Journal

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Energetic day, including intense 2.5 hour brainstorm on our Global Compact project. Facilitated by Jodie (Thorpe), the session involves Seb (Beloe), Yasmin (Crowther) and Peter (Zollinger). Leave slightly early to join a meeting of most of the Environment Foundation Trustees: (Dr) Malcolm Aickin, (Sir) Geoffrey Chandler, Jane Nelson and Tim O’Donovan. We are joined by John Lotherington of the 21st Century Trust. The idea of to merge our activities – with an annual Consultation on sustainable development. We make considerable headway.

Monday, January 26, 2004

Cast of The West Wing

Went down by train to Oxford, to spend the day with Geoff Lye and Peter Zollinger, both Directors of SustainAbility, to think through our future aims and strategy. After a tour of Geoff’s new home, which among many other things has a solar roof and ultra-high-tech instrumentation that tells you how much of the current energy use is being supplied by the sun, we surveyed the landscape SustainAbility is moving into – and worked through plans for the London, Washington and Zurich offices. Peter is planning to move into new offices in the old quarter of Zurich, in a building which dates back to the 1400s. Later, Peter returns with me to Barnes, where we end the evening by watching a couple of programmes from the second series of The West Wing. Incredibly funny, hugely thought-provoking and, paradoxically, wonderfully relaxing.

Sunday, January 25, 2004

Back from WEF. The absent-minded-professor sequence continues: when we arrive at Zurich airport, I discover I have lost the air tickets. Probability is that I jettisoned them in Davos along with some of the mountain of paper we collected during the five days of the conference. We buy new, standby tickets. On the flight, I start marking up my notes of the social entrepreneur interviews – and am struck by their richness.

Saturday, January 24, 2004

Mira, Simon and Elaine struggling with scarf (©JE)

Four more interviews, plus innumerable conversations through much of the day. It’s in danger of becoming a production line. Then walk across to the Hotel Derby with Tae Yoo, who heads Cisco Systems’ philanthropy side, for the launch of HP and Visa International’s Global Giving program in support of social entrepreneurs. Afterwards scoot back to the hotel and then on with Elaine to the Hotel Gentiana for a wonderful dinner with Simon Zadek of AccountAbility and his partner Mira Merme. It’s snowing quite heavily when we leave. But we hardly notice, since we are semi-catatonic with Davos syndrome.

Friday, January 23, 2004

Social entrepreneurs Chief Fidela Ebuk of WHEDA and Bunker Roy of Barefoot College(©JE)

Yet another busy day. Start off with four interviews, with Alan Khazei of City Year in the US (www.cityyear.org), Dr Ibrahim Abouleish of SEKEM in Egypt (www.sekem.org), Millard Fuller of Habitat for Humanity in the US (www.habitat.org) and then Vijay Mahajan of BASIX in India (www.basixindia.org). Then speak at a roundtable session chaired by Gordon Conway (President of the Rockefeller Foundation) on strategic alliances between business and NGOs. Followed by an ultra-high-powered ‘atelier’ on ‘Reducing Inequity’ with people like the heads of AID, UNDP and the World Food Programme and Hernando de Soto, facilitated by Ged Davis, previously head of Shell’s scenarios unit and now with WEF. So high-powered and pressured I end up just listening. In the evening, I speak at a dinner on the theme of ‘Does Social Activist Generate Light or Heat?’ Smallish group, but turns into remarkably animated discussion. Find myself saying that we may well be moving beyond the “Golden Age of NGOs”.

Thursday, January 22, 2004

Mrs Mbeki and Pamela Hartigan (©JE)

Busiest day yet. Start out with an interview with Richard Jefferson of CAMBIA. At one juncture I ask him what happened to his siblings? “I shot and ate them,” is his instantaneous reply. He has an ultra-broadband brain, indeed Elaine notes that one of his hobbies – juggling – is known to boost synapses. Then I speak at a private lunch of food and textile sector CEOs, facilitated by Anthony Ruys, Chairman of Heineken.

Next I scoot across town for the latest round in the ‘CSR Leaders Summit’ process organised by Bob Dunn of BSR. Some great people there, but frustrating for a number of reasons, not least because we run out of time as several of us have to flit back across town for a brainstorming session with WEF and the Swiss Agency for the Environment, Forests and Landscape (SAEFL). A lively session, chaired by Jose Maria Figueres, now co-CEO of WEF, but previously President of Costa Rica. He asks us to reconvene later in the year to discuss the sustainability agenda – and what more WEF can do in the area.

‘Can Science Take Sustainability Seriously?’ is the theme of the dinner session we go to this evening. Facilitated by Baroness Susan Greenfield (Director, UK Royal Institution), the session promises to be lively. Unfortunately, Greenfield goes for pizazz rather than understanding. The speakers – including Eileen Claussen (President, Pew Center on Global Climate Change) and Claude Martin (Director-General, WWF International) – struggle to keep the session on the rails. Find myself agreeing time and again with film producer (Lord) David Puttnam, for example on demographic pressures.

But, in a section of the debate on how we can build trust in science and other institutions, I suggest that maybe the very nature of science is part of the problem. Every time you have a major issue like climate change you always have dissenting voices arguing that there is no problem – providing a comfy alibi for polluters. (The unspoken question: ‘Can we trust scientists regardless of who pays them?’) The good Baroness manages to turn my spoken question in a split-second into an argument for mainstream science, as if more of the same is guaranteed to solve all our problems.

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

I paid a CHF10 fine, though I don’t totally trust UNICEF (©JE)

For me, the highlight of the day was Bill Clinton’s speech over lunch, in which he called for systemic change, rather than just piecemeal initiatives. Slightly under parr performance, indeed I found myself worrying about his health. Since he had flown in that morning from the Middle East, it may have been simply a case of jet lag, but maybe the man’s pushing himself a little hard? Start the sequence of social entrepreneur interviews with Pamela Hartigan (MD, Schwab Foundation), for the book we are planning: hugely energising.

In the evening, Elaine and I go to a dinner entitled: ‘Why are GMOs such a hard sell?’ Facilitated by Guy de Jonquieres, World Trade Editor of the Financial Times, it includes contributions from Gordon Conway (President, Rockefeller Foundation, who I’ve known for over 20 years), Hugh Grant (Chairman, President and CEO of Monsanto, who I first met when we were working with the chemicals-to-biosciences company in 1996-97, before our public resignation of the contract) and Jacques Diouf (Director-General, UN Food and Agricultural Organization, who I find myself sitting next to).

But the liveliest input by far comes from Richard Jefferson (Chairman and CEO, CAMBIA), one of the social entrepreneurs on my interview list. First met him last year at a similar Davos session, where we shared a table with the likes of Bill Joy, Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems – and one of the wierdest people I’ve come across. First came across Joy’s thinking in any depth when he contributed a piece to Wired in April 2000, entitled ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need us’. More specifically, he argued that technologies like robotics, genetic engineering and nanotech threatened to make humankind a threatened species. Surprisingly little of that sort of thinking this evening.

Tuesday, January 20, 2004

Barbed wire and snow in Davos (©JE)

Elaine and I fly to Zurich, then take a conference coach to Davos for the World Economic Forum summit on ‘Partnering for Security and Prosperity’. Spend part of the ride reviewing the proofs of the latest issue of SustainAbility’s newsletter, Radar, then chat with Ed Mayo, now chief executive of the National Consumer Council (NCC) about possible joint projects. Arrive in snow, then find our way to the Hotel Club, out on the trailing fringes of the Milky Way. Still, we walk into town and find the Gentiana restaurant, which we had failed to get into last time we were here. Luckily, we are the last people allowed in – and Elaine is beside herself because they serve snails.

Saturday, January 17, 2004

The World Social Forum (www.wsfindia.org) is now under way in Mumbai, or Bombay. Motto: ‘Another World Is Possible.’ Sadly, Kavita (Prakash-Mani), who was going to represent us, has damaged her back and can’t fly. Thought of her this morning when I finally started William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns, which she lent me many moons ago. Wonderfully funny introduction to the multi-layered worlds of New Delhi, but also in part a clear-eyed account of the massacres that have created strata of bones on which later versions of New Delhi have been built.

Meanwhile everyone at WSF, The Guardian reports this morning, “is sure of what they are against – capitalism, imperialism and George Bush.” But, Randeep Ramesh notes, “Nobody can say what precisely they are all for.” It will be interesting to see how, with India hosting, the WSF folk handle the caste issue.

Three images stuck in my mind from today’s papers. Two appeared in The Times: these were two grotesque photos found in a clear-out of an Argentinian photographic laboratory. They show how commandos were trained to torture dissidents during the country’s “dirty war” in the 1970s. But foul though they are, they seem like a cottage industry compared to the operations shown in an aerial reconnaissance image of Auschwitz featured in The Guardian. This shows inhumanity taken to an industrial scale. Smoke billows from mass burial pits, as the sheer volume of bodies in the “climactic frenzy of killing in 1944 and early 1945” outpaced the camp’s crematoria. Those waiting to be gassed had to queue for a day near one crematorium, in a rain of ash from the bodies of earlier victims. The photos can be found at www.evidenceincamera.co.uk.

Once again, the question arises as to why we didn’t act to halt or at least slow the killing? One reason, John Ezard suggests in The Guardian article, is that “technology outstripped its operators. The RAF’s photographers fired their cameras as fast as machine guns, bringing home millions of images – too many to inspect properly.” The resolution of this one extraordinary image of Auschwitz is so good that apparently inmates can also be seen standing at roll call. Somewhat reminiscent of the way images from NASA’s Nimbus 7 satellite showed the growing Antarctic ozone hole for years before British balloons revealed the growing crisis. NASA’s computers had apparently been programmed in such a way that anything like an ozone hole was considered “impossible”.

What are we missing today?

Friday, January 16, 2004

Moleskine world map by Stamen Design (http://www.stamen.com/projects/books/)

Started day by turning up at Waterstone’s, Piccadilly, just after 09.00, to find them closed until 10.00. In pursuit of Moleskine notebooks for the interviews I’ll be doing at the World Economic Forum next week, with 18 social entrepreneurs in the diary at the last count. With a high, buffeting wind, I had decided not to cycle to the office, instead taking the Tube and reading Into the Arms of Strangers, by Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer, the story of the Kindertransport – which brought Jewish children out of Germany before WWII.

Was sent the book a few days back by Robert Crawshaw, originally a friend of Elaine’s in the late 1960s when they both worked at Oxford University Press. He has been staying with us on occasion recently when working in London and the book came up when we were talking a week or two back of ways weaving an book from multiple stories, something I’m hoping to do with the social entrepreneurs book. The Harris/Oppenheimer book starts with a wonderfully touching preface by Richard Attenborough, whose parents took in two German girls when their onward passage across the Atlantic became impossible.

Made the best of the interlude, dropping into Tower Records, a frequent haunt: bought a double CD by Mahalia Jackson and Dev’lish Mary by The Hot Club of Cowtown, the latter to send to Gaia in Edinburgh. Then the W doors open and I found they don’t now do the particular style of notebook I have used for some while, so I gritted my teeth and bought three irridescent violet variants. At least they’ll stand out if I leave them on a table somewhere.

And that’s very likely to happen. Find my brain’s off on its own travels at the moment. So, for example, David Grayson of Business in the Community came in this afternoon to talk about his new book on how we can turn the responsibility agenda into a opportunity space, but my grey cells really struggled to get into gear. Maybe because I’m chasing too many hares – or, to bring things up to date, exceeding my bandwidth. But David suggested it might also because I had just found that I had mislaid by current Moleskine for the second day running. As I explained to Maddy, using Moleskines (www.moleskines.com) has become so much of an unconscious ritual that their absence may well be derailing me. The wrong sort of notebook, as Raitrack might have said. Yesterday, at Shell, Joppe Cramwinkel asked why I wasn’t using my little black book? Interesting what one becomes notorious for …

As I wrote this entry, I surfed in search of Moleskine images and came across the website of Stamen Design in San Francisco. Have always adored artists’ notebooks, and Stamen’s use of Moleskine notebooks and sketchbooks took my fancy. The rapid response e-mail from Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen giving permission to use the map image above is signed ‘with verdancy’.

Thursday, January 15, 2004

Having teased it out for the sheer wonder of the thing, I finished Bitter Lemons last night. It concludes with a rising tide of violence as EOKA tries to prise the island from the grip of the British Empire. Durrell’s idyllic life is brought to a rude end as the government hangs the young Greek Karaolis, convicted of a terrorist killing. I still remember, as a child, hearing the prelude to at least one hanging in Nicosia. The other prisoners rattled their plates and anything else they could lay their hands between the bars of their cells. On a still night you could hear the noise for miles. For years afterwards I imagined I might end up at the end of a rope. The banning of capital punishment in Britain came as a relief.

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

By train to Downing College, Cambridge. Had agreed some time back to help judge entries for a new award scheme for entrepreneurs, CU Entrepreneurs (www.cue.org.uk). Founded in 1999, CUE’s main award scheme is the Business Creation Competition, with a top prize of £30,000. I have been asked to help judge a brand new competition, focusing on a slightly modified 3P: ‘People, Planet and Productivity’. CU Entrepreneurs is a student-run initiative, working with Cambridge Enterprise and the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning. Top prize: £20,000, with a further £20,000 available for protype development. We managed to shake down the field with relatively little disagreement to six strong candidates – and a couple whose champions we would ask to do further work. Another round of judging will come later in the year when each team has put together a business plan.

Sunday, January 11, 2004

Cyprus (Ministry of Commerce, Industry & Tourism)

April shower-like weather, thumping rain one minute, ragged blue skies the next. Am loving Bitter Lemons, much of which takes me back to the late 50s in Cyprus. Durrell’s book came out in 1957 and we were there in 1958 and 1959, when the EOKA terrorists/freedom fighters were really getting into their stride. Durrell seems to have unwittingly come across a couple of early EOKA arms shipments when sleeping on beaches near Kyrenia. We were in Cyprus mainly, I think, because my father, Tim, was involved in trying to monitor and intercept the arms shipments.

An extraordinary moment not long after the US invasion of Afghanistan, when I was flying back from Australia and the plane made a long diversion to avoid the trouble spots. We came up over Dubai, where I looked down on the extraordinary new palm-shaped complex stretching out into the Gulf, and then out across the Mediterranean. There was a great deal of cloud, but I suddenly had an urge to look out the window, and there was most of the Cyprus panhandle. I couldn’t see the curvature of the Earth, as in the satellite image above, but it was a heart-stopping moment nonetheless.

One of the things that is interesting about the book is the unconscious references to things that (hopefully) would be totally unacceptable these days. For example, alongside the Enosis graffiti in Bellapaix, the village where he buys a house, there are painted records of when the area was last sprayed with DDT to control mosquitoes. And another thing I remember as a child was seeing the asbestos mining in the Troodos range. Durrell notes that “Amiandos made us catch our breath in pain. It lies against the side of a mountain which has been clumsily raped. The houses, factories and shacks are powdered white as if after a heavy snowfall; mounds of white snow rise in every direction, filling the cool still airs of the mountain with the thin dust of asbestos. Men and women walked about in the moon-landscape, powdered into ghoulish insignificance by the dust.”

And that, in turn, reminded me of the arguments I had while editor of The ENDS Report in the late 1970s with people from the asbestos industry, both from companies like Cape Industries and their trade association. Despite the growing evidence of the links with asbestosis and mesothelioma, most such people were still in total denial. A few years later, The Environment Foundation was founded, its funding coming from insurers who were underwriting risks linked to asbestosis, contaminated land, radioactive wastes and so on. (I have chaired the Foundation since 1995, but have recently catalysed a discussion about where we should head next. We have had an extremely productive exchange of e-mails among the Trustees this weekend.)

In one exchange today with (Sir) Geoffrey Chandler, an Environment Foundation Trustee, I asked whether he had ever come across one of the people who pops up a number of times in Bitter Lemons, Patrick (Paddy) Leigh Fermor. I knew that they had both served in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in WWII – and in Greece. Geoffrey replied: “I think Bitter Lemons is Durrell’s best book, though I much enjoyed the first two volumes of the Alexandrian quartet. His other Greek books I find precious. Paddy Leigh Fermor is in a totally diffferent class. In 1945 we travelled together to Corfu in a small caique which just transported my Jeep by placing it athwart-ships. I had a bag of sovereigns to pay those who had helped us in the German occupation. I can’t remember what Paddy was doing, but even in that short acquaintance he came across as a truly remarkable person. I wish – as do so many – that he would write the third volume of his travels. But, damn it, I am told he is translating Wodehouse into Greek instead!”

But back to asbestos and insurance, despite the distractions of caiques and bags of sovereigns. At the risk of sounding hugely argumentative, I also remember having arguments with some of those then carrying out environmental audits in the US for the insurers (including Bain Clarkson, who funded the Foundation from a ‘social tithe’ on their environmental impairment liability policies) on the basis that you really couldn’t expect to identify material risks in the space of a half-day visit to a company – which, in any event, would have a vested interest in pulling the wool over your eyes. It wasn’t long before those toxic chickens came home to roost. The US Superfund legislation was enacted and the concept of ‘joint and several’ liability adopted. If you had dumped asbestos into a landfill site, for example, and you were the only company surviving out of all those also dumping such problem materials, you became liable for their problems, too. The resulting costs for industry were staggering. Some 20% of the liabilities that almost sunk the Lloyd’s insurance market resulted from such problems.

The financial sector is increasingly aware of such risks, though it doesn’t always know quite what to do with them. This weekend I’m reading through a draft of a new SustainAbility report, by Geoff Lye and Francesca Muller, which focuses on the ways in which liability regimes are evolving around the world. What started with issues like asbestos and tobacco, then morphed out into areas like breast implants and ‘Nazi’ gold, is now broadening out to embrace sector such as fast food (obesity and diabetes) and climate change.

Wednesday, January 07, 2004

Finally got around to responding to Paul Hawken’s request for nominations for the Natural Capital Institute (NCI)’s proposed 100 Best Companies in the World index. The criteria being used are different from those used by most socially responsible investment (SRI) funds. As Paul explained: “Most funds accept a company’s business model (with the exception of tobacco, nuclear, gambling, and armaments) as sacrosanct or neutral, and then grade the company on how well it performs within its chosen mission.” NCI, by contrast, plans to “reverse the perspective, and weigh the company heavily on what it actually does. The reasoning here is simple: If a company is heading down a questionable path, it matters very little how it gets there.” More details from www.naturalcapital.org.

Monday, January 05, 2004

Nice start to working year: Oliver (Dudok van Heel)’s birthday means cake in the afternoon – and most people have had wonderful holidays, decompressing well. The exception is Judy (Kuszewski), who contracted a case of the ‘bends’ while diving off Dominica, in the Caribbean. She ended up in a decompression chamber, having had to be airlifted to Martinique. But she is apparently feeling much better now.

Thursday, January 01, 2004

A weird coincidence this morning. In 2001, Gaia’s friend Mahalia had compiled his version of Brian Wilson’s missing album Smile, or Dumb Angel as it was originally called. Wilson, who Mahalia describes as “the half-deaf, half-mad, non-surfing genius of the Beach Boys”, had promised that the album would exceed even the glories of Pet Sounds. ‘Good Vibrations’, which appears in my own ‘Desert Island Discs 16’ compilation (see ‘Influences’), gave every sign that the promise would be honoured. Then Wilson had a breakdown and The Beatles overtook with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band. The Beach Boys allowed various bits and pieces of Smile to dribble out onto later albums, but the project as a whole became one of the great mythical might-have-beens.

Anyway, just before Christmas, Gaia gave me a copy of Mahalia’s CD, with 25 tracks starting with ‘Our Prayer’ and ending with ‘You’re Welcome’. The compilation contains two tracks attributed to Dennis Wilson, ‘Little Bird’ and ‘Never Learn Not to Love’, which were in fact at least part-penned by Charles Manson. The second song, apparently, was originally titled ‘Cease to Exist’. I wonder whether he gets royalties in prison? Well, whatever, I have been listening to the CD, much of it unclassifiable, if – like ‘Good Vibrations’ – outlandishly well produced. But also often a bit cloying. Indeed I suspect that when some of this stuff is played live later in 2004 it will be considered over-rated. What they really needed was their own version of George Martin riding shotgun on the project.

And then this morning, in The Times, there was a short note that Brian Wilson will be “performing the legendary Smile for the first time in February.” His voice may be pretty ropey these days, but what intriguing news to start to the New Year: the Holy Grail disinterred?

NOTE: When I visited cider-makers HP Bulmer in the early 1980s, I learned that the word ‘ropey’ comes from the times when cider-makers would often get off-fermentations that resulted in white, ropey strings of rogue yeasts. They would dump the off batches in the hedgerows, and there were then tales of cows, horses, pigs, chickens and all sorts of other animals staggering around the landscape in a state of advanced intoxication. And that, it seems, was a key part of Brian Wilson’s challenge in getting to Smile. Finally, still on subject of music, while watching Jules Holland’s eleventh New Year’s Eve extravanganza last night on BBC2, I heard the Hot Club of Cowtown for the first time. Can’t imagine how I’ve missed them all these years.

 

Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Little Rissington, by Caroline Elkington 2003, 11 x 3 feet (©JE)

Once again, New Year’s Eve sets the mind thinking about time, intentions and ambitions. “Everything fears Time,” said the old Arab proverb, “only the pyramids laugh at it.” In recent days I have been reading Miroslav Verner’s fascinating account of the history and archaeology of The Pyramids. Mind-boggling. It’s amazing how far people will go to ensure some form of immortality.

Stumbled across a quote from Anne Frank this morning, as I prospected for a title for a new (and totally unrelated) book I’m planning. “I want to go on living after my death!” Anne wrote in her diary on 4 April 1944. “And therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me.” Amazing what she managed to achieve by the age of 15 with a few notebooks, as opposed to the 40- to 60-ton blocks of granite and limestone the Egyptians struggled to haul up to 70 metres into the sky.

It’s almost 30 years since I visited the Pyramids of Giza and Saqqara, when working in Egypt in 1975. Interesting to learn from Verner that under certain conditions, with varying temperatured layers near the horizon, an optical illusion can turn the sun’s disk into a step pyramid, like those at Saqqara. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen something of the sort. The early stepped pyramids would therefore have expressed the idea that the buried ruler was as immortal as the sun, dying on the western horizon every evening and then reawakening in the east every morning.

Sometimes strikes me that compiling a personal website like this is a bit like building a virtual pyramid, which others can later discover and wander around. Had an e-mail on 19 December from Soli(taire) Townsend of Futerra, saying that she had stumbled on the site and noting that she felt as though she had been given the chance “to rummage around inside someone’s head.” She suggests a bulletin board, or similar, to establish a more interactive conversation with visitors. Will ask Lynne (Elvins) to work out how this could be done. Certainly this would be an advance on the Pharaohs: I haven’t heard of any of them entering into direct conversation with those pillaging or studying their tombs.

Having bought Verner’s book together with The Rough Guide to Cyprus a few weeks before Christmas, I seem to be limbering up for further Near and Middle Eastern travels, with Crete, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran and Iraq all apparently on the ambitions list. But there are endless wrinkles: quite apart from the ongoing troubles in Iraq, I have always said I wouldn’t go back to Cyprus, where we spent a couple of years in the late 1950s, until Northern Cyprus was reintegrated. Many of the places I want to return to are on the Turkish side of the ‘Green Line’, including Kyrenia.

Still, to keep the fires burning, I borrowed a copy of Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons from my parents yesterday. And on page 28, I came across the words of a Turkish song:

If you should come to Kyrenia
Don’t enter the walls.
If you should enter the walls
Don’t stay long.
If you should stay long
Don’t get married.
If you should get married
Don’t have children …

Clearly since 1974, when the Turkish army invaded, Turkish refugees from the south and settlers from the mainland have done all of the above, and been buried there to boot. Fascinating how people’s lives interweave with the places they live – and, as in the Holy Land, how the social, economic and political implications then fan out through the generations.

Walking around Little Rissington (where we moved when we returned from Cyprus in 1959) on Tuesday morning, with Elaine and my sister Caroline, it was extraordinary to reflect on how much the village has changed since we were children. We were visiting the Village Hall, where Caroline’s huge (11 feet by 3) new painting of the village and its environs, from the perspective of Bobble Wood, now hangs.

Interestingly, too, there was a map on one of the walls showing all the field names in the parish, including ‘Upper Heaven’ and ‘Lower Heaven’, over towards Great Rissington. A lot easier to ramble downhill in 20 minutes, it struck me, than to spend 20 years building a vast limestone mountain like the Great Pyramid, but it takes all sorts to make a world.

Sunday, December 28, 2003

Elaine, in blue, masked by snowflake, asks for directions on Kleine Scheidegg (© HE)

Elaine, Gaia, Hania and I returned last night from a stunning week in Wengen, Switzerland, staying at the delightfully eccentric Hotel Falken. I used the opportunity to plough through a stack of books, including The Discovery of Slowness by Sten Nadolny, Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald and John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (the last of which which E, G and H had also all read or re-read on the trip). All three books are extraordinary, albeit in wildly different ways. Also dipped into The Quark and the Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann and A Terrible Beauty by Peter Watson, which I plan to read cover to cover, eventually.

The four of us went for mammoth walks every day, the first day in an unexpected blizzard. Thereafter, we enjoyed wonderful clean snow pretty much until the last day, when a partial thaw started. One day, we went up to the Schilthorn/Piz Gloria, where we had lunch in the remarkable revolving restaurant, looking out across the glittering peakscape, including the dark North Face of the Eiger. On the last evening, among other things, we went ice-skating at the Wengen rink. I had trouble keeping my feet to begin with, which made me happy that Maddy I had sat out the Somerset House skating a few weeks back, but soon I was managing to make a reasonable fist of it. Skating around in the midst of those amazing peaks is pretty much the ultimate way to take one’s mind off the day-to-day travails of sustainable development – until, that is, people start talking about why the glaciers are retreating and the Alpine permafrost thawing.

While we were away, I learned from ploughing through the papers that had arrived in our absence, Iraq hadn’t been the only source of bad news – over 20,000 Iranians had been killed by an earthquake in and around Bam, and over 200 people had died in a release of hydrogen sulphide from a natural gas field in China.

Cloudscape on Christmas Day (© JE)

Thursday, December 18, 2003

Yesterday was Amsterdam, speaking at the launch of CIMO, a new centre for innovation and sustainable business at the Free University of Amsterdam. Arriving mid-morning, I went to lunch at IMSA (www.imsa.nl), an organisation very like SustainAbility and originating in 1985. Lunch hosted by IMSA founder Wouter van Dieren and colleagues. Marcel Bovy had asked me to come by to discuss how SustainAbility manages values-based dilemmas and issues with 15 members or so of the IMSA team. Very interesting and lively debate.

Later, after the main part of the CIMO meeting, I was one of the people taking part in a series of so-called ‘tableaux vivants’, mine being with Alois Flatz of Sustainable Asset Management (SAM), in a darkened room, with a draped piano and a mystic pond, answering ‘burning questions’. In his speech, Alois noted that he had been doing calculations on his new son Joachim. He estimated that if Joachim had kept growing for a full human lifetime at the rate that he grew in the first few months, he would have ended up with a headroom problem: 780 kilometres tall!

Monday, December 15, 2003

Spoke at a conference this afternoon in Cabot Hall, Canary Wharf, focusing on extent to which London’s pitch for the 2012 Olympics could be linked to the sustainability agenda. Seems that it could be done, though it’s anyone’s guess what chance London would have of winning. The main Olympic Zone, it appears, would be built in the Lower Lea Valley.

Then, in the evening, along to the Royal Society of Arts, where we held a farewell dinner for Charles Muller, as a trustee of the Environment Foundation, and for Helen Holdaway, who has been our Director since 1998. She has been involved in the Foundation since the early 1980s, has orchestrated pretty much all our consultations at St George’s House, Windsor, and kept our lines steady when we were under determined, Dickensian assault by the Charity Commissioners. The fact that we eventually won the case, ensuring that sustainable development would henceforward be a charitable objective (www.environmentfoundation.net) in the UK, is probably the biggest single thing the Foundation has done, other than catalysing the process that led to the Queen’s Award for environmental achievement. The obvious question now: what next?

Saturday, December 13, 2003

Exhausted, but hopefully in recovery. This evening, watched a TV programme on the North African campaigns of Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) and the Special Air Services (SAS), the sort of special forces once dubbed the ‘Funnies’. Elaine’s father, Stanley, my late father-in-law, was in the desert for six years during WWII. Not PC to say so, I suspect, but I have always been attracted to the out-of-the-box style of warfare of people like the Chindits, LRDG and SAS. In Cyprus as a child I was forcibly impressed by an ex-Chindit, Douglas Walker-Brash. He came to the breakfast table heavily armed, sporting sidearms in the same way that General Patton did.

In The Guardian Review today I also read a review by William Dalrymple of Words of Mercury, a collection of the best of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s writings. Like Geoffrey Chandler (see 9 December and 27 October entries), he was involved in the unconventional fighting in Greece.

Asked Pat, my mother, who had read the same review, whether she had read Leigh Fermor’s Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water? I had, years ago, and loved them. She hadn’t, so I sent her all three for Christmas this evening, couresy of Amazon, after watching the grand finale of the BBC’s ‘The Big Read’. Of the final 5 books out of 6,000 originally entered, three were favourites of mine: Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Tolkien won. I can still recall the smell of rain on the earth outside at 06.00 one morning as I finished the third volume after a marathon 2-day, 3-volume reading session in the late 1960s.

Wednesday, December 10, 2003

Skaters: Back row – Oliver Dudok van Heel, Jan Scherer, Nick Robinson, Tell Muenzing, Peter Zollinger, Jeff Erikson; front row – Kavita Prakash-Mani, Frances Scott, Jodie Thorpe, Kizzi Keane, Philippa Moore (© JE)

Took part in SustainAbility Board meeting through to around 14.00. One key development: our 3-person US team has broken the $500,000 revenue mark for the first time and with Mark Lee joining us from Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) in January, the prospects there look pretty healthy. Later, a large bunch of us (people from the London, Washington and Zurich offices) went across to the skating rink at Somerset House.

Only time I have skated on ice was in the Cotswolds, at least 40 years ago, when the village fishmonger was out on his wooden skates, doffing his hat to everone he passed. You could look down through the ice to see trapped autumn leaves, with frozen streams of bubbles – a bit like skating across the boundary layer with an alternate universe.

Maddy (Rooke-Ley) and I sat it out, with hot chocolates, watching the passeo. One glorious moment when the SustainAbility folk linked up into a long gliding conga, and the Future Forests people (who just happened to be there same day, same time) linked on. Too much fun, though: the ice marshalls intervened and broke the conga up, but not before I had caught a fragment naughtily skimming by.

In the evening, the team and their partners head off to Yatra in Dover Street, for a delightful evening. As a gimmick to get people talking, Kizzi had allocated everyone with an identity: I turned out to be Samson and found my Delilah in the form of Nick’s Fiona. On the way home with Elaine, I mused that we have some fair old challenges ahead, but as long as we can get our management issues sorted we have the makings of a stunning team for 2004.

Outlaw conga: From the front – Oliver Dudok van Heel, Frances Scott, Nick Robinson, Yasmin Crowther, Tell Muenzing, Seb Beloe, with Jeff Erikson leaving picture on the left (© JE)

Tuesday, December 09, 2003

Council interlude: Craig Mackenzie (Insight), Sophia Tickell (Just Pensions/Oxfam), Peter Zollinger, Julia Hailes (co-founder of SustainAbility), Vernon Jennings (a Director of SustainAbility for nine years before leaving for Novo Nordisk), Yasmin Crowther, Sir Geoffrey Chandler (© Nick Robinson)

Our first face-to-face SustainAbility Council meeting for perhaps three years opens at the Royal Society of Arts. I introduce RSA Director Penny Egan by saying that Hania has been studying US and EU (particularly UK) approaches to film script writing – and discovered that Europeans (particularly Britons) tend to start with some history before getting into the real story, whereas Americans get straight to the story. As good Europeans, I say, we are going to start with a bit of context. Penny kicks off with a welcome noting that the Society is 250 years old next year – and that it has always had many aspects of the sustainability agenda among its priorities. Indeed, its genesis took place in the coffee shops of 18th century London, which many see as the origins of what many would call today ‘civil society’.

The RSA provided a platform – and something of a refuge – for the environmental debate through the Thatcher years in the UK, so in a sense it’s nice to come home. I also note that (Sir) Geoffrey (Chandler), present as a member of our Council, was also a regular denizen of the RSA in 1986 as Director of Industry Year. Apart from members of our Council and Faculty, the meeting also drew together people like Monique Barbut (the new Director of UNEP’s trade, industry and economics division), George Dallas (head of rating agency Standard & Poor’s governance unit), Craig Mackenzie (Insight Investment) and James Wilsdon (Demos).

Our focus during the day is primarily on SustainAbility’s research and think-tank priorities for the next 3-5 years, with the process run by Seb Beloe (our Director of Research & Advocacy) and Peter Zollinger (Executive Director). By the time we report back to the full Core Team late in the day, we have made a huge amount of progress, with a series of new perspectives and ideas surfacing. But perhaps the key outcome is that the team re-discover the value of our Council and Faculty. Many of the team hadn’t been around when we last held a Council meeting, that one at the Royal Aeronautical Society.

Thoughtful: Professor Tom Gladwin (University of Michigan), George Dallas (Standard & Poors) (© Nick Robinson)

Thursday, December 04, 2003

Hand in claw: Sophia Tickell, Lise Kingo and friend (©JE)

Wake up in the Old Bank Hotel, Oxford. Second day of fascinating conference at Magdalen College on non-communicable diseases, including obesity, cardio-vascular disease and diabetes. The purpose of the ‘Oxford Vision 2020’ event, sponsored by Novo Nordisk and organised by the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metalbolism, is to help the World Health Organisation (WHO) develop a strategy for dealing with what is expected to be an epidemic of chronic or non-communicable diseases (NCDs).

A paper circulated ahead of the meeting, and co-authored by Derek Yach of WHO, says that in 2003 there will have been an estimated 56 million deaths globally, of which 60% will be due to NCDs. Yach and his wife wrote another paper last year, which he sends me after the event, arguing that NCDs are emerging as a major threat to any chances we may have of achieveing sustainable development.

In my summing up late in the afternoon I say that the discussions have put me in mind of three characters: Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen (because the NCD challenge is one where the world will have to run faster and faster and yet will continue to slide backwards), Alexander the Great (except that here there is no way to slice to the heart of the Gordian Knot) and Kofi Annan (because of his emphais on partnerships for change – and because of the Global Compact project we are ramping up at SustainAbility, where I am now determined to include a component on NCDs).

The evening’s dinner is at the Pitt Rivers natural history museum, where just about the first case I come across contains a horseshoe crab, a reminder of our Cape Cod jaunt. As we leave, I take a couple of shots of Lise Kingo (VP for the triple bottom line at Novo Nordisk) and Sophia Tickell (just standing down from Oxfam, now part of Just Pensions and a much-valued member of SustainAbility’s Council), with a raucous, toothy passer-by.

Monday, December 01, 2003

Flew last night to Brussels, to speak at Fairer World Forum (www.humanitarian-review.org). Held at the Bibliotheque Solvay, in the shadow of the new European Parliament complex. Among the questions asked: Are multinational corporations the ‘unsung heroes’ of development aid? Is ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ the same in the First and Third Worlds? And, How are global commodities markets rigged against the Third World? Most of the proceedings left me strangely unstirred, but there was one extraordinary statement from a US company representative. He effectively argued that his transport and courrier group should be allowed to adopt different laws and standards in different parts of the world, one of which I happen to know is Burma/Myanmar. He was quickly scrabbling to make good the damage done, insisting that this wasn’t at all what he meant to say even if it was what he said. I wonder.

 

Sunday, November 30, 2003

Pilot lite: Gaia as Amelia Earhart (©JE)

Passing through en route to Cotswolds, Shaftesbury and Bristol, the latter for a fancy dress party, Gaia flew into the kitchen in full regalia. I always loved the stories, even if they both ended tragically, of Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson – Johnson shot down, it seems, by one of our own flak batteries in WWII.

Tuesday, November 25, 2003

Just in from a fascinating evening at the Foreign Press Association Media Awards, held at the Park Lane Hotel, as part of a table hosted by Rory Stear of Freeplay Energy (www.freeplay.net). Among other things, he’s one of the Schwab Foundation’s social entrepreneurs. Freeplay develop windup radios and other devices that help connect people in the developing world – though one unexpectedly large market post-9/11, apparently, has been Americans stocking up their bunkers.

U2’s Bono, clutching a pint of Guinness, cheered up the journalists present by saying (via video) that they were at the “top of the food chain of information”. But they took some cheering up: the issue of ‘friendly fire’ kept coming up – with over 50 journalists killed this year, and John Simpson getting an award for his reporting after a friendly fire incident in Iraq which killed 15 people. One of the winners was the cameraman who continued filming after the incident, wiping his own blood off the camera lens.

Alastair Campbell did a surprisingly funny speech, part of which recalled how he had recently rescued someone in North London who had been beaten up by thugs, helping him to find his way back to a church. Then he handed him his card, at which point the rescued victim realised who his rescuer was and said: “You’re Alastair Campbell? I fucking hate you!” Quite endearing. Hard to disagree with him when he said that skepticism about politicians has morphed into cynicism and even phobias, though it’s equally hard not to see him as part of the problem.

Sat next to Anita Roddick, of The Body Shop, which was good fun. It’s 15 years since she did the foreword for The Green Consumer Guide. Currently, she is much exercised about child slavery. She was handing out this year’s Environment Prize, sponsored by Freeplay, which went to a team which made a TV documentary about China’s much-abused moon bears. One of the things we talked about was the art of blogging, something she does very energetically (www.anitaroddick.com).

Several Andersons present, including Clive (who told an endless series of jokes, one of which was about George W. Bush sitting down so fast when he arrived at Heathrow that Blair didn’t have time to kiss him on both cheeks) and Gillian, of X-Files fame, who wore a ravishing red dress but looked somewhat trucculent throughout.

Sunday, November 23, 2003

B&HRRC: Greg Regaignon, Chris Marsden, Chris Avery (©JE)

Week started off with meeting of ACCA social and environmental committee, which I chair, on Monday. That evening, Jed Emerson arrived to stay. On Tuesday I accompanied him to his event on his Blended Value Map (www.blendedvalue.org) at the London Business School.

Thrown in amongst everything else over these few days, did interviews for two different parts of Newsweek and for the Wall Street Journal (who are profiling Tom Burke).

Meeting of ECGD Advisory Council on Wednesday, after which I return to chaos on the Underground. Nothing to do with President Bush’s visit, they say: signal failures, although I’m still unsure why they threw us all out of Green Park station and told us to walk to Hyde Park Corner. But while I’m away in Lancaster several of the SustainAbility team take part in the protests in London, during one of which an effigy/statue of Bush is toppled.

Took train to Lancaster on Thursday morning. Picked up from the station by Professor V.N. Balasubramanyam of the University’s Economics Department, for the Esmee Fairbairn Lecture I was due to give that evening. Following in footsteps of people like Lord Jenkins and Samuel Brittan. My theme is: ‘Sustainable business: useful – or dangerously misleading oxymoron?’. Useful, I say, but dangerous if we forget just how volatile markets are – and need to be. End by referring to the work of people like Joseph Schumpeter and Nikolai Kondratiev.

Turns out that the new vice-chancellor is Paul Wellings, who I knew when he was at CSIRO in Australia. Nice evening after the lecture, followed by dinner at Paul’s home with a range of people from the University and business. Then back to London on Friday, with a carriage-full of extremely unpleasant supporters of some sport or another. Much of the week devoted to the latest issue of Radar, which will be on the HIV/AIDS issue.

And then on Saturday, yesterday, a meeting of the Trustees of the Amnesty spin-off, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (B&HRRC). Held in SustainAbility’s offices. The photo shows Chris Avery, who has built this extraordinary website (www.business-humanrights.org), Chris Marsden who chairs both the B&HRRC and Amnesty International’s UK business group, and Greg Regaignon, who is helping with the US side of things. Also met Annabel Short for the first time: she has joined to help Chris A with the website, together with Debbie Legall, a volunteer. Good news is that Mary Robinson has agreed to chair the International Advisory Network.

Yesterday was also the 40th anniversary of the JFK assassination. Can still remember the news arriving literally like a bombshell in the common room at our Bryanston house, Forrester. Initially, I recall, the story was that he had been hit by a bazooka in Mexico. Walked around the site, including the Grassy Knoll, a few years back when I was in Dallas. The whole saga still exerts an extraordinary pull, even after all these years.

Saturday, November 15, 2003

Heavy metal: Henry Moore sculpture @ Wolfsberg (©JE)

Day started horribly early, with a 7.30 briefing of speakers for yet another event on sustainability. Really excellent speech to start with by Professor John Silber, President Emeritus of Boston University. Then Peter (Zollinger) and I ran two of the parallel sessions, focusing on global environmental trends and the implications for competitiveness.

Asked to be provocative, I compared the chief financial officers (CFOs) present – and their companies – to the pigs that they had watched race the previous evenings. Like the pigs, companies compete as they strain every sinew to gain the prizes on offer, be they apples or market share. No-one welcomes those who lean over the fence and ask whether the pigs (or companies) have woken up to the fact that the circumstances in which they find themselves aren’t designed with their long-term best interests in mind. But at least it raised a laugh!

After lunch, walked around the Henry Moore sculpture on the hill overlooking the nearby lake, before once again taking a taxi, this time to Zurich airport. Booked on BA, but ended up on a packed plane operated by Swiss, sitting in the very back row of seats, and feeling distinctly queasy as the plane bucked vigorously in high winds as it dropped towards Heathrow. Only mildly sedated by reading John Keegan’s remarkable new book on intelligence in warfare through the ages.

Thursday, November 13, 2003

Schweine: After the pig race (©JE)

Still in Switzerland. Took train to Zurich on Tuesday, staying with Peter and Doris Zollinger in their home overlooking the lake. Yesterday afternoon, Alois Flatz of Sustainable Asset Management (SAM) picked me up and we drove to Vorarlberg in Austria, where we were staying in the Hotel Deuring Schlossle.

The old castle, converted from a fortification into a mansion in the 17th century, has a wonderful atmosphere, but rain was belting down as we arrived in the dark, continued through a splendid dinner (spotlit by the floodlighting outside the castle) and was still at work this morning when we drove to the conference venue.

We were speaking at the 20th International Economy Forum, this time focusing on sustainability. Massive audience and speakers projected onto large screens, so we all had to be made up before our ordeals. Among other speakers, I was delighted to catch up with Jermyn Brooks, who was Global Partner with PwC when I first met him and more recently has been part of the directorate of anti-corruption organisation Transparency International.

Alongside the conference centre was a stage, jutting out into Lake Constanz, set for West Side Story, with the scenery powerfully suggesting the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center. Walked around it in the rain, then was picked up by a taxi for the 1.5 hour drive back to Wolfsberg, the UBS executive development centre. Had been told to bring waterproof clothing, but had pretty much ignored the instructions, thinking it was for optional walking in the countryside. Instead, it turned out that we were having dinner on a farm, with over 100 bankers and their clients eating in a barn, over a the byre where some 80 cows looked on nonplussed.

When I first arrived, I found the guests standing around what looked like a race course, with pigs milling around at various points. I was told that a pig race had just happened – and that another would soon start. Happily, fretting about animal welfare, I was taken off for a drink in one of the barns by Professor Prabhu Guptera of Wolfsberg. We missed the second race, hence my photograph of the coats the pigs had worn during the races, while the pigs were cooling down and being fed.

The smell of cows as we ate was amazingly reminscent of the 1950s on the farm in Northern Ireland. We were told that the cows choose when to be milked and the process if fully automatic. On many farms, cows are milked once or twice a day, whereas here they choose to be milked an average 3.2 times a day. The rafters of the barn were lined with recently picked apples – and crates of apples stood around the dining tables.

Sunday, November 09, 2003

Geneva swan interruptus (©JE)

Last day of the Evian Group conference really got into its stride, not least because of a last-minute – and very candid – intervention by ex-President Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico. Met some quit extraordinary people, then after the conference ended there was a nice winding down over lunch. In the afternoon, took a walk along the waterfront: slight mist, grey skies, strong sense of end of season. This evening, took Joan Bavaria (Trillium Asset Management and CERES) and her husband Jesse to dinner at la perle du lac. They had travelled across from Amsterdam – where they had attended the Triple Bottom Line Investing conference run by Robert Rubinstein – to talk about NGO accountability, something we’re all increasingly interested in these days.

Saturday, November 08, 2003

Geneva (©JE)

Second day at the Evian Group’s annual conference in Geneva (www.eviangroup.org), on the theme of ‘Economic Order in the Global Era’. Invited because the Evian Group’s founder and Executive Director, Professor Jean-Pierre Lehmann of the business school IMD, is someone I’ve known for some years, since we met in Norway when we both spoke at Statoil’s 25th anniversary conference, and has since been a member of SustainAbility’s Faculty.

Up at some ungodly hour to lead a breakfast session from 07.15 on the NGO agenda. It triggered a very lively discussion. A fair number of people here, as with the World Economic Forum meeting a few days back, are inclined to blame NGOs for the collapse of the Cancun trade talks. So have spent a fair amount of time painting a rather different picture.

Among the speakers today were people like Dr Supachai Panitchpakdi, head of the WTO, and Rubens Ricupero, head of UNCTAD. One speaker, more candid than most, noted that “talking about Cancun is like talking about a car accident” – we were all witnesses, but everyone now has slightly different stories about what happened. One Japanese speaker even noted that it was all a bit like Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express: everyone was responsible to some degree.

At the dinner this evening, I sat next to Dr Lyushun Shen, Taiwan’s ‘ambassador’ here. All the functions of an embassy, but not recognised by the government, which makes things a little more difficult. Fascinating conversation which took off in all sorts of directions, ranging from the Communist Revolution in China (his father accompanied the Nationalist gold across to Formosa) to the ‘Flying Tigers’, the aircraft of WWII, the history of islands like Malta and Cyrpus, the affairs of Lord Mountbatten, and films like The Guns of Navarone and Waterloo Bridge. A hugely enjoyable evening.

Thursday, November 06, 2003

A wonderful, almost Spring-like day. Awake from one of my ‘significant’ nightmare-dreams, that come along every few years. In this dream I found myself for some reason strapped to a towering crow’s nest structure on a vast, juggernaut-like vessel steaming down a major river. A bit like a pocket battleship. All grey metal and sharp edges. The vantage point afforded wonderful views of pink-tinged waters, as the sun set, but I was acutely aware that we would be passing under low bridges and that I would also likely suffer from hypothermia by the end of the night. No way down the vertiginous structure. The vessel picked up speed and I became increasingly agitated. Eventually, I can’t remember how, the crew woke up to the fact that I was above their heads and a rescue team arrived, though they were wielding surgical instruments that had me wondering whether they planned amputation. An over-reaction, perhaps, to the accelerating pace of events in the office?

In any event, Elaine and I start off with a meeting with Stephen Ward, the pensions expert who managed to extract us from the rubble of the Equitable Life disaster – one of the reasons I am so interested in the corporate responsibility and international justice issues surrounding the pensions sector.

Then, after several other meetings, off to St Yeghiche Armenian Church in Cranley Gardens for a World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting. Met by Armen Sarkissian, previously Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia, who explains the history of the church and of the Armenian diaspora (right back to the Crusades) to Guy de Joncquieres (World Trade Editor of the Financial Times) and I. The meeting is held in an upstairs room, with a glazed wall overlooking the nave of the church. Meeting chaired by Jose-Maria Figueres, co-CEO of WEF and an ex-PM of Costa Rica. One of the most interesting suggestions for the 2004 WEF agenda comes from Kazuo Ishiguro (An Artist of the Floating World, Remains of the Day), who proposes that the nexus of celebrity and power be explored. With Schwarzenegger now Governor of California, the proposal resonnates strongly.

Wednesday, November 05, 2003

Erotic Gherkin (©JE)

Francesca (Muller) and I start the day with a visit to Sara Fox, New Building Director at Swiss Re reponsible for the construction of the company’s new London headquarters skyscraper, fondly known as the ‘Erotic Gherkin’. Huge fun and we emerge determined to launch a new series of ‘Change Agent’ profiles in SustainAbility’s Radar. Jed Emerson of the Hewlett Foundation will be retrospectively adopted as the first in the series, Albina du Boisrouvray will be the second and Sara the third.

Sunday, November 02, 2003

Getting ready to fly to Copenhagen, to speak at Nordic Partnership conference tomorrow. Yesterday had a wonderful interview with Albina du Boisrouvray of the Association Francois-Xavier Bagnoud (www.fxb.org), which will feed into the HIV/AIDS issue of SustainAbility’s Radar newsletter. In the evening, Elaine and I went to Steve Warshal’s 60th birthday party in Queen’s Park. Fair number of current and ex- Greenpeacers, including Peter Melchett (wearing an anti-GM T-shirt and sporting an animated third arm, reminiscent of Zaphod Beeblebrox’s second head), Robin-Grove White, John Sauven and Peter Knight.

Saturday, November 01, 2003

Several linked environmental stories in The Times today, on the loss of Arctic ice and the long-term threat to polar bears, on the impact condensation trails produced by high-flying aircraft are having on global warming trends, and on the likelihood that in future planes will have to fly 5,000 feet lower, exposing passengers to more turbulence. This evening, watched a programme on the 1953 storm which killed over 500 people around the UK and some 1800 in The Netherlands.

Often feel people are completely disconnected with the slow-burn trends affecting their environment, but as I cycled home along New Oxford Street I found myself tailing – and then joining – a mass bike rally, with a surprising number of motorcycle and bicyle police riding herd. They were shutting off all the side streets, including Tottenham Road, so we could pass. A massive sound system on one cycle-based platform was booming out The Bee Gees’ Tragedy. One cyclist, just ahead of me, was trailing a huge hammer and sickle flag, which seemed slightly out of tune. Drivers and pedestrians seemed friendly, or nonplussed. After a slow amble for 10 or 11 blocks, I parted company with the throbbing herd, ducking down Berwick Street.

 

Friday, October 31, 2003

The Sixties redux

Yesterday, an old friend from university days – Leigh Sebba – stumbled across my website, even though it isn’t yet launched and I haven’t seen him for years. One of his comments: How about a photo of what you looked like in the late Sixties if you’re going to have a picture of Elaine in 1973? Well, here’s something from the days when I had hair and the world was pregnant with opportunity – and seething with great music (see ‘Influences’, Music).

The big news story today is the ousting of Tory Party leader Iain Duncan Smith, with Michael Howard seen as his likely successor. I don’t think I have ever met Howard, but I remember being linked with him in an item in The Times years ago. There was a palace revolution going on at St Paul’s School for Girls, where we both had daughters and various people were trying to turf out the then High Mistress. For some strange reason, maybe because we were both then involved in the environment, we were mentioned in the piece, the unspoken implication being that we were leading the coup. No truth in the rumour.

Thursday, October 30, 2003

Rupert Bassett: writings on the wall (©JE)

Hugely enjoyable day, with new photographs being done of the team and Rupert (Bassett), our designer, also continuing putting up the stream of words and phrases around the office walls. These were all suggested by team members, with languages including German, Hindi and Japanese. One of my ten suggestions, based on The Beatles’ Revolution, one of my Desert Island 16 Discs (see Influences), was YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION. In the photograph Rupert is applying the word HOPE, following THE PEOPLE’S HALL (where SustainAbility was based for six years) and NOT CHEATING ON OUR CHILDREN. This afternoon, Yasmin and I interviewed Angela Wilkinson and Betty Amailuk of Shell about their work on a set of HIV/AIDS scenarios for Africa, for the next issue of Radar. Seb, Yasmin and I also start work on a possible new UN Global Compact project, focusing on the likely future balance between the public and private sectors in the transition towards sustainable development. Cycle home in the beginnings of an autumn mist.

Monday, October 27, 2003

An interesting comment from Geoffrey Chandler today, when reviewing what I planned to report here on last week’s Environment Foundation Consultation – and finding himself tempted into reading further back into the BabelLOG stream. In the process, he came across the reference to Arminius and the muffling of a mule bell (October 17).

Noted that it reminded him of his time during WWII with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Greece. “We used to do this to our mules when crossing roads at night during the German occupation. Recalcitrant beasts, but remarkable for (their) stamina and sure-footedness. Only the Greek mule-drivers could control them by the use of language which enriched my vocabulary, but was unusable in polite society.”

Another, American, friend spotted the mule story and says his father also worked with mules when with the WWII US Army – and recalled sitting on a military tribunal trying a man who had been caught abusing a mule, which was apparently a serious matter in the Artillery!

Sunday, October 26, 2003

Deer and jackdaws, Richmond Park (©JE)

Elaine, Hania and I take a walk in the Park: clatter of deer antlers as the stags battled. The skies overhead seemed quiter, even though they aren’t, much. But scheduled Concorde flights of BA’s Concorde did stop on Friday. Lamenting the grounding of this “time machine”, Jonathan Glancer wrote on the front page of yesterday’s Guardian that “generations of the environmentally conscious thought of her as an evil, smokebelching dragon, a gas-guzzling curse, pandering only to the swinish rich.” Couldn’t have put it better myself. Having lived under the flight lanes into Heathrow since 1975 (Concorde’s maiden flight was in 1969), I have always felt I would far rather see her in a sculpture park than overhead.

Strapping military engines onto a civil airliner must have seemed a wizzard idea at the time, but few industrial products have so conspicuously failed to deliver across the triple bottom line. That said, I was in a drear minority of one at the Windsor event, where most people wanted to see the final curtain of three Concordes landing in sequence – and lamented the passing of an icon. One elderly participant who had flown on the plane said he had been seduced by the much-vaunted saving of time, but drank so much in-flight that when he got to his destination he had to go to bed.

Soli Townsend, Sir Geoffrey Chandler (©JE)

Thursday 23rd: One of the central themes of the Environment Foundation since I took over as Chairman has been the task of bridging the gap between the generations, symbolised for me by the picture of Soli(taire) Townsend and Sir Geoffrey Chandler approaching St George’s House. We started the day with a gripping presentation by Angela Wilkinson of the Shell scenarios group. She compared two different sets of scenarios, Shell’s latest ‘Business Case’ and ‘Prism’ scenarios, and a different set which had resulted from the ‘Riskworld’ process she had led.

Then Geoffrey followed with a quite brilliant speech, which will also be posted on the Foundation’s website (www.environmentfoundation.net). It began like this:

“As I lay half-waking half-sleeping in my bed this morning there came to me a vision of the decline and impending fall of the Roman Empire. There were the gilded palaces the imperial corporate headquarters remote in style and immune in culture from the real world outside. There were the cries of peacocks, the ripple of water from the marble fountains, the rustle of silk from the slave girls clearing the remnants of the previous nights debauch, whose lingering odours were disguised by the scent of roses. And there was the Emperor himself the Empires CEO rich beyond the dreams of avarice, indifferent to the picture he presented to the world or to the fact that his disproportionate rewards brought the imperial game into disrepute.

“And yet there were some stirrings of disquiet in his mind, closed though in many ways it was. His financial gains, he felt he had to say in justification, were no greater than those of the chief gladiator who, while he survived, was richly rewarded by the symbols or logos, as they were then called in the Greek language of the wealthy wine shops and the brothel-keepers, but whose retirement, the Emperor failed to observe, was in no way cushioned and could in any case be short-lived.

“His disquiet should have been heightened by the news that the barbarians were at the gates. But he was happy to dismiss the implications of their presence. These terrorists, as he characterised them, using the Latin word rather than the Greek barbarian these terrorists, he said, spring like Athena fully armed from the head of Zeus (he was not an uneducated man), and we will simply destroy them. And to soothe the mob we will in the meantime have more bread and circuses and call them Imperial Social Responsibility or ISR for short. So pull up the ladder, Caligula. Were all right.

“But then the mood seemed to darken as I looked beyond the limen, the threshold of Rome, to the limes, the shadowy possessions beyond, which were intended to be the Empires outer protection. It was thence that the barbarians came, their origins rooted in the inequity, injustice and oppression from which their world suffered. And their operations, however dastardly they might seem to the Romans, derived succour from the conditions of that world. But none of this was understood in Rome itself. Decline, it seemed to me in my dreaming state, would inevitably become fall, since symptoms, rather than causes, clouded the judgement of men and monopolised their attention. Rome would not survive unless it changed.

“And then the vision faded.”

Because I have been reading various books on the Roman Empire, the imagery snagged my imagination, but Geoffrey’s style of speaking is itself powerfully resonant of a different, sometimes more articulate and certainly more classically informed era.

Indeed, I joked in introducing him that he sometimes reminds me of a coelacanth, the mysterious ‘living fossil’ first found in 1938. He countered that the coelacanth is primitive, has to be dredged up from great depths and begins to disintegrate as it is hauled into the sun-flecked surface waters. Behind the humour, though, lies a shared passion for history. As Churchill once put it, the further you can see into the past, the further you can see into the future.

For much of the day, working groups explored the challenges of the next 20 years. One of the things that strikes me these days is how much the NGO sector now knows about the corporate world. The best example over these few days was Sophia Tickell, of Oxfam and Just Pensions, and also – like Geoffrey Chandler, Ian Christie and Jane Nelson – a member of SustainAbility’s Council.

Jane works on ‘Next Steps’ (©JE)

Friday: After the working groups reported back on their progress with their 20-year road-maps, Ian Christie (Joint Head, Economic & Sustainable Resources, Surrey County Council and Environment Foundation Trustee) and Jane Nelson (IBLF, Harvard and Environment Foundation Trustee) treated us to a pair of remarkable perspectives on what they had heard.

Ian began by noting that the software folk who wrote the code which resulted in the ‘Millennium Bug’ scare had never imagined that their code would last as long as it did, nor that it would threaten to bring down the world’s IT systems. Now, he said, “chickens are coming home to roost on an industrial scale”. He wondered why, if the next 20 years demanded gutst political leadership we hadn’t had it – at least in this area – in the past 20 years? One key to progress, he concluded, would be for governments – which he suggested suffer from “business envy” – to be lobbied by business leaders for “smart regulation”.

Jane also focused, among other things, on the role of governments – as champions, regulators, buyers, funders and so on. She stressed the key role of stock exchange listing requirements and underscored the need to mobilise consumers, some of whom can’t afford change, some of whom don’t know about the need for change, and many of whom currently fall into the “don’t care” category. She mentioned that the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard is planning work that will convene and hopefully mobilise the chairs of the CSR committees of major companies as another “infection factor”.

In short, the Foundation’s 20th anniversary Consultation gave us a huge amount to think about in planning our programme for the next 3-5 years. The Trustees’ meeting in the afternoon went extremely well and we left feeling that this had been one of the best – if not the best – events in the Foundation’s 20 year history.

Afterglow: Sheila Bloom with Helen (©JE)

Thursday, October 23, 2003

Windsor Castle (©JE)

To Windsor for the Environment Foundation’s 20th anniversary Consultation. Held in St George’s House (www.stgeorges-windsor.org), inside the walls of Windsor Castle, these events convene 25-30 people to discuss emerging issues. The discussions are subject to the Chatham House Rule, so what follows only attributes ideas and contributions where those involved gave their permission.

The themes and results of past Consultations can be found on the Foundation’s website (www.environmentfoundation.net). Arrived feeling slightly disorientated: despite all Maddy’s carefully prepared notes, I had taken a train from the wrong station and left my mobile phone on the back seat in the taxi. As it turned out, I wasn’t too late and Helen Holdaway (the Foundation’s Director) had also mislaid her mobile.

Helen is the only person to have attended all the Consultations over the life of the Foundation – and, indeed, has organised most of them. This event,sadly, was to be her last as Director of the Foundation, since she is retiring. The latest meeting, entitled ’21st Century Values at Work’, pulled together a fairly wide spectrum of people, representing companies like BT, Dow, National Grid Transco and Shell, NGOs like the 21st Century Trust, Amnesty International, Business in the Environment, the Food Ethics Council and Oxfam, and a range of people who variously make their living trying to drive CSR- and SD-related change. For example, it was great to see Marianne Knuth again: she is half-Danish, half-Zimbabwean, and is Director of the Kufunda Village project in Zimbabwe (www.kufunda.org). She was also one of the Foundation’s Travelling Fellows.

Dilemma sharing session. Foreground: Dr Angela Wilkinson (Shell), Dr Chris Tuppen (BT), Dr David Russell (Dow Europe) and John Lotherington (21st Century Trust) (©JE).

To set the scene, the first evening kicked off with a presentation from Professor Robert Worcester, Chairman of pollsters MORI, on the trends in UK public opinion over the past 20 years – actually since 1979, just pre-Mrs Thatcher. As insightful as ever, Bob made his usual distinction between public opinion (the ripples on the surface of the sea, the foam and spray, whipped this way and that), attitudes (the deep-running currents) and values (the incredibly powerful tides driving our priorities and politics alike). He noted that values are the hardest to change, “almost beyond any counter-pressure”. Our individual values are set by the age of 25, he argued, but later pointed out that cultural values can be quite plastic over the long term. For example, we don’t do slavery any more – and are uncomfortable with those that still do.

Bob’s session was followed by an experimental sharing of dilemmas between the participants. They were asked to recall when their personal values had to some degree collided with those of their origanisation. At the suggestion of Sheila Bloom, of the Institute of Global Ethics, we broke the participants out into small working groups (see photo), which made it much easier to get everyone to contribute and explore some of the messier, taxing aspects of working life.

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

Hania and grapes (©HE)

Woke up to the news that Tony Blair has the same complaint I have, arrythmia of the heart. Meanwhile flocks of eager starlings have been tearing at the strawberry grapes that grow up the front of our house. Hania took the photo of her reflection in a sink-full of grapes she was turning into some delicious concoction. It really has been an extraordinary October, with real Indian summer weather. Cycling to and from the office today was a complete joy.

Had meetings with people like (Professor) John Stopford and Stephanie Roberts from London Business School on a new project they are planning, with Seb (Beloe) and Maddy (Rooke-Ley) on our planned December Council meeting, and a telephone conference with Etienne Eichenberger of the World Economic Forum (WEF). He and I are working on an ‘Open Space’ component for next year’s Davos summit. This evening, the Pompeii theme continued with a stunning TV film on the eruptions and the impacts on those living there. I could almost feel my flesh vaporising and my brain boiling and exploding out of my skull: too much imagination. And now they’re growing grapes on the slopes of the volcano again.

Saturday, October 18, 2003

Apple sculpture at AstraZeneca’s HQ (©JE)

Lively day at AstraZeneca’s HQ outside Stockholm speaking to a group of 30 or so people responsible for various aspects of corporate responsibility. The countryside ablaze with the yellows, oranges and reds of fall. As ever, I was struck by the way that glacier-scoured rocks break the surface everywhere you look – the sense of the sheer weight of the Ice Ages (Sweden is still rising after the retreat of the glaciers) is extraordinary. But not sure the drivers in their headlit Volvos give the next Ice Age much thought.

On the flight home I finished The Battle that Stopped Rome, the story by Peter S. Wells of the obliteration of three Roman legions – some 20,000 men – by German tribes under the leadership of Arminius. Having seen relics of the battle at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn during a recent visit to DeutschePost (heard yesterday that we got the DP contract), the book was gripping, even if the writing was a bit ragged in parts (also just starting Tom Holland’s narrative history of the Roman Republic, Rubicon, which is fantastically readable).

If Wells is right, the bulk of the slaughter was over inside an hour. The scale of the disaster, which shaped Roman thinking for 400 years, made me think – repeatedly – of the incipient American imperium. The Romans massively underestimated their opponents. The battlefield turns out to have been a pre-prepared killing zone, with a wall built of turf, 15-feet deep and two thousand feet long, to trap the legions. Many of the ‘Germans’, including Arminius himself, had trained with the Roman legions. Shades of the US support for Osama bin-Laden in the war for Afghanistan – and, in the war against Iran, for Saddam Hussein.

One of the most poignant finds was the skeleton of a four-year-old female mule, the Roman equivalent of a Jeep, I suppose, with a bronze bell around her neck. The clapper had been muffled by oat and pea straw torn from the ground – and the straw has been dated by archaeologists to the autumn of AD 9, the year of the battle. It seemed she had tried to jump the wall and broken her neck. A small drama, given the sheer scale of the disaster, but it brought the terror home in a way that statistics often fail to.

Makes me think of the Swedish minister I was told about this time who, responsible for road traffic safety, has the details of every road fatal accident phoned through to him as soon as it happens. An attempt to get to grips with the tragedies behind the the facts, the numbers.

Friday, October 17, 2003

Interesting day in Stockholm at the 10th anniversary conference of NTM, the Network for Transport and Environment (www.ntm.a.se). Most of the participants are immersed in the worlds of logistics, transport and mobility. Excellent bunch of people, some of them determined to expand NTM’s activities into the rest of Europe. Lots of discussion of congestion charges, multi-fuel vehicles, safety research, fuel cells and the like.

Invited to speak by Magnus Schwan, who SustainAbility used to work for when he was at hauliers ASG, verifying ASG’s environmental report. He moved on to Green Cargo – and then recently launched himself as an independent sustainable logistics management consultant. Bulk of conference in Swedish, but extraordinary moment when Magnus did his entire presentation in English in order that (1) I would understand and (2) help promote NTM internationally. Bit sure whether to feel pleased or guilty. Either way, I now feel responsible for helping them get the message out. Among other things, NTM have developed a computer-based interface for handling environmental data for goods/freight transport, NTMCalc.

Fascinating discussion this evening over dinner with Per Carstedt. He owns a Ford dealership in Sweden, where he has been driving a greening initiative (www.GreenZone.nu). His brother, who ran IKEA in Europe, is similarly motivated. Per is also Chairman of the BioAlcohol Fuel Foundation (www.baff.info). Much influenced by Karl-Henrik Robert of the Natural Step Foundation.

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

After the Board meeting 1 (Nick Robinson)

After the Board meeting 2 (Nick Robinson)

The bulk of the day was spent on SustainAbility Board meeting. Maddy (Rooke-Ley) now organises the meetings and does the minutes: those also taking part (and shown in the photo) were Yasmin (Crowther, who heads our consulting practice), Peter (Zollinger, our Executive Director), Geoff (Lye, Director, who chaired the meeting), Seb (Beloe, who heads our think-tank), myself and Tom (Delfgaauw, ex-Shell and our first Non-executive Director). Key issues included the financial outlook, client reviews, a spate of new projects we have won, the future of our Global Reporters program with UNEP, and the imminent prospect of opening a new office in the Asia-Pacific region.

In the evening, Phillip Toyne – who with his wife Molly Harriss-Olson runs an Australian consultancy, EcoFutures (www.ecofutures.com) – brought in Mick Roche of BHP-Billiton, to explain their evolving ‘Green Lead’ initiative (www.greenlead.com). Phillip was formerly Head of the Australian Conservation Foundation and Deputy Secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Environment. Molly, among many other things was a marine campaigner for Greenpeace and then headed Clinton’s President’s Council on Sustainable Development.

Sunday, October 12, 2003

Quinces (©JE)

Glorious, sunny morning. The quinces are falling off the bushes onto the garden path. Key story today is that the Nobel peace prize has gone to Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian who was Iran’s first woman judge before the 1979 Isamic revolution – and was then sacked by the mullahs. In 2000, she ended up in solitary confinement. She is the first Muslim woman to win the prize. One of her key messages is that sharia law could be modernised without undermining Islam. Spent bulk of the day editing the text of website, taking on board comments of folk like Tom Delfgaauw, Tim (Elkington), Julia Hailes, Tell Muenzing, Francesca Muller and Francesca van Dijk.

Saturday, October 11, 2003

Interesting, after the WHOI visit and whalewatching off Cape Cod, to read in today’s International Herald Tribune that researchers have now identified a disease in whales akin to decompression sickness, or the ‘bends’. The suspicion is that the military’s use of powerful sonar systems may have scared the animals into surfacing too fast from deep waters, leading to mass strandings. Another possibility is that the sonar pulses themselves may directly trigger bubble formation in the nitrogen-saturated tissues of the whales.

UNEP meeting turns out rather better than I had expected, given my suspicion about industry federations. They are notoriously conservative, largely because they feel they must protect their slowest-moving members against impending environmental, human rights or sustainability laws, rules or standards. But the interest today came less from the federation people than from the speakers and people from groups like BSR Europe, CSR Europe, GEMI and the Global Peporting Initiative (GRI), particularly Nancy Bennet.

The focus was on voluntary agreements, by which business commits to achieve certain CSR or SD objectives, particularly on the UN Global Compact. (Lord) Richard Holme, representing the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), warned that a PR approach to the Global Compact would be “as superficial as a spray of paint on an old car.” Steve Sawyer of Greenpeace, who I hadn’t seen for around 15 years, accepted that there had been convergence between business and NGOs like his, but stressed the need for a new “global accountability regime”.

Ironic that because I had sent my slides as soon as I was asked, rather than the night before like some people, UNEP mislaid them – so I was halted in mid-flow, slideless, and had to speak off the top of my head. Seemed to work. Later, in response to a question I asked one panel of speakers about the way lawyers are increasingly slowing progress on corporate reporting, particularly in the US, David Vidal of the US Conference Board argued that we should throttle back on targeting CEOs and instead go for lawyers and law schools. Lawyers, he noted, constitute “90% of the drag” on the system.

Useful first meeting with the new head of UNEP’s Trade, Industry & Economics division, Monique Barbut. She’s keen for SustainAbility to push ahead with our ‘Engaging Stakeholders’ program, and together we came up with another area where we could work together. More anon.

Friday, October 10, 2003

Eurostar fish (©JE)

Worked at home in the morning, then caught the Eurostar for Paris. As usual, the fish hanging over the arrivals hall caught my eye. On my way to speak at the 20th UNEP consultative meeting with industry associations, having also been at the event that more or less started all of this, the World Industry Conference on Environmental Management (WICEM), in Versailles during 1984.

Thursday, October 09, 2003

For the second evening running, cycling home through Hyde Park, breathing through my mouth, I swallowed a bluebottle – or something leggy and frantic. Can’t have been that hungry: spat it out.

Hania home from Dublin, where she went to see a friend in a play. Another friend of hers, Peter, calls this evening to say he is leaving The Times to go to the US and work for General Wesley Clark’s campaign. Elaine and I heard Wesley Clark speak in Davos earlier in the year, before the Iraq invasion, and he came across well. A bit of a contrast to Arnie Schwarzenegger, just elected as California’s replacement Governor. Not sure I’d vote for him on the strength of his website, schwarzenegger.com.

Wednesday, October 08, 2003

A day spent developing the book on social enterprise I am planning with Pamela Hartigan, managing director of The Schwab Foundation, thinking through the revamp of SustainAbility’s website with Nick Robinson, corresponding with people who may join our Council and Faculty, working up the panel session I am involved in for UNEP in Paris on Friday, and sketching out speeches for later in the year. Also invited the Core Team to comment on the latest draft of the johnelkington.com website.

On the way home, I was forcefully struck by the beauty of the evening. The darkening blue sky had a few pink-brown slashes of cloud, as though a bear had raked the heavens, stirring underlying sediments. By the time I was cycling through Hyde Park, however, it was already dark, with a continuous stream of lights whizzing up and down Park Pane, and around Hyde Park Corner, glimpsed beneath the canopies of the great trees. Gathering drifts of plane tree leaves crunched under my tyres. The Moon posed brilliantly above an Elizabethan lace collar of pink-beige cloud. Hammersmith Bridge was wonderfully lit, the Thames lying low in its bed. Mars still bright in the southern sky.

I pondered as I pedalled down Madrid Road, why it is that often when my mood lifts powerfully I then see that the Moon is nearly full. Full Moon, according to The Times, is on 10 June. Maybe it’s the horshoe crab in me?

Tuesday, October 07, 2003

Sample of Radar cover, October-November 03

First day back in the office. Great buzz: Jodie (Thorpe) just back from Bangkok, Kavita (Prakash-Mani) from Cuzco. We receive boxes of the printed version of the first edition of our revamped newsletter, Radar, themed around the language of corporate responsibility (CSR) and sustainable development (SD). A decade or so ago, Radar was originally started partly as a way of forcing the team to read, think and write, but the thing developed a life of its own. A fairly wide range of people read it regularly (it came out 10 times a year), and many subscribed. But with so many competing newsletters in the field, we concluded a few months back that the best way forward was to go ‘New Economy’ – concentrating on providing insight rather than news, in a simplified (but attractive) format, and giving it away for free. The first edition looks very good. Free subscriptions are available either from SustainAbility’s website, www.sustainability.com or by e-mailing info@sustainability.com.

Monday, October 06, 2003

Both the New York Times and Sunday Times carry stories today on ‘offshoring’, the process by which millions of jobs are being exported to developing countries like India. The Sunday Times headline, alongside a photograph of a train draped with hundreds of Indians on their way to work, declaims: ‘This is the 8.15 to Bombay. It is carrying Indian commuters, on the way to do YOUR JOB.’

If globalisation is to succeed, this trend is inevitable, but it will be interesting to see what happens if consultancies, think-tanks or even SRI funds start to head down this track. I’m pretty sure that major companies rated by their analysts would feel – at least for a few years – that the ratings merited considerably less attention. This is something SustainAbility will be thinking through in a new project for BT on the ‘geography of jobs’.

Late morning, Elaine, Hania and I head off to Richmond to see a matinee of Calendar Girls. Delightful film and interesting handling of a range of ethical dilemmas, though in the end most were glossed over, like the cherries on the buns that so artfully concealed middle-aged nipples.

Saturday, October 04, 2003

Nudistes (sample of photo by Yann Arthus-Bertrand)

Reader advisory: If you’re squeamish or sensitive, don’t read on. But a weird set of mental connections this morning as I opened The Guardian Weekend magazine. Saw a series of stunning aerial photos of Europe by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. One that caught my eye: a wide expanse of naked bodies – nudists on a beach at Arnaouchot, France. And these were the connections that tumbled one atop another:

1 Mass graves : The connection is almost inevitable these days, for anyone who has seen the graves opened in Iraq, Bosnia or various parts of Europe and the old Soviet Union after WWII. But the connection was even more urgent in my mind since – in a Martha’s Vineyard bookshop a few days back – I had picked up an indescribable book of photos of the executions of women and children by the SS in Baltic States in WWII.

2 Ancient Cypriot slag : A few days before that, we had visited the Museum of Semitic Studies in Cambridge, MA, to see an exhibition on Cyprus, where I was partly raised as a child in the 1950s. A small, somewhat disappointing display, but one thing I commented on was a great shard of iron slag discarded ages ago by early copper smelters on the island. It looked exactly like an opened mass grave: the corpses had that browned, leathery look, intimately nested with people they would probably not have given the time of day in normal life. And mass graves will be found – unless they’ve been ‘tidied up’ – when the Green Line goes down on Cyprus. The Turkish invasion of the northern parts of the island wasn’t quite on the scale established by the SS or Serbs, but there’s a good deal of truth and reconciliation to be done before Turkey or the northern part of Cyprus are allowed into the EU.

3 Barbed wire : Last night I began a book I bought in Cambridge: Barbed Wire: A Political History. In the book, originally published in France, Olivier Razac explores the role of barbed wire, first patented in the US in 1874, in three great disasters: the physical elimination and then the ethnocide of the North American Indians; the unthinkable bloodbath of modern war; and at the center of the totalitarian catastrophe, the concentration camps and the Jewish and Gypsy genocides.

4 Human nature : Like photography, barbed wire’s uses reflect human nature. The same technology that enable Arthus-Bertrand to capture the beauty in everything from the symbols on airport taxiing areas to offshore windfarms, enabled SS soldiers to capture the outrages they performed on innocents – with the resulting photos sometimes found on their own corpses later in the war. Barbed wire could be presented as highly eco-efficient, in that it takes very small amounts of material to do work that would otherwise take huge amounts of stone, concrete or earth-moving, but in the end it’s what we choose to do with an such innovations that really counts.

Links: Yann Arthus-Bertrand-Bertrand, The Earth from the Air – 366 Days, Thames & Hudson, London, 2003; Olivier Razac, Barbed Wire: A Political History, The New Press, New York, 2002.

Thursday, October 02, 2003

Plymouth Rock (©JE)

Left Cape Cod, via Sandwich, then headed north to Plymouth. Here the much-celebrated Rock had a wonderful Union Jack-style shadow falling over it, thanks to the surrounding Union-Jack-style fencing. Not sure whether it was accidental or not. Behind and on a rise stands a powerful monument to the Indians and a memorial tablet recalling the genocide that followed. Later, we drove out to Carver to see the cranberry bogs – and were lucky enough to arrive as migrant workers were harvesting one of the bogs. The red berries floating on the floodwaters looked like something the artist Christo might have done, though – who knows – perhaps he originally got his inspiration from the cranberry harvest?

Link: www.cranberries.org

Cranberries awaiting harvest (©JE)

The harvest begins (©JE)

Wednesday, October 01, 2003

John with horsehoe crab shell (Elaine Elkington)

Glorious day, so we take the ferry across to Marthas Vineyard. Arriving in Woods Hole shortly after 09.00, though, we are sent back 3.7 miles to Falmouth to park, and then shipped back by bus to Woods Hole. What a country! But no doubt it keeps the oil companies happy. Once in Vineyard Haven, and after squabbling about whether we should walk, cycle or rent a car, we took a #13 bus to Edgartown, then found a small, 5-minute ferry across to Chappaquiddick Island.

Picked up at the ferry dock by Dick, a driver from The Trustees of Reservations. A few miles later, we were invited to scale the Eiger-like back end of a Ford F250 open-backed truck with four over-65s, at least two of whom seemed to have had (or to need) hip transplants. We are headed for a guided tour through the Cape Poge Wildlife Refuge, across the infamous Chappaquiddick Dike Bridge, along East Beach which faces the open Atlantic, up to the Cape Poge wooden lighthouse – which has been moved seven times since it was first built, as erosion chased it around the island.

On the way we see a great blue heron, cormorants, a hovering hawk, fishermen taking part in a fishing derby (at least one grim-faced wife sits inside a SUV while her man does what a man has to do, rod in hand), Monarch butterflies, then a small drift of shed horseshoe crab shells, complete with claws and gills. I am fascinated, having bought just a couple of days back Crab Wars (University Press of New England, 2002), by William Sargent, subtitled A Tale of Horseshoe Crabs, Bioterrorism, and Human Health.

More or less undisturbed for 300 million years, horseshoe crabs were found some 25 years ago to have an unsuspected use. Their blood provides the basis for the most reliable test for deadly gram-negative bacteria. To date, apparently, around a million lives have been saved. That’s the good news, as presumably is the fact that the result is a multi-million-dollar industry. But the bad news, at least for horseshoe crabs, is that they are bled to extract Limulus lysate.

The book catalogues the fiercesome politics involved. But Sarah, our guide today, noted that one of the biggest current threats to the future of the horseshoe crab is lobster fishing. The lobster fishermen use horseshoe crabs to bait their pots. Elaine ate lobster tonight.

Finally, Sarah also mentioned that the lighthouse-men had to clamber up and down stairs in the night to keep an eye on their lights in the days when they burned whale oil. This burned fierce and fast. The whaling captains houses are a major feature of Edgartown. In quiet moments, I am reading Moby-Dick for what I think may be the first time, though its one of those books that feels as though its in ones life-blood.

Link: www.thetrustees.org

 

Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Alvin (©JE)

Today Elaine and I stood on the tiny deck of Alvin, the submersible used to find an accidentally dumped H-bomb off Spain in 1966 – and to investigate wrecks like those of the Titanic, Bismarck and Thresher. Extraordinary sensation.

Here’s the background. Ever since the late 1960s, I had wanted to visit the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). I think I first heard of it via (Dr) John Todd, who founded the New Alchemy Institute and whose work on aquaculture, particularly the farming of tilapia, I was hooked by in the early 1970s. I even went off and worked with (Dr) Robin Clarke at his UK equivalent, BRAD (for Biotechnic Research & Development) for a short stint in 1973. But my burgeoning interest in oceanography and aquaculture lost steam by 1974, after timely, kindly advice from several professors in the field that you really needed a PhD to make any real progress.

But as the climate change issue grew in importance, so did my interest in the work of WHOI. Then Elaine and I met WHOI President and Director (Dr) Bob Gagosian at the 2003 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. He arranged for us to be taken around the Woods Hole set-up by (Dr) Dave Gallo, Director of Special Projects. Among the things we talked about was Daves work with (Dr) Robert Ballard, who among many other things discovered the Titanic.

We also got to see some pretty interesting technology. Dave took us around the 274-foot-long support ship Atlantis, on whose deck we saw and scrambled onto Alvin. Then there were the REMUS torpedoes, which were like something Q might have offered James Bond. Since I am just finishing off Robert Harriss novel Pompeii, whose hero is a Roman aqueduct engineer, I was interested to hear that REMUS torpedoes have been used to inspect a 45-mile stretch of the Delaware Aqueduct, which carries some 900 million gallons of water daily, and loses 10-36 million gallons each day.

I was even more interested to learn that REMUS machines have been used in Iraq to detect mines a job otherwise undertaken by US Navy-trained dolphins. The Navy also came up in discussions we had with a whale scientist whose work involves analysing blue whale calls picked up by SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System) and other Navy offshore hydrophones, normally used to detect submarines. One of the whales they have been tracking this way, and for years, is easy to detect, because it sounds different turns out to be an unusual blue/finback hybrid. Another interesting finding: there seem to be more whales in some areas than anyone had expected.

But my key interest today was in WHOIs work on climate change, particularly of the abrupt variety. New data show North Atlantic waters at depths between 1,000 and 4,000 metres becoming dramatically less salty, especially in the past decade. The concern is that large-scale freshening of the North Atlantic could cross a threshold that would disrupt ocean circulation and trigger abrupt climate change.

Links: www.whoi.edu

Sunday, September 28, 2003

Surfer in sea-mist (©JE)

Despite a heavy sea mist, in which we would later watch a lone surfer on the Atlantic shore plunge off into invisibility, we set off this morning for First Encounter Beach. Here the Pilgrims led by Captain Myles Standish first encountered Native Americans. Arrows flew, though apparently no-one was hurt.

Native Americans 0, Pilgrims 0.

But the locals can have had little inkling of what these aliens would mean for their kind: their future had arrived, oddly clothed, differently armed – and differently minded. Similarly, the business community of the late 1960s and early 1970s had little inkling of what their early encounters with weirdly dressed environmentalists might mean for their own future prospects. Too often, over decades, I have heard business people talk of my own ‘kind’ in terms of beads and sandals or “watermelons” (green outside, red inside).

Such stereotypes blind – and disable – us. These days I regularly quote writer William Gibson: The future is already here. It is just not evenly distributed. So who or what – now stands invisibly among us?

Hornets’ nest (©JE)

Found myself sitting on a bench today in Chatham, which was inscribed with a memorial message in honour of Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas, who died in 1997. “Thinking in generational terms,” the bench intoned, “must begin with reverence for this earth.” Tsongas, I recalled, was pro-human rights, pro-civil rights, pro women’s rights and pro-environment, but he was also – unusually for people of such persuasions – pro-business.

The bench stood outside what looked like a mini-temple, but turned out to be home to the town’s public ‘restrooms’. And no sooner did I leave the bench than I discovered a large hornet’s nest quietly humming in a tree a few paces away: either the powers that be had – in the spirit of the inscription – decided to live and let live, or they had missed this extraordinarily beautiful celebration of insect energies and architecture.

Later on in the day, Elaine and I walked along Marconi Beach, part of the Outer Cape’s National Seashore. Ravishingly beautiful. This was where Gugliemo Marconi built the first wireless station on the US mainland in 1901. Two years later, the first US wireless transmission went from here to England, a somewhat banal exchange of good wishes between President Roosevelt and King Edward VII. It took 25,000 volts to send the message.

As we walked along the beach, with what I think were sand pipers scurrying hither and thither and an energetic surf crashing in, we found an enormous number of unidentifiable egg-sacs, a sign of life’s more or less endless bounty. But other shells, symbols of death, turned up too: near where Hania stayed in a dune-top house earlier in the summer, I found a brass cartridge case that had washed ashore, either a heavy machine gun or cannon shell. Later, as we drove back to the Whalewalk Inn, we found some postcards showing an extensively pock-marked ‘Target Ship’ that had been moored and heavily bombarded and strafed in Cape Cod Bay in the 1950s, but that’s the other side of the Cape. So the history of the cartridge, which I intend to take home, remains a mystery.

But it did make me think of two things: first, the German shells that left substantial holes in my father’s legs (see Influences, ‘The True Battle of Britain’); and, second, Elaine’s discovery of a truly beautiful Indian arrow-head when we were walking along a seemingly endless white sand beach near Dune City, Oregon, in 1981. Later, I told Frank Herbert (see ‘Influences’) about this, and he said that (1) such finds were pretty rare and (2) that the beach was the one that in the 1940s gave him the idea of writing his extraordinary sci-fi novel Dune. Not sure what Marconi Beach will inspire me to do next, but walking barefoot in its sand left me feeling very much at peace with the world.

Elaine @ Marconi Beach (©JE)

Saturday, September 27, 2003

Whalewatchers, off Provincetown (©JE)

Our first full day at the Whalewalk Inn, in Eastham, Cape Cod. Drove down from Cambridge via Boston yesterday, having enjoyed several days with Peter Kinder of social investment firm KLD. Peter and I met many years back behind the scenes at a conference in Stockholm, organised by the Mistra Foundation. While we waited to speak, we found ourselves exchanging views on US Civil War generals. We share many things, including military history, music and corporate responsibility. Some time later later, Peter would walk me around two battlefields of the War of Independence, in Concord and Lexington.

While in Cambridge, we also took the opportunity to have breakfast with Bob and Anne Massie. Bob headed CERES, a leading US NGO, during the days when it was incubating the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). I well remember the session in New York when I led the charge to ensure the GRI was based on the triple bottom line concept rather than – as originally planned – just environmental reporting. Later, Bob moved CERES strongly into the corporate governance area, partnering with Innovest to target companies that, like ExxonMobil, place at hazard large sums of shareholder value by turning a blind eye to the risks of climate change.

This morning Elaine and I cycled several miles through woods and between salt-marshes. She wobbled a great deal, having last been on a bike decades ago – but notes that she didn’t fall off! Wonderful, though, to have a chipmunk amble across our reasonably silent path. Later, we drove north to Provincetown, where we took ship in the Humpback Express to watch whales over the Stellwagen Bank. Fascinating talk on the tensions between wildlife and shipping by a young man from the Center for Coastal Studies. Joined the queue afterwards to press money into his hands to support the research and whale rescue work.

A burning blue sky and mirror-calm seas, though the surface was often broken by riffles of bait fish desperately trying to escape predators. Every so often, a giant humpback jaw erupted through the skittering fish, before splashing back. A mother and calf ignored us as they ate their way through the gentle swell. Seeing those extraordinary animals was a powerful reminder of why I became an environmentalist over 30 years ago and of the songs Roger Payne recorded many years ago (see ‘Music’ under Influences).

Links: www.coastalstudies.org; www.ceres.org; www.kld.com; www.whalewalkinn.com

Wellfleet Harbour Actors’ Theater (©JE)