John Elkington

October 2005 31 October 2005

Sunday, October 30, 2005

SHE SAT DOWN SO WE COULD STAND UP

Was reading Nine Horses, a slim volume of poetry by Billy Collins (Picador, 2002), this morning and idly musing over my long-standing appetite for obituaries. We get two daily newspapers, The Times and The Financial Times, and I always turn to the Times obituaries section first. In a poem entitled Obituaries, Collins has this to say:

But eventually you may join
the crowd who turn here first to see
who has fallen in the night,
who has left a shape of air walking in their place.

He argues that:

… all the survivors huddle at the end
under the roof of a paragraph
as if they had sidestepped the flame of death.

Well, maybe, but it’s the power of the stories that I find irrestistible. And one this week, that for civil rights campaigner Rosa Parks, was just about as good as it gets (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1842813,00.html). Quoted in The New York Times, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said, “She sat down in order that we might stand up. Paradoxically, her imprisonment opened the doors for our long journey to freedom” (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/national/25parks.html?hp).

She will be the first woman to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda. For me, her act of defiance, more or less exactly 50 years ago on 1 December 1955, helped lay the foundations not only for the modern civil and human rights movements, but also for the environmental movement. The combination of widespread passive resistance with the political ability to find the allies needed to drive through major legislative changes in the 1960s was a model that would later be copied by the best environmental activists.

Saturday, October 29, 2005

HURRICANE SURFACES – AGAIN

Weird how it keeps happening. Had an e-mail last night from Crispin Whiting, who had found me via the blog, saying that part of Tim’s Battle of Britain Hurricane (see September 14 entry) was being sold on EBay as item #6573315928.

Turned out that Crispin’s great-uncle was a rear-gunner in WWII. I said I had always thought such people were incredibly brave, or innocents aloft, given that fighters generally went for the rear-gunner first. He replied: “Tail-end Charlie was indeed an unenviable post – particularly in a Wellington, when the only way in and out was on the ground. George was presumed lost by the rest of his crew on the first 1,000 bomber raid on Cologne. After the bomb run he opened his vacuum flask coffee only to have knocked out his hand by a close flak burst. The coffee went down the intercom and he spent the rest of a cold run home listening to the skipper first of all urgently calling ‘George, George, are you OK?’ and then the rest of the crew discussing how poor old George had bought it.”

In a later e-mail, Crispin wondered whether the story hadn’t got slightly exaggerated over the years, but it brought back those utterly grim missions in a very human way.

BHP BILLITON

Across to St Paul’s area to facilitate a stakeholder session for BHP Billiton (http://www.bhpbilliton.com/bb/sustainableDevelopment/home.jsp) with Judy Kuszewski. On the BHPB side, one of those taking part was Mick Roche, who has played a central role in getting the ‘Green Lead’ initiative off the ground (www.greenlead.com). As he has long admitted, this is an oxymoron, but I’m impressed with what I have heard, and interested to see whether the same approach can be applied elsewhere in the industry. This is something BHP Billtion are already working on. Another initiative the company is involved in, designed to tackle ethical, social and environmental issues in the trade of diamonds and gold, is the Council for Responsible Jewellery Practices (http://www.responsiblejewellery.com).

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

WAL-MART’S GIFT HORSE

First General Electric, now Wal-Mart – who next? ExxonMobil? The number of major ‘problem’ corporations appearing to roll over in the US is growing, with Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott claiming to have had an epiphany on climate change and the wider environmental challenge (http://walmartstores.com/GlobalWMStoresWeb/navigate.do?catg=463). “This used to be controversial, but the science is in and it is overwhelming,” he said. He also noted that “we should view the environment as [Hurricane] Katrina in slow motion.” Wal-Mart now says it will invest $500 million a year in new technology, including renewable energy systems.

Well, I’m not usually one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I’ll bet the Trojans wished they had. And there is something about the nature of Wal-Mart’s pledges which suggest that this huge commercial predator is highly unlikely to change its political and commercial spots any time soon. Scott said that Wal-Mart was going to move on from its historic “defensive posture”, but this still seems like little more than active defence, given the growing pressures brought to bear on it recently in such areas as healthcare provision for workers, the destruction of town centres (with some critics seeing it as a “retail cancer”), for destroying local jobs through outsourcing, a shoddy environmental record, and so ever on. The old phrase “Trust – but verify” comes to mind, but even though Conservation International is apparently backing the company (though I don’t see anything on its website to that effect), I can’t imagine trusting Wal-Mart this side of the next millennium.

Saturday, October 22, 2005

Thursday, September 29, 2005

YALE

Walked off the red-eye at JFK in surprisingly good fettle, after a couple of hours of sleep at best, and was sped north to New Haven and Yale in a Lincoln Town Car. Picked up from the hotel by Monica Araya, who is doing a PhD on corporate transparency and accountability – and played a key role in organising the event I am due to speak at later in the day.

Then was shuttled – on occasion in heavy rain driving almost horizontally – between sessions with James Gustave Speth (Dean of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies), Daniel Esty, who runs the School’s Center for Environmental Law and Policy (http://www.yale.edu/envirocenter/) and a group of Faculty members and students, over lunch. Among them Reid Lifset, editor of The Journal of Industrial Ecology (see http://mitpress.mit.edu/jie).

Have known Gus since 1984, when we met at a UN Environment Programme conference in Versailles. In the mid-1980s, when he was still at WRI, he commissioned three reports from me between 1986 and 1989. These were all focused on the implications of a range of technologies for – and potential applications in – sustainable development: Double Dividends focused on genetic engineering and wider forms of biotechnology, The Shrinking Planet on computing and remote sensing technologies, and Cleaning Up on waste management technology (http://johnelkington.com/pubs-reports.htm).

One of the things we talked about was the School’s planned new building project, the Kroon Building. This is being designed by Britain’s Hopkins Architects (http://www.hopkins.co.uk), who also designed London’s new Parliamentary Building. But why didn’t a US firm get the prestigious project? The asnwer is that the EU – and UK – are seen as taking the Kyoto Protocol on climate change much more seriously, with the result that levels of energy efficiency and building sustainability are higher than in the US. A US firm that had competed for the project, Centerbrook Architects and Planners, agreed to take on the role of executive architects instead of designers, something they had never done before. “We really felt there was a lot to be learned here,” explains Centerbrook partner Mark Simon (see Environment Yale, Spring 2005).

Then later the same afternoon I spoke at the 2-hour, standing-room-only session in the Bowers Auditorium, advertised in the poster below. It was kicked off by Dan Esty (who I first some years back through the World Economic Forum) and ended with a panel discusion with three key Yale people in this area: Marian Chertow, Director of the Industrial Environmental Management Program (http://www.yale.edu/environment), Brad Gentry, Project Director, Private International Finance and the Environment Project (http://www.yale.edu/forestry/bios/gentry.html) and Nat Keohane (Assistant Professor in economics at the School of Management). The debate was astonishingly polite and supportive, and I very much enjoyed the conversations afterwards with students from various departments. Then off to dinner at Zinc.

One of the most interesting things going on at Yale is Dan’s Environmental Sustainability Index (http://www.yale.edu/esi/). The 2005 Index, Benchmarking National Environmental Stewardship:The Environmental Sustainability Index, was released in Davos, Switzerland, at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum on Friday, 28 January 2005. And now they are working on the 2006 Environmental Performance Index (emphasis is mine). For more, see http://www.yale.edu/epm. We shall be keeping a much closer eye on Yale, for this and many other reasons.

The building in which we visited Dan Esty, originally owned by the Winchester rifle family – and, when abandoned for some time, apparently known as ‘The Frankenstein House’.

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

POST NIKE, JETBLUE RED-EYE

Waiting for the red-eye jetBlue flight from Portland to New York, at around midnight. Having flown out to Oregon on Monday, I have spent two days with Nike’s corporate responsibility team, their first offsite meeting (of over 100 people) for some years. Wonderful opportunity to catch up with the likes of Hannah Jones and Sarah Severn, who have been key in driving the corporate responsibility agenda within the company. Fantastic atmosphere and a growing sense that Nike has turned the corner with their 2004 corporate responsibility report, which I read again on the flight out (http://www.nike.com/nikebiz/nikebiz.jhtml?page=24). Extraordinary, particularly if you think what even leading companies were proeared to reveal (very little) when we started off on the reporting beat back in the early 1990s.

But one of the most interesting things for me was to hear more about Nike’s ‘Considered’ product line, which aims to embed sustainability factors from the outset and throughout the product life cycle (http://www.nike.com/nikebiz/nikeconsidered/). Had a great lunch with John Hoke, Vice-President for Footwear Design, whose interest in sustainable design could well hold the seeds of a very different Nike. In terms of life cycles, one of the outside exercises included everyone being instructed to form a line from those born longest ago to those born most recently. I was No. 3 at the grey/gray end of the line. As someone kindly (but accurately) pointed out, the only thing beyond us was a grave-shaped heap of earth.

The off-site was held in one of an extraordinary chain of hotels, the McMenamin Historic Hotels – specifically, in the McMenamin Edgefield (http://www.mcmenamins.com/index.php?loc=3&id=44). For the US, this was seriously eccentric. Originally a ‘poor farm’ for distressed people during the Depression and an insane asylum. In the grounds was a giant orange-red water tank on stilts and my favourite of many murals inside the main building was a vast painting around a staircase of two old ladies in their nighties, sitting astride the water tower as it turns into a rocket and blasts into the starry night sky. Slight shock to find that the facilities were somewhat remote from the bedrooms and shared, but nothing to what people went through in the 1930s!

Water tower

Rocketing up

Dusty Kidd orchestrates a session voting on likely outcome of World Cup football

Exit

Detail of painting on my bedroom door!

Saturday, September 24, 2005

JEREMY CLARKSON’S LOATHING

Well, at least it’s mutual. Jeremy Clarkson – of BBC’s Top Gear motoring programme – confessed this evening to a “deep-seated loathing of environmentalists.” If you haven’t come across him, try http://www.bbcworld.com/content/template_clickpage.asp?pageid=2231. He’s the one who has declared that he wants to run over cyclists who run red lights. I think that cyclists should have lights and obey the Highway Code, but his boorishness is increasingly shading into the area of generational war-crimes. His stance on issues like SUVs and climate change, for example, is several light-years to the right of George W. Bush.

This evening, while looking for a programme on the Waffen SS, we accidentally switched into a Clarkson program that wasn’t billed in the listings, and it turned out to be surprisingly interesting. He was tracing his ancestors and discovered that the inventor of the Kilner Jar was among them.

He drove around the country in his RangeRover SUV, archly wondering what had happened to the billions that “should have been his.” Ironically, he found that the Kilners (who pumped out smoke 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, because they couldn’t shut down their furnaces) had lost a major pollution battle with a neighbour, the Earl of Scarborough. The judge (who Clarkson groaned must have been related to UK environmentalist Jonathon Porritt) ruled that “no man has the right to interfere with the supply of clean air.” And the final irony? Clarkson found that the site of one of the key Kilner factories was later home to the (now defunct) Earth Centre, a self-styled Mecca for environmentalists which failed to attract enough to make a go of things.

It was somewhat surprising that Clarkson didn’t make more of that failure. The sad history of the Centre is summarised by Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Centre,_Doncaster). I remember the days when Jonathan Smales, the driving force behind the Centre, came around to SustainAbility’s offices in The People’s Hall, near Latimer Road, looking for help. And it’s interesting that the Eden Project, founded by Tim Smit and crew, has done much better – largely because it has been much more commercially minded.

It’s genuinely sad that in Clarkson’s brain it seems to be a Manichean universe, in which it’s a battle to eternity between enterprise and environment. Particularly since that’s what seems to have killed his ancestors’ business. Maybe the incapacity to spot what is going on in the wider world is genetic, a function of the inbreeding he implicitly referred to when he said that all his ancestors on one side of the family seem to come from the same village? The programme ended with a flashover between a photo of the ancestor most directly implicated in the failure of the family business, who looked as if he had been born and bred in the Appalachians, and a picture of a youthful Clarkson, with long curly hair – and looking as if he had jumped a century. Maybe one of his glass-making ancestors stumbled on a recipe for time travel? If so, future generations must hope that the Clarksons have lost the keys.

AMBELOPOULIA

As I sat in the garden this afternoon, enjoying the waning days of the British summer, and catching a breath between writing tasks, one of our two robins came and sat alongside, singing its heart out. Which reminded me of the photo in an article in today’s Independent covering the illegal ambelopoulia trade in Cyprus. It showed a robin dangling upside down from a ‘lime stick’ in Cyprus.

According to the RSPB (http://www.rspb.org.uk/international/illegal_hunting/cyprus/index.asp) , around 3.7 million birds are shot every year, of which some 750,000 are shot illegally. Small birds, and especially blackcaps, migrating through Cyprus are trapped for sale nationally as the Cypriot food delicacy, ambelopoulia. When Elaine and I were in Northern Cyprus earlier in the year, we were struck by the absence of bird-song in many areas.

The technique used to catch the birds is particularly repulsive. The preparation of ‘lime sticks’ involves coating a pomegranate branch with a sticky resin. The birds land on the branch, become stuck and many gnaw off their own legs in their efforts to escape. The numbers of bird deaths caused in this way have been cut dramatically in recent years, but RSPB-funded BirdLife Cyprus (http://www.birdlifecyprus.org/) stresses that the trade still operates in high gear – hardly surprising given that a dozen of these small birds now sells for £22.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

WEEE ARE THE WORLD

Slightly odd concatenation of circumstances today. After a morning spent planning future issues of SustainAbility’s newsletter, Radar (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/radar.asp), I travelled across to Docklands for the latest meeting of the ECGD Advisory Council. Then back to John Adam Street for the Royal Society of Art’s evening debate on enterprise and the Society’s five Manifesto Challenges (http://www.rsa.org.uk/events/detail.asp?eventID=1739). On a panel with Baroness Glenys Thornton, (Chair, Social Enterprise Coalition), Valerie Bayliss (Director, RSA Opening Minds Project), Richard Murphy (founder, Tax Justice Network) and, in the chair, John Knell (Director of the Intelligence Agency).

At one point, I used a slide of the WEEE Man (http://www.thersa.org/projects/weee_man.asp), which the RSA has organised to dramatise the volumes of electrical and electronic waste each of us produces over a lifetime. Then home, where I discovered that the second of the columns that I do with Mark Lee for Grist has just been posted (http://www.grist.org/biz/fd/2005/09/20/weee/). And the subject is the WEEE Directive and various other EU laws that are helping shape international markets – though the press today carried the story that the EU’s new air quality proposals have just been watered down following industry pressure.

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

CLEANTECH

Among a blizzard of meetings today, had a fascinating session with Nick Parker of Cleantech Ventures (http://www.cleantech.com/), who I have known for years. Have been getting a number of invitrations from this sector recently, which is erupting in the sustainability space. It’s fascinating how the ‘cleantech’ language is coming up the curve, very much like biotech in the 1970s and 1980s. One of the concerns must be another ‘tech bubble’, but cleantech potentially represents a big jump forward from the more traditional slow growth, engineering dominated markets (e.g. waste management) to a whole raft of new, potentially much higher growth opportunity spaces ( he instances solar). Nick sees all of this as reflecting a switch from regulatory drivers to market drivers, from concerns about compliance to growing interest in productivity, and from end-of-pipe to front-of-pipe.

Saturday, September 17, 2005

DAVID PEARCE

Very sorry to read today in The Independent of the sudden death of Professor David Pearce (http://www.econ.ucl.ac.uk/davidpearce.php), someone I had known since the early 1970s. His work on environmental economics and insistence on the primacy of markets in dealing with environmental problems had a major influence on my own thinking. His Blueprint for a Green Economy, written with Anil Markandya and Ed Barbier, was published in 1989, the year after our own Green Consumer Guide appeared. We shared membership of the UN Global 500. At a time when I’m trying to get SustainAbility to focus more on economics, he’s someone I’d have tried get to help us, yet another reason to regret his passing.

CANCER ARMADA

We had read that today would see a Richmond-to-Greenwich armada of boats, but thought we had missed it. Then Elaine and Gaia called as they headed across to Waitrose to say that the tail end was still passing on the Thames, a block or two away. I cycled over to the river wall and caught a few last boats making their way east. This was the 22-mile Trafalgar Great River Race along the Thames – to help people living with cancer. The event is now in its eighteenth year (http://www.macmillan.org.uk/news/news.asp?nid=1758).

Hania also called this morning to say she was on her way home after completing the 17-mile through-the-night walk around London to raise money for the Maggie’s Centre movement (http://www.maggiescentres.org/). The walkers were treated to visits to a number of key buildings as they wended their way, including City Hall. Belatedly, wish I had gone. A new Maggie’s Centre, designed by Sir Richard Rogers, has now got planning permission (http://www.richardrogers.co.uk/render.aspx?siteID=1&navIDs=1,6,12,1156). As I cycled back across Hammersmith Bridge last night, a stunningly beautiful moon was dropping out of the bottom of a plum-coloured cloud hanging over the Richard Rogers complex just to the east.

Friday, September 16, 2005

CNOOC VERSION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

According to FT.com, a senior executive at Cnooc, the Chinese oil company that failed to win buy Unocal earlier in 2005–which Mark Lee and I discussed in a recent Grist column (http://www.sustainability.com/news-media/news-resource.asp?id=349)–said political pressure to block China’s access to oil and gas abroad was a serious infringement of human rights. Yang Hua, the company’s chief financial officer and main negotiator with Unocal, said it was important for the world to grant both China and India, which are now major consumers of oil and gas, long-term energy security. “What is ‘human rights’? I’ll tell you what it means. It means having guaranteed access to energy. It means having petroleum to run your car.”

Thursday, September 15, 2005

DRAMA AT PERSIAN EXHIBITION

After lunch with triple bottom line expert Mark McElroy, I headed across to the British Museum to meet Elaine and see the Persian Exhibition. If I had paid to get in, I think I would have been disappointed, but dramatic events ensured we got in for free. The exhibits – some really extraordinary – were packed into a space that was extremely dark and seemed about the size of a modest London flat.

And the events? In a development worthy of Agatha Christie, someone either fell or was pushed from a great height inside the Museum and the whole place went into seizure as police cars and ambulances (van, car and motorcyle versions) began to arrive. Not sure whether the person died, but the gates were all closed and hundreds of people were trapped inside wanting to get out – and outside, still wanting to get in. Elaine and I wandered around the odd sculpture garden in front of the Museum, with its pink and green figures that also seem to have dropped from a height and then reassembled.

Various people then addressed the confused hordes, and from one of them I thought I gathered that someone had thrown a germ warfare weapon and that we were going to be held in quarantine. (True, I had been reading the September 19 edition of BusinessWeek earlier in the day, which explores the various crises that could further overwhelm US security processes, from a homemade nuke to terrorists pumping smallpox or Ebola into a subway or airport, so maybe my neurons were over-inflamed.) But God knows what non-English-speakers made of it all. In the end, we were all eventually released into the afternoon, with no further explanation.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

HURRICANE JX-O

With Hurricane Katrina uppermost in many people’s minds, a different sort of Hurricane was in ours over the weekend, the Hawker Hurricane. Parts of my father’s Hurricane have been sent through to us over the years by archaeologists who found its wreckage deeply embedded in West Sussex farmland. And now WWII aviation simulators have been toying around with his machine and film-makers have been recording his experiences when he and his colleagues were involved in the Battle of Britain and, later, when they were transferring Hurricanes to the Russians via Murmansk and Archangel – and training Soviet pilots to fly them.

I hadn’t realised that pilots had their own identifiers painted on their aircraft. The one in which he was shot down on 16 August 1940 was JX-O, as was the subsequent machine he is pictured alongside (see below) when he returned to No. 1 squadron in October that year. And the same identifier now shows up on a virtual version of his original machine (see below) in a Battle of Britain game, thanks to American simulators.

Tim Elkington and JX-O the second

Computer simulation of JX-O in Russia, by Kevin Moffat

BA + BG OFFER CLIMATE OPTIONS

SustainAbility has long offset its carbon emissions, both directly and through a small surcharge on contracts. So it’s good to see two more UK companies offering customers the option of offsetting their carbon emissions, in this case via Climate Care. They are:

British Airways, which has launched a carbon offset scheme to enable their customers to offset the carbon emissions from their flights through Climate Care. Customers that book British Airways flights at www.ba.com can offset their carbon emissions via the booking confirmation form or at www.ba.com/offsetyouremissions.

British Gas, which has launched an initiative that gives their customers the chance to offset the carbon emissions from their gas and electricity use. The initiative, called ‘Climate Aware’, enables British Gas customers to offset their emissions using an online calculator. Customers who sign-up are also offered an energy efficiency audit to help them reduce emissions in the year ahead. British Gas customers can sign up to Climate Aware online at www.house.co.uk/climate

Monday, September 12, 2005

ASHES, BAILS, BALES & GRAVES

My mother Pat’s 83rd birthday, so Elaine and I had headed west last night to Little Rissington, to celebrate. During the morning, the three of us drove across to Burford, to buy her some birthday plants, and came back with a car-full.

Striking how much road-kill there is on the highways and byways: among other things, I saw dead representatives of the pheasant, fox, rabbit, rat and squirrel families. Not sure I wouldn’t prefer to be back in the pony-and-trap era: Pat remembers riding through country lanes in such a conveyance and having time to see and smell the wildflowers. Managed to slam the car into a shuddering stop on the way home, just past Burford’s old woolpack bridge, by shifting from third gear into Drive, something I don’t normally do, but had been experimenting down Burford’s steeply inclined main drag, conditions in which automatic Volvos seem to run away with themselves. The SUV behind me managed to avoid a metallic coupling with our rear end. I think I’ll be staying in automatic from now on.

In the afternoon, Elaine and I walked out past the church, and then around the fields overlooking the Windrush valley as the sun inclined towards the horizon. Hedges are full of blackberries and sloes. The sequence of photos below take the viewer from beyond the church, through the graveyard, down the path through Church Field (with Hill House visible in the distance), through the gate, and then around the end of Hill House and into the garden. Often strikes me that you could walk through the same landscape and take images that were either idyllic or grotesque. I was in somewhat mellow, autumnal mood, and it probably shows. Inside, Caroline and Pat – alongside much of the nation – were watching England somewhat erratically win the Ashes. Reminded me of how much I like the Australians.

Saturday, September 10, 2005

POSH PIGEONS

The Times today contains two items that link, in my mind at least. The first is an obituary of Richard Fitter, naturalist and author of books like Collins’ much-loved Pocket Guide to British Birds and The Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers. I met him in the 1970s through Max Nicholson, who I was working with in setting up Environmental Data Services (ENDS). But I wonder what he thought–and what Max, one of the country’s leading ornithologists, would have thought–of the astounding invasion of parakeets which is also covered in the newspaper today. We have watched them move into Barnes and the surrounding region over the years with a sense of wonder progressively shading into alarm.

The parakeets (apparently known in some parts of London as “posh pigeons”) are raucously present behind the house most days, and apparently are competing with a whole raft of native species, among them kestrels, little owls, nightingales and kingfishers. Ben Macintyre’s piece notes that people are losing patience with the gorgeously coloured birds and, among other things, shouting abuse at them. Given that parakeets are among the best mimics in the parrot world, I wonder how long it will be before the dawn chorus is mainly a matter of four-letter words?

Friday, September 09, 2005

SUSTAINABILITY FORUM ZURICH

Last couple of days spent in Zurich, at the Swiss Re Ruschlikon Centre for Global Dialogue, for the sixth International Sustainability Leadership Symposium. This year, the focus was on ‘The Market Value of Reputation’. I chaired a plenary panel session on the first day, with four speakers: Peter Forstmoser (Chairman, Swiss Re – they are more than a little embroiled in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at the moment), Achim Steiner (Director General, IUCN – The World Conservation Union: he argued that the “Houston, we have a problem!” line is also true of economics, which is fundamentally flawed), Thierry Lombard (seventh generation private banker: “We are not good because we are old; we are old because we are good”) and Peter Quadri (Chairman, IBM Switzerland).

Good session and interesting event, but I came away feeling that much of the interest in corporate reputations is akin to navel-gazing, and that what we really need is a few more gales of creative destruction coupled with a much greater focus on entrepreneurial, disruptive solutions to the world’s great problems.

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

DOW JONES SUSTAINABILITY INDEXES

57 companies have been added–and 54 deleted–from the latest round of the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, where I am on the Advisory Board (http://www.sustainability-indexes.com). The assessments take account of such issues as corporate governance, climate change, supply chain standards and labour practices. Total assets under management in DJSI-based investment vehicles now amount to 3.3 billion euros ($4.1 billion). Among the key trends identified:

(1) Sustainability is continuing its move from corporate strategy and operations into product and service offerings. Advanced integration of eco-design requirements in the electronics industry, increasing implementation of environmental criteria in project financing and wider use of life cycle analysis in the chemcial industry are examples of this trend, say the DJSI team.

(2) Companies are converging around ‘first generation’ sustainability themes, such as corporate governance and environmental reporting. (Not sure I’d call corporate governance issues ‘first generation’, but let that pass.) The gap between leaders and laggards is opening out as the spotlight shifts to sector-specific issues such as healthy nutrition in the food industry, business opportunities for consumer goods in emerging markets, and anti-crime prevention in the financial sector.

(3) Transparency and accountability are spreading along supply chains, with greater use of environmental and social auditing processes.

(4) Sustainability indicators are increasingly linked to financial value drivers and integrated into Annual Reports, with new regulations, such as the UK’s Operating & Financial Review (OFR) requirement, helping to drive the trend.

(5) Corporations increasingly recognise the importance of human capital management for their success, although there is still felt to be great potential for improvement in areas like talent attraction, organizational learning and employee performance indicators.

Thursday, September 01, 2005

A DAY IN THE ONTWERPFABRIEK

Spent the day in Rotterdam, giving a keynote for the 50th birthday celebration for Dow Benelux. Amazing to think back – as I did in my speech – to 1955, when I was 6 and 8 communist nations (including the USSR) signed the Warsaw Pact, when Churchill resigned as UK PM, and when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, was arrested, and triggered the Mongomery Bus Boycott.

The Dow event was held in the Ontwerpfabriek, now a UNESCO World Heritage site (http://www.ontwerpfabriek.nl/index.asp?pageid=259a31f7b82841bc9744b474b072fb66). Built between 1925 and 1931, it was once the highest of high tech. It used to house the Van Nelle tobacco, tea and coffee works, but now acts as an incubator for businesses in the world of design and similar. So we would have sessions in rooms with names like Havana, which is romantic but slightly edgy for a passionate non-smoker. The photos below give some sense of the space, style and environs. Stimulating in other ways, too, given that I’m thinking around the EU as an incubator of new global rules for our next Grist column.

When we later had dinner at a wonderful restaurant overlooking the harbour, or at least overlooking the back of an enormous naval auxiliary ship, I noticed that the vile maggot (or Macedonian leaf-miner, see 31 August entry) is abroad here, too.

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

ANIMALS AT WAR

Every day I cycle in to the office, I pass the new David Backhouse ‘Animals at War’ memorial at Brook Gate, Park Lane (http://www.indielondon.co.uk/events/att_animals_warmemorial.html). It struck me more forcefully today after conversations we had yesterday at CFS in Manchester about animal welfare and animal testing. So I dismounted and took a few photos. It is thought that – to take just one species – 8 million horses died in WWI, so the memorial is richly deserved. But few other countries would erect such a thing. And, on the way back from Manchester, I reflected on the legal ban now in force on fox-hunting in this country, which I both support and yet in some odd way also regret. The thought stream was prompted by the sight of a great red dog fox sitting upright in the evening sun, alongside a canal.

HORSE CHESTNUT PLAGUE

Driving Gaia and a guitarist friend across to a concert in Putney earlier this week, she and I both noted that pretty much all the horse chestnut trees on the Common are in dire shape. Gaia said she thought a Macedonian moth was to blame, but promised to check on the Net and send a link. Here are three links she sent today for what turns out to be a real little horror.

http://www.forestry.gov.uk/forestry/INFD-59YJKP
http://www.forestry.gov.uk/fr/INFD-68JJRC
http://www.forestry.gov.uk/fr/INFD-5ZXGXZ

DAYS AFTER TOMORROW

It’s not quite The Day After Tomorrow in New Orleans and its environs, but CNN reports that, “survivors are facing dire conditions — no power, little drinking water, dwindling food supplies, gunfire in the distance — with no way to get out. And the waters are still rising, at times dotted by the bodies of those who perished when the hurricane roared into town Monday morning” (http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/31/katrina/).

SustainAbility has long argued that it would take one or more really major climate-related disasters in the US to begin to shift the Bush regime. Hurricane Katrina probably won’t be enough to swing things, but it will contribute to the steady drip-drip pressure on the climate Neanderthals. One key factor: unlike people in most of the areas hit by the tsunami, Americans tend to be insured. And that means big insurance bills — and major headaches for the reinsurers, who are already among the most vocal champions of more serious action on climate change. That is a central theme of SustainAbility’s latest report, The Changing Landscape of Liability (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/liability.asp), one of the sponsors for which was the international reinsurance giant, Swiss Re.

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

CFS BANISHES FATIGUE

CFS stands for many different things around the world, among them Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Having known several people with this version of CFS, I know it’s no joking matter. But as something of a reptile myself, unable to stir until the sun is in the heavens, I felt more than a little dissociated from reality as I got up at 04.45 this morning to head up to Manchester, courtesy of Virgin Rail, and spend a day with CFS – as in Co-operative Financial Services. It was like a shot of adrenalin. The issues ranged from climate change to the risk of creating a genetic underclass. Part of the discussion focused on the future of reporting. In SustainAbility’s 2004 benchmark survey of corporate reporting, the latest CFS report came top (http://www.cfs.co.uk/servlet/Satellite?cid=1108109697271&pagename=CFSSustain/Page/tplCFSPageStandard&c=Page). But the two sessions I did with different CFS groups also woke me up to the longer term potential of a re-energised co-operative movement, if that could be achieved.

Monday, August 29, 2005

APATHY OUT OF FASHION

An ex-colleague, Nick Robinson, currently with BP, just sent me a link to a website I hadn’t come across, http://www.antiapathy.org/. We have been thinking about the fashion industry recently, largely because of its huge impact on other industries, and Anti-Apathy is active in that area. Anyone interested in this area might want to roll up for the Ethical Fashion Show on October 7-9, in Paris (http://www.ethicalfashionshow.com/index2.htm#).

SKYWHALESONG

Spent most of the long holiday weekend working, but the weather over the last couple of days has been glorious, the sky an extraordinary deep blue, the temptation to dawdle immense, but largely resisted. And the skies have had me thinking of fin whales and – in the wake of a piece I read in The Observer yesterday – about new ideas about life in space, alien life-forms. The fin whales came from today’s Times, which reports that fin whales, humpbacks and something like 2000 dolphins have been pursuing fish which have been pursuing plankton in warm currents reaching much further north than usual through the Irish Sea. Climate change, it seems, maybe also linked with Hurricane Katrina, which today just missed New Orleans.

And the skywhales? These are from a Channel 4 TV series (Alien Worlds) that will apparently begin on 4 October, alongside a new exhibition on the ‘Science of Aliens’ at London’s Science Museum (http:www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/aliens). They are reputed to live on Blue Moon, which has a super-dense atmosphere of oxygen and carbon dioxide. The ‘skywhales’ float through the soupy atmosphere on 10-metre wings, preyed on only by ‘caped stalkers’, eagle-like predators that sound like killer whales on amphetamines.

One of the questions raised by the Science Museum website’s alien section is whether someone out there is listening to us? As I sat down to file this blog, my Mac’s screen was dark, with the SETI at home scan running in the background. This uses down time on the computer to process signals received from deep space (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/). I haven’t seen any signs of intelligent life as yet, but having always loved whalesong (particularly as recorded many years ago by Roger Payne), I would quite like to hear skywhalesong.

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

WORLDPROCESSOR

With flood tides of data and information sluicing around the world, there is growing interest in visualisation techniques. That’s one reason why I have been experimenting with the notion of the ‘Value Palette’ (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article.asp?id=322). And was fascinated to see a feature in the August issue of Wired on the work of New York artists Ingo Gunther. He and Worldprocessor (http://www.worldprocessor.com) plot data from newspapers and NGOs onto 12-inch plastic globes. Although the statistics are forever morphing, the impact of some of these globes is extraordinary.

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

CHINA SYNDROMES

The first in the series of columns Mark Lee and I will be doing for Grist magazine went live today at http://www.grist.org/biz/fd/2005/08/23/china/

COMING DOWN FROM SOLVENTS

Hania in repainted kitchen

Finally able to blog again, after further problems with hosting agency. Having taken a couple of weeks ‘off’ at home to concentrate on a range of writing projects, particularly the social enterprise book, I have found myself working as hard as ever on a range of SustainAbility and related projects. But, still, the writing projects have gradually been cranking through, and that in spite of the fact that I have been breathing a very heady, solvent-rich atmosphere for the past week. We have had our kitchen repainted, after twelve years, and there still seem to be limits to what you can achieve with water-based paints. But that’s something to look into again if and when a possible consumer-focused project we are discussing materialises.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

PEOPLE TREE

Dinner last night with Safia Minney of fair trade fashion company People Tree (http://www.ptree.co.uk or http://www.ptree.co.jp), based in London and Tokyo, and her husband James and Elaine. Had met Safia some time back, via the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, and had interviewed her for SustainAbility’s Radar (http://www.sustainability.com/network/global-influencer.asp?id=258). Emerged re-enthused about SustainAbility’s long-standing idea of tackling the fashion sector as a ‘gatekeeper’ industry that sets the specifications (and, often, horrendous deadlines and pricing levels) that drive so many other industries, among them those producing fibres, textiles and a range of chemical products – including the pesticides used to protect crops like cotton and the dyes that may delight the eye but too often pollute the rivers of major producer countries like India.

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

GRISTWARD HO!

Three painters – one on his way shortly to Iraq as a member of the Territorial Army – are repainting our kitchen after 12 years. But the smell of solvents from the gloss areas has me wondering whether my enthusiasm for various projects during the day has had more to do with what I’ve been inhaling than with what I’ve been hearing. That said, one of the bits of goods news today came as a result of a teleconference Mark Lee and I had today with an editor of Grist (http://www.grist.org), the US electronic magazine. Unusually, they apply humo(u)r to the environmental challenge. Mark and I will be starting a new monthly column for Grist in the autumn.

Sunday, August 14, 2005

BARNES WETLANDS

Overblown dragonfly

Spend a quiet afternoon walking around the Barnes Wetland Centre with cousin Simon Mills and his family. Apart from a few edge-of-vision frogs and the usual birds, real wildfowl are relatively scarce, but the transformation wrought on these once-vast reservoirs is an extraordinary example of what can be done with imagination and determination. Every time I walk past the wonderful sculpture of Sir Peter Scott at the entrance, who drove the whole process, I can’t help but recall the times he helped me – particularly, when as a Trustee of The Winston Churchill Trust, he helped sway the panel towards awarding me a 1981 Fellowship, which I took in the US. And the visits I did during that period represented a big step towards my first Pelican, Sun Traps.

Friday, August 12, 2005

WIRELESS, AT LAST

Working at home this week on a bunch of writing tasks and future presentations, with a trip down to Oxford on Monday with Elaine for a session on SustainAbility’s future format. Today, a couple of IT engineers – one PC, one Apple – came to sort out longstanding issues with my home IT system, which is built around an Apple G4 desktop, one of the most exquisite bits of technology I have ever used. Turns out that the Hermstedt NetShuttle box I had bought some time ago was dysfunctional from the outset, whereas I had thought it was just my incompetence.

While I am constantly confounded by how far computers have come since I began using them in the late 1970s, from the perspective of 2010 it seems unbelievable that we still need engineers to sort out dysfunctional boxes, VPN connections and the like. Hopefully, tomorrow’s computers will be able to sort themselves out, with a dollop of artificial intelligence. In fact, only this morning, I was browsing through a book by John Edwards, The Geeks of War (Amacom, 2005) while waiting for the e-surgery to finish upstairs. If the military can have things like self-healing databases, which Edwards discusses, why oh why can’t we? The answer, of course, is that their budgets help develop such things, then they cascade through what’s left of the world at large.

Monday, August 08, 2005

SOLAR HOME

Drove to Oxford with Elaine, for session with Geoff (Lye) and Sophia (Tickell). Once again hugely impressed by Geoff’s solar home – which continuously informs you on how much electricity the house is using, how much is being captured by the solar panels, and how much is being bought from (or sold to) the national grid. The repayments from the power company may be somewhat token to date, but you catch a whiff of the future.

Geoff shows Elaine what’s watts

Sunday, August 07, 2005

TANGLEY

Caterpillar hedge

Peter, Eleo, me, Elaine

Elaine, Gaia and I drove down to Tangley, beyond Andover, to have lunch with age-old friends, Eleo Gordon and Peter Carson. Elaine and I had arrived to stay for two weeks with Eleo in her tiny Pimlico flat in the early 1970s, when I was at UCL, and ended up staying 18 months. Wonderful – if somewhat fitful – weather. Countryside looked idyllic, though the drive to and fro along the M3 was enough to persuade us that we are fundamentally urban creatures.

Driving in motorway lava streams drains me, whereas cycling to and from work recharges me. Got my bike back from the repair shop yesterday: one set of gears had collapsed, so they have put in new, stainless steel cables. The charge was very reasonable, given today’s labour costs, but it struck me that for not much more than three times the repair cost I could have bought some sort of new bike, made in Korea or China. But the huge amount I spent on the bike (a Dawes) over 15 years ago has repaid itself many times over, not least in standing up to a couple of major spills.

LEAVING SOCIAL FOOTPRINTS

Heard again yesterday from Mark McElroy, who is joining a team of researchers at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands for a three year project as Visiting Researcher. The ultimate ambition is to evolve a systematic methodology for computing ‘blended’ TBL (triple bottom line) scores for companies and others. Further details of his social footprint work from:
http://www.sustainableinnovation.org/the-social-footprint.html

Saturday, August 06, 2005

THE VALUE PALETTE

One of the things I have been working on in recent weeks has been what I dub ‘The Value Palette’. As I have become more impatient with some of the reductionist ways of using triple bottom line (TBL) thinking, which we have been so instrumental in developing and spreading, my brain has been heading off in two related directions: the first towards greater integration across the TBL agenda of economic, social and environmental value added/destroyed, which pushes me in the direction of ‘Blended Value’ (www.blendedvalue.org); and the second is towards a much finer grain focus on the different forms of value that entrepreneurs, companies and investors will increasingly have to understand and blend.

And that’s where the Value Palette potentially comes in. It started of as a thought experiment which began to evolve in my mind as I was toying with an invited paper for the California Management Review – which I’m finishing off this weekend. It took a big jump forward when I bought and read John Gage’s Colour and Culture (Thames & Hudson, 1993/2001) while in Paris recently. And now it features in the latest issue of SustainAbility’s Radar (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article.asp?id=322).

Saturday, July 30, 2005

AWAY DAYS

Jodie Thorpe and Brompton cycle

Much of the week has been taken up with a process of strategic reflection with the entire SustainAbility team. We started with all members of the team bringing something that spoke to them of the future: among them, Seb (Beloe) brought his Brompton cycle, Geoff (Lye) a picture of his new granddaughter, Jodie (Thorpe) a piece of string (she spoke of the need to manage the tension, ensuring there wasn’t so much that it snapped yet making sure there was enough so that we could play good tunes) and Kavita (Prakash-Mani) a snow leopard (shown in the picture), which she linked to a whole mass of themes, from the fact that it was an endangered species to the fact that it was ‘Made in China’.

I took the Vertical Speed Indicator from my father’s shot-down Hurricane (see 25 June entry), arguing the need to recall the security side of our agenda – and the growing need for tools that tell us where we are in terms of the climb towards sustainability.

One of my other inputs was a survey of our Council, Faculty and a small sample of clients and partners, which provided a hugely helpful mapping of the trends, risks and opportunities for us through to 2010. We are now planning to evolve the survey into a twice-a-year fixture, with the results posted and debated on the SustainAbility website.

Thursday, July 28, 2005

BELU

Old (glass) bottle

Jeff Erikson (who runs SustainAbility’s Washington, DC office) and I boarded a river boat at Butler Wharf this evening and sailed east down the Thames, celebrating the launch of a new bio-bottle for Belu, the ethical bottled spring water. Aboard: folk like Anita Roddick of The Body Shop and John Bird of The Big Issue. Caught up with a fair few people from the social enterprise world.

Belu’s new bottle is made from a polymer, polylactic acid (PLA), produced by NatureWorks (http://www.natureworksllc.com/corporate/nw_pack_home.asp), originally a joint venture between Dow Chemical and Cargill. SustainAbility did a stakeholder engagement process for them some time back, identifying only one major issue with PLA in the EU market: it is produced by fermenting corn – and corn in the US in now generally genetically modified. Against this, the profits from Belu’s products are invested in clean water projects in the developing world. And Belu say they are thinking of an ‘offset’ policy, ensuring an equivalent acreage of non-GM corn is grown.

Then Jeff and I walked back across Tower Bridge to catch the Tube west. The river looked beautiful, as did the Gherkin, poking up behind the Tower of London.

Looking west, towards HMS Belfast

CODE TALKERS, PREGNANT AEROPLANES

If anyone wanted an example of the value of diversity – human diversity – they would be hard placed to find a better illustration than the amazing successes of the Native American ‘code talkers’ used by American forces in WWI and WWII. Have long been fascinated by the story, which was brought back to mind by today’s obituary in The Times for Charles Chibitty, a Comanche code talker who served in Europe from the landings on Utah Beach through the liberation of at least one concentration camp (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1710775,00.html).

The code talkers used a language in radio transmissions which the Germans had no way of cracking. The bitter irony was that the US Government had for years tried to drive the Comanche tongue into extinction. Chibitty, too, was punished at school if he ever tried to speak his native language. One of the things I found most fascinating about the code talkers was the way they worked around the fact that their vocabulary had few words for modern warfare: they made terms up. When they wanted to refer to a machine-gun, for example, they spoke of a “sewing machine”. A tank became a “turtle” and a bomber a “pregant aeroplane”. Adolf Hitler was known as posah tai vo, Comanche for “crazy white man”.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

MAREK MAYER

Enormously saddened to hear yesterday of the death of Marek Mayer, one of the foremost environmental journalists of his generation. Richard Macrory’s obituary appears in today’s Independent. Richard quotes me to the effect that when I first recruited Marek to Environmental Data Services (ENDS: http://www.ends.co.uk) he failed to produce much copy at all for the first six months – but then went critical, like a nuclear reactor, and thereafter poured forth a steady stream of very high quality, highly critical and profoundly influential coverage of the issues of the day.

As with Carol Crashaw, whose memorial service Elaine and I went to on Friday, there was an odd cross-connect here between Elaine’s world and mine. She knew Sue Gee (later Marek’s wife) via Wildwood House, the alternative publisher she worked with in Covent Garden in the early 1970s. (TEST, where I then worked, was on the top floor of the same building.) And it was through Sue that we heard of Marek when ENDS was looking for new talent. He took over from me as Editor of the ENDS Report in 1981, three years after we (David Layton, Max Nicholson and I) started the company, while I became Managing Director.

A key enabler was the Churchill Fellowship (http://www.wcmt.org.uk/) I received in 1981, which enabled me to travel to the US – and meant that Marek and Georgina McAughtry (the first ENDS team member, later a Director) had to take over in my absence. I left the company in 1983 to start the progression of activities that would lead to the founding of SustainAbility in 1987. And have felt profoundly grateful ever since to both Marek and Georgina not only for taking ENDS off my shoulders but also turning it into such a thundering success over the years.

Sunday, July 24, 2005

ADDER

As Elaine and I walked through the Swiss mountains last week, I would often take a look at the dung heaps and other decomposing mounds of agricultural waste in hope of seeing breeding snakes. No such luck. Then when we arrived in Little Rissington to see my parents a couple of days back, it was to hear that they had just found a large (for the species) adder in one of their compost heaps.

Can’t recall them being found so close in to the village before. But I do remember one very hot summer’s day maybe four decades ago when several of us walked up over the hill towards the RAF camp. There was a large field with a Cotswold stone barn along the way, which often sported a sign warning passers-by of adders. People tended to think it was a (largely unsuccessful) ruse to keep teenagers out of the barn. Then that afternoon, as we walked through the long grass, we saw adders and grass snakes curled up in pretty much every available nook in the hedgerow, sunning themselves, many intertwined with other snakes.

Saturday, July 23, 2005

CAROL CRAWSHAW

Elaine, Gaia and I drove up beyond Lancaster yesterday to the memorial service for Carol Crawshaw, who died while we were on holiday. Born the same year as I, 1949, she was an American who decided to make her life in the UK. I first met her when we both did an M. Phil. at UCL, 1972-74, but in one of those coincidences that so often seems to happen, Elaine already knew her husband, Robert, because they worked together at Oxford University Press (OUP).

One upshot of our meeting Carol was that Elaine and I moved into a small room she had been occupying with Eleo Gordon (later a Director of Penguin); we came to impose on Eleo’s hospitality for two weeks and stayed – in a bedroom the size of a broom cupboard and a flat which wasn’t much bigger – for 18 months.

Denied the chance to work in the Department of the Environment because of her nationality, Carol became a leading light in English tourism. Ferociously intelligent, quite competitive (American sense of ‘quite’) and hugely effective, she was someone I liked tremendously and respected hugely. Robert did perhaps the most extraordinary tribute I have ever heard, although Blair’s tribute to Princess Diana also comes to mind. Carol will be sorely missed.

The traffic we encountered on the way up and the way back, to Little Rissington where we stayed the night with my parents, reminded us of why we so rarely use our car.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

LONDON FROM THE GHERKIN

Geoff Lye and I spend part of the day with Swiss Re atop the ‘Erotic Gherkin’, with mind-bending panoramas during lunch across London. Overcast, so hard to take photos that do justice to spectacle. While waiting for our meeting, I had bumped into Sara Fox again: she ran the construction project. It’s amazing how visible the building is: I caught sight of its top floating above the trees as I cycled across Hyde Park this morning. Taken to and fro in a silver Mercedes: just as well, as someone has been detonating – or mis-detonating devices – in the Tube and on at least one bus again.

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

DAY TO REMEMBER

Finished a 5,500 word chapter for a Canadian book on Tube, a chapter I’m doing with Jodie (Thorpe) and Seb (Beloe). (Strangely, she also has contracts today for authors’ signature on two other chapters we have written for other books.) With the Piccadilly Line still out, am using the District Line when I can’t cycle. While the trip takes much longer, one gets to walk – from Temple – through bits of London which one doesn’t normally see. Wonderful.

Start with a session with the team on the latest issue of SustainAbility’s bi-monthly newsletter, Radar, following which I write a letter to the British Airways complaints department. Then off to Canary Wharf and ECGD, for the first meeting in my new role as Chairman of the ECGD Advisory Council. Main subject: corruption.

Then home, where I find a growing number of replies from our Council, Faculty and clients to an e-mail survey I sent out this morning, in preparation for SustainAbility’s away days next week. The two questions I asked were: What are the biggest risks for SustainAbility in the period through to 2010? And the biggest opportunities?

There was also an invitation to the 2006 World Economic Forum event in Davos. But the highlight of the evening came when I spotted that the third and final programme in the To the Ends of the Earth trilogy was showing on BBC2. Hadn’t seen the previous two, because we were in Switzerland. Benedict Cumberbatch, who played the lead role, is someone we know through a friend of the girls. I was totally blown away by his performance – and by the quality of the programme. A rising star.

Sunday, July 17, 2005

FOR BA, READ BALLSUP AIRLINES

Finally home, despite the best efforts of British Airways. How sad to see a great airline unravelling, as we now unquestionably are with BA. After decades of favouring BA, my experience of the last 12 months suggests an accelerating, spectacular spiral of decline in levels of service and quality in the UK’s national carrier. Nor is it just me: we heard the same message today from people from countries as far apart as Canada, the USA, Thailand and India.

Among recent symptoms, BA lost my bags on a flight to Melbourne, Australia. Nor was I traveling zoo class, as one Australian friend puts it: these days BA is just as ready to abuse you in Business Class. Yes Cathay Pacific mislaid the same bags a week or so later in Hong Kong, but they had a real excuse: they had to connect flights from Tokyo and to Beijing in the midst of a tropical rainstorm that had knocked Hong Kong’s airport for six.

Then, a week or so ago, BA added insult to injury by losing both our bags on the flight from Heathrow to Zurich. Now, adding insult to insult, they cancelled our flight from Zurich to Heathrow, and we were told we couldn’t be home for a further 24 hours, and would have to go via Paris.

And – at the risk of sounding like a Grumpy Old Man – as if that wasn’t enough to complain about, the customer service by BA at Zurich was scandalous. They didn’t announce they had problems with BA 717: instead, you had to pick it up from the screens. More or less at the head of the queue, we hoped to get a place on the other BA flight, 715, which (it hardly merits mentioning) was delayed by three hours, but like pretty much everyone else found this wasn’t possible.

No-one from BA turned up at any point to explain to the 50 or so people at the Transfers desk, who stood in line for many hours as they slowly processed a passenger every 30-40 minutes. Again there were no announcements or explanations. BA were very lucky not to have had a riot on their hands – and I wish their customer service people could have heard the ire among would-be passengers, some of whom would have been satisfied with just basic civility.

On current evidence, BA is developing something of a death wish. It seems hard to imagine, but I can now begin to see BA following Swiss Air into the vortex which ends in bankruptcy and forced rebranding. Any airline that takes the Union Jack as its emblem really ought to try harder. BA is in danger of becoming a national disservice.

Friday, July 15, 2005

IN PASSING

Two images shot in passing, as we walked today, the first truly sunny day of the holiday.

A Six-spot Burnet, says Sir Geoffrey Chandler

Thursday, July 14, 2005

AUSTRALASIA 2006

Elaine and I had a great breakfast session this morning in Vals with Murray and Dobrina Edmonds, who for many years now have helped us organise our missions to Australia and New Zealand – and, increasingly, Asia proper. We are already discussing the 2006 round, which will likely coincide with the international launch of SustainAbility’s latest Global Reporters benchmarking project.

Dobrina, me, Murray

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

ON FUTURE GENERATIONS

If sustainable development is about anything, it is about protecting the opportunities available to future generations. So the following sequence from James Meeks’ extraordinary book The People’s Act of Love struck a chord yesterday:

‘Who are you really?’ said Alyosha.

‘Destruction.’

‘Destruction of what?’

‘Of everyone that stands in the way of the happiness of the people who will be born after I’m dead.’

And this from a character who merits a place in The Silence of the Lambs. Then we walked up into the mountains today and simply looking at flowers like the pair shown below, from the Sempervivum (everliving) family, put it all in perspective. And the milk churns? Well they reminded me of the eternal cycles of life and death growing up on farms in Northern IIreland in the 1950s.

Monday, July 11, 2005

CHEZ ST JOHANNES BAPTISTA

A time of stone and water. The new thermal baths at the Hotel Therme, Vals, which we are using at least once a day, are constructed in the most beautiful stone. Perhaps not incidentally, across the valley there are several quarries where they periodically blast stone from the mountains. On our first day, as we walked along the valley’s opposite flank, there was a big rolling bang that could have been thunder or a Swiss airforce jet breaking the sound barrier, but then a plume of dusty smoke rose from the flank of a nearby hill.

This morning Elaine and I walked up the mountain behind the hotel to a small chapel dedicated to St Johannes Baptista. Last time we came across his trail was in Damascus, where his reputed head is reputed to lie in a small chapel inside the unbelievably beautiful Ummayad Mosque. The little chapel here, though, is every bit as dramatic, with spectacular views across the valley to a tumbling waterfall – albeit in peripheral vision you can’t help spotting the large factory in which the local water is bottled under the ‘Valser’ label.

Elaine and chapel

Therme 1

Therme 2

Therme 3

Chapel and waterfall

TERROR IN A TUBE

Some thoughts stimulated by the 7 July London Transport attacks follow. They will be edited when I get back to London.

Now terror comes in a Tube. And terrible though the events of 7 July were, and not for a moment wanting to discount the long-term effects on the physical and mental health of survivors and of the families and friends of the victims, it has to be said: whatever the ultimate death toll, London got off relatively lightly this time. There will be other attempts on mass transit systems like London’s Underground. Some will succeed, on a much greater scale.

So-called ‘asymmetry’ in the distribution of political and military power more or less guarantees further growth in terrorism-related activities. In parallel, the war in Iraq, right or wrong, is proving to be a highly fertile breeding ground for future generations of terrorists – or freedom fighters, if you prefer. As a child exposed to the internecine hatreds and tensions of places like Northern Ireland, Cyprus and Israel, I was forced to recognise early that the sort of hatreds currently being stirred have been around for generations – and will continue to cascade through the generations.

Meanwhile, modern terrorism increasingly finds itself in a ‘target-rich’ environment. Consider these simple facts: Demographic trends are driving huge numbers of people into the world’s burgeoning mega-cities. There they are best served by mass transit systems. At the same time, the weapons of terror are getting ever-more powerful and portable. Some people are perfectly happy dying alongside their victims. And even where they are not, there are plans to install cell phone systems in subways, systems of the sort that helped trigger the Madrid bombs.

There are many implications of all of this, not least because – in contrast to London’s Blitz and V-weapon ordeals of the 1940s – it is much less clear these days where the bombs are coming from. Who now do we blame? Who do we begin to mistrust? And who do we expect to provide solutions? I expect increasingly high-energy links between already volatile areas like security, identity and human and civil rights.

Are there links to sustainable development? Yes, indeed too many to list. But here are a few. Democracy, in its various forms, depends on at least a degree of trust among the peoples living alongside one another – and our definitions of ‘alongside’ are being continuously stretched by entities like the EU, by overseas travel and by the Internet. Capitalism, in its various forms, depends on ‘low friction’ access, mobility and transport systems, implying a minimum of traditional security intrusions. And our capacity to think long term, always in precariously short supply, is little helped by concerns that we may not survive the journey to work.

Several of the e-mails I received in the aftermath of the bombings expressed total surprise about what has just happened. That fact itself should surprise us. Let’s be clear: this was inevitable. The twenty-first century will see more such attacks. Their sophistication and scale will grow. So will the casualty lists. ‘Big Brother’ solutions will be proposed and, I fear, citizens will often accept constraints on their civil liberties that would once have seemed unimaginable.

Few skills are as critical in ensuring a sustainable future as the art of foresight. We cannot afford to be taken totally by surprise in terms of mass transit security, but many people will be. Even less can we risk being surprised by the enormously greater scale of the environmental, social, economic and political shockwaves that will follow the sorts of climate change now thought inevitable in the coming decades. But, again, many of us will be.

No doubt the Bush administration’s skeptics will express great ‘surprise’ when climate change really gets its claws in. So let’s spell it out. The evidence suggests that we are our immediate descendants will live in an increasingly unstable natural environment. Unstable natural environments mean unstable economies. Unstable economies mean unstable societies. Unstable societies create perfect breeding grounds for future rounds of insurgency and counter-insurgency. And – this is where the cycle becomes particularly vicious – such conditions make it increasingly unlikely that effective strategies will be developed for ensuring stable environments.

We owe it to the victims of New York, Madrid, Baghdad, London and a growing list of cities, towns and villages to ensure that we consciously and effectively work to break this vicious cycle – rather than using their deaths as an excuse to accelerate it.

Sunday, July 10, 2005

FROGS

We walk slowly, thoughtfully this afternoon in the drizzle and rain, along the river bank. The mountains wear swirling boas of cloud, the peaks winking in and out of view. We pass an algally challenged pond around which there are signs suggesting the presence of salamanders and the like. The thing looks rather like an aquatic version of the abandoned mini-golf course a little further along the same bank, but the grass around the pond and nearby marshy ground is alive with froglets. Restorative.

Saturday, July 09, 2005

HAY SOUP

Zerfreilahorn 1
Zerfreilahorn 2

Dam

Reservoir turns corner

Wildflowers

Apparently carvivorous caterpillar pretending to be a curled-up leaf

The death toll in London continues to mount: 49 last time I looked. And it’s getting closer: one e-mail today mentioned someone in an organisation we know who was in the King’s Cross area and has now been missing for three days. But, though it’s terrible to say, it could have been infinitely worse. The investigators are now saying that the bombs may have been the work of local terrorists, because they weren’t particularly sophisticated. At some point, someone is going to have a sophisticated go.

With e-mails continuing to come in from places like Wales, California, Nepal, China and Japan, from people wondering how we are, we feel an umbilical connection to the news events, but are also trying to unhook to some degree.

So a day of swimming and walking around the man-made lake above Vals. Wonderful flowers and wildlife, including a vole which briefly communed with Elaine. Am also reading – and hugely enjoying – a new book by James Meek, The People’s Act of Love. Published by Canongate, where Gaia’s great friend Francis Bickmore works. She was completely taken over by it. Francis, who is credited in The People’s Act, was the man who found the original submission for The Life of Pi in Canongate’s ‘slush pile’.

This evening, Elaine was so tired that she hovered between consciousness and sleep throughout dinner, despite the fact that we were served such things as Vallser Hay Soup and Olive Oil Ice Cream. The hay, which is being gathered into the small barns here between the rainstorms, smells heavenly. Wouldn’t easily have thought of making it into soup, but it worked wonderfully well.

Friday, July 08, 2005

SWIMMING IN THE RAIN

Elaine walking down to river

Front elevation

Not quite Gene Kelly, but last night – at the end of a day in which mobile phone calls and e-mails poured in literally from around the world asking how we (family and SustainAbility team) were – Elaine and I went swimming in the thermal pools here in Vals. Swimming in the rain. There are many pools to choose from – indoor and outdoor pools, Fire Pool, Ice Pool, Flower Pool, Flower Pool and so on. This was around 23.00, in the outdoor pool, with the raindrops kicking up reverse images of themselves in the luminous water. The pool was illuminated from underneath, which made the swirls kicked up by one’s feet look like boiling liquid crystal.

The waitress earlier this evening, from East Germany, near Dresden, asked whether we were from London? Told that we were, she expressed her sympathy. After what the RAF and USAF did to Dresden during the latter stages of WWII, this struck me as particularly big-hearted. Perhaps coincidentally, just down the slope from the hotel and on the way to the river, we pass a Trabant on our walks, a squat reminder of the very different world that intervened between 1945 and 1989.

 

Thursday, July 07, 2005

7/7

The first we knew of the London bombings – Elaine and I have just arrived in Vals, Switzerland – was when Gaia called to say she and Hania were OK. Extraordinarily touching how many e-mails I have had today from different parts of the world to check whether we and the team were still among the living. Answer, on all counts so far as I can determine, is yes.

Even though as I write the death count stands at 33, I can only say it’s a relief that it isn’t way higher. I have been expecting an attack on the Tube for years, indeed have often warned of the danger. But what to do? Even now we know of the risk, what are those responsible for running the Underground to do? In the end, we are going to have trade off freedom of movement against the risks of terrorist attacks. But it does make me think that (post Madrid) Elaine’s constant concerns about ever allowing cell phones to be used on the Tube are well placed.

Interesting to ponder the 21st century prospect. As more and more people live in mega-cities, which are best served by public transport, particularly mass transit systems like the Tube, the risks of terrorist mass murders grows almost exponentially. Can’t help but think that the Tokyo sarin attacks, the Madrid bombings and now 7/7 are just the stuttering beginnings of a long-running saga.

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

GAYLORD NELSON

Wildlife, of sorts, abounds even in London: last night, for example, I was woken by the screaming of foxes and this morning I awoke to the shrieks of the parakeets that are taking over the skies here. Even the vile lamprey has taken up lodgings a few blocks from here in the Thames, which is a sign of a clean river, apparently.

Someone who did a great deal to drive forward the conservation and environmental agenda, Gaylord Nelson, is obituarised in today’s Times. He was 89. I first heard of him many years ago via Denis Hayes, who I saw again a few weeks back in Seattle. They had worked together on the first Earth Day in 1970. “The reason Earth Day worked,” Nelson is quoted as saying, “is that it organised itself.”

Well, up to a point. The organisation may have been catalytic rather than command-and-control, but it worked wonders. I still recall the extraordinary enthusiasm of the young team in Palo Alto who helped Denis organise the 1990 Earth Day, which went truly international for the first time – and for which I served on the international board. Sad, though, that Nelson died in the wake of yet another series of Republican roll-back of so many of the environmental advances he and his colleagues had achieved.

Monday, July 04, 2005

FREEPLAY RINGS NASDAQ’S BELL

Among other things, am continuing to work on the book on social entrepreneurs with Pamela Hartigan of the Schwab Foundation (www.schwabfound.org). Interesting to see that on 28 June, in New York, Kristine Pearson, executive director of the Freeplay Foundation (www.freeplayfoundation.org) and a Schwab Foundation social entrepreneur, participated in the ringing of the opening bell at the NASDAQ Stock Exchange in Times Square, along with a group of ten Tech Museum Award laureates. Meredith Taylor, president of the Tech Museum, singled out the Freeplay Foundation’s work in Africa with orphans to illustrate the importance of technology benefiting humanity. The picture is of Kristine on the giant NASDAQ plasma sign. The Foundation is linked to Freeplay, run by Rory Stear, another Schwab Foundation social entrepreneur.

Sunday, July 03, 2005

8 MEN IN A ROOM

Spent several hours writing articles for Nikkei Ecology and Grist, but for most of the day I watched the London Live 8 concert agog. To my mind, the Sixties bands pretty much blew every one else off the stage: The Who, the reformed Pink Floyd, McCartney and U2. And Sting, with his “We’ll Be Watching You,” with the G8 leaders in the background. But maybe that’s just age. I was also impressed by Madonna, Joss Stone, Annie Lennox and – though I don’t like their music – Velvet Revolver. Now we shall see what effect all of this has on the “eight men in a room” next week. But hats off to Geldof: what an extraordinary achievement.

Saturday, July 02, 2005

CYCLING AROUND LIVE 8

Cycling home last night, through fitful drizzle, I joined a number of cyclists cycling around the edges of the Live 8 concert area of Hyde Park. Would have been up in Edinburgh this weekend for SustainAbility’s G8 event, but we had a board meeting today. Sophia (Tickell), one of our non-executive directors, was wearing the white band. If any readers haven’t yet signed up for the Live 8 campaign, it’s easy to do at http://www.live8live.com/whatsitabout/index.shtml.

When I got home, Gaia and Hania had cooked a dinner in celebration of my recent birthday, and among their presents were two CDs by Madeleine Peyroux. Careless Love, in particular, is extraordinary.

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

NORMAL SERVICE …

Apologies. The host company for this website has managed to lose 40-50 of the photographs over the past week or so. We are doing our best to get back to the status quo ante – and to ensure, as far as possible, that this sort of meltdown doesn’t happen again. These days I use the website a fair amount to track down dates and contacts, so it has been a bit like – though I really shouldn’t say this – early onset Alzheimer’s.

DRENCHED

Cycle to and from the office today for the first time in ages, because of air travel and other constraints. Amazing sense of recharge. My eyes, though, come up in some form of allergic reaction to pollen or somesuch. Day of stakeholder interviews with Unilever, plus work on blended value paper for California Management Review. Then home, with the heavens opening as I cross Hammersmith Bridge. Even though I periodically take shelter under trees, I arrive home soaked. But, again, with lighting flashing the sky, it’s all quite invigorating.

Saturday, June 25, 2005

VERTICAL SPEED INDICATOR

Age-eaten vertical speed indicator atop pristine book cover

Jude the Obscure: dangerous rose

First, across to lunch with David Grayson in Kennington. Typically, I forget the address and instructions on how to get there, and am only saved by the fact that David comes out to greet another guest and spots us passing. Then Elaine and I drive down to the Cotswolds to stay with my parents at Hill House.

During the stay my father, Tim, gives me the vertical speed indicator recovered by archaeologists from the Hurricane in which he was shot down in 1940. It’s amazing how Meccano-like the workings are behind the dial. The tin or aluminium face is eaten away by either water or by the fire that engulfed the machine 65 years ago. Some sense of where the instrument came from can be got from the following image (http://www.historicaircraftcollection.ltd.uk/images/hurricane_02.jpg), where it is found on the top right of the four dials around the aircraft’s control column.

While walking around the Hill House garden, I am taken – once again – by the scent of one rose, Jude the Obscure. One of the flowers later turns up on the kitchen table. The rose also turns out to be the one that savaged Tim a while back, when he fell into it. His arms still show the bloody scratches. They’re all out to get him. If it isn’t the Luftwaffe, it’s flowers.

Thursday, June 23, 2005

TIM O’RIORDAN

Spend my fifty-sixth birthday in Norwich, at the University of East Anglia, at a conference on governance and sustainability. The event, at ZICER (Zuckerman Institute of Connective Environment Research, www.uea.ac.uk/zicer/) is in honour of the impending retirement of a long-time colleague and friend (and a member of SustainAbility’s Faculty), Professor Tim O’Riordan (http://www.uea.ac.uk/env/cserge/people/tim_o).

Stunning evening and dinner at the Cathedral, or at least in the newly built refectory alongside. One of the most successful examples I have seen of the integration of deeply historic architecture and sympathetic modern building. Tim plays double bass in a small orchestra playing Mozart and Elgar. Spend much of the evening talking with Jonathon Porritt and Angela Wilkinson (of Shell) about prospects for next 15-20 years, arguing that we are likely to see at least one discontinuity on the scale of 1929.

Tim on double bass

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

SLOWLY LEADING THE WORLD?

Bevy of meetings, including an unexpectedly fascinating one with Stephen Jordan of the American Chamber of Commerce (http://www.uschamber.com/ccc) Corporate Citizenship Center and another with Unilever as part of a stakeholder process SustainAbility is doing for them. In between times, I drafted an article on the energy prospect for Chevron, which Jeff Erikson in our DC office had asked me to do last night.

Then on to the Sustainable Development Commission’s ‘Leading the World?’ pre-G8 summit event. Jonathan Dimleby chaired, Jonathon Porritt (who chairs the SDC) concluded, and the weather steamed. Somewhat frustrating process, but the evening ended with a slow food dinner which drove home many of the sustainability points the evening’s speakers had been trying to make at a more abstract level. This part of the event was organised by Slow Food UK (http://www.slowfoodfoundation.com): wonderful people presenting wonderful food.

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

WSBF CSR FORUM

Started the day in Westminster, speaking at a conference organised by the Westminster Sustainable Business Forum (www.wsbf.org.uk). Founded in October 2004 by Networking for Industry (NFI), the Forum is focusing on such areas as business ethics, climate change, corporate social responsibility, green procurement and public/private partnerships. Good turn-out, interesting people but the first session ran way over, so my presentation time was cut in half. With Richard (Lord) Holme in the chair, I did it on the fly and raced on for a lunch with Shell people – which was enormously interesting in terms of wider trends in our field.

Monday, June 20, 2005

NEW ECGD ROLE

After meeting with Innocent Drinks, I head across to Canary Wharf for meeting of the advisory council of Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD). This is Liz Airey’s last meeting as Chair of the advisory council – and my appointment as her successor in the role is press-released today (http://www.ecgd.gov.uk/news_home.htm?id=6543).

INNOCENT RUMINATIONS


My udder van is …

After (separate) meetings in the office on Shell and Microsoft, and with the sky rocked with thunder, I streak westwards to Hammersmith for a meeting with Jon Wright of Innocent Drinks (http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk). Having already been seduced by their smoothies and their vehicles (http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/us/us.html), I was keen to see whether they would fit into our blended value piece for California Management Review. Mercifully, particularly after a fast-paced walk to meet co-founder Jon Wright at ‘Fruit Towers’, all of this through conditions worthy of Kuala Lumpur, I find that they do.

Saturday, June 18, 2005

PARISIAN REFLECTIONS

Paris, by Eurostar yesterday morning. Last night we had dinner with David Vogel, who edits the California Management Review, and his wife Virginia. Am writing him a paper on different forms of value, with Jed Emerson and Seb Beloe. Today my brain is playing with colours, so a walk around Paris today with Elaine turned into a sequence of reflections on the spectrum, colours and reflections. We walked around the Rive Gauche, including the Musee d’Orsay, then up to Montmartre by Metro to see a strange but interesting Dali exhibition, then back to Rive Gauche. Glorious weather.

Dripping paint

Crabs

Elaine and womannequin

Two heads

Woman looking out towards Montmartre

Shadow puppets

Three mannequins

Dancer

Gilded chairs

Wednesday, June 15, 2005
BSR UP BT TOWER
Interesting evening session with Business for Social Responsibility (BSR – http://www.bsr.org), co-hosted by BT, in the BT Tower complex. Before the roundtable started, we all trooped up to the top of the tower to look out over London, a nice parallel for what corporate boards increasingly need to do – get the big picture, the 360-degree view. One striking thing about the view from the top of this eyrie: how small the distant City looked, for all its financial power.

The theme of the session was the need for convergence between the corporate governance and corporate (social) responsibility agendas. One interesting sign of the times: Dr Chris Tuppen, who has handled the environmental, social and sustainability agendas for BT since at least the early 1990s, has now moved into the Company Secretary’s office.

View from BT Tower east towards the City

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

BLOWING IN THE WIND: HITLER

Finished reading Until the Final Hour, Traudl Junge’s account of her time as Hitler’s secretary. Used as basis of the film Downfall. Astounding. So much is in the detail, like the mention of the wife of Baldur von Schirach (her name isn’t given) who asked Hitler at tea-time about the rumours of the tribulations of the Jews deported from Amsterdam. Painful silence. Hitler gets to his feet and withdraws. “Apparently she had exceeded her rights as a guest and failed to carry out her duty of entertaining Hitler,” says Traudl. Then, towards the end of the story, the suicides in the bunker. “The most powerful man in th Reich a few days ago, and now a little heap of ashes blowing in the wind.”

Monday, June 13, 2005

MOLLY & MARCH

Wonderful evening at Cafe Fish, near Piccadilly Circus, with Elaine, Molly March (who I first met in Cyprus in the late 1950s: see Cyprus link on homepage, http://johnelkington.com/pubs-unpublished-cyprus.htm), her daughter March, March’s friend Mark, and March’s father, Nick Hutchinson.

Before heading across there, I dropped into Virgin records to get Ry Cooder’s latest album, Chavez Ravine. A “post World War II era American narrative of ‘cool cats, radios, UFO sightings, J. Edgar Hoover, red scares, and baseball’, the CD is a tribute to the erstwhile Los Angeles Latino enclave known as Chavez Ravine, bulldozed by developers in the 1950s in the process of building the Dodgers Stadium. Also bought a best-of compilation of Ringo’s All Starr Band (had been struck by his rendition of ‘Photograph’ during the ‘Concert for George’ celebration of the life and work of George Harrison) and the first CD from The Magic Numbers, which was playing as I was paying.

Amazing the impact music has: Molly and I talked about the Beach Boys, who we both woke up to in the early 1960s, and about skateboarding. She used an ironing board atop some old roller skates. When I used to skateboard at Bryanston, our boards’ wheels used to seize solid every time they hit a piece of grit, resulting in several chips out of my teeth. Odd coincidence: Nick went to Bryanston, too. Molly had recently met four ex-Bryanstonians. I asked her what she saw as the common characteristics. Confident, questioning, humorous, she began, and I stopped her before the list went negative!

The trigger for the Beach Boys discussion was that I had watched The Beach Boys: An American Family yesterday on Channel 5, directed by Jeff Bleckner and first released in 2000. Highly engaging – and surprisingly accurate – profile.

Molly March, me, Cafe Fish

Molly, me, March, Nick

Saturday, June 11, 2005

GAIA GOES WEST

Gaia and Hania here overnight, ahead of driving to Somerset for a party. Snap Gaia in her feathers in front of a painting that Elaine and I bought many, many years ago, which reminded me of the heights of the Aztec and Inca eras. So something of a clash of eras, but I thought the reds went together nicely.

Friday, June 10, 2005

GEORGE BUSH: AMERICAN CYCLOPS

What follows is a piece that popped into my head – more or less fully formed – at 03.00 in the morning after I flew back from Seattle. Intemperate, maybe. And some of my colleagues say that the real issue is how the sustainability movement can work with right-wingers. Well, maybe. But I feel increasingly angry at the extraordinary damage that George Bush and his colleagues are doing to the reputation of America, around the world. And I am also dumbstruck by the idiocy of much current American foreign policy. Europe, to put it mildly, is not without its idiocies, but – for better or worse – the US current has the greater global responsibilities, not least because it has taken them upon itself. Let the piece stand as a matter of record:

GEORGE BUSH II: AMERICAN CYCLOPS

The future of the United States is increasingly threatened by the monocular vision of its President.

In the unlikely event that the head of President George W. Bush ever appears among the giant presidential sculptures of Mount Rushmore, it is increasingly – worryingly – obvious that he would best be rendered as an American Cyclops. It is also clear that his aggressively monocular vision, powerfully inflamed by the 9/11 attacks, endangers the future both of his own country and, to a degree, much of the rest of the world.

On the threshold of a new century, and very much like the original Cyclops described by Euripides around 408 B.C.E., George W. Bush stands in the mouth of the world he knows, still enraged, blinded and desperate to capture the intruder who thrust the “blinding brand” into his face. Wait a moment, you may say: it is Osama bin Laden who (if he still lives) who is hiding out in caves, not the President of the world’s current hyper power. True, but caves come in many forms, some self-imposed.

Maybe it was inevitable that the Clinton administration’s sticky-fingered interest in exploring every last aspect of any area of policy would produce an opposite and at least equal reaction. Whatever, the troglodytic reflexes of the current administration were again exposed with the New York Times leak of papers showing how Philip Cooney – chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality – repeatedly intervened to water down and subvert the conclusions of scientific reports on the likely impacts of climate change (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/politics/08climate.html).

Caveman politics

We can argue about the scale of the problem, but the underlying pattern is clear. Whether it involves deciding war and then force-fitting the facts to provide a strategic case or airbrushing the science where it is likely to offend the delicate sensibilities of the President and his funders, this is a caveman administration that finds anything approaching binocular vision unsettling.

You need look no further than its own staffing policy. It is surely no accident that Cooney – who seems happy to wade into the scientific debate without having himself any form of science background – is a former oil industry lobbyist. Much of his job seems to have involved inserting the words “significant and fundamental” every time he saw the words “uncertainties” in reports and policy papers on climate change.

Destructively, the Bush administration seems to be boxed in both by its own ideology and by the narrow self-interest it has consciously set out to promote among ordinary Americans. As a result, growing numbers of American citizens and voters are afflicted by an increasingly pernicious form of tunnel vision. A question worth asking: Are we seeing the early stages of America once again retreating into its shell? One litmus test of this trend will be what happens with Ford and GM. Toyota chairman Hiroshi Okuda has been fretting in public that the collapse of the Big Two Detroit auto-makers into their current junk bond status could trigger U.S. moves against foreign auto-makers. A couple of months back he even suggested that Japanese auto-makers should try to help Ford and GM by raising the price of cars sold in the U.S.!

Naturally there are also some hopeful signs. Whether you walk around the streets of San Francisco or around Microsoft’s car-parks in Redmond, on the leafy outskirts of Seattle, you will see surprising numbers of Toyota’s Prius hybrid cars. People are buying them because they are wonderfully fuel efficient a time when gas prices are soaring, but also – they say – because they look ‘cool’.

At last Japanese auto designers have grasped something that Apple’s Steve Jobs has long known: design sells – and it can sell sustainable products, not just unsustainable ones. But for the moment it is clear that most Americans remain cocooned in their glistening SUVs, their ears lulled with their iPod comforters, all blissfully unaware of just how different the twenty-first century will be to the twentieth, dubbed by Harold Evans and others as ‘The American Century’. Like all incumbents, their very success has blinded them to how fast the world can change.

The second Republican Cyclops?

Having arrived in the U.S. after a 5-country tour that took in South Korea, Japan and China, I had momentarily returned to London en route thinking that Tom Friedman’s recent book The World Is Flat may even understate the scale of the longer term threat – economic, political and perhaps most fundamentally cultural – to U.S. hegemony in each and all of these areas. And while the politics of the cities of the U.S. and Canadian west coasts tend to much more progressive than in these countries’ heartlands, the mood I found in the U.S. worried me profoundly.

No-one disputes that there are Cyclopean – or should it be Cycloptic? – tendencies in Europe or in countries like China. But at the moment what happens in the U.S. is likely to be crucial in shaping the policy agenda for the next decade or so. When the Cyclops metaphor first flashed into my mind on the flight back to Heathrow from Seattle it seemed to capture the almost mythic scale of the changes now under way. But before deciding to use it, the reptilian part of my brain wondered whether someone else had already laid claim to the phrase ‘American Cyclops’? Googling, I discovered that, once again, there is not much new under the sun.

That said, the main reference dated back to1868, when James Fairfax McLaughlin used it to headline a satirical attack on Ben Butler, the ‘Black Republican’ Union Civil War general – and a notorious carpet bagger. Butler’s high-handed rule in New Orleans and elsewhere in the South in 1862 earned him the sobriquet ‘Beast’ and soon had him removed from office. Today, with reports of systematic torture in Iraq and elsewhere, alongside the twenty-first century forms of carpet-bagging practiced by the likes of Halliburton (contrast http://www.halliburtonwatch.org or http://www.corpwatch.org with http://www.halliburton.com), George Bush II seems well down the same slippery slope.

So how, in God’s name, did Bush II get back into office with a significantly improved majority? Among the more convincing answers to the question is that proposed by University of California professor of linguistics George Lakoff. On a visit to San Francisco earlier in the year, I came across his work on the framing of social issues with the Rockridge Institute (http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org) – and after reading his book, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values, Frame the Debate, suggested it should be required reading for all my colleagues at SustainAbility. Or, at least, Lakoff’s four key points on the uses – and the many abuses by those driving the current Republic agenda – of framing in politics (http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/projects/strategic/simple_framing/view).

Perfect Storm, 2016

And just in case all of this seems comfortably remote, perhaps I can commend one other recent (and fairly mind-warping) article. In the July/August issue of The Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows posits a “perfect storm” in which the U.S. economy implodes. Among the factors that come together to collapse the economy and drive a complete outsider into the Presidency in 2016 were: the frailty of the relationship between the U.S. and China (which had essentially been bankrolling the U.S. deficit for years); the fourth – and worst – oil shock; a run on the dollar; a tsunami of bankruptcies; the evaporation of lifetime savings; and a domino effect cascading through every level of government funding.

For me, one of the most credible outcomes – though no doubt Hiroshi Okuda would prefer that this wasn’t noised abroad – was the take-over of Ford and GM by Toyota. As Fallows puts it, the 2012 takeover had a grim inevitability. “Over the previous decade,” he writes, “the two U.S. companies had lost money on every car they sold. Such profit as they made was on SUVs, trucks, and Hummer-style big rigs. In 2008, just before the oil shock, GM seemed to have struck gold with the Strykette- an adaptation of the Army’s Stryker vehicle, so famous from Iraq and Pakistan, whose marketing campaign attracted professional women. Then the SUV market simply disappeared. With gasoline at $6 a gallon, the prime interest rate at 15 percent, and the stock and housing markets in the toilet, no one wanted what American car makers could sell. The weak dollar, and their weak stock prices, made the companies a bargain for Toyota.”

Fallows foresees an end to 164 years of two-party rule in the US. The new President, an independent, is taking over from a military hero, the man who famously captured Osama bin Laden in the Saudi Arabian desert in 2011 – and who was elected to the presidency in 2012. The challenge, as it is laid out in a brief for the incoming President, is three-fold:

“Our country no longer controls its economic fundamentals.
“Compared with the America of the past, it has become stagnant, classbound, and brutally unfair.
“Compared with the rest of the world, it is on the way down. We think we are a great power – and our military is still ahead of China’s. Everyone else thinks that over the past twenty years we finally pushed our luck too far.”

The optimist in me tries to believe that the U.S. will once again be spurred to action by the urgency of the threats. But, like climate change, the very nature of many of the challenges that blend into that perfect storm less than a decade from now are that they build slowly and often imperceptibly. Without clear-eyed political leadership, the bleak scenario seems increasingly likely. And the implications for the rest of the world, increasingly hooked onto the U.S. economy, are equally dire.

Hold on, Arnie’s coming

Of course, there are bright spots against the gloom – and not simply those sun-hazed Priuses as you walk around Microsoft’s parking lots. For one thing, there’s ‘The Terminator’. On June 1st, for example, as part of the UN’s World Environment Day celebrations, Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vowed to tackle global warming in the state. He declared the debate on climate change “over”, announcing a climate change plan with targets to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to 2000 levels by 2010, 1990 levels by 2020, and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. If all goes to plan, the 2010 target equates to an 11% reduction on business-as-usual.

It’s supremely ironic that the man driving progressive politics in the sunshine state is a Republican. As the Climate Group notes, the messages emanating from the Governor’s office reinforce the progressive policy measures both in place and in development in California, covering sectors from power generation through to transport.

“For example,” the Climate Group reports, “California state lawmakers recently passed the Pavley Bill, which will reduce greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles put on the market from 2009. These regulations are expected to cut greenhouse gas emissions from new cars by 30% by 2016. And in 2002, the state implemented a Renewables Portfolio Standard stating that renewable energy must be the source of 20% of the electricity sold by 2017. In his speech, the Governor pledged to accelerate this commitment to 20% by 2010 and 30% by 2020.”

Significantly, a key message at the heart of Governor Schwarzenegger’s speech was that these measures, and the new targets, will not compromise economic growth, rather they will promote innovation and business opportunities in the state. As he stressed said, “together we can meet the needs of both our economy and the environment. Together we can continue California’s environmental heritage and legacy of leadership in innovation in cutting-edge technology.”

Nor is Governor Schwarzenegger alone in spotting the emerging opportunity space. The recent unveiling by General Electric Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt of the company’s new ‘Ecomagination’ strategy has won widespread praise. The company has pledged to spend $1.5 billion a year on such research by 2010, more than double the $700 million it spends currently.

Immelt also noted that GE aims to double the revenue goal over that period for products that provide better environmental performance, to $20 billion a year, and expects more than half of its product revenue to come from such products by 2015. At the same time, GE promises to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of its factory operations 1 percent by 2012. Without the initiative, those emissions were expected to increase 40 percent, GE said.

Gearing down

But even an optimist must admit that there is a very large fly in this ointment. Having devoted nearly thirty years of my life to opening up business to the market risks and opportunities created by sustainable development in general, and by environmental issues like climate change in particular, it is increasingly clear to me that governments will need to play a central role in shaping twenty-first century markets.

Indeed, this is a line we pursued in a recent report for the UN Global Compact, Gearing Up: From Corporate Responsibility to Good Governance and Scaleable Solutions (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/scalingup.asp). And it’s also a key reason why SustainAbility has focused on corporate lobbying in recent years, most recently with a review of the level of transparency public policy positions among the world’s biggest 100 companies – the subject of a report due out at the end of June.

Jeffrey Immelt has also waded into the debate, noting that he would like the U.S. Congress to pass an energy bill setting “clear milestones” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – so that companies would know clearly how to invest to achieve them. The bill should include market-based mechanisms to encourage businesses to cut pollution, such as caps with incentives or the ability to trade emissions credits, he said.

But the current signals from White House – or Cyclops’ Cave – are pretty clear, and leave little room for optimism. Someone I met while in Seattle is Denis Hayes, co-founder of the Earth Day movement in 1970 (http://www.earthday.org) and now President of the Bullitt Foundation (http://www.bullittfoundation.org). When I first met him, in 1981, he was still running the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI: now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, http://www.nrel.gov), which had just heard that newly elected President Ronald Reagan was going to defenestrate him and hack away at SERI’s budget. Having survived one axeman Republic president, he now worries that the Republicans seem set on creating financial crises that force the closure or castration of many key environmental programs.

Some caveman politicians will never get over the run-for-the-bunkers mentality shaped by the Cold War. But, as Hayes noted in a recent column in The Seattle Times, “the greatest threats facing the world today are not Soviet bombers but major environmental changes. The earlier we learn of such threats, the better our chances of mitigating their damage.” Among the examples he gives are climate change, the El Nino cycle, tsunamis and invasive species. In the Cold War, Americans accepted the need for “distant early warning,” investing huge amounts of money in the DEW Line to detect incoming nuclear bombers or missiles.

To those who argue that the private sector should take over many of the environmental early warning programs run by such agencies as NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Science Foundation, Hayes counters that “information produced by such research is, by its very nature, a ‘public good’. It benefits everyone, and it is most valuable when it is universally distributed. Hence, little, if any, distant early warning research will ever be conducted and disseminated by the private sector.”

Ironically, but again not accidentally, the American Cyclops has ordered major cuts in the budgets of basic environmental monitoring and research programs at NASA, NOAA and the NSF. It’s almost as if some giants prefer to run blind. It may be said that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king, but after my recent world tour I believe that the American Cyclops is handing the new century to others.

Thursday, June 09, 2005

MUSEUM OF FLIGHT

Took the opportunity on my way out to the airport to drop off for a couple of hours at Seattle’s Museum of Flight (www.museumofflight.org), which includes the (currently under refurbishment) Red Barn in which the Boeing Company started in 1916. Probably 20 years since I was last there and was as impressed as last time. It may not be politically correct, but I still find many of the aircraft of the 1930s and 1940s really beautiful – and the collection includes such favourites as a (in this case Goodyear) gull-wing Super Corsair, a twin-boom Lockheed P-38 Lightning, a North American P-51 Mustang and a Supermarine Spitfire Mark IX. But the most spectacular of all the planes in the museum has to be the Lockheed SR-71 ‘Blackbird’ (www.sr-71.org). This air-breathing monster set air speed records that remain unbroken after more than 25 years.

Foreground, the pedal-powered MacReady Gossamer Albatross II

Fokker D-VIII monoplane, introduced too late into WWI to make a difference

Nose-to-nose: Supermarine Spitfire and Messerschmitt Bf-109

Super Corsair, late WWII variant

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

A DAY IN SEATTLE

Yesterday, a reasonably energetic session on CSR trends with Microsoft (www.microsoft.com), today a series of sessions with Starbucks (www.starbucks.com), starting with their new CEO, Jim Donald – one of the most impressive CEOs I have yet met. After our meeting, Mark (Lee) and I were invited to observe one of the company’s open forums, in which Jim and Howard Schultz (now Chairman) opened themselves up for an hour to maybe a couple of hundred Starbucks ‘partners’. High touch, highly responsive, and a good deal of humour – usually a good signal. Then a very productive session with several Starbucks people in relation to the piece I am doing for California Management Review on blended value, with Jed Emerson and Seb Beloe.

Early in the afternoon Mark did a presentation for some of the Starbucks team on our benchmark analysis of their latest CSR report. They score pretty well, appearing in our 2004 Top 50 ratings, but much of the good stuff they are doing isn’t public knowledge. My impression of Starbucks improves considerably during the day, though it will be fascinating to see how the company copes in the coming years with the inevitable shock waves created by its plans to grow from around 9,000 stores today to a targeted 30,000 outlets – or even 50,000, as some hope.

Later in the day, after Mark has flown back to San Francisco, I have dinner with Denis Hayes, President of the Bullitt Foundation (www.bullitt.org) and co-founder in 1970 of Earth Day (www.earthday.net). I first met Denis in 1981, when he was Director of the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI), just as President Reagan started to undermine many of the institutions that had been spawned by the Earth Day movement. I was researching my book on renewables, Sun Traps (Pelican 1985). Had subsequently caught up with him in Palo Alto in the run-up to Earth Day 1990 and, later, in Seattle after he took on the Bullitt job. Wonderful chance to catch up with one of the godfathers of modern environmentalism.

Over the weekend, had been handed a bunch of press articles by my cousin Charlotte Turner, on top of which I found a piece written by Denis for the Seattle Times. In it he argued that in the same way that the US invested in the DEW Line, to provide “distant early warning” of nuclear attack during the Cold War, we should now be investing in early warning schemes to alert us to threats in such areas as climate change, invasive species and tsunamis. Conversely, the Bush Administration is currently running down funding for such key institutions as NASA (www.nasa.gov), NOAA (www.noaa.gov) and the National Science Foundation (www.nsf.gov).

Howard Schultz (centre left), Jim Donald (right)

Monday, June 06, 2005

FLIGHT SERGEANT BERRY RESURFACES

Something I had always hoped to be able to do was to thank the family of Flight Sergeant Fred Berry, who saved my father’s life during the Battle of Britain (http://johnelkington.com/archive/inf-people-father.htm), sadly being shot down himself and killed shortly afterwards, on 1 September 1940. I had also posted photos of Berry on my blog on 6 February 2004, but we had failed to track the family down. So I was thrilled today when Berry’s granddaughter got in touch by e-mail, having come across this website and my reference to how her family tree interconnected with mine all those years ago. Given that today marks the 61st anniversary of D-Day, it’s one more reminder – alongside the constant B17 fly-pasts outside my Edgewater window – of how much we owe to the ‘Greatest Generation’.

[NOTE POSTED ON 25-08-2014: Some years later, she, her mother and my father would meet. It turned out that Fred Berry’s wife never mentioned his name after he was killed, so his daughter and granddaughter had no idea of his exploits until they came across the accounts on this blog.]

Sunday, June 05, 2005

EXPERIENCE MUSIC PROJECT

Back from Vashon Island, and with rain threatening, I walk from the Edgewater Hotel to the Space Needle, in search of Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project (EMP: www.emplive.com). As I go, a B17 flies overhead (www.museumofflight.org/collections/craftdisplay.html?ID=23), a reminder of ‘Rosie the Riveter’ (www.rosietheriveter.org), D-Day (whose anniversary it is) and the huge contribution Boeing and Seattle made to the ultimate victory in WWII. Various of the people we have known in the Seattle area have been involved with Boeing, my cousin Hollister Sprague – who died in 1986 – as Mr Boeing’s lawyer, others as designers, engineers, photographers. (And as I type this up in the fading light, around 20.00, the B17 drones past again.)

As I twist and turn on my way to the Space Needle, I catch glimpses of Seattle’s port installations, with the giant gantry cranes towering like herds of metallic orange brontosauri. Musing that George Lukas was inspired by such cranes to produce his giant, lumbering white battle monsters in Star Wars, I shortly afterwards find myself standing behind Darth Vader, or at least a cutout version, inside the Science Fiction Museum.

Maybe it is my mood, but the EMP experience is flat, tacky and commercial. I was here in October 2000 for the ‘Digital Dividends’ conference (www.digitaldividend.org), shortly after the EMP opened in June of that year, and wasn’t hugely impressed then, either. The Beatlemania show, still advertised on the EMP website, has gone. Most of the displays strike me as second rate, a bit like an end-of-the-pier show, and the unbelievable electricity of performers like Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan – at least in the context of their times – is hard to detect. Ironically, I walk past a stall where Dylan, in later life, is explaining on video how dramatic the Sixties had been. You’d hardly guess it from the EMP version. You see clips of the civil rights marches, but the whole thing feels like History rather than an immersion in the era.

The Frank Gehry building in which the EMP and the Science Fiction Museum are housed is a real Curate’s Egg, good in parts, but somehow less than the sum of its parts. But every so often there is a bit of detailing that catches the eye, like penultimate last photo in this series. The last photo, at least for me, raises the question of how we could do the same list of things – jam, touch, learn, play – for sustainability that EMP aspires to (but, I think largely fails to do) for rock’n’roll.

B17 over Elliott Bay

Herds of metallic brontosauri

Darth Vader’s dark side

Bob Dylan and guitar geyser

Dylan, Joan Baez and Tide of Conformity

Civil rights marchers

Jimi Hendrix

Frank Gehry’s undulations and tree

This works for me

How do we do this for sustainability?

FOOLHARDY KILLDEER

Breakfast this morning with close neighbours of the Turners – and good friends of ours from years back. Blake shows me where a pair of killdeer (www.nhptv.org/natureworks/killdeer.htm) have nested among the stones and logs on the foreshore. So vulnerable are they that his mother, Carol, has bought a water cannon of sorts to ward off predators like crows. Killdeer are precocious, able to run around amazingly soon after they break out of the egg, but I’m not sure I rate this pair’s chances of successfully raising a brood at all high. Later, Blake drives me back to Seattle, via one of the ferries visible in the background of the crow picture.

Metal version of one of the predators

Carol and Blake, mother and son

It’s the idea that counts

Saturday, June 04, 2005

OTTER AT WORK

Have always loved Ring of Bright Water and the like, so am partial to otters – though I think I have only seen them in the wild – once – in Scotland. This afternoon, as Clark and I watched the water, what he described as a river otter pretended to be the Loch Ness Monster a little way out from the beach. This was quite a large animal, with a long tail that would follow him down into the depths like a conger eel. Later on, I walked the short distance down to the beach to take a photo of the house – and surprised the same animal right by the jetty. He strolled to the water and swam away, repeatedly looking back over his shoulder, probably signalling his displeasure at being disturbed in his toilet.

PUGET SOUND

Am staying with cousins – Charlotte and Clark Turner – in their beachside house on Vashon Island, on Puget Sound. We have a delightfully extended lunch with Chuck and Jeanne Branson, also cousins, who live across the water, their son David and his partner, Ruth. The Turner house has outlandishly wonderful views of the Sound and I can’t stop taking photographs, despite remembering the architect Moshe Safdie saying he threw his camera away because he ended up looking at everything through a rectangular frame.

SOY BEAN POWERED

Walking down the Fontleroy Ferry Dock, to catch the ferry to Vashon Island, I was truck by the large message across the bridge of the vessel – declaring that it to be soybean-powered. Inside, posters informed passengers that this was in aid of reducing greenhouse emissions. But soybeans aren’t an unadulterated Good Thing for environmentalists. Quite apart from the GM issue which has disrupted the soybean trade to the EU, at the WWF conference in Vancouver last week they showed satellite photographs of Amazonia – with peculiarly patterned bites being taken out of the rainforest by new soybean farms. Apparently much of the production goes to feed livestock, used to satisfy the growing appetite for meat in Asia.

THE BRITISH INVASION

The Edgewater Hotel

Even in its revamped state, The Edgewater Hotel – where I am staying in Seattle – has struck me as a little odd. It juts out into the sea, atop one of the old piers, but its decor is like something from Twin Peaks. That said, had breakfast there this morning with Mark and Valerie Lee (he co-directs SustainAbility’s US business) and Maria Eitel of the Nike Foundation (http://www.nike.com/nikebiz/nikefoundation/home.jhtml) – and Maria told me something that made me feel slightly differently about it all. Apparently The Beatles stayed here in the Sixties, during ‘The British Invasion’, and their fans took to the waters around the hotel in a flotilla of small boats – or even tried to swim in the chilly waters of Elliott Bay. Checked: it was 1964 – and the nearby Experience Music Project ran an exhibition last year to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of America’s descent into Beatlemania (http://www.edgewaterfabfouroh.com). Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end.

Maria and Mark

Friday, June 03, 2005

ROOM WITH A VIEW

My room on the Seattle waterfront looks out both onto an endless parade of ships and boats plying in and out of the harbour – and onto the take-off and landing lanes for Seattle airports. Looming in the foreground, a huge cruise liner. When Mark and I first see it this afternoon, I comment that it reminds me of the vast ships that I have seen docking and loading in Freemantle, Australia. They carry live sheep for slaughter in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries. The smell – indeed the insult to all the senses – was beyond words.

In the midst of it all, late this afternoon, a roiling in the waters and something animate surfaces briefly. With my normal glasses still somewhere in Beijing – and new ones being constructed somewhere a continent or two away – I can’t make out what this life-form is. But there’s reasurrance in the mystery.

Docked

RATS

Fly down to Seattle in time for Mark Lee and I to have lunch with Chip Giller, founder and President of Grist (http://www.grist.org/about/). Then across to the hotel to drop bags and out with Mark to have a beer downtown and discuss future plans. As we leave the hotel, we pass a protest by plumbers and pipelayers, featuring a display of rats, one of which (not shown here) is the size of a small T. rex.

When I walk back, it strikes me that the dock next to the hotel is where Elaine, the girls and I saw Jacques Cousteau’s weird vessel the Alcyone in the mid-1980s. If you’re interested to see what the strange creature looked like, go to: http://www.cousteau.org/en/cousteau_world/our_ships/alcyone.php

Rats 1

Rats 2

TBL IN BC AND OZ

My visit this week to British Columbia has persuaded me that there is still a great deal of life in the old triple bottom line concept – indeed, it seems that in many places it is only just beginning to ‘break’. And this week I was also notified by CSIRO of the launch of Australia’s first set of TBL accounts.

The island continent’s first triple bottom line account at a whole-economy level offers a full life cycle analysis of each of 135 economic sectors using ten macro-indicators. The financial indicators are profits, export propensity and import penetration. The social indicators are employment, income and government revenue (taxation). The environmental indicators are greenhouse emissions, energy use, water use and land disturbance. These macro-indicators are expressed as intensities per one dollar of final demand.

The report highlights the low export performance of the services sectors, relatively good outcomes for basic mining, the many challenges faced by domestic manufacturing in the face of globalisation, and the resource intensity of food and fibre industries. While one dollar might look much the same as another, where it is spent, can have vastly different outcomes for social and environmental issues.

The work is based on the integration of the financial input-output tables in the Australian national accounts with key social and environmental indicators. Both a summary and the full report in four volumes can be accessed at http://www.cse.csiro.au/research/balancingact/

Thursday, June 02, 2005

WHISTLER

As something of a reptile, I don’t like getting up early, so a 05.00 start to today wasn’t particularly welcome – except that there was already light in my eyrie-like, glass-walled 17th floor room. Picked up at 06.00 by Linda Coady (Vice-President for Sustainability, 2010 Winter Olympics) and Coro Strandberg, we drive north towards Whistler, where the Games will be held (http://www.tourismwhistler.com/about/2010_wintergames.asp).

Also with us: Jon O’Riordan, formerly Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management in the British Columbia Provincial Government. It’s the first time we have met, though he is the twin brother of someone I have known for decades, Professor Tim O’Riordan of the University of East Anglia, who is also a member of SustainAbility’s Faculty – like Linda and Coro.

When we get to Whistler, we have a wonderful session with the Mayor of the town, Hugh O’Reilly, and some of the key people from the 2010 Winter Olympics team. Interesting to live in London, which is bidding for the 2012 Olympics, and to have visited in quick succession both Beijing (which is hosting the 2008 games) and now Whistler. Most sports leave me cold, but am increasingly interested in the potential of major sports events to either create positive economic, social and environmental regeneration or, at worst, to leave a trail of white elephants in their wake.

After a snatched sandwich lunch, I do a public lecture. Then back into the van and off south for several commitments in Vancouver, notably a public lecture which I do at the Robson Square Media Center. Capacity audience, Linda chairs and a most enjoyable evening. Then film a sequence for a couple of people who had heard me on the CBC programme a couple of days back and are making a film on idleness and productivity. By the time I get back to the hotel, a life of idleness is beginning to seem quite appealing.

Vancouver dawn

Whistler

Homeward bound: Elizabeth Bowker at wheel

Blue blur

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

ANOTHER DAY IN VANCOUVER

Started off day with a media interview, then my keynote at the WWF conference on ‘Mobilizing Millions’, followed by energetic discussion session, then lunch with Jorgen Randers (one of the authors of The Limits to Growth), then an afternoon discussion panel, then a wine and cheese discusion with around 40 people at the amazing studio home of Joel and Dana Solomon. He is a sustainability-focused venture capitalist involved in e.g. the Tides Foundation (www.tidescanada.org), the Endswell Foundation (www.endswell.org) and Renewal Partners (www.renewalpartners.com).

Among many other interesting people I met today were Dr Claude Martin, the outgoing Director-General of WWF International; Chief Eleazar Anyaoku, President of WWF International and Chair of NEPAD; WWF-UK Chairman Christopher Ward, who it turns out was responsible for the section in the Daily Mirror in 1961 which triggered my first fund-raising venture, for the fledgling WWF launched that year; Monte Hummel, President Emeritus of WWF Canada; Mark Achbar, a producer of the film The Corporation; Tzeporah Berman, Program Director of Forest Ethics (www.forestethics.org); and Gregor Robertson of Happy Planet Foods (www.happyplanet.com), now in political office here.

Then – having somewhat regretfully handed back my complimentary tickets for the Barenaked Ladies concert this evening, I went off with Coro Strandberg to a dinner with a dozen or so people from business in the Vancouver area. Discussion whether a sustainability cluster could be developed in Vancouver or the wider British Columbia area. Dining room overlooked Vancouver’s famous steam clock. Inside the room a mouse was slowly dying, presumably poisoned. Encouraging …

Steam clock

Catatonic mouse at the feast