Archive

Sunday, February 29, 2004

Grand Theft Parsons

Sense of achievement, with major progress on the speeches, after huge brain-ache earlier in the week. Day spent getting Gaia off to her new home in Wiltshire, with two vans (one medium-sized, one tiny) heading west in convoy. Real sense of a watershed, with Hania also starting her new job at a film and TV agency tomorrow. Weirdly, the agency represents Gollum (see 21 February entry).

Yesterday, Hania showed me an advance video of a new film on the life – or rather death – of country-rock star Gram Parsons, Grand Theft Parsons. Though he disliked the term country-rock, that genre was pretty much of his making. The only time I saw The Byrds live, in 1969 in Covent Garden’s Middle Earth club, Gram was playing – this was the time of the vastly underrated Sweetheart of the Rodeo album. Also loved his later work with The Flying Burrito Brothers and with Emmylou Harris. The new film is a delightful tribute not only to Parsons but to the people behind the scenes who have helped keep the whole rockn’roll show on the road. A somewhat elaborated storyline, but a lovely vignette at the end.

Saturday, February 28, 2004

Corporate Predators

The last few days have involved preparing speeches for Atlanta, Baltimore, Berlin and Dubai, on a range of issues, including corporate social responsibility, pollution prevention and sustainable coffee production. Have been struggling to simplify the messages, given the need not just to entertain people but to inspire action.

My other big project at the moment, working closely with Seb Beloe and Jodie Thorpe, is for the UN Global Compact. We are looking at what needs to be done to take business-led voluntary initiatives ‘to scale’. The project also looks at the future responsibilities and roles of governments in this respect. And one of the things I set in train a few days back was a poll of fellow members of the Commission on Globalisation, operated by the State of the World Forum (www.worldforum.org). The replies have started to come in – they’re hugely interesting and provocative. Yesterday, for example, I heard from David Korten (www.davidkorten.org), who has written books like When Corporations Rule the World and The Post-Capitalist Future. He sees corporations, by their very nature and design, as predatory.

And today’s Finanical Times provides eloquent evidence of the continuing fall-out from predatory business like Equitable Life (the pension fund to which Elaine and I once belonged) and Enron. In the latter case, the UK Government – via its Export Credit Guarantees Department, whose Advisory Council I sit on – is now the subject of the largest suit in ECGD’s 30-year-plus history. Standard Chartered, ABN Amro and ANZ are seeking $60 million in relation to losses incurred with the Enron-backed (but ultimately mothballed) Dabhol power project in India. The $2.9 billion project, near Mumbai, was the largest single foreign investment in India. Enron managed to negotiate extremely high power tariffs and was accused of profiteering. The Corner House (www.thecornerhouse.org.uk), one of the most effective NGOs pressuring ECGD and other organs of government on such issues, noted that while non-one was accusing the banks or ECGD of wrong-doing, the project had long been dogged by allegations of corruption and human rights abuses.

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

The Afterlife of Brian

The Afterlife of Brian (©JE)

Just back from the Royal Festival Hall and, thanks to an invitation from Gray (brother), one of the musical highs of my life: Brian Wilson’s Smile concert. It was like witnessing a latter day rising from the almost-dead.

It’s no accident that the musical element of the Influences section of this website contains both the front cover of the Beach Boys’ Surfing USA and, in my ‘Desert Island Discs‘, Good Vibrations. Surfing USA was the first album I ever bought, in 1963 or 64, Good Vibrations remains my favorite pop song, and the Beach Boys feature massively in my music collection.

But this concert was really something else: Brian’s band was staggeringly good, the lost masterwork way beyond my expectations. Interesting, given the sunken wrecks theme of Sunday’s Journal entry, that Brian Wilson once said that reviving Smile would be like raising The Titanic. The Financial Times, no less, had given the opening concert in the series ***** and The Independent went so far as to compare the “perfect mosaic” of Smile to Bach. Gershwin or Cole Porter might be a bit more apt, but to hear songs like Good Vibrations, Heroes and Villains and Surf’s Up in the matrix Wilson had intended was pure magic. Wonderful, too, that the extraordinary lyricist Van Dyke Parks was invited back into the game – and got his own ovation on the first night.

And to have Brian Wilson resurrect first himself and then Smile 37 years after the whole thing disassembled in 1967 was little short of miraculous. But just as striking was the way the band played classics like Surfing USA, California Girls, Dance, Dance, Dance, Help Me Rhonda and Barbara Ann. The music was extraordinary both in terms of how close it was to the originals and of how wierdly 21st century it sounded.

Thank you Gray, thank you Brian.

Sunday, February 22, 2004

HMS Hood

HMS Hood (US Naval Historical Center)

Wonderful white blossom erupting as we walk around the reservoir this afternoon. High wind, with a heron on an island holding itself like a submarine on legs, to minimise wind resistance. Talking to Pat (mother) this evening about recent TV programs on the Dunkirk evacuations; she recalled going down to Chatham shortly before Dunkirk. Remembers the cherry blossom. Whistled aboard HMS Keith, on which her brother Paul’s godfather was serving at the time. Shortly afterwards, the Keith went to Dunkirk, where she was sunk by enemy aircraft: a bomb went straight down her smokestack, apparently. And shortly after that, a friend came by Coalbrookdale and told Pat, Paul and their family what had happened. But it’s alright, he said, Paul’s godfather had been posted before the Keith was sunk. Where? To HMS Hood. She was sunk less than a year later, in May 1941, by the Bismarck (her wreck discovered by Robert Ballard, see ‘Journal’ entry for 30 September 2003). Only three men out of over 1400 survived. Paul’s godfather wasn’t among them. The wreck of the Hood was found 60 years later, in 2001, 2800 metres down in the Denmark Strait (http://hmshood.com).

Saturday, February 21, 2004

Gollum and Dunkirk

Gollum (© New Line Productions)

Finally saw The Return of the King last night with Elaine and Hania: unbelievable. Gollum must be one of the most perfectly realised characters in film history. And, sadly, there seems to be a Gollum-like character at work nearby. A large black Samsonite trolley suitcase that washed up not far away in Barnes, and was first reported when I was in Barcelona, turned out to contain the remains of a Pakastani woman, Mrs Ahmed, 27, who was a check-in clerk at Heathrow and had vanished on her way to a hairdresser’s on Valentine’s Day. Walked past the spot this evening and the police appeal for witnesses and information: she looked a lovely young woman. Behind, the curving river looked like hammered, blued steel in the dark, a long launch with a brilliant stern light giving the scene a John Buchan touch.

At least she was found. What will palaeontologists millions of years from now, perhaps descended from rats or coatimundi, make of the compacted fossil layers of 20th and 21st century flotsam and jetsam?

On a happier note, Julia (Hailes) stayed with us on Thursday night, en route to speak at an Economist conference, and yesterday afternoon Fran(cesca) van Dijk – who used to work with SustainAbility – dropped in for tea at SustainAbility, with her husband Ken and children Freya and Finn. At a time when I seem to spend much of my life hauling trolley suitcases through airports, it’s tremendous to renew long-standing friendships. And that’s what I feel with The Lord of the Rings. Reading the 3-volume series in the late 1960s was one of the most powerful experiences of the era – and Peter Jackson has more than done Tolkien justice.

This evening, we watch the Battle of France program, featuring No. 1 squadron and the excavation of Billy Drake’s Hurricane (see 6 February entry). Reminiscent of the excavation of Tim’s own Hurricane (see Influences/Family/The True Battle of Britain). Very moving, as was the following BBC2 program on Dunkirk, featuring extraordinary archive footage and interviews of veterans. Julia’s father Jack was captured during this period and spent the war as a prisoner of war.

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

Barcelona

Just in from Barcelona, having seen a quite spectacular aerial view of what can only have been Beachy Head, its chalk cliffs brilliantly lit by the early morning sun. Last night I gave a lecture to several hundred people at a leading business school, ESADE (Escuela Superior de Administracion y Direccion de Empresas). When I arrived, I unexpectedly found myself pitched into a TV interview and then back-to-back interviews with two major newspapers. One issue that came up repeatedly, both in the interviews and in discussion with ESADE Faculty members over lunch and dinner, was what they called “the sustainability of employment”. I was asked by one professor whether we had worked in this area and initially answered no, then recalled the fairly extensive piece of work we have just done with BT on the “geography of jobs“. That will be published imminently.

The immediacy of the issue in Spain was brought home forcefully this morning when I picked up a copy of The International Herald Tribune. ‘Spanish labor clashes at dockyards leave 60 hurt’ was the caption of a photograph showing damage from a violent confrontation between dock workers and police in Seville, which left 38 workers and 12 policemen hurt. Another 10 officers were injured in a related battle in Cadiz. From our US office, Philippa (Moore) sent me a listing of US companies today that are being pilloried for exporting jobs by a CNN program hosted by Lou Dobbs (http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/lou.dobbs.tonight/).

The US presidential election is certainly turning the heat up under this one – and the rest of the world is going to get an idea of just how committed the US is to globalisation on anyone’s terms but their own. A semi-sore point with me, having been stopped a couple of times when entering the States, particularly in Detroit, and asked by aggressive immigration officals why Americans can’t do the work we’re doing?

Sunday, February 15, 2004

Up A Tree

Gaia, with para boots, chainsaw and family heirloom

Last night, Elaine, Hania and I watched the New Zealand film Whale Rider, the story of a Maori girl who has to fight her grandfather to become chief of her tribe. The dramatic tension flows from the fact that women are not allowed to be chiefs, or to take part in the training of chiefs. The high point is when she rides a right whale after a mass stranding of a pod of right whales, which she appears to have caused.

The story put me in mind of a picture of Gaia (see above) which I couldn’t use in the main body of this website because its dimensions didn’t fit Rupert’s design. After her time with the anti-road-campaigners, she got her teeth into the arboreal world and went off to Merrist Wood to train to be a tree surgeon. The only female student on the course. She succeeded and then went back to Edinburgh to set up The Lumberjills, to do tree work in the city and its surroundings. This picture was taken for a profile of her in The Glasgow Herald. Wearing an old family heirloom: I think because the journalist wanted to cover both her forestry antics and her exploits in the field of fashion. It all comes to mind, I suspect, because she is folding her tent in Edinburgh and moving south in a week or two.

As to Gaia and Hania’s surviving grandparents, I spoke to Pat and Tim today. Pat talked of the attrition rate in the group of pilots in the photos I had sent them (see 6 February entry). Only two of the pilots in the group shot survived, Tim and Pat Hancock (in Mae West jacket) – who died last year. One of the group with the Hurricane, F/Lt Demozay, wearing a dark French uniform, was a French pilot who had been flown out of France sitting in the lap of a Spitfire pilot. He, too, was killed.

Tim said he had just been to have an X-ray for his knees. Apart from the arthritis, the doctors were surprised to find his knees splattered with dark spots. It’s shrapnel from when he was shot down in the Battle of Britain. Asked whether he wasn’t worried about contamination, he said it had all been pretty well cauterised when the Hurricane’s fuel tank blew up.

Friday, February 13, 2004

Great Whites Et Al

Great white shark (www.animalyawns.com/sharksleft.htm)

Started yesterday with my mouth open wide, in the arms of the dentist. Then, last night, I gave the second in a new series of Linacre Lectures at Oxford University on the subject of NGO accountability, following on from the first lecture last week by Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth. Nice welcome from Paul Hannam and Dr Paul Jepson of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI), then on to tea with Professor Paul Slack, Linacre College’s Principal, and a number of his colleagues, including Professor Diana Liverman, who now runs ECI (www.eci.ox.ac.uk).

To get things off to a lively start, my second slide was of a great white shark, as a trailer for our NGO typology of Sharks, Killer Whales (Orca), Sealions and Dolphins. This resulted from a project we did for BP’s board in 1996, but also featured in our recent report The 21st Century NGO. The original idea was suggested by the thinking of Max Nicholson, who argued that NGOs could be broken down into polarisers and integrators on one axis, and discriminators and non-discriminators on the other. We took that idea and dropped marine creatures into each of the resulting four cells, as follows:

Shark (non-discriminating polarizers): Acts on instinct, tactical at best, attacks any target in distress, often attacks in packs, and happiest in feeding frenzies; not particularly receptive to new information once there is blood in the water.

Orca (discriminating polarizers): Highly intelligent, strategic, hunts over long distances, operates in ‘resident’ and ‘transient’ modes (‘residents’ hunt salmon, therefore keep their dorsal fins above water and make a good deal of noise, since their prey – salmon – can’t hear and doesn’t spend much time looking about above water; while ‘transients’ hunt marine mammals which can both see and hear, so run deep and silent), and attacks not only seals and sealions but also, sometimes, dolphins.

Sealion (non-discriminating integrators): Keen to please, attractive to mass audiences, ‘performs tricks for whoever has the bucket of fish’, often professional and well trained, prefers inshore waters, and gets anxious if separated from the group.

Dolphin (discriminating integrators): Great capacity to learn, adapts strategies and behaviours to context, creative, playful, can fend off sharks.

Happily, the debate with the capacity audience took off, with a forest of hands when the open forum was announced. And it’s interesting how well the 1996 work has stood the test of time. When we did the original research for BP, we found a great many NGOs heading, or wanting to head, into the ‘Dolphin’ space. Hence the title of the resulting report: Strange Attractor.

Last night I was asked, once again, where I would place SustainAbility in the matrix? At the time of the original research, a fair number of people saw us operating in – even defining – the Dolphin space. But as a number of us walked back from the lecture last night, I wondered – tongue very firmly in cheek – whether we aren’t sometimes a bit like a Portuguese Man’o’War, drifting in from outside the frame, stinging everything in sight and then drifting off into the blue? In reality, though, we have always been very much pro-NGO, are often taken for an NGO ourselves (we have been described variously as a ‘for-profit NGO’ and a ‘campaigning company’), and are determined to help NGOs wake up and adapt in good time to the emerging accountability challenge.

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Cannes

‘Eagle owl’ in Second Port, Cannes (©JE)

Having signed a confidentiality agreement, probably all I can say is that I was in Cannes on Monday and Tuesday, speaking at a conference organised in the Inter-Continental Carlton Hotel by a major pharmaceutical company. One key issue we discussed was the sustainability of their business model.

In the morning, I walked east along the Boulevard de la Croisette, hard by the Mediterranean. The sky was brilliant blue, the pavement recently washed, roller-bladers scooting by. The thin strip of sand between the boulevard and the Baie de Cannes was densely pock-marked by footprints and caterpillar tracks. Everywhere the sound of motors: cranes, bulldozers, jackhammers, scooters, cars, buses, trucks, motor-boats. As I walked around the Second Port and Port Canto, marvelling at the size of the yachts, and at the number of ‘For Sale’ notices they sported, my eye was caught by one boat whose brilliant paintwork was protected by a large model eagle owl. Odd, end-of-the-world feeling.

Saturday, February 07, 2004

Angels

Covent Garden 07-02-04 (©JE)

Bridges and angels’ wings seemed to be everywhere today. The bridges corkscrewed aerially between buildings in Covent Garden, in the show Anything Goes (with the SS American as a floating bridge between the New World and Old), to which Hania took us as a birthday present for Elaine, and then again in Angels in America (with angels bridging this world and the next by crashing through ceilings), which ran on Channel 4 from 21.00 to after midnight. Extraordinary television.

I remember being blown away by Cole Porter’s Anything Goes (dating from 1934) when it was covered by Harper’s Bizarre in 1967 (still have the LP, one of the first I bought on going to university), but this afternoon I was particularly taken by ‘Blow, Gabriel, Blow’, the mock-spiritual belted out by Reno and the Angels.

So maybe, on reflection, it was angels that were ubiquitous? This evening, Tim (father) e-mailed photos of a new painting Caroline (sister) has just done of Gaia (daughter) dressed as Amelia Earhart (who disappeared in the Pacific in 1937), complete with aviator’s goggles (see sample, 30 November 2003). And that reminded me of when Gaia used to go to school (St Paul’s) wearing a huge pair of home-made angel’s wings, which she would sit and quietly flap during morning assembly.

My memory is that the High Mistress decided that the wings should be banned. Unfortunately for the authorities, there was nothing in the school’s rules allowing wings to be banned – so they were redefined as a hat and banned as such. That sparked something of a rebellion, with students and staff divided on whether this wasn’t a bit dictatorial? Gaia was summoned and asked whether the wings were being worn with seditious intent? She replied that she wore them because they made her – and others – happy. So the ban was removed. Contrary creature that she is, Gaia promptly shed the wings.

Friday, February 06, 2004

Sgts Berry and Albonico

Sgts Berry and Albonico

Pilots of No 1 squadron, with Tim (my father) third from right

Fascinating unsolicited e-mail from John Hayes-Fisher today, linked to the Battle of Britain story told elsewhere on this site (see under Influences/Family, then click on Battle of Britain).

Dear John

I have come across your name on many occasions, probably initially through my degree (Environmental Studies) and in the New Scientist and almost certainly when I made a programme over 10 years ago on sustainability for BBC2’s Nature Series, when Michael Buerk was the presenter.

However the reason why I’m writing is completely unrelated. I am making a programme about the RAF’s No 1 Squadron in the Battle of France and I was searching the web for references to armour plating being fitted to Hurricanes. I think it was with this search that I came across the article you had written in the Guardian about your father’s time with the Squadron and noticed reference to Sgt Berry who was one of the pilots with No 1 Squadron in France – and as you say was later killed in the Battle of Britain.

I believe that Berry was instrumental in saving your father’s life and I thought you might be interested in seeing a photo of Berry taken outside the town hall at Neuville, where the Squadron were billeted for the Autumn of ’39 and first part of 1940. I am also sending a copy of another photo I have found in the No 1 Squadron scrapbook which we are borrowing for the programme. Needless to say, you will probably recognise the man third from the right.

Our programme is probably going out on BBC2 at 8pm on Saturday 21st February and is called Billy and the Fighter Boys. As I say, it’s about No 1 Squadron’s time in the Battle of France and in it we follow aviation archaeologists as they discover the remains of Billy Drake’s Hurricane, which he bailed out of in May 1940, and excavate it while he is present. Maybe your father might be interested in watching? Being in Billy’s company has left with a deep sense of humility and admiration for the pilots of 1940, one which I hope comes out in the programme.

Regards

John

Thursday, February 05, 2004

Nike

Statue in Hotel Lucia symbolises multidimensional stakeholder process – at least in my mind.

Just in from supper with Elaine and Mark Lee, who is joining SustainAbility from BSR. Arrived back in London earlier today from Portland, via San Francisco (which, coincidentally, is where Mark is based). Had gone to take part in what was billed as Nike’s first major multistakeholder event, on Tuesday and Wednesday. Nike, to be fair, have already done a fair amount of stakeholder engagement – indeed, I took part in one interesting session they hosted in Portland a few years back. This time, though. the event was on a much larger scale and was held in the Tiger Woods building on the Nike campus. Stakeholders were broadly very positive – and keen that other companies should do similar sessions.

The three key themes focused on what Nike should do in relation to: the imminent ending of the multi-fibre arrangement (MFA); gender issues in the supply chain; and China. A fascinating learning experience on all fronts – and remarkably well run by Nike. Facilitated by David Sibbett of The Grove Consultants International (www.grove.com), who charted the evolving debate on vast sheets of paper. So quick and accurate was he that one person said it was almost as if he was “chaneling”.

The MFA issues were almost all news to me. I had read about the planned ending of the MFA quota system for textiles and clothing around the time of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial meeting in Doha, when most developing countries were gung-ho about ending what they then saw as an unfair trade system. At the time, Sri Lanka claimed that the end of the MFA would boost its share of trade in these areas, while the Bangladeshis actively lobbied for a quicker phase-out of the MFA. Today, by contrast, as the International Textile Garment & Leather Workers’ Federation (ITGLWF) puts it, “panic is the order of the day in most textiles and clothing exporting nations as governments contemplate industrial meltdown.”

A key reason for the shift in opinion is that other developing countries have only recently woken up to the degree to which China is likely to win in the new game. And the likely impact on their own economies – reflecting huge dependency on exports of textiles and clothing – is illustrated by the fact that for many least developed and small developing countries the sector now accounts for more than 90% of industrial exports and more than 50% of total employment. On current evidence, the impact on employment in countries like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka could be profound. The question for Nike and the other stakeholders present: What can be done to at least moderate the negative impacts?

On the flights out, I read Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons, which Geoffrey Chandler gave me recently. Published in 1932, the book is delightful, funny and very much a work of its period: it talks of a “Jew-shop” and looks forward into a near-future in which there have been modest little wars (there is mention, I recall, of an Anglo-Nicaraguan war of ’46). Weird that people couldn’t sense the disturbance in the force-field caused by the impending WWII. What are we missing in the same way today? On the flights back, I read most of Steve Kemper’s book Code Name Ginger: The Story Behind Dean Kamen’s Quest to Invent a New World. Kamen (www.dekaresearch.com) was the man behind the Segway Human Transporter, launched a while back after a period of intense secrecy and hype. His interest in technologies like the Stirling engine and water treatment technologies for the developing world potentially make him someone to try to talk to for the social entrepreneurs book.

Sunday, February 01, 2004

It’s the System Stupid

A WEF piece I wrote today. Edited version posted on http://www.opendemocracy.net on 5 February.

‘IT’S THE SYSTEM, STUPID!’

Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jose Maria Figueres (©WEF)

Even when jet-lagged, Bill Clinton knows how to hold Davos Man and Woman in the palm of his hand. Count me more or less in their number. Kicking off this years World Economic Forum (www.weforum.org) on 21 January, he used language which was to resonate through the rest of that high-octane, high testosterone week. Nothing new there: Google the phrase Its the Economy, Stupid! – the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign slogan – and youll find its echoes everywhere. But now, it seems, Clintons implicit message when on the broad range of economic, social and environmental challenges we face is, Its the System, Stupid!

Instead of making flying visits to people like the Grameen Banks Muhammad Yunus, he suggested, we should bring Yunus and folk like the property-rights-for-the-poor campaigner Hernando de Soto in from the cold. Mainstream them. No doubt some corporate bottoms shifted uneasily in their seats at this call for some sort of Third Way revolution, but what exactly was Clinton prescribing, exactly? Sadly, at least in my memory, he was long on concept and short on detail.

He was, he said, all for systematic change, but the scale of the challenges we now face requires systemic change. Well, fine, and no doubt he would have won nods from many of those across the road at the Public Eye on Davos (www.evb.ch) and, indeed, at the anti-WEF World Social Forum, held this year in Mumbai, India (www.wsfindia.org). But most of these people, I suspect, would have soon parted company with the Davos crowd even with Clinton – in terms of how much, how far, how fast and at whose expense.

Thinking back, though, it strikes me that it would be easy to over-dramatise the chasm between Davos and Mumbai. The divides are there, of course, but, willingly or not, both sides are in the process of adjusting their mindsets. In fact, this was the third time I had attended the World Economic Forums annual summit and I was forcefully struck by just how far both the nature and content of the debate have shifted over the past three years.

At WEF, many once forceful globalizers are now off balance, some even taking part in sessions on corporate social responsibility and sustainable development. Its not yet a question of Globalizers Anonymous, but the agenda is a lot more nuanced than it was just a few years back. And, for the most part still in a parallel universe, a growing number of former anti-globalizers are trying on labels like alter-mondialiste and talking in terms of responsible globalisation.

Several swallows never did make a summer, but the basis for some form of convergence is clearly there. That really wasnt the case a few years back. The first time I got the call, in 2002, the WEF event was held in New York, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The following year, 2003, most of the caravan returned happily to snowy Davos, in Switzerland. This time, though, there were bitter recriminations between America and its allies – who were actively planning for war and those who opposed invasion, with or without UN sanction. One of the sessions I remember best was the one where General Wesley Clark pointed energetically to places on the map of Iraq where the coalition forces expected to be attacked with anthrax and other weapons of mass destruction.

What a difference twelve months can make. This year, by contrast, US Vice-President Dick Cheney was in conciliatory mood. And my overall impression, while British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw drew no cheers for his lacklustre defence of the Iraqi venture, was that most participants were much more interested in what would happen to the US recovery and to the dollar. Most seemed to have little appetite for major changes in the economic architecture.

And something else had changed too, it seemed to me. Looking back, 2002 saw the WEF summit in New York invaded by a fairly considerable number of NGOs and fellow travellers, myself included. The trend evolved further in 2003. On both occasions, demonstrations in the streets outside helped keep the political pot bubbling. You could almost feel the steam percolating up through the floorboards into some of the sessions. This year, by contrast, the security forces choked off most of the protests in and around Davos, and whether it was a related trend or not the NGO voices seemed muted.

Behind the scenes, true, there were clashes between WEF officials and some NGOs on the best ways forward. Afterwards, the head of one highly reputable NGO told me that he they – would not be coming back. I could understand the frustration. A couple of the parallel sessions I attended were surprisingly glib and ill-informed, although in my experience they were the exception. While you hear some of their research partners seethe that the relationship with WEF is pretty one sided, with the Forum claiming most of the credits, it has positioned itself as the most coherent global platform for integrated debate in this area.

When I challenged WEF co-CEO Jose Maria Figueres, a former president of Costa Rica, on the issue of whether the Forum would ever take a stand position on a major policy issue, he stressed that it is essentially neutral in what it does. But, however you judge that claim, it really is leaning into the debate a bit more these days.

This year, for example, the WEF Global Governance Initiative launched its first annual report . And it is surprisingly critical of current efforts to tackle the priority issues identified at the 2000 UN Millennium Summit, in the form of the Millennium Development Goals. Scoring each of seven areas of activity out of a maximum of 10 for 2003, WEF set the numbers such that a 0 means retrogression, whereas a 10 means that the world that is, national governments, businesses, civil society and international organizations taken together – essentially did everything needed to be on track to reach the goals.

The report came up with the following results: peace and security (3), poverty (4), hunger (3), education (3), health (4), environment (3) and human rights (3). Reading the numbers, it struck me that the world really deserves a school report I got some time late in the 1950s: Sets himself low standards and consistently fails to achieve them.

Whatever you think of WEF, this is an important contribution. Nor is this the only initiative WEF is helping drive forward in this area. Indeed, one of the reasons the NGOs probably seemed a bit muted to me this year was that the voices of the social entrepreneurs in Davos had been wound up several notches. Convened by the Schwab Foundation (www.schwabfound.org), also founded by WEF founder Klaus Schwab and his wife Hilde, the entrepreneurs came together for the first time at the WEF summit in New York. After a slightly wobbly start, more of them hit the ground running in Davos in 2003 and most really got into their stride this year.

Most social entrepreneurs today are unknown to the general public. Some, like Muhammad Yunus or Bunker Roy of the Barefoot College, may be well known to Bill Clinton and be covered fairly regularly in the international media, but for most of us most of what they do tends to disappear into the background noise. Nor are they guaranteed to succeed. Many of them will fail, some more than once. Such is the life of entrepreneurs, perhaps even more so of social entrepreneurs. But these people have the potential to transform the way in which hundreds of millions of people live, learn and work.

A huge and growing variety of social entrepreneurs are tackling such issues as environmental protection, family planning, the empowerment of women, fair trade, food security, the homeless, HIV/AIDS orphans and youth development. Where markets fail, as they do in relation to many of these issues, social entrepreneurs are working on leapfrog thinking, technology and business models to do the previously undoable. They are not primarily motivated by profit although many are more than happy to make a profit.

In short, the phrase The impossible takes a little longer could have been coined for them. It has been my great good fortune to be in the passenger seat as they began their WEF breakthrough. In 2002, I sat in on the first WEF social entrepreneur session in New York. In 2003, I facilitated the first Davos social entrepreneurs session. And this year, with Pamela Hartigan, who runs the Schwab Foundation, I had the extraordinary privilege of interviewing 15 or so social entrepreneurs for a book we are planning. Thats around a quarter of the Schwab Foundations current network – and I emerged supercharged.

No wonder Clinton name-checks these people in his speeches. Both he and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan have every excuse for pleading exhaustion in the wake of their continuous efforts to get these issues onto the political agenda. But an hour with any of these entrepreneurs is like the shot of monkey gland extract that some rich people apparently used to come to Switzerland for. (And, who knows, perhaps some of the Davos crowd still do?)

Whatever, the real question right now is how we can initiate the necessary top-down changes to the market system to help social entrepreneurs bring their bottom-up activities to scale. Maybe it will help if we adopt the Its the System, Stupid! mantra, even sticking it on our fridge doors. But we can all be sure of one thing: only if we are prepared to throw our collective weight behind these extraordinary pioneers can we hope to see evidence of real progress in future Global Governance Initiative scorecards.

 

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Energetic day, including intense 2.5 hour brainstorm on our Global Compact project. Facilitated by Jodie (Thorpe), the session involves Seb (Beloe), Yasmin (Crowther) and Peter (Zollinger). Leave slightly early to join a meeting of most of the Environment Foundation Trustees: (Dr) Malcolm Aickin, (Sir) Geoffrey Chandler, Jane Nelson and Tim O’Donovan. We are joined by John Lotherington of the 21st Century Trust. The idea of to merge our activities – with an annual Consultation on sustainable development. We make considerable headway.

Monday, January 26, 2004

Cast of The West Wing

Went down by train to Oxford, to spend the day with Geoff Lye and Peter Zollinger, both Directors of SustainAbility, to think through our future aims and strategy. After a tour of Geoff’s new home, which among many other things has a solar roof and ultra-high-tech instrumentation that tells you how much of the current energy use is being supplied by the sun, we surveyed the landscape SustainAbility is moving into – and worked through plans for the London, Washington and Zurich offices. Peter is planning to move into new offices in the old quarter of Zurich, in a building which dates back to the 1400s. Later, Peter returns with me to Barnes, where we end the evening by watching a couple of programmes from the second series of The West Wing. Incredibly funny, hugely thought-provoking and, paradoxically, wonderfully relaxing.

Sunday, January 25, 2004

Back from WEF. The absent-minded-professor sequence continues: when we arrive at Zurich airport, I discover I have lost the air tickets. Probability is that I jettisoned them in Davos along with some of the mountain of paper we collected during the five days of the conference. We buy new, standby tickets. On the flight, I start marking up my notes of the social entrepreneur interviews – and am struck by their richness.

Saturday, January 24, 2004

Mira, Simon and Elaine struggling with scarf (©JE)

Four more interviews, plus innumerable conversations through much of the day. It’s in danger of becoming a production line. Then walk across to the Hotel Derby with Tae Yoo, who heads Cisco Systems’ philanthropy side, for the launch of HP and Visa International’s Global Giving program in support of social entrepreneurs. Afterwards scoot back to the hotel and then on with Elaine to the Hotel Gentiana for a wonderful dinner with Simon Zadek of AccountAbility and his partner Mira Merme. It’s snowing quite heavily when we leave. But we hardly notice, since we are semi-catatonic with Davos syndrome.

Friday, January 23, 2004

Social entrepreneurs Chief Fidela Ebuk of WHEDA and Bunker Roy of Barefoot College(©JE)

Yet another busy day. Start off with four interviews, with Alan Khazei of City Year in the US (www.cityyear.org), Dr Ibrahim Abouleish of SEKEM in Egypt (www.sekem.org), Millard Fuller of Habitat for Humanity in the US (www.habitat.org) and then Vijay Mahajan of BASIX in India (www.basixindia.org). Then speak at a roundtable session chaired by Gordon Conway (President of the Rockefeller Foundation) on strategic alliances between business and NGOs. Followed by an ultra-high-powered ‘atelier’ on ‘Reducing Inequity’ with people like the heads of AID, UNDP and the World Food Programme and Hernando de Soto, facilitated by Ged Davis, previously head of Shell’s scenarios unit and now with WEF. So high-powered and pressured I end up just listening. In the evening, I speak at a dinner on the theme of ‘Does Social Activist Generate Light or Heat?’ Smallish group, but turns into remarkably animated discussion. Find myself saying that we may well be moving beyond the “Golden Age of NGOs”.

Thursday, January 22, 2004

Mrs Mbeki and Pamela Hartigan (©JE)

Busiest day yet. Start out with an interview with Richard Jefferson of CAMBIA. At one juncture I ask him what happened to his siblings? “I shot and ate them,” is his instantaneous reply. He has an ultra-broadband brain, indeed Elaine notes that one of his hobbies – juggling – is known to boost synapses. Then I speak at a private lunch of food and textile sector CEOs, facilitated by Anthony Ruys, Chairman of Heineken.

Next I scoot across town for the latest round in the ‘CSR Leaders Summit’ process organised by Bob Dunn of BSR. Some great people there, but frustrating for a number of reasons, not least because we run out of time as several of us have to flit back across town for a brainstorming session with WEF and the Swiss Agency for the Environment, Forests and Landscape (SAEFL). A lively session, chaired by Jose Maria Figueres, now co-CEO of WEF, but previously President of Costa Rica. He asks us to reconvene later in the year to discuss the sustainability agenda – and what more WEF can do in the area.

‘Can Science Take Sustainability Seriously?’ is the theme of the dinner session we go to this evening. Facilitated by Baroness Susan Greenfield (Director, UK Royal Institution), the session promises to be lively. Unfortunately, Greenfield goes for pizazz rather than understanding. The speakers – including Eileen Claussen (President, Pew Center on Global Climate Change) and Claude Martin (Director-General, WWF International) – struggle to keep the session on the rails. Find myself agreeing time and again with film producer (Lord) David Puttnam, for example on demographic pressures.

But, in a section of the debate on how we can build trust in science and other institutions, I suggest that maybe the very nature of science is part of the problem. Every time you have a major issue like climate change you always have dissenting voices arguing that there is no problem – providing a comfy alibi for polluters. (The unspoken question: ‘Can we trust scientists regardless of who pays them?’) The good Baroness manages to turn my spoken question in a split-second into an argument for mainstream science, as if more of the same is guaranteed to solve all our problems.

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

I paid a CHF10 fine, though I don’t totally trust UNICEF (©JE)

For me, the highlight of the day was Bill Clinton’s speech over lunch, in which he called for systemic change, rather than just piecemeal initiatives. Slightly under parr performance, indeed I found myself worrying about his health. Since he had flown in that morning from the Middle East, it may have been simply a case of jet lag, but maybe the man’s pushing himself a little hard? Start the sequence of social entrepreneur interviews with Pamela Hartigan (MD, Schwab Foundation), for the book we are planning: hugely energising.

In the evening, Elaine and I go to a dinner entitled: ‘Why are GMOs such a hard sell?’ Facilitated by Guy de Jonquieres, World Trade Editor of the Financial Times, it includes contributions from Gordon Conway (President, Rockefeller Foundation, who I’ve known for over 20 years), Hugh Grant (Chairman, President and CEO of Monsanto, who I first met when we were working with the chemicals-to-biosciences company in 1996-97, before our public resignation of the contract) and Jacques Diouf (Director-General, UN Food and Agricultural Organization, who I find myself sitting next to).

But the liveliest input by far comes from Richard Jefferson (Chairman and CEO, CAMBIA), one of the social entrepreneurs on my interview list. First met him last year at a similar Davos session, where we shared a table with the likes of Bill Joy, Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems – and one of the wierdest people I’ve come across. First came across Joy’s thinking in any depth when he contributed a piece to Wired in April 2000, entitled ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need us’. More specifically, he argued that technologies like robotics, genetic engineering and nanotech threatened to make humankind a threatened species. Surprisingly little of that sort of thinking this evening.

Tuesday, January 20, 2004

Barbed wire and snow in Davos (©JE)

Elaine and I fly to Zurich, then take a conference coach to Davos for the World Economic Forum summit on ‘Partnering for Security and Prosperity’. Spend part of the ride reviewing the proofs of the latest issue of SustainAbility’s newsletter, Radar, then chat with Ed Mayo, now chief executive of the National Consumer Council (NCC) about possible joint projects. Arrive in snow, then find our way to the Hotel Club, out on the trailing fringes of the Milky Way. Still, we walk into town and find the Gentiana restaurant, which we had failed to get into last time we were here. Luckily, we are the last people allowed in – and Elaine is beside herself because they serve snails.

Saturday, January 17, 2004

The World Social Forum (www.wsfindia.org) is now under way in Mumbai, or Bombay. Motto: ‘Another World Is Possible.’ Sadly, Kavita (Prakash-Mani), who was going to represent us, has damaged her back and can’t fly. Thought of her this morning when I finally started William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns, which she lent me many moons ago. Wonderfully funny introduction to the multi-layered worlds of New Delhi, but also in part a clear-eyed account of the massacres that have created strata of bones on which later versions of New Delhi have been built.

Meanwhile everyone at WSF, The Guardian reports this morning, “is sure of what they are against – capitalism, imperialism and George Bush.” But, Randeep Ramesh notes, “Nobody can say what precisely they are all for.” It will be interesting to see how, with India hosting, the WSF folk handle the caste issue.

Three images stuck in my mind from today’s papers. Two appeared in The Times: these were two grotesque photos found in a clear-out of an Argentinian photographic laboratory. They show how commandos were trained to torture dissidents during the country’s “dirty war” in the 1970s. But foul though they are, they seem like a cottage industry compared to the operations shown in an aerial reconnaissance image of Auschwitz featured in The Guardian. This shows inhumanity taken to an industrial scale. Smoke billows from mass burial pits, as the sheer volume of bodies in the “climactic frenzy of killing in 1944 and early 1945” outpaced the camp’s crematoria. Those waiting to be gassed had to queue for a day near one crematorium, in a rain of ash from the bodies of earlier victims. The photos can be found at www.evidenceincamera.co.uk.

Once again, the question arises as to why we didn’t act to halt or at least slow the killing? One reason, John Ezard suggests in The Guardian article, is that “technology outstripped its operators. The RAF’s photographers fired their cameras as fast as machine guns, bringing home millions of images – too many to inspect properly.” The resolution of this one extraordinary image of Auschwitz is so good that apparently inmates can also be seen standing at roll call. Somewhat reminiscent of the way images from NASA’s Nimbus 7 satellite showed the growing Antarctic ozone hole for years before British balloons revealed the growing crisis. NASA’s computers had apparently been programmed in such a way that anything like an ozone hole was considered “impossible”.

What are we missing today?

Friday, January 16, 2004

Moleskine world map by Stamen Design (http://www.stamen.com/projects/books/)

Started day by turning up at Waterstone’s, Piccadilly, just after 09.00, to find them closed until 10.00. In pursuit of Moleskine notebooks for the interviews I’ll be doing at the World Economic Forum next week, with 18 social entrepreneurs in the diary at the last count. With a high, buffeting wind, I had decided not to cycle to the office, instead taking the Tube and reading Into the Arms of Strangers, by Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer, the story of the Kindertransport – which brought Jewish children out of Germany before WWII.

Was sent the book a few days back by Robert Crawshaw, originally a friend of Elaine’s in the late 1960s when they both worked at Oxford University Press. He has been staying with us on occasion recently when working in London and the book came up when we were talking a week or two back of ways weaving an book from multiple stories, something I’m hoping to do with the social entrepreneurs book. The Harris/Oppenheimer book starts with a wonderfully touching preface by Richard Attenborough, whose parents took in two German girls when their onward passage across the Atlantic became impossible.

Made the best of the interlude, dropping into Tower Records, a frequent haunt: bought a double CD by Mahalia Jackson and Dev’lish Mary by The Hot Club of Cowtown, the latter to send to Gaia in Edinburgh. Then the W doors open and I found they don’t now do the particular style of notebook I have used for some while, so I gritted my teeth and bought three irridescent violet variants. At least they’ll stand out if I leave them on a table somewhere.

And that’s very likely to happen. Find my brain’s off on its own travels at the moment. So, for example, David Grayson of Business in the Community came in this afternoon to talk about his new book on how we can turn the responsibility agenda into a opportunity space, but my grey cells really struggled to get into gear. Maybe because I’m chasing too many hares – or, to bring things up to date, exceeding my bandwidth. But David suggested it might also because I had just found that I had mislaid by current Moleskine for the second day running. As I explained to Maddy, using Moleskines (www.moleskines.com) has become so much of an unconscious ritual that their absence may well be derailing me. The wrong sort of notebook, as Raitrack might have said. Yesterday, at Shell, Joppe Cramwinkel asked why I wasn’t using my little black book? Interesting what one becomes notorious for …

As I wrote this entry, I surfed in search of Moleskine images and came across the website of Stamen Design in San Francisco. Have always adored artists’ notebooks, and Stamen’s use of Moleskine notebooks and sketchbooks took my fancy. The rapid response e-mail from Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen giving permission to use the map image above is signed ‘with verdancy’.

Thursday, January 15, 2004

Having teased it out for the sheer wonder of the thing, I finished Bitter Lemons last night. It concludes with a rising tide of violence as EOKA tries to prise the island from the grip of the British Empire. Durrell’s idyllic life is brought to a rude end as the government hangs the young Greek Karaolis, convicted of a terrorist killing. I still remember, as a child, hearing the prelude to at least one hanging in Nicosia. The other prisoners rattled their plates and anything else they could lay their hands between the bars of their cells. On a still night you could hear the noise for miles. For years afterwards I imagined I might end up at the end of a rope. The banning of capital punishment in Britain came as a relief.

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

By train to Downing College, Cambridge. Had agreed some time back to help judge entries for a new award scheme for entrepreneurs, CU Entrepreneurs (www.cue.org.uk). Founded in 1999, CUE’s main award scheme is the Business Creation Competition, with a top prize of £30,000. I have been asked to help judge a brand new competition, focusing on a slightly modified 3P: ‘People, Planet and Productivity’. CU Entrepreneurs is a student-run initiative, working with Cambridge Enterprise and the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning. Top prize: £20,000, with a further £20,000 available for protype development. We managed to shake down the field with relatively little disagreement to six strong candidates – and a couple whose champions we would ask to do further work. Another round of judging will come later in the year when each team has put together a business plan.

Sunday, January 11, 2004

Cyprus (Ministry of Commerce, Industry & Tourism)

April shower-like weather, thumping rain one minute, ragged blue skies the next. Am loving Bitter Lemons, much of which takes me back to the late 50s in Cyprus. Durrell’s book came out in 1957 and we were there in 1958 and 1959, when the EOKA terrorists/freedom fighters were really getting into their stride. Durrell seems to have unwittingly come across a couple of early EOKA arms shipments when sleeping on beaches near Kyrenia. We were in Cyprus mainly, I think, because my father, Tim, was involved in trying to monitor and intercept the arms shipments.

An extraordinary moment not long after the US invasion of Afghanistan, when I was flying back from Australia and the plane made a long diversion to avoid the trouble spots. We came up over Dubai, where I looked down on the extraordinary new palm-shaped complex stretching out into the Gulf, and then out across the Mediterranean. There was a great deal of cloud, but I suddenly had an urge to look out the window, and there was most of the Cyprus panhandle. I couldn’t see the curvature of the Earth, as in the satellite image above, but it was a heart-stopping moment nonetheless.

One of the things that is interesting about the book is the unconscious references to things that (hopefully) would be totally unacceptable these days. For example, alongside the Enosis graffiti in Bellapaix, the village where he buys a house, there are painted records of when the area was last sprayed with DDT to control mosquitoes. And another thing I remember as a child was seeing the asbestos mining in the Troodos range. Durrell notes that “Amiandos made us catch our breath in pain. It lies against the side of a mountain which has been clumsily raped. The houses, factories and shacks are powdered white as if after a heavy snowfall; mounds of white snow rise in every direction, filling the cool still airs of the mountain with the thin dust of asbestos. Men and women walked about in the moon-landscape, powdered into ghoulish insignificance by the dust.”

And that, in turn, reminded me of the arguments I had while editor of The ENDS Report in the late 1970s with people from the asbestos industry, both from companies like Cape Industries and their trade association. Despite the growing evidence of the links with asbestosis and mesothelioma, most such people were still in total denial. A few years later, The Environment Foundation was founded, its funding coming from insurers who were underwriting risks linked to asbestosis, contaminated land, radioactive wastes and so on. (I have chaired the Foundation since 1995, but have recently catalysed a discussion about where we should head next. We have had an extremely productive exchange of e-mails among the Trustees this weekend.)

In one exchange today with (Sir) Geoffrey Chandler, an Environment Foundation Trustee, I asked whether he had ever come across one of the people who pops up a number of times in Bitter Lemons, Patrick (Paddy) Leigh Fermor. I knew that they had both served in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in WWII – and in Greece. Geoffrey replied: “I think Bitter Lemons is Durrell’s best book, though I much enjoyed the first two volumes of the Alexandrian quartet. His other Greek books I find precious. Paddy Leigh Fermor is in a totally diffferent class. In 1945 we travelled together to Corfu in a small caique which just transported my Jeep by placing it athwart-ships. I had a bag of sovereigns to pay those who had helped us in the German occupation. I can’t remember what Paddy was doing, but even in that short acquaintance he came across as a truly remarkable person. I wish – as do so many – that he would write the third volume of his travels. But, damn it, I am told he is translating Wodehouse into Greek instead!”

But back to asbestos and insurance, despite the distractions of caiques and bags of sovereigns. At the risk of sounding hugely argumentative, I also remember having arguments with some of those then carrying out environmental audits in the US for the insurers (including Bain Clarkson, who funded the Foundation from a ‘social tithe’ on their environmental impairment liability policies) on the basis that you really couldn’t expect to identify material risks in the space of a half-day visit to a company – which, in any event, would have a vested interest in pulling the wool over your eyes. It wasn’t long before those toxic chickens came home to roost. The US Superfund legislation was enacted and the concept of ‘joint and several’ liability adopted. If you had dumped asbestos into a landfill site, for example, and you were the only company surviving out of all those also dumping such problem materials, you became liable for their problems, too. The resulting costs for industry were staggering. Some 20% of the liabilities that almost sunk the Lloyd’s insurance market resulted from such problems.

The financial sector is increasingly aware of such risks, though it doesn’t always know quite what to do with them. This weekend I’m reading through a draft of a new SustainAbility report, by Geoff Lye and Francesca Muller, which focuses on the ways in which liability regimes are evolving around the world. What started with issues like asbestos and tobacco, then morphed out into areas like breast implants and ‘Nazi’ gold, is now broadening out to embrace sector such as fast food (obesity and diabetes) and climate change.

Wednesday, January 07, 2004

Finally got around to responding to Paul Hawken’s request for nominations for the Natural Capital Institute (NCI)’s proposed 100 Best Companies in the World index. The criteria being used are different from those used by most socially responsible investment (SRI) funds. As Paul explained: “Most funds accept a company’s business model (with the exception of tobacco, nuclear, gambling, and armaments) as sacrosanct or neutral, and then grade the company on how well it performs within its chosen mission.” NCI, by contrast, plans to “reverse the perspective, and weigh the company heavily on what it actually does. The reasoning here is simple: If a company is heading down a questionable path, it matters very little how it gets there.” More details from www.naturalcapital.org.

Monday, January 05, 2004

Nice start to working year: Oliver (Dudok van Heel)’s birthday means cake in the afternoon – and most people have had wonderful holidays, decompressing well. The exception is Judy (Kuszewski), who contracted a case of the ‘bends’ while diving off Dominica, in the Caribbean. She ended up in a decompression chamber, having had to be airlifted to Martinique. But she is apparently feeling much better now.

Thursday, January 01, 2004

A weird coincidence this morning. In 2001, Gaia’s friend Mahalia had compiled his version of Brian Wilson’s missing album Smile, or Dumb Angel as it was originally called. Wilson, who Mahalia describes as “the half-deaf, half-mad, non-surfing genius of the Beach Boys”, had promised that the album would exceed even the glories of Pet Sounds. ‘Good Vibrations’, which appears in my own ‘Desert Island Discs 16’ compilation (see ‘Influences’), gave every sign that the promise would be honoured. Then Wilson had a breakdown and The Beatles overtook with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band. The Beach Boys allowed various bits and pieces of Smile to dribble out onto later albums, but the project as a whole became one of the great mythical might-have-beens.

Anyway, just before Christmas, Gaia gave me a copy of Mahalia’s CD, with 25 tracks starting with ‘Our Prayer’ and ending with ‘You’re Welcome’. The compilation contains two tracks attributed to Dennis Wilson, ‘Little Bird’ and ‘Never Learn Not to Love’, which were in fact at least part-penned by Charles Manson. The second song, apparently, was originally titled ‘Cease to Exist’. I wonder whether he gets royalties in prison? Well, whatever, I have been listening to the CD, much of it unclassifiable, if – like ‘Good Vibrations’ – outlandishly well produced. But also often a bit cloying. Indeed I suspect that when some of this stuff is played live later in 2004 it will be considered over-rated. What they really needed was their own version of George Martin riding shotgun on the project.

And then this morning, in The Times, there was a short note that Brian Wilson will be “performing the legendary Smile for the first time in February.” His voice may be pretty ropey these days, but what intriguing news to start to the New Year: the Holy Grail disinterred?

NOTE: When I visited cider-makers HP Bulmer in the early 1980s, I learned that the word ‘ropey’ comes from the times when cider-makers would often get off-fermentations that resulted in white, ropey strings of rogue yeasts. They would dump the off batches in the hedgerows, and there were then tales of cows, horses, pigs, chickens and all sorts of other animals staggering around the landscape in a state of advanced intoxication. And that, it seems, was a key part of Brian Wilson’s challenge in getting to Smile. Finally, still on subject of music, while watching Jules Holland’s eleventh New Year’s Eve extravanganza last night on BBC2, I heard the Hot Club of Cowtown for the first time. Can’t imagine how I’ve missed them all these years.

 

Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Little Rissington, by Caroline Elkington 2003, 11 x 3 feet (©JE)

Once again, New Year’s Eve sets the mind thinking about time, intentions and ambitions. “Everything fears Time,” said the old Arab proverb, “only the pyramids laugh at it.” In recent days I have been reading Miroslav Verner’s fascinating account of the history and archaeology of The Pyramids. Mind-boggling. It’s amazing how far people will go to ensure some form of immortality.

Stumbled across a quote from Anne Frank this morning, as I prospected for a title for a new (and totally unrelated) book I’m planning. “I want to go on living after my death!” Anne wrote in her diary on 4 April 1944. “And therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me.” Amazing what she managed to achieve by the age of 15 with a few notebooks, as opposed to the 40- to 60-ton blocks of granite and limestone the Egyptians struggled to haul up to 70 metres into the sky.

It’s almost 30 years since I visited the Pyramids of Giza and Saqqara, when working in Egypt in 1975. Interesting to learn from Verner that under certain conditions, with varying temperatured layers near the horizon, an optical illusion can turn the sun’s disk into a step pyramid, like those at Saqqara. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen something of the sort. The early stepped pyramids would therefore have expressed the idea that the buried ruler was as immortal as the sun, dying on the western horizon every evening and then reawakening in the east every morning.

Sometimes strikes me that compiling a personal website like this is a bit like building a virtual pyramid, which others can later discover and wander around. Had an e-mail on 19 December from Soli(taire) Townsend of Futerra, saying that she had stumbled on the site and noting that she felt as though she had been given the chance “to rummage around inside someone’s head.” She suggests a bulletin board, or similar, to establish a more interactive conversation with visitors. Will ask Lynne (Elvins) to work out how this could be done. Certainly this would be an advance on the Pharaohs: I haven’t heard of any of them entering into direct conversation with those pillaging or studying their tombs.

Having bought Verner’s book together with The Rough Guide to Cyprus a few weeks before Christmas, I seem to be limbering up for further Near and Middle Eastern travels, with Crete, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran and Iraq all apparently on the ambitions list. But there are endless wrinkles: quite apart from the ongoing troubles in Iraq, I have always said I wouldn’t go back to Cyprus, where we spent a couple of years in the late 1950s, until Northern Cyprus was reintegrated. Many of the places I want to return to are on the Turkish side of the ‘Green Line’, including Kyrenia.

Still, to keep the fires burning, I borrowed a copy of Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons from my parents yesterday. And on page 28, I came across the words of a Turkish song:

If you should come to Kyrenia
Don’t enter the walls.
If you should enter the walls
Don’t stay long.
If you should stay long
Don’t get married.
If you should get married
Don’t have children …

Clearly since 1974, when the Turkish army invaded, Turkish refugees from the south and settlers from the mainland have done all of the above, and been buried there to boot. Fascinating how people’s lives interweave with the places they live – and, as in the Holy Land, how the social, economic and political implications then fan out through the generations.

Walking around Little Rissington (where we moved when we returned from Cyprus in 1959) on Tuesday morning, with Elaine and my sister Caroline, it was extraordinary to reflect on how much the village has changed since we were children. We were visiting the Village Hall, where Caroline’s huge (11 feet by 3) new painting of the village and its environs, from the perspective of Bobble Wood, now hangs.

Interestingly, too, there was a map on one of the walls showing all the field names in the parish, including ‘Upper Heaven’ and ‘Lower Heaven’, over towards Great Rissington. A lot easier to ramble downhill in 20 minutes, it struck me, than to spend 20 years building a vast limestone mountain like the Great Pyramid, but it takes all sorts to make a world.

Sunday, December 28, 2003

Elaine, in blue, masked by snowflake, asks for directions on Kleine Scheidegg (© HE)

Elaine, Gaia, Hania and I returned last night from a stunning week in Wengen, Switzerland, staying at the delightfully eccentric Hotel Falken. I used the opportunity to plough through a stack of books, including The Discovery of Slowness by Sten Nadolny, Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald and John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (the last of which which E, G and H had also all read or re-read on the trip). All three books are extraordinary, albeit in wildly different ways. Also dipped into The Quark and the Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann and A Terrible Beauty by Peter Watson, which I plan to read cover to cover, eventually.

The four of us went for mammoth walks every day, the first day in an unexpected blizzard. Thereafter, we enjoyed wonderful clean snow pretty much until the last day, when a partial thaw started. One day, we went up to the Schilthorn/Piz Gloria, where we had lunch in the remarkable revolving restaurant, looking out across the glittering peakscape, including the dark North Face of the Eiger. On the last evening, among other things, we went ice-skating at the Wengen rink. I had trouble keeping my feet to begin with, which made me happy that Maddy I had sat out the Somerset House skating a few weeks back, but soon I was managing to make a reasonable fist of it. Skating around in the midst of those amazing peaks is pretty much the ultimate way to take one’s mind off the day-to-day travails of sustainable development – until, that is, people start talking about why the glaciers are retreating and the Alpine permafrost thawing.

While we were away, I learned from ploughing through the papers that had arrived in our absence, Iraq hadn’t been the only source of bad news – over 20,000 Iranians had been killed by an earthquake in and around Bam, and over 200 people had died in a release of hydrogen sulphide from a natural gas field in China.

Cloudscape on Christmas Day (© JE)

Thursday, December 18, 2003

Yesterday was Amsterdam, speaking at the launch of CIMO, a new centre for innovation and sustainable business at the Free University of Amsterdam. Arriving mid-morning, I went to lunch at IMSA (www.imsa.nl), an organisation very like SustainAbility and originating in 1985. Lunch hosted by IMSA founder Wouter van Dieren and colleagues. Marcel Bovy had asked me to come by to discuss how SustainAbility manages values-based dilemmas and issues with 15 members or so of the IMSA team. Very interesting and lively debate.

Later, after the main part of the CIMO meeting, I was one of the people taking part in a series of so-called ‘tableaux vivants’, mine being with Alois Flatz of Sustainable Asset Management (SAM), in a darkened room, with a draped piano and a mystic pond, answering ‘burning questions’. In his speech, Alois noted that he had been doing calculations on his new son Joachim. He estimated that if Joachim had kept growing for a full human lifetime at the rate that he grew in the first few months, he would have ended up with a headroom problem: 780 kilometres tall!

Monday, December 15, 2003

Spoke at a conference this afternoon in Cabot Hall, Canary Wharf, focusing on extent to which London’s pitch for the 2012 Olympics could be linked to the sustainability agenda. Seems that it could be done, though it’s anyone’s guess what chance London would have of winning. The main Olympic Zone, it appears, would be built in the Lower Lea Valley.

Then, in the evening, along to the Royal Society of Arts, where we held a farewell dinner for Charles Muller, as a trustee of the Environment Foundation, and for Helen Holdaway, who has been our Director since 1998. She has been involved in the Foundation since the early 1980s, has orchestrated pretty much all our consultations at St George’s House, Windsor, and kept our lines steady when we were under determined, Dickensian assault by the Charity Commissioners. The fact that we eventually won the case, ensuring that sustainable development would henceforward be a charitable objective (www.environmentfoundation.net) in the UK, is probably the biggest single thing the Foundation has done, other than catalysing the process that led to the Queen’s Award for environmental achievement. The obvious question now: what next?

Saturday, December 13, 2003

Exhausted, but hopefully in recovery. This evening, watched a TV programme on the North African campaigns of Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) and the Special Air Services (SAS), the sort of special forces once dubbed the ‘Funnies’. Elaine’s father, Stanley, my late father-in-law, was in the desert for six years during WWII. Not PC to say so, I suspect, but I have always been attracted to the out-of-the-box style of warfare of people like the Chindits, LRDG and SAS. In Cyprus as a child I was forcibly impressed by an ex-Chindit, Douglas Walker-Brash. He came to the breakfast table heavily armed, sporting sidearms in the same way that General Patton did.

In The Guardian Review today I also read a review by William Dalrymple of Words of Mercury, a collection of the best of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s writings. Like Geoffrey Chandler (see 9 December and 27 October entries), he was involved in the unconventional fighting in Greece.

Asked Pat, my mother, who had read the same review, whether she had read Leigh Fermor’s Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water? I had, years ago, and loved them. She hadn’t, so I sent her all three for Christmas this evening, couresy of Amazon, after watching the grand finale of the BBC’s ‘The Big Read’. Of the final 5 books out of 6,000 originally entered, three were favourites of mine: Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Tolkien won. I can still recall the smell of rain on the earth outside at 06.00 one morning as I finished the third volume after a marathon 2-day, 3-volume reading session in the late 1960s.

Wednesday, December 10, 2003

Skaters: Back row – Oliver Dudok van Heel, Jan Scherer, Nick Robinson, Tell Muenzing, Peter Zollinger, Jeff Erikson; front row – Kavita Prakash-Mani, Frances Scott, Jodie Thorpe, Kizzi Keane, Philippa Moore (© JE)

Took part in SustainAbility Board meeting through to around 14.00. One key development: our 3-person US team has broken the $500,000 revenue mark for the first time and with Mark Lee joining us from Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) in January, the prospects there look pretty healthy. Later, a large bunch of us (people from the London, Washington and Zurich offices) went across to the skating rink at Somerset House.

Only time I have skated on ice was in the Cotswolds, at least 40 years ago, when the village fishmonger was out on his wooden skates, doffing his hat to everone he passed. You could look down through the ice to see trapped autumn leaves, with frozen streams of bubbles – a bit like skating across the boundary layer with an alternate universe.

Maddy (Rooke-Ley) and I sat it out, with hot chocolates, watching the passeo. One glorious moment when the SustainAbility folk linked up into a long gliding conga, and the Future Forests people (who just happened to be there same day, same time) linked on. Too much fun, though: the ice marshalls intervened and broke the conga up, but not before I had caught a fragment naughtily skimming by.

In the evening, the team and their partners head off to Yatra in Dover Street, for a delightful evening. As a gimmick to get people talking, Kizzi had allocated everyone with an identity: I turned out to be Samson and found my Delilah in the form of Nick’s Fiona. On the way home with Elaine, I mused that we have some fair old challenges ahead, but as long as we can get our management issues sorted we have the makings of a stunning team for 2004.

Outlaw conga: From the front – Oliver Dudok van Heel, Frances Scott, Nick Robinson, Yasmin Crowther, Tell Muenzing, Seb Beloe, with Jeff Erikson leaving picture on the left (© JE)

Tuesday, December 09, 2003

Council interlude: Craig Mackenzie (Insight), Sophia Tickell (Just Pensions/Oxfam), Peter Zollinger, Julia Hailes (co-founder of SustainAbility), Vernon Jennings (a Director of SustainAbility for nine years before leaving for Novo Nordisk), Yasmin Crowther, Sir Geoffrey Chandler (© Nick Robinson)

Our first face-to-face SustainAbility Council meeting for perhaps three years opens at the Royal Society of Arts. I introduce RSA Director Penny Egan by saying that Hania has been studying US and EU (particularly UK) approaches to film script writing – and discovered that Europeans (particularly Britons) tend to start with some history before getting into the real story, whereas Americans get straight to the story. As good Europeans, I say, we are going to start with a bit of context. Penny kicks off with a welcome noting that the Society is 250 years old next year – and that it has always had many aspects of the sustainability agenda among its priorities. Indeed, its genesis took place in the coffee shops of 18th century London, which many see as the origins of what many would call today ‘civil society’.

The RSA provided a platform – and something of a refuge – for the environmental debate through the Thatcher years in the UK, so in a sense it’s nice to come home. I also note that (Sir) Geoffrey (Chandler), present as a member of our Council, was also a regular denizen of the RSA in 1986 as Director of Industry Year. Apart from members of our Council and Faculty, the meeting also drew together people like Monique Barbut (the new Director of UNEP’s trade, industry and economics division), George Dallas (head of rating agency Standard & Poor’s governance unit), Craig Mackenzie (Insight Investment) and James Wilsdon (Demos).

Our focus during the day is primarily on SustainAbility’s research and think-tank priorities for the next 3-5 years, with the process run by Seb Beloe (our Director of Research & Advocacy) and Peter Zollinger (Executive Director). By the time we report back to the full Core Team late in the day, we have made a huge amount of progress, with a series of new perspectives and ideas surfacing. But perhaps the key outcome is that the team re-discover the value of our Council and Faculty. Many of the team hadn’t been around when we last held a Council meeting, that one at the Royal Aeronautical Society.

Thoughtful: Professor Tom Gladwin (University of Michigan), George Dallas (Standard & Poors) (© Nick Robinson)

Thursday, December 04, 2003

Hand in claw: Sophia Tickell, Lise Kingo and friend (©JE)

Wake up in the Old Bank Hotel, Oxford. Second day of fascinating conference at Magdalen College on non-communicable diseases, including obesity, cardio-vascular disease and diabetes. The purpose of the ‘Oxford Vision 2020’ event, sponsored by Novo Nordisk and organised by the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metalbolism, is to help the World Health Organisation (WHO) develop a strategy for dealing with what is expected to be an epidemic of chronic or non-communicable diseases (NCDs).

A paper circulated ahead of the meeting, and co-authored by Derek Yach of WHO, says that in 2003 there will have been an estimated 56 million deaths globally, of which 60% will be due to NCDs. Yach and his wife wrote another paper last year, which he sends me after the event, arguing that NCDs are emerging as a major threat to any chances we may have of achieveing sustainable development.

In my summing up late in the afternoon I say that the discussions have put me in mind of three characters: Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen (because the NCD challenge is one where the world will have to run faster and faster and yet will continue to slide backwards), Alexander the Great (except that here there is no way to slice to the heart of the Gordian Knot) and Kofi Annan (because of his emphais on partnerships for change – and because of the Global Compact project we are ramping up at SustainAbility, where I am now determined to include a component on NCDs).

The evening’s dinner is at the Pitt Rivers natural history museum, where just about the first case I come across contains a horseshoe crab, a reminder of our Cape Cod jaunt. As we leave, I take a couple of shots of Lise Kingo (VP for the triple bottom line at Novo Nordisk) and Sophia Tickell (just standing down from Oxfam, now part of Just Pensions and a much-valued member of SustainAbility’s Council), with a raucous, toothy passer-by.

Monday, December 01, 2003

Flew last night to Brussels, to speak at Fairer World Forum (www.humanitarian-review.org). Held at the Bibliotheque Solvay, in the shadow of the new European Parliament complex. Among the questions asked: Are multinational corporations the ‘unsung heroes’ of development aid? Is ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ the same in the First and Third Worlds? And, How are global commodities markets rigged against the Third World? Most of the proceedings left me strangely unstirred, but there was one extraordinary statement from a US company representative. He effectively argued that his transport and courrier group should be allowed to adopt different laws and standards in different parts of the world, one of which I happen to know is Burma/Myanmar. He was quickly scrabbling to make good the damage done, insisting that this wasn’t at all what he meant to say even if it was what he said. I wonder.

 

Sunday, November 30, 2003

Pilot lite: Gaia as Amelia Earhart (©JE)

Passing through en route to Cotswolds, Shaftesbury and Bristol, the latter for a fancy dress party, Gaia flew into the kitchen in full regalia. I always loved the stories, even if they both ended tragically, of Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson – Johnson shot down, it seems, by one of our own flak batteries in WWII.

Tuesday, November 25, 2003

Just in from a fascinating evening at the Foreign Press Association Media Awards, held at the Park Lane Hotel, as part of a table hosted by Rory Stear of Freeplay Energy (www.freeplay.net). Among other things, he’s one of the Schwab Foundation’s social entrepreneurs. Freeplay develop windup radios and other devices that help connect people in the developing world – though one unexpectedly large market post-9/11, apparently, has been Americans stocking up their bunkers.

U2’s Bono, clutching a pint of Guinness, cheered up the journalists present by saying (via video) that they were at the “top of the food chain of information”. But they took some cheering up: the issue of ‘friendly fire’ kept coming up – with over 50 journalists killed this year, and John Simpson getting an award for his reporting after a friendly fire incident in Iraq which killed 15 people. One of the winners was the cameraman who continued filming after the incident, wiping his own blood off the camera lens.

Alastair Campbell did a surprisingly funny speech, part of which recalled how he had recently rescued someone in North London who had been beaten up by thugs, helping him to find his way back to a church. Then he handed him his card, at which point the rescued victim realised who his rescuer was and said: “You’re Alastair Campbell? I fucking hate you!” Quite endearing. Hard to disagree with him when he said that skepticism about politicians has morphed into cynicism and even phobias, though it’s equally hard not to see him as part of the problem.

Sat next to Anita Roddick, of The Body Shop, which was good fun. It’s 15 years since she did the foreword for The Green Consumer Guide. Currently, she is much exercised about child slavery. She was handing out this year’s Environment Prize, sponsored by Freeplay, which went to a team which made a TV documentary about China’s much-abused moon bears. One of the things we talked about was the art of blogging, something she does very energetically (www.anitaroddick.com).

Several Andersons present, including Clive (who told an endless series of jokes, one of which was about George W. Bush sitting down so fast when he arrived at Heathrow that Blair didn’t have time to kiss him on both cheeks) and Gillian, of X-Files fame, who wore a ravishing red dress but looked somewhat trucculent throughout.

Sunday, November 23, 2003

B&HRRC: Greg Regaignon, Chris Marsden, Chris Avery (©JE)

Week started off with meeting of ACCA social and environmental committee, which I chair, on Monday. That evening, Jed Emerson arrived to stay. On Tuesday I accompanied him to his event on his Blended Value Map (www.blendedvalue.org) at the London Business School.

Thrown in amongst everything else over these few days, did interviews for two different parts of Newsweek and for the Wall Street Journal (who are profiling Tom Burke).

Meeting of ECGD Advisory Council on Wednesday, after which I return to chaos on the Underground. Nothing to do with President Bush’s visit, they say: signal failures, although I’m still unsure why they threw us all out of Green Park station and told us to walk to Hyde Park Corner. But while I’m away in Lancaster several of the SustainAbility team take part in the protests in London, during one of which an effigy/statue of Bush is toppled.

Took train to Lancaster on Thursday morning. Picked up from the station by Professor V.N. Balasubramanyam of the University’s Economics Department, for the Esmee Fairbairn Lecture I was due to give that evening. Following in footsteps of people like Lord Jenkins and Samuel Brittan. My theme is: ‘Sustainable business: useful – or dangerously misleading oxymoron?’. Useful, I say, but dangerous if we forget just how volatile markets are – and need to be. End by referring to the work of people like Joseph Schumpeter and Nikolai Kondratiev.

Turns out that the new vice-chancellor is Paul Wellings, who I knew when he was at CSIRO in Australia. Nice evening after the lecture, followed by dinner at Paul’s home with a range of people from the University and business. Then back to London on Friday, with a carriage-full of extremely unpleasant supporters of some sport or another. Much of the week devoted to the latest issue of Radar, which will be on the HIV/AIDS issue.

And then on Saturday, yesterday, a meeting of the Trustees of the Amnesty spin-off, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (B&HRRC). Held in SustainAbility’s offices. The photo shows Chris Avery, who has built this extraordinary website (www.business-humanrights.org), Chris Marsden who chairs both the B&HRRC and Amnesty International’s UK business group, and Greg Regaignon, who is helping with the US side of things. Also met Annabel Short for the first time: she has joined to help Chris A with the website, together with Debbie Legall, a volunteer. Good news is that Mary Robinson has agreed to chair the International Advisory Network.

Yesterday was also the 40th anniversary of the JFK assassination. Can still remember the news arriving literally like a bombshell in the common room at our Bryanston house, Forrester. Initially, I recall, the story was that he had been hit by a bazooka in Mexico. Walked around the site, including the Grassy Knoll, a few years back when I was in Dallas. The whole saga still exerts an extraordinary pull, even after all these years.

Saturday, November 15, 2003

Heavy metal: Henry Moore sculpture @ Wolfsberg (©JE)

Day started horribly early, with a 7.30 briefing of speakers for yet another event on sustainability. Really excellent speech to start with by Professor John Silber, President Emeritus of Boston University. Then Peter (Zollinger) and I ran two of the parallel sessions, focusing on global environmental trends and the implications for competitiveness.

Asked to be provocative, I compared the chief financial officers (CFOs) present – and their companies – to the pigs that they had watched race the previous evenings. Like the pigs, companies compete as they strain every sinew to gain the prizes on offer, be they apples or market share. No-one welcomes those who lean over the fence and ask whether the pigs (or companies) have woken up to the fact that the circumstances in which they find themselves aren’t designed with their long-term best interests in mind. But at least it raised a laugh!

After lunch, walked around the Henry Moore sculpture on the hill overlooking the nearby lake, before once again taking a taxi, this time to Zurich airport. Booked on BA, but ended up on a packed plane operated by Swiss, sitting in the very back row of seats, and feeling distinctly queasy as the plane bucked vigorously in high winds as it dropped towards Heathrow. Only mildly sedated by reading John Keegan’s remarkable new book on intelligence in warfare through the ages.

Thursday, November 13, 2003

Schweine: After the pig race (©JE)

Still in Switzerland. Took train to Zurich on Tuesday, staying with Peter and Doris Zollinger in their home overlooking the lake. Yesterday afternoon, Alois Flatz of Sustainable Asset Management (SAM) picked me up and we drove to Vorarlberg in Austria, where we were staying in the Hotel Deuring Schlossle.

The old castle, converted from a fortification into a mansion in the 17th century, has a wonderful atmosphere, but rain was belting down as we arrived in the dark, continued through a splendid dinner (spotlit by the floodlighting outside the castle) and was still at work this morning when we drove to the conference venue.

We were speaking at the 20th International Economy Forum, this time focusing on sustainability. Massive audience and speakers projected onto large screens, so we all had to be made up before our ordeals. Among other speakers, I was delighted to catch up with Jermyn Brooks, who was Global Partner with PwC when I first met him and more recently has been part of the directorate of anti-corruption organisation Transparency International.

Alongside the conference centre was a stage, jutting out into Lake Constanz, set for West Side Story, with the scenery powerfully suggesting the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center. Walked around it in the rain, then was picked up by a taxi for the 1.5 hour drive back to Wolfsberg, the UBS executive development centre. Had been told to bring waterproof clothing, but had pretty much ignored the instructions, thinking it was for optional walking in the countryside. Instead, it turned out that we were having dinner on a farm, with over 100 bankers and their clients eating in a barn, over a the byre where some 80 cows looked on nonplussed.

When I first arrived, I found the guests standing around what looked like a race course, with pigs milling around at various points. I was told that a pig race had just happened – and that another would soon start. Happily, fretting about animal welfare, I was taken off for a drink in one of the barns by Professor Prabhu Guptera of Wolfsberg. We missed the second race, hence my photograph of the coats the pigs had worn during the races, while the pigs were cooling down and being fed.

The smell of cows as we ate was amazingly reminscent of the 1950s on the farm in Northern Ireland. We were told that the cows choose when to be milked and the process if fully automatic. On many farms, cows are milked once or twice a day, whereas here they choose to be milked an average 3.2 times a day. The rafters of the barn were lined with recently picked apples – and crates of apples stood around the dining tables.

Sunday, November 09, 2003

Geneva swan interruptus (©JE)

Last day of the Evian Group conference really got into its stride, not least because of a last-minute – and very candid – intervention by ex-President Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico. Met some quit extraordinary people, then after the conference ended there was a nice winding down over lunch. In the afternoon, took a walk along the waterfront: slight mist, grey skies, strong sense of end of season. This evening, took Joan Bavaria (Trillium Asset Management and CERES) and her husband Jesse to dinner at la perle du lac. They had travelled across from Amsterdam – where they had attended the Triple Bottom Line Investing conference run by Robert Rubinstein – to talk about NGO accountability, something we’re all increasingly interested in these days.

Saturday, November 08, 2003

Geneva (©JE)

Second day at the Evian Group’s annual conference in Geneva (www.eviangroup.org), on the theme of ‘Economic Order in the Global Era’. Invited because the Evian Group’s founder and Executive Director, Professor Jean-Pierre Lehmann of the business school IMD, is someone I’ve known for some years, since we met in Norway when we both spoke at Statoil’s 25th anniversary conference, and has since been a member of SustainAbility’s Faculty.

Up at some ungodly hour to lead a breakfast session from 07.15 on the NGO agenda. It triggered a very lively discussion. A fair number of people here, as with the World Economic Forum meeting a few days back, are inclined to blame NGOs for the collapse of the Cancun trade talks. So have spent a fair amount of time painting a rather different picture.

Among the speakers today were people like Dr Supachai Panitchpakdi, head of the WTO, and Rubens Ricupero, head of UNCTAD. One speaker, more candid than most, noted that “talking about Cancun is like talking about a car accident” – we were all witnesses, but everyone now has slightly different stories about what happened. One Japanese speaker even noted that it was all a bit like Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express: everyone was responsible to some degree.

At the dinner this evening, I sat next to Dr Lyushun Shen, Taiwan’s ‘ambassador’ here. All the functions of an embassy, but not recognised by the government, which makes things a little more difficult. Fascinating conversation which took off in all sorts of directions, ranging from the Communist Revolution in China (his father accompanied the Nationalist gold across to Formosa) to the ‘Flying Tigers’, the aircraft of WWII, the history of islands like Malta and Cyrpus, the affairs of Lord Mountbatten, and films like The Guns of Navarone and Waterloo Bridge. A hugely enjoyable evening.

Thursday, November 06, 2003

A wonderful, almost Spring-like day. Awake from one of my ‘significant’ nightmare-dreams, that come along every few years. In this dream I found myself for some reason strapped to a towering crow’s nest structure on a vast, juggernaut-like vessel steaming down a major river. A bit like a pocket battleship. All grey metal and sharp edges. The vantage point afforded wonderful views of pink-tinged waters, as the sun set, but I was acutely aware that we would be passing under low bridges and that I would also likely suffer from hypothermia by the end of the night. No way down the vertiginous structure. The vessel picked up speed and I became increasingly agitated. Eventually, I can’t remember how, the crew woke up to the fact that I was above their heads and a rescue team arrived, though they were wielding surgical instruments that had me wondering whether they planned amputation. An over-reaction, perhaps, to the accelerating pace of events in the office?

In any event, Elaine and I start off with a meeting with Stephen Ward, the pensions expert who managed to extract us from the rubble of the Equitable Life disaster – one of the reasons I am so interested in the corporate responsibility and international justice issues surrounding the pensions sector.

Then, after several other meetings, off to St Yeghiche Armenian Church in Cranley Gardens for a World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting. Met by Armen Sarkissian, previously Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia, who explains the history of the church and of the Armenian diaspora (right back to the Crusades) to Guy de Joncquieres (World Trade Editor of the Financial Times) and I. The meeting is held in an upstairs room, with a glazed wall overlooking the nave of the church. Meeting chaired by Jose-Maria Figueres, co-CEO of WEF and an ex-PM of Costa Rica. One of the most interesting suggestions for the 2004 WEF agenda comes from Kazuo Ishiguro (An Artist of the Floating World, Remains of the Day), who proposes that the nexus of celebrity and power be explored. With Schwarzenegger now Governor of California, the proposal resonnates strongly.

Wednesday, November 05, 2003

Erotic Gherkin (©JE)

Francesca (Muller) and I start the day with a visit to Sara Fox, New Building Director at Swiss Re reponsible for the construction of the company’s new London headquarters skyscraper, fondly known as the ‘Erotic Gherkin’. Huge fun and we emerge determined to launch a new series of ‘Change Agent’ profiles in SustainAbility’s Radar. Jed Emerson of the Hewlett Foundation will be retrospectively adopted as the first in the series, Albina du Boisrouvray will be the second and Sara the third.

Sunday, November 02, 2003

Getting ready to fly to Copenhagen, to speak at Nordic Partnership conference tomorrow. Yesterday had a wonderful interview with Albina du Boisrouvray of the Association Francois-Xavier Bagnoud (www.fxb.org), which will feed into the HIV/AIDS issue of SustainAbility’s Radar newsletter. In the evening, Elaine and I went to Steve Warshal’s 60th birthday party in Queen’s Park. Fair number of current and ex- Greenpeacers, including Peter Melchett (wearing an anti-GM T-shirt and sporting an animated third arm, reminiscent of Zaphod Beeblebrox’s second head), Robin-Grove White, John Sauven and Peter Knight.

Saturday, November 01, 2003

Several linked environmental stories in The Times today, on the loss of Arctic ice and the long-term threat to polar bears, on the impact condensation trails produced by high-flying aircraft are having on global warming trends, and on the likelihood that in future planes will have to fly 5,000 feet lower, exposing passengers to more turbulence. This evening, watched a programme on the 1953 storm which killed over 500 people around the UK and some 1800 in The Netherlands.

Often feel people are completely disconnected with the slow-burn trends affecting their environment, but as I cycled home along New Oxford Street I found myself tailing – and then joining – a mass bike rally, with a surprising number of motorcycle and bicyle police riding herd. They were shutting off all the side streets, including Tottenham Road, so we could pass. A massive sound system on one cycle-based platform was booming out The Bee Gees’ Tragedy. One cyclist, just ahead of me, was trailing a huge hammer and sickle flag, which seemed slightly out of tune. Drivers and pedestrians seemed friendly, or nonplussed. After a slow amble for 10 or 11 blocks, I parted company with the throbbing herd, ducking down Berwick Street.

 

Friday, October 31, 2003

The Sixties redux

Yesterday, an old friend from university days – Leigh Sebba – stumbled across my website, even though it isn’t yet launched and I haven’t seen him for years. One of his comments: How about a photo of what you looked like in the late Sixties if you’re going to have a picture of Elaine in 1973? Well, here’s something from the days when I had hair and the world was pregnant with opportunity – and seething with great music (see ‘Influences’, Music).

The big news story today is the ousting of Tory Party leader Iain Duncan Smith, with Michael Howard seen as his likely successor. I don’t think I have ever met Howard, but I remember being linked with him in an item in The Times years ago. There was a palace revolution going on at St Paul’s School for Girls, where we both had daughters and various people were trying to turf out the then High Mistress. For some strange reason, maybe because we were both then involved in the environment, we were mentioned in the piece, the unspoken implication being that we were leading the coup. No truth in the rumour.

Thursday, October 30, 2003

Rupert Bassett: writings on the wall (©JE)

Hugely enjoyable day, with new photographs being done of the team and Rupert (Bassett), our designer, also continuing putting up the stream of words and phrases around the office walls. These were all suggested by team members, with languages including German, Hindi and Japanese. One of my ten suggestions, based on The Beatles’ Revolution, one of my Desert Island 16 Discs (see Influences), was YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION. In the photograph Rupert is applying the word HOPE, following THE PEOPLE’S HALL (where SustainAbility was based for six years) and NOT CHEATING ON OUR CHILDREN. This afternoon, Yasmin and I interviewed Angela Wilkinson and Betty Amailuk of Shell about their work on a set of HIV/AIDS scenarios for Africa, for the next issue of Radar. Seb, Yasmin and I also start work on a possible new UN Global Compact project, focusing on the likely future balance between the public and private sectors in the transition towards sustainable development. Cycle home in the beginnings of an autumn mist.

Monday, October 27, 2003

An interesting comment from Geoffrey Chandler today, when reviewing what I planned to report here on last week’s Environment Foundation Consultation – and finding himself tempted into reading further back into the BabelLOG stream. In the process, he came across the reference to Arminius and the muffling of a mule bell (October 17).

Noted that it reminded him of his time during WWII with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Greece. “We used to do this to our mules when crossing roads at night during the German occupation. Recalcitrant beasts, but remarkable for (their) stamina and sure-footedness. Only the Greek mule-drivers could control them by the use of language which enriched my vocabulary, but was unusable in polite society.”

Another, American, friend spotted the mule story and says his father also worked with mules when with the WWII US Army – and recalled sitting on a military tribunal trying a man who had been caught abusing a mule, which was apparently a serious matter in the Artillery!

Sunday, October 26, 2003

Deer and jackdaws, Richmond Park (©JE)

Elaine, Hania and I take a walk in the Park: clatter of deer antlers as the stags battled. The skies overhead seemed quiter, even though they aren’t, much. But scheduled Concorde flights of BA’s Concorde did stop on Friday. Lamenting the grounding of this “time machine”, Jonathan Glancer wrote on the front page of yesterday’s Guardian that “generations of the environmentally conscious thought of her as an evil, smokebelching dragon, a gas-guzzling curse, pandering only to the swinish rich.” Couldn’t have put it better myself. Having lived under the flight lanes into Heathrow since 1975 (Concorde’s maiden flight was in 1969), I have always felt I would far rather see her in a sculpture park than overhead.

Strapping military engines onto a civil airliner must have seemed a wizzard idea at the time, but few industrial products have so conspicuously failed to deliver across the triple bottom line. That said, I was in a drear minority of one at the Windsor event, where most people wanted to see the final curtain of three Concordes landing in sequence – and lamented the passing of an icon. One elderly participant who had flown on the plane said he had been seduced by the much-vaunted saving of time, but drank so much in-flight that when he got to his destination he had to go to bed.

Soli Townsend, Sir Geoffrey Chandler (©JE)

Thursday 23rd: One of the central themes of the Environment Foundation since I took over as Chairman has been the task of bridging the gap between the generations, symbolised for me by the picture of Soli(taire) Townsend and Sir Geoffrey Chandler approaching St George’s House. We started the day with a gripping presentation by Angela Wilkinson of the Shell scenarios group. She compared two different sets of scenarios, Shell’s latest ‘Business Case’ and ‘Prism’ scenarios, and a different set which had resulted from the ‘Riskworld’ process she had led.

Then Geoffrey followed with a quite brilliant speech, which will also be posted on the Foundation’s website (www.environmentfoundation.net). It began like this:

“As I lay half-waking half-sleeping in my bed this morning there came to me a vision of the decline and impending fall of the Roman Empire. There were the gilded palaces the imperial corporate headquarters remote in style and immune in culture from the real world outside. There were the cries of peacocks, the ripple of water from the marble fountains, the rustle of silk from the slave girls clearing the remnants of the previous nights debauch, whose lingering odours were disguised by the scent of roses. And there was the Emperor himself the Empires CEO rich beyond the dreams of avarice, indifferent to the picture he presented to the world or to the fact that his disproportionate rewards brought the imperial game into disrepute.

“And yet there were some stirrings of disquiet in his mind, closed though in many ways it was. His financial gains, he felt he had to say in justification, were no greater than those of the chief gladiator who, while he survived, was richly rewarded by the symbols or logos, as they were then called in the Greek language of the wealthy wine shops and the brothel-keepers, but whose retirement, the Emperor failed to observe, was in no way cushioned and could in any case be short-lived.

“His disquiet should have been heightened by the news that the barbarians were at the gates. But he was happy to dismiss the implications of their presence. These terrorists, as he characterised them, using the Latin word rather than the Greek barbarian these terrorists, he said, spring like Athena fully armed from the head of Zeus (he was not an uneducated man), and we will simply destroy them. And to soothe the mob we will in the meantime have more bread and circuses and call them Imperial Social Responsibility or ISR for short. So pull up the ladder, Caligula. Were all right.

“But then the mood seemed to darken as I looked beyond the limen, the threshold of Rome, to the limes, the shadowy possessions beyond, which were intended to be the Empires outer protection. It was thence that the barbarians came, their origins rooted in the inequity, injustice and oppression from which their world suffered. And their operations, however dastardly they might seem to the Romans, derived succour from the conditions of that world. But none of this was understood in Rome itself. Decline, it seemed to me in my dreaming state, would inevitably become fall, since symptoms, rather than causes, clouded the judgement of men and monopolised their attention. Rome would not survive unless it changed.

“And then the vision faded.”

Because I have been reading various books on the Roman Empire, the imagery snagged my imagination, but Geoffrey’s style of speaking is itself powerfully resonant of a different, sometimes more articulate and certainly more classically informed era.

Indeed, I joked in introducing him that he sometimes reminds me of a coelacanth, the mysterious ‘living fossil’ first found in 1938. He countered that the coelacanth is primitive, has to be dredged up from great depths and begins to disintegrate as it is hauled into the sun-flecked surface waters. Behind the humour, though, lies a shared passion for history. As Churchill once put it, the further you can see into the past, the further you can see into the future.

For much of the day, working groups explored the challenges of the next 20 years. One of the things that strikes me these days is how much the NGO sector now knows about the corporate world. The best example over these few days was Sophia Tickell, of Oxfam and Just Pensions, and also – like Geoffrey Chandler, Ian Christie and Jane Nelson – a member of SustainAbility’s Council.

Jane works on ‘Next Steps’ (©JE)

Friday: After the working groups reported back on their progress with their 20-year road-maps, Ian Christie (Joint Head, Economic & Sustainable Resources, Surrey County Council and Environment Foundation Trustee) and Jane Nelson (IBLF, Harvard and Environment Foundation Trustee) treated us to a pair of remarkable perspectives on what they had heard.

Ian began by noting that the software folk who wrote the code which resulted in the ‘Millennium Bug’ scare had never imagined that their code would last as long as it did, nor that it would threaten to bring down the world’s IT systems. Now, he said, “chickens are coming home to roost on an industrial scale”. He wondered why, if the next 20 years demanded gutst political leadership we hadn’t had it – at least in this area – in the past 20 years? One key to progress, he concluded, would be for governments – which he suggested suffer from “business envy” – to be lobbied by business leaders for “smart regulation”.

Jane also focused, among other things, on the role of governments – as champions, regulators, buyers, funders and so on. She stressed the key role of stock exchange listing requirements and underscored the need to mobilise consumers, some of whom can’t afford change, some of whom don’t know about the need for change, and many of whom currently fall into the “don’t care” category. She mentioned that the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard is planning work that will convene and hopefully mobilise the chairs of the CSR committees of major companies as another “infection factor”.

In short, the Foundation’s 20th anniversary Consultation gave us a huge amount to think about in planning our programme for the next 3-5 years. The Trustees’ meeting in the afternoon went extremely well and we left feeling that this had been one of the best – if not the best – events in the Foundation’s 20 year history.

Afterglow: Sheila Bloom with Helen (©JE)

Thursday, October 23, 2003

Windsor Castle (©JE)

To Windsor for the Environment Foundation’s 20th anniversary Consultation. Held in St George’s House (www.stgeorges-windsor.org), inside the walls of Windsor Castle, these events convene 25-30 people to discuss emerging issues. The discussions are subject to the Chatham House Rule, so what follows only attributes ideas and contributions where those involved gave their permission.

The themes and results of past Consultations can be found on the Foundation’s website (www.environmentfoundation.net). Arrived feeling slightly disorientated: despite all Maddy’s carefully prepared notes, I had taken a train from the wrong station and left my mobile phone on the back seat in the taxi. As it turned out, I wasn’t too late and Helen Holdaway (the Foundation’s Director) had also mislaid her mobile.

Helen is the only person to have attended all the Consultations over the life of the Foundation – and, indeed, has organised most of them. This event,sadly, was to be her last as Director of the Foundation, since she is retiring. The latest meeting, entitled ’21st Century Values at Work’, pulled together a fairly wide spectrum of people, representing companies like BT, Dow, National Grid Transco and Shell, NGOs like the 21st Century Trust, Amnesty International, Business in the Environment, the Food Ethics Council and Oxfam, and a range of people who variously make their living trying to drive CSR- and SD-related change. For example, it was great to see Marianne Knuth again: she is half-Danish, half-Zimbabwean, and is Director of the Kufunda Village project in Zimbabwe (www.kufunda.org). She was also one of the Foundation’s Travelling Fellows.

Dilemma sharing session. Foreground: Dr Angela Wilkinson (Shell), Dr Chris Tuppen (BT), Dr David Russell (Dow Europe) and John Lotherington (21st Century Trust) (©JE).

To set the scene, the first evening kicked off with a presentation from Professor Robert Worcester, Chairman of pollsters MORI, on the trends in UK public opinion over the past 20 years – actually since 1979, just pre-Mrs Thatcher. As insightful as ever, Bob made his usual distinction between public opinion (the ripples on the surface of the sea, the foam and spray, whipped this way and that), attitudes (the deep-running currents) and values (the incredibly powerful tides driving our priorities and politics alike). He noted that values are the hardest to change, “almost beyond any counter-pressure”. Our individual values are set by the age of 25, he argued, but later pointed out that cultural values can be quite plastic over the long term. For example, we don’t do slavery any more – and are uncomfortable with those that still do.

Bob’s session was followed by an experimental sharing of dilemmas between the participants. They were asked to recall when their personal values had to some degree collided with those of their origanisation. At the suggestion of Sheila Bloom, of the Institute of Global Ethics, we broke the participants out into small working groups (see photo), which made it much easier to get everyone to contribute and explore some of the messier, taxing aspects of working life.

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

Hania and grapes (©HE)

Woke up to the news that Tony Blair has the same complaint I have, arrythmia of the heart. Meanwhile flocks of eager starlings have been tearing at the strawberry grapes that grow up the front of our house. Hania took the photo of her reflection in a sink-full of grapes she was turning into some delicious concoction. It really has been an extraordinary October, with real Indian summer weather. Cycling to and from the office today was a complete joy.

Had meetings with people like (Professor) John Stopford and Stephanie Roberts from London Business School on a new project they are planning, with Seb (Beloe) and Maddy (Rooke-Ley) on our planned December Council meeting, and a telephone conference with Etienne Eichenberger of the World Economic Forum (WEF). He and I are working on an ‘Open Space’ component for next year’s Davos summit. This evening, the Pompeii theme continued with a stunning TV film on the eruptions and the impacts on those living there. I could almost feel my flesh vaporising and my brain boiling and exploding out of my skull: too much imagination. And now they’re growing grapes on the slopes of the volcano again.

Saturday, October 18, 2003

Apple sculpture at AstraZeneca’s HQ (©JE)

Lively day at AstraZeneca’s HQ outside Stockholm speaking to a group of 30 or so people responsible for various aspects of corporate responsibility. The countryside ablaze with the yellows, oranges and reds of fall. As ever, I was struck by the way that glacier-scoured rocks break the surface everywhere you look – the sense of the sheer weight of the Ice Ages (Sweden is still rising after the retreat of the glaciers) is extraordinary. But not sure the drivers in their headlit Volvos give the next Ice Age much thought.

On the flight home I finished The Battle that Stopped Rome, the story by Peter S. Wells of the obliteration of three Roman legions – some 20,000 men – by German tribes under the leadership of Arminius. Having seen relics of the battle at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn during a recent visit to DeutschePost (heard yesterday that we got the DP contract), the book was gripping, even if the writing was a bit ragged in parts (also just starting Tom Holland’s narrative history of the Roman Republic, Rubicon, which is fantastically readable).

If Wells is right, the bulk of the slaughter was over inside an hour. The scale of the disaster, which shaped Roman thinking for 400 years, made me think – repeatedly – of the incipient American imperium. The Romans massively underestimated their opponents. The battlefield turns out to have been a pre-prepared killing zone, with a wall built of turf, 15-feet deep and two thousand feet long, to trap the legions. Many of the ‘Germans’, including Arminius himself, had trained with the Roman legions. Shades of the US support for Osama bin-Laden in the war for Afghanistan – and, in the war against Iran, for Saddam Hussein.

One of the most poignant finds was the skeleton of a four-year-old female mule, the Roman equivalent of a Jeep, I suppose, with a bronze bell around her neck. The clapper had been muffled by oat and pea straw torn from the ground – and the straw has been dated by archaeologists to the autumn of AD 9, the year of the battle. It seemed she had tried to jump the wall and broken her neck. A small drama, given the sheer scale of the disaster, but it brought the terror home in a way that statistics often fail to.

Makes me think of the Swedish minister I was told about this time who, responsible for road traffic safety, has the details of every road fatal accident phoned through to him as soon as it happens. An attempt to get to grips with the tragedies behind the the facts, the numbers.

Friday, October 17, 2003

Interesting day in Stockholm at the 10th anniversary conference of NTM, the Network for Transport and Environment (www.ntm.a.se). Most of the participants are immersed in the worlds of logistics, transport and mobility. Excellent bunch of people, some of them determined to expand NTM’s activities into the rest of Europe. Lots of discussion of congestion charges, multi-fuel vehicles, safety research, fuel cells and the like.

Invited to speak by Magnus Schwan, who SustainAbility used to work for when he was at hauliers ASG, verifying ASG’s environmental report. He moved on to Green Cargo – and then recently launched himself as an independent sustainable logistics management consultant. Bulk of conference in Swedish, but extraordinary moment when Magnus did his entire presentation in English in order that (1) I would understand and (2) help promote NTM internationally. Bit sure whether to feel pleased or guilty. Either way, I now feel responsible for helping them get the message out. Among other things, NTM have developed a computer-based interface for handling environmental data for goods/freight transport, NTMCalc.

Fascinating discussion this evening over dinner with Per Carstedt. He owns a Ford dealership in Sweden, where he has been driving a greening initiative (www.GreenZone.nu). His brother, who ran IKEA in Europe, is similarly motivated. Per is also Chairman of the BioAlcohol Fuel Foundation (www.baff.info). Much influenced by Karl-Henrik Robert of the Natural Step Foundation.

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

After the Board meeting 1 (Nick Robinson)

After the Board meeting 2 (Nick Robinson)

The bulk of the day was spent on SustainAbility Board meeting. Maddy (Rooke-Ley) now organises the meetings and does the minutes: those also taking part (and shown in the photo) were Yasmin (Crowther, who heads our consulting practice), Peter (Zollinger, our Executive Director), Geoff (Lye, Director, who chaired the meeting), Seb (Beloe, who heads our think-tank), myself and Tom (Delfgaauw, ex-Shell and our first Non-executive Director). Key issues included the financial outlook, client reviews, a spate of new projects we have won, the future of our Global Reporters program with UNEP, and the imminent prospect of opening a new office in the Asia-Pacific region.

In the evening, Phillip Toyne – who with his wife Molly Harriss-Olson runs an Australian consultancy, EcoFutures (www.ecofutures.com) – brought in Mick Roche of BHP-Billiton, to explain their evolving ‘Green Lead’ initiative (www.greenlead.com). Phillip was formerly Head of the Australian Conservation Foundation and Deputy Secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Environment. Molly, among many other things was a marine campaigner for Greenpeace and then headed Clinton’s President’s Council on Sustainable Development.

Sunday, October 12, 2003

Quinces (©JE)

Glorious, sunny morning. The quinces are falling off the bushes onto the garden path. Key story today is that the Nobel peace prize has gone to Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian who was Iran’s first woman judge before the 1979 Isamic revolution – and was then sacked by the mullahs. In 2000, she ended up in solitary confinement. She is the first Muslim woman to win the prize. One of her key messages is that sharia law could be modernised without undermining Islam. Spent bulk of the day editing the text of website, taking on board comments of folk like Tom Delfgaauw, Tim (Elkington), Julia Hailes, Tell Muenzing, Francesca Muller and Francesca van Dijk.

Saturday, October 11, 2003

Interesting, after the WHOI visit and whalewatching off Cape Cod, to read in today’s International Herald Tribune that researchers have now identified a disease in whales akin to decompression sickness, or the ‘bends’. The suspicion is that the military’s use of powerful sonar systems may have scared the animals into surfacing too fast from deep waters, leading to mass strandings. Another possibility is that the sonar pulses themselves may directly trigger bubble formation in the nitrogen-saturated tissues of the whales.

UNEP meeting turns out rather better than I had expected, given my suspicion about industry federations. They are notoriously conservative, largely because they feel they must protect their slowest-moving members against impending environmental, human rights or sustainability laws, rules or standards. But the interest today came less from the federation people than from the speakers and people from groups like BSR Europe, CSR Europe, GEMI and the Global Peporting Initiative (GRI), particularly Nancy Bennet.

The focus was on voluntary agreements, by which business commits to achieve certain CSR or SD objectives, particularly on the UN Global Compact. (Lord) Richard Holme, representing the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), warned that a PR approach to the Global Compact would be “as superficial as a spray of paint on an old car.” Steve Sawyer of Greenpeace, who I hadn’t seen for around 15 years, accepted that there had been convergence between business and NGOs like his, but stressed the need for a new “global accountability regime”.

Ironic that because I had sent my slides as soon as I was asked, rather than the night before like some people, UNEP mislaid them – so I was halted in mid-flow, slideless, and had to speak off the top of my head. Seemed to work. Later, in response to a question I asked one panel of speakers about the way lawyers are increasingly slowing progress on corporate reporting, particularly in the US, David Vidal of the US Conference Board argued that we should throttle back on targeting CEOs and instead go for lawyers and law schools. Lawyers, he noted, constitute “90% of the drag” on the system.

Useful first meeting with the new head of UNEP’s Trade, Industry & Economics division, Monique Barbut. She’s keen for SustainAbility to push ahead with our ‘Engaging Stakeholders’ program, and together we came up with another area where we could work together. More anon.

Friday, October 10, 2003

Eurostar fish (©JE)

Worked at home in the morning, then caught the Eurostar for Paris. As usual, the fish hanging over the arrivals hall caught my eye. On my way to speak at the 20th UNEP consultative meeting with industry associations, having also been at the event that more or less started all of this, the World Industry Conference on Environmental Management (WICEM), in Versailles during 1984.

Thursday, October 09, 2003

For the second evening running, cycling home through Hyde Park, breathing through my mouth, I swallowed a bluebottle – or something leggy and frantic. Can’t have been that hungry: spat it out.

Hania home from Dublin, where she went to see a friend in a play. Another friend of hers, Peter, calls this evening to say he is leaving The Times to go to the US and work for General Wesley Clark’s campaign. Elaine and I heard Wesley Clark speak in Davos earlier in the year, before the Iraq invasion, and he came across well. A bit of a contrast to Arnie Schwarzenegger, just elected as California’s replacement Governor. Not sure I’d vote for him on the strength of his website, schwarzenegger.com.

Wednesday, October 08, 2003

A day spent developing the book on social enterprise I am planning with Pamela Hartigan, managing director of The Schwab Foundation, thinking through the revamp of SustainAbility’s website with Nick Robinson, corresponding with people who may join our Council and Faculty, working up the panel session I am involved in for UNEP in Paris on Friday, and sketching out speeches for later in the year. Also invited the Core Team to comment on the latest draft of the johnelkington.com website.

On the way home, I was forcefully struck by the beauty of the evening. The darkening blue sky had a few pink-brown slashes of cloud, as though a bear had raked the heavens, stirring underlying sediments. By the time I was cycling through Hyde Park, however, it was already dark, with a continuous stream of lights whizzing up and down Park Pane, and around Hyde Park Corner, glimpsed beneath the canopies of the great trees. Gathering drifts of plane tree leaves crunched under my tyres. The Moon posed brilliantly above an Elizabethan lace collar of pink-beige cloud. Hammersmith Bridge was wonderfully lit, the Thames lying low in its bed. Mars still bright in the southern sky.

I pondered as I pedalled down Madrid Road, why it is that often when my mood lifts powerfully I then see that the Moon is nearly full. Full Moon, according to The Times, is on 10 June. Maybe it’s the horshoe crab in me?

Tuesday, October 07, 2003

Sample of Radar cover, October-November 03

First day back in the office. Great buzz: Jodie (Thorpe) just back from Bangkok, Kavita (Prakash-Mani) from Cuzco. We receive boxes of the printed version of the first edition of our revamped newsletter, Radar, themed around the language of corporate responsibility (CSR) and sustainable development (SD). A decade or so ago, Radar was originally started partly as a way of forcing the team to read, think and write, but the thing developed a life of its own. A fairly wide range of people read it regularly (it came out 10 times a year), and many subscribed. But with so many competing newsletters in the field, we concluded a few months back that the best way forward was to go ‘New Economy’ – concentrating on providing insight rather than news, in a simplified (but attractive) format, and giving it away for free. The first edition looks very good. Free subscriptions are available either from SustainAbility’s website, www.sustainability.com or by e-mailing info@sustainability.com.

Monday, October 06, 2003

Both the New York Times and Sunday Times carry stories today on ‘offshoring’, the process by which millions of jobs are being exported to developing countries like India. The Sunday Times headline, alongside a photograph of a train draped with hundreds of Indians on their way to work, declaims: ‘This is the 8.15 to Bombay. It is carrying Indian commuters, on the way to do YOUR JOB.’

If globalisation is to succeed, this trend is inevitable, but it will be interesting to see what happens if consultancies, think-tanks or even SRI funds start to head down this track. I’m pretty sure that major companies rated by their analysts would feel – at least for a few years – that the ratings merited considerably less attention. This is something SustainAbility will be thinking through in a new project for BT on the ‘geography of jobs’.

Late morning, Elaine, Hania and I head off to Richmond to see a matinee of Calendar Girls. Delightful film and interesting handling of a range of ethical dilemmas, though in the end most were glossed over, like the cherries on the buns that so artfully concealed middle-aged nipples.

Saturday, October 04, 2003

Nudistes (sample of photo by Yann Arthus-Bertrand)

Reader advisory: If you’re squeamish or sensitive, don’t read on. But a weird set of mental connections this morning as I opened The Guardian Weekend magazine. Saw a series of stunning aerial photos of Europe by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. One that caught my eye: a wide expanse of naked bodies – nudists on a beach at Arnaouchot, France. And these were the connections that tumbled one atop another:

1 Mass graves : The connection is almost inevitable these days, for anyone who has seen the graves opened in Iraq, Bosnia or various parts of Europe and the old Soviet Union after WWII. But the connection was even more urgent in my mind since – in a Martha’s Vineyard bookshop a few days back – I had picked up an indescribable book of photos of the executions of women and children by the SS in Baltic States in WWII.

2 Ancient Cypriot slag : A few days before that, we had visited the Museum of Semitic Studies in Cambridge, MA, to see an exhibition on Cyprus, where I was partly raised as a child in the 1950s. A small, somewhat disappointing display, but one thing I commented on was a great shard of iron slag discarded ages ago by early copper smelters on the island. It looked exactly like an opened mass grave: the corpses had that browned, leathery look, intimately nested with people they would probably not have given the time of day in normal life. And mass graves will be found – unless they’ve been ‘tidied up’ – when the Green Line goes down on Cyprus. The Turkish invasion of the northern parts of the island wasn’t quite on the scale established by the SS or Serbs, but there’s a good deal of truth and reconciliation to be done before Turkey or the northern part of Cyprus are allowed into the EU.

3 Barbed wire : Last night I began a book I bought in Cambridge: Barbed Wire: A Political History. In the book, originally published in France, Olivier Razac explores the role of barbed wire, first patented in the US in 1874, in three great disasters: the physical elimination and then the ethnocide of the North American Indians; the unthinkable bloodbath of modern war; and at the center of the totalitarian catastrophe, the concentration camps and the Jewish and Gypsy genocides.

4 Human nature : Like photography, barbed wire’s uses reflect human nature. The same technology that enable Arthus-Bertrand to capture the beauty in everything from the symbols on airport taxiing areas to offshore windfarms, enabled SS soldiers to capture the outrages they performed on innocents – with the resulting photos sometimes found on their own corpses later in the war. Barbed wire could be presented as highly eco-efficient, in that it takes very small amounts of material to do work that would otherwise take huge amounts of stone, concrete or earth-moving, but in the end it’s what we choose to do with an such innovations that really counts.

Links: Yann Arthus-Bertrand-Bertrand, The Earth from the Air – 366 Days, Thames & Hudson, London, 2003; Olivier Razac, Barbed Wire: A Political History, The New Press, New York, 2002.

Thursday, October 02, 2003

Plymouth Rock (©JE)

Left Cape Cod, via Sandwich, then headed north to Plymouth. Here the much-celebrated Rock had a wonderful Union Jack-style shadow falling over it, thanks to the surrounding Union-Jack-style fencing. Not sure whether it was accidental or not. Behind and on a rise stands a powerful monument to the Indians and a memorial tablet recalling the genocide that followed. Later, we drove out to Carver to see the cranberry bogs – and were lucky enough to arrive as migrant workers were harvesting one of the bogs. The red berries floating on the floodwaters looked like something the artist Christo might have done, though – who knows – perhaps he originally got his inspiration from the cranberry harvest?

Link: www.cranberries.org

Cranberries awaiting harvest (©JE)

The harvest begins (©JE)

Wednesday, October 01, 2003

John with horsehoe crab shell (Elaine Elkington)

Glorious day, so we take the ferry across to Marthas Vineyard. Arriving in Woods Hole shortly after 09.00, though, we are sent back 3.7 miles to Falmouth to park, and then shipped back by bus to Woods Hole. What a country! But no doubt it keeps the oil companies happy. Once in Vineyard Haven, and after squabbling about whether we should walk, cycle or rent a car, we took a #13 bus to Edgartown, then found a small, 5-minute ferry across to Chappaquiddick Island.

Picked up at the ferry dock by Dick, a driver from The Trustees of Reservations. A few miles later, we were invited to scale the Eiger-like back end of a Ford F250 open-backed truck with four over-65s, at least two of whom seemed to have had (or to need) hip transplants. We are headed for a guided tour through the Cape Poge Wildlife Refuge, across the infamous Chappaquiddick Dike Bridge, along East Beach which faces the open Atlantic, up to the Cape Poge wooden lighthouse – which has been moved seven times since it was first built, as erosion chased it around the island.

On the way we see a great blue heron, cormorants, a hovering hawk, fishermen taking part in a fishing derby (at least one grim-faced wife sits inside a SUV while her man does what a man has to do, rod in hand), Monarch butterflies, then a small drift of shed horseshoe crab shells, complete with claws and gills. I am fascinated, having bought just a couple of days back Crab Wars (University Press of New England, 2002), by William Sargent, subtitled A Tale of Horseshoe Crabs, Bioterrorism, and Human Health.

More or less undisturbed for 300 million years, horseshoe crabs were found some 25 years ago to have an unsuspected use. Their blood provides the basis for the most reliable test for deadly gram-negative bacteria. To date, apparently, around a million lives have been saved. That’s the good news, as presumably is the fact that the result is a multi-million-dollar industry. But the bad news, at least for horseshoe crabs, is that they are bled to extract Limulus lysate.

The book catalogues the fiercesome politics involved. But Sarah, our guide today, noted that one of the biggest current threats to the future of the horseshoe crab is lobster fishing. The lobster fishermen use horseshoe crabs to bait their pots. Elaine ate lobster tonight.

Finally, Sarah also mentioned that the lighthouse-men had to clamber up and down stairs in the night to keep an eye on their lights in the days when they burned whale oil. This burned fierce and fast. The whaling captains houses are a major feature of Edgartown. In quiet moments, I am reading Moby-Dick for what I think may be the first time, though its one of those books that feels as though its in ones life-blood.

Link: www.thetrustees.org