Blog

 This is how I want to cycle.  Thanks, Gaia.

Chrysler Building from my bed

Spent much of the week in New York, primarily for the first meeting of the new Nestlé Creating Shared Value Advisory Board, of which I’m a member. More on the background here.

Strange feeling, looking out at the Chrysler Building from my hotel bedroom, with the company in the process of filing for bankruptcy. Truly the end of an era. But also magic moments when the sun came up and caught the great silver gargoyles atop the building, a profoundly Ghostbusters moment.  Today, we need the economic equivalent of that merry band.

On Wednesday, I dropped in on a number of people, among them Linda Rottenberg of Endeavor, Peter Knight of Generation Investment Management and Ed Hughes and Michelle Kahane at the Clinton Global Initiative.  Slightly distracted in the CGI boardroom when, looking past Ed and Michelle I saw a naked man disporting in a window of the Hilton hotel across the way.  Then in the evening I took the ‘F’ line to Brooklyn, visiting SustainAbility’s NYC office with Michael Sadowski, after which we walked back across Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan as the sun set – and had supper at an excellent vegetarian restaurant, Gobo, in Greenwich Village.

Chrysler Building, again Flags on Fifth Avenue One of the Creating Shared Value panels Yellow ribbons line church railings View from the other side of Generation’s offices – towards Statue of Liberty Me in the lobby of Clinton Global Initiative building Eight legs, or thereabouts Brooklyn Bridge

Grisly fact in The Times today, which says that the population of European eels is now at 5% of levels recorded as recently as the 1970s.  Given their role in tripping me into environmentalism in the 1950s, the news was particularly shocking.  And the story of a tagged eel’s 1,200 odyssey is extraordinary. The data on the recovered tag that had plotted the eel’s journey from Sweden towards the distant Sargasso Sea suggest that it was eventually eaten by a shark west of the Shetlands, then excreted – at which point the tag was probably eaten by a gull and then re-excreted.  Finally, it washed up on the shore, where a passer-by found it.

Elaine and I had a wonderful lunch today at the British Museum with Rohini Nilekani and her friend, the historian Dr Ramachandra Guha.  Ram proved to have had a remarkably similar early journey to mine, describing himself as a failed economist who switched to sociology, with a strong environmental thread shot through much of his work.  

Afterwards, we had another wander around the Egyptian section of the Museum, which is on a level with the restaurant, and I was again left slightly breathless by the beauty of the funerary objects – though the exhibits speak of intense social stratification, always uncomfortable, wherever found. Have been somewhat sensitised by Sam to the extent to which many of the artifacts on display have been looted at some point in their life-cycles, sometimes serially. But, at the same time, what a joy to be able to see things like the Sutton Hoo treasure, which might otherwise be locked up in a private collection.

Yes, but will it fly? Charmian takes a closer look How to juice a car

Electric cars are all the rage suddenly, though very few people are driving them–and, despite the Government’s recent announcement of grants of up to £5,000 for purchasers, the prospects of electrifying private transport still remain fairly distant.  This is a complex challenge, requiring multi-dimensional strategies, as we discussed in our recent Evergreen session on the theme at the 2009 Skoll World Forum.  I took the images of the Juice Point in Berkeley Square when Charmian and I went to see Herta von Stiegel a week or so ago.  Eye also caught by bird sculpture in the Square Gardens.

Bird 1 Bird 2