HQ in Hammersmith a few months back – the walls were blazoned with an evolutionary tree beginning with Homo volans and topping out with SpaceShipOne (see above). See also July 6 entry here. Branson is now helping to fund further work through Virgin Galactic, with a typically saucy picture of their Eve launch vehicle (or ‘Mothership’, with the Virgin maiden often said to represent Branson’s mother) shown below. A short, hyperlinked update on the latest Prizes developed by the X-Prize Foundation can be found here. Among other things, it talks about the $35 million fare paid by Cirque du Soleil billionaire Guy Laliberte for an almost-out-of-this-world experience, flying to the limits of Earth’s atmosphere. Given Laliberte’s origins as a social entrepreneur, there’s a neat set of connections here somewhere, but I’ll work on them later.
When the Average Age Is 71 …
Peter (far left) and Cemil (second left) leaving Topkapi
During the tour I guesstimated the average age of those on this fourth ACE study tour we have done as 70. Peter Clark was to tell me when we arrived back at Heathrow that it was 71, making me the youngest, at 60. After Syria, Northern Cyprus and Crete, I had worried that nothing could match those trips, but this Constantinople/Istanbul tour was really quite exceptional. As the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle progressively came together, the picture of an extraordinary melting pot for cultures and thinking popped into our minds – and we really can’t wait to go back.