Journal

IGP 2009

As the fields opened out by pioneering social and environmental entrepreneurs begin to mainstream, we will see a secondary wave of professionalisation.  Although I have tended to shy away from the conventional professional institutes in these fields, because they have often struck me as pursuing the narrow self-interests of particular groups of professionals or as being obsessed with strapping letters after people’s names, I do see a growing need to network across the hugely diverse disciplines and fields that social entrepreneurship, human rights, cleantech, sustainable development and so on now embrace.  Which is a key reason I was happy to accept this week the Honorary Fellowship offered by the Institute of Green Professionals, based in the USA.

As background, IGP is “an independent, professional, education, credentialing, research and philanthropic “social enterprise” organization for sustainable development professionals and academics.  Multi-disciplinary in its scope, the Institute of Green Professionals is the only credentialing and ethics code-based global organization that brings together individuals and organizations from diverse areas of sustainable development expertise. The IGP specialties currently include accounting, appraisal, architecture, engineering, land planning, landscape architecture, real property valuation, law, including participants in CSR capacities.” 

What caught my interest, though, was IGP’s Mission Statement, which referenced the thinking of both Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson and economist Brian Milani. Professor Wilson noted that: “A balanced perspective cannot be acquired by studying disciplines in pieces but through pursuit of the consilience among them.” As IGP points out, the term ‘consilience’ was used in Wilson’s 1998 book of the same name, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, and means “the joining together of knowledge and information across disciplines to create a unified framework of understanding.” 

Milani applied this concept to participants in the transition to a Green economy when he said: “The environmental movement in particular should put more emphasis on establishing an educational network that both formalizes its educational tasks and systematizes connections with the rest of the community.” 

These are sentiments, ambitions and pursuits that I wholly buy into.

Earthrise

I am often asked – most recently yesterday by a woman from the US – what got me into this space. And I often tell the story of the moonless nocturnal walk by the derelict flax ponds that had me standing in the mid-1950s in an elastic sheet of elvers, migrating from somewhere to somewhere. But that was a switching on to the natural environment, which could have led me into the world of pure conservation. I took a different path, towards environmentalism – and a critical influence was the cascade of images of Earth from space, notably Earthrise, the fortieth anniversary of whose publication falls this year.

The year before I was born, in 1948, the cosmologist Fred Hoyle predicted that the first images of Earth from space would forever change our view of our planet. And so it was, though not nearly as fast as some might have imagined. We had another session at Volans yesterday on sustainable fisheries, with many of the global trends taking us in very-far-from-sustainable directions. Still, it’s no accident that the image on the screen of MacBook Pro is of a version of Earthrise.

My profile of entrepreneur Albina Ruiz Rios, executive director of Ciudad Saludable, based in Peru, appears in the January-February issue of Ode Magazine – which spotlights 25 ‘Intelligent Optimists’.

Hawthorn hedging 1 Hawthorn hedging 2 Hawthorn hedging 3

Walking across Barnes Common today, we came across a section of new hawthorn hedging, done by BTCV volunteers.  Wonderful to see, too rarely seen these days, and will keep an eye on it all as it, hopefully, regenerates. Always remember sticking in a short length of willow to stake a rose some 40 years ago, at Hill House, and seeing the stake grow into a 50- or 60-foot tree.  Reassuring. Otherwise have been alternating today between doing a little work, reading, watching films, thinking about digging out the compost and reaching out to old friends and new on Facebook.

  Branching

Wonderful walk through Richmond Park early this afternoon.  Sunny but cold.  Interesting moment when we came up towards the Ballet School and saw a tumbling ball of birds, involving claw-to-claw fighting between several parakeets and a jackdaw.  There were parakeets sitting on various trees nearby, watched by a scattering of jackdaws.  A brilliant green parakeet head emerged from a hole in the tree shown here, giving us the sense that the two species were fighting for territory.

Herd     Photographer on far left   Afternoon shadowing