John Elkington

With final trips to Basel (for Novartis) and Paris (EcoVadis, including a dinner at Chez Fred, old haunt of author Georges Simenon, whose corner EcoVadis co-founder Fred Trinel sat in), an end-of-year session with David Grayson and his Cranfield U MBA and PhD students, a new Executive Director at Volans (Louise Kjellerup Roper, who also came to Basel, where we stayed in the intriguing Gaia Hotel, motto: ‘Come as a Guest – Leave as a Friend’), a team lunch at Nopi, a trip to see the family in Little Rissington on Tim’s 97th birthday), extraordinary news from Hania, and accelerated work on multiple fronts, including the next phase of our Carbon Productivity program, 2017 finally came to an end with a couple of weeks’ holiday ahead of 2018.

Confess I have slept for England in the days since. And listened to the rain falling and the foxes barking. And played with ideas for a new book, with the Triple Bottom Line resurgent in the world and our work. And read endless predictions for the New Year. And watched more of the stunning series The Crown on Netflix. And read through a mini-Alp of books, including Anthony McCarten’s brilliant Darkest Hour on Churchill’s May 1940 and one of several scientists-fi books in bought in Foyle’s after a glorious lunch at Imperial China with Gaia, Hania, Jake and Paul, Peter Watts’ Brightsight.

And mentally prepared myself for a 2018 that feels likely to be unusually significant, though I can’t yet exactly put my finger on the reasons why.

Latest GreenBiz blog published here. Quite pleased with it.

Flew to Tel Aviv on Wednesday – and was again helpfully and delightfully steered through the VIP channel. Next day up early for the trip to the UBQ Materials factory, which I first visited earlier in the year – as reported in a previous entry on this site and in a subsequent GreenBiz blog.

I knew President Trump would probably be making an inflammatory announcement this week, but had hoped that sanity would prevail – but  it almost never does with the delinquent denizen of today’s White House. A cool assessment of the implications can be found here in the New York Times.

All of that seemed quite a long way away, however, as we began the kick-off meeting of the UBQ International Advisory Board – even though several of our group were heading to Jerusalem on Saturday, the day after the slated “Day of Rage”.

In alphabetical order of first name, the other IAB members are: Connie Hedegaard (former European Commissioner for Climate Action), Ilan Cohn (senior partner at Reinhold Cohn, Israel’s largest intellectual property firm), Oded Shoseyov (professor in plant molecular biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a pioneer in nano-composite materials and a renowned winemaker), Roger Kornberg (professor of structural biology at Stanford University School of Medicine and winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006) and Scott Tobin (managing partner at Battery Ventures, an international venture capital fund).

The visit included a trip to the UBQ factory, based on a kibbutz in the Negev, where things have been coming along by leaps and bounds. Fascinating conversations every step of the journey, and again fascinated to see the former desert areas where multiple crops now flourish. Including potatoes which, because of the irrigated sandy soils, apparently emerge from the ground perfectly formed.

A useful insight into the UBQ approach is given by an interview we filmed with their CEO, Jack (Tato) Bigio, during our Reimagining Carbon Basecamp at the Royal Society of Arts in June.

After an intensive couple of days, I had much of Saturday off ahead off the flight back to London. Visible in the distance from the top floor of the Hilton Hotel, where I was staying, was the peninsula part of Jaffa. Having been there briefly on our last trip, ably guided by UBQ Chief Sustainability Officer Chris Sveen, I decided to walk there along the coast – around 5 kilometres either way.

To say the city has had a complicated history is to put it mildly. But I enormously enjoyed the opportunity to freewheel for a change – and spent an interesting half hour pottering around the old town before heading back to the hotel. Then out to the airport, passing through cordons of heavily armed plainclothes guards on the approaches.

During the trip, I read Andy Weir’s new novel, Artemis. Had enormously enjoyed both his earlier book, The Martian, and the subsequent film – and very much look forward to this one being filmed. The heroine, Jazz Beshara, is wonderfully rendered and, like astronaut Mark Watney in The Martian, funny.

With Artemis set some 70 years in the future, and this time on the Moon, it is tempting to imagine what sort of Middle East the 2,000 citizens of the first lunar city would be looking down upon. And also, a couple of generations post-Brexit, what sort of hinterland to my own city of London.

Great couple of days in Barcelona, speaking at the Ship2B Foundation‘s Impact Forum. Picked up from the hotel by Ship2B co-founder Xavi(er) Post and taken on a long perambulation around the city.

One of the places we passed through was Plaça de Sant Felip, with its extensively pockmarked walls. Was told that this was where executions were carried out in the Civil War, but the size of the impact holes had me thinking of the bomb damage we still see in London – so was interested to see this blog later. Interesting how stories can mutate.

Fascinating visit to the City Council to see Francesca Bria, Barcelona’s chief technology and digital innovation officer. We share interests in such people as Nikolai Kondratiev and Joseph Schumpeter, Chris Freeman and Carlota Perez, and Manuel Castells.

Really enjoyed the 2017 Impact Forum on Thursday, themes around ‘Change Is Happening’ and held in the Mazda Space, alongside the old central market building – which is where we had lunch. Sadly, I had to be whipped away to be taken across to the airport.

As we arrived at the airport, I suddenly realised that my assertion that I had only once been to Barcelona before, in 1968, en route to Ibiza, was wrong. I have spoken at least one of the local business schools, but many years back. Checking back through this blog, I found an entry for 18 February 2004, on a visit to speak at ESADE.

I’m beginning to wish for a biochip memory implant …

3D graphics image by Quince Creative, https://quincemedia.com.

One of the ideas for a new book I have been playing with has been around the parallels between the bids to end slavery and to create the National Health Service in Britain, on the one hand, and the increasingly urgent need to ward off runaway climate change on the other. Some headlines on that line of thought in this piece posted this week on LinkedIn.