A column I co-authored with Pierre-François Thaler and Sylvain Guyoton of EcoVadis appeared in yesterday’s issue of Le Monde. It explored similarities between the U.S. suprime and Chinese melamine-in-milk scandals.
The Horse’s Eye View
When I cycle to Volans, I pass the Animals in War Memorial by Park Lane. But until today I hadn’t realised that of the one million horses shipped from Britain to France during WWI, only 62,000 had returned to this country. Nor had I realised how many of the animals were shipped from the US and Canada when our own stables ran dry. Those animals that weren’t killed outright tended to end up on the butcher’s block. All this was brought home by War Horse, which I saw this afternoon with Elaine’s sister, Christine.
The staging was incredible, with the main backdrop symbolising part of a page torn from an artist’s notebook. I surreptitiously took photos, without using flash, and though they don’t really capture the full measure of the thing, they’ll remind me of a deeply moving experience. One image that will live on is the centre of the stage spiralling up to show a cross-section of the carnage beneath the surface, like one of those instruments that they push into a Stilton to extract a sample of the cheese. Here, instead of the blue veins, you could see the bodies of men and horses.
Cursing in Church
The full Moon seen from Taylor’s
As the financial crisis continued to deepen, I flew to Porto, Portugal, on Tuesday, to do a keynote address at an Organic Exchange conference on opportunities to use organic approaches to strengthen sustainability, resource and investment strategies. The focus of Organic Exchange, which involves companies like C&A, Nike and Patagonia, is on organic cotton.
One highlight of the two-day visit was dinner with a small group of people near the old iron bridge across the Douro, hosted by Jill Dumain of Patagonia; the other a dinner with pretty much all the participants at Taylor’s, with spectacular views over Porto – and a full moon hanging in the sky (see photo above). Wonderful evening sandwiched between Rebecca Calahan Klein of Organic Exchange and Marci Zaroff of Under the Canopy.
The keynote seemed to go very well, with a couple of companies telling me that they had (independently) called or emailed their CEOs to suggest I did a similar speech for them. That said, I did provoke one participant to protest that I was “cursing in church” when I imagined a future in which demographic pressures – with a global population rising towards 9-10 billion – drove a process by which elements of the organic movement hybridised with aspects of the genetic engineering world. But then others came up afterwards and said they could easily imagine this happening, as safer GM methods were used to boost the water efficiency of cotton plants – though, admittedly, the definitions of organic would need to change for this to become possible.
This bridge is a bit of a blur – because I didn’t want to flash Crossing the bridge en route to Taylor’s Walking down to Taylor’s Barrels of port Walking back afterwards
Happy Birthday, Land Rover
Our Land Rover with Blue, the whippet, as bonnet mascot
It’s sixty years since the first Land Rover took to the road, in 1948 – the year before I was born. Its registration number was HUE 166. For close on 20 years in the 60s and 70s, my family had a vehicle which didn’t look much different, JBW 797. It was old even when we got it, the story being that it had been twice around the world already and at one stage had served as a logging vehicle.
Whatever its family tree and previous exploits, it became a centre plank of our younger years, a porch on wheels, a rough-and-tumble covered wagon. We would put it in the lowest gear as we drove across Little Rissington airfield, leaving it to its own devices as we all dived off to find and pick mushrooms. We treated it to excursions in a nearby quarry, in the days when we still shot things – and I recall one time, with the canvas top removed, when we drove back through Bourton-on-the-Water in the rain, with at least one of our party wearing a huge snorkel mask and another plucking something, with the feathers strewing out in our wake.
In 1970, Elaine and I took it – and four friends from university, ian, Jan, Martin and Rex – to Greece for two months, taking the ferry to Skiathos and then on around the Pelopennes. During that trip, it turns out, we bumped into Geoff Lye, much later a colleague at SustainAbility and Volans, who was driving around the Greece with friends in a London black cab.
It was a wrench when the family finally sold JBW 797, but by then its alumium body was corroding fairly badly – and its paintwork had worn down to silver on the wings and bonnet, where we seemed to spend much of our time – as shown in the photo above.
So happy birthday to HUE 166, to whatever is left of JBW 797 and to Land Rover. That said, I do wonder whether a decade hence we will look back and see that Land Rover – like many other automakers – took a dangerous detour in plunging so wholeheartedly into the SUV era. True, as Land Rover insists, the vehicle has served brilliantly in an endless number of scientific and environmental projects, but the marque has become much more closely identified in recent years with the 4×4 plague of Chelsea Tractors. If conspicuous consumption becomes less socially acceptable, it will be fascinating to watch the Land Rover mutate back closer towards its original functions.
In the eye of the storm
With the financial world tumbling around our ears, Charmian and I went early in the week to find out more about the London Accord from Michael Mainelli of the Z/Yen Group. A fascinating initiative which aims to blend social, environmental and financial agendas and that deserves to be even more widely known. A little later in the week, Doug Miller of the European Venture Philathropy Association kindly came in and did a 101 session for a group from Volans and SustainAbility. Spent a fair amount of the week doing client work, writing articles and preparing presentations, all of which are tending to refer back to the work of Nikolai Kondratiev and Joseph Schumpeter, two economists whose work had a profound influence on the way I see the world.
London’s future as a financial centre is being questioned by some as the market turmoil continues, but the current crisis and suffering is put in perspective by something Elaine told me today. I have always wondered why the Piccadilly Line jinks about and makes such a screeching noise between South Kensington and Knightsbridge stations. The reason, according to Catherine Arnold’s book Necropolis, is that the line had to be routed around huge numbers of corpses that had been buried near Rotten Row during the Great Plague. Something else to think about as I cycle nearby on my way to and from work.
The conversation continues after Doug Miller has gone Charmian and I … … are among those celebrating Smita’s joining full-time Sam reclines towards the end of another frenetic day With Sam, Astrid and Smita: am I turning into a silver-back gorilla? Deceptive: the sun sets over London – after another day of financial carnage