John Elkington

Reagan National 1   Reagan National 2

The G20 summit was still in session in Washington, D.C., as I came out through Reagan National Airport.  Had to fly to Detroit before heading across to London, but trip made widly worth while by conversation on the plane with Alicia Diaz, a lawyer, who I started talking to because she had a copy of David McCulloch’s wonderful biography of John Adams.  I continue to work my way through Mrs Lincoln, which I am enjoying hugely.

Had largely spent the week in DC, for a SustainAbility AGM and Board meeting, including joint sessions with the team and a delightful dinner at a restaurant that only serves relatively local food, albeit noise levels were almost industrial.  When I first arrived, I snuck in visits to the National Gallery of Art, to take a look at Calder’s giant mobile, and then to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.

Then took Amtrak to Philadelphia on Friday afternoon, to speak at the Net Impact ‘The Sustainable Advantage’ conference at The Wharton School.  My session was titled ‘Unreasonable People: The Role Entrepreneurs Play in Shaping Tomorrow’s Markets’.  Chaired by Virginia Barreiro, New Global Ventures Global Director at the World Resources Institute, the panel session also involved Agnes Dasewicz, COO at the Grassroots Business Fund, and Ben Powell, Co-founder and Managing Partner, Agora Partnerships.  I began early road-testing of my thinking around the emerging ‘Phoenix Economy’, the focus of a possible new book I’m working on.  Wonderful reaction to the session from the several hundred MBA students and similar that took part.

Calder mobile   Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis, Rutan’s SpaceShipOne and Yeager’s X1   Dark Star, Predator et al   Mark Lee and Sophia Tickell in SustainAbility’s DC office    Bottled carrots in restaurant   Table setting – with Mark and Geoff in background   Meghan and Kate

Flew into Washington, DC, earlier today – having come via Detroit.  The taxi driver from Ronald Reagan/National Airport proved to be a delightful Palestinian, born in Jerusalem in 1959, the only year I ever visited that beautiful, blighted city.  

He had been tricked into exile by the Israelis 35 years ago – and told me how the Israelis bulldozed some of his family members’ homes a few days back, homes that had been built in the 1950s on land given to them by Jordan, on the grounds that the land belongs to Jews.  Hard not to share the sense of grievance.  He had zero hope that President-elect Obama would do anything to rein in Israel, but I said I’m not so sure.  My sense is that Israel sits on a diaspora-spread Krakatoa which will blow at some point, though the magma chambers may prove to lie in geographically distant parts of Iran or similar.

As I tapped away at the keyboard, with an aromatic bottle of Sam Adams at my elbow, it struck me what an intricately cantilevered global house of cards we live in.  And as I sent an email to a new friend in Tokyo, it also struck me – today is Veterans’ Day here – how that this simple act would have been seen very differently a mere 65 years ago.  Treasonable.  

And listening to President Bush doing a Veterans’ Day speech on an aircraft carrier today, it struck me again just how unconscionably flat-footed he and his cabal have been.  Yes, Britain helped cause much of the mayhem in the area originally covered by the Palestinian Mandate, but you’d think someone in the U.S. government would have the capacity to learn the right lessons from history.  He seems to have been awarded the Freedom Medal and given a standing ovation, when I suspect the Court of History will conclude – whatever the motives – the results of his actions could scarcely have been more damaging if he, Cheney, Rumsfeld et. al. had willfully set out with treasonable intent.  

What thoughts, you wonder, were really running through Obama’s mind when the Bushes showed the President-elect and his family around the White House this week?

Having always said that I don’t get jet-lag, the latest trip has had me on my knees, almost.  Maybe it was the combination of the travel with having to prepare presentations as I went, but it’s also possible that I’ve managed to delude myself all these years – a matter of mind over matter, as I have often said. Perhaps, too, it has been the additional strain of the cataracts I have been nurturing for a while, with the left eye now fairly blurred, and of the tinnitus that affects both ears – and is like a receiver left open to the distant radio signals of the galaxy.  Perhaps something significant will come through at some point?  I live in hope.

Still, have used the down-time while flying to work on ideas for a new book – and have been making a good deal of progress, I think.  

That may sound like a law firm, but it isn’t.  Wading through the cuttings Elaine had done for me while I was doing my around-the-world-in-around-8-days trip, I came across three obituaries that struck home.  One was of a writer whose work I sometimes enjoyed, but whose views on environmentalism I found uncomfortably Bushian.  Michael Crichton first came to fame with The Andromeda Strain, published in 1969, was based on a threat that returned with a space probe to Earth.  Many of his books had to do with the sort of issues that environmentalists tend to raise, from the side-effects of genetic engineering to those of nanoscience, but he surely didn’t like environmentalists.

Two folk I think I might have got on with better also died while I was circumnavigating, Jacques Picard and Studs Terkel.  I loved Terkel’s oral biographies and histories when I was at university around the time The Andromeda Strain was published.  Apparently, he adored FDR and wept against a lampost when the latter died, which makes me wonder whether people will do the same when Obama eventually shakes off this mortal coil.  Terkel’s ‘bottom-up history’ was an inspiration for the oral histories I did when I was working on my M. Phil. thesis on how people and communities respond to changes in the built environment in the early 1970s.

The third obituary was for Picard, who I remember being hugely impressed by during the 1960s.  OOn January 23, he had dived the the bathyscape Trieste to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the western Pacific.  Apart from the sheer courage of the deed, sinking down over 35,000 feet into a world where the water pressure is eight tons per square inch, there was the fact that Picard and his team found life even at such unbelievable depths – a discovery that would lead to the subsequent ban on the dumping of nuclear wastes in such ocean trenches.  Had it not been for Picard, Crichton might have ended up writing a blockbuster along the lines of The Challenger Strain.

Extraordinary day spent at annual Environmental Advisory Meeting of Nissan, with many of the top brass in attendance, but with we visitors – and many of the younger Nissan people – barely able to keep our minds off the results of the US election.  Cell phones and laptops were being passed around at various junctures, with people debating the signifciance of the mapped results.  When the news finally went solid, there was applause across the room, twice. 

A strong sense that a dark, misguided, benighted, mean-spirited period in America’s history may finally be drawing end, with at least the hope of something better. Like many people, I suspect, I found my mind turning back to the even darker days of slavery.  Am currently reading Janis Cooke Newman’s extraordinary novelised life of Mrs Lincoln.  And then Mark (Lee) at SustainAbility sent out a link to the latest Tom Friedman op-ed from the New York Times.  Caught the spirit to the nth degree.  What a race it has been – and the first US election where I actually dreamed of the outcome on election night.  No-one can envy Obama the Augean task he now faces, but he certainly won my (non-existent) vote.

Driven to Nissan’s R&D Center outside Tokyo in a fuel-cell vehicle, for a session I did head-to-head with one of Japan’s leading environmentalists, Junko Edahiro.  Great fun – and someone I’m keen to build a deeper connection with.

Dashboard of Fuel Cell Vehicle I was driven out of the city in   Solar roofing at Nissan R&D Center   After the session – Junko in the middle   Any colour as long as it’s …   Electric car 1   Electric car 2   Now I have my Carbon Off Passport, what mobility option to choose?