Archive

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

NORMAL SERVICE …

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

DRENCHED

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

Saturday, June 25, 2005

VERTICAL SPEED INDICATOR

Age-eaten vertical speed indicator atop pristine book cover

Jude the Obscure: dangerous rose

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

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

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

Thursday, June 23, 2005

TIM O’RIORDAN

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

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

Tim on double bass

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

SLOWLY LEADING THE WORLD?

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

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

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

WSBF CSR FORUM

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

Monday, June 20, 2005

NEW ECGD ROLE

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

INNOCENT RUMINATIONS


My udder van is …

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

Saturday, June 18, 2005

PARISIAN REFLECTIONS

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

Dripping paint

Crabs

Elaine and womannequin

Two heads

Woman looking out towards Montmartre

Shadow puppets

Three mannequins

Dancer

Gilded chairs

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

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

View from BT Tower east towards the City

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

BLOWING IN THE WIND: HITLER

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

Monday, June 13, 2005

MOLLY & MARCH

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

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

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

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

Molly March, me, Cafe Fish

Molly, me, March, Nick

Saturday, June 11, 2005

GAIA GOES WEST

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

Friday, June 10, 2005

GEORGE BUSH: AMERICAN CYCLOPS

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

GEORGE BUSH II: AMERICAN CYCLOPS

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

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

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

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

Caveman politics

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

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

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

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

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

The second Republican Cyclops?

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

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

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

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

Perfect Storm, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

Hold on, Arnie’s coming

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gearing down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, June 09, 2005

MUSEUM OF FLIGHT

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

Foreground, the pedal-powered MacReady Gossamer Albatross II

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

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

Super Corsair, late WWII variant

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

A DAY IN SEATTLE

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, June 06, 2005

FLIGHT SERGEANT BERRY RESURFACES

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

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

Sunday, June 05, 2005

EXPERIENCE MUSIC PROJECT

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

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

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

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

B17 over Elliott Bay

Herds of metallic brontosauri

Darth Vader’s dark side

Bob Dylan and guitar geyser

Dylan, Joan Baez and Tide of Conformity

Civil rights marchers

Jimi Hendrix

Frank Gehry’s undulations and tree

This works for me

How do we do this for sustainability?

FOOLHARDY KILLDEER

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

Metal version of one of the predators

Carol and Blake, mother and son

It’s the idea that counts

Saturday, June 04, 2005

OTTER AT WORK

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

PUGET SOUND

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

SOY BEAN POWERED

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

THE BRITISH INVASION

The Edgewater Hotel

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

Maria and Mark

Friday, June 03, 2005

ROOM WITH A VIEW

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

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

Docked

RATS

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

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

Rats 1

Rats 2

TBL IN BC AND OZ

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

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

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

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

Thursday, June 02, 2005

WHISTLER

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

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

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

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

Vancouver dawn

Whistler

Homeward bound: Elizabeth Bowker at wheel

Blue blur

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

ANOTHER DAY IN VANCOUVER

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

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

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

Steam clock

Catatonic mouse at the feast

 

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

TOTEMIC WELCOME

Among other things, did a phone-in programme for CBC today. Then, this evening, out by bus to the UBC Museum of Anthropology (http://www.moa.ubc.ca/) for welcome reception, surrounded by totem poles, masks and canoes. Second time I have been to the Museum – and I genuinely can’t wait to have a serious opportunity to see more of the 35,000 objects stored there.

Surrounded by all that glass, though, I couldn’t help wondering what will happen when the next mega-quake hits this coastline. But was soon distracted by the First Nations troupe who had the entire audience of WWF-ers pretending to be eagles, frogs, killer whales and wolves (my end of things). First opportunity I had to howl all day – and welcome opportunity to see the late Bill Reid’s astounding Clam again (http://www.billreidfoundation.org/).

The eagles include the Lieutenant Governor, in white jacket

A sense of angst

Not sure what’s going on here …

But he seems agitated …

As are the people squeezed in Bill Reid’s clam

Monday, May 30, 2005

EU IMPASSE

I’m getting used to viewing major events in the UK and EU from a considerable distance, as with the recent Uk elections (when I was in Australia and New Zealand) and yesterday’s French vote on the EU Constitution (where I got the results in Vancouver).

On one level, it’s obviously a big blow to the process of European integration, as currently defined. But, on another level, it seems to me that it really is time to revisit our definitions of the EU. Quite apart from the schadenfreude associated with seeing President Chirac so mightily embarassed – having said late last year that any country that voted against the Constitution should immediately leave the EU – it is increasingly clear that we need a less technocratic, more engaging vision of what Europe’s role in the world could be. For me, being a counterbalnce to the US doesn’t quite qualify. And we also need a new generation of leadership, fit for the 21st century.

Jacques Chirac, at 72, isn’t quite as bad as the glaced politicians who graced the rostrum of the Kremlin before the collapse of Communism, but his self-serving style of politics is pretty much the polar opposite of what we now need. His regal response to the vote, at least as quoted here on the West Coast, underscored the problem: “France has expressed itself democratically … it is your sovereign decision, and I take note.”

The bigger issue, though, is the collision between two opposing views of Europe. The first, embraced by Britain, Ireland and Eastern Europe, views the EU primarily as an opportunity space, with the main emphasis being on creating a more efficient market. The second view, most energetically embraced by the nations that were the epicentre of two world wars, or European civil wars as some have styled them, sees the EU primarily in terms of an emerging set of pan-European social institutions.

It’s clear that the French are alarmed about the prospects of the first approach undermining the ‘European social model’ enshrined in the second approach. And they aren’t alone in that, as the Dutch vote will probably show. But my recent visits to Asia, particularly China, persuade me that it won’t really matter how much Europeans fret about their social models if Asia continues along its current economic trajectory. Ensuring a radically more efficient European market is the only way to ensure a viable future for Europeans – and I would argue that we should let the EU’s institutional forms emerge from those needs and processes, not the other way around.

SATISH KUMAR AS CASTAWAY

Was thrilled to hear Sue Lawley interview Satish Kumar of Schumacher College (www.schumachercollege.gn.apc.org) and Resurgence magazine (www.resurgence.gn.apc.org) on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs before I flew to Vancouver today. Some years back, my erstwhile colleague Max Nicholson did one too, but I missed it because I was travelling. Today, though, you can hear these things via the BBC website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4).

Satish picked a number of my favourite musicians, among them Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and John Lennon. But, as I told him by email this evening, he picked ‘Imagine’ where I would probably have picked the Beatles and the more muscular ‘Revolution’. The Beatles and their (ultimately ill-fated) Apple venture were an early inspiration for my own later move into the world of business.

Saturday, May 28, 2005

FAY GODWIN, JOYCE LAMBERT & DEREK RATCLIFFE

Three obituaries in recent days mark the passing of more of the pioneers of environmental conservation.

First was Joyce Lambert, who died on 4 May. She had astounded Britain when she discovered that the Norfolk Broads were man-made, rather than natural. They were the result of extensive peat-digging, particularly between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. One of my first articles for New Scientist, in the mid-1970s, featured the Broads, which was where I first came across her work. I still remember trailing my fingers in the water as I was taken around the Broads by Dr Martin George, the NCC’s Regional Officer, and saying how wondrously green the water was — and being told that what I was admiring was pollution, eutrophication!

Second, on 23 May, Derek Ratcliffe died. His obituary appears in today’s Times. I knew him when I sat for several years on an Advisory Council for the old Nature Conservancy Council (NCC) and he was the NCC’s Chief Scientist. He is probably best remembered for his research showing the links between the use of organochlorine pesticides, particularly DDT, and the decline of birds of prey, among them peregrine falcons and sparrowhawks. I well remember long talks with Max Nicholson — a founder of the original Nature Conservancy – about that period of what he had dubbed ‘The Environmental Revolution’. But when I came across Ratcliffe he was probably best known as the architect of 1977’s A Nature Conservation Review, often described as a ‘Domesday Book’ of Britain’s most important natural features.

And third, Fay Godwin’s death is reported in today’s Guardian. An extraordinary photographer, I first came across her work when she was producing the pictures for a book on The Ridgeway which was published by Oliver Caldecott at Wildwood House, where Elaine was working in the mid-1970s. Godwin was an ardent landscape conservationist and her images helped switch me on to the country’s ancient stone circles.

HEIMAT

Last night, I watched BBC4’s reshowing of the first programme in the first series of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat TV series, which I last saw in the 1980s. Astounding. The second series, which I saw many more of, was hugely reminiscent of the time I spent in Hamburg in the early 1970s. The other German TV series which I was completely absorbed by when it was first shown was Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot, the extraordinary inside story of the U-boat war against Britain, released in 1981 (www.dasboot.com).

Friday, May 27, 2005

KINGSTON READERS’ FESTIVAL

Politics and the media were the focus of a ‘Question Time’-style panel session I was involved in last night at the Kingston Readers’ Festival (www.kingston.ac.uk/krf or www.kingston.gov.uk/arts). Held at the Tiffin School, the event was chaired by Donald MacCormick, former presenter of BBC TV’s Newsnight programme. Other panellists were: Brian Cathcart, Deputy Editor of The Independent on Sunday; Diane Coyle, Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester, with whom I sit on the RSA Council; and Kevin Maguire, political columnist and Associate Editor on the Daily Mirror.

Great audience, lively debate – and, having dreaded the thing, found that I rather enjoyed it. And it forced me to think about things – among them the EU Constitution, the future of the UK educational system, and who I would like to run each of the major UK political parties – that I don’t normally devote much attention to. On the last point, my reply ran along the following lines: SustainAbility is able to succeed internationally in large part because we are diverse. Last time I looked, our team of less than 25 people was made up of 10-11 nationalities. But in the latest UK Election, the Conservatives ran a campaign targeting immigrants that made me wonder whether they had any sense of what it will take for the UK to compete in globalized markets. And, while I am sure our immigration policies could be better designed and managed, their strident campaign almost made me ashamed to be British.

But I sent a note today to the British Ambassador in South Korea, who hosted the dinner for me when I was in Seoul, and noted in passing that his hospitality and the quality of the discussion that evening had made me proud of the British diplomatic corps. So, it seems, my pride in my national identity is a matter of swings and roundabouts. And, having been brought up to some degree outside the UK, I have always felt slightly ill-at-ease with the notion of Britishness, feeling instead a layered sense of identity: English – and a Londoner for 35 years; European; and Terran, something that is reinforced every time I fly around the planet. But the best of the British identity, which involves accepting kinship with other nationalities (the Irish, Scots and Welsh, plus the myriad of contacts from the Empire, colonial and Commonwealth eras) is something I find I’m warming to.

Monday, May 23, 2005

ENVIRONMENT FOUNDATION GOES BICS

Great meeting of the Environment Foundation Board of Trustees today, during which we conclude that our joint venture with The 21st Century Trust will involve developing annual Consultations at St George’s House, Windsor Castle, focusing on China, India, Brazil and South Africa. The first, on China, to be held in October.

Tim O’Donovan, Jane Nelson, me, Sir Geoffrey Chandler. Dr Malcolm Aickin, John Lotherington (21st Century Trust)

Friday, May 20, 2005

CHINA DEVELOPMENT BRIEF

One of the more interesting visits Kavita and I made in Beijing was to China Development Brief, run by Founding Editor Nick Young (www.chinadevelopmentbrief.com). We had a very pleasant lunch in the courtyard of the Brief’s compound in the sort of jerry-built hutong (an ancient city alley or lane) that is fast disappearing from many areas of the city. Among other things, we discussed the Brief, which was launched in 1996, and such reports as their latest publication, 250 Chinese NGOs: Civil Society in the Making. More information from their website.

Writing on the wall

Nick Young

A major report, on Chinese NGOs, held by Robyn Wexler

Kavita and lychees

EYELESS IN FORBIDDEN CITY

Kavita and I start out early to see the Forbidden City, only for me – after our being caught in endless jams – leaving my glasses in the taxi. Went through the Forbidden City in a state of high agitation and grief, but was nonetheless vastly impressed by the scale and timelessness of the place.

Afterwards, we came back to the hotel to meet Jerry Lixhe of LEAD and New Ventures, after which we sped off in another taxi to a huton, back street lunch with Robyn Wexler and Nick Young of China Development Brief (www.chinadevelopmentbrief.org). Then on to a WWF event, hosted by the ad agency Ogilvy, where I do my last presentation. Then on to a China-India colloquium, which proves better than Valium, so we head back to the hotel.

In the background, hundreds of energetic schoolchildren …

Where was this originally quarried?

Time passes slower as repairs continue on ravages of Time

Roof friezes

Symbol of power

The stone for this carving came in on a road made of ice

Swift

Gurning urn

Historic fire brigade

His past – and future?

Brooding

Bridge

Soldiers and passers-by

Is this good luck?

Kavita thinks so …

Mao

Three policemen in tricycle.

Thursday, May 19, 2005

THE DAY ENDS IN APRICOT BLOSSOM HAMLET

What a day! Kavita and I spent the morning with Jeanne-Marie Gescher and Natalie Cade of Beijing-based Claydon-Gescher Associates, or CGA (www.cga-ltd.com), who had pulled together 6-7 people from Chinese NGOs and universities. A fascinating set of insights, followed by lunch with Jeanne-Marie and Natalie.

Then a monstrous ride in a taxi to the wrong end of Beijing, in solid state dynamics traffic, in an attempt to find a group of AIESEC students who had set up a workshop. After an hour and a half of getting thoroughly lost, our hosts managed to talk the taxi driver in by cell phone – and we spent a frustratingly short – but nonetheless intriguing and stimulating – 30 minutes with some 30 or so students.

Then into another taxi, which got us back to the hotel a little late for the car that was meant to be taking us to dinner with Minister Pan Yue, Vice Minister with the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) – http://www.zhb.gov.cn/english/chanel-1/chanel-1-end-2.php3?chanel=1&column=1

Had liked him tremendously when we sat next to each other at a Shell dinner last night. He had asked Kavita and I to dinner this evening, and now had us driven to the outskirts of Beijing, past the Summer Palace, in a government limousine with six different horns, each of which we used, as we blazed at warp speed towards the Western Hills. We were met and accompanied by a SEPA Deputy Director, Wang Qian, who is as good an ambassador for China as you are likely to find.

The dinner was at the ‘Apricot Blossom Hamlet’, in the Beijing Botanical Garden, near the ‘Fragrance Hill’, where we are joined by Vice Minister Pan and Dr Shu Qing, Deputy Director-General. I enormously admire what Vice Minister Pan and his colleagues have been doing, with SEPA energetically pursuing polluters and shutting a considerable number of projects down to force greater attention to environmental issues. A very courageous politician.

All in all, a quite extraordinary meeting of minds – and the most sophisticated vegetarian repast I have yet eaten, including bird’s nest soup, though I think our Chinese friends would have much preferred meat. In the process, we drank ‘Daughter Red’ wine, which apparently is buried in a ceramic urn when a girl is born and dug up and drunk – with plums dropped in – when she turns eighteen. I found myself wondering what sort of world – and what sort of China – a newborn girl would find if a bottle buried today were to be dug up in 2023?

Dr Shu Qing, Kavita, Vice Minister Pan Yue, me, Wang Qian

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

RED SHIFTED IN BEIJING

Fairly energetic day, happily with Kavita (Prakash-Mani) now alongside, starting with session with Shell, then on to Fortune 500 Global Forum to do my session on the roles and responsibilities of multinationals (with David Cunningham, President of FedEx’s Asia Pacific Division, Jim Harkness of WWF, Xue Lan, professor at Tsinghua University, all moderated by Marc Gunther of Fortune). Louis Camilleri, Chairman and CEO of Altria, the fags-to-foods group, drops out at the last moment.

The red-shifted race continues – after several cars fail to arrive at Diao Yu Tai State Guesthouse, – with high-speed car drive to a lunchtime session across town where I am due to talk to 70-80 people invited by Shell and the China Business Council for Sustainable Development. Then also speak at dinner with Shell, state oil companies, people from embassies and Pan Yue, Vice Minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration. He has been taking a unusually aggressive line with high-impact developments, stalling at least 20 until they tackled a range of environmental issues.

Fascinating man – and gives me a degree of hope that some of China’s environmental problems can be tackled. But we were also told today by Heng Hock Cheng, Chairman of the Shell companies in China, that China has to build power production capacity each year equivalent to the total UK grid capacity! The scale of the challenge is phenomenal. We were also told that before the Olympics draconian measures like shutting down many boilers and many factories will be taken to clean up the air, plus seeding the skies with silver nitrate, to settle out the gunk!

Pre-panel session

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

TIANANMEN SQUARE

After the Temple of Heaven, consenting adults were bussed across to Tiananmen Square, where we were offered drinks on the rostrum overlooking where the massacre of students happened in 1989. I didn’t drink, but silently toasted the aspirations and courage of those extraordinary people – exemplified by the young man with the shopping bags who stopped that platoon of tanks in their tracks. Some of the buildings around the Square are very reminiscent of the megalomaniac construction attempted by President Ceaucescu, who paid for his manifold sins in front of an impromptu firing squad that same year – events I covered in my published diary of 1989, A Year In the Greenhouse (Gollancz, 1990).

Ceiling lights

Balustrade

Flag

Great Hall of the People in the distance

Tiananmen Square ablaze

Can’t wait to see this place in daylight

TEMPLE OF HEAVEN

Fly (originally typed ‘fry’, perhaps because everyone at Narita encouraged me to “have a good fright”) in to Beijing from Tokyo. Due to speak at a session of the Fortune 500 Global Forum, titled ‘China and the New Asian Century’. Met at the airport by Antonius Papaspiropoulos and driver – and bags come through at lightning speed.

After dropping off stuff at China World Hotel, I take a taxi to the Diao Yu Tai State Guesthouse, or at least that’s what I ask for. Am taken to the Daioyutai Hotel instead, where they seem to know nothing about the Guesthouse, even though it’s only a (fairly large) city block away. After all sorts of confusions, I get to the Guesthouse in the end, register, and then find it’s already time to head back in busses through the afternoon traffic to the St Regis Hotel, to await embarkation for an evening at Temple of Heaven.

The Temple turns out to be literally out of this world, with a fairly dramatic light show and very impressive dinner – though I have to keep ducking and weaving to avoid the endless meaty treats put in front of me. And it’s even harder than usual because each diner has a young, impressively costumed attendant standing just behind them – although they don’t attempt to force-feed me.

I find myself sitting betwen the CEO of a speciality oil products company and the CEO of a Hawaiian property company, both of them pretty substantial concerns (the oil company’s annual revenues are $7 billion) – and both Paul and Allen are informed and thoughtful on sustainability issues. But Allen and I spend much of the time talking about history, particularly that of the Vietnam War, where he served during those crucible years. His wife, also at the table, is Vietnamese and her father was one of the last senior officers out – finally deciding to leave when he heard that the Communists were executing officers in front of their men. The plane before his was shot down and his crash-landed in Thailand.

One real high point for me was the high-energy flights of swifts that shot back and forth across the assembled heads during the early stage of the evening. Reminded me of cycling home to Barnes on summer evenings, when the swifts come bombing down the street at you, mouths open, and shrieking like maniacs. The avian equivalent of Hell’s Angels. By contrast, the musicians playing around the Temple were like something from the Elysian Fields, China-style.

Musicians behind screens line approach to Temple of Heaven

The backdrop

Lasers

Balloons

Young people lining exit route

Monday, May 16, 2005

FUJITSU: THE POSSIBILITIES ARE INFINITE

After the fish market, Tomoo and I did an hour-long interview and then were collected for the drive across to the Fujitsu Research Institute (FRI) conference I keynoted this afternoon. The session was chaired by Professor Haruo Shimida, Chairman of FRI. Panellists were: Kimie Iwata, General Manager at the CSR Department of Shiseido, the cosmetics company; Seiichi Ueyama, General Manager of the Corporate Citizenship Department at AEON, the retail group; Masanobu Katoh, Corporate Vice President at Fujitsu; and Kiyoshi Masuda, General Manager of Toyota’s Environmental Affairs Division. An excellent event, with some good questions afterwards.

Then we were driven to a Fujitsu centre opposite Hibiya Park, to be presented with the Fujitsu vision of the future, ‘netCommunity’ (http://e-japan.fujitsu.com/nc/). The Fujitsu motto is ‘The Possibilities are Infinite’, and the exhibition is designed to show the myriad ways in which Fujitsu technology – from palm print readers to RFID tags – can promote a better society. I am afraid I asked a number of ‘Big Brother’ questions, which was somewhat in the spirit of some my comments this afternoon. For example, when commenting on the Toyota presentation, I warned that although they may talk of sustainable mobility solutions, for car companies the almost uniform answer to the question of what ‘sustainable mobility’ might be is some form of car. I also noted that the idea that car ownership might reach saturation in China fills me with horror.

And then I had to quietly turn down foie gras sushi this evening at dinner, apparently something of a culinary innovation here. I imagine I will be persona non grata from now on …?

Palm print technology

Have you tried our RFID tags?

Marked from birth

Something about baby worries me …

Ah, of course. He/it has wings!

TOKYO FISH MARKET

Did I know you?

Tomoo and I make an early morning visit to Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market, a first for us both. Earlier, Tomoo and Judy had forwarded me a link to an Observer article on the implications of the nature and scale of Japanese fish consumption for the world’s oceans:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/foodmonthly/story/0,,1453356,00.html

One of the most striking lines from the piece, by Alex Renton, was from a fish conservation poster in the Misaki fish market, featuring a smiling fisherman and a haiku:

Shining ocean
Is a big mirror
Which reflects our future.

True, but unfortunately the reflections suggest a pretty dire future for oceanic fish, for this extraordinary fish market and for fish consumers, both in Japan and elsewhere.

Take the bluefin tuna. As Renton puts it: “The bluefin is the black truffle of the tunas: mysterious, rare and stunningly expensive. Its raw belly meat provides the greatest otoro, the fatty tissue that is the most prized for sashimi and sushi. This gourmet’s distinction has been unfortunate for the fish, making it ‘severely endangered’: the Atlantic variety of bluefin is likely to be the first tuna species that will become effectively extinct. But, absurdly, the price of this luxury has collapsed because the market is glutted. That same quality bluefin tuna, from the same fishing ground, raised 2,250 yen a kilo on the Misaki quayside two years ago – maybe twice as much five years ago. ”

We have failed, again and again, to police the world’s oceans. As Renton concludes: “It’s a documented and recognised global disaster, but one we can do nothing about. No multinational mechanism exists with the muscle to beat the wallets of the fish-eaters.” Not sure what we can do in this area, but came away feeling SustainAbility should be doing something.

Retail fish market

Last tuna from morning’s auction

Tuna head

More tuna

Fugu, the deadly delicacy, contains a toxin 1200 times more lethal than cyanide

Some form of garfish?

Eco-crimes: shark’s fin and whalemeat

Where are you from?

Fading, but the colours are amazing

Swimming in a sea of blood

These guys again

Shoal on ice

The sharp end

Octopus

And, in the end, we drive it all …

Sunday, May 15, 2005

PICASA, THUNDER AND BLENDED VALUE

One of the great joys of recent days was my – perhaps somewhat belated – discovery of Picasa 2, the image management software now offered by Google. Geoff Lye at SustainAbility had mentioned recently that he found it hugely helpful, so I downloaded it yesterday (free) from www.picasa.com onto my ThinkPad. The first thing it does is to trawl through your hard drive to find all the images – and it was amazing to see images I had used years ago surfacing, like so many coelacanths. Easy to use, pretty much akin to what I have been using on my Mac for several years, and hugely recommended.

A day largely spent tapping away in my hotel room, sketching out an invited paper for California Management Review on the blended value agenda, which I’m co-authoring with Jed Emerson (who coined the blended value term, see www.blendedvalue.org) and Seb Beloe of SustainAbility. At one point in the afternoon, there was an enormous series of crashes outside, which at first I thought was an earthquake – but which turned out to be a thunder storm.

Saturday, May 14, 2005

‘CRANE’ AND BULLET TRAIN

Heron stalks …

Tabloid headline: ‘Gotcha!’

Well, maybe it was a white heron rather than a crane, but as I walked around the Hama-rikyu Gardens this afternoon a water bird caught its prey. At one stage, this was effectively the family garden of the Tokugawa Shogun, a place for leisure and duck hunting. The place was pulverised, however, by the Great Kanto Earthquake and by WWII bombing raids. A typhoon – ‘Kitty’ – also hit in 1949, the year I was born. Much of the gardens still seem in shambles, with diggers at work in various places behind ‘No Entry’ signs. And the moat around the gardens is rancid and foul-smelling, full of prams, haversacks and other rubbish – surprising in such a tidy city.

Soaring over the gardens is a glistening wall of skyscrapers, including the one where we had dinner the other evening. As I walk back to the hotel, bullet trains slide noiselessly through the backdrop. Then off to dinner with friends, their children and mother-in-law. Wonderful to see a Japanese family at home. Then driven home in – you guessed it – a Prius.

Bullet train: Ambitious Japan!

A DAVID IN JAPAN

Saying goodbye to Judy (Kuszewski) this morning, I was reminded of something that a number of the Japanese people we have met this week have said, often with a slight sense of awe. They simply cannot imagine how SustainAbility, which we openly explain is a global midget of between 20 and 25 people, can have had such an impact in Japan. Indeed, there often seems to be a Wizard of Oz character to our reputation here.

The answers to the riddle, I suspect, are relatively simple. They include picking the right issues over the years, building relationships with the right partners, and coming here year after year. This must be my tenth or twelfth trip over the past 20 years or so. The interesting question as our interests expand to include countries like China and India is how we can build the capacity to invest similar – or greater – levels of effort across the wider region. This is something we will have to think about in greater depth when Kavita (Prakash-Mani) and I join Judy back in our London office, after our impending trip to Beijing.

Friday, May 13, 2005

E-SQUARE AND TACHI, A HUMAN PHENOMENON

Tea ceremony house roof

This morning included a fascinating session for E-Square Inc., founded in September 2000 and dedicated to creating a ‘green economy’ (www.e-squareinc.com). Their CEO, Peter David Pedersen has visited our London offices several times, typically with a small group of Japanese companies in tow. Today’s session attracted around 30 people, from companies as diverse as All Nippon Airways, The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Fuji Photo Film, Matsushita Electric Industrial, The Seiyu, Sekisui Chemical, and the charmingly named Unicharm Corporation. The theme of the session, for which I was providing the keynote, was ‘sustainable business models and branding’.

But by far the most charming feature of the event was Takashi ‘Tachi’ Kiuchi, one of Japan’s most iconoclastic businessmen. He picked Judy (Kuszewski), Tomoo (Machiba) and I up from our hotel in a chauffeur-driven limousine and took us to Kaitokaku, a huge grey house on a hill at the eastern end of the Tanakawa Heights – an area once famed as a place to view cherry blossom and the moon.

As Chairman and CEO of Mitsubishi Electric America, Tachi oversaw the company’s transition from the old to the new economy. He also championed a “living systems” approach to business that included rapid adaptation, financial transparency, openness, cultural diversity, executive positions for women and environmental sustainability. But he is perhaps best known in NGO circles for developing a breakthrough agreement with the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) to promote corporate sustainability.

Among other things, he is now Chairman of the Future 500 (www.globalff.org) and CEO of E-Square. Surfing the Net to find out more about him, I was not surprised to find (on the Forum for Corporate Conscience site, www.forumforcorporateconscience.com) that in his spare time he skydives, runs marathons, climbs Mount Fuji, rides his bicycle to the Future 500 HQ in downtown Tokyo and does 1600 push-ups a day.

On top of it all, he has a wonderful sense of humour. Indeed, one of the things I commented on during the Kaitokaku session was that the participants had been showing a great deal of humour as we ran around the table. And that, for me, has always been a good sign, suggesting that people are no longer in awe of the agenda, but are allowing a degree of playfulness to creep in – and this, in turn, potentially fuels creative, lateral thinking.

After the excellent lunch with the E-Square team and other participants, Judy, Tomoo and I walked around the gardens, among other things watching the huge trellised wisteria being pruned by a platoon of gardeners. The somewhat drear grey stone main house was designed by English architect Josiah Conder, but – following extensive damage during the wartime air raids – the interior was reconstructed from 1963. Commissioned by Yanosuke Iwasaki – who died the same year it was finished – the house was later used by the Mistubishi Company to entertain executives and staff.

The gardens also suffered post-war neglect, but things have been looking up. The 300-year-old wisteria produces huge blossoms each year, each some 24-24 inches long, indeed the remnants of these were being trimmed away by the gardeners as we watched. And in the rose garden, something like 1,000 rose bushes bloom all at once each year, which must be a spectacle.

Wisteria gets a trim

Then we crunched across the carefully raked gravel to yet another taxi for the trip to the next session, this time with the Nikkei BP Environmental Management Forum. I did the speech, Tomoo translated, and – once again – CSR was on top of everyone’s mind. In this case, however, one key area of interest was how an initiative originally set up to tackle environmental issues could transform itself to handle the wider corporate social responsibility agenda.

Interestingly, a degree of angst was expressed by at least one major company about the way in which the questionnaires sluicing in from foreign socially responsible investment (SRI) funds increasingly feature a growing range of social issues, among them issues related to human rights. So, while apologising for possible political insensitivity, I explained why human rights are important even in developed countries like Japan, noting the presence of sizeable excluded populations in Japan – quite apart from the ongoing dispute with China over wartime atrocities carried out by the Japanese.

Later in the evening, Judy, Tomoo and I walk out into the city, drop into a small, convivial bar, and have a wonderfully relaxing supper – surrounded by end-of-the-week salarymen who get progressively livelier as the evening wears on – and the beer and sake flow. In the background, a cook throws the most extraordinary range of species onto the open grill, triggering great clouds of steam and sheets of flame. A speciality of the house seems to be huge fish-heads

Thursday, May 12, 2005

‘RISK & OPPORTUNITY’ LAUNCH

Main event of the day is the launch of the Japanese language version of our Risk & Opportunity report in front of 250-300 executives. Judy and I both speak, together with Daisuke Fukutomi, Director of Corporate & Government Ratings at Standard & Poor’s, our partners in the project – alongside the United Nations Environment Progamme (UNEP). I get hooked out of the session before Judy begins to begin the first of a series of five or six press interviews, most with photographers buzzing around like electric bluebottles.

Afterwards, we are taken out to dinner by people from the Japanese end of Ernst & Young. The Japan-as-predator theme continues in my brain as we are served with white clods of conger eel in clear broth, and the delightful waitress gaily tells us that the animal was killed but moments before for our dining pleasure.

What with the 90-minute interview I did early this morning for the Editor-in-Chief of Toyo Keizai magazine, I end the day feeling fairly hoarse. Toyo Keizai, who are 110 years old this year and describe themselves as the Japanese version of The Economist, are organising a major conference later in the year at which I am due to be one of the speakers. And then, from 22.30, do a 60-minute teleconference with the SustainAbility Board, with calls linking in from the West and east coasts of the US, the UK, Belgium and Switzerland. Highly productive.

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

PANASONIC’S FUTURE LABORATORY

I go bladerunner

We kick off the day at the Panasonic Center Tokyo, complete with photovoltaic cell-stippled roof, where the Matsushita Group spotlights its twin visions of ‘the ubiquitous network society’ and of ‘peaceful coexistence with the environment’. We meet Managing Director and Board member Hidetsuga Otsuru and several of his colleagues, before they take us around the exhibits. When I am subjected to a retinal scan, my retinas glow blue and I end up looking like something from Bladerunner. We also visit the ‘Future Laboratory’, where all sorts of futuristic machinery responds to every human whim. All utterly fascinating, but leaves me feeling somewhat uneasy. Odd sense that we dream of living in Star Trek luxury, but may end up back in caves rather faster than we can imagine.

Later in the day, I do a keynote at a Nikkei CSR Group session with 25-30 executives. Discussion, as ever, slow to start, so I end up giving 10-minute answers to the questions I do get, though this includes Tomoo (Machiba)’s translations. Companies present include Shiseido, Sumitomo Forestry, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and Tokyo Marine & Nichido Insurance.

After drinks, Tomoo and I head off to dinner at Zipangu with two colleagues from Sony, Asako Nagai (who I first met when she worked with Ford in Detroit) and Hidemi Tomita, who I first met when he worked with Sony in Germany. We dine on the forty-seventh floor of a soaring Shiodome skyscraper, which soon has us talking about earthquakes. The trip down in an open, glass elevator is vertiginous – and, as my ears pop, I wonder if the same thing happened to those who fell to their deaths from the World Trade Center.

Wonderful meal, with the only hiccup being the arrival of carefully prepared servings of shark’s fin. I gently squawk and avoid, but the more I eat out in Japan, the more I have the sense of a mighty predator drawing in threatened species from around the globe. And the fate of dominant species in overtaxed environments was nicely spotlighted earlier in the day by the dinosaur scultpure rearing through the heart of the Panasonic Centre.

Eco-efficient mini-dishwasher

21st century luxury at finger-tip command

Tomoo sees future of transport

Judy views over-bed dream machine

Dinosaur sculpture and solar cells

And so goobye: Elkington-san, Otsuru-san, Kuszewski-san

Our team: Tomoo (second from left), me, Judy

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

SPELL GINKGO

Spot the missing ginkgo. To my left: Mr Chung Haebong (Chief Executive Officer of Eco-Frontier), and to my right: Professor Byoung-Hoon Ahn (Korea Advanced Institution of Science and Technology Graduate School of Management).

One of the nice touches of this visit has been that Antonius Papasiropoulos of Shell came up with the idea of having a small golden badge struck for the occasion, in the shape of a ginkgo leaf (gingko also seems a permissible spelling). The point being that the ginkgo tree is a symbol of longevity in Korea – and has been around as a species for some 270 million years. By the end of the day, half Seoul seemed to be wearing them on their lapel. I’m normally not a great badge-wearer, indeed I avoid them like some lapel plague, but have rather enjoyed the sense of confraternity bestowed by this one.

Monday, May 09, 2005

CHEONGGYE CLEAN UP

Seoul

Arrived very late last night, after storms reduced Hong Kong’s airport to chaos. When I had flown to Melbourne, BA lost one of my bags, whereas this time Cathay Pacific manages the feat of losing both. As longstanding colleague Antonius Papaspiropoulos of Shell Gas & Power kindly greets me and travels with me in the limousine into Seoul, where we’re staying at the Lotte Hotel, it’s around midnight and I’m wondering what it’s going to be like greeting Mayoral folk and the British Ambassador tomorrow in jeans.

In the background, the news continues to be about Pyongyang’s continuing threats to test a ‘plutonium-based nuclear device’, or bomb as Tom Lehrer long ago encouraged us to call such things. But, as someone says to me today, the further away from Korea you get the more fearful such issues seem – and vice versa. People here seem surprisingly relaxed about it all.

Today starts with a breakfast with Dr Colin McClune, Chairman of Shell Pacific Enterprises, and some of his colleagues, followed by a session with a number of Korean journalists, mainly from business magazines and media. Much interest in how Korea stands in relation to the rest of the world in relation to our issues. Well briefed by Shell, my hosts here, local NGO Eco-Frontier and Insight Communications, I was able to say that Korean companies have been making a fair amount of progress, albeit from a relatively low base.

Some 2,500 are now registered under the ISO14001 environmental standards, perhaps 50 have published environmental reports and seven – with Samsung SDI having jumped in first – have produced at least one sustainability report. Several banks have signed the Carbon Disclosure Project and a fair number of companies also now have product-related environmental certification. But my sense is that most of this driven by concerns about the environmental and sustainability concerns of major international markets and customers rather than by any great local appetite for sustainable development.

One of the most interesting meetings is a session with the Vice Mayor of Seoul. (The Mayor, we are told, has lost his voice but see below.) The Vice Mayor turns out to have an attractive sense of humour, as do many of the Koreans I meet. We talk about a number of sustainability-related issues, including air quality problems in the city and the ‘yellow dust’ problem caused in Korea by soil erosion in nearby China. But the subject that I was particularly interested in was the Cheonggyecheon restoration project, which involves removing an elevated stretch of highway and uncovering a long-buried stretch of stream in the city centre.

In some ways this is a matter of national pride, in that the environmental defects now being addressed reflected the exigencies of post-war reconstruction, at a time when Korea’s GDP per caoita stood at a mere US$100, compared to US$10,000 today. The Vice Mayor and I hover over maps of the scheme while photographers happily snap away.

Diplomatically, none of us mention the latest news: a second Vice Mayor, Yang Yoon-jae, has just been arrested as part of an investigation of the stream restoration project – and charged with allegedly accepting 200 million won (US$200,000) from a real estate developer, in exchange for relaxing height limits for a building due to be built alongside the stream. If proved true, this could be a major blow to the Mayor’s own presidential hopes. But, whatever the facts of the matter, the financial corruption charges should not blind us to the very real environmental and civic benefits of a project designed to clean up past ecological corruption.

By late morning, one of my bags – and my suit – turns up. So I am at last respectably turned out, though am still wearing an unfamiliar dolphin tie lent to me this morning by Colin McClune. One oddity: as we drive through the city today after one of two events I spoke at – a British Chamber of Commerce lunch at the Grand Hyatt Hotel and a ‘Sustainable Korea’ workshop organised by Eco-Frontier – someone points out that most of the cars here are white, off-white, pale brown, grey or black. The overall impression, coupled with the Eastern bloc aesthetic of much of the building, is dusty, workaday, drab.

By contrast, our dinner this evening with the British Ambassador, Warwick Morris, is a welcome respite in a small green oasis, complete with lawns and even a newly constructed – and thatched – bird table. Sadly, though, bird life is in short supply here, given the general hostility of the surrounding environment to wildlife. Many interesting conversations, but one in particular sticks in my mind – with Dr Chul-Hwan Koh, a profesor of marine biology and member of Korea’s Presidential Commission on Sustainable Development. Having spent seven years as a member of the European Commission’s Consultative Forum on Sustainable Development, which proved unwieldy at around 30 members, I am interested to hear that Korea’s version is having a real impact with 80 members.

In my small thank you speech as the dinner winds down, I note that the day’s conversations have encouraged me to do my homework on Korea when I get home. And the process is already starting. When I get back to the hotel, there is a new book on my bed: The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies, by Michael Breen (St Martin’s Press, 1998/2004). Something to read on tomorrow’s flight as my bags no doubt go AWOL again.

Sunday, May 08, 2005

CATHAY PACIFIC TO HONG KONG

What do you do? we are often asked. One of the SustainAbility team recently found it all so hard to explain that he began telling people that he was a banker. But every now and then you get into a conversation where it’s easier. I had one of those today.

The day started in Melbourne and, if all goes well, will end in Seoul. Up at 05.15, after a much-disturbed night of riotous noise in the streets outside: post-football revels, I learned. The hotel’s Indian receptionist â originally from Hyderabad – said (despairingly) that this was pretty typical for a weekend. My taxi driver, originally from the Punjab, agreed. The back seat of his car was covered in the vile debris from previous passengers who, he sighed, were generally drunk. Not surprisingly, he wasnât enamored with Australian youth or sports culture.

Brilliant white banks of mist stand between trees, over river courses as the sun rises over the airport. I am flying Cathay Pacific to Hong Kong, then on to Seoul. Business class is bursting at the seams, with two travelers ahead of me being involuntarily downgraded because no-one is prepared to accept money to switch to Economy. Another sign of the growing importance of the ‘China trade’?

I find myself sitting next to a white-haired Australian farmer, traveling to China and Japan as part of a delegation from a dairy cooperative. They sell powdered milk and cheeses to Asia. He asks me what I do, and when I tell him, he regales me with some of the many issues the farming community now faces, particularly the long-running drought and incipient problems of soil salinization caused by irrigation. His farm’s water allocation has been cut back again this year, which makes life progressively tougher. Many people are leaving the land, though the fact that water rights are now tradable and they can sell their increasingly valuable allocations often helps ease the transition. He’s not at all sure that he will encourage his children to stay on the land.

We trade notes on some of the politicians I have met on this trip, among them Victoria Premier Steve Bracks, Deputy Premier John Thwaites and Treasurer John Brumby, and he comments that they are all more aware of environmental and other sustainability issues than their predecessors. But he wonders whether we are acting fast or effectively enough.

Our talk roams back and forth over decades. And, as it happens, today is my parents’ 58th wedding anniversary. As we head north over the old, scoured, arid wastes of the Australian outback, I find myself musing how all our issues will be seen 58 years from now, in 2063. I shall be long gone, of course, but I muse to my farmer friend that a world of 9-10 billion people is going to be radically different, with growing problems in such areas as climate change and human and livestock pandemics.

Rick Murray of Swiss Re used an extraordinary slide during our conferences this week which underscored the ways in which the impact of diseases such as foot-and-mouth, BSE and SARS already impact the insurance and reinsurance industries. Both Australia and New Zealand are now highly expert at biosecurity, with intensive checks as you land to ensure visitors don’t bring in diseases, but no system is perfect. And there will be those who intentionally introduce diseases as acts of terrorism or economic warfare.

In fact, one of the most interesting bets Wired magazine ‘Senior Maverick’ Kevin Kelly told me about when I visited him in San Francisco a few weeks back and we talked about the predictions open for wagers on the www.longbets.com website was that one million people would die in a single bioterror or bioerror incident in the first few decades of the 21st century.

Having read the latest issue of Scientific American on the flight up from Auckland a few days back, I would say that the chances were high. Scientists researching ice cores have found evidence of falling carbon dioxide and methane levels accompanying massive historic die-backs in the human population, as when 25-40% of the European population were killed by bubonic plague in Roman times, and again when similar proportions were killed in the Middle Ages. But perhaps most dramatic was the period of die-back of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas when the Europeans arrived, bringing with them diseases such as smallpox. Perhaps as many as 50 million died.

Sustainability may be hard to define, but that strikes me as one form of unsustainability.

THE MURRAY EDMONDS FLYING CIRCUS

This is the seventh time I have led one of Murray Edmonds’ Flying Circus tours of Australia and New Zealand – and it’s great to be on the road again with Murray and Dobrina – and with a wonderful new bunch of speakers. Here is a miscellany of images accumulated during the 2005 tour. Some say this was the best tour yet, but each tour has had its own strengths, joys and nail-biting moments. None of them, however, would have got airborne had it not been for Murray and Dobrina’s Herculean efforts (www.edmondsmgt.com.au).

I do not envy my neighbour’s plate

On our first day in Melbourne, we visit a school that is ‘going sustainable’

Dobrina awaits

The Circus warms up on the runway

The CSR ‘crusade’ builds

I lie cheek-by-jowl with David Grayson and Adrian Hodges

Peter Nelson (CEO, NZ Business Council for SD), Debra (Dunn), (Baroness) Barbara Young

Pamela Hartigan and Peter Nelson

Richard (Murray), right, in conversation

David Smith, CEO, IAG New Zealand

Murray and Debra unwind at the farewell dinner in Auckland

Red shoes: Kerry Griffiths, Principal Sustainability Consultant, URS, New Zealand

And so good night.

Saturday, May 07, 2005
THE COLOUR INDIGO

Rooftop reflections

One of the questions I had been sent in advance for a session with the Melbourne City Council team yesterday was an oddball: ‘What is your favourite colour?’

In preparing for the session – which mainly meant scratching my head on the flight across from Auckland – I had pondered this one at some length. The strange thing was that no particular colour fitted the bill. What came to mind, instead, was a sequence of diverse, mixed colourations: so, for example, lapis lazuli, rainbows, the Northern Lights. But, after discussion, I finally settled on some form of midnight blue, or – as Adam Briscomb prompted me to conclude – indigo. A blue-black, mysterious colour.

Primed with that thought, I was walking along Flinders Lane earlier on this afternoon, on my way to the National Galleryof Victoria (where I decided not to see the Adny Warhol ‘Time Capsules’ exhibition largely on the basis of the fact that I wasn’t sure I had enough money both for that and for a taxi tomorrow morning), when I spotted some delightfully variegated and colourful painted lines on the entry ramp to some sort of parking facility. As I took photographs, an Asian employee who was smoking outside the building approached me with a nervous smile and asked whether I was planning to sue someone?

Then I went swimming in the pool on top of the hotel, at several points swimming out over the street. And there were touches of indigo in the water, I thought. Since I can’t work out how to dimension the photos on my laptop, this is the only picture I will post until I get back.

Saturday, May 07, 2005

AM I AN INVASIVE SPECIES?

Don’t drop names, I say, unless you can drop a barrow-load. So here we go. I’m back in Melbourne, after a whistle-stop tour of Australia and New Zealand with our annual traveling circus. We have done major conferences in Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland, though I have also been doing a number of other speeches and sessions on the side, including a session for the New Zealand Business Council for Sustainable Development, a lunchtime session yesterday for Melbourne City Council (www.melbourne.vic.gov.au) and, last night, an Alfred Deakin Innovation Lecture (www.deakinlectures.com), in memory of one of Australia’s most influential historic politicians, in Melbourne Town Hall.

The theme of the Deakin session was ‘Using Capital Creatively’, the chair was Victoria’s Premier, Steve Bracks, and the other speakers included Bendigo Bank CEO Rob Hunt, Dr R.A. Mashelkar (Director General of India’s Council of Scientific & Industrial Research) and, though a paper presented on his behalf, Senator Aden Ridgeway, an Indigenous leader and Democrats Senator for New South Wales.

Once again, our 2005 conference tour has been organized by Murray Edmonds, a long-standing member of our Faculty (www.edmondsmgt.com.au). This year the focus has been on the practicalities of implementing sustainable development and our line-up has included (Baroness) Barbara Young, who runs the UK Environment Agency, Richard Murray, who is Chief Risk Strategist for Swiss Re, Debra Dunn, senior vice-president at Hewlett-Packard (HP), Pamela Hartigan, who is Managing Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, and two people from IAG, the Australian insurance group, Sam Mostyn (she toured with us in Australia) and NZ IAGCEO (are you keeping up?) David Smith, who joined us in Auckland. I have been enormously impressed by the way that IAG are embedding a range of corporate responsibility and sustainability-related priorities.

Before coming out, I did an interview with George Dallas, who heads the corporate governance practice at credit-risk-raters Standard & Poor’s (S&P), which I brought with me in the form of a DVD and which we have shown at each of the conferences. It has gone down very well – and can be seen on the SustainAbility website. Note, incidentally, that George and I weren’t in the same room when the filming was done – we were on different continents, filming at different times, so I was interviewing an empty chair.

Among other folk I meet again as we travel round: Ros Kelly (a former federal Environment Minister in Austrlaia, married to the CEO of Westpac Bank, David Morgan) and, in Auckland, Ann Sherry, who is Westpac’s CEO in New Zealand. Ros reminds me, when we meet in Sydney, of the time – some years ago – when she invited me to dinner with David and some of his Westpac colleagues. She often remarks that this was a key milestone in the evolution of Westpac’s sustainability thinking.

This is the seventh time I have done the Oz-NZ tour; last year I couldn’t make it and my place was taken by ex-New Zealand Premier Mike Moore. Originally, in 1998, the focus was on environment, but the agenda opened out rapidly thereafter. Indeed the triple bottom line concept, which SustainAbility originated in 1994, has exploded in Australia and New Zealand – a bit like such introduced species as rabbits and cane toads in Australia and possums in New Zealand.

I’m still pondering whether to try swimming in the pool here at the Adelphi Hotel, a pool which is apparently cantilevered out from the hotel’s roof, over the street, so you can swim over the transparent bottom and see pedestrians walking around many floors below. But, while I’m sure the perspective would be interesting, I suffer from vertigo and discretion may well get the better of valor. And this trip is already proving all sorts of bottom-up, top-down and inside-out perspectives that provide more than adequate compensation.

Three things that have been borne in on me are these:

First, the extraordinary impact that SustainAbility’s work has had in different parts of the world.

Second, the way in which sustainability issues are now penetrating the political debate, both on this side of the world and in the UK – where Tony Blair is pledged to bring climate change into the agendas of his EU and G8 presidencies, while the Conservatives had threatened to eviscerate Barbara’s Environment Agency and to drop the just-introduced Operating & Financial Review (OFR) requirement for companies, one of the most interesting recent advances in corporate governance legislation.

And, third, the way that markets are beginning to pick up on the social and environmental priorities that make up the sustainable development agenda. Debra Dunn noted that HP now wins contracts each year worth several billion dollars where the project criteria include social and/or environmental specifications. And, she added, that area of business is growing at 30-50% a year.

Oh, and a final thought. Our addition of Pamela’s social enterprise component this year has gone down a storm. The ‘can do’ attitudes of social entrepreneurs chimes in very powerfully with the ‘it’s time to walk the talk’ theme of the 2005 tour.

BLAIR, ERUPTIONS AND EELS

Well, Blair – along, presumably, with his pledges to bring climate change onto this year’s G8 and EU Presidency agendas – is back. But his significantly reduced majority – and the fact that he has tapped Gordon Brown as his successor within the next Parliament – raise a forest of question marks over his future effectiveness. But at least the Conservatives aren’t in and energetically disabling Barbara Young’s Environment Agency or removing the newly introduced Operating & Financial Review (OFR) requirement, both things they had promised (threatened) to do.

A world away, Barbara tees up in Melbourne

Now that the blasts of hot air are over, we can settle back to politics as usual. Meanwhile, today’s Australian Financial Review reports on a blast of 200 degree steam which erupted here a few weeks back. It was produced as part of attempts to exploit geothermal energy from the arid northeeastern corner of South Australia – by drilling four kilometres down into hot granitic rocks thought to contain twelve times as much energy as the fossil fuel reserves of the North-West Shelf. Apparently, these are the hottest rocks of their sort known worldwide other than beneath volcanoes.

Which reminds me of a conversation last night with Victoria’s Deputy Premier, John Thwaites, after a dinner atop the city’s ANZ Tower. He had just flown in from the Mount Eccles region, where he had visited an area where indigenous people some 8,000 years ago had cut into basaltic lava flows to divert local water flows and, by creating a series of wetlands, constructed a series of elver-rearing ponds. The spectacular wraparound views from the ANZ Tower and that blast of superheated steam the other day may have been pretty impressive, but the ponds (and the nearby clusters of stone-built homes) underscore the fact that the aboriginal peoples were often a great deal more sophisticated than many imagine. I thought I had been knocking off most of the places I still wanted to see in the world, among them northern Cyprus, but people just keep adding to the list!

Thursday, May 05, 2005

TALL POPPIES

In the final session of the Auckland conference, Professor Brian Springett once again raises an issue that has surfaced a number of times as we traveled around – that of the ‘tall poppy syndrome’. The problem is that people who excel in Australia and New Zealand tend to be cut down. Indeed, as Brian puts it: ‘There’s a ruddy great mowing machine operating.’ Given the importance of generating waves of successful social entrepreneurs, this potentially poses a major challenge. Interestingly, Pamela (Hartigan)’s presentations have addressed the issue of which cultures around the world support entrepreneurship – and which don’t.

Brian and Delyse Springett part-hosted my first visit to New Zealand. When I ask Delyse this evening, at an end-of-tour dinner at the No. 5 restaurant in Auckland, when that was, she says it was in 1995. Thank heavens for external memory modules. That time, I was speaking at a sustainable tourism conference in Wellington. Air New Zealand flew Elaine and I out first class – the first and only time I have flown first class – and Gaia came with us too, traveling steerage at our own expense.

Typically, I had brought only summer clothes and we arrived in Wellington in the midst of their first snowstorm for 40 years. When we eventually crossed to South Island and started to drive south, we were turned back by the police, who said the roads were impassable. In the event, we discovered the delights of Farewell Spit and of whale-watching off Kaikoura. Most impressively of all, however, we pitched up at a winery in the Marlborough district late at night, to find it closed for the winter. It turned out to be owned by Jane Hunter, a well-known New Zealand vintner. She opened up her restaurant just for us, lit a huge fire and made us feel wonderfully at home.

When we finally flew out, after a visit to the hot springs of Rotorua, Gaia appeared in the first class lounge at Auckland airport as a post-Apocalyptic vision, wearing dreadlocks, paratroop boots and finger-drawn facial markings of Rotorua volcanic mud. Luckily, four or five minutes later, Roger Daltrey and The Who pitched up, too, and Gaia spent much of the flight back to London with them.

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

SYDNEY HARBOUR

A moment out, in the dark. Debra (Dunn) and I walk back from The Wharf restaurant, hard by Sydney Bridge, to the hotel. Great restaurant, where I had been taken when I first came to Australia, by Paul Gilding of Ecos. One test of The Wharf’s flexibility this evening: Debra, Pamela and I all ask for grilled barramundi, rather than fried â as it appears on the menu. And they oblige.

Anyway, Debra and I walk right around the harbor front, pausing to watch gulls circling like moths in the spotlights above the bridge – and later I learn they are themselves hunting for moths, attracted by the lights. How extraordinarily privileged we are to be able to have conversations like these in such places.

Pamela leaving The Wharf

Sydney Opera House

Sunday, May 01, 2005

100 MILLION HEARTS EN ROUTE TO OZ

Arrived in Melbourne around 04.30 this morning, to find BA had lost one of my bags in transit. Apart from anything else, it was the one with all my plugs and cables, making me realise – once again – how umbilically connected one is to the rest of the world, and how truncated when such things go AWOL. Roll on total wirelessness. Arrival takes a little longer than normal – and Murray (Edmonds) puts me in a car into the city with me still having no idea if and when the bag will arrive. But great to see him and, as I tell him, its extraordinary that he would greet a plane at such an uncivilised hour. Still, (Baroness) Barbara Young, another of our speakers was arriving not long afterwards, so it was two birds with one stone.

As flight BA17 flew in across bulldozer-scalped landscapes towards Changhi airport, Singapore, its shadow racing across the cleared areas and green pimpled oil palm plantations, I was just hitting page 181 in Kerri Sakamoto’s astounding book One Hundred Million Hearts (Harcourt 2003). She writes about two sisters in today’s world whose father was a (failed) kamizaze pilot. And the sequence on page 181 is about the Peace Park and museum in Hiroshima. Their reactions – or at least the reactions of the younger sister, Hana – were exactly mine when I visited the city in the 1980s. No sense of the historical context, nothing on the rape of Nanjing, just a story of an aerial holocaust wrought upon innocents.

The current row between the Chinese and Japanese about sanitised Japanese history books underscores the issue.

 

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

MONKEY GLANDS AND WORLD TOUR

Since getting back from San Francisco, I have mainly been absorbed in two things: working with SustainAbility’s board on our future strategy (with the SF trip having had a similar re-energising effect on me that ageing millionaires and rock stars used to get, apparently, and pre-Green-Monkey-disease scares, via injections of monkey glands in Swiss clinics), and preparing for my impending tour of Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan and China. Since a key emphasis of SustainAbility’s new strategy is likely to be on emerging markets, the trip is timely – and will be the first time I have visited South Korea and China.

SYRIA PULLS OUT

Not front page news, perhaps, but I have been watching the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon in peripheral vision. The last forces crossed the border yesterday. The possibility would have seemed outlandish when we were there a few years ago, but the assassination of Lebanon’s popular former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri catalysed trends that have brought to an end three decades of occupation. The longer term implications for the Syrian regime are unclear, but things are very unlikely to stop here.

Sunday, April 17, 2005

MONTEREY & CARMEL

On our last day, Ian and Alda drive us south to Monterey. I had wanted to visit the Monterey Aquarium (www.mbayaq.org) for pretty much as long as I can remember, having taken Elaine and the girls on a coast-to-coast tour of US aquariums 20 years ago or so. Fascinating to see the old canneries, prettified fossil remains of a more or less extinct industry, which was responsible in large part for destroying the regional fisheries. Steinbeck has long been a favourite of the Elkington family, particularly Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday.

Though time is pressing, we make our way further south along the coast to Carmel, where the beachside homes, trees and detailing are about as highly distilled a version of the Californian dream as one is likely to find. Then – after a whistlestop visit to one of the area’s orginal missions – we head back home and out to the airport for the long trip home.

Girl and shark, Monterey Aquarium

Mobile cells

Elaine and Ian

I vote for Charlton Heston

Carmel surfer

Jesus and birds

Saturday, April 16, 2005

BAY BRIDGE & PAINTED LADIES

Mark drives us – in their Civic hybrid – across to open-air breakfast alongside farmers’ market at the Ferry Building, from where we watch the Bay Bridge gain and lose a long white scarf of cloud. Ongoing conversation about where we should drive SustainAbility in future.

Under the bridge, on the far shore, we can make out massive port cranes. I muse that they look like the giant white dinosaur-like armoured vehicles from Star Wars, which prompts Mark to say that the cranes originally gave George Lukas the idea for the monsters. On the way back, we take a walk around the Presidio and Golden Gate area, and take a peek at the ‘Painted Ladies’, the wonderful Victorian homes of Alamo Square.

By the time we get back, our friends Ian Keay (our best man many moons ago) and Alda Angst have arrived. We pack our bags into their BMW and, after stopping off to see energy efficient NOW House, we drive up to a high point to look back over the city. We also take a tour of some of the houses that Ian and his team have painted in the city, including some zillionaire homes where the cost of the painting alone was equivalent to that of an average London home.

Then we head south towards Palo Alto. On the way, we cruise through the grounds of Stanford University, walking around the Rodin exhibition and a serpentine wall construction by my favourite artist, bar none: Andy Goldsworthy. Then back to Ian and Alda’s new home, out for a Thai meal, and bed.

Bay Bridge

A serpentine Goldsworthy

Headless woman by Rodin

Ian Keay

San Francisco in perspective

Friday, April 15, 2005

SOCIAL FUSION & ZUNI

Elaine and I meet Amber Nystrom for lunch, agreeing that both Elaine and Amber would be wearing items of red. We turn out to be well matched in a number of ways – indeed, when I get back to London, I shall tell the team that these meetings with social entrepreneurs are pretty much akin to what millionaires apparently used to get when they flew decades ago to Switzerland for their annual injections of monkey gland extracts!

We meet in the Ferry Building, which has been massively revamped since we were last here. A great lunch and a really invigorating conversation. Amber, who had been suggested by a friend of our San Francisco colleague Mark Lee, is the founder and Director of Social Fusion (www.socialfusion.org), a business incubator that builds the resources and knowledge to launch and grow highly innovative nonprofit and for-profit social ventures. The basic idea is that “sustainable innovation requires an ecosystem of support that bridges business expertise, proactive investment, and a community of social entrepreneurs advancing new solutions for systemic social change.”

Later in the afternoon, after a Yunnan Black tea at The Slanted Door restaurant, Elaine and I trundle through various bookshops. Among other things, I buy Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat, Joel Kotkin’s The City, Kerri Sakamoto’s One Hundred Million Hearts, and Gary Snyder’s Axe Handles. Snyder has been my favourite poet since the Sixties. Buy a second copy for Gaia, partly because she likes him too, but also partly because Part Two of the book is entitled ‘Little Songs for Gaia’. Then on to the San Francisco MOMA art museum, before catching a cable car back towards Fisherman’s Wharf, to pick up our bags from the Sheraton. The cable car system breaks down, so we decide to walk most of the way, which actually turns out to be a treat, with glorious sunshine coupled with a cool breeze.

Then across to the Folsom area of the city to stay with Mark and Val (Lee). They live in the most extraordinary home, in the midst of a light industrial area. Wonderfully hospitable, and in the evening the four of us wander across to the Zuni Cafe, on Market Street. Great sense of occasion, but delightfully informal and with wonderful service – in this case from a young Canadian woman. Elaine and I work our way down the west coast with 20 oysters in groups of four, representing different regions from Canada down to California. Mark chooses a stunning Syrah wine from Spencer & Roloson (www.punched.net).

San Francisco MOMA

Thursday, April 14, 2005

BSR BROWN BAG

Elaine and I head across to Business for Social Responsibility (www.bsr.org) to do a brown-bag with many of the team. Great session: many similarities, but also some significant differences in approach. Then a nice afternoon session near Union Square in Maiden Street (or similar) with Sara Olsen, who specialises in social return on investment (SROI). Among other things, the conversation helped me map out the overlapping space between corporate sustainability, social entrepreneurs and bottom-of-the-pyramid markets.

We walk back to Fisherman’s Wharf via Chinatown. On the way we stop into the extraordinary City Lights bookstore (www.citylights.com), where I buy George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant!, subtitled “Know Your Values and Frame the Debate.” Recommended by Aron and Berit Cramer earlier in the week. Ever the magazine-aholic, I also buy an armful of US publications such as Entrepreneur, Fast Company and Technology Review, the latter highly recommended by Kevin Kelly yesterday.

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

KEVIN KELLY AND DRIVING OFF AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER

We visit the Pier 39 aquarium, not knowing we would be at the Monterey aquarium a few days later. The highlight here was the pulsing of the Moon Jellies. We grab lunch in the Virgin record store, with Roger-Dean-esque twins and dragon over the door. Then we take BART out to Colma, to see Kevin Kelly in Pacifica. He was involved in the Whole Earth Catalog/Review business, then was editor of Wired, and wrote two of my favorite books: Out of Control (Addison Wesley, 1994) and New Rules for the New Economy (Viking Penguin, 1998). His extraordinary website is at www.kk.org

We are driven from Colma by a semi-blind taxi driver who has no idea of where he is going. In the end, we are rescued by a Good Samaritan in Pacifica: she gets in her car and drives ahead of us to the head of the valley where Kevin’s wood-clad house is to be found. Most of the house seems to be library, with one entire wall covered in images for new graphic novel or comic?, as Kevin puts it. He gives us a copy of his book Asia Grace, published by Taschen. Among the initiatives he is involved in: The Foundation for the Long Now (www.longnow.org) and the All Species Foundation (www.all-species.org). When I ask him about the conversion experience in Jerusalem which set him on a new path, he reaches into the shelves and hands me a CD of a radio interview on the theme. The man’s seems to be prepared for everything, including – in some way – Armageddon.

In the evening, back in San Francisco, we head across to Portrero Hill to see Denise Caruso, of the Hybrid Vigor Institute (www.hybridvigor.org), a member of SustainAbility’s Faculty. She is racing to finish a book on risk and genetic engineering – by Monday. Huge great model neurons stride like mega-spiders across her staircase walls. We arrive courtesy of a Latvian taxi driver, who loses his way and even switches off his meter, driving all the while like his life depended on it, as do ours. A perfectly fabulous meal, surrounded with views of the city lights and Bay.

We bring a white wine, but when asked opt for red – at which Denise pulls out an extraordinary selections of wines, from which we choose a Rabbit Ridge red. A fabulous wine. Later she drives us home, turning the corner of her street to plunge over the edge of a hill towards the broad scape of the city, very much like plunging off the leading edge of an aircraft carrier.

Pier 39 aquarium shark and fish

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

CHINESE DIG, IRISH BLAST

Day starts with, of all things, creme brule, French toast and chicken sausage, half of which we refuse immediately, half of which we leave on our plates. Some American cuisine seems like an attempt to get a bit of structure into sugar.

Later in the day we visit the Beringer winery, including their caves, largely dug out by Chinese labourers, though our guide Tom says the Irish probably did the blasting. Started in 1876, this is the oldest continuously operating winery in Napa Valley, mainly because it continued to produce wine through the Prohibition era, ostensibly for medicinal and sacred purposes. As we leave, we buy a copy of Sideways. Then on to another winery whose wines we have bought, Ravenswood. Something of a disappointment: all the wines taste the same and quite raw.

As we move deeper into the Napa, so the traffic pressure builds. Eventually we decide to drop the car off in Berkeley and take a taxi across the Bay Bridge to SF. Find ourselves in a smoking room, one of the hazards of internet hotel booking. Then across to the Blue Mermaid, which is quite pleasant, though their idea of New England clam chowder turns out to involve a good deal of bacon – which I spend much of the evening picking out and piling up on the side of my plate. But the draft Anchor Steam beer is great.

Napa vineyard (JE)

Monday, April 11, 2005

RAINBOWS, STEELHEAD TROUT AND PHOTOVOLTAICS

Wake to cries of the rooks, ravens. In the Vignonier room of the Grape Leaf Inn, Healdsburg, with morning sun coming through restrained stained glass, splashing rainbow effects. Reminds me of my attempts to reproduce San Francisco in my attic bedroom at Little Rissington in the mid-1960s. Outside, the sound of street cleaning. Inside, the hum and throb of all the pumps needed for people’s showers and Jacuzzis.

We take a picnic out into wine country settling at the Quivira winery, where we drink a delicious Petite Syrah under the trees. The winery is covered with huge arrays of photovoltaic cells and there is a sustainability scheme for the local steelhead trout, linked to a wine, Steelhead Red (www.quivirawine.com). Vines along the river banks have been ripped out and replaced with willows, woven together to slow soil erosion that has been sedimenting the fish spawning grounds. (When later in the day, we drive a huge circle through the mountains to the coast and then down to the mouth of the Russian River, we are struck by the vast amount of silt coming out into the Pacific.)

Later, we happen on the Raymond Burr winery, set up by the actor who played Perry Mason in ‘Ironside’ in the long-running TV series. Their port, originally planted for family and friends, has apparently got on to menus at upscale San Francisco restaurants and in 1996 took Double Gold at the Harvest Fair there. Well, maybe, but I can’t say we took to the wines, though they were served by a delightful woman.

Sunday, April 10, 2005
ECHO BOOMS IN SONOMA
We rent a car from Avis, then drive out on the 580 and 101, across the Richmond Bridge. The car is a Ford Taurus, a bit like driving a middle-aged sea-cucumber on wheels. The roads have also seen better days, but it’s great to be free for a while. As we head up towards Sonoma, we are both struck by the number of vineyards that seem relatively newly planted. Will Rosenzweig tells us later in the day that much of the planting was driven by New Economy money, with a perhaps inevitable echo boom and, to a degree, a perhaps inevitable bust.

Following Will’s hand-drawn map, done the previous evening because I had lost the detailed instructions he had sent by e-mail, we find both the Russian River and his magical home, the IdeaGarden (www.ideagarden.com). A Victorian house, with wrap-around porch, extraordinary garden, spiral wind mobile and Paolo Soleri bell at the entrance. Parked in the drive: a black hybrid Prius. The San Francisco area seems to be awash with Priuses, partly – someone tells us – because Toyota decided to focus its marketing efforts on a few key cities in the US.

Great lunch with Will (once known as Bill, and a serial entrepreneur, who among other things was President, CEO and Minister of Progress at the Republic of Tea and Director of the Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) conference), his wife Carla and daughter Lily. Will is a member of SustainAbility’s Faculty, and something of a stepping stone for me as I venture into the world of social enterprise. A blue jay enjoys splashing in the bird bath as we lunch, while we enjoy a couple of wines from the Belvedere winery, immediately below. Will was also CEO of Hambrecht Vineyards & Wineries, which is how he came to find this house in the first place.

Later, as we walk around the IdeaGarden, we see many lizards and a pretty lively snake. There are rafts of herbs, trees thick with orange blossom and delicious oranges, California poppies, a date palm, olive, almond and pear trees, and a great many roses. A wonderful afternoon, with Louie Armstrong playing as Will drives us around local wineries in the Prius. A really great wine tasting at the Gary Farrell winery (www.garyfarrell.com), with Lily energetically taking photographs with my digital camera.

Then on to the Armstrong redwood reserve, the first time Elaine and I had been into a redwood grove: awe-inspiring. After a winding drive back to the IdeaGarden, we head off to our hotel and dinner at Willi’s Seafood Bar, where I try and enjoy a Vision Cellars Pinot Noir, licorice, and Elaine a cabernet sauvignon from Michel Schlumberger. It really is turning into something of a Sideways adventure, albeit a great deal more civilised than the book.

IdeaGarden

Buddha and leis

Lily and Colonel Armstrong

Will in Prius

Saturday, April 09, 2005

SIDEWAYS INTO SUSTAINABILITY

We take part in a number of interesting sessions on social performance metrics and social return on investment (SROI). Gavin Power of the UN Global Compact does a brilliant lunchtime speech. The final session is chaired by Will Rosenzweig, who we are due to visit tomorrow. Late in the day, we have a wonderful dinner with Aron Cramer of BSR (www.bsr.org) and his wife Berit, at a delightful restaurant called Oliveto.

The wine was extraordinary, a Russian River pinot noir by Merry Edwards (www.merryedwards.com), one of the very few women wine-makers in the region. Haven’t yet seen the film Sideways, or read the book [Note 1: we will buy it next week at the Beringer winery, and Elaine – reading it first – will tell me that it’s too raucous for me], but it feels as though we’re starting the sideways slide into the winery world. Whether that has anything to do with sustainability remains to be seen. [Note 2: apart from sheer pleasure of most of the wines, we find sustainability projects at several wineries, particularly Quivira, www.quivirawine.com.]

Berkeley campanile

Berkeley umbrella

Friday, April 08, 2005

HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

I get up a number of times in the night to try to fix a radiator which – despite not being on – makes sounds like gnomes hammering, distant forges of the mini-Vulcans. The hotel sends up an engineer in the morning, but apparently this is normal.

Start day with an interview for Wall Street Journal on the new Nike sustainability report, which comes out in a few days. Today sees the beginning of the conference on social performance metrics, organized by the University’s of Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and, more particularly, by the Center for Responsible Business (www.haas.berkeley.edu/responsiblebusiness/). Launched in 2003, and led by Kellie McElhaney, the Center is developing a series of conferences with the Boston University School of Management and London Business School.

My keynote begins by comparing measurement across the triple bottom line as somewhat akin to broccoli: we all know it’s good for us, but I for one find it difficult to get passionately excited about metrics. Even so, measurement and performance metrics are becoming increasingly important, and I focus in on the four areas that have been preoccupying me for a while: Balance Sheets (accountability, accounting, reporting, assurance), Boards (the cross-connects between sustainable development and corporate governance), Brands (the conversations between companies and their consumers, customers and investors) and Business Models (the basic processes of wealth creation).

Lots of conversations afterwards, plus an invitation to write a paper for a special edition of the California Management Review.

Gavin Power, Kellie McElhaney, John Elkington

Thursday, April 07, 2005

BERKELEY

Elaine and I fly to San Francisco. We first went there on our honeymoon in 1973, five years after we met. That, too, had turned into a mix of work and pleasure, with visits to interesting people right across the United States. As usual, I use the flight to plough through books. Finish off The World Is Not Enough and then turn to Why Blame Israel? Read the first hundred pages and learn a good deal I didn’t know about the history of Israeli-Palestinian relations.

When we arrive at San Francisco International, the PhD student who was meant to be picking us up wasn’t there, so we hopped a cab across the Bay Bridge to Berkeley. Sign of the times: Apple’s big “Life is Random” ad hoardings for their new mini-iPod.

When I go online from the Hotel Durant, there are far fewer e-mails than usual and I wonder whether maybe the world has forgotten me? No, as it turns out. Instead, SustainAbility’s new spam filter is now working effectively, knocking out huge numbers of spurious mail that I once had to trawl through each day. One interesting e-mail notes that the new SustainAbility website is attracting three times as many CVs as the previous one, and from a wider range of people.

In the evening, Elaine and I walk around the Berkeley campus, with the Bay glittering in the background. Although I have been to San Francisco a number of times, this is the first time I have made it across to Berkeley – even though events here in the late 1960s made the place feel almost like a parallel alma mater. We are quite surprised by the extraordinary number of Asian students. When Elaine finds two very healthy and quite vigorous caterpillars in her salad at supper, the hotel gives us the meal free – even though we had only mentioned the caterpillars in passing and had tried to insist that we wanted to pay. Thanks, Crystal.

California poppies (©JE)

Wednesday, April 06, 2005
DIGITAL INCLUSION
Spent an interesting day in Reading, chairing a digital inclusion roundtable for Microsoft. I often note that the human rights agenda has mutated strikingly in recent years, increasingly taking in a range of ‘access’ issues: for example, access to clean water, access to affordable energy and access to drugs for HIV/AIDS, malaria and TB, with huge implications for the relevant industries – and for their underlying business models. The digital inclusion agenda increasingly raises similar issues for the ICT hardware, software and service provider sectors. An extremely constructive session.

Monday, April 04, 2005

OYBIKE

Multifaceted day, kicking off with a visit to OYBike in Hammersmith, a social enterprise aiming to bring high-tech cycle hire to London and other cities. Idea, as explained to me by OYBike Director Gordon Keenan, is that you will use your mobile phone to unlock cycles for hire. Hammersmith, bounded on three sides by motorways and on the fourth by the Thames, was chosen as a testbed.

I definitely wish the initiative well, but was struck by the number of challenges they still have to overcome, not the least of which will be loosing at least some innocents onto London roads. Having twice been left unconscious while cycling in London, once with three broken ribs, I’m slightly sensitive to the risks that they would face. That’s why SustainAbility has supported the London Cycling Campaign (www.lcc.org.uk), which aims to turn London into a world class cycling city.

Then back to office, on to Soho for a meeting with Ford, and back to office for meeting and teleconference with Nike people on their impending new report. Wish I’d been able to cycle home: the Piccadilly Line had signal problems, which meant that we sat there alongside a man who was playing his personal hi-fi at Concorde levels. I’d rather risk life and limb in London’s roads than put up with that sort of acoustic aggression.

Gordan Keenan with OYBike cycle stand (JE)

Saturday, April 02, 2005

STELLATA PERFORMANCE, BUT …

Couldn’t resist shooting the Magnolia stellata that has erupted in the front garden. Real sense of Spring breaking loose, with cascades of cherry blossom streaming down from the trees around the corner as I walk home. And my favourite perfume of the moment: the flowering blackcurrant on the other side of our block, albeit interspersed with the peppery odour of fox. And, overhead, the wild screech of the parakeets. How long before they turf the pigeons out of Trafalgar Square?

6 April cautionary note from (Sir) Geoffrey Chandler, among other things a member of SustainAbility Council: “The Magnolia stellata is correctly identified and admirably photographed, but I suspect your ‘flowering blackcurrant’, unless it has insipid yellowish flowers and is therefore Ribes americanum, is in fact the flowering currant (no ‘black’) Ribes sanguineum, its flowers either pinkish, red, or possibly white. With any luck no one visits [your] site and their education will therefore not be blighted. But you never know.”

He’s right, of course. The flowers are pinkish, mauveish, whiteish. I stand, or currently sit, corrected.

Friday, April 01, 2005

SKOLL FOUNDATION ANNUAL SUMMIT & AWARDS

Awards ceremony, including Sir Ben Kingsley (fifth from left), Jeff Skoll (sixth) and Sally Osberg (seventh), who heads the Skoll Foundation (©JE)

Just back from three fascinating days at the Skoll Foundation summit on social entrepreneurship, held at the Said Business School, Oxford. Chaired a session on governance, but mainly got a chance to catch up with social entrepreneurs and fellow travellers from around the world.

Last night we had the latest set of awards from the Foundation, which can be accessed by clicking the title of this item. Award winners shown in the photo. One of the highlights of the event: a showing of part of the film Gandhi, starring Ben Kingsley who now presented the awards, dubbed into Palestinian Arabic – for showings in Palestinian refugee camps. The sequence shown was where Gandhi, abed, told a Hindu he could atone for his murder of a Muslim child (in revenge for the murder of his own son) by adopting a Muslim child – and raising him or her as a Muslim.

Today started with a small, invitation-only breakfast session with people from Participant Productions (Jeff Skoll’s new Hollywood film production company, www.participantproductions.com), and from media organisations like the BBC and PBS. Left me thinking we should do more with the media.

For more on the event, go to either www.skollfoundation.org or to www.social edge.org. After the summit ended, Geoff Lye and I did a session for MSc and PhD students from the Environmental Change Institute in Oxford (http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/). Great fun.

 

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

ARGILE ET CENDRES

Well, I made it back on the cycle last night, so no plot to unhorse me. At times it was almost as if I was swimming on wheels, but there was a strange joy to it, too. Took a warm shower and then curled up with The World Is Not Enough, Zoe Oldenbourg’s novel of the Middle Ages, first published in 1946 as Argile et Cendres, or Clay and Embers. Took me a while to get into it, but now I’m hooked. Today, it’s off to Oxford, for the annual Skoll Foundation summit on social entrepreneurship.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005
RAIN CYCLE

Time to go home and it’s really pouring outside. But I have to cycle because the machine is booked in for a service tomorrow, ahead of our San Francisco trip next week. Still, something to take my mind off the cat-fighting in the build-up to the UK Election.

The latest issue of Green Futures came through today, with a long piece on the Election hopes and perspectives of a number of folk in the sustainable development world, including Sara Parkin and Jonathon Porritt. One of my quotes was to the effect that: “politicians who use sustainable development language still sound like government-approved Soviet rock’n’rollers: derivative, second-rate and, ultimately, unconvincing. And such language — particularly when delivered from the missionary position — simply alienates people.”

If I don’t make it home this evening, maybe it was a Government plot …

Monday, March 28, 2005

EASTER WRITING

It seems a long time since we got back from Cyprus, but that’s largely because last week was fairly busy, with a blaze of meetings and various articles to write. Have also been preparing for upcoming travels in the weeks ahead, starting with the Skoll Foundation annual summit on social entreprneurship, to be held in Oxford later this week. But the Easter weekend, apart from things like the usual frantic helicoptering overhead in the final minutes of the annual Oxbridge Boat Race, has been spent largely on the book, including a new chapter on ‘hot spots’ of social enterprise. Every so often I have been tempted to go out and sit in the sun, but the weather remains pretty chilly.

Saturday, March 19, 2005

HOME

The return flight is uneventful. As the group disbands around the baggage carousels in Terminal 3, there is a bittersweet sense of loss, of interesting conversations truncated. But there is also a sense of completion, of a great wheel turning and coming momentarily to rest. Maybe it’s the carousels, but I find the story of St Catherine of Alexandria running through my mind as I watch the baggage go round. (On reflection, she had been mentioned as we drove towards Famagusta Bay.)

Maybe she was martyred on the wheel, recalled in our Catherine’s Wheel firework, or maybe the spiked torture wheel was miraculously destroyed and, instead, she was beheaded. But her story symbolises both the trials and tribulations ahead of us, and, though St Catherine is now largely passe the potential of some extraordinary people and peoples to rise above them.

It also reminds me that pretty much top of my current list of places to visit is Alexandria.

Royal room with a view, St Hilarion (©JE)

Friday, March 18, 2005

KANTARA AND THE PANHANDLE

Lizards and Moon (©JE)

Another long haul trip, up into the island’s eastward-pointing Panhandle. Having been in Kantara House at school in Nicosia, this was another must, and once again exceeds my expectations. The road up to the castle is endlessly serpentine and I often wonder whether the bus will make it at all. We pass a fair few summer villas that are boarded up, but which in the event of any peace settlement will no doubt be the subject of energetic court cases by the dispossessed Greek owners.

Kantara is a hugely powerful castle, with the best-preserved remains of the three mountain castles we have seen. From the heights, you command huge sweeps of the northern coastline, Panhandle to the east and Famagusta Bay to the south. The flanks of the mountain are a riot of cyclamen, giant fennel and other plants unknown to me. On the way down, we stop under trees for an impromptu snack, which includes sheep cheese and beer, wine and raki, made by a distillery near Famagusta, which I am surprised to find myself hugely enjoying.

Among several things we do during the rest of the day, what stands out in my mind is the visit to Ayios Philon, part of the ancient coastal city of Karpasia. The arms of the long-since destroyed harbour are engaging enough, apart from the endemic plastic flotsam and jetsam, but as the larks trill overhead I spot two large lizards on an arch of the ruined basilica, with the Moon in the background. Spring into action with the new digital camera we bought for Elaine at Heathrow but which to date I am the only one to use, largely because I forgot to bring the cable for my Sony CyberShot, with the result that I am limited to the capacity of the two memory sticks I happened to have brought along.

One thing I wish I’d caught as we passed: it was in the village near the Panhandle where Turks and Greeks continue to live side by side – and where, uniquely in my memory, the cafe signs feature both the Coca-Cola and Pepsi signs alongside one another. A nice gesture. (In the 1950s, Coke seemed to dominate, but now Pepsi is everywhere in northern Cyprus, though a few Coke signs start to surface as you drive towards the Panhandle.)

Then, just outside the basilica, I come across several seething clusters of the caterpillars I remember so well from the 1950s. There is an instant, powerful sense of the endless cycles of life and death, of civilisation and decline into barbarism. Cyprus, positioned in the path of so many marauding, crusading and empire-building peoples has been subject to intense pressures, but once again friction has resulted in architectural, urban and cultural pearls among the devastation.

Our own stay on the island was part of the wind-down of the British Empire. Waning days. There will be other Empires, some imposed, some embraced. And Cyprus will continue to be at the epicentre of the endless succession of geological, climatic, cultural, ethnic and political tectonic forces that have shaped and reshaped the region and the island. But, whether you see it in a seething heap of caterpillars or in the boat-builders working on new vessels just over the ramparts from a 2300-year-old wreck, this island leaves you with a sense of the ways in which the human spirit, in all its infinite and troublesome variety, can prevail.

As it winds down, I reflect that the trip was far better than I had any reason to expect or hope. And I’m happy to have seen northern Cyprus again, warts and all, before the forces of development really get to work on it. Even today, it is clear that the island’s economy is completely unsustainable. When we were returning from the Panhandle, we saw the deflated hulk of the giant red membrane in which fresh water was towed in from Turkey. How long before the endless buildings mushrooming up across the island are the long-since deserted ruins of the future?

Like several others I have travelled with in recent days, I come away with a heightened sense not only of the vulnerability of all civilisations, but also of how difficult it is going to be to sort out Cyprus politically and of how challenging it will be to work out a sustainable relationship between Turkey and the European Union. That, however, is something to think about when I’m back in London.

Tomorrow waits to take wing (©JE)

Thursday, March 17, 2005

ST HILARION AND VOUNI

St Hilarion (©JE)

The day of days. In all the years I dreamed of coming back to Cyprus, one symbol stood out in my mind, partly I suspect because of the associations with the romantic, brutish Lionheart, Richard of England. This was the castle of St Hilarion, which we had seen every day when we awoke from the balcony of our hotel in Kyrenia.

Among my strongest memories of the island was playing up on the jousting field beneath the castle, with the March girls: Molly, Terry and Peggy, part of one of two American families we grew up alongside in Nicosia. As Elaine and I walked around Kyrenia harbour, I looked for the house where we visited the Marches at some point during our time on the island. The other family, just across the road from our house, was headed by the American consul, whose wife, a detail that stuck in my imagination, had died some time before by choking on a chicken bone.

Even before we got up to the castle, however, we could see the damage done by the fires of 1995. Though the flanks of the mountains are still green at this time of year, most of the wonderful forest cover of the northern side of this part of the Kyrenia range was burned in the three days that the fires raged out of control. Because they started in various places, arson has always been suspected, with Greek Cypriots, Greeks, Israelis and Kurdish separatists among those fingered. It also has to be said that Turkish incompetence and chronic under-funding of the forestry service had a fair amount to do with the eventual scale of the damage, which affected almost 70 square miles.

In the event, the castle proved to even more wonderful than I had remembered, not least because you can now get right to the very pinnacles in a way I suspect wasn’t possible when I was eight or nine. The one sour note: the jousting ground, once surrounded by trees, is now naked because of the fires and, to add insult to injury, the Turks have slapped a helipad and what looks like an assault course into its very heart. Poetic justice, I’m sure, but tragic nonetheless.

Again, the views are unbelievable, under clear blue skies. The fire apparently raged all about in June 1995, destroying anything built of wood and plaster, but you would hardly guess it today. The wildflowers are everywhere, with mandrake particularly in evidence around the walls.

On the way back, we drop into the cafe to get a glass of orange and buy a jar of carob syrup. Homemade by the wife of the cafe’s manager, the orange is delicious, very much like the lemonade my mother, Pat, used to make all those years ago in Nicosia. But it is so cold that, as I hurry to down it in time to catch up with the rest of the group, it almost scorches my throat.

In the end, it turns out that I needn’t have hurried, since others had tarried a bit lower down, and those that hadn’t were busily warning the habitual denizen of the back seat of the bus that his end of the vehicle was cantilevered out over space, rather like the end of The Italian Job. But, as befits a man who had served as a doctor for a community of 600 drug addicts near Hong Kong for something like 30 years, he appears unfazed.

From the lower ramparts of St Hilarion, looking down on jousting field (©JE)

After St Hilarion, we head south towards Nicosia, then turn right, westwards, for the trip to the Monastery of St Mamas and the hilltop palace of Vouni. To get there, though, we have to drive through one of the saddest regions of the entire island.

As The Rough Guide notes, if you mention Guzelyurt (known to Greek Cypriots as Morfou) you will trigger grief among Greek Cypriots, who recall that before the 1974 invasion this region was a hub of Greek Cypriot enterprise. The endless citrus orchards, melon patches and strawberry fields are irrigated with water from huge underground aquifers. Unfortunately, the acreage under cultivation has been increased since 1974 and the water resources over-pumped, with the result that saltwater has intruded from the sea, contaminating a considerable and growing area of land.

We take in the slightly grotesque archaeology and wildlife museum, next to the monastery, with its eight-legged lamb (stuffed with the same lack of art that was true, I suspect, of poor Bragadino) and a variety of birds, reptiles and so on that have been around so long that they would have mummified even if they hadn’t been so artlessly preserved. But I do get a close look at a bee-eater, which is enough to confirm that it had indeed been a flight of these glorious birds that I had started in the cliffside ruins of Dura Europa, Syria, and then watched wing their way down over the green Euphrates.

When we get to the monastery church, there is the usual display of models of different parts of the human anatomy that the relevant saint is supposed to treat, even cure. Senol manages to knock a heap of the things over, with the most enormous clatter, though I doubt that the effects will have been felt in ears and limbs across the region. And even if they were, the monastery contains a rather unpleasant looking ‘sweating stone’ that exudes what looks like the sludge left after carob syrup is made, which is apparently very effective in such cases.

Given that SustainAbility is now working on tax avoidance and evasion by companies, I am particularly interested in St Mamas. A poor, 12th-century hermit, he reputedly refused to pay his equivalent of the poll tax. Soldiers were sent to bring him in for punishment, but as they were trundling along they saw a lamb threatened by a lion (never actually known to inhabit these parts, but let it lie). St Mamas saved the lamb and rode the wild lion into Nicosia. So impressed were the Byzantine authorities that it is said that they forgave him his taxes. There are now 14 churches across Cyprus dedicated to the memory of the patron saint of tax avoiders.

Then onwards again, with the snow-capped Troodos mountains looming to the southwest, into copper-mining country. The mines for which Cyprus has been famous for millennia are now pretty much abandoned, partly because of exhaustion but also because of the economic effects of the invasion. As we walk back from the Vouni palace site, I look out across the plain and my eye catches something which literally takes me back almost 50 years.

I have always remembered that when we went to Israel we visited a great mining complex, maybe even the source of the legend of King Solomon’s mines. But as I see the vast toroidal ‘donut shaped’ hill, I know in an instant that this is where I saw the mining. Maybe someone mentioned King Solomon at the time? The shape is exactly as I remembered it. And later in the day Charles lends me Colin Thubron’s Journey into Cyprus, flagging the extraordinary account of the mining here. The mining of recent times, with dynamite and bulldozers, often cut through the galleries dug by generations of earlier miners, many of them slaves. Underground, this area is shot through with tunnels like some giant termite’s nest.

On the way back, we pass the heavily smoking conical furnaces of the charcoal burners. Like the smokeless fuel people, they help clean up urban area but at the expense of fairly intense local pollution.

And isn’t it odd that as a non-carnivorous omnivore for over 30 years, one of my most intense and delightful memories of Cyprus is of charcoal-grilled lamb?

Copper mine from Vouni (©JE)

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

SALAMIS AND FAMAGUSTA

An early departure eastwards, en route to a rendezvous with a couple of saints, the ruins of Salamis (dating back to the 11th-century BC) and the Venetian fortifications of Famagusta. The high points for me were Salamis, which I don’t remember visiting as a child, and Famagusta, though some of the fired clay toys in the museum at the Monastery of Saints Paul and Barnabas were outstanding. The story of the discovery of St Barnabas’ body, though, smacks of outright fraud. But perhaps a childhood partly spent sandwiched between Protestants and Catholics (Northern Ireland), Christians and Muslims (Cyprus) and Jews and Muslims (Israel, which we visited from Cyprus) left me with an over-developed scepticism about all faiths?

Monastery of St Barnabas (©JE)

The Salamis visit started with a box of chilled oranges and tangerines from the garden of Senol Ciner, extracted from the hold of the bus. We then found our way around the ruins of the gymnasium, forum and theatre, in the midst of sand dunes and wild fennel ‘forests’, the latter often covered in small snails that in places had brought entire plants low with their gnawing and combined weight. Much of this city, periodically brought to ruin by earthquakes and sacked by Arab raiders, was until recently under the dunes, indeed, it is thought that a fair amount still is, and some of the ruins also extend out under the sea. In the end, the inhabitants gave up, moving to Arsinoe, which eventually became Famagusta.

After lunch, we walked around Famagusta, starting with the so-called Othello’s Tower (originally built in the 12th-century Lusignan period), where I was impressed both by the air vents from the cannon chambers built deep into the walls and by the extraordinary weathering on stones used in the internal walls of the powder room, no doubt because of the recycling of parts of the earlier Lusignan fortifications. Incidentally, Leonardo da Vinci is said to have advised the Venetians on the design of the fortifications.

Then on to various churches and the Cathedral of St Nicholas (aka the Lala Mustafa Mosque). The latter is quite extraordinary, considered to outshine its Nicosia counterpart, the Ayia Sofia. Unfortunately, the top of the cathedral’s two towers were shot away during the siege of 1571, generally considered to be one of the greatest battles of the medieval era.

Orange (©JE)

During the 10-month siege – an earlier, more protracted version of the Alamo in 1836 – some 8000 defenders held off around 200000 Ottomans, inflicting an estimated 50000 casualties. By the time the white flag was run up by the survivors, after the long-promised relief fleet from Venice had failed to materialise, the level of bravery had gone off the scale. Then the Ottomans perpetrated another of their grim atrocities, which I recall reading about when very much younger.

The surrender had been agreed on terms that meant that the defenders could return to Venice, but the Ottomans soon changed their minds. Tortured for days, Marcantonio Bragadino, the brilliant commander of the defenders, was finally flayed alive between two granite pillars that still stand near the cathedral, and were apparently originally brought across from Salamis. His skin was then stuffed with straw and paraded around the city. Later, it would be ransomed by the man’s descendants and is now to be found in a Venetian church.

As we head back towards Nicosia and Kyrenia, the sun goes down in a blaze of tangerine and pistachio, the mountains highlighted in all their Gothic splendour. And I think back to when we left in 1959, particularly to the sight of our pale blue Jaguar 2.4, my father’s pride and joy, being lifted in a great net into the ship’s hold. A small drama compared to what else has happened here, but breath was held.

Docks from the Venetian walls, Famagusta (©JE)

Ghost town extends south of Famagusta (©JE)

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

BUFFAVENTO CASTLE

The happy couple (©JE)

A stunning walk to the top of Buffavento Castle, past the memorial to the crew of a Turkish Airlines aircraft that crashed here in 1988, the year we published The Green Consumer Guide. Again glorious weather, with pairs, always pairs, of quail or black francolin exploding out ahead of us. Their flying habits seem eminently suited to a country carpeted with shotgun cartridge cases.

The views are out of this world, back and forth along the coastal strip and, on the inner side of the mountains, across the central plain: called Mesaoria in the South, Mesarya in the North. The last time we were here, we visited the monastery down the hill, where the monks gave my sister Caroline a small glass basket of sugared almonds. The monks left post haste after the 1974 invasion.

Despite what happened here to the monastics and , much, much worse, to John Visconti, I am literally having the time of my life. This is the highest of the three mountain castles we will visit, some 3100 feet (945 metres) up. And Visconti? He tried to warn his friend King Peter I of his Queen’s infidelities while her husband was abroad. Disbelieved, though it seems that the queen was guilty as charged, the wretched Visconti was imprisoned and tortured in Kyrenia, then bundled off to Buffavento where he was starved to death.

I wouldn’t mind having some of my ashes scattered up here, though with the winds that buffet these summits in bad weather they probably wouldn’t stick around for long.

Then on to the nearby Herbarium and a different (I think) abandoned monastery, with upper walkways that are developing nicely as a total hazard to life and limb. Periodic sense as I walk around that my ashes may be blowing in the winds sooner than I had planned, though someone has kindly written in chalk where the hazards are greatest.

Buffavento Castle entrance (©JE)

Monday, March 14, 2005

NORTHERN NICOSIA

After a visit to part of the Green Line where it cuts through Nicosia, taking a moment to view the bullet holes where soldiers sprayed the top of a tall building to knock out one or more snipers, we are dropped off at the Kyrenia Gate in north Nicosia. Here I easily recognise the ramparts, topped by a long, low building with a pan tile roof, surrounded by tall eucalyptuses.

We walk the short distance to the delightful remnants of the Mevlevi Tekke (or ‘Whirling Dervish’) museum, with its line of 16 tombs under six domes and its blossomy courtyard. Lines of elegant tombstones, the style of the carved headdress topping the stones apparently speaking volumes to initiates. The music to which the Dervishes danced included that of the reed flute, with the lonely sound of the reed flute or ney ‘uprooted from its reed bed’ seen as a metaphor (I read in Marc Dubin’s excellent Cyprus: The Rough Guide) for the human soul separated from its Godhead, keening for reunion with the Infinite. Scandalous to orthodox Muslims, the order was widely suppressed, though the British allowed it to live in Cyprus, where it lasted until 1954, a couple of years before the Family Elkington arrived on the island.

Ataturk Meydani, Nicosia (©JE)

Buyuk Han, Nicosia (©JE)

As we walk along, it is hard to miss the head of Ataturk ‘propped up like something from a Dali/Orwell dystopia’ which overlooks Ataturk Meydani, long the central hub of Turkish life in the city. Again, I recognise the law courts, built by the long-ago British. We pause for a moment by the granite column, once topped by a Lion of St Mark, but toppled by the Ottomans in 1570. The British re-erected the column in 1915, though this time topping it out with a globe instead of the Venetian lion.

We buy Turkish delight in the covered market, made with ‘mastic’, which we take to be gum arabic. Then the Buyuk Hamam, once part of a 14th-century church but now the sunken facade of the city’s largest public bath, and the Buyuk Han. As we walk towards the Buyuk Han, I turn to Elaine and say that this used to be a prison. Something else from childhood, I suspect. Then we would hear prisoners clattering their plates and cups against the bars of their cells in at least one of the Nicosia prisons, though the Buyuk Han’s incarnation as a prison was from an earlier period of British rule, I think. My (perhaps mistaken) memory is that the clattering was when executions were due.

Ayia Sofia/Selimiye Camii, Nicosia (©JE)

There would have been much more clattering when the Ottomans broke into the city in 1570, slaughtering many of the Venetian defenders, and sending the heads of the defeated leaders to the defenders of Kyrenia, persuading them to surrender without further ado. We visit Ayia Sofia, begun by French masons accompanying the Crusaders in 1209 (two years, incidentally, after the original Whirling Dervish, Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi, was born in what is now Afghanistan). The cathedral was under construction for 150 years and was still unfinished when the city fell. Long term thinking incarnate.

The Ottomans ‘who had been burning the old, disabled and ugly among the city’s inhabitants, the rest sent off into slavery’ turned the pulpit and pews into firewood and evicted the dead from their tombs in the cathedral’s floors. Because they also whitewashed the interior, it’s possible to get a very clear sense of the Gothic structure. But, with the wall-to-wall prayer carpet cut on the cross, to enable the faithful to pray towards Mecca, there is something weirdly skewed about the place, an effect heightened by the twin 50-metre minarets grafted like SAM-7 batteries atop the building.

Elaine and Senol Ciner, Lapidary Museum, Nicosia (©JE)

Among the other places we drop into are the Lapidary Museum and the Dervish Pasha Konak, once the home of the publisher of the island’s first Turkish newspaper. This is hard by the Green Line, as is the old Armenian church we visit. This is now a grisly ruin, full of rubbish and graffiti. One graffito is carved into the plaster. Some take it to be an elegantly cut wine bottle, but I rather insensitively point out that it is more likely a hand grenade. The Armenians, once rewarded for siding with the Ottoman invaders, got it wrong in the 1960s, when the Turkish equivalent of EOKA expelled them from the area because they were judged to have aligned with the Greek Cypriots.

On our way back, we walk through a desperately poor part of the city. And when we pass a run-down cinema, I ask Senol where I might have seen the film The Vikings in an open cinema. The film haunted me over the years, largely because of the sequence where a man has a hand chopped off and is thrown into a wolf-pit (though this was tame compared to what happened to Marcantonio Bragadino in Famagusta, where we are headed on Thursday). As we drive back towards Kyrenia, Senol points out the open-air cinema and it is exactly as I remember it, though this shrine to the visual arts has long since been ‘deconsecrated’.

Chair in the Dervish Pasha Konak, Nicosia (©JE)

Sunday, March 13, 2005

BELLAPAIS

Bellapais Abbey (©JE)

We awoke to wonderful blue skies, with nothing slated until 12.00, when we all headed off for Bellapais Abbey. Having recently re-read Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons, I was intrigued to see the competing candidates for his “Tree of Idleness”, including a mulberry tree and a Japanese pagoda tree, under which a seemingly unending game of backgammon was played in Durrell’s time.

We wandered around the Abbey, from which I spotted a scarecrow in the gardens way below, dressed ,it seemed, like an archbishop, complete with mitre. It (or more likely hunting pressure) seems to have been remarkably effective: one of the things that struck a number of us was the paucity of birdlife on the island, coupled with the crunch of blue or red plastic shotgun cartridges underfoot in the wilder areas. We did see a fair few sparrows and hooded crows, however, plus the occasional falcon, duck and lark.

Lunch at the Huzur Agac restaurant, overlooking the Abbey. The first of many meze meals, which I like tremendously, but this time with a tank of beady-eyed piranha overlooking my back throughout the proceedings. They seemed to be aggressive kissers: most had seriously gnawed mouthparts. As we walked back to our bus, a number of us took a closer look at a listing monument, a coach that was suspended at the top of a long slope down to a rubbish drop in the centre of the village. Given how much attention we paid to it, I fear it could become a listed monument.

Listing monument (©JE)

Later in the day, we wandered around Kyrenia castle. This was a prison for EOKA terrorists (or freedom-fighters, depending on your view) when we were there in the 1950s, so inaccessible. I loved St George’s, the encapsulated Byzantine church thought to date from the 1100s, once outside the walls but absorbed into the much more powerful structure of the Venetian period.

Though some probably loved the display of torture methods, with a Mumluk prisoner standing in for the multitudes abused and slaughtered within these walls, I had taken off on my own along the battlements, drinking in the astounding panoramas and the glorious diversity of wildflowers erupting from between the stonework. I also managed to shoot in to the Shipwreck Museum, which was beautifully presented. When it sank some 2300 years ago, the wrecked ship had already been 80 years old and much repaired. The cargo was mainly composed of amphorae of wine, with the 4-to-5-man crew apparently subsisting on almonds, together with what fish they could catch along the way.

Shipwreck (©JE)

On the subject of fish, the Turkish Cypriot I had sat alongside on the flight from Izmir had warned that much of the fish now eaten on Cyprus comes in from Turkey. He noted that the damming of the Nile at Aswan had stopped the flow of nutrients into the eastern Mediterranean. The result â as I knew from my work in the Nile delta in 1974, was a collapse of many offshore fisheries, though I had no idea that the impacts had extended as far north as Cyprus.

Later still, with the castle about to close, I again prowled the walls with Elaine, Charles (Hind) and several others. We stood on the battlements overlooking the harbour, watching the sun go down behind the mountains, through the smoky haze. A magical moment, though we had earlier walked along the quay and seen the astonishing profusion of plastic bags and beer bottles in the apparently romantic waters below.

Kyrenia harbour (©JE)

ROOM 404

After the chaos of the Turkish Airlines section of Heathrow’s Terminal 3, where we found that one member of the study tour was an old friend, it was almost a relief to get on the flight to Izmir. After an hour’s stopover at Izmir, we were off again to Ercan airport in Cyprus, arriving well after midnight, local time. The air was pleasantly chill as we disembarked from the jet and walked across the tarmac to the terminal, but the faint, mimosa-like fragrance was utterly delightful, seductive.

As our bus headed westward across the plain towards Nicosia, then turned right and north for Kyrenia (the Turks call it Girne), we were welcomed by the bearded course director, Charles Hind, and his bearded local colleague, Senol Ciner. Inevitably, it proved that they had other qualities, too. I was slightly taken aback, however, by how quickly we got to the coast and how low the Kyrenia range seemed to be. Then it struck me that the roads must have been straightened considerably since the 1950s and that, in the dark, the peaks were looming on either side of the pass.

Getting into Kyrenia proved a bit of a trial with the bus having to negotiate some particularly tight corners, waltzing around a number of roadworks. And the initial impression of the neon-lit casinos as we headed for the Dome Hotel seemed to confirm my worst fears. But we were too tired to fret, picked up the keys to our room, 404, overlooking the sea as it turned out, and headed off to bed.

Casino, Kyrenia (©JE)

Saturday, March 12, 2005

A RETURN TO CYPRUS

Omnipresent symbol of Turkish presence (©JE)

They say you can’t return to your childhood, but ever since that day in 1959 when my family and I took ship for Italy, I have ached to return to Cyprus. As the great ship turned out to sea and the Famagusta docks and fortifications shrank into the eastern horizon, I stood at the warm, salty metal rail, nine years old, feeling like some sort of refugee. It would be forty-six years before I once again set foot on Cypriot soil, or, as it turned out, tarmac. And by the time I did the island had been torn in half for over a generation.

What follows is the story of a few short days in late March, 2005, when Elaine and I embarked on our second ACE study tour (www.study-tours.org). The first, to Syria, had been such an outstanding success that some part of me dreaded tempting fate again, particularly where it involved a return to Cyprus, which, alongside the years we spent on a farm outside Limavady, Northern Ireland, had so powerfully shaped my consciousness and interests. In the event, we both returned agreeing that the trip had exceeded our wildest expectations.

In part, perhaps, that’s because our expectations were low. Ever since the mass graves and other atrocities of the 1970s, peaking during the 1974 Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus, I had pretty much given up any thought of returning, given that most of the places I wanted to see were north of the bitterly disputed Green (or Attila) Line that now separated the Greek south from the Turkish north. It was only when the Turkish Cypriots finally voted for membership of the European Union, only to have the Greek Cypriots vote to keep them out, that I began to think in terms of a possible return.

After checking with colleagues at Amnesty International, to see whether there were still reasons to stay away, we decided to give it a go. Booking late, we were lucky to get a couple of cancellations.

Another end of the spectrum, asphodel, thought to flower in the Elysian Fields (©JE)

Sunday, March 06, 2005

TIT REFLECTIONS

Much of the weekend spent either reading stacks of newspapers or working on the book, which is going quite well. As Elaine and I walked around the Common this evening, I found myself wondering aloud whether – assuming I finish this book – I will be satisfied with having authored 17? Ended up suspecting not. It’s a bit like the tit at our front window.

For weeks now the same little bird has been perching on a branch of the strawberry grape vine and then hurling itself at the window, presumably at its own reflection. I have also been plastering (in the Polyfilla manner) and painting a wall in the front room after our desperately geriatric piano (which had concealed the relevant bit of wall) left for different climes on Friday, so I could hear the constant click-collisions of the bird’s beak against the glass. And I suppose that’s akin to me and books, really.

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

IMPERIAL COLLEGE, ACCA & .COM

A highly enjoyable day, starting off with a near-3-hour session with MSc students at Imperial College, something I have done each year for years, with Andrew Blaza at the helm. A great opportunity to test SustainAbility’s thinking, priorities and overall approach with the rising generation.

Then on to ACCA (Association of Chartered and Certified Accountants), to chair meeting of the Social and Environmental Committee. Pivotal presentations from Rob Lake of Henderson Global Investors on the growing inter-connections between the CSR and corprate tax agendas, from Roger Adams of ACCA on same issue, and then from David Bent of Forum for the Future and Adrian Henriques on their monetised triple bottom line balance sheet for a cider company.

Then back in rain and sleet to SustainAbility, in time to celebrate the launch of our new website. Putting the new site together has been a major task, particularly since we started again from the ground up. There is still a good deal more to do, but the basic structure is there and the interior design will evolve in the coming months.

Tuesday, March 01, 2005
ON TIME

Every so often, one is brought up short by how time passes. Yesterday I worked at home on the book and today I mainly worked on a Unilever project, with time behaving itself more or less normally. Then this evening Satish Kumar dropped in – and mentioned that his magazine Resurgence (http://www.resurgence.org) will be 40 next year. Having read it since the late 1960s, off and on, and written for it more recently, it’s odd to try to think back now to that world. It seems forever in the past, even though much of the music remains weirdly alive. It’s like a geological era, with some things that should be fossils still flitting around our heads. That doesn’t apply to Satish, though, who at 69 is still firing on at least 70 cylinders.

CEDAR REVOLUTION

Syria may be a wonderful country to visit, as we did a few years back, but the regime remains a pretty unpleasant one. The news that the Syrian-backed Lebanese government has stpped down, following widespread protests after the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Shafiq Hariri in Beirut on 14 February, seems like good news, potentially at least. But it’s always interesting to see the spin Al-Jazeera puts on such things. Click title to read the Al-Jazeera angle.

Sunday, February 27, 2005

PETER BENENSON

One of the great privileges of advancing old age is that you get asked to sit on advisory councils and boards. One of these invitations that has meant a great deal to me has been the invitation to be a member of the board of trustees of the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (www.business-humanrights.org), spun out from Amnesty. And today I was forwarded the news of the death of Amnesty International founder, Peter Benenson. Here’s the press release AI issued:

Death of Amnesty International founder:

Peter Benenson, 1921-2005

Peter Benenson, the founder of the worldwide human rights organisation Amnesty International, died yesterday evening. He was 83. Mr Benenson founded and inspired Amnesty International in 1961 first as a one-year campaign for the release of six prisoners of conscience. But from there came a worldwide movement for human rights and in its midst an international organisation — Amnesty International — which has taken up the cases of many thousands of victims of human rights violations and inspired millions to human rights defence the world round.

“Peter Benenson’s life was a courageous testament to his visionary
commitment to fight injustice around the world,” said Irene Khan,
Secretary General of Amnesty International.

“He brought light into the darkness of prisons, the horror of torture
chambers and tragedy of death camps around the world. This was a man whose conscience shone in a cruel and terrifying world, who believed in the power of ordinary people to bring about extraordinary change and, by creating Amnesty International, he gave each of us the opportunity to make a difference.”

“In 1961 his vision gave birth to human rights activism. In 2005 his
legacy is a world wide movement for human rights which will never die.”

The one-year Appeal for Amnesty was launched on 28 May 1961, in an article in the British newspaper, The Observer, called “The Forgotten Prisoners“. That appeal attracted thousands of supporters, and started a worldwide human rights movement.

The catalyst for the original campaign was Mr Benenson’s sense of
outrage after reading an article about the arrest and imprisonment of
two students in a cafe in Lisbon, Portugal, who had drunk a toast to
liberty.

In the first few years of Amnesty International’s existence, Mr Benenson supplied much of the funding for the movement, went on research missions and was involved in all aspects of the organisation’s affairs.

Other activities that Mr Benenson was involved in during his lifetime
included; adopting orphans from the Spanish Civil War, bringing Jews who had fled Hitler’s Germany to Britain, observing trials as a member of the Society of Labour Lawyers, helping to set up the organisation “Justice” and establishing a society for people with coeliac disease.

At a ceremony to mark Amnesty International’s 25th anniversary, Mr Benenson lit what has become the organisation’s symbol — a candle entwined in barbed wire — with the words: “The candle burns not for us, but for all those whom we failed to rescue from prison, who were shot on the way to prison, who were tortured, who
were kidnapped, who ‘disappeared’. That is what the candle is for.”

Today Amnesty International is into its 44th year. It has become the
world’s largest independent human rights organisation, with more than 1.8 million members and committed supporters worldwide.

For more information:

The man who decided it was time for a change – Peter Benenson remembered by Richard Reoch:
http://amnesty-news.c.topica.com/maadeqTabeANCbdSp2Ab/

Background information on Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty
International:
http://amnesty-news.c.topica.com/maadeqTabeANDbdSp2Ab/

Saturday, February 26, 2005

MERLIN, GREEN ALLIANCE & NOVO NORDISK

Source: encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com

Back late last night – after an aborted landing at Heathrow, when our plane had to shriek back into the skies – from a day spent outside Copenhagen with Novo Nordisk, alongside Sophia Tickell. When I got home, Michael Wood was on TV probing the myth of Arthur and the Round Table. Merlin turns out to have been a flaxen-haired boy, by Wood’s account. And thoughts of airborne excitements, of once-and-future kings and of those who will return to defend England, put me in mind of Thursday evening and a very different breed of Merlin.

I was strolling around London’s Science Museum at an after-hours reception ahead of 300 or so people convening in the iMAX theatre to celebrate 25 years of the Green Alliance (www.green-alliance.org.uk). Among the extrordinary flotsam and jetsam of the Industrial Revolution, I came across a Merlin engine from a 1943 Spitfire, which rose to defend these islands in desperate days. Oddly, if someone hadn’t pointed it out I would probably have brushed past the Merlin in quest of Stephenson’s Rocket, which at least had a chimney. But the Merlin certainlly has presence, even on blocks. Ever the romantic, I adore the engine’s sound, though no doubt those who tore through the skies behind these things – like my father – experience a rather different set of emotions when one of the few working survivors roars throatily overhead.

And that had me wondering what all of those environmentalists gathered in the Science Museum will be best remembered for – or by? Given that people like the Eden Project’s Tim Smit and BedZED’s Bill Dunster were among the speakers, its at least possible that environmentalism will be as much remembered as much for things done as for things resisted.

MAALA SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY RATING

Having only been to Israel once, in the late 1950s, a visit which I loved (particularly sitting on the lap of the pilot of a DC-3 over the Dead Sea and being allowed to steer), I have found it a difficult country to come to terms with, not least because of the Palestinian issue. But in the midst of it all we have been lucky to come across some really impressive Israelis, among them Talia Aharoni, who is President of Tel Aviv-based MAALA – Business for Social Responsibility. MAALA have just announced what sounds like a significant advance, the launch of a new social responsibility rating index on the Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange. Their press release:

TEL-AVIV STOCK EXCHANGE LAUNCHES SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE INVESTING INDEX

Monday, February 14, 2005 – The Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange launched the Maala Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) Index on February 13. The new index comprises the shares of the top 20 companies on the Maala social responsibility rating.

Maala is a non-profit professional organization uniting member businesses that are leaders in working towards social change in Israel. The organization promotes social and environmental responsibility in business and rates the largest companies in the economy according to their level of community involvement and contribution to society. Maala rates companies which are included in the TA-100 Index or whose turnover is larger than $100 million, from various sectors, including services, commerce, industry, construction, and infrastructure.

Shares on the Maala Social Responsibility Index must be among the TASE’s 200 most actively traded shares and must meet minimum public float requirements, including a 15% float rate and a float value of at least $18 million. The index will be published daily at the end of trading and updated annually on June 1 (first update on June 1, 2005).

Maala’s rating criteria reflect the organization’s view that social responsibility is expressed not merely in donations, but in the way in which firms manage their on-going business activities. Criteria include the scope of contributions in shekels, contributions relative to profit or turnover, and the companies’ conduct towards their employees, customers, suppliers, and the community and environment at large.

The complete criteria for Maala ratings are available at www.maala.org.il (Hebrew only).

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

CLIMATE HEATS UP AS AN ISSUE

Spent much of today working on slides for a series of presentations this year, starting off with a session with Novo Nordisk in Denmark on Friday, though with detours to do things like a BBC World interview on green consumerism in London and Beijing. In the process of putting together the slides, though, I have been asking friends and colleagues in different parts of the world for images illustrating their recent work. This evening, Canada’s GlobeScan (www.globescan.com) come back with a fascinating set of charts based on their surveys of sustainability experts internationally. Have taken part in their surveys for years.

The chart shown below illustrates the way that climate change has overtaken biotechnology-based issues, a key concern for companies like Novo in recent years. Interesting to recall that our relationship with Novo started in 1989, after the publication of The Green Consumer Guide, which had implications for their deteregent enzymes business. The way they handled the issue was brilliant – and the company remains one of the very few ‘pure play’ sustainability companies.

(© GlobeScan 2005)

Sunday, February 20, 2005

BRAUTIGAN & BILLABONG ODYSSEY

Gaia has been buying up the works of Richard Brautigan on eBay — and I started the day with his A Confederate General From Big Sur. My favourite passage to date is the piece on the punctuation marks in Ecclesiastes. The main character spends night after night reading Ecclesiastes and recording the number of each type of punctuation mark in his notebook. His explanation? He was treating it as a study in engineering. “Certainly before they build a ship know how many rivets it takes to hold the ship together and the various sizes of the rivets. I was curious about the number of rivets and the sizes of those rivets in Ecclesiastes, a dark and beautiful ship saling on our water.”

Then, after a walk with Elaine in Richmond Park, where we passed through a herd of red deer and could smell their unmistakable, unfortgettable aroma, Gaia and I sat down and watched Billabong Odyssey (www.billabongodyssey.com), a wildly wonderful surf movie. Lacks the gravitas of Riding Giants, which we saw recently, but what unadulterated fun! The image below was snapped from the TV screen at one point in the proceedings, actually the high point, when Mike Parsons scored 10 out of 10 for his unbelievable ride on a deep ocean giant. When that sort of thing happens, who’s keeping score? Not me.

A FUTURE FOR THE UN?

It felt faintly disloyal, but when John Mannochehri and I had lunch on Friday, we were talking about whether or not there was a future for the United Nations. John used to work for the United Nations Environment Programme and SustainAbility has partnered with UNEP for over ten years on our Engaging Stakeholders programme. But in today’s Sunday Times, Mark Mallock Brown — chief of staff to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan — goes way further. He notes that the UN is currently in deep trouble, having to explain itself to no less than six Congressional committees in the US, and that the oil-for-food scandal and “flagrant breaches of UN codes of behaviour in peacekeeping operations” are all conspiring to raise question marks over the organisation’s future. But he also notes the key role the UN has been playing in responding to the tsunami disasters and in places like Darfur, Sudan. There seems to be a strong downward momentum to some of this stuff, but there’s no question we need something like the UN, a 21st century version of this 1940s-era creature. There will be a UN summit in September, 60 years after the organisation was founded, so maybe someone will pull a rabbit out the hat in the meantime — and in time?

Thursday, February 17, 2005

FUTURE GENERATIONS TODAY: NSPCC

Because sustainable development is fundamentally about intergenerational equity, the agenda can be a bit slippery for business people with 24/7 lives. Probably the closest thing we have to future generations today is the current generation of young people, which is one reason why SustainAbility this year chose to support the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). This morning a couple of people from NSPCC came in to do a team briefing, which was both eye-opening and disturbing. I hadn’t realised that levels of child abuse in the UK were quite so high, nor that – for example – NSPCC people trying to help child prostitutes in London’s East End are being shot at by pimps, so that they have to change their cars regularly in order to minimise the chances of being spotted. More at: www.nspcc.org.uk

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

MCLIBEL HUMAN RIGHTS WIN

Interesting development in the McLibel case. The two environmental campaigners who were the subject of a bittterly-fought libel case brought by McDonald’s seem to have won their appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. The Court concluded: “Given the enormity and complexity of [the trial process], the Court does not consider that the correct balance was struck between the need to protect the applicants’ rights to freedom of expression and the need to protect McDonalds’ rights and reputation.” By way of explanation, the Court added: “The more general interest in promoting the free circulation of information and ideas about the activities of powerful commercial entities, and possible ‘chilling’ effect on others are also important factors to be considered in this context, bearing in mind the legitimate and important role that campaign groups can play in stimulating public discussion.”

Having fought our own battle against McDonald’s in the late 1980s, in respect of what Julia Hailes and I had said in The Green Consumer Guide, I take a certain interest in the McLibel proceedings … http://news.ft.com/cms/s/4eb50e06-7f47-11d9-8ceb-00000e2511c8.html

Monday, February 14, 2005

PINSTRIPED CAMPAIGNER?

Having always been something of an outsider, it’s strange to be periodically sucked back into the fold. If there was one thing I really valued at Bryanston School, apart from the proximity to Hod and Hambledon Hills, it was the encouragement we got to make up our own minds, follow our own paths. One result: I refused to be confirmed, refused to join the Sea Cadets and, when the time came, also refused to join up for the Old Boys Society, whatever it was called.

But now I appear on the back page of Bryanston Newsletter 18 (Winter 2005), in a piece called ‘The Pinstriped Campaigner’, although it has yet to be posted on the school’s website (www.bryanston.co.uk/news/news_main.htm). And I have also done an essay for Bryanston: Reflections, due to be published in July, in celebration of the first 75 years of the school’s history.

BIOREGIONAL AND BEDZED

Interesting meeting this morning with BioRegional Development Group (www.bioregional.com), housed in the BedZED development south of London. BedZED was designed by Bill Dunster (www.zedfactory.com/home.html). Think I may see if can organise a SustainAbility team site visit. Certainly, the BedZED concept is a prime candidate for the ‘Showcase’ area of SustainAbility’s new website, due to launch shortly.

Saturday, February 12, 2005

HP COUP

One thing that happened while I was offline last week was the coup at HP (Hewlett-Packard), whose beautifully designed Palo Alto boardroom I found myself in late last year – though not when the board was present (see October 15). What stories those walls could now tell. CEO Carly Fiorina fell foul of what The Times today calls “a classic boardroom ambush” — and bade farewell to 142,000 employees, a $3.2 million salary and a company that many now see as having lost its way. A recent Fortune profile, which I read a few weeks back, must have left many readers wondering whether the writing wasn’t already on the wall.

My main reason for bringing the HP story up, however, is that as sustainability-style thinking moves into the mainstream, we have seen a growing number of SD- or CSR-‘friendly’ business leaders losing their jobs, perhaps most spectacularly Sir Philip Watts of Shell. To some degree such things are inevitable, given that they are part and parcel of mainstream business life, but Fiorina’s ouster sure as hell won’t help the wider corporate responsibility agenda in Bush’s America. And it will be interesting to see what happens to her ‘e-inclusion’ strategy (www.hp.com/e-inclusion/en/) now she has gone.

Friday, February 11, 2005

WE’RE BAAAAACK

After a week or so trying to get this blog back online, it seems to be up and running again – though the blogging toolbars have shrivelled on the Mac. If it’s not one thing … Not that the week has been wildly exciting, with much of it spent editing SustainAbility’s new website. But we did have an interesting workshop a few days back on corporate priority setting and Peter (Zollinger) stayed with us for a couple of days in the week – and, as usual, we watched a couple of the second series editions of The West Wing. Fabulous. And this evening a bunch of us — including Elaine — collapsed on the office sofas with glasses of sparkling wine and unravelled.

Saturday, February 05, 2005

CBI ERUPTS

Well, my intuition that some long-standing Davos supporters — and their ilk — would be upset about this year’s agenda is confirmed by the outspoken attack by CBI Director-General Sir Digby Jones. As the Davos event wound down, he apparently accused WEF of allowing the NGOs to “hijack” the agenda. “Too many sessions have been an excuse to beat up on business,” he is quoted as saying in Roberto Savio’s Other News. He argued that there should have been more on risk takers and wealth creators.

But what can be seen as the ‘hijacking’ of the WEF agenda can also be seen as an inevitable stage towards the time when a new set of entrepreneurs, investment bankers and venture capitalists start to drive new waves of creative destruction in the global economy. And in that context I had an interesting lunch yesterday with a couple of venture capitalists who want me to join up for a new venture fund in the area of sustainable technology. Given that I am keen that SustainAbility shifts a proportion of its effort into the area of new ventures, I’m taking the invitation seriously.

Friday, February 04, 2005

IDENTITY CORRECTION – THE YES MEN

The leading edge of activist continues to mutate. Hot on the heels of their spoof Dow Chemical BBC interview on the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, The Yes Men (“activist-pranksters” Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno) are back with a film — which launches on 18 February (www.theyesmen.org). The focus of the film (www.theyesmenmovie.com) is on their hijacking of the World Trade Organization (WTO) website, or at least their launching of a website that mimics the WTO’s website — the same trick they pulled with Dow.

They call the process ‘identity correction’. “Unlike identity theft,” says Bonanno, “where a crimical uses your identity in order to steal something, we thought, ‘We’re going to target the biggest criminals and we’re going to steal their identity to make them more honest. And so we impersonate them to make them more honest.”

Thursday, February 03, 2005

MY SECOND HOME – BA

Yesterday, had lunch with top Microsoft people and a number of European movers and shakers. Late afternoon, after another Microsoft meeting (in a room with a view), I walked back to the Prague Hilton in driving, slushy snow.

Then this morning out to the airport, where it struck me that BA really is my second home. That said, the safety announcement was done at a blistering speed which even I, as an English-speaker, struggled to keep up with, added to which it was in a regional accent. Then customer questionnaires came around and, unusually, I took one and let BA have it with both barrels. Am I getting old and cantankerous? Then into office for meeting with some Japanese colleagues, following which I headed home – among other things – to plow through a mountain of cuttings that Elaine had produced while I was away.

Room with a darkish view (©JE)

My second home (©JE)

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

IT’S PAUL HAWKEN, BY A WHISKER

Back late from a Microsoft dinner in the Spanish Hall, Prague Castle, to find an e-mail from GlobeScan with the results of their latest survey of sustainability experts. One question in the survey had asked who was the best author on sustainable development, with no prompts on names. Of those named, Paul Hawken came top (22), I came second (21) and Amory Lovins third (20). Not sure the numbers mean that much, though they’re substantially higher than for the next cluster of names mentioned, but it’s nice to be in such company.

POST SAM, IT MUST BE PRAGUE

Arrived in Prague this morning for a Microsoft Government Leaders Forum. Last couple of days, post Davos, were spent in Zurich with Peter Zollinger and his family, including — yesterday — my first Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes advisory board meeting with Sustainable Asset Management (SAM: www.sam-group.com). Great session with the SAM team (Alex Barkawi, MD of SAM Indexes; Reto Ringger, SAM’s founder and CEO; and Christian Werner, SAM Head of Research), with the external folk being: Michelle Chan-Fishel (Program Manager, Green Investments Project, Friends of the Earth, USA), Bill McDonough (www.mbdc.com), John Prestbo (Editor, Down Jones Indexes) and Bjorn Stigson (www.wbcsd.org).

Odd feeling as Peter accompanied me to the station this morning: the snow had thawed and was re-freezing, so it was like — as Peter described it — walking on wet soap. A slithery start to the day, especially when dragging a heavy case on wheels. But then whisked through the VIP route at Prague airport, with the case following me on automatic. I could almost get used to this.