Journal

It is a couple of years since an X-Prize Foundation team came to visit us at SustainAbility’s London offices, but I already knew of them through magazines like Wired and Fast Company – and have since kept a fairly close eye on their doings. Still, they were brought forcefully back to mind when Alejandro (Litovsky) and I met people from Concordia 21 at Richard Branson’s HQ in Hammersmith a few months back – the walls were blazoned with an evolutionary tree beginning with Homo volans and topping out with SpaceShipOne (see above). See also July 6 entry here.   Branson is now helping to fund further work through Virgin Galactic, with a typically saucy picture of their Eve launch vehicle (or ‘Mothership’, with the Virgin maiden often said to represent Branson’s mother) shown below.   A short, hyperlinked update on the latest Prizes developed by the X-Prize Foundation can be found here. Among other things, it talks about the $35 million fare paid by Cirque du Soleil billionaire Guy Laliberte for an almost-out-of-this-world experience, flying to the limits of Earth’s atmosphere. Given Laliberte’s origins as a social entrepreneur, there’s a neat set of connections here somewhere, but I’ll work on them later.

Peter (far left) and Cemil (second left) leaving Topkapi

During the tour I guesstimated the average age of those on this fourth ACE study tour we have done as 70. Peter Clark was to tell me when we arrived back at Heathrow that it was 71, making me the youngest, at 60. After Syria, Northern Cyprus and Crete, I had worried that nothing could match those trips, but this Constantinople/Istanbul tour was really quite exceptional. As the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle progressively came together, the picture of an extraordinary melting pot for cultures and thinking popped into our minds – and we really can’t wait to go back.

An obituary of David Layton, with whom Max Nicholson and I founded Environmental Data Services (ENDS) in 1978, can be found here.  

Later addition: ENDS Report 219  (October, page 7) gives more of the background, as follows:

“ENDS was the result of a chance meeting [David Layton] had with the conservationist Max Nicholson, a co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund. They agreed that business was sorely ignorant of environmental issues and decided to provide solution.

“Max brought a passion for the environment. Through IDS [Incomes Data Services] David supplied the investment, and also clear views of how ENDS should be run as a business.

“They secured the services of John Elkington as the first editor of the new company’s only product, the fortnightly ENDS Report.  Max took the role of managing editor. The first edition appeared in May 1978 …”

In the longer term, two people played a crucial role in ensuring the survival and evolution of ENDS: Georgina McAughtry, who arrived at ENDS a few days before I did, and the late Marek Mayer, who Elaine found via Wildwood House, where she worked and had met Marek’s partner, author Sue Gee.

Looking back, David – alongside Max – had a huge impact on the development of my career. I had previously written extensively for magazines like New Scientist, which is where Max had first come across me, but ENDS was trying to open up what Max called the “last dark continent’ for environment, business.  

Despite the backing of IDS, which had wide access to business, it took us nine months to get through the door of the first company willing to open itself up to our scrutiny, which happened to be Albright & Wilson. In this, we were following in the footprints of Social Audit, where I hugely admired the work of people like Charles Medawar and Maurice Frankel.

The ENDS work led to my first proper book, The Ecology of Tomorrow’s World, published by Associated Business Publishers in 1980.  David’s tuition on how to write for business had proven to be a huge inspiration – and both his and Max’s thinking influenced the book. In later years, as I began to co-evolve SustainAbility and cranked out books like The Green Consumer Guide and Cannibals with Forks, on the rare occasions when I met David I made a point of thanking him for the platform he had provided for our small team.

Apart from David and Max, the only other work-related mentor (though we would not have used that term then) that I would place alongside them was John Roberts, whose TEST I joined in 1974.  At the time, TEST was based in King Street, Covent Garden, though we shortly thereafter moved to the other side of the block and Floral Street.

And it was there that I worked with TEST on the top floor while Elaine later arrived to work with Wildwood House on the floor below – and a sequence of events began that would prove to have a significant impact on the longer term survival of a company, ENDS, whose survival and impact I look back on with quiet pride.

Later addition, on 18 November: On my way to 1 Victoria Street for a meeting with BIS this morning, I walked by Orchard House, at the corner of Abbey Orchard Street and Great Smith Street, where ENDS had its first proper offices. Later, we moved it across to Bowling Green Lane, where a friend – Mike Franks – had converted an old light industrial warehouse, where craftsmen had made everything from looms to parts for Concorde, into offices. (This was just around the corner from the offices of The Guardian, to which I also contributed regularly over some 20 years.) I recently found myself back in the same building, when visiting the Carbon Disclosure Project. 

Cafe Turing light Elaine and oncoming coffee Jetty shadows Peter and Elaine on the ferry back to Istanbul Cemil and Peter Fishstall Florence Nightingale hotel spotted in passing Graffito Washing Bust in Adam Mickiewicz Museum Children in the street outside Policemen Galata Tower View from Galata Tower New Mosque minarets Final view of Haghia Sophia

Day begins with trip back by ferry to Istanbul. Then, among other things, a visit to the Adam Mickiewicz Museum in the slum area of Beyoglu. As we arrived outside the museum, what looked like a virtual riot was going on among the residents, though it later seemed to resolved itself in one way or another – and the children in the street were charm itself when we emerged into the sunlight. The views from the Galata Tower were mind-blowing, though had to wrestle with an intense sense of vertigo on occasion. Later in the evening, almost inevitably, Elaine and I found our feet wending their way back uphill to the Haghia Sophia area, for a light supper of baklava, milk pudding, raki and Turkish coffee. And tomorrow back to London, to process all we have seen and experienced.

Ferry arrives at Buyukada Splendid Palace Hotel, where we stay, on left Under refurbishment, like so much here Trotsky’s erstwhile home Fire axe in hotel Horses and carriages Istanbul on the horizon

We took the ferry out to the Princes’ Islands, having lunch on Heybeliada, where we saw the house of Mustafa Ismet Inonu (Ismet Pasha), who followed Ataturk as President. Once on Buyukuda, the largest of the islands, we walked among the huge villas, enjoying the almost complete absence of cars, although the racing horse-drawn carriages almost filled the gap in terms of safety hazards, before finding our way to the house where Leon Trotsky lived in exile, between Moscow and Mexico.

Couldn’t help fretting about the condition of the horses, which seemed pretty poorly treated – something a woman who had lived on the island for 35 years sadly confirmed. But I always enjoy the smell of horses – and the view from our front-of-house room in the Splendid Palace Hotel, a place that had clearly seen much grander days, was fabulous. The bathroom, however, left a great deal to be desired, a plastic implant in the room which seemed designed to leak into the rest of the room.