Blog

Aron Cramer at Advisory Council meeting Oded and Tabata Brazier in restaurant

Arrived in Sao Paulo on Sunday morning and then was immersed in several days of meetings with the Instituto Ethos Advisory Board. One of the things we discussed with Ethos founder Oded Grajew was the possibility of organising a parallel conference in 2012 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 UN Earth Summit in 1992. Later we all cascaded into the annual Ethos conference. I did a couple of sessions, chairing one with Pavan Sukhdev of Deutsche Bank and UNEP, Otto Scharmer, of MIT, who focuses on what he calls ‘Theory U’, and Vania Somavilla, who is Director of Environment and Sustainability at the mining company Vale. Will try and track down and post some photographs – I took very few this week. Alejandro (Litovsky) and I also did a session to launch our new report, The Biosphere Economy.

This month sees the launch of the second Volans survey report, the first having been The Phoenix Economy. This time, we are focusing on ecosystem services, in The Biosphere Economy – which has just been spotlighted on the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) website. Am currently in Brazil, where we will do a local launch of the report at the Ethos annual conference in a few days. Our third survey report, The Transparent Economy, will launch at the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) annual conference in Amsterdam later in the month.

As I cycled in this morning, heading north through Hyde Park towards Speaker’s Corner, another cyclist overtook, then stopped dead. I overtook him, then he came up alongside. He said he had also once had a Dawes Mean Street of this vintage – I bought the bike in 1990, I think, but his had been wrecked in a traffic accident. He wanted to buy mine, but I had to declare my love for it – not least with its various scars and dents from accidents it has somehow carried me through. But a rather nice moment, nonetheless. A bit like having another rider admire one’s horse, not least because I had just passed a couple of what looked like Buckingham Palace horse-drawn carriages about three minutes earlier. 

Jack Cardiff

Went to the NFT to see a special showing of Craig McCall’s wonderful film Cameraman, on the life and work of cinematographer Jack Cardiff.  He shot films like A Matter of Life and Death, The African Queen and Black Narcissus. Martin Scorsese took the stage to introduce the showing, followed by Sanjeev Bhaskar. The film has been 13 years in the making – and Gaia helped at one point, so she got a credit. Afterwards, Elaine, Gaia, Hania, Jake, Tor, Steve, Sandar and I had dinner together, in a tented restaurant on the north side of the river, where the air was cold, the food was cold, but the company was wonderfully warming.

Statue 1 Statue 2 Waiting, reflected Tor, Jake, Hania Steve, Elaine Streetscape

We haven’t read much – if anything – about it in the press, but one of the things that Tony Hayward did when he took over as BP’s CEO was to quietly drop one of the values that had been adopted and trumpeted by his predecessor, Lord John Brown. The value was green.

I am sure there is absolutely no link with the ecological horrors unfolding since the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon, but whether or not the Financial Times today is right that Hayward’s first response to the news of the disaster was to ask the question, “How the hell could this happen?”, it might just be worth the subsequent investigators asking the question whether that quiet change in the company’s declared values was a more significant than we might have realised?

I can’t help but agree with Simon Barnes in today’s Times, when he argues that, in so many respects, “our addiction to oil is madness.”