John Elkington

Sam’s shot of me at my desk   Charmian and JP Renaut after the SustainAbility/Volans London session   Charmian (Love) and I, with BlackBerries   Water cannon at the Water Conference in Stockholm   Dots of light on the wall as Sam and I confer at SustainAbility on Friday 19 August

Life is becoming a bit of a blur at the moment, mainly – I suspect – because my head is full of the various sections I am drafting for the new Volans website, due to launch early in September.  One thing we did recently was to present the latest developments at Volans to the SustainAbility teams, in London and Washington, DC. 

Meanwhile, Sam and I continue to hang out at SustainAbility for much of the time, because BT and others have been distinctly Stone Age in their wiring of the Volans offices in Bloomsbury Place.  Phones and printers are now stacked on the floors, but a glitch means yet another delay.  More positively, we have been building the Advisory Board at a rate of knots and now have some quite extraordinary people aboard, all to be announced in a couple of weeks.

This week kicked off with a flying visit to Stockholm, to speak on a panel at the Stockholm World Water Week event.   This was to launch the ITT Watermark.  Outside the conference centre, an extraordinary series of water cannon fired coloured columns into the air, though by the time I came out into the evening they seemed a little flacid and tired.

Apart from the endless typing away on the website content, I seem to be doing a fair number of telephone interviews at the moment.  It seems that despite the gathering clouds of recession various media are still intersted in the corporate responsibility agenda – and where it might take us next.

 

When I came into the environmental movement in the 1960s, the emblem of what we are losing that meant most to me was the humpback whale.  Later, in the 1980s, I played The Songs of the Humpback Whale – which I had bought way back in 1970 – to Gaia and Hania in the dark when they were very young, songs recorded by Dr Roger Payne.  For more on all of this, see Wikipedia entry.  Today, happily, The Times reports that humpback numbers are back up to around 40,000, suggesting that the magnificent creatures have managed to haul themselves back from the edge of the precipice.  But climate change, by impact ingthe evailability of food, particularly krill, could still reverse the process.

Spent the morning ferrying boxes of books from home – and from my desk SustainAbility – across the the new Bloomsbury Place offices of Volans.  Nice and bright when we started out, but by the time Elaine and I got to Bloomsbury Place the wind was fairly thumping through the trees there and in Bloomsbury Square nearby. 

Then we found I was missing one key of the front door set, so – while we sat on the steps in the wind with our boxes and no doubt looked like refugees to the steady stream of foreigners making their way to the British Museum, poor Sam had to streak across to let us and our pile of boxes in.  Nice feeling, though, to be building up the library in a building which the man who lives in the basement told us today dates back to the 1600s.

As we drove back through Trafalgar Square, a giant screen was showing swimming races from the Beijing Olympics, something I find excites me not a jot.  But it was nice to drive back along the Embankment and see the bridges, which I always find a delight.

Courtesy of BBC

Just watched Andrew Marr present two quite stunning programmes, on BBC1 and BBC2, the first on Britain from Above, the second on London ditto.  Seeing the pulsing webs of energy, telecommunications and road, air and sea traffic reminded me of the ecosystemic perspectives on landscapes and cities that first drew me to planning in the early 1970s – and then the Abercrombie Plan sequences in the London programme reminded me of some of the reasons why I fled the discipline once I had my M. Phil. 

The sequences of London’s Docklands at the same time prompted memories of my solo jaunts around the derelict docks, with my Leica M3, including one early morning horror where I found myself alone in an area of warehousing, triangulated upon by three guard-dogs – two Alsatians and a Doberman.  I had to stand in the same spot for an unconscionable time before their owner arrived to liberate me – and chastise me for trespassing.

The sequence of the Luftwaffe bombing the docks was extraordinary, with the aerial photographs catching one stick of bombs splashing into the Thames, but also reminding me of the stick that went along our road in Barnes – and of the day when Elaine was turned out of the house, maybe six or seven years ago, when neighbours digging a hole for a tree about five feet from our kitchen found an unexploded bomb from that same stick.

Some of the best television I have seen in a very long time.

Wall-E  

Across to Leicester Square this evening to meet up with Elaine, Gaia and Hania and see Wall-E, the new Pixar/Disney robot-loves-robot film. Absolutely stunning and, while Elaine spent much of the film with her hands over her ears because of the volume of the Sensuround sound system, I was transported. Best of all, the grudging remobilisation of the human space maggots gave me a degree of hope that America might still reclaim its soul.