John Elkington

Gaia took a number of us to the Soho Curzon this evening to see Slumdog Millionaire, the film she has been working on at Celador.  Wonderful to see her name rolling up in the credits at the end. Absolutely stunning film, though puts you through the emotional wringer any number of times on the way.  The kiss on the scar will live on in my memory.  Struck me that tthis could help raise awareness of a number of issues we have been associated with at Volans, particularly our work with Jeroo Billimoria’s Aflatoun, which helps teach children (including slum and street children) – in India and elsewhere – how to manage what little money they do get their hands on. 

 

Blur 1 Blur 2 Blur 3 (Roka)

Elaine, Gaia, Hania, Christine, Mickey and I went to see Slumdog Millionaire at the Curzon Soho this evening – in my case for the first time.  Totally blown away.  Then across to Roka in Charlotte Street for supper.  On the way across, my camera seemed to take on a slightly slumdog personality.

Cotswold frost (Tim Elkington)   One of a series of images sent this morning by my father, showing hoar frost in their garden yesterday.

IGP 2009

As the fields opened out by pioneering social and environmental entrepreneurs begin to mainstream, we will see a secondary wave of professionalisation.  Although I have tended to shy away from the conventional professional institutes in these fields, because they have often struck me as pursuing the narrow self-interests of particular groups of professionals or as being obsessed with strapping letters after people’s names, I do see a growing need to network across the hugely diverse disciplines and fields that social entrepreneurship, human rights, cleantech, sustainable development and so on now embrace.  Which is a key reason I was happy to accept this week the Honorary Fellowship offered by the Institute of Green Professionals, based in the USA.

As background, IGP is “an independent, professional, education, credentialing, research and philanthropic “social enterprise” organization for sustainable development professionals and academics.  Multi-disciplinary in its scope, the Institute of Green Professionals is the only credentialing and ethics code-based global organization that brings together individuals and organizations from diverse areas of sustainable development expertise. The IGP specialties currently include accounting, appraisal, architecture, engineering, land planning, landscape architecture, real property valuation, law, including participants in CSR capacities.” 

What caught my interest, though, was IGP’s Mission Statement, which referenced the thinking of both Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson and economist Brian Milani. Professor Wilson noted that: “A balanced perspective cannot be acquired by studying disciplines in pieces but through pursuit of the consilience among them.” As IGP points out, the term ‘consilience’ was used in Wilson’s 1998 book of the same name, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, and means “the joining together of knowledge and information across disciplines to create a unified framework of understanding.” 

Milani applied this concept to participants in the transition to a Green economy when he said: “The environmental movement in particular should put more emphasis on establishing an educational network that both formalizes its educational tasks and systematizes connections with the rest of the community.” 

These are sentiments, ambitions and pursuits that I wholly buy into.

Earthrise

I am often asked – most recently yesterday by a woman from the US – what got me into this space. And I often tell the story of the moonless nocturnal walk by the derelict flax ponds that had me standing in the mid-1950s in an elastic sheet of elvers, migrating from somewhere to somewhere. But that was a switching on to the natural environment, which could have led me into the world of pure conservation. I took a different path, towards environmentalism – and a critical influence was the cascade of images of Earth from space, notably Earthrise, the fortieth anniversary of whose publication falls this year.

The year before I was born, in 1948, the cosmologist Fred Hoyle predicted that the first images of Earth from space would forever change our view of our planet. And so it was, though not nearly as fast as some might have imagined. We had another session at Volans yesterday on sustainable fisheries, with many of the global trends taking us in very-far-from-sustainable directions. Still, it’s no accident that the image on the screen of MacBook Pro is of a version of Earthrise.