John Elkington

I was in Tokyo on the day that Obama won the election, watching the results come in with people of many nations.  Today I have been in Utrecht as the coverage of the Inaugural Address and parade came through on the BBC and CNN.  Later, I read the speech.  And I found it deeply moving, even if if not yet quite up to the punishing standard – how could it be – of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.   

It was moving to see mention of whips and hard ploughing, but also – as someone who saw Khe Sahn as a symbol of all that ailed America in the late 1960s and early 1970s – the mention of those who died there.  

Al Gore’s prescient warnings on energy and climate security have clearly been taken on board – and what a delight to see Obama hug not only Gore but also McCain.  This is truly a paradigm shift, in multiple dimensions, in the true sense that I think Thomas Kuhn intended.

A section of the speech that will live on in my memory, partly because of the echoes, but partly because it seeks to redefine the spirit of citizenship, which in some corporate hands has become a fairly dilute wine, was this:

“What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.”

And I can’t think of another Inaugural Address that ended on that phrase that has been so central to the pursuit of sustainability, “future generations”.  Understanding and meeting their needs is likely to be a challenge every bit as demanding as that of tackling secession, the aftermath of slavery, Nazism or Communism – particularly at a time when the economic backdrop gets darker by the day. But President Barack Hussein Obama is, for the first time, a President I feel I share.

  This is the best I can do from the Web on the cover of the Italian version of The Power of Unreasonable People, which arrived in the office today.  Did another signing session for the US edition today, too.  And this evening staggered home with my bag full not only of computers, cables, papers and magazines, but also a copy each of the US, Italian and Japanese editions of the book. More foreign editions are in the pipeline.  

 

One of my favourite authors as a child was Thor Heyerdahl, with The Kon-Tiki Expedition profoundly shaping the way I thought of team-building, the natural environment and internationalism.  Now David de Rothschild of Adventure Ecology is planning to set sail in the Plastiki, setting out on 28 April, the sixty-second anniversary of the start of the Kon-Tiki expedition.  The Kon-Tiki, which is now the subject of its own museum, was built of balsa wood, the laster Ra II raft of reeds.  On both, Heyerdahl could see evidence of the growing population of the oceans, because of their intimate contact with the blue face of the planet.  The Plastiki will be built of more modern materials, empty plastic bottles encased in a plastic skin.  The goal: to sail into an area of plastic debris that has accumulated between California and Hawaii, in an area of the northern Pacific gyre, an area five times the size of Britain.  According to the Sunday Times today, of the 100 million tons of plastic produced each year, fully 10 per cent ends up in the oceans.  

Delightful dinner this evening at Admiralty House, London, hosted by the Office of the Third Sector  – with excellent catering by Jamie Oliver’s restaurant Fifteen.  In addition to social entrepreneurs I already knew – including Penny Newman (now of Fifteen), Nigel Kershaw of Big Issue Invest, Gib Bulloch of Accenture Development Partners and Reed Paget of Belu Water, I was delighted to meet people like Tokunbo Ajasa-Oluwa of Catch 22 Magazine and Sam Everington of Bromley By Bow.  Many of them were Social Enterprise Ambassadors.  Good chat, too, with Campbell Robb, who heads the Office of the Third Sector.  Downturn very much in people’s minds, but I found myself thinking of same rooms when occupied by Winston Churchill during WWII and my mood lightened considerably.

Never thought of myself as a diary-keeper, indeed had not kept a diary until 1989, when I completed a diary which was then turned into a book, A Year in the Greenhouse, by Victor Gollancz.  The first entry, for Friday, 23 December 1988, began as follows” In today’s world, a shotgun can sometimes be heard around the world.”  I then went on to talk about the assassination the previous day of Chico Mendes, who had fought to protect Brazil’s rubber and brazil nut reserves against the depredations of loggers and cattle ranchers.  Activists still run the risk of murder there.

Tonight, went along to the Royal Society of Arts for an evening with Elenira Mendes, Chico’s daughter, flanked by a panel including Jonathan Dove, Charlie Kronick of Greenpeace and Dame Vivienne Westwood.  Interesting flashes, and not (mercifully) by the once-knickerless-Dame, but overall the evening struck me as somewhat flat.  Dame Vivienne did her best pantomime party piece, alternately lauding Jim Lovelock and warning that 5 billion people will die this century before scooting off into la-la-land.

Early on there was lively applause for Greenpeace’s cunning plan of buying a plot of land smack-bang in the middle of where BAA wants to build its third runway at Heathrow.