John Elkington

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

LEARN FROM THE LEADERS + PHARMA FUTURES II

I don’t normally post plugs for SustainAbility projects or programs on this site, but two programs we have just put up on the SustainAbility website are rather exciting and worth mentioning.

First, we now offer a new online database on best practice in company reporting. Good sustainability reporting is fast becoming a basic requirement for all companies wanting to operate effectively and with credibility in the sustainability space. Building a great report can be a little easier if you learn from other companies – those with leadership experience and reputations – but this requires research few have the time to do themselves. SustainAbility and Flag have partnered to create Learn from the Leaders (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article.asp?id=732), an online, searchable database and customized research tool that brings together years of experience reviewing, analyzing and benchmarking sustainability reports. Learn from the Leaders includes hundreds of best practice examples, and you can search them in dozens of different ways, including: (1) SustainAbility’s Global Reporters benchmarking criteria; (2) Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines; (3) Sector; (4) Region; (5) Issue; and (6) Format.

Second, there is Pharma Futures II (http://www.sustainability.com/news-media/news-resource.asp?id=738) whose new website is now on the SustainAbility homepage. This program is led by our Chair, Sophia Tickell. The healthcare operating environment is changing profoundly requiring creative responses from both management and investors. ‘Pharma Futures: Prescription for Long-Term Value’ is an ambitious investor-led dialogue between the pharmaceutical industry and its investors about how to manage a rapidly changing operating environment to deliver long-term value.

Pharma Futures is convened by pension funds Algemeen Burgerlijk Pensioenfonds (ABP Netherlands), the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS, US) and the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS, UK). As long-term owners of pharmaceutical companies, pension funds have a substantial interest in the continued profitability of a sector that has historically created considerable shareholder value. Pharma Futures recognises the vital contribution that the industry makes to society, through innovative breakthroughs in medical science, improvements to longevity and quality of life, and support to economies. Pharma Futures is centred around two, two day workshops, the first held in London in October 2006 and the second due to be held in New York in March 2007, bringing together the core working group of industry executives and investors.

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

TOMORROW’S COMPANY HITS 10

Across to Wragge & Co this evening with Geoff Lye for a celebration of the tenth anniversary of Tomorrow’s Company (http://www.tomorrowscompany.com). The idea behind this business-led think-tank is to help realise “a future for business which makes equal sense to staff, shareholders and society.” The temperature in the space used for the reception could hardly have been better suited for showcasing what a warmed world will be like. Geoff was a member of the original Tomorrow’s Company Inquiry Team, which reported in 1995. Mark Goyder noted in his speech that much of that report’s analysis has been subsumed into subsequent UK regulation. I’m a member of the ongoing Tomorrow’s Global Company Inquiry Team (http://www.tomorrowscompany.com/global). An altogether tougher challenge.

Monday, January 29, 2007

BUCKS FIZZING

Across to Bucks Club (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucks_Club), apparently the origin of ‘Bucks Fizz,’ for an evening reception focusing on the coming year’s programme for the 21st Century Trust (http://www.21stcenturytrust.org/). Thanked (Lord) Chris Patten for agreeing to take a central role in The Environment Foundation’s planned October conference on ‘Democracy & Sustainability,’ to be held on the top floor of City Hall (http://www.london.gov.uk/gla/city_hall/index.jsp). Although set up by folk who wanted a less stuffy gentleman’s club, it was pretty stuffy this evening – with fires blazing at either end of the room. Happily, heard today that we (Environment Foundation) have been awarded a grant by The Esmee Fairbairn Trust (http://www.esmeefairbairn.org.uk/) for the Foundation’s 2007 programme.

I’M ON YOUTUBE

Odd. Nic Frances, Chairman of Easy Being Green, did a video cameo of me in Davos, posted at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKauuqU-iUg

Sunday, January 28, 2007

A DIFFERENT CLIMATE IN DAVOS

After the busiest Davos I have experienced to date, I plan to post reflections piecemeal. But here are some fairly random photos and captions to start with. Overall, the event was the most productive since we first went in 2002, when the Forum convened in New York post-9/11 – with the number of serendipitous encounters this year running off the scale. The main focus: climate change (which really dominated the proceedings this year) and how to revive the Doha trade negotations.
I was running at 10-12 meetings a day throughout, but my biggest commitment was yesterday, when I had to facilitate a session on designing sustainable cities, with participants ranging from the Mayor of Dalian in China through Yann Arthus-Bertrand (the photographer whose images adorn the walls of our London office) and Google’s Larry Page. (When I mentjoned to Larry that we had ducked in to – and very rapidly out of – the famed Google party, because it was so noisy and crowded, he said he felt the same.) Two of my key speakers in the session were Lawrence Bloom, Chairman of EcoCities, and Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute.
Then I went straight on to be one of several roving experts in a pressure-cooker session – run in rip-roaring style by Bloomberg’s Craig Copetas – forcing CEOs and others to adapt to real-time scenarios based around a series of melt-downs in the global energy system. Was in harness with the likes of Amory and Dan Esty of Yale.
Just one example of the serendipity effect, apart from being able to thank London Mayor Ken Livingstone for his congestion charge (which I enjoy as a cyclist) and for letting us have the top floor of City Hall in October for a conference the Environment Foundation is planning on ‘Democracy and Sustainability,’ was my visit to the One Laptop Per Child exhibition in the Hotel Panorama. This is the $100 laptop project developed by Nicholas Negroponte and others (http://www.laptop.org/). He was there, but busy in presentation mode. Then, the next day, I bumped into him, explained that we were covering OLPC in the book, and he agreed to vet.
Took the train to Zurich this afternoon, bumping into Pamela and Barry and Andrea Coleman of Riders for Health (http://www.riders.org/en/html/) at the station – and then travelling down the mountain with them. Arrived home to find my youngest sister had had a brain haemorrhage while we were away, the emails having come into the Apple at home rather than the laptop I was carrying. But it seems that she is well on her way to recovery. Something I always dread is family disasters while I am travelling – particularly to places like Australia.

Magic of the mountains

Shadowed in Davos – in my Indiana Jones hat

A break in the proceedings

Some of the courtesy cars that we didn’t use

Elaine’s self-explanatory coat

One Laptop Per Child 1

One Laptop Per Child 2

One Laptop Per Child 3

Nick Negroponte presents

The Belvedere, where we ducked in – and out of – the Google party

Belvedere 2

‘Doomberg’ 1

‘Doomberg’ 2

Craig Copetas in full flow

Nic Frances of Easy Being Green lights up

Nic 2

Police clearing up as the event winds down
Empty media stand-up interview platform
Waiting for the train
Serendipitous encounter with Barry Coleman and Pamela
Snowscape
Barry and Andrea Coleman of Riders for Health
Pamela

Train snaking

Thursday, January 25, 2007

BBC INTERVIEW ON BIOFUELS

Did an interview from a studio in Davos for BBC4’s ‘Today’ Programme this morning, on biofuels. Somewhat squeezed for time, so unable to challenge the car industry’s current stand on emissions in quite the way I would have wanted – but such interviews always reach an extraordinary range of people (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/thursday.shtml go to 08.52 am).

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

SCHWAB FOUNDATION SUMMIT 07

Dr Mechai Viravaidya (‘Dr Condom’) and Pamela Hartigan

Elaine and I caught a train this evening to Davos, after two days at the latest Schwab Foundation social entrepreneurs summit, held at Swiss Re’s Rushlikon complex, overlooking Lake Zurich. Among other things, I chaired a plenary session on the business case for social entrepreneurship. My speakers were Debra Dunn (ex-senior-VP at HP and now a board member at The Skoll Foundation), Paul Fletcher (senior managing partner at Actis Capital), Will Rosenzweig (MD, Great Spirit Ventures) and Frans van Scaik (managing partner, Logispring). Overall, a truly extraordinary gathering. And it now looks as if Swiss Re will co-host the event on an annual basis.

We travelled to Davos with Isaac Durojaiye, a big man, Nigerian, with a huge laugh – which at times seemed to rock the train on its rails. He’s in the what he delicately describes as the “shit business,” running DMT Mobile Toilets. Once he was employed as bodyguard to the late Chief M.K.O Abiola. His nickname, ‘Otunba Gadaffi,’ originates from that time. As bodyguard to Chief M.K.O Abiola, he was extremely protective, so people would ask, “Why do you behave like Gadaffi?” (Otunba means “high chief.”)

As the Schwab Foundation notes: “DMT Toilets came about as a result of a request from Chief M.K.O Abiola, who wanted to have a large celebration for his son and charged Durojaiye with the task of organizing security. Durojaiye immediately noticed the lack of toilets at the venue and found that no toilets could be hired in Nigeria for such occasions. In fact, there were hardly any to be found anywhere in the region. DMT’s plan is to reach every part of Nigeria and beyond. His business model was inspired by Dr Bindeshwar Pathak of Sulabh International in India, who has set up about 1.5 million toilets across the country.” Isaac’s achievements give me hope even in a country like Nigeria.
More: http://www.schwabfound.org

Saturday, January 20, 2007

AFTER THE STORM

As Elaine and I took a quick walk around Barnes this evening, in between bouts of working on the book, we came across a tree that had been sawn into great logs by the river wall – alongside a car that had been pancaked. The ‘Great Storm’ hit on Thursday and I am rather glad I wasn’t on the bike that day. Might have ended up in Kansas the way it was blowing by the time we were doing the Environment Trustees meeting: the great plane trees behind the office were gyrating wildly and a TV aerial across Bedford Row was going like a hula dancer.

HRANT DINK

Robert Fisk is one of my favourite journalists, with his remarkably insightful coverage of the Middle East and environs. But his story in today’s Independent was particularly grisly (http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2169190.ece). He reported on the assassination in an Istanbul street of Hrant Dink, a journalist who has been courageously trying to get Turkey to admit its complicity in the unbelievably brutal massacre of the Armenians in 1915. This is an issue I have brought up with Turks I have met for decades, including Turkish taxi drivers in places like Berlin who themselves are no strangers to racial enmity, and have almost always had a defensive-shading-through-to-pretty-virulent reaction. In my mind there is absolutely no way Turkey can become a member of the EU until it comes clean on the twentieth century’s first holocaust.

Friday, January 19, 2007

UP FROM THE UNDERGROUND

After a slightly manic day, working on our report on the future of globalisation and getting ready for Zurich and Davos next week, I caught the Tube from Holborn to meet Elaine and Sally and Dick Osberg for an early dinner at The Wolseley in Piccadilly. Then the train ground to a halt in the tunnel. Perhaps it was only 15 minutes before a voice came on the tannoy to say that someone had gone onto the lines at Piccadilly Circus station, but it always seems an eternity when you are in a hurry.

After another wait, the train inched into Covent Garden station – from whence we all herded into the exit passages and then had to climb the endless spiral stairs to escape. No taxis, so I walked as fast as I could through an almost-solid-state-mechanics Leicester Square, ducking down Jermyn Street to avoid the press along Piccadilly, and turning up maybe 25 minutes late. Happily Elaine had made it more or less in time. Joyous conversations, wonderful food, but I couldn’t help wondering what it was that had had that poor soul plunging from the platform?

Thursday, January 18, 2007

GUTTER LANE

I do love the snickets, lanes and alleyways of old London. Today, in wild winds and driving rain, I walked up Gutter Lane – recalling the spat between Cooper Brothers and, if memory serves, the old GLC. The firm wanted to get the name of the lane changed to Cooper Lane, but the riposte was that they should change their names to Gutter Brothers.

Was on my way to a meeting of the WWF UK Council of Ambassadors at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson’s offices in Gresham Street. Some fascinating sessions on WWF’s One Planet Living accounting methodology (http://www.wwf.org.uk/oneplanetliving/index.asp) and on its work on the world’s water economy. Then raced back by Tube to SustainAbility to chair a meeting of the Trustees of the Environment Foundation, idiotically leaving my umbrella and WEF programme in the conference room. (Sir) Geoffrey Chandler was in typically vigorous form, leaving my shins elegantly bruised – and, in the process, helped us develop a high-energy plan for the rest of 2007.

SNEAKY PETE KLEINOW

Obituaries again, and today it’s Sneaky Pete Kleinow, who played pedal steel guitar the only time we saw The Byrds, at Middle Earth in Covent Garden. This was the Sweetheart of the Rodeo era, with Gram Parsons in full flow. Later, Sneaky Pete played alongside Parsons with another of my favourite bands of the late 1960s, The Flying Burrito Brothers. (He’s the one in black.) Had no idea he had done animations for films like The Right Stuff and The Empire Strikes Back.

BREAKFAST WITH JULIA

Got back late last night after doing the audio interview with Peter Senge, but only just behind Julia Hailes, who was staying overnight with us. Appropriate timing, really, since it is almost exactly 20 years since we founded SustainAbility – in March 1987. She had arrived on my doorstep late in 1986, hot-foot from travelling in South America. At the time, I was still involved with Earthlife, at 10 Belgrave Square. Extraordinary to think back to all the travails of that time – and to type this blog entry in the back study where she and I sat back-to-back for two-and-a-half years while we cranked out The Green Consumer Guide and a couple of its successors. Her update, The New Green Consumer Guide, is due out in May. As she left to see the book designer this morning, the wind howled and thumped through the trees outside. Am hoping that I’m not borne off to Kansas when I leave in a hour or so for a meeting of the WWF Council of Ambassadors. (WWF, incidentally, played a key role in funding 1988’s Green Consumer Week, which we organised to coincided with the launch of The Green Consumer Guide.)

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

CONVERSATION WITH PETER SENGE

Interesting 1.5 hour audio interview this evening with Peter Senge of the Society for Organizational Learning this evening (http://www.solsustainability.org/upcoming.htm). A little more broad ranging than I had imagined, but we are talking about doing another which zeroes in on particular sectors and issues. A CD of the interview will be available shortly.

Sunday, January 14, 2007

BUY ARNIE, SELL BROWNE

Seismic shocks are shaking the once-and-future pantheon of green heroes. BP’s Lord John Browne has announced his early departure as chief executive, a few days before the publication of the Baker report on the company’s US disasters. With Russia now seen as likely to bully BP in the same that it did Shell, some see the BP miracle unravelling. But, whatever his flaws, a hugely positive element Browne’s legacy will be his extraordinarily courageous speaking out on the issue of climate change in Stanford and Berlin, as long ago as 1997. Meanwhile, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, has launched the world’s first low-carbon vehicle fuel standard, a move that is sending shock waves through the oil industry. His goal: to achieve freedom from “dirty oil and from OPEC.” Who, back in 1997, would have predicted all of this?

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

After a fascinating convening of social entrepreneurs who won this year’s Fast Company Social Capitalist Awards, conclusions of which I’ll try to summarise when I’m back in London for the Skoll Program area of the SustainAbility website, we all bussed over to The Lighthouse, at Chelsea Pier, overlooking the Hudson, for a reception and dinner. Hunter Lovins did an extraordinarily good job of compering, in her somewhat unusual combination of range hat and Arab headdress.

I was thrilled to hear that Astrid Sandoval – who is editing the book Pamela Hartigan and I are doing for Harvard Business School Press – had come up with a list of possible new titles, something we had been slightly stalling on. When her colleague Kirsten Sandberg arrived, having received the list a short while earlier, it was almost instantaneously clear we had a title – and one everyone loved. It certainly has legs.

Later in the evening, Pamela announced the winner of the 2007 ‘Outstanding Social Entrepreneur’ Award from The Schwab Foundation, which she runs (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/111/open_socap-partners-firstbook.html).

Mary Poppins passes by

New York man – note fellow to his left

Paul Rice outside The Lighthouse

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

BIG APPLE, GREAT STINK

Arrived yesterday afternoon at JFK – after star-crossed almost-collisions with both Charles Dance and Stephen Fry as I made my way throughHeathrow. Took a cab in to New York, BlackBerrying as I went – with a driver who clearly thought he was racing at Brands Hatch. Result was a number of emails sent to people around the world which were, to put it mildly, challenged on the spelling front. The driver’s cell phone had a ring tone that was the Muslim call to prayer, which livened things up considerably.

Then across to The Algonquin Hotel for a drink with Jed Emerson, his girlfriend and Pamela Hartigan. First time I had been there. One thing it’s known for is the ‘Round Table.’ After World War I, Vanity Fair writers and Algonquin regulars including Dorothy Parker began lunching there. In 1919 they convened in the Rose Room to welcome back “acerbic critic” Alexander Woollcott from his adventures as a war correspondent. Intended as a put-down of Woollcott’s pretensions (the Algonquin’s website notes that he had the annoying habit of beginning stories with, “From my seat in the theatre of war…”), it proved so enjoyable that it became a regular event, strongly influencing writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Though society columns called them the Algonquin Round Table, they called themselves the Vicious Circle.

One less vicious subject of our own mini-roundtable-with Chardonnay: yesterday’s Great Stink of Manhattan. Happily, it was news to me. But the New York Times front page story this morning is titled: “A Rotten Smell in Manhattan Raises Alarms and Questions.” People even put off smoking breaks, for fear of detonating an explosion. To date, no-one seems to know what the cause was. Some people, apparently, were reminded of a similar incident in 2005, though the smell that time was not of sulphur compounds and mercaptans but of maple syrup, on separate days. Again, no-one ever worked out what the source was.

Another subject of conversation: how unseasonably warm it is here. Much of my time in the rocketing back seat of the cab was spent peeling off one layer of clothing after another.

Saturday, January 06, 2007

GOING GREEN

One of the things we do at SustainAbility is track the waves of societal pressure on governments and business. A couple of years back, I got a strong sense that another wave was building – and it’s certainly splashing all over the UK media at the moment. The ‘Money’ section of The Times today is yet another case in point, covering the greening of energy, housing and money. Even started a book in 2004, The New Green Consumer Guide, with Julia Hailes, but she took that over while I concentrated on the book with Pamela Hartigan on social and environmental entrepreneurship. Finished a major rewrite of that on Thursday, with just one chapter still to go. Hoping to discuss with editors and Pamela in New York next week. Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see how long this new green wave runs. My sense is that it will extend at least through the end of 2007, though much will depend on what happens in terms of the health of the dollar, recession, the Middle East, the price of oil, terrorism threats and so on.

A DIFFERENT PLANET

Apart from the war in Iraq and the execution of Saddam Hussein, no subject has enjoyed more oxygen this year than the vexed issue of climate change. As I recalled at a recent event on the climate prospect, I wrote a report on climate change for the Hudson Institute as long ago as 1978, predicting it would be a major threat by the late 1990s. I wonder what I would have made then of today’s newspaper headlines? An article carried by The Independent on 30 December, for example, was headlined: ‘Vast ice shelf collapses in the Arctic.’ The news about the Ayles ice shelf’s becoming a free-floating ice island, apparently over five times the size of central London, coincided with leading climate scientist James Hansen saying that the Earth is being turned into “a different planet.”

A few days earlier, the Financial Times had noted the likelihood that polar bears will be reclassified as a threatened species, following an announcement by the US Department of the Interior. Interestingly, however, the Secretary of the Interior said that climate change was beyond his remit. A bit like saying terrorism is beyond his remit, although anyone viewing the world from the perspective of 2050, say, might conclude that this was a case of the developed world practising a form of ecological terrorism at the expense of the rest of future generations.

Then, on January 4, the Financial Times reported that new data from Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology confirm that the country is now experiencing the effects of global warming more profoundly than other parts of the world. Poetic justice, in a way, given the country’s alignment with the Bush administration on all matters climatic. True, the Howard government has had much to say on the increasingly severe water shortages across the island continent, but the penny (or cent) has yet to drop in terms of the links between water, climate and human and industrial energy consumption.

Meanwhile, today’s Times reports happier news for butterflies in the UK, summed up in its headline: “‘Climate change brings butterfly invasion.’ The number of butterfly and moth species migrating to Britain for the summer has increased four-fold in the past 25 years, we are told. With each degree of temperature rise resulting from global warming, scientists at the Monks Wood research centre have determined, 14 extra species can be expected to cross the Channel in search of new breeding territory. The scientists note, however, that pest species will likely follow suit.

In Italy, according to The Guardian today, malaria is making a comeback, having been eradicated by 1970. Venice is worst-hit. Other diseases enjoying a new lease of life in the country as conditions warm are encephalitis and visceral leishmaniasis. By way of context, of six sustained droughts in Italy in the last 60 years, four have occurred since 1990.

As a result of such trends, according to today Financial Times, northern Europe could enjoy Riviera-like conditions, while the Mediterranean could face crippling shortages of water and of its economic lifeblood, tourism, by mid-century. A new report from the European Commission also envisages growing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide helping to acidify the oceans, seriously impacting fish stocks. On the somewhat more hopeful side, the report concludes that it would only cost 0.19 percent of the EU’s GDP annually to cut emissions by 25 percent. Sounds more than worth doing, though some scientists say we should be aiming for cuts of 60 percent and over.

KHARTOUM

Finished Michael Asher’s astonishingly well researched and written book Khartoum this morning, which tells the story of the events leading up to the death of General Gordon and, many years later, to the battle of Omdurman. The description of the British Army’s last cavalry charge, in which Winston Churchill took part as a young subaltern, portrays a very different reality than that I imbibed at school in the late 1950s. Astounding what can happen in just two short minutes, enough to win three VCs – and I well recognise the way that time can slow down dramatically under stress, as It has done a number of times as I have flown over my handlebars. A slightly different matter, though, when you are surrounded by hundreds of dervishes wanting your guts for garters.

I remember being very proud in the 1960s that Churchill was a distant cousin, via our great-aunt Helen. And I recall with some embarassment one evening when we were with her, her extraordinarily long white hair a thing of wonder and beauty, at our grandmother Isabel Coaker’s apartment in Pont Street. Great Aunt Helen asked to hear what my brother Gray and I were playing on our guitars at the time. So we popped one end of her hearing aid in one of our guitars. God only knows what it must have sounded like to someone who would have been alive when Omdurman was being fought. Pretty much the same, I suspect.

Must drop a note to Eleo Gordon, the book’s editor. Elaine and I went to stay with her for a couple of weeks in her tiny Pimlico flat in the early 1970s, when I was doing my M.Phil, and we ending up staying 18 months. We, at least, enjoyed it enormously. As I did this book. The great sweep of history is combined with a sensitive handling of the clash of cultures and an even-handed treatment of the soldiers on both sides. In a last-minute twist, Asher links those seemingly-far-off events and people with Osama bin-Laden and the 9/11 attacks and what has been happening in The Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Required reading for anyone who wants to get some sort of grip on the world we find ourselves in. If, God forbid, I were to live into my nineties like Great Aunt Helen, we would be pushing towards mid-century, in a very different world.

Friday, January 05, 2007

U864

Wreck of U864
http://bellona.no/imagearchive/3e34014a5907971417b60916e4631d04

Watched BBC2’s The Hunt for U864 this evening – recalling the only known case in which one submerged submarine sank another. The U864, on her maiden voyage, had been carrying advanced jet engine parts from Germany to Japan, but code-breakers at Bletchley Park learned about ‘Operation Caesar’ and sent a V-class submarine, HMS Venturer, to intercept off Norway. The story was interesting enough for the bad luck that had dogged the German boat, the extraordinary gamble that the British captain took in firing all four of his torpedoes (three missed, the last one – they think it was – hit), and the amazing caculations that allowed Lieutenant Launders and his team on the Venturer to guess where the zig-zagging U864 would be at a particular moment.

A surviving able seaman from the British boat recalled the relief they felt when they heard the U-boat breaking up, but noted the wave of sympathy that quickly followed for those who had died. But they might have been even more concerned had they known what the resulting wreck would be up to over 60 years later. In short, as The Times had put it on December 19, it has become a “toxic timebomb.” The U-boat, which today’s scans show had broken in two, had been carrying 65 tonnes of mercury in 1,857 cannisters, which are now highly corroded. So great is the pollution threat that there are now plans to bury the wreck, 152 metres (500ft) down, with up to 100,000 cubic metres of sand and gravel – or maybe even concrete. One more example of how some of the technologies we use can result in quite unexpected impacts several generations later.

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

WILD LAW – THE PHOTO

Because I’m usually behind the camera, I don’t often get a look-in as far as photos are concerned, but here’s one I received today, of speakers and others involved in November’s Wild Law conference, which I chaired.

Left to right, back row: Kirsty Smallbone (Brighton University); Herman Greene (Center for Earth Jurisprudence); John Elkington (Chair); Vicki Elcoate (UK Environmental Law Association, or UKELA); Simon Boyle (UKELA and Argyll Environmental); Peter Kellett (UKELA vice-chair and Environment Agency)

Front row (speakers): Cormac Cullinan; Satish Kumar; Norman Baker MP; and Begonia Filgueira.

Monday, January 01, 2007

007

So, here we are, another new year. But just reminded by a friend in Japan that this isn’t any old year. March 2007, he notes, is SustainAbility’s twentieth anniversary. February, too, marks Elaine’s sixtieth birthday.

What an extraordinary journey it has been: so much done, so much still to do. Am sitting in the back study where so much of the early work – including The Green Consumer Guide – was done by Julia (Hailes) and I. Today, coincidentally, is also the birthday of her eldest son, my godson. Glorious Moon this evening as I wind down from another day of book writing.

New Year’s resolutions? Having just fired off an email saying yes, if they’ll have me, to an event that will cut into my planned month-long sabbatical in April, one well-intentioned resolution that is already wobbling is to spend more time on friends and family. But urgency underscored by news today that an old family friend fell and broke her leg a few days back, aged 80. So easy to put off seeing people because of work presssures, so seductive to let that bigger world override more local, intimate calls on time. Perhaps it will all be different when the book is done …?

Sunday, December 31, 2006

DARK DAYS

Day after day on the book, with a little occasional light relief doing columns for e.g. Director magazine and – today – a wonderful email, in response to questions I asked him for the book, from Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation, on issues around the triple bottom line and scaling. Huge temptation to post such gems immediately, but must try to keep at least some of the book’s powder dry!

Papers again full of the execution of Saddam Hussein. Dark times, though few people so richly deserved this end. Even so, a sense that those notionally in charge of the Iraqi invasion have little sense of how such things are likely to be seen in the round. Saddam, by contrast, seems to have been playing to a wider gallery for some time – even though some of his ploys, like comparing himself to my favourite Kurd, Salah el-Din, were laughable – given what Saddam did to the Kurds. And the complicity of the western powers in Saddam’s rise to power really ought to be the subject of a major inquiry.

Even as I write these words, however, I’m feeling happier than for ages, with the book trundling along well and so much time out. And even as I typed the first line of the paragraph above, Ruben Gozalez dead fingers, in the midst of playing Mandinga, segued into one of my favourite tunes of all time, La Curacha, which I first came across as a teenager in the film Flying Down to Rio. Late this afternoon, we took a walk around Barnes under lowering clouds, watching a pair of dogs swimming out into the Thames in chase of duck and gulls on the water, and then across the Common in wintry but wonderful rain.

Thursday, December 28, 2006

KEW GARDENING

Maggie (Brenneke), the Oregonian who joined SustainAbility earlier this year to help run our Skoll Program, came across to lunch today with her mother and aunt, and then we all drove across to Kew Gardens for a meander. The Gardens were wonderful and the weather weirdly balmy, with a clearish blue sky, and ice-skating rink in full tilt. The most astonishing array of flowers and flowering shrubs in bloom, in the open, which must be making someone nervous about what will happen with the first really hard frost.

EARTHQUAKES

With Hania staying up near Dumfries, we noted the Boxing Day 3.5 magnitude earthquake that hit the town yesterday with more than a little interest. Reminded me of the earthquake that hit Mossley the night before the funeral for Elaine’s father, shaking her awake.

INTERGENERATIONAL EQUITY, WWII VERSION

This week, according to today’s Times, Britain will pay the last instalment of the US$4.3 billion loan given us in 1945 – and Canada will also receive the last payment on its parallel Can$1.25 billion loan. At the time, John Maynard Keynes had apparently warned that the war had left Britain facing a “financial Dunkirk,” which the loans helped us deal with. The whole Lend Lease agreement was an extraordinary form of intergenerational equity transfer, and – from my perspective, at least – more than worth the price in terms of helping rid the world of the Nazis. Thank you FDR.

Friday, December 22, 2006

FOGGED

The fog that replaced the wonderful blue skies of a while back really have hunkered in for the duration. As I cycled in to Holborn on a couple of mornings earlier in the week, my glasses frosted with moisture, the damp cold went deep. Several colleagues flying to Germany were severely disrupted by the huge wave of flight cancellations, among them Tell Muenzing, who came over to Barnes for tea yesterday, before we headed out to see old friends in Richmond. Otherwise have been tidying up loose ends from 2006, refreshing our connections with our far-flung Faculty with the help of Sam (Lakha) and working on a major revamp of the new book. Oddly, despite the fog, am feeling brighter than for a while – perhaps because of the prospect of the break, even though bulk of it will be book writing.

Richmond Park last weekend

Kensington Gardens as I cycled through earlier in the week

Rotten Row, ditto

Wellington Memorial statue of Achilles, which our old Knightsbridge office overlooked

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

VENUS

A whole slew of rock and pop obituaries appeared in today’s Times. One was of Denis Payton, of The Dave Clark Five, who I confess to having liked during the British Invasion of the US era of pop. But the one that really caught my eye was that of Mariska Veres, front-woman of the Dutch band Shocking Blue.

Venus was the only track of theirs I think I ever heard, but I still remember the shock of recognition and pleasure when we turned the Landrover into a gas station in Greece in 1970 and a big truck pulled in behind us. The driver opened his door just as the opening chords of Venus crashed out. Stunning – and if you want a taste, try searching for Shocking Blue on iTunes. The band sank pretty much without a trace after this one mega-hit, though Nirvana (the obituary notes) turned the song into a grunge anthem. News to me.

An odd thing was that during the same two-month journey around Greece, with a long sojourn on the island of Skiathos, we came across Geoff Lye (later a Director of SustainAbility from 1994) in the Pelepponese. He was with a group of folk in a London taxi – and it was only many years after he joined us in SustainAbility that we ultimately, serendipitously worked out that he was one of the folk in that taxi while Elaine and I were among the folk in the Landrover, our family wheels for many a year.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

COPSE HILL

Despite bright blue skies all day, I woke under a dark cloud, not at all helped by reading the newspaper accounts this morning of the Government’s spiking of the Serious Fraud Office investigation of bribery and corruption in defence industry contracts with the Saudis. Disgraceful. Growing sense that the House of Saud will collapse in wreckage and flames, and sooner than we might imagine, potentially dragging much of the western economy with it. If this scenario plays out, we will have no-one to blame but ourselves.

Then, early this afternoon, drove across to Christ Church, Copse Hill, West Wimbledon, with Jane Nelson, for memorial service for Ian Christie’s wife, Caroline. Darkly tragic, but with flashes of humour. Good to see people like Nick Robins, who has just produced a fascinating book on The East India Company, which he bills as the world’s first transational corporation (http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-7-29-904.jsp), and Michael Jacobs, now working with Gordon Brown. Brown’s idiotic decision on the Operating & Financial Review (OFR) makes him highly suspect in my eyes, but he does seem to be doing some interesting things behind the scenes on energy markets and carbon capture.

Friday, December 15, 2006

RUSSIAN OR AMERICAN ROULETTE?

Could never watch that scene in The Deer Stalker, where the Vietcong forced prisoners to play Russian Roulette. But at least it was Russian, with only one loaded chamber, whereas American Roulette (at least as one person today defined it) involves using a gun with only one empty chamber. Spent much of the day at the Royal College of Surgeons with faculty members of the University of Cambridge Business & Environment Programme (http://www.cpi.cam.ac.uk/bep), together with some of the world’s leading climate change experts. Came away believing that, as the same participant put it, we are increasingly playing the American version of roulette with our climate. A strong sense, too, that we are within a few years of being “beyond the tipping point.”

One subject was Venice, where the barrage to keep back a sea-level rise of some 12 cm is set to cost 20 billion euros, whereas some of experts are now talking about up to 50-metre sea-level rises as “domino dynamics” switch in. It’s not just an issue of a possible $1 trillion storm hitting the Gulf of Mexico in the near future but of Europe increasingly switching to a monsoon regime, the monsoons ending in India, the Great Barrier Reef dead in just a few decades as the oceans acidify, or “go sour,” a process that will itself slow the oceanic absorption of carbon, and the death of the Earth’s green lungs, in Amazonia.

One line that sticks in my mind is the gloomy conclusion that “the choice is now between taking a dangerous gamble with the planet – and taking a disastrous gamble.”

Then across to the office and on to a restaurant in north London with the SustainAbility London team, to celebrate the impending holidays and to mark Geoff Lye’s move to non-executive director status after well over a decade with us. Happily he will be spending a growing proportion of his time on climate change at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute (http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/), which should help us put our foot on the gas in this critical area.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

FROST/NIXON

Across to Café Fish for supper with Hania, including six oysters between us, then on to see Frost/Nixon at the Gielgud Theatre. Am not much of a theatre-goer, but it turned out to be a fascinating study of one of the most flawed politicians of modern times. Also an extraordinary insight into the entrepreneurial risks David Frost took in getting the four-part interview onto the world’s TV screens – the most-viewed news programme of all time, they say. Almost a disaster, though, as Nixon fended off the ravening Frost, until the latter managed to shuck the former, prizing him out of his post-presidential shell. Left you feeling almost sorry for Nixon. Michael Heseltine and party arrived shortly after us – and I found myself wondering what such a politician would have made of it all …

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

CREATIVE JUICES

A day when the creative juices ran energetically. Began by taking the Tube to Holborn and reading the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, particularly the Michael Porter article on the need to reinvent corporate social responsibility (CSR) and Clayton Christensen’s article on the need to apply radical innovation to social issues.

Shortly after I arrived in the office, Rupert Bassett – our designer – arrived and we had a wildly productive session with Ritu (Khanna) and Ivana (Gazibara) on our future-of-globalization project. Next a brief catch up with Julia Hailes on her new book, then back into another highly productive session with Maggie (Brenneke) and Sophia (Tickell) on our upcoming survey of social entrepreneurs.

Took Ivana and Jean-Philippe (JP) Renaut, both of whom joined us this year, to Galleria Charlick for lunch – where we were told that the Galleria team had seen my earlier blog reference to them. The menu may be limited, but the food is consistently excellent. And I love their ‘Power Juices,’ which mix the most unusual ingredients.

Then back to the office for further meetings and work on a proposal for a project I’m hoping to do with The Environment Foundation (http://www.environmentfoundation.net) next year, before going out to dinner with Lawrence Bloom (http://www.lawrencebloom.com/) – with whom I am facilitating a session on the future of cities at the World Economic Forum Davos summit in January.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

LITVINENKO

The newspapers are still full of the fall-out from the poisoning of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, the reality of which was brought home to me when – on my way to St James’s Palace earlier in the week – I walked past the front of the now-closed-for-decontamination restaurant where the story first surfaced. Here’s the photo I snapped in passing.

Itsu, sad and shocked

THE WEEK THAT WAS

A fair amount of through traffic in the London office this week, including Laura Pérez Arce from the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve (http://www.schwabfound.org/schwabentrepreneurs.htm?schwabid=325), already blogged on the SustainAbility website (http://www.sustainability.com/blogs/skoll/skollblog1.asp?id=914, 5 December entry), the Formula Zero team (ditto, http://www.sustainability.com/blogs/skoll/skollblog1.asp?id=914, 8 December entry) also at and Sara Olsen of SVT (http://www.svtconsulting.com/index.html), who focuses on social return on investing (SROI).

Then, yesterday, I took part in the latest meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (http://www.business-humanrights.org/Home). Amazing how far things have come along, with a fantastic group of interns from around the world – and we also approved designs for a revamp of the website, which should make it much more visually appealing and accessible.

Lunch arrives @ B&HRRC

Next, back hotfoot to Barnes to help Elaine with preparations for dinner with Doug (of GlobeScan) and Margot Miller, Steve (of Greenpeace Business) and Sandar Warshal, and Gaia, Hania and John. Wonderful evening which once again underscored how privileged we are to work in an area with such extraordinary friends involved.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

“RATHER A GOOD VINTAGE”

A glorious pale Moon hung over Victoria as I walked across Vauxhall Bridge for a breakfast meeting with Nike in John Islip Street. Mark (Lee) and I had expected breakfast, but instead we found ourselves dropped straight into an intense brainstorming session with around ten Nike people – fascinating discussion over an hour-and-a-half. Key issue is that Nike is dropping the supplier in Pakistan which originally got it into difficulties around child labour, because of endemic corruption, but is keen to work out how to help the local communities transition to new forms of employment. One possibility: various new business models based on – or linking out to – social enterprise.

Then back to Holborn, before shortly thereafter retracing at least some of my steps to St James’s Palace, for the launch event of Prince Charles’ new ‘Accounting for Sustainability’ initiative (http://www.accountingforsustainability.org.uk). Intense security as we threaded our way into the Palace, probably amplified by the fact that Tony Blair was speaking, too. Extraordinarily rich networking over lunch, before the session began, after which we all diligently trooped in to hear James Naughtie of the BBC’s Today programme chair a panel session on the new initiative.

Prince Charles noted that accounting is often seen as “an ancient and even mystical practice,” although much of it has evolved since WWII. In the same way that accountants had to embrace such issues as pension costs and foreign currency trading issues in the late twentieth century, HRH argued, so now they will have to embrace a growing range of social and environmental costs. To date, however, the art is ill-developed, so companies don’t ask themselves such questions as, “How many miles of polar ice cap have we helped melt this year?” No-one is accounting for these costs, HRH observed, though we will all end up paying for them – indeed, we are “running up the biggest credit card debt in history.”

Tony Blair congratulated HRH on being consistently “way ahead of your time” on environmental issues, and wryly noted that he had just left Question Time in the House of Commons in pursuit of a more kindly – and “better paid” – audience. He seemed moderately optimistic about the climate challenge, arguing that, “This is not an impossible thing to do.” But then optimism is the stock-in-trade of politicians. He, like other speakers, referred a number of times to the recent Stern Review on climate change, describing the issue as “the most serious threat that mankind faces.”

The Bishop of London noted that “we’re all afloat in the same planetary Ark,” stressing that those in First Class accomodation won’t long outlast those drowning in steerage. Lord John Browne of BP, meanwhile, warned that too much of today’s accounting is “backward looking,” with a growing need to develop forms of accounting and reporting that are forward-looking. We increasingly need a universal language to embrace triple bottom line impacts, he said.

Meanwhile, a giant portrait of Cardinal Richelieu loomed over the proceedings, and I wondered what a man who died in 1642 would have made of all this? Interesting to recall what a shot in the arm to the English economy Richelieu’s destruction of the power of the French Huguenots was, rather like Hitler forcing out the Jews who would later do so much to contribute to the Allied war effort.

Towards the end of the event, Prince Charles came back on stage and mentioned that he was the same age as Al Gore, who had just appeared by video link. Theirs had proved, he opined, a “rather good vintage,” which I am pleased to believe, since I am the same age. Overall, however, and whatever the outcome of the Accounting for Sustainability project, due to report in a year or so, I found the panel discussion disappointing – with too many senior people from business professing to be on top of the climate issue, when the reality is that no-one is. Indeed someone from one of our client companies told me over lunch that the more he reads about climate change, the more worried he becomes – not least because his home in The Netherlands is technically well below even today’s sea levels.

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

SARA PARKIN, 60 + 40

After a blizzard of meetings, including a hugely energising lunch with Laura Pérez Arce of the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve in Mexico, followed by a US teleconference on the knowledge and education requirements for successful social entrepreneurship, I travelled across to The Geffrye Museum (“of English Interiors from 1600 to the present day”) for a party to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of Sara Parkin, plus her 40 years of campaigning to date. She was a leading light in the European Green Party movement and then a founder-director of Forum for the Future (http://www.forumforthefuture.org.uk). Wonderful gathering of the tribes, with delicious food by Maria Clancey and Passion Organic.

Monday, December 04, 2006

TEST SITE

Up very early with Elaine and across to Tate Modern, with wonderful, balmy walk along the South Bank from Waterloo. Invited to breakfast by Unilever to see the latest Carsten Höller show, Test Site. The artist says his slides are sculptures you can travel inside – and asks what the effect would be if we all did more sliding as part of our daily lives? He suggests that sliding in this way is a means of experiencing “voluptuous panic.” Certainly it was less unpleasant than my normal experience of sliding, when my cycle loses traction on ice at speed.

We both commit our bodies to the depths, riding sacks that are reminiscent of those they use to send dead seamen overboard. You do indeed feel ‘transported,’ building up an extraordinary, juddering momentum as you come down, particularly from the fifth floor (a 58-metre ride). I felt quite set up for the rest of the day – which included a briefing session on an event I am due to do in Bangalore early next year, another on a survey we are planning as part of our Skoll Program, and then another Tubular journey across to Canary Wharf for a meeting of the ECGD Advisory Council. On the way, I espied the most extraordinary slip of a boat, that looked like something out of James Bond, or the as-yet-unmade film The Alien Seedpods Have Landed.

Test Site 1

Gaping maw

Elaine inserted

Swallowed

Another body blurs by

Millennium Bridge

Is it a boat, is it a …?

Sunday, December 03, 2006

INTO THE WEST WITH THE ACCIDENTAL ANGLER

Catching my breath after marathon bouts working on the book, I watched the Custer’s Last Stand episode of Steven Spielberg’s TV miniseries, Into the West (http://alt.tnt.tv/itw/), billed as a “Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.” More like a nightmare. The Little Bighorn massacre was portrayed as it is now thought to have happened, over in less time than it takes “a hungry man to eat his dinner,” or words to that effect. What a fool George Armstrong (should have been Headstrong) Custer was, though the battle-site, which we visited many years ago, is one of the most beautiful memorials I have seen, particularly the tiny Indian prayer-bundles hidden away in the brush.

The most grotesque part of the nightmare was the subsequent tearing away of Indian children to be carted off to a school that would reprogram them, forcing them to eat soap any time they used their own language, and making them choose new names: Hiram, Meredith, Walter … Felt huge synmpathy for the boy called ‘Voice That Carries,’ who had seen the Battle of the Little Bighorn from afar, and ironically gets stuck with the name George.

Then we watched the last program in a wonderful series, The Accidental Angler, in which Charles Rangeley-Wilson, who we have seen fish in some the world’s most exotic locations, returns to London to try to catch native brown trout in the Thames tributaries. However hard he tries, though, he fails, working his way progressively further into the west. In the end, he ventures as far west as Rickmansworth, near where I was born in a mill cottage alongside the Kennet (http://johnelkington.com/babelfish.htm). A sense of coming home – and then he finally catches his trout, just as the fishing season draws to a close.

He ends up in tears at the grotesque things he has seen dumped into the various tributaries, but there was one upbeat moment where he watched conservationists working to restore the upper reaches of the Wandle.

Friday, December 01, 2006

JOOLS AND LULU

Finally made it to the Jools Holland rhythm & blues concert at the Royal Albert Hall – and it was hugely worth the angst in getting there. Elaine, Gaia, Hania, John and I sat up in the Gods, or at least the Choir. Was blown away by the persussionist, Gilson Lavis. Unexpected ingredient in the mix was Lulu, whose bluesy style these days I find surprisingly engaging. And one of the encores was a favourite song, written in 1948, a year after Elaine was born, a year before I was – Enjoy Yourself, It’s Later Than You Think, which runs something like this:

Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as you wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think …

Sums things up, really.

Lulu prowls, Jools plays guitar

Jools takes a bow

ALCOA FOUNDATION

Back today from a couple of days in Brussels with the Aloca Foundation, which hosted a conference entitled Advancing Sustainability. More details at http://www.alcoa.com/global/en/news/news_detail.asp?pageID=20061201005300en&newsYear=2006.

My speech kicked off today’s session, and was followed by a panel discussion chaired by Meg McDonald (President, Alcoa Foundation), where I appeared alongside Magnus Johanesson (Secretary General, Iceland’s Ministry for the Environment), Tom Lovejoy (President, John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment), David O’Connor (Chief, Policy Integration and Analysis Branch, UN Division for Sustainable Development) and Leena Srivastava (Executive Director, The Energy and Resources Institute, India).

One performance indicator: within minutes of finishing, I had been invited to speak – by different people – in Australia, Brazil, Mexico and the US.

Sadly, though, I had to miss the afternoon session with Joseph Stiglitz, in order to get back to London for this evening’s Jools Holland concert. But, as events turned out, I should have stayed and heard him since the flight was delayed for over two hours. When we got back to Heathrow, a rain storm had just passed through, so the plane squatted on the runway for 25-30 minutes, after which the near-suicidal pilot came on the intercom to say they couldn’t pull into the jetty because some electronic beacon had failed. Because I was by now wildly late, and Terminal 4 isn’t currently served by the Underground, I jumped into a cab – and ran smack into lava-like gridlock. Eventually got to the Royal Albert Hall 15 minutes before the show started, borne along on a riptide of adrenaline.

Brussels panorame from my room

Brief encounter

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

BOLLOCKS, DARLING

I remember, in 1971 or 72, my much-loved, much lamented paternal grandmother Isabel assuring Elaine and I after a cocktail party in her Knightsbridge apartment that when we were grown up we would love cocktail parties. When I assured her I had antibodies to the whole cocktail culture, which were her preferred milieu, her response was blunt: “Bollocks, darling!”

Well, this evening we were at a very interesting party, hosted by Shell, which confirmed me in my long-ago feelings. Yes, Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer very kindly introduced me to Shell’s new Chairman, Jorma Ollila, previously CEO of Nokia, and I certainly wouldn’t have met him many other places, but I have bat’s ears, where I seem to hear every frequency all at once, and find these events a torment. Indeed, my idea of Purgatory would probably be an eternal cocktail party, with the same guests.

LEAPBLOG

Yesterday evening we launched the new Skoll zone of the SustainAbility website at http://www.sustainability.com/insight/skoll.asp, including a ‘Leapfrog’ blog at http://www.sustainability.com/blogs/skoll/skollblog1.asp?id=914

Thursday, November 23, 2006

EYE WATCHES PARK PELICANS

The Millennium Eye peered at me over Horseguards Parade as I made my way across to the Triodos event this evening – and traffic blurred past. Passing the pelican area, I pondered media coverage of recent pelican-eats-pigeon-in-St-James-Park-shock-horror. The fact that pelicans snack on their cooing neighbours has been known for ages, but no doubt it was news to the children who no doubt watched on in horrified fascination. Made me think of the premieres of Phil Agland’s Korup rainforest film 20 years or so ago, when one bunch of Cameroonians told me that they only liked the bits when animals were eating one another. Tonight it was almost as if the Eye were keeping watch over the unruly parklife.

Millennium Eye

A DAY IN THE LIFE

Once I got back home, put on George and Giles Martin’s astounding Love, which I had bought at Virgin in Piccadilly this afternoon. This is the impossibly wonderful reworking of 26 Beatles tracks for the Cirque de Soleil show – which Geoff (Lye) went on to see in Las Vegas after our board meeting in DC. Don’t envy him Las Vegas, but on the strength of this CD I do envy him the show (http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/CirqueDuSoleil/en/showstickets/love/intro/intro.htm?sa_campaign=internal_click/redirect/love).

Rest of day included meetings with a German financial organisation and Nick Parker of Cleantech Venture Network (http://www.cleantech.com), a session on climate change communication hosted by the International Visual Communication Association (IVCA: http://www.ivca.org) and an evening event hosted by Triodos Bank, launching a new report – The Future of Finance.

James Vaccaro of Triodos (http://www.triodos.co.uk) described the bank as a hybrid between a financial institution and a social experiment – and argued that the growing importance of business means that investment is now almost more important than voting. The other Triodos speakers, Charles Middleton and Peter Blom, described the bank’s emerging focus as “conscious investment.” Nice to see them our old 3P formula, which I first used for a SustainAbility brochure in 1995 or 1996: ‘People, Planet and Profit’ (or ‘Prosperity’, if you want to be a little less provocative).

Speakers like Tom Delay of The Carbon Trust gave a number of examples of entrepreneurial efforts to tackle major social and environmental problems. Jonathon Porritt wondered whether we are now approaching a tipping point in the sustainability field – or whether this is simply one more spasm of capitalism as people try to forcefeed new information into existing business models? But he noted that the recent Stern Report had hit the nail on the head by describing the climate challenge as the greatest market failure of all time.

Monday, November 20, 2006

YALE UNLOCKED

Dinner this evening at the Mirabelle in Curzon Street, to celebrate with Dan Esty and guests the launch of his new book, Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage. Among many other things, Dan is Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at Yale University and Director of the Yale World Fellows Program (http://www.yale.edu/worldfellows), which was also very much on the agenda. Fellows are high achievers, selected from outside the US at an early mid-career point, generally 5-to-15 years into their professional development, and spend 15 weeks designed to jump their careers into overdrive.

Sunday, November 19, 2006

IBRIDO TV

A side-benefit of blogging this week was that a ‘good news’ web-TV team I hadn’t yet heard of tracked me down in New York – and came and interviewed me virtually at the drop of a hat. They are ibrido (http://www.ibrido.tv/welcome.html). I’m green with envy: I want to be able to step out of a door on our home page the way Daniel Belanger does on their site. Their podcast for that day can be found at http://www.ibrido.tv/video_51, trailing the full interview.

I really like the Antoine de Saint Exupery quote they use on their site: “As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.”

THE DESTINY OF LOVE

The Observer today covers the work of Bao Ninh, who wrote the most extraordinary book I have yet read on the Vietnam War, The Sorrow of War (http://www.amazon.com/Sorrow-War-Bao-Ninh/dp/1573225436) – which in Vietnamese was rendered as The Destiny of Love. Utterly horrifying in parts, as the war was, but whole sections remain in my memory, even though I read it many years ago. One reason I was so interested in the war, apart from the fact that I protested against it, was my friendship with the Observer‘s foreign correspondent Gavin Young, who covered the war and its aftermath in books like A Wavering Grace (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wavering-Grace-Gavin-Young/dp/0140251154).

Friday, November 17, 2006

WORST CASE SCENARIO

Storm incoming

The lashing rain on the way out to Dulles airport should have been warning enough – but there wasn’t that much I could do in any event. My Northwest flight to Detroit and then on to Lansing was first delayed, then cancelled. After an endless queuing saga, I was diverted to Atlanta on Delta, and then on to Detroit. On the way, I lost my coat – and my pen exploded ink all over my hands as we reached altitude en route to Atlanta.

Worst of all, when I got to Detroit, after midnight, to be picked up by Chris Guenther, we discovered that my large case hadn’t made the trip with me. Given that it had pretty much all my clothes, cables for all my electronic equipment and all the signed forms for the share transfers we have so laboriously been working through at SustainAbility, this was the Worst Case Scenario.

When Chris and I eventually got to Ann Arbor, I had to drop into a convenience store to buy some shaving things, toothbrush and so on. My heart fell when I saw everything was made in China, including the only cold razor on offer. I knew I would end up with a scalped face, as indeed I did this morning.

Still, made it on time – if after precariously little sleep, to see (Professor) Tom Gladwin for an early coffee and then on to a brunch session from 09.00-11.00 with a bunch of students and Andy Hoffman. One person I met for the first time, after a fair time communing by email, was Aparna Sunderam. When she first contacted me, she was a social entrepreneur in Tibet, and is now a student at Michigan. Then on to meeting with Tom Lyons at the Erb Institute, before doing my lecture early afternoon. Introduced by Tom G, I launched forth – and we got into a wonderfully lively discussion. Tom noted that SustainAbility is now the second biggest hirer of Erb Institute students, after the Meridian Institute, I think. And given the quality of the ex-Erb people on our team and the people I met on this trip, I’m not surprised.

Coda on Worst Case Scenario: Annie Oliver in our DC office finally tracked the case down in Detroit, where Northwest were getting ready to project it back to London. Rather than trust them again, we had them store it until I came through after my Ann Arbor trip. And it was there when I arrived late afternoon. Aparna had given me a Tibetan scarf earlier today, saying that my luck was about to change – and, at least with this case, this trip, there seems to have been a local better luck effect.

Playing hide-and-seek with Tom Gladwin

Thursday, November 16, 2006

FIRST U.S. BOARD MEETING

Today, we held our first SustainAbility board meeting in the US, at our office in Washington, D.C., following a reception there last night. A bunch of us walked across to the office from the Willard Hotel this morning in spectacular sunshine, soaking in the glorious yellow of the ginkgo trees along the way.

The evolution of our US team really is a wonder to behold, with a real sense that it has reached critical mass. All credit to Jeff Erikson, our US Director. Given how delightful the current brownstone office is, it’s amazing to think back to our previous offices: the tiny one in Brooklyn from which our much smaller team watched with horror as the planes flew into the World Trade Center in 2001, our bigger, smarter and yet not much-loved first office in DC, and now this one. Feels like home – and even they have a couch these days, to ensure the roll-out of our sofa strategy continues. The thinking behind our couch position is that free-flowing conversations are a key ingredient in the rocket fuel that propels us to new heights …

Gingko tree

Rescued from the street, a gingko leaf follows us to the office

Sam gets a handle on the teapot situation

Tom (Delfgaauw) and Geoff (Lye) after board meeting

Somewhere else where new thinking may now impact our agenda …

LESTER BROWN

Meghan (Chapple-Brown) and I made our way across this morning to the Earth Policy Institute in driving rain, though luckily we quickly found a yellow cab. Had talked to Lester Brown at the World Economic Forum Davos summit earlier in the year about visiting, but then had to cry off last time when I missed a flight out of Ithaca – after a visit Meghan and I made to Cornell University – and then had to drive seven hours in a rental car to catch a flight from JFK. This time we make it, though, and, boy, I wish I had a direct feed into the Brown brain.

The process is made a little easier, of course, by the fact that he is such a prolific writer. Previously with the Worldwatch Institute, he now runs the Earth Policy Institute (http://www.earth-policy.org/) – and manages to achieve an extraordinary amount of media coverage for his thinking. One recent theme has been the danger that the American Dream will become a nightmare when adopted – or aspired to – by China’s 1.3 billion people. That’s only one of many things we discuss with Brown and his colleague Janet Larsen, EPI’s Director of Research.

One subject that sticks in my mind, though, is his observation that the number of failed states is growing – and with it a wide range of health, environmental and security risks for the rest of the world. But anyone who reads this and begins spiralling into gloom (we talked of the suction effect created by failed states, and the way that we may found ourselves pulled in rather like many of those who jumped from the Titanic were sucked into the vortex the foundering ship created), a useful antidote is Brown’s book Plan B 2.0. (http://www.earth-policy.org/). An essential introduction to the man’s thinking.

Janet, me, Lester Brown

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

STONE’S THROW FROM WHITE HOUSE

By Amtrak to Washington, DC this afternoon. The four of us arrived at the Willard InterContinental to be met like royalty, because of the relationship SustainAbility’s US team have built with the Willard on our issues. The hotel, which says it is a stone’s throw from the White House, something which I am still tempted to test, is this year celebrating the 20th anniversary of its re-opening.

And what a place this is. The Willard has hosted just about every US President since Franklin Pierce in 1853. Its anniversary brochure also notes that it was “at the Willard that Julia Ward Howe wrote ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ where Abraham Lincoln lived for a month, where, in the grand lobby, President Ulysses S. Grant coined the term ‘Lobbyist,’ and where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King finished his famous ‘I Have A Dream’ speech.” Talking to someone earlier today about bribery and corruption, I noted that one of the prominent American inhabitants of my family tree was Grant’s rampantly corrupt Vice President, Schuyler Colfax (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuyler_Colfax), who came so spectacularly to grief towards the end of the Gilded Age (http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/schulyer_colfax.pdf). The widespread corruption of the era helped precipitate a depression.

After shaking off the dust of our travels in the comfortable embrace of the Willard, we sped across to SustainAbility’s offices for a reception, which pulled together old and new friends – ahead of our first-ever board meeting in the US tomorrow.

Monday, November 13, 2006

IMAGINE

The highlight of today – aside from meeting the likes of Linda Rottenberg of Endeavor Global (http://www.endeavor.org) and Alice Tepper Marlin of Social Accountability International (http://www.sai-intl.org), alongside Sam (Lakha) and Sophia (Tickell) – was a long, long walk on my own through Central Park.

My main purpose in Central Park was to visit Strawberry Fields, the black-and-white memorial to John Lennon. The first time I went there, fairly soon after it was opened, I found myself there alone, except for a small, quiet figure that suddenly appeared on the other side of the circle: Yoko Ono. No such luck this time, but the fall colours were exquisite. And the Alice statuary (http://www.centralparknyc.org/virtualpark/thegreatlawn/aliceinwonderland) was strangely moving, the mushrooms linking nicely to the hallucinogenic fuel that drove so much of my favourite music way back then.

At the nearby Tavern on the Green, on my way, I had come across something that reminded me of this year’s 800-pound gorilla (see previous entry), all the tune of Imagine played in the most eggregiously schmalzy way. Later in the day, Sam and I also met up with a couple of TV people planning a series on sustainability pioneers, which would be useful if it came off.

Green gorilla

Blowing in the wind

Tried to catch falling leaves, but failed …

It’s 26 years …

Last of the fall colours

Not far removed from the hat I wore the other evening …

Alice 2

Hatter 2 – with Dormouse

800-POUND GORILLA IN NEW YORK

Arrived in New York a couple of hours ago, to pouring rain. Yellow cabbed to hotel, where I have been trying to do justice to my role as guest editor of an upcoming issue of marketer, which they are dedicating to the triple bottom line and sustainability. In my main article, I note that at a World Economic Forum meeting earlier in the year one of the WEF people had said that the 800-pound gorilla looming in corporate boardrooms this year has been the issue of sustainability. Seems appropriate to recall in the city of King Kong.

Sunday, November 12, 2006

BLUE MAN FALLING

Racing to get ready to fly to New York, but one thing I had to do before heading off was to write a congratulatory note to Frank Barnard, author of Blue Man Falling. Finished this extraordinary novel yesterday morning, and can’t wait to re-read. Covers the RAF’s campaign in France before the retreat across the Channel and the Battle of Britain. One of Barnard’s references was a copy of a book first published in 1941, Fighter Pilot: A Personal Record of the Battle of France. The author was the late Paul Richey, a member of No. 1 squadron – with which my father Tim also flew. Sent him a copy of Blue Man yesterday via Amazon, such a wonderful service. Talking to my mother, Pat, yesterday, she recalled that when they saw Richey last he was late – his pet swan was ill.

The other reason I am interested to engage Barnard is that he features the sinking of the Lancastria towards the end of his book, which I covered in my blog of November 23, 2005. He has Do-17s sinking the ship and escaping, whereas I had understood a Heinkel 111 was involved – and that Flt Sgt Fred Berry, who later saved Tim’s life, had been awarded the DFM partly on the basis that he had shot down the bomber that sank the old Cunard liner. In the midst of such chaos, it must have been very difficult to keep track of who did what to whom, but I’d like to ensure my facts are broadly correct …

Saturday, November 11, 2006

REVIVING BRAND AMERICA

Filed retrospectively on November 13, after reading a letter in the Financial Times in New York under the title: ‘Bush united the world.’ John Arndt from San Anselmo, California, noted that “Many underestimate how successful President George W. Bush was as a uniter. He succeeded in uniting practically the whole world against him!”

Elaine and I had a delightful dinner this evening with Doug and Margot Miller, he of GlobeScan, and Peter Kinder of KLD. At Whits, just off Kensington High Street. One of the areas of discussion, inevitably, was the potential longer-term impact of the Democrat victories in the US Senate and House of Representatives. And one of the eddies in that conversation revolved around the question of how long it would take for the US to reclaim its pre-Bush 2 position in the world, rebuild its tarnished global brand and recover at least some of the soft power lost in the process.

We reflected on companies like Nike and Shell, where top management eventually admitted some degree of fault as a necessary first step to the recovery process. Phil Knight of Nike may have taken a while to get there, but when he recently noted in a foreword to a Nike report that “yours truly” had been responsible for among other things misreading the runes, my phrase, it was a major step forward. It’s virtually impossible to imagine George W., or Tony Blair for that matter, accepting real fault and culpability, but perhaps even here we should say ‘never say never …’

Friday, November 10, 2006

BLOGGER APOLOGISES

Well not really, but my silence for over a week has been because of Blogger problems, which they prefer to leave to users to sort out. Only a technical wizard, or someone with hours of free time on their hands, could resolve. Thanks to the wizard Craig (Ray) for sorting, and as soon as I can find an alternative to Blogger I will switch.

WILD LAW

First thing I see as I leave the house this morning, on my way to Victoria to catch the train to Brighton, is that someone has taken a hammer to our car – with the result that the bonnet has a hole in it worthy of a cannon-shell strike.

Once on the train, I was poring over the bios of the speakers of the conference I was to chair later in the day at the University of Brighton. Organised by the UK Environmental Law Association (UKELA: http://www.ukela.org), the Environmental Law Foundation (ELF: http://www.elflaw.org) and The Gaia Foundation (http://www.gaiafoundation.org), the event was due to spotlight the ‘Wild Law’ movement, led by Cormac Cullinan. Read his fascinating book, Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice (Green Books, 2003), as the train rattled south.

Suddenly, a small, dark-haired girl (she turned out to be Romanian) erupted in the opposite seat and asked me, in broken English, what colour my shoes were? What colour was my front door? And what colour my garden? When I asked how old she was, she replied 7. Then she asked me how old I was. When I asked her to guess, she frowned and suggested 8. Then she pointed to a photograph of Satish Kumar, one of the speakers whose bios I was poring over, and asked who he was?

How do you explain someone who at the age of 9, just two years older than my earnest neighbour, had joined the wandering brotherhood of Jain monks, subsequently leaving in his late teens to join India’s land reform movement, then walked 8,000 miles from India to America to meet Bertrand Russell and join the anti-nuclear-weapons movement, handing out tea to world leaders on his way across to London? And, if my memory serves, at the suggestion of women in a weapons factory he had met in Russia, encouraging those leaders he did get to see to brew up a pot before they brewed up the planet? I had missed this year’s fortieth anniversary celebration of Resurgence magazine, which Satish has edited since the early 1970s, because I was in Australia, but hold it and him in great affection. The fortieth anniversay edition of Resurgence (September/October 2006) carried an article of mine on the evolution of the relevant business agendas. Apart from Cormac, other speakers included Norman Baker, who chairs the All Party Environment Group, and Begonia Filgueira of Gaia Law. One of Satish’s lines that sticks with me is, “Let all isms become wasms.” Another: “Long live the worm.”

Also met up before the conference with Fiona Byrne, after many years. Fiona was SustainAbility’s first employee way back in the 1980s, when we were still based at our home in Barnes, and now lives in Brighton with her daughter. Reminded me of just how long we have been hoeing this particular furrow.

At the end of the day, four of us travelled back on the train to London, including Satish and Ed Posey of The Gaia Foundation. Wonderful conversation, palely captured in the somewhat speed-blurred photos below. Alighted from the train at Clapham Junction and looped back to Barnes station. Arrived home to find that Hania had just called in from Madrid (we didn’t even know she was there) to say that she had had her purse and credit cards stolen. Odd to be discussing how to evolve systems of Earth-focused jurisprudence when the waters of criminality lap all around.

Ed and Satish 1

Ed and Satish 2

Ed and Satish 3

Thursday, November 09, 2006

TOMORROW’S VALUE LAUNCH

Today, we launched our latest report, Tomorrow’s Value, at parallel events in London and New York. This is SustainAbility’s fourth international benchmark of corporate sustainability reporting, once again developed in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Standard & Poor’s. This year we introduce a revised methodology, developed in close consultation with experts and leading corporate reporters, and — in line with our sense that the focus also needs to shift beyond disclosure and reporting to communication — we have adopted a portfolio approach. Tomorrow’s Value is the flagship document in a suite of publications that will explore wider aspects of reporting, including communication with financial analysts and the innovation agenda.

I chaired the London event, hosted by Standard & Poor’s in Canary Wharf. Free, downloadable copies of the report are available from http://www.sustainability.com/insight/research-article.asp?id=865, together with a podcast version of highlights of the launch session – and another in which I interview Matt Loose, who ran the 2006 Global Reporters benchmark survey, on the findings. The photos, taken at the reception afterwards, show Sasha Silver of Credit Suisse Securities and Monica Araya, both of whom went through Yale – where Monica organised the event I spoke at (see October 1, 2005 entry). JP Renaut was one of our interns on the Global Reporters project and has since joined the Core Team.

Me, Sasha Silver, JP Renaut

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

SUSTAINABILITY RETREAT

Written, belatedly, on 12 November:

October 30-31 saw the full SustainAbility team (now exceeding 30) engaging in an extremelysuccessful retreat at The Orangery, Kew Gardens. Tremendously invigorating – and the new strategy is coming together very well. Due to problems with Blogger, I didn’t capture the spirit of the thing at the time, and also agreed not show team members in their extraordinary Halloween costumes after our fancy dress at the Bluebird Restaurant, which has somewhat cramped my style!

But here are a few less peopled photographs to give a sense of the proceedings. The Earthlife health poster caught my eye, given that it was the unravelling of a different Earthlife in 1986 that led to our founding of SustainAbility early in 1987. On the second day, I took much of the team around the Princess of Wales greenhouse (showing them the time capsule Elaine dreamed up and Gaia Books, David Attenborough and others of us installed in 1985) and the Palm House.

Poster en route to Kew

Early morning sun

The lion and the unicorn

Pumpkin Man

Symbolic, perhaps, of our quest to find the levers of power …

Handscape

Angelic corner in The Orangery

Kelly at speed

Squash 1

Squash 2

Time capsule, Princess of Wales Greenhouse

Maggie Brenneke and Mr Mystery (or Mr E: thanks, Sam)

Thursday, October 26, 2006

A WEEK OF CONVERSATIONS

A somewhat fractured week of writing, including a long paper for a new Indian magazine called Triple Bottom Line, team discusions and meetings – or perhaps I should say conversations, which are the fuel which drive much of what we do. Among others, these included lunch with Michael Meacher, MP (http://www.epolitix.com/EN/MPWebsites/Michael+Meacher), on Monday; a gentle walk across to IIED (http://www.iied.org) with Mark Lee on Tuesday to see IIED Director Camilla Toulmin – the first time I had been at IIED for what seems like many a year; a morning meeting on Wednesday with Charles Middleton, Managing Director of the UK end of Triodos Bank (http://www.triodos.co.uk/uk/?lang), who is also Chairman of the Haller Foundation, of which I am a Patron (http://www.thehallerfoundation.com/governance.html); a session later in the day with Sophia Tickell’s sister Alison and her colleague Shelagh Wright, to discuss the creative sector in the UK; and then, on Thursday later afternoon, I walked across to The Athenaeum with Geoff Lye for a meeting with Fields Wicker-Miurin and Tom Wright of Leaders’ Quest (http://www.leadersquest.org/index/articles.php?id=126&page=Partners&navi_id=2), having first met Fields in Davos earlier in the year.

The meeting at the Athenaeum – Fields noted in the process that Darwin and Dickens had joined the club on the same day, which suggested some interesting conversations – put me in mind of one of the pivotal meetings of my life, late in 1977 or early 1978, when Max Nicholson asked me across to the Athenaeum for tea. This was to discuss whether I would join Max and David Layton of IDS in setting up Environmental Data Services (ENDS), which we did later in 1978 (http://www.ends.co.uk/). I asked for several months to do a feasibility study while remaining at TEST, but in the end concluded that it was worth making the jump. Thank heavens.

Footonote: I never joined a club, partly because they seemed saurian, partly because I lived in London anyway, partly because I couldn’t afford it, but mainly because they didn’t let in women. Even the Athenaeum, which seemed fairly lively at times, seemed to be largely populated with old grey men in sofas – who seemed so settled that it was almost impossible to see where the old men ended and the sofa or armchair began.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

GIBBERD, THRING & COOLING TOWERS

Two people I glanced off in recent decades appeared cheek-by-jowl in the obituary columns of The Times. The first was Professor Meredith Thring, a scientist and engineer driven by the notion that engineers should have a social conscience. One of his passions was energy – and fuel technology in particular. During WWII, he led a project to run vehicles on producer gas, made from wood to save petrol. Another, later scheme, was a key reason I came across his work: the development of ways of harvesting water hyacinth, an aggressive water weed, and turning it into food.

Whether or not they ever met, Thring turned up cheek-by-jowl this morning with Lady Patricia Gibberd, who was involved in the development of Harlow New Town, designed by her husband Sir Frederick Gibberd. We met them both over dinner over 30 years ago, thanks to her nephew Toby Greenbury, with whom Elaine and I shared a flat in Belgravia. One of my memories of the dinner is our discussion of Gibberd’s design of the cooling towers at Didcot, which we used to pass regularly on our way by train down to the Cotswolds. The Gibberds waxed lyrical about the beauty of the cluster of cooling towers, something I confess I struggled to see.

But in recent days I had been struck in reading England in Particular, by Sue Clifford and Angela King, to see them also wax lyrical on cooling towers, in an entry squeezed between confectionery and corn dollies. “What a magnificent presence they have, these great chess castles gathering beside rivers as if for communal ablutions,” Clifford and King begin. “They steam away water and heat generated by the making of electricity from coal.” They mention Didcot, too, noting that the towers there “dominate views acros the Thames Valley and from Wittenham Clumps.” Protypically Clifford/King, that last bit.

Still, I don’t share their regret that, “Perhaps during the next twenty years these structures will disappear, taking their functional beauty into the history photographs.” They note that the dismantling of a single cooling tower near the M6 in Birmingham “proved disorientating.” True, I’m sure, but this is an area where we need to be disorientated, as I am sure Professor Thring would have agreed. Cooling towers are the most visible component of a fossil-fuel-to-electricity cycle which on the same time-scale will come to look criminally insane.

Much of the latent energy in the fuels is dumped into the atmosphere as steam. I remmeber visiting expreimental units aiming to use waste hot water to produce tomatoes, eels and such-like, though in the end most of them bit the commercial dust. The old CEGB, when I was a member of their Environmental & Development Advisory Panel for several years in the pre-privatization era, used to insist that the steam wasn’t pollution. But it has always signalled profligate inefficiency – and still does. Those cloud-making towers stand as symbols of an era of dinosaur technology.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

MURDEROUS NEIGHBOUR

Red in beak and claw, to mutate Tennyson. One of the neighbouring sparrowhawks on the Hill House lawn, photographed a couple of days ago by my father, Tim. The debris appears to have been one of the collared doves that are such a prominent part of the local acoustic environment. Sparrowhawks have come back in force, apparently, among other things decimating a neighbour’s dovecot at the bottom of Little Rissington Hill.

Saturday, October 21, 2006

APPLE DAY

Today was Apple Day, a celebration of local distinctiveness and diversity in terms of apples. Elaine brought back Orange Kidd apples from the Farmer’s Market in Barnes which deserve to be arrayed as artworks, for their glorious colours, but turned out to be wildly delicious too. Apple Day was launched many moons ago by one of my favourite charities, Common Ground. Two of the co-founders were Sue Clifford and Angela King who I first came acros when they were at Friends of the Earth. The culmination of their Common Ground efforts is a book I bought a couple of weeks ago, England in Particular. As Cleve West notes in today’s Independent Magazine, the book is “an almost biblical record of everything from accents and anty-tumps (anthills) to zigzags (a way to negotiate hills) and zawns (narrow recesses in cliffs).” I also came across one of my favourite artists, Peter Randall-Page (http://www.peterrandall-page.com/), ages ago thanks to Common Ground, who at the time were creating wayside shrines for walkers.

Friday, October 20, 2006

NAU AND BEST FOOT FORWARD

Matt (Loose) and I are finishing off the last bits of our 2006 Global Reporters survey, which is shaping up nicely. Craig Simmons of Best Foot Forward (http://www.bestfootforward.com/) comes in to give Mark (Lee) and I a briefing on their ecological footprinting methodology, which underpins WWF’s impending One Planet Business offering – which Seb (Beloe) and I have been helping with. Hard at work writing columns for the likes of Grist (with Mark), European Business Forum (with Geoff Lye) and Director. Late in the afternoon, Mark and I do a teleconference with a fascinating new start-up based in Portland, Oregon, called Nau (http://www.nau.com). They are largely refugees from companies like The Gap, Nike and Patagonia, and their sustainability strategy sounds world-class. They launch their first products in January. Worth watching, I think.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

SHELL AND ECGD

Another hectic day, much of it spent with Shell. Niel Golightly, who we worked with when he was with Ford, has moved to Shell as VP for External Affairs & Communications in the company’s Downstream business, which stretches from bitumen and refineries to chemicals. I had to do two short presentations, one on climate change and one on the wider public agenda. Good people, some tough issues, lively discussion.

Then on to a dinner at Lancaster House this evening, hosted by Ian MacCartney, Minister of State for Trade – the annual ministerial convening of the members of the Export Credits Guarantee Department’s Advisory Council, which I chair. Walked from Waterloo, where the Shell event was held, across to St James, stopping off at Waterstone’s in Piccadilly on the way – where I bought three books, including two novels (one of which was Blue Man Falling) and The Goldilocks Enigma, which poses the question why the universe is so suited to life, at least in our neck of the woods. Weird October weather: by the time we were having a pre-dinner drink in Lancaster House the temperature was almost tropical, hot and steamy.

One issue on the agenda was the recent NGO proposal that the Advisory Council should consider ‘live’ cases like Sakhalin, the giant oil field being developed in Russia by Shell and Exxon. (At the moment, the Advisory Council only considers cases that have already been decided.) Sakhalin was already controversial, because of alleged environmental impacts, but has become a good deal more so now that the Russians have stalled a permit, on environmental grounds – though it is hard to believe that they care a fig about the environment. If the Advisory Council did shift to live cases, which it seems that we are unlikely to do, I would probably have to “consider my position,” straddling as I now find myself doing the worlds of oil and export guarantees. Meanwhile, it’s a fascinating opportunity to work on some of the issues that exporters are increasingly expected to manage, among them bribery and corruption, human rights and sustainable development.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

AIX ET MAS DES GRAVIERS

And here are some shots of Aix-en-Provence, Mont Sainte-Victoire and Mas des Graviers, where we celebrated the sixtieth birthday of Jan-Olaf Willums. On the evening of the celebration, there was a jazz band and 38 guests.

Museum window, Aix

Heads in a museum, Aix

Roadworks

Four Dolphins

Mont Sainte-Victoire 1

Mont Saint-Victoire 2

Elaine on Mont Sainte-Victoire

Praying mantis

Parasail

Cleared for replanting of vines

Elaine 1

Elaine and Pastis

Elaine and Doris

Elaine 2

Breakfast begins

Jan-Olaf

Mas des Graviers, masking the pool

Saturday, October 14, 2006

CYCLE COMES HOME FROM HOSPITAL

Have more or less finished wading through the pile of newspapers that built up while we were in Provence. After a session with the opticians this morning, where it turned out that I have embyonic cataracts, I walked across Putney Common to pick up my bike, finally repaired after my entanglement with the Mongolian woman (see 23 August entry). Also bought a radiant fluorescent yellow jacket to try to ensure that future autopredators see me a little earlier. Ribs almost mended, but, my, it takes a while. We really ought to have laws like those in Amsterdam, where it’s universally assumed that drivers are at fault in accidents involving cyclists. Things can swing too far the wrong way, of course, but we have a fair way to go before we are in any danger of that here.

Friday, October 13, 2006

FRIDAY 13

One explanation for the dark reputation of Friday 13 was the destruction of the Knights Templar in 1307 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_the_13th), launched on Friday, October 13 – which will make the same date next year something of a milestone. Today, though, has been fun. First meeting, organised by Charles Perry of Green Order (http://www.greenorder.com/), was with Nick Hurd MP and Clare Kerr of the Conservative Party’s Quality of Life Policy Group (http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=news.story.page&obj_id=126829, though the link to the Policy Group website didn’t work when I tried it). I can’t imagine ever voting Conservative, but I emerged impressed with what they are trying to do in such areas as climate change, quality of life and sustainable development.

Then Paloma Berenguer of Shell came across to brief me on a session on sustainable development I am due to do there next week. Next, among other meetings, we had a lively session with Marcos Egydio Martins, Chief Sustainability Officer of Natura (one of the most interesting of the many hundreds of companies I have visited and certainly the most impressive in Brazil, see http://www.natura.com/) and Simon Lyster of LEAD International (http://www.lead.org/member/2566). Later, John Ganzi came in to talk about a fascinating new social enterprise he is developing in the area of sustainable tourism.

And all this in the midst of my efforts to keep on track with the final bout of writing for our Global Reporters benchmark survey. The main section I worked on today covered corporate reporting in the emerging economies, or non-OECD world, and in the end quite well.

In the evening, I collapsed on the sofa to watch The Death of a President on TV. In many ways it’s shocking that they would do such a program on the assassination of a living President, but equally this President is likely to be remembered as a special case, a man who – as a Financial Times columnist argued earlier in the week – has done more than anyone else to make the ‘Axis of Evil’ a reality. I can’t help but enormously admire this week’s statement on the Iraq War by General Sir Richard Dannatt.

SHOULD YUNUS HAVE WON THE ECONOMICS PRIZE?

Sent a congratulatory note today to Muhammad Yunus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Yunus) on behalf of SustainAbility, after hearing the news that he had won this year’ Nobel Peace Prize (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2006/). It did make me wonder, however, whether it mightn’t have been more interesting if he had won the Economics Prize. If the socioeconomic side of sustainable development is ever to be achieved, his work on microcredit will be critical. Some years back, I was thrilled when the UK paperback of his book Banker to the Poor sported a quote from me, extracted from a review I had done for The Guardian. His work with Grameen – including the new partnership with Danone on local yoghurt production – is central to the book I am doing with Pamela Hartigan.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

CAN PROPERTY THRIVE IN A CHANGING CLIMATE?

Across to Claridge’s first thing this morning, to speak at the Estates Gazette Summit 2006, on the theme of how the property industry can thrive in a changing climate. Estates Gazette editor Peter Bill kicked off with comments about how weird the UK’s weather is at the moment, which is certainly true – at times it’s like June and quite sticky. He was followed by John Gummer, as co-Chairman of the Conservative Party’s Quality of Life Commission. One of the things he said was that any property develop who has been buying up land for development around airports could be in for a rude shock when the air travel business goes into something of a tailspin – and the Government imposes controls on further airport expansion.

I followed on, talking among other things about the need to green the valuation of buildings, something I really woke up to when listening to Chris Corps in Canada earlier in the year. Next up was Keith Wells, Director of Strategy & Planning at Dragon and Rupert Clarke, chief executive of Hermes Real Estate. Then a fascinating presentation by Jan van Dokkum, president of UTC Power, on everything from fuel cells to to the future of elevator technology. He was followed by Yolande Barnes, research director at Savills, on the trends in demand for greener residential and commercial property. And then Sir Crispin Tickell summed up. He is now director of the Policy Foresight Programme at the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization at Oxford.

Lunch was in the Gordon Ramsay restaurant at Claridge’s, which I cycle past regularly but had never darkened the doortstep of. Food and wine exquisite. Then raced back to the office for a session on the Pharma Futures II event we are organising in Docklands next week, bringing together top executives from the pharmaceuticals industry and major pension funds, who invest in those companies. This initiative has been developed by Sophia Tickell, our Chair – and Sir Crispin’s niece. A much more structured approach to a particular sector than anything we have attempted to date. Today’s event made me wonder whether the property sector mightn’t be a suitable future case for similar treatment?

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

99 TO 1

An interesting thing happened at today’s conference organised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing (http://www.cim.co.uk/cim/new/html/newArt.cfm?objectID=45BE13FC-A022-58D8-769BE7A98652DAB6 and http://www.cim.co.uk/conf/speakers.html). My talk followed that of marketing guru Philip Kotler (http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/bio/Kotler.htm), who told me that his work has consistently overlooked our agenda – and that if he gets a chance to do a 13th edition of his standard work it’s one of the areas he feels he must now engage.

Then we had a breakout debate organised in typical university fashion (though not any university I ever attended), with a motion, a proposer, an opposer and two seconds. The motion was that “the triple bottom line complicates marketing – and doesn’t help.” I opposed the motion, perhaps not surprisingly.

I have to say that I played to the gallery a bit. I noticed that over half of the audience were women. So, while my main opponent read an excellent prepared speech, I did the thing on the fly, said I had no idea how to do a formal debate (appealing to the sympathy vote), noted that TBL thinking does indeed complicate anything it touches (but, then, it’s an increasingly complex world out there), and then told two stories.

The first picked up from the proposer’s attack on what he dubbed “minstrel-driven lists” of 3Bs (me), 4Ps (Kotler) or whatever. I said I had just come back from a land – Provence – where minstrels had played a critical role in the evolution of culture. One minstrel serenaded Sermonda, the beautiful wife of the hot-blooded Raymond de Roussillon, as one was meant to be able to do in those days. Raymond promptly waylaid and slew the troubador, I learned from Lawrence Durrell’s book Caesar’s Vast Ghost. He then had the man’s heart cooked and served to his unsuspecting spouse. When she discovered what had been done, she threw herself to her death from the castle’s highest window. The perhaps inevitable result was that an appeal for revenge was made to King Arragon, who invaded with an army of freebooters and put everything and everyone to the sword.

The point I was making, in perhaps overly dramatic form, was that a culture of male domination and brutality had eventually been civilised by a social movement, the Courts of Love, catalysed by the minstrels. And what had previously seemed normal later came to be viewed as repugnant. The same would be true, I concluded, as the sustainability revolution really gets into its stride. And the vote? Well, our session attracted around 100 delegates and when it came to the vote, exactly 1 hand went up for the motion, and every other hand went up for our view of the world.

Sunday, October 08, 2006

A HOWLING AND BELLOWING AT POURRIERES

As we walked around Mas des Graviers, partly through fields laid bare where Jan-Olaf’s vines had been pulled up to plant new ones, it was hard not to think of the fact that this plain beneath towering Mont Ste-Victoire was the scene of a perfectly hideous battle in 102 BC. A huge horde of Teutons and Ambrons streamed towards Italy and Rome, with a view to sacking the city. Plutarch says that the Roman troops under Marius (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Marius) watched the barbarians stream through a gorge beneath them for six days.

Whatever the facts, Marius outwitted his enemies, who had earlier slaughtered some 200,000 Romans in a disastrous reverse. Now Marius turned the tables once again, with his men killing anywhere between 100,000 and 200,000 of the Teutons and Ambrons, and taking an estimated 80,000 prisoners. Contemporary accounts report that the beleaguered Romans awaiting a counter-attack heard instead a “crying … all through the night, not like the sighs and groans of men but like the howling and bellowing of wild beasts.”

I have all this on the authority of Lawrence Durrell, in his book Caesar’s Vast Ghost (Faber & Faber, 1990 and 2002). Again according to Plutarch, the remains of the dead were left where they had fallen, rotting in the summer heat, with the result that the area became known as Campi Putridi, or the Fields of Putrefaction. And that phrase, it seems, accounts fro the name of the nearest village to Mas des Graviers, Pourrieres.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

AIX EN PROVENCE

Some photographs from Aix en Provence, where Elaine and I have been decompressing these last few days – having come down by Eurostar and TGV. Read Sophia MacDougall’s novel Romanitas on the way down, and am now immersed in Lawrence Durrell’s Caesar’s Vast Ghost, his valedictory book on Provence.

Site of the old thermal spring

Spirals outside the thermal baths

Fountain

Statue and modern equivalents

Market

Market 2

Cross-legged pillar

Bollards

Sunday, October 01, 2006

ROYAL SECRET

When I was in Auckland last week, a number of us recalled the limpet mining of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior in 1985. Today it turns out – at least according to The Sunday Times – that one of French presidential contender Ségolène Royal’s brothers was the DGSE agent who attached the mine to the ship’s hull. A Portuguese photographer was killed and the incident backfired badly on France, except in France. Still feel that Royal is an attractive proposition, politically, but what a complex world.

That complexity is also underscored by another story in the same paper, taking groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Soil Association and WWF to task for the many flights their top staff take – and the climate consequences, both directly and because of the example they set. SustainAbility has offset its carbon emissions from all its activities, including team members’ lifestyles, for many years – and, in the case of client projects, has long invited clients to double the offset. But this is something we are clearly going to have to devote more thought to.

Saturday, September 30, 2006

SUSTAINABILITY APPOINTS SKOLL FELLOW

SustainAbility put out this press release yesterday:

SustainAbility appoint Maggie Brenneke as first Skoll Fellow

Hot on the heels of the announcement of a $1 million, 3-year grant from The Skoll Foundation, SustainAbility has appointed its first Skoll Fellow to help run its evolving Skoll Program on entrepreneurial solutions to sustainability challenges. Maggie Brenneke joins SustainAbility as both Associate Director and Skoll Fellow. She will work closely with John Elkington, SustainAbility’s Founder and Chief Entrepreneur—and will also play a leading role in business development and consulting, bringing expertise in the energy sector.

“The Skoll grant has been an extraordinary shot in the arm,” says John Elkington, “and Maggie Brenneke will help us drive our work in such areas as creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. Our thanks to Jeff Skoll. Both with his Foundation and his new movie studio, Participant Productions, Jeff—who co-founded eBay—is an extraordinary example of entrepreneurial energy. A central goal as we move towards our twentieth year as a business is to leverage the passion, experience and contacts of such people in support of sustainable development.”

Prior to joining SustainAbility, Maggie worked in Portland, Oregon for LaunchBox a boutique strategy and market research consultancy, and for Ecos Consulting, as a Senior Manager focusing on developing energy efficiency and renewable energy transformation programmes for utility and government clients. Maggie has ten years’ industry experience and has a BA in Economics and an MBA.

So what persuaded Maggie Brenneke to become the first Skoll fellow? “What attracts me to SustainAbility and The Skoll Program”, she says, “is the opportunity to tap the wells of creativity springing up around the world – and in some of the most unusual places – to inspire fresh thinking in addressing our most pressing social concerns.”

Two new analysts join London team

Joining the London-based team in early October, Ivana Gazibara and Jean-Philippe Renaut will play important roles in supporting the implementation of SustainAbility’s new strategy. Recently graduated from the London School of Economics with Masters degrees and as key members of the Global Reporters research team, Ivana and JP will be working to apply their insights in key areas of SustainAbility’s forward strategy such as the emerging economies program and in further development of our ICT and healthcare sector practices.

Friday, September 29, 2006

CRYING WOLF

Our latest Grist column is titled Citizen Hope. It begins, “Who’s afraid of the big, bad future? Al Gore, clearly — and pretty much anyone who has seen An Inconvenient Truth. While Gore’s dissenters may argue that he cries wolf too often, no one who knows and understands the statistics used in the film can doubt that the Big Bad Wolf of climate change is at the door. The question is whether our economies are best built of straw, sticks, or bricks.”

For more, http://www.grist.org/biz/fd/2006/09/27/crywolf/

HOW MANY LIGHTBULBS DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE THE WORLD?

The question isn’t mine. It’s from the September issue of one of my favourite magazines, Fast Company. And it’s about Wal-Mart’s plans to push compact fluorescent lightbulbs, with dire implications for the now wildly obsolete incandescent lightbulb industry. The scale of the company is mind-boggling, although that scale can be used for good or ill – as a range of activists, unions and local communities have argued in recent years. But my sense is that Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott was serious when he described his environmental epiphany, post-Hurricane-Katrina, as waking up to the fact that the broad spectrum of environmental issues can be seen as “Katrina in slow motion.”

IN NATURE’S FACE

For some years, I have contributed a monthly column to a Japanese newsletter, Nikkei Ecology. The latest covers the death of Australian wildlife enthisiast Steve Irwin, whose funeral got saturation coverage when we were in Oz. Here is the piece:

NATURE HAS WAYS OF STRIKING BACK

When the World Economic Forum convened in Davos this year, one key question was what risks the world faces in the future? Among them, alongside terrorism, conflict and climate change, was the growing threat of pandemics. And that threat was brought home to me during a lecture tour of Australia and New Zealand a few weeks back, partly through the death of an internationally known Australian wildlife expert, and partly as I read a book—China Syndrome, sub-titled ‘The True Story of the 21st Century’s First Great Epidemic,’ by Karl Taro Greenfeld—on the long flight home. The book, which reads like a thriller, is about the evolution, spread and eventual containment of the SARS epidemic.

As we shuttled between conference venues in Australia, the TV screen in the limousine showed long sequences of the funeral of Steve Irwin, featuring the country’s Prime Minister John Howard (a political ally of President Bush in denying the reality of climate change) and an extraordinary list of Hollywood stars, including Russell Crowe, Kevin Costner (who made the film Waterworld in part to underscore the threat of climate change) and Cameron Diaz. But the highlight of the show turned out to be a tribute to her father by Irwin’s 8-year-old daughter, Bindi. Among all the tears and TV cameras it would have been easy to miss a key element of the drama: Irwin’s fame came in large part because he got in close to wildlife, for example wrestling crocodiles on camera. So the nature of his death—killed by a stingray, whose barb punctured his chest, was hardly a surprise.

What struck me as I watched the tributes flow was that Irwin’s work and fame was symptomatic of a world in which the human species pushes ever deeper into the natural world. Yes, that creates opportunities for wonderful television, but it also opens up growing opportunities for unknown diseases to cross the species barrier. Among the diseases that have jumped in this way have been Lassa fever, HIV/AIDS and SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). In his book, Greenfeld takes the reader on an extraordinary ride from the bedside of an early Chinese victim, via leading laboratoriess where researchers race—compete—to identify the new illness, to the World Health Organization as officials desperately try to work out what is going on behind massive Chinese government cover-up. We only just escaped a devastating global pandemic, with 15-20 per cent of those infected dying

SARS probably originated in the city of Shenzen, in China’s Guangdong province. Scientists tracked the site of the wild-species-to-human jump to markets and restaurants selling, slaughtering and cooking exotic wild animals for what is known as ‘Wild flavour’ cuisine. Thanks to a lawless culture, the trade in snakes, camels, otters, monkeys, badgers, bats, pangolins, geese, civets, wild boars had become a booming industry. In this horrendous, overcrowded, polluted environment a virus hopped from civet cats to humans. Worryingly, Greenfeld concludes that diseases like SARS and Avian Flu are part of a much wider pattern of disease that suggests that the next global pandemic will break out in Asia.

So was the Chinese cover-up unusual? No. In Vietnam, in 2004, the government covered up cases of avian flu rather than upset the preparations for the South-east Asian Games. What happens if the next pandemic builds as we move towards the 2008 Beijing Olympics? Who knows, but one thing we can be sure of is that if a major pandemic does take hold our delicately balanced global economy, much of it based on the globalization of Japanese just-in-time methods, will unravel. This could happen sooner—and much faster—than we might imagine.

Monday, September 25, 2006

WWF 2

More from WWF UK, http://www.wwf.org.uk/news/n_0000003012.asp

WWF CRASH

When I first heard a day or two ago that a WWF helicopter had gone down in Nepal, I wondered whether anyone we knew was involved. It turns out that they were, and the search party reports that all 24 people aboard died (http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-09-25T094932Z_01_DEL298529_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRASH-NEPAL.xml&archived=False). A meeting of the WWF UK Council of Ambassadors tomorrow morning has been cancelled. Our thoughts are with WWF and the families of those who died.

Saturday, September 23, 2006

BIG SHOT

Somehow, in transit, I have lost the copy of The Australian that on 21 September carried the interview I did in Melbourne, under its ‘Big Shot’ label, with a photograph against the a Titanic-like stairway. But the text can be found at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20448042-643,00.html.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

ULYSSES JOINS US IN MELBOURNE

If our Sydney event was largely business people, Melbourne has seen pretty much all levels of government represented. The day was kicked off by a longstanding friend, Terry A’Hearn – who is Director of the Sustainable Development Unit at Victoria’s Environmental Protection Agency. He had three ribs broken four weeks ago by an over-enthusiastic barrister during a game of football. So I kicked offf my presentation by saying that this was something else that Terry and I shared, though – given that my injuries were inflicted by an attractive Mongolian woman – mine probably had the edge in the romantic stakes. For the second time, I also showed the photo of our line-up with the Misses Earth, to underscore the travails of our journey so far.

The growing importance of government in sustainable development was weirdly underscored by a photo of a grotesquely muscle-bound Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lobby of the Sofitel Hotel, where we have been staying – and where our third conference has been held. His recent initiative to cap greenhouse gas emissions in California has featured in all my Down Under presentations this time – and was also mentioned by several other speakers. Who would have imagined a few years back that the Terminator would become an icon of sustainability, particularly given his continuing fetish for Hummers?

Among those contributing today were Matt Viney (Parliamentary Secretary for Innovation and Industry), standing in for John Brumby, State Treasurer and Minister for Innovation, a long-standing supporter of our series, Geoff Lawler (Director, Sustainability & Innovation, City of Melbourne), another long-standing supporter, and Liza Maimone (Partner, Environment and Sustainability Services, Ernst & Young).

After another highly successful day, seven of us (Alex, Attracta, Bob, Dave, Geoff, Murray and I) repaired to a Japanese restaurant to celebrate. On a whim, I brought along the mini-disk player and microphone that Crag (Ray) bought for me on eBay a short while back, and at the end of the meal – after Japanese beers (Asahi, Kirin), sake and a wonderful Australian red wine – I passed the mike around. Geoff Lawler become quite animated about the new green HQ (CH2) building the City of Melbourne has almost completed (http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/info.cfm?top=171&pg=1933), which I hope to visit next time around.

The CH2 building won 6 stars

But the evening’s astonishing highlight was Murray’s quite unexpected, end-to-end rendition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s great poem, Ulysses:

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,–
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me–
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads–you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

A seven-stars-worthy recounting and podcast-in-the-making. True, at the end, Murray forgot the last six lines, but after the mike had circled the table, he remembered. As he finished the last line and handed the mike on, it caught him saying, “You could live by that.” He has. A great Australian, an enthusiastic supporter of all that is wonderful about this island continent, but also not afraid to name the challenges it faces in moving towards sustainability. He and his wife Dobrina have been transformative friends on this journey as we have striven, sought and tried not to yield to the passage of time and other challenges. A 72-year-old Ulysses and bringer of new things. As Tennyson put it: “Well-loved of me.”

Bimbocity: Schwarzenegger at work

Dave going global

Geoff Lawler leans into the future

Alex, Christine, Bob, Dave – and my empty chair (photo taken by Murray)

Alex, Murray, a cradled Australian red and Bob

Glowing with relief, sake and sunburn

Our two pianists, Bob (and Alex), try (unsuccessfully) to break into locked hotel piano

In the lift/elevator en route to a well-deserved rest

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

SYDNEY

Yesterday, as we flew in from Auckland, I read China Syndrome, by Karl Taro Greenfeld. Published by Penguin (though on the title page that’s rendered as Pengiuin), this is the story of SARS. Stunningly well written – more like a novel. A stupefyingly powerful case for transparency at all levels of the global economy.

The discussion in Sydney was livelier than in Auckland. Noel Purcell (Group General Manager, Stakeholder Communications, Westpac) kicked us off, arguing that business is now at a cross-roads, but that the paths leading outward are poorly signposted. Session chairs included Karen Waldmann, General Manager Regulatory, Integral Energy, one of the local companies that recently took a stand on climate change.

One of the most powerful elements of the presentations to date as been the stories told, Bob about his attempts to grow wheat and other crops without agrichemicals in his parallel-to-IDEO farming life, Dave about the growing pressure on companies like Intel to get toxic materials out of the value chain. The recent EU injunction to the ICT industry to get lead out of all of its products, including the tin-lead solder that has been a central feature of ICT technology since the get-go, has been the equivalent, Dave said, of saying to McDonald’s and Burger King that they can make all the burgers they want – just so long as they don’t use beef.

Dave (Stangis) and Attracta (Lagan) en route to airport

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

SYDNEY AND THE MISSES EARTH

We flew across to Sydney today, then made our way down to the Harbour for a drink ahead of being picked up by a boat owned by Ros Kelly (who I first knew when she was Australia’s Environment Minister) and her husband David Morgan (CEO of Westpac Banking Corporation). While we waited for Peter Kinder of KLD Research & Analytics – who just happened to be in Sydney – to arrive, several of us got embroiled with the Miss Earth Australia candidates (see photos below). In addition to their aesthetic qualities, they have to have a firm grip on at least one environmental issue. So the photos show us talking about bidoversity, salinization and the like. Honest.

When the boat and Peter had arrived, it was a tough job to prize our speakers away from the young ladies in green. But the effort was well worth it, as the boat put on speed and shot across the harbour. We picked up Ros and a friend, Peter Thompson, who is a leading educator, communications consultant, broadcaster and author. For many years he has been an ABC radio and television broadcaster and has hosted the ‘Talking Heads’ program on ABC TV. His publications include Persuading Aristotle.

Ros Kelly

Ros – who among many other things was the first Australian MP to give birth while in office (I discover in her Wikipedia stub, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ros_Kelly) – was great fun, as ever, and the party was under way. Later, we took a slow spin around the maritime museum (with its replica of Captain Cook’s bark The Endeavour, in which he went looking for the ‘Great South Land’) and then headed across to a small cove to anchor and have supper – watching the sun go down over the Sydney skyline. Breathtaking. Found myself wondering what Cook would have made of all this?

When we got back to the harbourside, David Morgan was there to meet and we all repaired to a fascinating bar to catch up and consider how best to respond to the Australian coal industry’s hard-ball tactics in response to recent attempts to get climate change onto the political agenda here.

Alex musing

Bob (Adams) does his research – Christine (Charles) in background

Four speakers (including me) carry out an eco-invigilation

We’re off to pick up Ros and Peter

Alex and Christine

Alex and Peter (Kinder)

Peter (Thompson), Bob (Adams), Dave (Stangis) and Attracta’s hands

Opera House and Bridge

The Endeavour

Waterfront

Replica paddle boat with Wallenius giant

Red water 1

Red water 2

Sunset over Sydney

Monday, September 18, 2006

SUSTAINABILITY 3.0: THE INNOVATION IMPERATIVE

And so we are off – with the first in the 2006 conference series held today in the Hyatt Regency hotel in Auckland. Murray Edmonds kicks of, saying this – our ninth series – is his swansong. Then come Ann Sherry, CEO of Westpac Banking Corporation in New Zealand and Judith Tizard, who – take a breath – is Minister of Consumer Affairs, Minister Responsible for Auckland Issues, Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, Associate Minister of Transport, Associate Minister of Commerce and Minister responsible for Archives New Zealand and the National Library. Then me.

My theme was that we are headed towards a Sustainability 3.0 agenda, where 1.0 was the compliance agenda (when business was forced to do things by regulators and, as a result, was on the defensive) and 2.0 has been the corporate citizenship agenda, which like a snowball has scooped up a seemingly endless spectrum of issues, from human rights and bribery and corruption through to climate change. The Sustainability 3.0 agenda will see a growing focus on fun, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurial solutions that can replicate and scale.

My presentation will end each time with an edited version of an ABC TV program profiling Jeff Skoll, with cameos from people like George Clooney, Al Gore, Jesse Jackson and Robert Redford and social entrepreneurs like Martin Fisher of KickStart and Bill Strickland of nonprofit Pittsburgh-based Manchester Bidwell Corporation, which offers after-school programs to at-risk public school students and vocational training for adults. The producer, Grace Kahng, had very kindly edited down the film for me.

Then the rest of our team were Bob Adams, Head Designer of the Sustainability Practice at IDEO, Dave Stangis who is Director of Corporate Responsibility at Intel, Christine Charles who is Director of Environment & Social Responsibility at Newmont Australia, and Alex Barkawi, Managing Director of Sustainable Asset Management (SAM). Each day, as the tour travels around, we will also have local people chairing the sessions. Today, for example, we had people like Jim Collings (General Manager, Shell New Zealand) and Rachel Dupree (General Manager of the Sustainable Industry Group at the Ministry for the Environment). The day is brought to an end by a brief overview by yours truly, followed by Attracta Lagan of Managing Values, a long-standing friend and colleague who has taken over from Murray in working out where this travelling circus will head next. We know where we are headed toimorrow, however: Sydney.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

RANGITOTO AND MUSTANG

No sooner had we (Bob Adams of IDEO, Alex Bakarwi of Sustainable Asset Management, Dave Stangis of Intel and I) arrived at Auckland airport, than Murray Edmonds had scooped us off first to central Auckland, then to the ferry dock – from where Attracta Lagan took us out to Rangitoto Island. We walked up through the lava fields, in fitful sun and fitful rain, past the volcano’s gaping maw to the summit – from where you look out over the Rangitoto Channel to distant Auckland.

As we were getting ready to walk back down, a Battle of Britain memorial flypast began, with an extraordinary collection of old planes, among them a Catalina, a Dakota in D-Day colours, and a P-51 Mustang, I think the first time I have ever seen one aloft. Tim flew the Mustang in India, where I seem to remember they used to fly beer up to great heights to flash-distil it. No doubt a great contribution to the war effort. I also knew someone whose father was one of the first Mustang pilots shot down over Germany and was tortured ferociously, by people desparate to know about a super-weapon that was beginning to turn the air war in the Allies’ favour. Stunning, stirring sight as the growling, geriatric warbirds went round and round our summit, before heading out across the Channel to Auckland. But you could also imagine what similar aircraft in less friendly hands might have sounded like over Pearl Harbor or, in WWII Australia, Darwin.

Mustang

Catalina

Distorted tower

THE SPIRE

I finally read one of the most extraordinary novels I have yet come across on the flights to Auckland: William Golding’s The Spire, first published in 1964. Various people had recommended it, and it seemed particularly appropriate since when we did one of those rapid-fire word-choice tests many years back, in which you have to choose between matched pairs of words like foundation and spire, I went for spire with no hesitation. Aspirational. In my mind, at least, if you were building a spire the foundations would logically already be in place. Not in Golding’s book. My brain is now seething, infested with the story. The humming, then shrieking pillars in the cathedral on top of which Dean Jocelin builds his towering folly struck me (whatever Golding intended) as a powerful metaphor for the ecosystem changes we are beginning to detect all around, in our climate, marine fisheries and so on – as we continue to build our unstable civilization upon ever-more-precarious ecological foundations.

ANZ VS VEGETARIANS

The Air New Zealand flight from London to Los Ageles yesterday confronted me with some of the worst efforts at vegeratian food it has ever been my misfortune to confront. Before long, I gave up and went on an enforced diet. The good-hearted young steward had said it was his first day and when he later wanted to know if there was anything he could do better, I didn’t have the heart to suggest shooting the chefs.

But then on the leg from LA to Auckland, quite unprompted, a new steward said he hadn’t even bothered to put my vegetarian meal in the oven, it was so horrible. In so many words, he said that ANZ can’t be bothered with vegetarians and I would be better of with the ‘bland food’ option, where at least you got the odd potato. Hard not to agree. The sandwiches I was offered at one stage looked as though their flilling had been scooped up from the outfall from a silage clamp or intensive piggery.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE GOT IF YOU HAD CROSSED MOTHER TERESA WITH RICHARD BRANSON?

Have just finished listening to and editing the taped conversation I did with Pamela Hartigan a week or so ago, for the second in SustainAbility’s Skoll Program series of podcasts. We got so carried away that I have gone Rambo and edited it into a Part I and Part II. Part I is provisionally titled: ‘How Not to Give Away $1 Million.’ And Part II: ‘What Would You Have Got If You Had Crossed Mother Teresa with Richard Branson?’ The answer to the riddle, originally posed by Pamela, is the social entrepreneur’s social entrepreneur, Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank. But am glad no-one seems to have tried the experiment. Hybrid vigour can be taken too far.

Am beginning to enjoy this new format and technology as a way of connecting both with the agenda and the wider world. Tomorrow am off to Los Angeles, then Auckland, Melbourne and Sydney, and am taking one of our new (well, bought used off eBay) Sony MD Walkmans – or Walkmen – with me in the hope of chasing interesting stories to ground.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

ENVIRONMENT FOUNDATION

The Environment Foundation, which I chair, had a very productive Trustees’ meeting today, hosted as usual at SustainAbility’s offices. We were joined by a new Trustee, Halina Ward. And an idea I have been developing since the Richard Sandbrook memorial event earlier in the year – which would involve developing a collective history of UK environmentalism ahead of evolving some degree of consensus on where next – got a strong following wind. Have tested the idea on a variety of people in the field and all have been very positive, so am planning to move ahead, but would be interested to know whether anyone else is already embarked on such a venture?

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH

This evening, Elaine and I went along to the Vue Cinema for a pre-release screening of Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth. The event was co-hosted by Business in the Community, The Prince of Wales’s Business and the Environment Programme, and Tomorrow’s Company. A delightful gathering of the tribes. I had had high expectations of the film – and they were exceeded. Gore was graceful, powerful, persuasive. The links he made to the near-death of his son and the death from lung cancer of his only sister, Nancy (the irony being that their father was a tobacco grower who, to that point, had largely ignored the evidence on the health effects of smoking), achieved some energetic emotional spotwelding.

The overall sense given is that it may well be too late to do much of any great import, at least if we leave it very much longer, but that the idea – promoted by people like Bjorn Lomborg – that all we need do is invest in helping people adapt is borderline criminally insane.

[Later footnote, on September 8: Interesting that Stanley Fink, deputy chairman of the Man Group, introduced last night’s film screening. Today’s Finanical Times carries the news that he is stepping back from executive duties to devote more time to philanthropy. This follows Bill Gates’ recent stepping back announcement, and that by Citigroup’s Sandy Weill that he would give away $1bn. A very welcome trend, but what will happen (to the trend) when the next recession kicks in, I wonder?]

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

MEDIA ON MY MIND

Spent a fair amount of time this week in the normal cycle of writing columns for various publications, including Director magazine, Grist and Nikkei Ecology (published in Japan). I also got mentions in the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal Europe, plus – a real thrill – had a piece appear in the fortieth anniversary issue of Resurgence.

Pamela Hartigan was in the office for several hours this afternoon, both so we could discuss follow-up on the book and record a new podcast, which (owing to my impending absence in Australia and New Zeland) should be out in a couple of weeks. The Schwab Foundation, which she heads, is building a wider range of media relationships around the world. Indeed, she had come on from a meeting with the Financial Times – which hopefully will help when the book comes out next year.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

THE CYCLING WOUNDED

As the current frenzy of greening builds in the media, we are being encouraged to get on our bikes. All well and good, until you factor in the perilous conditions in which cycling is currently done. Jan-Olaf Willums was in the office earlier today, with Richard Blundell, his colleague in the TH!NK electric car venture. Jan-Olaf’s head now has an extraordinary, livid scar which loops across his scalp, from a wound he recently received coming off his bicycle on his way downhill from seeing an artist we both adore in Provence, Sama. That, I think, we can put down to over-enthusiasm.

Then, this evening, Elaine and I had Peter Kinder to dinner – and it turns out that when he came off his bike recently he broke all his ribs and did major damage to a shoulder, all of which are still in the process of mending. Which made me wonder whether I hadn’t got off reasonably lightly a couple of weeks back? Meanwhile, the Neurofen works wonders, though Peter was recommending industrial quantities of Ibuprofen.

Whatever Peter’s excuses, mine – of being hit from behind while well inside a cycleway – must qualify as almost watertight. As to getting back onto the road, it turns out that the mechanic who usually sees to my bike is away for a week, overlapping with my trip to the Antipodes, so it seems I’ll be bikeless for a while. It’s a little like losing a limb.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

FORUM FOR THE FUTURE ALUMNI

Tintern Abbey

Got back home earlier this evening after driving back from Ross-on-Wye, which we visited for the first time this morning. Last night, we had arrived at The Leadership Trust centre in West-under-Penyard (http://www.leadership.org.uk), just outside Ross, where I was due to do an evening session with alumni of the Forum for the Future Master’s programme. Soon after we arrived, we sat in on a session that Forum CEO Peter Madden and a colleague did on futurology and scenarios, then after dinner Sara Parkin introduced me and off we went. After a short introduction, I basically turned it over the to the 50-or-so alumni to drive with their questions and comments, and the discussion took wing. Hugely enjoyable. Elaine and I got to bed around 12.30, with the distant rumour of jollity continuing on virtually until sunrise. On our way back today, we visited Symond’s Yat, walking for a couple of hours alongside the Wye, and meeting a huge caterpillar along the way, and then dropping in on Tintern Abbey on the way home – arriving at the Abbey as Vespers were sung.

Market building, Ross-on-Wye

Wye, Symond’s Yat

Ditto

Caterpillar – for what? Does anyone know?

Wye

Saturday, September 02, 2006

PODCAST PAT

Pat Elkington – listening to taped interview

This morning, I managed to record a long sequence of my mother, Pat, talking about cellar that sits beneath the oldest end of Hill House. Apparently someone came through a few weeks back who was something of an expert in such things. He went down into the cellar and pronounced that it was possibly a couple of hundred years older than we had thought – we had always assumed it was from the 1500s, predating that end of the house. We also talked about the cider presses that used to be set up in our back yard as late as the 1920s, when the turned Rissington Redstreak apples into a powerful cider, much of which was chanelled through lead pipes into barrels in the cellar. There’s a new book by Michael Boyes, a neighbour, which contains a 1920s photograph of eight men at work on the presses, all wrapped in sackcloth aprons. We were given the photo some years ago by Bill Oakey, whose family were involved in the cider-making way back then. Sadly, the last Redstreak apple tree was felled a few years back, apparently.

But much of the time we talked about the ghosts that have long haunted that end of the house, most notably the 12-year-old girl who many years ago told my siblings via a ouija board session that she had died falling down the back stairs while visiting the house. Have never believed in ghosts, but this one has put in too many appearances for comfort. Even guests who knew nothing about her have found themselves following her downstairs. With advice from another expert, I think from Gloucester Cathedral, Pat eventually did a DIY exorcism, which seems to have worked. Now the idea is to edit this morning’s tapes down into some sort of podcast for the website.

Friday, September 01, 2006

THE SPIRE AND A BLOODIED EYE

Another Friday, but one that marks the 33rd anniversary of Elaine and I getting married in 1973 – an event I suspect we have never previously celebrated as such, and rarely remembered. More often than not I have been abroad, but not this time – and we drove down this morning to Little Rissington, en route to a Forum for the Future event tomorrow, near Ross-on-Wye.

At the last moment, however, my father had to take my mother across to Cheltenham to get an injection in her eye, so after lunch we drove across to Stow-on-the-Wold with Caroline. There Elaine fell in love with a raku ceramic hare, sprawling out in a gallery window, its legs crossed ahead and behind. So it became the first anniversary gift more or less in living memory. A few doors along, we also dropped into the Borzoi Bookshop, from which I emerged with Sun Shuyun’s The Long March, Douglas Galbraith’s A Winter in China, and William Golding’s The Spire – a book I had been meaning to track down for years. In that old test where you are asked to choose – fast – between the words foundation or spire, I went for spire without any hesitation, as did Elaine. I suppose we both assume that the foundations will sort themselves out … unlike those under Dean Jocelin’s towering folly.

On the way back from Stow, we dropped down into Icomb in the hope of seeing Bunny (Vanda) Palmer, and arrived a few moments before she came back from a trip across to Stow. Had a wonderful time catching up and discussing the diaspora of once-upon-a-time children from our various families. In her eighties, Bunny is an extraordinary advertisement for old age, though that generation is not without its torments these days. When we got back, it was to find the parents back – and Pat’s eye so bloodshot that it reminded me of that ghastly still from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin film.