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In 1989, Julia Hailes and I were elected to the UN Global 500 Roll of Honour, awarded for extraordinary environmental achievements – the highlight of which was meeting so many others around the world who had been spotlighted in the same way. Now, against a tight deadline, nominations are being invited for the successor scheme, Champions of the Earth. Any ideas?

UNEP Champions of the Earth Award honors those who, through their visionary thinking, unwavering dedication and committed action, promote the sustainable use of the planet’s resources towards global green growth. (It’s interesting that when Julia and I founded SustainAbility in 1987, with early inputs from Tom Burke, our tag-line was ‘The Green Growth Company’, building on the work I had done for an early book called The Green Capitalists.

UNEP will select a laureate for each of the following categories: Policy Leadership, Science & Innovation, Entrepreneurial Vision, and Inspiration & Action. Each laureate will receive a $40,000 prize and a specially designed trophy at an Award Ceremony and Gala Dinner to be held on 22 April, 2010 in Seoul, Republic of Korea. Nominations will be accepted until 31 October. For more information, please visit www.unep.org/champions.

Vote now and he’ll try.  See here.

I comment on the attacks by animal welfare activists on Daniel Vasella of Novartis in today’s FT online.

Exhibition of past Unilever Series installations Walking homeward

Thanks to Unilever, Elaine and I have seen a number of the Unilever Series installations at the Tate Modern, including those by Rachel Whiteread (2005), Carsten Holler (2006) and Doris Salcedo (2007) efforts, of which we liked the second and third best. Today, we were invited to see the tenth commission for the series, ‘How It Is’, by Miroslaw Balka. A sense of what it’s like can be had here.

Find myself agreeing that the scale is impressive, but the effect is slightly undermined by the fact that one end of what looks like a gigantic front-loading waste skip is open to the light, so you are never really in the void. I get the links to the Holocaust, but this didn’t feel anything like that – in the sense that there was none of the sense of coercion or forced intimacy of the cattle wagons into which people were herded. The most interesting place to experience the thing, really, was underneath, where you could hear people shuffling around above – and imagine what they were feeling and saying. We talked to an interesting Indonesian diplomat there, about the massacres in his country in the 1960s.

Sat next to some intriguing people at dinner, mainly from the advertising industry, and had found ourselves introduced to Lord (Leon) Brittan and Sir Martin Sorrell when we first arrived. Talked to the former about the restaurant where they serve you in the dark and all the waiters are blind. He didn’t like the idea one bit. We talked about the links between taste, smell and sight. Then Gavin Neath of Unilever mentioned that they had carried out research where perfectly good steaks were coloured green – and people disliked the taste, not just the colour.

Talking to Sean Harrigan this week, at the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Board meeting in Amsterdam – he used to be President of CalPERS – we got into the question of which came first, the double bottom line – or the triple bottom line?

I have always assumed TBL (which I coined in 1994) came first, because I hadn’t heard of rival multiple bottom line concepts at that point, but I didn’t know. Jed Emerson’s work on blended value then followed both, looking for ways of breaking down the implicit silos between the different areas of value creation – or destruction.

Sean noted that CalPERS had done a good deal of work on the DBL front from the early years of the 21st century, but I’d be obliged if anyone knows where and when the DBL formulation was first used.