Journal

There are many things that have made me proud of our daughters over the years, but with Gaia one of them was her role in the anti-motorway protests of the 1990s. She was involved in the Newbury Bypass protests, then arrested and imprisoned in Scotland for protesting the opening of the M77.

I remember the day well. I had been chairing an Environment Foundation conference at St George’s House, inside the walls of Windsor Castle. Towards the end, one of the business delegates asked what would happen when every environmentalist was “inside the tent,” with no-one “throwing rocks from the outside?” (He felt that the external pressure was vital to ensure progress.)

My reply was that he shouldn’t fret: there would always be people willing to apply external pressure.

Later that same night, back at home, we were woken by a call from a gruff Glaswegian police officer – and asked if we had a daughter called Gaia? We then learned that six young people had chained themselves to the M77 central reservation just as it was opened by the Secretary of State for Scotland.

Gaia and her colleagues, we were told, were to be detained at her Majesty’s pleasure. The laws on detaining young people appear to different in Scotland.

Allowed just one phone call, Gaia phoned her director of studies at Edinburgh University to say she was going to miss her first year University exams, due to being in police custody for an act of civil disobedience. The charge: “wilful and reckless behaviour.” He promptly sent her a hand-drawn cartoon showing her in leg-irons – and rescheduled the exams.

The saga rattled on for around a year, but in the end (pursued by the government, but protected by the police) they got off scot-free.

Now the BBC is asking whether all that tree-hugging achieved anything? And the answer, the broadcaster suggest,s is that it most certainly did. The Newbury protestors may have lost the immediate battle, but they won the war. Very few major new roads were built for a generation.

In the same way, some people are quick to say that the Occupy movement failed, but I’m not so sure. First, it sent an immediate and unmistakable message to those in power, but, second, it also helped a new generation get a taste for activism. And the right sort of activism is as essential to a modern democracy as high quality education, sustainable transport and, yes, good policing.

The diagram above, from Ray Kurzweil’s work on what he dubs the impending Singularity (a concept that he dates back at least to the work of John von Neumann in the 1950s), is on an exponential scale (the vertical axis) and shows writing turning up relatively late in the story. Thank heavens it did. My appetite for books, magazines and newspapers remains virtually unquenchable.

During the last couple of months the piles of books I have bought have also risen near-exponentially, whereas my ability to read them has been compromised by the pace of work, except those I could take on planes. Happily, however, the holiday period has broken the logjam.

The first book I roared through was Jonathan Dimbleby’s extraordinary The Battle of the Atlantic. One of the most memorably storylines was the pursuit of FDR by winston Churchill, with Dimbleby describing FDR as playing the role of the “artful dodger” when it came to involving the United States directly in the war.

But on the same page there was a footnote mentioning that there Atlantic Charter that the two statesmen signed aboard the Prince of Wales in Placentia Bay in 1941 would become the blueprint for 1945’s UN founding Charter. Given our impending work with the UN Global Compact, I found this particularly interesting.

Shortly afterwards, I read Carlo Rovelli’s beautifully written Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. The book’s ‘In Closing’ section is remarkable for its brief consideration of whether our species will long survive the consequences of its environmental depredations.

“I believe that our species will not last long,” says Rovelli, chiming with Lord Martin Rees, who kindly gave me a signed copy of his 2003 book Our Final Century earlier in the year when we met in Bristol.

Interestingly, though, Rovelli concludes that “There are frontiers where we are learning, and our desire for knowledge burns.” They are, he says, “in the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, at the origins of the cosmos, in the nature of time, in the phenomenon of black holes, and in the workings of our own thought processes.”

And it is around the last of these that much of my recent reading has revolved. A couple of days back a couple of Amazon packages arrived, one containing Ray Kurzweil’s wonderfully provocative book The Singularity Is Near, which I have now read much of.

An earlier package had disgorged a new copy of Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail (to replace the copy I left on a plane and the Kindle version which I found virtually unreadable), A History of the Future in 100 Objects by Adrian Hon, Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation by Tony Seba, and James Barrat’s Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era.

All of this is building towards our 2016-17 work theme, of which more later.

In between times, I have also been churning through faster books, because they are page turners (like Simon Scarrow’s Britannia), because I can flip through the images (the 2-volume Taschen collection of Salvador Dalí’s work which I bought in Ely earlier in the year, or because they are shorter (as are the short stories in The Book of Gaza, published by the wonderfully named Comma Press).

In any event, I seem to have got back my reading mojo.

For reasons that will become clearer in 2016, the final couple of weeks of 2015 included a gathering tempo of system change sessions, with key ones in London (on 9 December, which Volans co-hosted with the Academy of Systemic Change) and Amsterdam (on 11 December, where I was part of embryonic conversations around a new system change platform).

More anon, but there’s a new spirit abroad, particularly in the wake of the apparently successful outcome of the COP21 climate summit, which several of the Amsterdam participants had taken part in. The Amsterdam session was hosted by the THNK School of Creative Leadership and Innovation, which I am really keen to get to know better.

Fascinating ride in from the airport early in the morning (had to get up around 04.20 to get there in time), with a driver in a white Tesla who looked like a university lecturer, or a taller version of Lester Brown, and who promptly have me (with no signal from me on what my interests were) a lecture on sustainability.

Among those he flagged as leading champions was Thomas Rau, who he had recently seen in a TV documentary. Once I revealed my colours, we had a very energetic discussion, and exchanged cards. Later in the day I sent a note to Thomas’s wife, Sabine, to say he seemed to be virtually ubiquitous.

I can’t remember which weird American book it was in which I read that as a major change approaches the number of apparent coincidences goes off the scale, though I think it was probably The Celestine Prophecy, but that’s what I’m experiencing at the moment.

So here we are in 2016. Unhappily, some form of mass hack took down elements of my blogging site over the Merrymas season, so many thanks to Chris Wash for both bringing it back online and migrating the whole thing to a more secure platform. Having gone almost a month now without being able to post blogs, I will begin by melding a variety of storylines together to bridge the gap.

But, the spirit of entering the New Year in a blaze of energy and creativity, the painting above is one of my sister Caroline’s sold-to-someone-other-than-me works, and one which I regret having missed.

It’s hard to capture the pace of the end of 2015, where I did something like 17 keynotes in 7 weeks, and ended with a trip to Mexico City to work with Grupo Bimbo (subject of a separate blog). Suffice it to say that I have had a long siesta pretty much every day since the holidays started, except on days where we went to see my parents in the Cotswolds, for example, or entertained Gaia, Hania, Jake and Paul.

One key activity has been reading, something I’ll aim to distil in a separate entry. And writing. In the wake of my most recent column (they go out in GreenBiz in the USA, Monday Morning in Denmark, and Eco-Business in Singapore) of the legacy of the late Maurice Strong, I have been writing around our evolving exponential solutions theme, including evolving the next round of our program outline for the UN Global Compact (on which more anon) and another column, to appear in January.

Meanwhile, here are several images that capture brief encounters during the closing days of 2015 – the Ai Weiwei images stemming from a team day-out, the River Café ones from a delightful lunch hoisted by Will Rosenzweig:

Fascinating couple of days in Mexico City, doing a session yesterday for Grupo Bimbo alongside GlobeScan. Then Mauricio, Paco and I went to the Museum of Modern Art, where among other things we took in an exhibition of ceramics by Francisco Toledo and an absolutely stunning exhibition of photographs by Lee Miller.