Journal

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

ANIMALS AT WAR

Every day I cycle in to the office, I pass the new David Backhouse ‘Animals at War’ memorial at Brook Gate, Park Lane (http://www.indielondon.co.uk/events/att_animals_warmemorial.html). It struck me more forcefully today after conversations we had yesterday at CFS in Manchester about animal welfare and animal testing. So I dismounted and took a few photos. It is thought that – to take just one species – 8 million horses died in WWI, so the memorial is richly deserved. But few other countries would erect such a thing. And, on the way back from Manchester, I reflected on the legal ban now in force on fox-hunting in this country, which I both support and yet in some odd way also regret. The thought stream was prompted by the sight of a great red dog fox sitting upright in the evening sun, alongside a canal.

HORSE CHESTNUT PLAGUE

Driving Gaia and a guitarist friend across to a concert in Putney earlier this week, she and I both noted that pretty much all the horse chestnut trees on the Common are in dire shape. Gaia said she thought a Macedonian moth was to blame, but promised to check on the Net and send a link. Here are three links she sent today for what turns out to be a real little horror.

http://www.forestry.gov.uk/forestry/INFD-59YJKP
http://www.forestry.gov.uk/fr/INFD-68JJRC
http://www.forestry.gov.uk/fr/INFD-5ZXGXZ

DAYS AFTER TOMORROW

It’s not quite The Day After Tomorrow in New Orleans and its environs, but CNN reports that, “survivors are facing dire conditions — no power, little drinking water, dwindling food supplies, gunfire in the distance — with no way to get out. And the waters are still rising, at times dotted by the bodies of those who perished when the hurricane roared into town Monday morning” (http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/31/katrina/).

SustainAbility has long argued that it would take one or more really major climate-related disasters in the US to begin to shift the Bush regime. Hurricane Katrina probably won’t be enough to swing things, but it will contribute to the steady drip-drip pressure on the climate Neanderthals. One key factor: unlike people in most of the areas hit by the tsunami, Americans tend to be insured. And that means big insurance bills — and major headaches for the reinsurers, who are already among the most vocal champions of more serious action on climate change. That is a central theme of SustainAbility’s latest report, The Changing Landscape of Liability (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/liability.asp), one of the sponsors for which was the international reinsurance giant, Swiss Re.

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

CFS BANISHES FATIGUE

CFS stands for many different things around the world, among them Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Having known several people with this version of CFS, I know it’s no joking matter. But as something of a reptile myself, unable to stir until the sun is in the heavens, I felt more than a little dissociated from reality as I got up at 04.45 this morning to head up to Manchester, courtesy of Virgin Rail, and spend a day with CFS – as in Co-operative Financial Services. It was like a shot of adrenalin. The issues ranged from climate change to the risk of creating a genetic underclass. Part of the discussion focused on the future of reporting. In SustainAbility’s 2004 benchmark survey of corporate reporting, the latest CFS report came top (http://www.cfs.co.uk/servlet/Satellite?cid=1108109697271&pagename=CFSSustain/Page/tplCFSPageStandard&c=Page). But the two sessions I did with different CFS groups also woke me up to the longer term potential of a re-energised co-operative movement, if that could be achieved.

Monday, August 29, 2005

APATHY OUT OF FASHION

An ex-colleague, Nick Robinson, currently with BP, just sent me a link to a website I hadn’t come across, http://www.antiapathy.org/. We have been thinking about the fashion industry recently, largely because of its huge impact on other industries, and Anti-Apathy is active in that area. Anyone interested in this area might want to roll up for the Ethical Fashion Show on October 7-9, in Paris (http://www.ethicalfashionshow.com/index2.htm#).

SKYWHALESONG

Spent most of the long holiday weekend working, but the weather over the last couple of days has been glorious, the sky an extraordinary deep blue, the temptation to dawdle immense, but largely resisted. And the skies have had me thinking of fin whales and – in the wake of a piece I read in The Observer yesterday – about new ideas about life in space, alien life-forms. The fin whales came from today’s Times, which reports that fin whales, humpbacks and something like 2000 dolphins have been pursuing fish which have been pursuing plankton in warm currents reaching much further north than usual through the Irish Sea. Climate change, it seems, maybe also linked with Hurricane Katrina, which today just missed New Orleans.

And the skywhales? These are from a Channel 4 TV series (Alien Worlds) that will apparently begin on 4 October, alongside a new exhibition on the ‘Science of Aliens’ at London’s Science Museum (http:www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/aliens). They are reputed to live on Blue Moon, which has a super-dense atmosphere of oxygen and carbon dioxide. The ‘skywhales’ float through the soupy atmosphere on 10-metre wings, preyed on only by ‘caped stalkers’, eagle-like predators that sound like killer whales on amphetamines.

One of the questions raised by the Science Museum website’s alien section is whether someone out there is listening to us? As I sat down to file this blog, my Mac’s screen was dark, with the SETI at home scan running in the background. This uses down time on the computer to process signals received from deep space (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/). I haven’t seen any signs of intelligent life as yet, but having always loved whalesong (particularly as recorded many years ago by Roger Payne), I would quite like to hear skywhalesong.

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

WORLDPROCESSOR

With flood tides of data and information sluicing around the world, there is growing interest in visualisation techniques. That’s one reason why I have been experimenting with the notion of the ‘Value Palette’ (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article.asp?id=322). And was fascinated to see a feature in the August issue of Wired on the work of New York artists Ingo Gunther. He and Worldprocessor (http://www.worldprocessor.com) plot data from newspapers and NGOs onto 12-inch plastic globes. Although the statistics are forever morphing, the impact of some of these globes is extraordinary.

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

CHINA SYNDROMES

The first in the series of columns Mark Lee and I will be doing for Grist magazine went live today at http://www.grist.org/biz/fd/2005/08/23/china/

COMING DOWN FROM SOLVENTS

Hania in repainted kitchen

Finally able to blog again, after further problems with hosting agency. Having taken a couple of weeks ‘off’ at home to concentrate on a range of writing projects, particularly the social enterprise book, I have found myself working as hard as ever on a range of SustainAbility and related projects. But, still, the writing projects have gradually been cranking through, and that in spite of the fact that I have been breathing a very heady, solvent-rich atmosphere for the past week. We have had our kitchen repainted, after twelve years, and there still seem to be limits to what you can achieve with water-based paints. But that’s something to look into again if and when a possible consumer-focused project we are discussing materialises.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

PEOPLE TREE

Dinner last night with Safia Minney of fair trade fashion company People Tree (http://www.ptree.co.uk or http://www.ptree.co.jp), based in London and Tokyo, and her husband James and Elaine. Had met Safia some time back, via the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, and had interviewed her for SustainAbility’s Radar (http://www.sustainability.com/network/global-influencer.asp?id=258). Emerged re-enthused about SustainAbility’s long-standing idea of tackling the fashion sector as a ‘gatekeeper’ industry that sets the specifications (and, often, horrendous deadlines and pricing levels) that drive so many other industries, among them those producing fibres, textiles and a range of chemical products – including the pesticides used to protect crops like cotton and the dyes that may delight the eye but too often pollute the rivers of major producer countries like India.

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

GRISTWARD HO!

Three painters – one on his way shortly to Iraq as a member of the Territorial Army – are repainting our kitchen after 12 years. But the smell of solvents from the gloss areas has me wondering whether my enthusiasm for various projects during the day has had more to do with what I’ve been inhaling than with what I’ve been hearing. That said, one of the bits of goods news today came as a result of a teleconference Mark Lee and I had today with an editor of Grist (http://www.grist.org), the US electronic magazine. Unusually, they apply humo(u)r to the environmental challenge. Mark and I will be starting a new monthly column for Grist in the autumn.

Sunday, August 14, 2005

BARNES WETLANDS

Overblown dragonfly

Spend a quiet afternoon walking around the Barnes Wetland Centre with cousin Simon Mills and his family. Apart from a few edge-of-vision frogs and the usual birds, real wildfowl are relatively scarce, but the transformation wrought on these once-vast reservoirs is an extraordinary example of what can be done with imagination and determination. Every time I walk past the wonderful sculpture of Sir Peter Scott at the entrance, who drove the whole process, I can’t help but recall the times he helped me – particularly, when as a Trustee of The Winston Churchill Trust, he helped sway the panel towards awarding me a 1981 Fellowship, which I took in the US. And the visits I did during that period represented a big step towards my first Pelican, Sun Traps.

Friday, August 12, 2005

WIRELESS, AT LAST

Working at home this week on a bunch of writing tasks and future presentations, with a trip down to Oxford on Monday with Elaine for a session on SustainAbility’s future format. Today, a couple of IT engineers – one PC, one Apple – came to sort out longstanding issues with my home IT system, which is built around an Apple G4 desktop, one of the most exquisite bits of technology I have ever used. Turns out that the Hermstedt NetShuttle box I had bought some time ago was dysfunctional from the outset, whereas I had thought it was just my incompetence.

While I am constantly confounded by how far computers have come since I began using them in the late 1970s, from the perspective of 2010 it seems unbelievable that we still need engineers to sort out dysfunctional boxes, VPN connections and the like. Hopefully, tomorrow’s computers will be able to sort themselves out, with a dollop of artificial intelligence. In fact, only this morning, I was browsing through a book by John Edwards, The Geeks of War (Amacom, 2005) while waiting for the e-surgery to finish upstairs. If the military can have things like self-healing databases, which Edwards discusses, why oh why can’t we? The answer, of course, is that their budgets help develop such things, then they cascade through what’s left of the world at large.

Monday, August 08, 2005

SOLAR HOME

Drove to Oxford with Elaine, for session with Geoff (Lye) and Sophia (Tickell). Once again hugely impressed by Geoff’s solar home – which continuously informs you on how much electricity the house is using, how much is being captured by the solar panels, and how much is being bought from (or sold to) the national grid. The repayments from the power company may be somewhat token to date, but you catch a whiff of the future.

Geoff shows Elaine what’s watts

Sunday, August 07, 2005

TANGLEY

Caterpillar hedge

Peter, Eleo, me, Elaine

Elaine, Gaia and I drove down to Tangley, beyond Andover, to have lunch with age-old friends, Eleo Gordon and Peter Carson. Elaine and I had arrived to stay for two weeks with Eleo in her tiny Pimlico flat in the early 1970s, when I was at UCL, and ended up staying 18 months. Wonderful – if somewhat fitful – weather. Countryside looked idyllic, though the drive to and fro along the M3 was enough to persuade us that we are fundamentally urban creatures.

Driving in motorway lava streams drains me, whereas cycling to and from work recharges me. Got my bike back from the repair shop yesterday: one set of gears had collapsed, so they have put in new, stainless steel cables. The charge was very reasonable, given today’s labour costs, but it struck me that for not much more than three times the repair cost I could have bought some sort of new bike, made in Korea or China. But the huge amount I spent on the bike (a Dawes) over 15 years ago has repaid itself many times over, not least in standing up to a couple of major spills.

LEAVING SOCIAL FOOTPRINTS

Heard again yesterday from Mark McElroy, who is joining a team of researchers at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands for a three year project as Visiting Researcher. The ultimate ambition is to evolve a systematic methodology for computing ‘blended’ TBL (triple bottom line) scores for companies and others. Further details of his social footprint work from:
http://www.sustainableinnovation.org/the-social-footprint.html

Saturday, August 06, 2005

THE VALUE PALETTE

One of the things I have been working on in recent weeks has been what I dub ‘The Value Palette’. As I have become more impatient with some of the reductionist ways of using triple bottom line (TBL) thinking, which we have been so instrumental in developing and spreading, my brain has been heading off in two related directions: the first towards greater integration across the TBL agenda of economic, social and environmental value added/destroyed, which pushes me in the direction of ‘Blended Value’ (www.blendedvalue.org); and the second is towards a much finer grain focus on the different forms of value that entrepreneurs, companies and investors will increasingly have to understand and blend.

And that’s where the Value Palette potentially comes in. It started of as a thought experiment which began to evolve in my mind as I was toying with an invited paper for the California Management Review – which I’m finishing off this weekend. It took a big jump forward when I bought and read John Gage’s Colour and Culture (Thames & Hudson, 1993/2001) while in Paris recently. And now it features in the latest issue of SustainAbility’s Radar (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article.asp?id=322).

Saturday, July 30, 2005

AWAY DAYS

Jodie Thorpe and Brompton cycle

Much of the week has been taken up with a process of strategic reflection with the entire SustainAbility team. We started with all members of the team bringing something that spoke to them of the future: among them, Seb (Beloe) brought his Brompton cycle, Geoff (Lye) a picture of his new granddaughter, Jodie (Thorpe) a piece of string (she spoke of the need to manage the tension, ensuring there wasn’t so much that it snapped yet making sure there was enough so that we could play good tunes) and Kavita (Prakash-Mani) a snow leopard (shown in the picture), which she linked to a whole mass of themes, from the fact that it was an endangered species to the fact that it was ‘Made in China’.

I took the Vertical Speed Indicator from my father’s shot-down Hurricane (see 25 June entry), arguing the need to recall the security side of our agenda – and the growing need for tools that tell us where we are in terms of the climb towards sustainability.

One of my other inputs was a survey of our Council, Faculty and a small sample of clients and partners, which provided a hugely helpful mapping of the trends, risks and opportunities for us through to 2010. We are now planning to evolve the survey into a twice-a-year fixture, with the results posted and debated on the SustainAbility website.

Thursday, July 28, 2005

BELU

Old (glass) bottle

Jeff Erikson (who runs SustainAbility’s Washington, DC office) and I boarded a river boat at Butler Wharf this evening and sailed east down the Thames, celebrating the launch of a new bio-bottle for Belu, the ethical bottled spring water. Aboard: folk like Anita Roddick of The Body Shop and John Bird of The Big Issue. Caught up with a fair few people from the social enterprise world.

Belu’s new bottle is made from a polymer, polylactic acid (PLA), produced by NatureWorks (http://www.natureworksllc.com/corporate/nw_pack_home.asp), originally a joint venture between Dow Chemical and Cargill. SustainAbility did a stakeholder engagement process for them some time back, identifying only one major issue with PLA in the EU market: it is produced by fermenting corn – and corn in the US in now generally genetically modified. Against this, the profits from Belu’s products are invested in clean water projects in the developing world. And Belu say they are thinking of an ‘offset’ policy, ensuring an equivalent acreage of non-GM corn is grown.

Then Jeff and I walked back across Tower Bridge to catch the Tube west. The river looked beautiful, as did the Gherkin, poking up behind the Tower of London.

Looking west, towards HMS Belfast

CODE TALKERS, PREGNANT AEROPLANES

If anyone wanted an example of the value of diversity – human diversity – they would be hard placed to find a better illustration than the amazing successes of the Native American ‘code talkers’ used by American forces in WWI and WWII. Have long been fascinated by the story, which was brought back to mind by today’s obituary in The Times for Charles Chibitty, a Comanche code talker who served in Europe from the landings on Utah Beach through the liberation of at least one concentration camp (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1710775,00.html).

The code talkers used a language in radio transmissions which the Germans had no way of cracking. The bitter irony was that the US Government had for years tried to drive the Comanche tongue into extinction. Chibitty, too, was punished at school if he ever tried to speak his native language. One of the things I found most fascinating about the code talkers was the way they worked around the fact that their vocabulary had few words for modern warfare: they made terms up. When they wanted to refer to a machine-gun, for example, they spoke of a “sewing machine”. A tank became a “turtle” and a bomber a “pregant aeroplane”. Adolf Hitler was known as posah tai vo, Comanche for “crazy white man”.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

MAREK MAYER

Enormously saddened to hear yesterday of the death of Marek Mayer, one of the foremost environmental journalists of his generation. Richard Macrory’s obituary appears in today’s Independent. Richard quotes me to the effect that when I first recruited Marek to Environmental Data Services (ENDS: http://www.ends.co.uk) he failed to produce much copy at all for the first six months – but then went critical, like a nuclear reactor, and thereafter poured forth a steady stream of very high quality, highly critical and profoundly influential coverage of the issues of the day.

As with Carol Crashaw, whose memorial service Elaine and I went to on Friday, there was an odd cross-connect here between Elaine’s world and mine. She knew Sue Gee (later Marek’s wife) via Wildwood House, the alternative publisher she worked with in Covent Garden in the early 1970s. (TEST, where I then worked, was on the top floor of the same building.) And it was through Sue that we heard of Marek when ENDS was looking for new talent. He took over from me as Editor of the ENDS Report in 1981, three years after we (David Layton, Max Nicholson and I) started the company, while I became Managing Director.

A key enabler was the Churchill Fellowship (http://www.wcmt.org.uk/) I received in 1981, which enabled me to travel to the US – and meant that Marek and Georgina McAughtry (the first ENDS team member, later a Director) had to take over in my absence. I left the company in 1983 to start the progression of activities that would lead to the founding of SustainAbility in 1987. And have felt profoundly grateful ever since to both Marek and Georgina not only for taking ENDS off my shoulders but also turning it into such a thundering success over the years.

Sunday, July 24, 2005

ADDER

As Elaine and I walked through the Swiss mountains last week, I would often take a look at the dung heaps and other decomposing mounds of agricultural waste in hope of seeing breeding snakes. No such luck. Then when we arrived in Little Rissington to see my parents a couple of days back, it was to hear that they had just found a large (for the species) adder in one of their compost heaps.

Can’t recall them being found so close in to the village before. But I do remember one very hot summer’s day maybe four decades ago when several of us walked up over the hill towards the RAF camp. There was a large field with a Cotswold stone barn along the way, which often sported a sign warning passers-by of adders. People tended to think it was a (largely unsuccessful) ruse to keep teenagers out of the barn. Then that afternoon, as we walked through the long grass, we saw adders and grass snakes curled up in pretty much every available nook in the hedgerow, sunning themselves, many intertwined with other snakes.

Saturday, July 23, 2005

CAROL CRAWSHAW

Elaine, Gaia and I drove up beyond Lancaster yesterday to the memorial service for Carol Crawshaw, who died while we were on holiday. Born the same year as I, 1949, she was an American who decided to make her life in the UK. I first met her when we both did an M. Phil. at UCL, 1972-74, but in one of those coincidences that so often seems to happen, Elaine already knew her husband, Robert, because they worked together at Oxford University Press (OUP).

One upshot of our meeting Carol was that Elaine and I moved into a small room she had been occupying with Eleo Gordon (later a Director of Penguin); we came to impose on Eleo’s hospitality for two weeks and stayed – in a bedroom the size of a broom cupboard and a flat which wasn’t much bigger – for 18 months.

Denied the chance to work in the Department of the Environment because of her nationality, Carol became a leading light in English tourism. Ferociously intelligent, quite competitive (American sense of ‘quite’) and hugely effective, she was someone I liked tremendously and respected hugely. Robert did perhaps the most extraordinary tribute I have ever heard, although Blair’s tribute to Princess Diana also comes to mind. Carol will be sorely missed.

The traffic we encountered on the way up and the way back, to Little Rissington where we stayed the night with my parents, reminded us of why we so rarely use our car.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

LONDON FROM THE GHERKIN

Geoff Lye and I spend part of the day with Swiss Re atop the ‘Erotic Gherkin’, with mind-bending panoramas during lunch across London. Overcast, so hard to take photos that do justice to spectacle. While waiting for our meeting, I had bumped into Sara Fox again: she ran the construction project. It’s amazing how visible the building is: I caught sight of its top floating above the trees as I cycled across Hyde Park this morning. Taken to and fro in a silver Mercedes: just as well, as someone has been detonating – or mis-detonating devices – in the Tube and on at least one bus again.

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

DAY TO REMEMBER

Finished a 5,500 word chapter for a Canadian book on Tube, a chapter I’m doing with Jodie (Thorpe) and Seb (Beloe). (Strangely, she also has contracts today for authors’ signature on two other chapters we have written for other books.) With the Piccadilly Line still out, am using the District Line when I can’t cycle. While the trip takes much longer, one gets to walk – from Temple – through bits of London which one doesn’t normally see. Wonderful.

Start with a session with the team on the latest issue of SustainAbility’s bi-monthly newsletter, Radar, following which I write a letter to the British Airways complaints department. Then off to Canary Wharf and ECGD, for the first meeting in my new role as Chairman of the ECGD Advisory Council. Main subject: corruption.

Then home, where I find a growing number of replies from our Council, Faculty and clients to an e-mail survey I sent out this morning, in preparation for SustainAbility’s away days next week. The two questions I asked were: What are the biggest risks for SustainAbility in the period through to 2010? And the biggest opportunities?

There was also an invitation to the 2006 World Economic Forum event in Davos. But the highlight of the evening came when I spotted that the third and final programme in the To the Ends of the Earth trilogy was showing on BBC2. Hadn’t seen the previous two, because we were in Switzerland. Benedict Cumberbatch, who played the lead role, is someone we know through a friend of the girls. I was totally blown away by his performance – and by the quality of the programme. A rising star.

Sunday, July 17, 2005

FOR BA, READ BALLSUP AIRLINES

Finally home, despite the best efforts of British Airways. How sad to see a great airline unravelling, as we now unquestionably are with BA. After decades of favouring BA, my experience of the last 12 months suggests an accelerating, spectacular spiral of decline in levels of service and quality in the UK’s national carrier. Nor is it just me: we heard the same message today from people from countries as far apart as Canada, the USA, Thailand and India.

Among recent symptoms, BA lost my bags on a flight to Melbourne, Australia. Nor was I traveling zoo class, as one Australian friend puts it: these days BA is just as ready to abuse you in Business Class. Yes Cathay Pacific mislaid the same bags a week or so later in Hong Kong, but they had a real excuse: they had to connect flights from Tokyo and to Beijing in the midst of a tropical rainstorm that had knocked Hong Kong’s airport for six.

Then, a week or so ago, BA added insult to injury by losing both our bags on the flight from Heathrow to Zurich. Now, adding insult to insult, they cancelled our flight from Zurich to Heathrow, and we were told we couldn’t be home for a further 24 hours, and would have to go via Paris.

And – at the risk of sounding like a Grumpy Old Man – as if that wasn’t enough to complain about, the customer service by BA at Zurich was scandalous. They didn’t announce they had problems with BA 717: instead, you had to pick it up from the screens. More or less at the head of the queue, we hoped to get a place on the other BA flight, 715, which (it hardly merits mentioning) was delayed by three hours, but like pretty much everyone else found this wasn’t possible.

No-one from BA turned up at any point to explain to the 50 or so people at the Transfers desk, who stood in line for many hours as they slowly processed a passenger every 30-40 minutes. Again there were no announcements or explanations. BA were very lucky not to have had a riot on their hands – and I wish their customer service people could have heard the ire among would-be passengers, some of whom would have been satisfied with just basic civility.

On current evidence, BA is developing something of a death wish. It seems hard to imagine, but I can now begin to see BA following Swiss Air into the vortex which ends in bankruptcy and forced rebranding. Any airline that takes the Union Jack as its emblem really ought to try harder. BA is in danger of becoming a national disservice.

Friday, July 15, 2005

IN PASSING

Two images shot in passing, as we walked today, the first truly sunny day of the holiday.

A Six-spot Burnet, says Sir Geoffrey Chandler

Thursday, July 14, 2005

AUSTRALASIA 2006

Elaine and I had a great breakfast session this morning in Vals with Murray and Dobrina Edmonds, who for many years now have helped us organise our missions to Australia and New Zealand – and, increasingly, Asia proper. We are already discussing the 2006 round, which will likely coincide with the international launch of SustainAbility’s latest Global Reporters benchmarking project.

Dobrina, me, Murray

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

ON FUTURE GENERATIONS

If sustainable development is about anything, it is about protecting the opportunities available to future generations. So the following sequence from James Meeks’ extraordinary book The People’s Act of Love struck a chord yesterday:

‘Who are you really?’ said Alyosha.

‘Destruction.’

‘Destruction of what?’

‘Of everyone that stands in the way of the happiness of the people who will be born after I’m dead.’

And this from a character who merits a place in The Silence of the Lambs. Then we walked up into the mountains today and simply looking at flowers like the pair shown below, from the Sempervivum (everliving) family, put it all in perspective. And the milk churns? Well they reminded me of the eternal cycles of life and death growing up on farms in Northern IIreland in the 1950s.

Monday, July 11, 2005

CHEZ ST JOHANNES BAPTISTA

A time of stone and water. The new thermal baths at the Hotel Therme, Vals, which we are using at least once a day, are constructed in the most beautiful stone. Perhaps not incidentally, across the valley there are several quarries where they periodically blast stone from the mountains. On our first day, as we walked along the valley’s opposite flank, there was a big rolling bang that could have been thunder or a Swiss airforce jet breaking the sound barrier, but then a plume of dusty smoke rose from the flank of a nearby hill.

This morning Elaine and I walked up the mountain behind the hotel to a small chapel dedicated to St Johannes Baptista. Last time we came across his trail was in Damascus, where his reputed head is reputed to lie in a small chapel inside the unbelievably beautiful Ummayad Mosque. The little chapel here, though, is every bit as dramatic, with spectacular views across the valley to a tumbling waterfall – albeit in peripheral vision you can’t help spotting the large factory in which the local water is bottled under the ‘Valser’ label.

Elaine and chapel

Therme 1

Therme 2

Therme 3

Chapel and waterfall

TERROR IN A TUBE

Some thoughts stimulated by the 7 July London Transport attacks follow. They will be edited when I get back to London.

Now terror comes in a Tube. And terrible though the events of 7 July were, and not for a moment wanting to discount the long-term effects on the physical and mental health of survivors and of the families and friends of the victims, it has to be said: whatever the ultimate death toll, London got off relatively lightly this time. There will be other attempts on mass transit systems like London’s Underground. Some will succeed, on a much greater scale.

So-called ‘asymmetry’ in the distribution of political and military power more or less guarantees further growth in terrorism-related activities. In parallel, the war in Iraq, right or wrong, is proving to be a highly fertile breeding ground for future generations of terrorists – or freedom fighters, if you prefer. As a child exposed to the internecine hatreds and tensions of places like Northern Ireland, Cyprus and Israel, I was forced to recognise early that the sort of hatreds currently being stirred have been around for generations – and will continue to cascade through the generations.

Meanwhile, modern terrorism increasingly finds itself in a ‘target-rich’ environment. Consider these simple facts: Demographic trends are driving huge numbers of people into the world’s burgeoning mega-cities. There they are best served by mass transit systems. At the same time, the weapons of terror are getting ever-more powerful and portable. Some people are perfectly happy dying alongside their victims. And even where they are not, there are plans to install cell phone systems in subways, systems of the sort that helped trigger the Madrid bombs.

There are many implications of all of this, not least because – in contrast to London’s Blitz and V-weapon ordeals of the 1940s – it is much less clear these days where the bombs are coming from. Who now do we blame? Who do we begin to mistrust? And who do we expect to provide solutions? I expect increasingly high-energy links between already volatile areas like security, identity and human and civil rights.

Are there links to sustainable development? Yes, indeed too many to list. But here are a few. Democracy, in its various forms, depends on at least a degree of trust among the peoples living alongside one another – and our definitions of ‘alongside’ are being continuously stretched by entities like the EU, by overseas travel and by the Internet. Capitalism, in its various forms, depends on ‘low friction’ access, mobility and transport systems, implying a minimum of traditional security intrusions. And our capacity to think long term, always in precariously short supply, is little helped by concerns that we may not survive the journey to work.

Several of the e-mails I received in the aftermath of the bombings expressed total surprise about what has just happened. That fact itself should surprise us. Let’s be clear: this was inevitable. The twenty-first century will see more such attacks. Their sophistication and scale will grow. So will the casualty lists. ‘Big Brother’ solutions will be proposed and, I fear, citizens will often accept constraints on their civil liberties that would once have seemed unimaginable.

Few skills are as critical in ensuring a sustainable future as the art of foresight. We cannot afford to be taken totally by surprise in terms of mass transit security, but many people will be. Even less can we risk being surprised by the enormously greater scale of the environmental, social, economic and political shockwaves that will follow the sorts of climate change now thought inevitable in the coming decades. But, again, many of us will be.

No doubt the Bush administration’s skeptics will express great ‘surprise’ when climate change really gets its claws in. So let’s spell it out. The evidence suggests that we are our immediate descendants will live in an increasingly unstable natural environment. Unstable natural environments mean unstable economies. Unstable economies mean unstable societies. Unstable societies create perfect breeding grounds for future rounds of insurgency and counter-insurgency. And – this is where the cycle becomes particularly vicious – such conditions make it increasingly unlikely that effective strategies will be developed for ensuring stable environments.

We owe it to the victims of New York, Madrid, Baghdad, London and a growing list of cities, towns and villages to ensure that we consciously and effectively work to break this vicious cycle – rather than using their deaths as an excuse to accelerate it.

Sunday, July 10, 2005

FROGS

We walk slowly, thoughtfully this afternoon in the drizzle and rain, along the river bank. The mountains wear swirling boas of cloud, the peaks winking in and out of view. We pass an algally challenged pond around which there are signs suggesting the presence of salamanders and the like. The thing looks rather like an aquatic version of the abandoned mini-golf course a little further along the same bank, but the grass around the pond and nearby marshy ground is alive with froglets. Restorative.

Saturday, July 09, 2005

HAY SOUP

Zerfreilahorn 1
Zerfreilahorn 2

Dam

Reservoir turns corner

Wildflowers

Apparently carvivorous caterpillar pretending to be a curled-up leaf

The death toll in London continues to mount: 49 last time I looked. And it’s getting closer: one e-mail today mentioned someone in an organisation we know who was in the King’s Cross area and has now been missing for three days. But, though it’s terrible to say, it could have been infinitely worse. The investigators are now saying that the bombs may have been the work of local terrorists, because they weren’t particularly sophisticated. At some point, someone is going to have a sophisticated go.

With e-mails continuing to come in from places like Wales, California, Nepal, China and Japan, from people wondering how we are, we feel an umbilical connection to the news events, but are also trying to unhook to some degree.

So a day of swimming and walking around the man-made lake above Vals. Wonderful flowers and wildlife, including a vole which briefly communed with Elaine. Am also reading – and hugely enjoying – a new book by James Meek, The People’s Act of Love. Published by Canongate, where Gaia’s great friend Francis Bickmore works. She was completely taken over by it. Francis, who is credited in The People’s Act, was the man who found the original submission for The Life of Pi in Canongate’s ‘slush pile’.

This evening, Elaine was so tired that she hovered between consciousness and sleep throughout dinner, despite the fact that we were served such things as Vallser Hay Soup and Olive Oil Ice Cream. The hay, which is being gathered into the small barns here between the rainstorms, smells heavenly. Wouldn’t easily have thought of making it into soup, but it worked wonderfully well.

Friday, July 08, 2005

SWIMMING IN THE RAIN

Elaine walking down to river

Front elevation

Not quite Gene Kelly, but last night – at the end of a day in which mobile phone calls and e-mails poured in literally from around the world asking how we (family and SustainAbility team) were – Elaine and I went swimming in the thermal pools here in Vals. Swimming in the rain. There are many pools to choose from – indoor and outdoor pools, Fire Pool, Ice Pool, Flower Pool, Flower Pool and so on. This was around 23.00, in the outdoor pool, with the raindrops kicking up reverse images of themselves in the luminous water. The pool was illuminated from underneath, which made the swirls kicked up by one’s feet look like boiling liquid crystal.

The waitress earlier this evening, from East Germany, near Dresden, asked whether we were from London? Told that we were, she expressed her sympathy. After what the RAF and USAF did to Dresden during the latter stages of WWII, this struck me as particularly big-hearted. Perhaps coincidentally, just down the slope from the hotel and on the way to the river, we pass a Trabant on our walks, a squat reminder of the very different world that intervened between 1945 and 1989.

 

Thursday, July 07, 2005

7/7

The first we knew of the London bombings – Elaine and I have just arrived in Vals, Switzerland – was when Gaia called to say she and Hania were OK. Extraordinarily touching how many e-mails I have had today from different parts of the world to check whether we and the team were still among the living. Answer, on all counts so far as I can determine, is yes.

Even though as I write the death count stands at 33, I can only say it’s a relief that it isn’t way higher. I have been expecting an attack on the Tube for years, indeed have often warned of the danger. But what to do? Even now we know of the risk, what are those responsible for running the Underground to do? In the end, we are going to have trade off freedom of movement against the risks of terrorist attacks. But it does make me think that (post Madrid) Elaine’s constant concerns about ever allowing cell phones to be used on the Tube are well placed.

Interesting to ponder the 21st century prospect. As more and more people live in mega-cities, which are best served by public transport, particularly mass transit systems like the Tube, the risks of terrorist mass murders grows almost exponentially. Can’t help but think that the Tokyo sarin attacks, the Madrid bombings and now 7/7 are just the stuttering beginnings of a long-running saga.

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

GAYLORD NELSON

Wildlife, of sorts, abounds even in London: last night, for example, I was woken by the screaming of foxes and this morning I awoke to the shrieks of the parakeets that are taking over the skies here. Even the vile lamprey has taken up lodgings a few blocks from here in the Thames, which is a sign of a clean river, apparently.

Someone who did a great deal to drive forward the conservation and environmental agenda, Gaylord Nelson, is obituarised in today’s Times. He was 89. I first heard of him many years ago via Denis Hayes, who I saw again a few weeks back in Seattle. They had worked together on the first Earth Day in 1970. “The reason Earth Day worked,” Nelson is quoted as saying, “is that it organised itself.”

Well, up to a point. The organisation may have been catalytic rather than command-and-control, but it worked wonders. I still recall the extraordinary enthusiasm of the young team in Palo Alto who helped Denis organise the 1990 Earth Day, which went truly international for the first time – and for which I served on the international board. Sad, though, that Nelson died in the wake of yet another series of Republican roll-back of so many of the environmental advances he and his colleagues had achieved.

Monday, July 04, 2005

FREEPLAY RINGS NASDAQ’S BELL

Among other things, am continuing to work on the book on social entrepreneurs with Pamela Hartigan of the Schwab Foundation (www.schwabfound.org). Interesting to see that on 28 June, in New York, Kristine Pearson, executive director of the Freeplay Foundation (www.freeplayfoundation.org) and a Schwab Foundation social entrepreneur, participated in the ringing of the opening bell at the NASDAQ Stock Exchange in Times Square, along with a group of ten Tech Museum Award laureates. Meredith Taylor, president of the Tech Museum, singled out the Freeplay Foundation’s work in Africa with orphans to illustrate the importance of technology benefiting humanity. The picture is of Kristine on the giant NASDAQ plasma sign. The Foundation is linked to Freeplay, run by Rory Stear, another Schwab Foundation social entrepreneur.

Sunday, July 03, 2005

8 MEN IN A ROOM

Spent several hours writing articles for Nikkei Ecology and Grist, but for most of the day I watched the London Live 8 concert agog. To my mind, the Sixties bands pretty much blew every one else off the stage: The Who, the reformed Pink Floyd, McCartney and U2. And Sting, with his “We’ll Be Watching You,” with the G8 leaders in the background. But maybe that’s just age. I was also impressed by Madonna, Joss Stone, Annie Lennox and – though I don’t like their music – Velvet Revolver. Now we shall see what effect all of this has on the “eight men in a room” next week. But hats off to Geldof: what an extraordinary achievement.

Saturday, July 02, 2005

CYCLING AROUND LIVE 8

Cycling home last night, through fitful drizzle, I joined a number of cyclists cycling around the edges of the Live 8 concert area of Hyde Park. Would have been up in Edinburgh this weekend for SustainAbility’s G8 event, but we had a board meeting today. Sophia (Tickell), one of our non-executive directors, was wearing the white band. If any readers haven’t yet signed up for the Live 8 campaign, it’s easy to do at http://www.live8live.com/whatsitabout/index.shtml.

When I got home, Gaia and Hania had cooked a dinner in celebration of my recent birthday, and among their presents were two CDs by Madeleine Peyroux. Careless Love, in particular, is extraordinary.

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

NORMAL SERVICE …

Apologies. The host company for this website has managed to lose 40-50 of the photographs over the past week or so. We are doing our best to get back to the status quo ante – and to ensure, as far as possible, that this sort of meltdown doesn’t happen again. These days I use the website a fair amount to track down dates and contacts, so it has been a bit like – though I really shouldn’t say this – early onset Alzheimer’s.

DRENCHED

Cycle to and from the office today for the first time in ages, because of air travel and other constraints. Amazing sense of recharge. My eyes, though, come up in some form of allergic reaction to pollen or somesuch. Day of stakeholder interviews with Unilever, plus work on blended value paper for California Management Review. Then home, with the heavens opening as I cross Hammersmith Bridge. Even though I periodically take shelter under trees, I arrive home soaked. But, again, with lighting flashing the sky, it’s all quite invigorating.

Saturday, June 25, 2005

VERTICAL SPEED INDICATOR

Age-eaten vertical speed indicator atop pristine book cover

Jude the Obscure: dangerous rose

First, across to lunch with David Grayson in Kennington. Typically, I forget the address and instructions on how to get there, and am only saved by the fact that David comes out to greet another guest and spots us passing. Then Elaine and I drive down to the Cotswolds to stay with my parents at Hill House.

During the stay my father, Tim, gives me the vertical speed indicator recovered by archaeologists from the Hurricane in which he was shot down in 1940. It’s amazing how Meccano-like the workings are behind the dial. The tin or aluminium face is eaten away by either water or by the fire that engulfed the machine 65 years ago. Some sense of where the instrument came from can be got from the following image (http://www.historicaircraftcollection.ltd.uk/images/hurricane_02.jpg), where it is found on the top right of the four dials around the aircraft’s control column.

While walking around the Hill House garden, I am taken – once again – by the scent of one rose, Jude the Obscure. One of the flowers later turns up on the kitchen table. The rose also turns out to be the one that savaged Tim a while back, when he fell into it. His arms still show the bloody scratches. They’re all out to get him. If it isn’t the Luftwaffe, it’s flowers.

Thursday, June 23, 2005

TIM O’RIORDAN

Spend my fifty-sixth birthday in Norwich, at the University of East Anglia, at a conference on governance and sustainability. The event, at ZICER (Zuckerman Institute of Connective Environment Research, www.uea.ac.uk/zicer/) is in honour of the impending retirement of a long-time colleague and friend (and a member of SustainAbility’s Faculty), Professor Tim O’Riordan (http://www.uea.ac.uk/env/cserge/people/tim_o).

Stunning evening and dinner at the Cathedral, or at least in the newly built refectory alongside. One of the most successful examples I have seen of the integration of deeply historic architecture and sympathetic modern building. Tim plays double bass in a small orchestra playing Mozart and Elgar. Spend much of the evening talking with Jonathon Porritt and Angela Wilkinson (of Shell) about prospects for next 15-20 years, arguing that we are likely to see at least one discontinuity on the scale of 1929.

Tim on double bass

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

SLOWLY LEADING THE WORLD?

Bevy of meetings, including an unexpectedly fascinating one with Stephen Jordan of the American Chamber of Commerce (http://www.uschamber.com/ccc) Corporate Citizenship Center and another with Unilever as part of a stakeholder process SustainAbility is doing for them. In between times, I drafted an article on the energy prospect for Chevron, which Jeff Erikson in our DC office had asked me to do last night.

Then on to the Sustainable Development Commission’s ‘Leading the World?’ pre-G8 summit event. Jonathan Dimleby chaired, Jonathon Porritt (who chairs the SDC) concluded, and the weather steamed. Somewhat frustrating process, but the evening ended with a slow food dinner which drove home many of the sustainability points the evening’s speakers had been trying to make at a more abstract level. This part of the event was organised by Slow Food UK (http://www.slowfoodfoundation.com): wonderful people presenting wonderful food.

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

WSBF CSR FORUM

Started the day in Westminster, speaking at a conference organised by the Westminster Sustainable Business Forum (www.wsbf.org.uk). Founded in October 2004 by Networking for Industry (NFI), the Forum is focusing on such areas as business ethics, climate change, corporate social responsibility, green procurement and public/private partnerships. Good turn-out, interesting people but the first session ran way over, so my presentation time was cut in half. With Richard (Lord) Holme in the chair, I did it on the fly and raced on for a lunch with Shell people – which was enormously interesting in terms of wider trends in our field.

Monday, June 20, 2005

NEW ECGD ROLE

After meeting with Innocent Drinks, I head across to Canary Wharf for meeting of the advisory council of Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD). This is Liz Airey’s last meeting as Chair of the advisory council – and my appointment as her successor in the role is press-released today (http://www.ecgd.gov.uk/news_home.htm?id=6543).

INNOCENT RUMINATIONS


My udder van is …

After (separate) meetings in the office on Shell and Microsoft, and with the sky rocked with thunder, I streak westwards to Hammersmith for a meeting with Jon Wright of Innocent Drinks (http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk). Having already been seduced by their smoothies and their vehicles (http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/us/us.html), I was keen to see whether they would fit into our blended value piece for California Management Review. Mercifully, particularly after a fast-paced walk to meet co-founder Jon Wright at ‘Fruit Towers’, all of this through conditions worthy of Kuala Lumpur, I find that they do.

Saturday, June 18, 2005

PARISIAN REFLECTIONS

Paris, by Eurostar yesterday morning. Last night we had dinner with David Vogel, who edits the California Management Review, and his wife Virginia. Am writing him a paper on different forms of value, with Jed Emerson and Seb Beloe. Today my brain is playing with colours, so a walk around Paris today with Elaine turned into a sequence of reflections on the spectrum, colours and reflections. We walked around the Rive Gauche, including the Musee d’Orsay, then up to Montmartre by Metro to see a strange but interesting Dali exhibition, then back to Rive Gauche. Glorious weather.

Dripping paint

Crabs

Elaine and womannequin

Two heads

Woman looking out towards Montmartre

Shadow puppets

Three mannequins

Dancer

Gilded chairs

Wednesday, June 15, 2005
BSR UP BT TOWER
Interesting evening session with Business for Social Responsibility (BSR – http://www.bsr.org), co-hosted by BT, in the BT Tower complex. Before the roundtable started, we all trooped up to the top of the tower to look out over London, a nice parallel for what corporate boards increasingly need to do – get the big picture, the 360-degree view. One striking thing about the view from the top of this eyrie: how small the distant City looked, for all its financial power.

The theme of the session was the need for convergence between the corporate governance and corporate (social) responsibility agendas. One interesting sign of the times: Dr Chris Tuppen, who has handled the environmental, social and sustainability agendas for BT since at least the early 1990s, has now moved into the Company Secretary’s office.

View from BT Tower east towards the City

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

BLOWING IN THE WIND: HITLER

Finished reading Until the Final Hour, Traudl Junge’s account of her time as Hitler’s secretary. Used as basis of the film Downfall. Astounding. So much is in the detail, like the mention of the wife of Baldur von Schirach (her name isn’t given) who asked Hitler at tea-time about the rumours of the tribulations of the Jews deported from Amsterdam. Painful silence. Hitler gets to his feet and withdraws. “Apparently she had exceeded her rights as a guest and failed to carry out her duty of entertaining Hitler,” says Traudl. Then, towards the end of the story, the suicides in the bunker. “The most powerful man in th Reich a few days ago, and now a little heap of ashes blowing in the wind.”

Monday, June 13, 2005

MOLLY & MARCH

Wonderful evening at Cafe Fish, near Piccadilly Circus, with Elaine, Molly March (who I first met in Cyprus in the late 1950s: see Cyprus link on homepage, http://johnelkington.com/pubs-unpublished-cyprus.htm), her daughter March, March’s friend Mark, and March’s father, Nick Hutchinson.

Before heading across there, I dropped into Virgin records to get Ry Cooder’s latest album, Chavez Ravine. A “post World War II era American narrative of ‘cool cats, radios, UFO sightings, J. Edgar Hoover, red scares, and baseball’, the CD is a tribute to the erstwhile Los Angeles Latino enclave known as Chavez Ravine, bulldozed by developers in the 1950s in the process of building the Dodgers Stadium. Also bought a best-of compilation of Ringo’s All Starr Band (had been struck by his rendition of ‘Photograph’ during the ‘Concert for George’ celebration of the life and work of George Harrison) and the first CD from The Magic Numbers, which was playing as I was paying.

Amazing the impact music has: Molly and I talked about the Beach Boys, who we both woke up to in the early 1960s, and about skateboarding. She used an ironing board atop some old roller skates. When I used to skateboard at Bryanston, our boards’ wheels used to seize solid every time they hit a piece of grit, resulting in several chips out of my teeth. Odd coincidence: Nick went to Bryanston, too. Molly had recently met four ex-Bryanstonians. I asked her what she saw as the common characteristics. Confident, questioning, humorous, she began, and I stopped her before the list went negative!

The trigger for the Beach Boys discussion was that I had watched The Beach Boys: An American Family yesterday on Channel 5, directed by Jeff Bleckner and first released in 2000. Highly engaging – and surprisingly accurate – profile.

Molly March, me, Cafe Fish

Molly, me, March, Nick

Saturday, June 11, 2005

GAIA GOES WEST

Gaia and Hania here overnight, ahead of driving to Somerset for a party. Snap Gaia in her feathers in front of a painting that Elaine and I bought many, many years ago, which reminded me of the heights of the Aztec and Inca eras. So something of a clash of eras, but I thought the reds went together nicely.

Friday, June 10, 2005

GEORGE BUSH: AMERICAN CYCLOPS

What follows is a piece that popped into my head – more or less fully formed – at 03.00 in the morning after I flew back from Seattle. Intemperate, maybe. And some of my colleagues say that the real issue is how the sustainability movement can work with right-wingers. Well, maybe. But I feel increasingly angry at the extraordinary damage that George Bush and his colleagues are doing to the reputation of America, around the world. And I am also dumbstruck by the idiocy of much current American foreign policy. Europe, to put it mildly, is not without its idiocies, but – for better or worse – the US current has the greater global responsibilities, not least because it has taken them upon itself. Let the piece stand as a matter of record:

GEORGE BUSH II: AMERICAN CYCLOPS

The future of the United States is increasingly threatened by the monocular vision of its President.

In the unlikely event that the head of President George W. Bush ever appears among the giant presidential sculptures of Mount Rushmore, it is increasingly – worryingly – obvious that he would best be rendered as an American Cyclops. It is also clear that his aggressively monocular vision, powerfully inflamed by the 9/11 attacks, endangers the future both of his own country and, to a degree, much of the rest of the world.

On the threshold of a new century, and very much like the original Cyclops described by Euripides around 408 B.C.E., George W. Bush stands in the mouth of the world he knows, still enraged, blinded and desperate to capture the intruder who thrust the “blinding brand” into his face. Wait a moment, you may say: it is Osama bin Laden who (if he still lives) who is hiding out in caves, not the President of the world’s current hyper power. True, but caves come in many forms, some self-imposed.

Maybe it was inevitable that the Clinton administration’s sticky-fingered interest in exploring every last aspect of any area of policy would produce an opposite and at least equal reaction. Whatever, the troglodytic reflexes of the current administration were again exposed with the New York Times leak of papers showing how Philip Cooney – chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality – repeatedly intervened to water down and subvert the conclusions of scientific reports on the likely impacts of climate change (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/politics/08climate.html).

Caveman politics

We can argue about the scale of the problem, but the underlying pattern is clear. Whether it involves deciding war and then force-fitting the facts to provide a strategic case or airbrushing the science where it is likely to offend the delicate sensibilities of the President and his funders, this is a caveman administration that finds anything approaching binocular vision unsettling.

You need look no further than its own staffing policy. It is surely no accident that Cooney – who seems happy to wade into the scientific debate without having himself any form of science background – is a former oil industry lobbyist. Much of his job seems to have involved inserting the words “significant and fundamental” every time he saw the words “uncertainties” in reports and policy papers on climate change.

Destructively, the Bush administration seems to be boxed in both by its own ideology and by the narrow self-interest it has consciously set out to promote among ordinary Americans. As a result, growing numbers of American citizens and voters are afflicted by an increasingly pernicious form of tunnel vision. A question worth asking: Are we seeing the early stages of America once again retreating into its shell? One litmus test of this trend will be what happens with Ford and GM. Toyota chairman Hiroshi Okuda has been fretting in public that the collapse of the Big Two Detroit auto-makers into their current junk bond status could trigger U.S. moves against foreign auto-makers. A couple of months back he even suggested that Japanese auto-makers should try to help Ford and GM by raising the price of cars sold in the U.S.!

Naturally there are also some hopeful signs. Whether you walk around the streets of San Francisco or around Microsoft’s car-parks in Redmond, on the leafy outskirts of Seattle, you will see surprising numbers of Toyota’s Prius hybrid cars. People are buying them because they are wonderfully fuel efficient a time when gas prices are soaring, but also – they say – because they look ‘cool’.

At last Japanese auto designers have grasped something that Apple’s Steve Jobs has long known: design sells – and it can sell sustainable products, not just unsustainable ones. But for the moment it is clear that most Americans remain cocooned in their glistening SUVs, their ears lulled with their iPod comforters, all blissfully unaware of just how different the twenty-first century will be to the twentieth, dubbed by Harold Evans and others as ‘The American Century’. Like all incumbents, their very success has blinded them to how fast the world can change.

The second Republican Cyclops?

Having arrived in the U.S. after a 5-country tour that took in South Korea, Japan and China, I had momentarily returned to London en route thinking that Tom Friedman’s recent book The World Is Flat may even understate the scale of the longer term threat – economic, political and perhaps most fundamentally cultural – to U.S. hegemony in each and all of these areas. And while the politics of the cities of the U.S. and Canadian west coasts tend to much more progressive than in these countries’ heartlands, the mood I found in the U.S. worried me profoundly.

No-one disputes that there are Cyclopean – or should it be Cycloptic? – tendencies in Europe or in countries like China. But at the moment what happens in the U.S. is likely to be crucial in shaping the policy agenda for the next decade or so. When the Cyclops metaphor first flashed into my mind on the flight back to Heathrow from Seattle it seemed to capture the almost mythic scale of the changes now under way. But before deciding to use it, the reptilian part of my brain wondered whether someone else had already laid claim to the phrase ‘American Cyclops’? Googling, I discovered that, once again, there is not much new under the sun.

That said, the main reference dated back to1868, when James Fairfax McLaughlin used it to headline a satirical attack on Ben Butler, the ‘Black Republican’ Union Civil War general – and a notorious carpet bagger. Butler’s high-handed rule in New Orleans and elsewhere in the South in 1862 earned him the sobriquet ‘Beast’ and soon had him removed from office. Today, with reports of systematic torture in Iraq and elsewhere, alongside the twenty-first century forms of carpet-bagging practiced by the likes of Halliburton (contrast http://www.halliburtonwatch.org or http://www.corpwatch.org with http://www.halliburton.com), George Bush II seems well down the same slippery slope.

So how, in God’s name, did Bush II get back into office with a significantly improved majority? Among the more convincing answers to the question is that proposed by University of California professor of linguistics George Lakoff. On a visit to San Francisco earlier in the year, I came across his work on the framing of social issues with the Rockridge Institute (http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org) – and after reading his book, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values, Frame the Debate, suggested it should be required reading for all my colleagues at SustainAbility. Or, at least, Lakoff’s four key points on the uses – and the many abuses by those driving the current Republic agenda – of framing in politics (http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/projects/strategic/simple_framing/view).

Perfect Storm, 2016

And just in case all of this seems comfortably remote, perhaps I can commend one other recent (and fairly mind-warping) article. In the July/August issue of The Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows posits a “perfect storm” in which the U.S. economy implodes. Among the factors that come together to collapse the economy and drive a complete outsider into the Presidency in 2016 were: the frailty of the relationship between the U.S. and China (which had essentially been bankrolling the U.S. deficit for years); the fourth – and worst – oil shock; a run on the dollar; a tsunami of bankruptcies; the evaporation of lifetime savings; and a domino effect cascading through every level of government funding.

For me, one of the most credible outcomes – though no doubt Hiroshi Okuda would prefer that this wasn’t noised abroad – was the take-over of Ford and GM by Toyota. As Fallows puts it, the 2012 takeover had a grim inevitability. “Over the previous decade,” he writes, “the two U.S. companies had lost money on every car they sold. Such profit as they made was on SUVs, trucks, and Hummer-style big rigs. In 2008, just before the oil shock, GM seemed to have struck gold with the Strykette- an adaptation of the Army’s Stryker vehicle, so famous from Iraq and Pakistan, whose marketing campaign attracted professional women. Then the SUV market simply disappeared. With gasoline at $6 a gallon, the prime interest rate at 15 percent, and the stock and housing markets in the toilet, no one wanted what American car makers could sell. The weak dollar, and their weak stock prices, made the companies a bargain for Toyota.”

Fallows foresees an end to 164 years of two-party rule in the US. The new President, an independent, is taking over from a military hero, the man who famously captured Osama bin Laden in the Saudi Arabian desert in 2011 – and who was elected to the presidency in 2012. The challenge, as it is laid out in a brief for the incoming President, is three-fold:

“Our country no longer controls its economic fundamentals.
“Compared with the America of the past, it has become stagnant, classbound, and brutally unfair.
“Compared with the rest of the world, it is on the way down. We think we are a great power – and our military is still ahead of China’s. Everyone else thinks that over the past twenty years we finally pushed our luck too far.”

The optimist in me tries to believe that the U.S. will once again be spurred to action by the urgency of the threats. But, like climate change, the very nature of many of the challenges that blend into that perfect storm less than a decade from now are that they build slowly and often imperceptibly. Without clear-eyed political leadership, the bleak scenario seems increasingly likely. And the implications for the rest of the world, increasingly hooked onto the U.S. economy, are equally dire.

Hold on, Arnie’s coming

Of course, there are bright spots against the gloom – and not simply those sun-hazed Priuses as you walk around Microsoft’s parking lots. For one thing, there’s ‘The Terminator’. On June 1st, for example, as part of the UN’s World Environment Day celebrations, Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vowed to tackle global warming in the state. He declared the debate on climate change “over”, announcing a climate change plan with targets to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to 2000 levels by 2010, 1990 levels by 2020, and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. If all goes to plan, the 2010 target equates to an 11% reduction on business-as-usual.

It’s supremely ironic that the man driving progressive politics in the sunshine state is a Republican. As the Climate Group notes, the messages emanating from the Governor’s office reinforce the progressive policy measures both in place and in development in California, covering sectors from power generation through to transport.

“For example,” the Climate Group reports, “California state lawmakers recently passed the Pavley Bill, which will reduce greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles put on the market from 2009. These regulations are expected to cut greenhouse gas emissions from new cars by 30% by 2016. And in 2002, the state implemented a Renewables Portfolio Standard stating that renewable energy must be the source of 20% of the electricity sold by 2017. In his speech, the Governor pledged to accelerate this commitment to 20% by 2010 and 30% by 2020.”

Significantly, a key message at the heart of Governor Schwarzenegger’s speech was that these measures, and the new targets, will not compromise economic growth, rather they will promote innovation and business opportunities in the state. As he stressed said, “together we can meet the needs of both our economy and the environment. Together we can continue California’s environmental heritage and legacy of leadership in innovation in cutting-edge technology.”

Nor is Governor Schwarzenegger alone in spotting the emerging opportunity space. The recent unveiling by General Electric Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt of the company’s new ‘Ecomagination’ strategy has won widespread praise. The company has pledged to spend $1.5 billion a year on such research by 2010, more than double the $700 million it spends currently.

Immelt also noted that GE aims to double the revenue goal over that period for products that provide better environmental performance, to $20 billion a year, and expects more than half of its product revenue to come from such products by 2015. At the same time, GE promises to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of its factory operations 1 percent by 2012. Without the initiative, those emissions were expected to increase 40 percent, GE said.

Gearing down

But even an optimist must admit that there is a very large fly in this ointment. Having devoted nearly thirty years of my life to opening up business to the market risks and opportunities created by sustainable development in general, and by environmental issues like climate change in particular, it is increasingly clear to me that governments will need to play a central role in shaping twenty-first century markets.

Indeed, this is a line we pursued in a recent report for the UN Global Compact, Gearing Up: From Corporate Responsibility to Good Governance and Scaleable Solutions (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/scalingup.asp). And it’s also a key reason why SustainAbility has focused on corporate lobbying in recent years, most recently with a review of the level of transparency public policy positions among the world’s biggest 100 companies – the subject of a report due out at the end of June.

Jeffrey Immelt has also waded into the debate, noting that he would like the U.S. Congress to pass an energy bill setting “clear milestones” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – so that companies would know clearly how to invest to achieve them. The bill should include market-based mechanisms to encourage businesses to cut pollution, such as caps with incentives or the ability to trade emissions credits, he said.

But the current signals from White House – or Cyclops’ Cave – are pretty clear, and leave little room for optimism. Someone I met while in Seattle is Denis Hayes, co-founder of the Earth Day movement in 1970 (http://www.earthday.org) and now President of the Bullitt Foundation (http://www.bullittfoundation.org). When I first met him, in 1981, he was still running the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI: now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, http://www.nrel.gov), which had just heard that newly elected President Ronald Reagan was going to defenestrate him and hack away at SERI’s budget. Having survived one axeman Republic president, he now worries that the Republicans seem set on creating financial crises that force the closure or castration of many key environmental programs.

Some caveman politicians will never get over the run-for-the-bunkers mentality shaped by the Cold War. But, as Hayes noted in a recent column in The Seattle Times, “the greatest threats facing the world today are not Soviet bombers but major environmental changes. The earlier we learn of such threats, the better our chances of mitigating their damage.” Among the examples he gives are climate change, the El Nino cycle, tsunamis and invasive species. In the Cold War, Americans accepted the need for “distant early warning,” investing huge amounts of money in the DEW Line to detect incoming nuclear bombers or missiles.

To those who argue that the private sector should take over many of the environmental early warning programs run by such agencies as NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Science Foundation, Hayes counters that “information produced by such research is, by its very nature, a ‘public good’. It benefits everyone, and it is most valuable when it is universally distributed. Hence, little, if any, distant early warning research will ever be conducted and disseminated by the private sector.”

Ironically, but again not accidentally, the American Cyclops has ordered major cuts in the budgets of basic environmental monitoring and research programs at NASA, NOAA and the NSF. It’s almost as if some giants prefer to run blind. It may be said that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king, but after my recent world tour I believe that the American Cyclops is handing the new century to others.

Thursday, June 09, 2005

MUSEUM OF FLIGHT

Took the opportunity on my way out to the airport to drop off for a couple of hours at Seattle’s Museum of Flight (www.museumofflight.org), which includes the (currently under refurbishment) Red Barn in which the Boeing Company started in 1916. Probably 20 years since I was last there and was as impressed as last time. It may not be politically correct, but I still find many of the aircraft of the 1930s and 1940s really beautiful – and the collection includes such favourites as a (in this case Goodyear) gull-wing Super Corsair, a twin-boom Lockheed P-38 Lightning, a North American P-51 Mustang and a Supermarine Spitfire Mark IX. But the most spectacular of all the planes in the museum has to be the Lockheed SR-71 ‘Blackbird’ (www.sr-71.org). This air-breathing monster set air speed records that remain unbroken after more than 25 years.

Foreground, the pedal-powered MacReady Gossamer Albatross II

Fokker D-VIII monoplane, introduced too late into WWI to make a difference

Nose-to-nose: Supermarine Spitfire and Messerschmitt Bf-109

Super Corsair, late WWII variant

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

A DAY IN SEATTLE

Yesterday, a reasonably energetic session on CSR trends with Microsoft (www.microsoft.com), today a series of sessions with Starbucks (www.starbucks.com), starting with their new CEO, Jim Donald – one of the most impressive CEOs I have yet met. After our meeting, Mark (Lee) and I were invited to observe one of the company’s open forums, in which Jim and Howard Schultz (now Chairman) opened themselves up for an hour to maybe a couple of hundred Starbucks ‘partners’. High touch, highly responsive, and a good deal of humour – usually a good signal. Then a very productive session with several Starbucks people in relation to the piece I am doing for California Management Review on blended value, with Jed Emerson and Seb Beloe.

Early in the afternoon Mark did a presentation for some of the Starbucks team on our benchmark analysis of their latest CSR report. They score pretty well, appearing in our 2004 Top 50 ratings, but much of the good stuff they are doing isn’t public knowledge. My impression of Starbucks improves considerably during the day, though it will be fascinating to see how the company copes in the coming years with the inevitable shock waves created by its plans to grow from around 9,000 stores today to a targeted 30,000 outlets – or even 50,000, as some hope.

Later in the day, after Mark has flown back to San Francisco, I have dinner with Denis Hayes, President of the Bullitt Foundation (www.bullitt.org) and co-founder in 1970 of Earth Day (www.earthday.net). I first met Denis in 1981, when he was Director of the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI), just as President Reagan started to undermine many of the institutions that had been spawned by the Earth Day movement. I was researching my book on renewables, Sun Traps (Pelican 1985). Had subsequently caught up with him in Palo Alto in the run-up to Earth Day 1990 and, later, in Seattle after he took on the Bullitt job. Wonderful chance to catch up with one of the godfathers of modern environmentalism.

Over the weekend, had been handed a bunch of press articles by my cousin Charlotte Turner, on top of which I found a piece written by Denis for the Seattle Times. In it he argued that in the same way that the US invested in the DEW Line, to provide “distant early warning” of nuclear attack during the Cold War, we should now be investing in early warning schemes to alert us to threats in such areas as climate change, invasive species and tsunamis. Conversely, the Bush Administration is currently running down funding for such key institutions as NASA (www.nasa.gov), NOAA (www.noaa.gov) and the National Science Foundation (www.nsf.gov).

Howard Schultz (centre left), Jim Donald (right)

Monday, June 06, 2005

FLIGHT SERGEANT BERRY RESURFACES

Something I had always hoped to be able to do was to thank the family of Flight Sergeant Fred Berry, who saved my father’s life during the Battle of Britain (http://johnelkington.com/archive/inf-people-father.htm), sadly being shot down himself and killed shortly afterwards, on 1 September 1940. I had also posted photos of Berry on my blog on 6 February 2004, but we had failed to track the family down. So I was thrilled today when Berry’s granddaughter got in touch by e-mail, having come across this website and my reference to how her family tree interconnected with mine all those years ago. Given that today marks the 61st anniversary of D-Day, it’s one more reminder – alongside the constant B17 fly-pasts outside my Edgewater window – of how much we owe to the ‘Greatest Generation’.

[NOTE POSTED ON 25-08-2014: Some years later, she, her mother and my father would meet. It turned out that Fred Berry’s wife never mentioned his name after he was killed, so his daughter and granddaughter had no idea of his exploits until they came across the accounts on this blog.]

Sunday, June 05, 2005

EXPERIENCE MUSIC PROJECT

Back from Vashon Island, and with rain threatening, I walk from the Edgewater Hotel to the Space Needle, in search of Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project (EMP: www.emplive.com). As I go, a B17 flies overhead (www.museumofflight.org/collections/craftdisplay.html?ID=23), a reminder of ‘Rosie the Riveter’ (www.rosietheriveter.org), D-Day (whose anniversary it is) and the huge contribution Boeing and Seattle made to the ultimate victory in WWII. Various of the people we have known in the Seattle area have been involved with Boeing, my cousin Hollister Sprague – who died in 1986 – as Mr Boeing’s lawyer, others as designers, engineers, photographers. (And as I type this up in the fading light, around 20.00, the B17 drones past again.)

As I twist and turn on my way to the Space Needle, I catch glimpses of Seattle’s port installations, with the giant gantry cranes towering like herds of metallic orange brontosauri. Musing that George Lukas was inspired by such cranes to produce his giant, lumbering white battle monsters in Star Wars, I shortly afterwards find myself standing behind Darth Vader, or at least a cutout version, inside the Science Fiction Museum.

Maybe it is my mood, but the EMP experience is flat, tacky and commercial. I was here in October 2000 for the ‘Digital Dividends’ conference (www.digitaldividend.org), shortly after the EMP opened in June of that year, and wasn’t hugely impressed then, either. The Beatlemania show, still advertised on the EMP website, has gone. Most of the displays strike me as second rate, a bit like an end-of-the-pier show, and the unbelievable electricity of performers like Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan – at least in the context of their times – is hard to detect. Ironically, I walk past a stall where Dylan, in later life, is explaining on video how dramatic the Sixties had been. You’d hardly guess it from the EMP version. You see clips of the civil rights marches, but the whole thing feels like History rather than an immersion in the era.

The Frank Gehry building in which the EMP and the Science Fiction Museum are housed is a real Curate’s Egg, good in parts, but somehow less than the sum of its parts. But every so often there is a bit of detailing that catches the eye, like penultimate last photo in this series. The last photo, at least for me, raises the question of how we could do the same list of things – jam, touch, learn, play – for sustainability that EMP aspires to (but, I think largely fails to do) for rock’n’roll.

B17 over Elliott Bay

Herds of metallic brontosauri

Darth Vader’s dark side

Bob Dylan and guitar geyser

Dylan, Joan Baez and Tide of Conformity

Civil rights marchers

Jimi Hendrix

Frank Gehry’s undulations and tree

This works for me

How do we do this for sustainability?

FOOLHARDY KILLDEER

Breakfast this morning with close neighbours of the Turners – and good friends of ours from years back. Blake shows me where a pair of killdeer (www.nhptv.org/natureworks/killdeer.htm) have nested among the stones and logs on the foreshore. So vulnerable are they that his mother, Carol, has bought a water cannon of sorts to ward off predators like crows. Killdeer are precocious, able to run around amazingly soon after they break out of the egg, but I’m not sure I rate this pair’s chances of successfully raising a brood at all high. Later, Blake drives me back to Seattle, via one of the ferries visible in the background of the crow picture.

Metal version of one of the predators

Carol and Blake, mother and son

It’s the idea that counts

Saturday, June 04, 2005

OTTER AT WORK

Have always loved Ring of Bright Water and the like, so am partial to otters – though I think I have only seen them in the wild – once – in Scotland. This afternoon, as Clark and I watched the water, what he described as a river otter pretended to be the Loch Ness Monster a little way out from the beach. This was quite a large animal, with a long tail that would follow him down into the depths like a conger eel. Later on, I walked the short distance down to the beach to take a photo of the house – and surprised the same animal right by the jetty. He strolled to the water and swam away, repeatedly looking back over his shoulder, probably signalling his displeasure at being disturbed in his toilet.

PUGET SOUND

Am staying with cousins – Charlotte and Clark Turner – in their beachside house on Vashon Island, on Puget Sound. We have a delightfully extended lunch with Chuck and Jeanne Branson, also cousins, who live across the water, their son David and his partner, Ruth. The Turner house has outlandishly wonderful views of the Sound and I can’t stop taking photographs, despite remembering the architect Moshe Safdie saying he threw his camera away because he ended up looking at everything through a rectangular frame.

SOY BEAN POWERED

Walking down the Fontleroy Ferry Dock, to catch the ferry to Vashon Island, I was truck by the large message across the bridge of the vessel – declaring that it to be soybean-powered. Inside, posters informed passengers that this was in aid of reducing greenhouse emissions. But soybeans aren’t an unadulterated Good Thing for environmentalists. Quite apart from the GM issue which has disrupted the soybean trade to the EU, at the WWF conference in Vancouver last week they showed satellite photographs of Amazonia – with peculiarly patterned bites being taken out of the rainforest by new soybean farms. Apparently much of the production goes to feed livestock, used to satisfy the growing appetite for meat in Asia.

THE BRITISH INVASION

The Edgewater Hotel

Even in its revamped state, The Edgewater Hotel – where I am staying in Seattle – has struck me as a little odd. It juts out into the sea, atop one of the old piers, but its decor is like something from Twin Peaks. That said, had breakfast there this morning with Mark and Valerie Lee (he co-directs SustainAbility’s US business) and Maria Eitel of the Nike Foundation (http://www.nike.com/nikebiz/nikefoundation/home.jhtml) – and Maria told me something that made me feel slightly differently about it all. Apparently The Beatles stayed here in the Sixties, during ‘The British Invasion’, and their fans took to the waters around the hotel in a flotilla of small boats – or even tried to swim in the chilly waters of Elliott Bay. Checked: it was 1964 – and the nearby Experience Music Project ran an exhibition last year to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of America’s descent into Beatlemania (http://www.edgewaterfabfouroh.com). Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end.

Maria and Mark

Friday, June 03, 2005

ROOM WITH A VIEW

My room on the Seattle waterfront looks out both onto an endless parade of ships and boats plying in and out of the harbour – and onto the take-off and landing lanes for Seattle airports. Looming in the foreground, a huge cruise liner. When Mark and I first see it this afternoon, I comment that it reminds me of the vast ships that I have seen docking and loading in Freemantle, Australia. They carry live sheep for slaughter in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries. The smell – indeed the insult to all the senses – was beyond words.

In the midst of it all, late this afternoon, a roiling in the waters and something animate surfaces briefly. With my normal glasses still somewhere in Beijing – and new ones being constructed somewhere a continent or two away – I can’t make out what this life-form is. But there’s reasurrance in the mystery.

Docked

RATS

Fly down to Seattle in time for Mark Lee and I to have lunch with Chip Giller, founder and President of Grist (http://www.grist.org/about/). Then across to the hotel to drop bags and out with Mark to have a beer downtown and discuss future plans. As we leave the hotel, we pass a protest by plumbers and pipelayers, featuring a display of rats, one of which (not shown here) is the size of a small T. rex.

When I walk back, it strikes me that the dock next to the hotel is where Elaine, the girls and I saw Jacques Cousteau’s weird vessel the Alcyone in the mid-1980s. If you’re interested to see what the strange creature looked like, go to: http://www.cousteau.org/en/cousteau_world/our_ships/alcyone.php

Rats 1

Rats 2

TBL IN BC AND OZ

My visit this week to British Columbia has persuaded me that there is still a great deal of life in the old triple bottom line concept – indeed, it seems that in many places it is only just beginning to ‘break’. And this week I was also notified by CSIRO of the launch of Australia’s first set of TBL accounts.

The island continent’s first triple bottom line account at a whole-economy level offers a full life cycle analysis of each of 135 economic sectors using ten macro-indicators. The financial indicators are profits, export propensity and import penetration. The social indicators are employment, income and government revenue (taxation). The environmental indicators are greenhouse emissions, energy use, water use and land disturbance. These macro-indicators are expressed as intensities per one dollar of final demand.

The report highlights the low export performance of the services sectors, relatively good outcomes for basic mining, the many challenges faced by domestic manufacturing in the face of globalisation, and the resource intensity of food and fibre industries. While one dollar might look much the same as another, where it is spent, can have vastly different outcomes for social and environmental issues.

The work is based on the integration of the financial input-output tables in the Australian national accounts with key social and environmental indicators. Both a summary and the full report in four volumes can be accessed at http://www.cse.csiro.au/research/balancingact/

Thursday, June 02, 2005

WHISTLER

As something of a reptile, I don’t like getting up early, so a 05.00 start to today wasn’t particularly welcome – except that there was already light in my eyrie-like, glass-walled 17th floor room. Picked up at 06.00 by Linda Coady (Vice-President for Sustainability, 2010 Winter Olympics) and Coro Strandberg, we drive north towards Whistler, where the Games will be held (http://www.tourismwhistler.com/about/2010_wintergames.asp).

Also with us: Jon O’Riordan, formerly Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management in the British Columbia Provincial Government. It’s the first time we have met, though he is the twin brother of someone I have known for decades, Professor Tim O’Riordan of the University of East Anglia, who is also a member of SustainAbility’s Faculty – like Linda and Coro.

When we get to Whistler, we have a wonderful session with the Mayor of the town, Hugh O’Reilly, and some of the key people from the 2010 Winter Olympics team. Interesting to live in London, which is bidding for the 2012 Olympics, and to have visited in quick succession both Beijing (which is hosting the 2008 games) and now Whistler. Most sports leave me cold, but am increasingly interested in the potential of major sports events to either create positive economic, social and environmental regeneration or, at worst, to leave a trail of white elephants in their wake.

After a snatched sandwich lunch, I do a public lecture. Then back into the van and off south for several commitments in Vancouver, notably a public lecture which I do at the Robson Square Media Center. Capacity audience, Linda chairs and a most enjoyable evening. Then film a sequence for a couple of people who had heard me on the CBC programme a couple of days back and are making a film on idleness and productivity. By the time I get back to the hotel, a life of idleness is beginning to seem quite appealing.

Vancouver dawn

Whistler

Homeward bound: Elizabeth Bowker at wheel

Blue blur

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

ANOTHER DAY IN VANCOUVER

Started off day with a media interview, then my keynote at the WWF conference on ‘Mobilizing Millions’, followed by energetic discussion session, then lunch with Jorgen Randers (one of the authors of The Limits to Growth), then an afternoon discussion panel, then a wine and cheese discusion with around 40 people at the amazing studio home of Joel and Dana Solomon. He is a sustainability-focused venture capitalist involved in e.g. the Tides Foundation (www.tidescanada.org), the Endswell Foundation (www.endswell.org) and Renewal Partners (www.renewalpartners.com).

Among many other interesting people I met today were Dr Claude Martin, the outgoing Director-General of WWF International; Chief Eleazar Anyaoku, President of WWF International and Chair of NEPAD; WWF-UK Chairman Christopher Ward, who it turns out was responsible for the section in the Daily Mirror in 1961 which triggered my first fund-raising venture, for the fledgling WWF launched that year; Monte Hummel, President Emeritus of WWF Canada; Mark Achbar, a producer of the film The Corporation; Tzeporah Berman, Program Director of Forest Ethics (www.forestethics.org); and Gregor Robertson of Happy Planet Foods (www.happyplanet.com), now in political office here.

Then – having somewhat regretfully handed back my complimentary tickets for the Barenaked Ladies concert this evening, I went off with Coro Strandberg to a dinner with a dozen or so people from business in the Vancouver area. Discussion whether a sustainability cluster could be developed in Vancouver or the wider British Columbia area. Dining room overlooked Vancouver’s famous steam clock. Inside the room a mouse was slowly dying, presumably poisoned. Encouraging …

Steam clock

Catatonic mouse at the feast

 

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

TOTEMIC WELCOME

Among other things, did a phone-in programme for CBC today. Then, this evening, out by bus to the UBC Museum of Anthropology (http://www.moa.ubc.ca/) for welcome reception, surrounded by totem poles, masks and canoes. Second time I have been to the Museum – and I genuinely can’t wait to have a serious opportunity to see more of the 35,000 objects stored there.

Surrounded by all that glass, though, I couldn’t help wondering what will happen when the next mega-quake hits this coastline. But was soon distracted by the First Nations troupe who had the entire audience of WWF-ers pretending to be eagles, frogs, killer whales and wolves (my end of things). First opportunity I had to howl all day – and welcome opportunity to see the late Bill Reid’s astounding Clam again (http://www.billreidfoundation.org/).

The eagles include the Lieutenant Governor, in white jacket

A sense of angst

Not sure what’s going on here …

But he seems agitated …

As are the people squeezed in Bill Reid’s clam

Monday, May 30, 2005

EU IMPASSE

I’m getting used to viewing major events in the UK and EU from a considerable distance, as with the recent Uk elections (when I was in Australia and New Zealand) and yesterday’s French vote on the EU Constitution (where I got the results in Vancouver).

On one level, it’s obviously a big blow to the process of European integration, as currently defined. But, on another level, it seems to me that it really is time to revisit our definitions of the EU. Quite apart from the schadenfreude associated with seeing President Chirac so mightily embarassed – having said late last year that any country that voted against the Constitution should immediately leave the EU – it is increasingly clear that we need a less technocratic, more engaging vision of what Europe’s role in the world could be. For me, being a counterbalnce to the US doesn’t quite qualify. And we also need a new generation of leadership, fit for the 21st century.

Jacques Chirac, at 72, isn’t quite as bad as the glaced politicians who graced the rostrum of the Kremlin before the collapse of Communism, but his self-serving style of politics is pretty much the polar opposite of what we now need. His regal response to the vote, at least as quoted here on the West Coast, underscored the problem: “France has expressed itself democratically … it is your sovereign decision, and I take note.”

The bigger issue, though, is the collision between two opposing views of Europe. The first, embraced by Britain, Ireland and Eastern Europe, views the EU primarily as an opportunity space, with the main emphasis being on creating a more efficient market. The second view, most energetically embraced by the nations that were the epicentre of two world wars, or European civil wars as some have styled them, sees the EU primarily in terms of an emerging set of pan-European social institutions.

It’s clear that the French are alarmed about the prospects of the first approach undermining the ‘European social model’ enshrined in the second approach. And they aren’t alone in that, as the Dutch vote will probably show. But my recent visits to Asia, particularly China, persuade me that it won’t really matter how much Europeans fret about their social models if Asia continues along its current economic trajectory. Ensuring a radically more efficient European market is the only way to ensure a viable future for Europeans – and I would argue that we should let the EU’s institutional forms emerge from those needs and processes, not the other way around.

SATISH KUMAR AS CASTAWAY

Was thrilled to hear Sue Lawley interview Satish Kumar of Schumacher College (www.schumachercollege.gn.apc.org) and Resurgence magazine (www.resurgence.gn.apc.org) on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs before I flew to Vancouver today. Some years back, my erstwhile colleague Max Nicholson did one too, but I missed it because I was travelling. Today, though, you can hear these things via the BBC website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4).

Satish picked a number of my favourite musicians, among them Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and John Lennon. But, as I told him by email this evening, he picked ‘Imagine’ where I would probably have picked the Beatles and the more muscular ‘Revolution’. The Beatles and their (ultimately ill-fated) Apple venture were an early inspiration for my own later move into the world of business.

Saturday, May 28, 2005

FAY GODWIN, JOYCE LAMBERT & DEREK RATCLIFFE

Three obituaries in recent days mark the passing of more of the pioneers of environmental conservation.

First was Joyce Lambert, who died on 4 May. She had astounded Britain when she discovered that the Norfolk Broads were man-made, rather than natural. They were the result of extensive peat-digging, particularly between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. One of my first articles for New Scientist, in the mid-1970s, featured the Broads, which was where I first came across her work. I still remember trailing my fingers in the water as I was taken around the Broads by Dr Martin George, the NCC’s Regional Officer, and saying how wondrously green the water was — and being told that what I was admiring was pollution, eutrophication!

Second, on 23 May, Derek Ratcliffe died. His obituary appears in today’s Times. I knew him when I sat for several years on an Advisory Council for the old Nature Conservancy Council (NCC) and he was the NCC’s Chief Scientist. He is probably best remembered for his research showing the links between the use of organochlorine pesticides, particularly DDT, and the decline of birds of prey, among them peregrine falcons and sparrowhawks. I well remember long talks with Max Nicholson — a founder of the original Nature Conservancy – about that period of what he had dubbed ‘The Environmental Revolution’. But when I came across Ratcliffe he was probably best known as the architect of 1977’s A Nature Conservation Review, often described as a ‘Domesday Book’ of Britain’s most important natural features.

And third, Fay Godwin’s death is reported in today’s Guardian. An extraordinary photographer, I first came across her work when she was producing the pictures for a book on The Ridgeway which was published by Oliver Caldecott at Wildwood House, where Elaine was working in the mid-1970s. Godwin was an ardent landscape conservationist and her images helped switch me on to the country’s ancient stone circles.

HEIMAT

Last night, I watched BBC4’s reshowing of the first programme in the first series of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat TV series, which I last saw in the 1980s. Astounding. The second series, which I saw many more of, was hugely reminiscent of the time I spent in Hamburg in the early 1970s. The other German TV series which I was completely absorbed by when it was first shown was Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot, the extraordinary inside story of the U-boat war against Britain, released in 1981 (www.dasboot.com).

Friday, May 27, 2005

KINGSTON READERS’ FESTIVAL

Politics and the media were the focus of a ‘Question Time’-style panel session I was involved in last night at the Kingston Readers’ Festival (www.kingston.ac.uk/krf or www.kingston.gov.uk/arts). Held at the Tiffin School, the event was chaired by Donald MacCormick, former presenter of BBC TV’s Newsnight programme. Other panellists were: Brian Cathcart, Deputy Editor of The Independent on Sunday; Diane Coyle, Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester, with whom I sit on the RSA Council; and Kevin Maguire, political columnist and Associate Editor on the Daily Mirror.

Great audience, lively debate – and, having dreaded the thing, found that I rather enjoyed it. And it forced me to think about things – among them the EU Constitution, the future of the UK educational system, and who I would like to run each of the major UK political parties – that I don’t normally devote much attention to. On the last point, my reply ran along the following lines: SustainAbility is able to succeed internationally in large part because we are diverse. Last time I looked, our team of less than 25 people was made up of 10-11 nationalities. But in the latest UK Election, the Conservatives ran a campaign targeting immigrants that made me wonder whether they had any sense of what it will take for the UK to compete in globalized markets. And, while I am sure our immigration policies could be better designed and managed, their strident campaign almost made me ashamed to be British.

But I sent a note today to the British Ambassador in South Korea, who hosted the dinner for me when I was in Seoul, and noted in passing that his hospitality and the quality of the discussion that evening had made me proud of the British diplomatic corps. So, it seems, my pride in my national identity is a matter of swings and roundabouts. And, having been brought up to some degree outside the UK, I have always felt slightly ill-at-ease with the notion of Britishness, feeling instead a layered sense of identity: English – and a Londoner for 35 years; European; and Terran, something that is reinforced every time I fly around the planet. But the best of the British identity, which involves accepting kinship with other nationalities (the Irish, Scots and Welsh, plus the myriad of contacts from the Empire, colonial and Commonwealth eras) is something I find I’m warming to.

Monday, May 23, 2005

ENVIRONMENT FOUNDATION GOES BICS

Great meeting of the Environment Foundation Board of Trustees today, during which we conclude that our joint venture with The 21st Century Trust will involve developing annual Consultations at St George’s House, Windsor Castle, focusing on China, India, Brazil and South Africa. The first, on China, to be held in October.

Tim O’Donovan, Jane Nelson, me, Sir Geoffrey Chandler. Dr Malcolm Aickin, John Lotherington (21st Century Trust)

Friday, May 20, 2005

CHINA DEVELOPMENT BRIEF

One of the more interesting visits Kavita and I made in Beijing was to China Development Brief, run by Founding Editor Nick Young (www.chinadevelopmentbrief.com). We had a very pleasant lunch in the courtyard of the Brief’s compound in the sort of jerry-built hutong (an ancient city alley or lane) that is fast disappearing from many areas of the city. Among other things, we discussed the Brief, which was launched in 1996, and such reports as their latest publication, 250 Chinese NGOs: Civil Society in the Making. More information from their website.

Writing on the wall

Nick Young

A major report, on Chinese NGOs, held by Robyn Wexler

Kavita and lychees

EYELESS IN FORBIDDEN CITY

Kavita and I start out early to see the Forbidden City, only for me – after our being caught in endless jams – leaving my glasses in the taxi. Went through the Forbidden City in a state of high agitation and grief, but was nonetheless vastly impressed by the scale and timelessness of the place.

Afterwards, we came back to the hotel to meet Jerry Lixhe of LEAD and New Ventures, after which we sped off in another taxi to a huton, back street lunch with Robyn Wexler and Nick Young of China Development Brief (www.chinadevelopmentbrief.org). Then on to a WWF event, hosted by the ad agency Ogilvy, where I do my last presentation. Then on to a China-India colloquium, which proves better than Valium, so we head back to the hotel.

In the background, hundreds of energetic schoolchildren …

Where was this originally quarried?

Time passes slower as repairs continue on ravages of Time

Roof friezes

Symbol of power

The stone for this carving came in on a road made of ice

Swift

Gurning urn

Historic fire brigade

His past – and future?

Brooding

Bridge

Soldiers and passers-by

Is this good luck?

Kavita thinks so …

Mao

Three policemen in tricycle.

Thursday, May 19, 2005

THE DAY ENDS IN APRICOT BLOSSOM HAMLET

What a day! Kavita and I spent the morning with Jeanne-Marie Gescher and Natalie Cade of Beijing-based Claydon-Gescher Associates, or CGA (www.cga-ltd.com), who had pulled together 6-7 people from Chinese NGOs and universities. A fascinating set of insights, followed by lunch with Jeanne-Marie and Natalie.

Then a monstrous ride in a taxi to the wrong end of Beijing, in solid state dynamics traffic, in an attempt to find a group of AIESEC students who had set up a workshop. After an hour and a half of getting thoroughly lost, our hosts managed to talk the taxi driver in by cell phone – and we spent a frustratingly short – but nonetheless intriguing and stimulating – 30 minutes with some 30 or so students.

Then into another taxi, which got us back to the hotel a little late for the car that was meant to be taking us to dinner with Minister Pan Yue, Vice Minister with the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) – http://www.zhb.gov.cn/english/chanel-1/chanel-1-end-2.php3?chanel=1&column=1

Had liked him tremendously when we sat next to each other at a Shell dinner last night. He had asked Kavita and I to dinner this evening, and now had us driven to the outskirts of Beijing, past the Summer Palace, in a government limousine with six different horns, each of which we used, as we blazed at warp speed towards the Western Hills. We were met and accompanied by a SEPA Deputy Director, Wang Qian, who is as good an ambassador for China as you are likely to find.

The dinner was at the ‘Apricot Blossom Hamlet’, in the Beijing Botanical Garden, near the ‘Fragrance Hill’, where we are joined by Vice Minister Pan and Dr Shu Qing, Deputy Director-General. I enormously admire what Vice Minister Pan and his colleagues have been doing, with SEPA energetically pursuing polluters and shutting a considerable number of projects down to force greater attention to environmental issues. A very courageous politician.

All in all, a quite extraordinary meeting of minds – and the most sophisticated vegetarian repast I have yet eaten, including bird’s nest soup, though I think our Chinese friends would have much preferred meat. In the process, we drank ‘Daughter Red’ wine, which apparently is buried in a ceramic urn when a girl is born and dug up and drunk – with plums dropped in – when she turns eighteen. I found myself wondering what sort of world – and what sort of China – a newborn girl would find if a bottle buried today were to be dug up in 2023?

Dr Shu Qing, Kavita, Vice Minister Pan Yue, me, Wang Qian

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

RED SHIFTED IN BEIJING

Fairly energetic day, happily with Kavita (Prakash-Mani) now alongside, starting with session with Shell, then on to Fortune 500 Global Forum to do my session on the roles and responsibilities of multinationals (with David Cunningham, President of FedEx’s Asia Pacific Division, Jim Harkness of WWF, Xue Lan, professor at Tsinghua University, all moderated by Marc Gunther of Fortune). Louis Camilleri, Chairman and CEO of Altria, the fags-to-foods group, drops out at the last moment.

The red-shifted race continues – after several cars fail to arrive at Diao Yu Tai State Guesthouse, – with high-speed car drive to a lunchtime session across town where I am due to talk to 70-80 people invited by Shell and the China Business Council for Sustainable Development. Then also speak at dinner with Shell, state oil companies, people from embassies and Pan Yue, Vice Minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration. He has been taking a unusually aggressive line with high-impact developments, stalling at least 20 until they tackled a range of environmental issues.

Fascinating man – and gives me a degree of hope that some of China’s environmental problems can be tackled. But we were also told today by Heng Hock Cheng, Chairman of the Shell companies in China, that China has to build power production capacity each year equivalent to the total UK grid capacity! The scale of the challenge is phenomenal. We were also told that before the Olympics draconian measures like shutting down many boilers and many factories will be taken to clean up the air, plus seeding the skies with silver nitrate, to settle out the gunk!

Pre-panel session

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

TIANANMEN SQUARE

After the Temple of Heaven, consenting adults were bussed across to Tiananmen Square, where we were offered drinks on the rostrum overlooking where the massacre of students happened in 1989. I didn’t drink, but silently toasted the aspirations and courage of those extraordinary people – exemplified by the young man with the shopping bags who stopped that platoon of tanks in their tracks. Some of the buildings around the Square are very reminiscent of the megalomaniac construction attempted by President Ceaucescu, who paid for his manifold sins in front of an impromptu firing squad that same year – events I covered in my published diary of 1989, A Year In the Greenhouse (Gollancz, 1990).

Ceiling lights

Balustrade

Flag

Great Hall of the People in the distance

Tiananmen Square ablaze

Can’t wait to see this place in daylight

TEMPLE OF HEAVEN

Fly (originally typed ‘fry’, perhaps because everyone at Narita encouraged me to “have a good fright”) in to Beijing from Tokyo. Due to speak at a session of the Fortune 500 Global Forum, titled ‘China and the New Asian Century’. Met at the airport by Antonius Papaspiropoulos and driver – and bags come through at lightning speed.

After dropping off stuff at China World Hotel, I take a taxi to the Diao Yu Tai State Guesthouse, or at least that’s what I ask for. Am taken to the Daioyutai Hotel instead, where they seem to know nothing about the Guesthouse, even though it’s only a (fairly large) city block away. After all sorts of confusions, I get to the Guesthouse in the end, register, and then find it’s already time to head back in busses through the afternoon traffic to the St Regis Hotel, to await embarkation for an evening at Temple of Heaven.

The Temple turns out to be literally out of this world, with a fairly dramatic light show and very impressive dinner – though I have to keep ducking and weaving to avoid the endless meaty treats put in front of me. And it’s even harder than usual because each diner has a young, impressively costumed attendant standing just behind them – although they don’t attempt to force-feed me.

I find myself sitting betwen the CEO of a speciality oil products company and the CEO of a Hawaiian property company, both of them pretty substantial concerns (the oil company’s annual revenues are $7 billion) – and both Paul and Allen are informed and thoughtful on sustainability issues. But Allen and I spend much of the time talking about history, particularly that of the Vietnam War, where he served during those crucible years. His wife, also at the table, is Vietnamese and her father was one of the last senior officers out – finally deciding to leave when he heard that the Communists were executing officers in front of their men. The plane before his was shot down and his crash-landed in Thailand.

One real high point for me was the high-energy flights of swifts that shot back and forth across the assembled heads during the early stage of the evening. Reminded me of cycling home to Barnes on summer evenings, when the swifts come bombing down the street at you, mouths open, and shrieking like maniacs. The avian equivalent of Hell’s Angels. By contrast, the musicians playing around the Temple were like something from the Elysian Fields, China-style.

Musicians behind screens line approach to Temple of Heaven

The backdrop

Lasers

Balloons

Young people lining exit route

Monday, May 16, 2005

FUJITSU: THE POSSIBILITIES ARE INFINITE

After the fish market, Tomoo and I did an hour-long interview and then were collected for the drive across to the Fujitsu Research Institute (FRI) conference I keynoted this afternoon. The session was chaired by Professor Haruo Shimida, Chairman of FRI. Panellists were: Kimie Iwata, General Manager at the CSR Department of Shiseido, the cosmetics company; Seiichi Ueyama, General Manager of the Corporate Citizenship Department at AEON, the retail group; Masanobu Katoh, Corporate Vice President at Fujitsu; and Kiyoshi Masuda, General Manager of Toyota’s Environmental Affairs Division. An excellent event, with some good questions afterwards.

Then we were driven to a Fujitsu centre opposite Hibiya Park, to be presented with the Fujitsu vision of the future, ‘netCommunity’ (http://e-japan.fujitsu.com/nc/). The Fujitsu motto is ‘The Possibilities are Infinite’, and the exhibition is designed to show the myriad ways in which Fujitsu technology – from palm print readers to RFID tags – can promote a better society. I am afraid I asked a number of ‘Big Brother’ questions, which was somewhat in the spirit of some my comments this afternoon. For example, when commenting on the Toyota presentation, I warned that although they may talk of sustainable mobility solutions, for car companies the almost uniform answer to the question of what ‘sustainable mobility’ might be is some form of car. I also noted that the idea that car ownership might reach saturation in China fills me with horror.

And then I had to quietly turn down foie gras sushi this evening at dinner, apparently something of a culinary innovation here. I imagine I will be persona non grata from now on …?

Palm print technology

Have you tried our RFID tags?

Marked from birth

Something about baby worries me …

Ah, of course. He/it has wings!

TOKYO FISH MARKET

Did I know you?

Tomoo and I make an early morning visit to Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market, a first for us both. Earlier, Tomoo and Judy had forwarded me a link to an Observer article on the implications of the nature and scale of Japanese fish consumption for the world’s oceans:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/foodmonthly/story/0,,1453356,00.html

One of the most striking lines from the piece, by Alex Renton, was from a fish conservation poster in the Misaki fish market, featuring a smiling fisherman and a haiku:

Shining ocean
Is a big mirror
Which reflects our future.

True, but unfortunately the reflections suggest a pretty dire future for oceanic fish, for this extraordinary fish market and for fish consumers, both in Japan and elsewhere.

Take the bluefin tuna. As Renton puts it: “The bluefin is the black truffle of the tunas: mysterious, rare and stunningly expensive. Its raw belly meat provides the greatest otoro, the fatty tissue that is the most prized for sashimi and sushi. This gourmet’s distinction has been unfortunate for the fish, making it ‘severely endangered’: the Atlantic variety of bluefin is likely to be the first tuna species that will become effectively extinct. But, absurdly, the price of this luxury has collapsed because the market is glutted. That same quality bluefin tuna, from the same fishing ground, raised 2,250 yen a kilo on the Misaki quayside two years ago – maybe twice as much five years ago. ”

We have failed, again and again, to police the world’s oceans. As Renton concludes: “It’s a documented and recognised global disaster, but one we can do nothing about. No multinational mechanism exists with the muscle to beat the wallets of the fish-eaters.” Not sure what we can do in this area, but came away feeling SustainAbility should be doing something.

Retail fish market

Last tuna from morning’s auction

Tuna head

More tuna

Fugu, the deadly delicacy, contains a toxin 1200 times more lethal than cyanide

Some form of garfish?

Eco-crimes: shark’s fin and whalemeat

Where are you from?

Fading, but the colours are amazing

Swimming in a sea of blood

These guys again

Shoal on ice

The sharp end

Octopus

And, in the end, we drive it all …

Sunday, May 15, 2005

PICASA, THUNDER AND BLENDED VALUE

One of the great joys of recent days was my – perhaps somewhat belated – discovery of Picasa 2, the image management software now offered by Google. Geoff Lye at SustainAbility had mentioned recently that he found it hugely helpful, so I downloaded it yesterday (free) from www.picasa.com onto my ThinkPad. The first thing it does is to trawl through your hard drive to find all the images – and it was amazing to see images I had used years ago surfacing, like so many coelacanths. Easy to use, pretty much akin to what I have been using on my Mac for several years, and hugely recommended.

A day largely spent tapping away in my hotel room, sketching out an invited paper for California Management Review on the blended value agenda, which I’m co-authoring with Jed Emerson (who coined the blended value term, see www.blendedvalue.org) and Seb Beloe of SustainAbility. At one point in the afternoon, there was an enormous series of crashes outside, which at first I thought was an earthquake – but which turned out to be a thunder storm.

Saturday, May 14, 2005

‘CRANE’ AND BULLET TRAIN

Heron stalks …

Tabloid headline: ‘Gotcha!’

Well, maybe it was a white heron rather than a crane, but as I walked around the Hama-rikyu Gardens this afternoon a water bird caught its prey. At one stage, this was effectively the family garden of the Tokugawa Shogun, a place for leisure and duck hunting. The place was pulverised, however, by the Great Kanto Earthquake and by WWII bombing raids. A typhoon – ‘Kitty’ – also hit in 1949, the year I was born. Much of the gardens still seem in shambles, with diggers at work in various places behind ‘No Entry’ signs. And the moat around the gardens is rancid and foul-smelling, full of prams, haversacks and other rubbish – surprising in such a tidy city.

Soaring over the gardens is a glistening wall of skyscrapers, including the one where we had dinner the other evening. As I walk back to the hotel, bullet trains slide noiselessly through the backdrop. Then off to dinner with friends, their children and mother-in-law. Wonderful to see a Japanese family at home. Then driven home in – you guessed it – a Prius.

Bullet train: Ambitious Japan!

A DAVID IN JAPAN

Saying goodbye to Judy (Kuszewski) this morning, I was reminded of something that a number of the Japanese people we have met this week have said, often with a slight sense of awe. They simply cannot imagine how SustainAbility, which we openly explain is a global midget of between 20 and 25 people, can have had such an impact in Japan. Indeed, there often seems to be a Wizard of Oz character to our reputation here.

The answers to the riddle, I suspect, are relatively simple. They include picking the right issues over the years, building relationships with the right partners, and coming here year after year. This must be my tenth or twelfth trip over the past 20 years or so. The interesting question as our interests expand to include countries like China and India is how we can build the capacity to invest similar – or greater – levels of effort across the wider region. This is something we will have to think about in greater depth when Kavita (Prakash-Mani) and I join Judy back in our London office, after our impending trip to Beijing.

Friday, May 13, 2005

E-SQUARE AND TACHI, A HUMAN PHENOMENON

Tea ceremony house roof

This morning included a fascinating session for E-Square Inc., founded in September 2000 and dedicated to creating a ‘green economy’ (www.e-squareinc.com). Their CEO, Peter David Pedersen has visited our London offices several times, typically with a small group of Japanese companies in tow. Today’s session attracted around 30 people, from companies as diverse as All Nippon Airways, The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Fuji Photo Film, Matsushita Electric Industrial, The Seiyu, Sekisui Chemical, and the charmingly named Unicharm Corporation. The theme of the session, for which I was providing the keynote, was ‘sustainable business models and branding’.

But by far the most charming feature of the event was Takashi ‘Tachi’ Kiuchi, one of Japan’s most iconoclastic businessmen. He picked Judy (Kuszewski), Tomoo (Machiba) and I up from our hotel in a chauffeur-driven limousine and took us to Kaitokaku, a huge grey house on a hill at the eastern end of the Tanakawa Heights – an area once famed as a place to view cherry blossom and the moon.

As Chairman and CEO of Mitsubishi Electric America, Tachi oversaw the company’s transition from the old to the new economy. He also championed a “living systems” approach to business that included rapid adaptation, financial transparency, openness, cultural diversity, executive positions for women and environmental sustainability. But he is perhaps best known in NGO circles for developing a breakthrough agreement with the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) to promote corporate sustainability.

Among other things, he is now Chairman of the Future 500 (www.globalff.org) and CEO of E-Square. Surfing the Net to find out more about him, I was not surprised to find (on the Forum for Corporate Conscience site, www.forumforcorporateconscience.com) that in his spare time he skydives, runs marathons, climbs Mount Fuji, rides his bicycle to the Future 500 HQ in downtown Tokyo and does 1600 push-ups a day.

On top of it all, he has a wonderful sense of humour. Indeed, one of the things I commented on during the Kaitokaku session was that the participants had been showing a great deal of humour as we ran around the table. And that, for me, has always been a good sign, suggesting that people are no longer in awe of the agenda, but are allowing a degree of playfulness to creep in – and this, in turn, potentially fuels creative, lateral thinking.

After the excellent lunch with the E-Square team and other participants, Judy, Tomoo and I walked around the gardens, among other things watching the huge trellised wisteria being pruned by a platoon of gardeners. The somewhat drear grey stone main house was designed by English architect Josiah Conder, but – following extensive damage during the wartime air raids – the interior was reconstructed from 1963. Commissioned by Yanosuke Iwasaki – who died the same year it was finished – the house was later used by the Mistubishi Company to entertain executives and staff.

The gardens also suffered post-war neglect, but things have been looking up. The 300-year-old wisteria produces huge blossoms each year, each some 24-24 inches long, indeed the remnants of these were being trimmed away by the gardeners as we watched. And in the rose garden, something like 1,000 rose bushes bloom all at once each year, which must be a spectacle.

Wisteria gets a trim

Then we crunched across the carefully raked gravel to yet another taxi for the trip to the next session, this time with the Nikkei BP Environmental Management Forum. I did the speech, Tomoo translated, and – once again – CSR was on top of everyone’s mind. In this case, however, one key area of interest was how an initiative originally set up to tackle environmental issues could transform itself to handle the wider corporate social responsibility agenda.

Interestingly, a degree of angst was expressed by at least one major company about the way in which the questionnaires sluicing in from foreign socially responsible investment (SRI) funds increasingly feature a growing range of social issues, among them issues related to human rights. So, while apologising for possible political insensitivity, I explained why human rights are important even in developed countries like Japan, noting the presence of sizeable excluded populations in Japan – quite apart from the ongoing dispute with China over wartime atrocities carried out by the Japanese.

Later in the evening, Judy, Tomoo and I walk out into the city, drop into a small, convivial bar, and have a wonderfully relaxing supper – surrounded by end-of-the-week salarymen who get progressively livelier as the evening wears on – and the beer and sake flow. In the background, a cook throws the most extraordinary range of species onto the open grill, triggering great clouds of steam and sheets of flame. A speciality of the house seems to be huge fish-heads

Thursday, May 12, 2005

‘RISK & OPPORTUNITY’ LAUNCH

Main event of the day is the launch of the Japanese language version of our Risk & Opportunity report in front of 250-300 executives. Judy and I both speak, together with Daisuke Fukutomi, Director of Corporate & Government Ratings at Standard & Poor’s, our partners in the project – alongside the United Nations Environment Progamme (UNEP). I get hooked out of the session before Judy begins to begin the first of a series of five or six press interviews, most with photographers buzzing around like electric bluebottles.

Afterwards, we are taken out to dinner by people from the Japanese end of Ernst & Young. The Japan-as-predator theme continues in my brain as we are served with white clods of conger eel in clear broth, and the delightful waitress gaily tells us that the animal was killed but moments before for our dining pleasure.

What with the 90-minute interview I did early this morning for the Editor-in-Chief of Toyo Keizai magazine, I end the day feeling fairly hoarse. Toyo Keizai, who are 110 years old this year and describe themselves as the Japanese version of The Economist, are organising a major conference later in the year at which I am due to be one of the speakers. And then, from 22.30, do a 60-minute teleconference with the SustainAbility Board, with calls linking in from the West and east coasts of the US, the UK, Belgium and Switzerland. Highly productive.

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

PANASONIC’S FUTURE LABORATORY

I go bladerunner

We kick off the day at the Panasonic Center Tokyo, complete with photovoltaic cell-stippled roof, where the Matsushita Group spotlights its twin visions of ‘the ubiquitous network society’ and of ‘peaceful coexistence with the environment’. We meet Managing Director and Board member Hidetsuga Otsuru and several of his colleagues, before they take us around the exhibits. When I am subjected to a retinal scan, my retinas glow blue and I end up looking like something from Bladerunner. We also visit the ‘Future Laboratory’, where all sorts of futuristic machinery responds to every human whim. All utterly fascinating, but leaves me feeling somewhat uneasy. Odd sense that we dream of living in Star Trek luxury, but may end up back in caves rather faster than we can imagine.

Later in the day, I do a keynote at a Nikkei CSR Group session with 25-30 executives. Discussion, as ever, slow to start, so I end up giving 10-minute answers to the questions I do get, though this includes Tomoo (Machiba)’s translations. Companies present include Shiseido, Sumitomo Forestry, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and Tokyo Marine & Nichido Insurance.

After drinks, Tomoo and I head off to dinner at Zipangu with two colleagues from Sony, Asako Nagai (who I first met when she worked with Ford in Detroit) and Hidemi Tomita, who I first met when he worked with Sony in Germany. We dine on the forty-seventh floor of a soaring Shiodome skyscraper, which soon has us talking about earthquakes. The trip down in an open, glass elevator is vertiginous – and, as my ears pop, I wonder if the same thing happened to those who fell to their deaths from the World Trade Center.

Wonderful meal, with the only hiccup being the arrival of carefully prepared servings of shark’s fin. I gently squawk and avoid, but the more I eat out in Japan, the more I have the sense of a mighty predator drawing in threatened species from around the globe. And the fate of dominant species in overtaxed environments was nicely spotlighted earlier in the day by the dinosaur scultpure rearing through the heart of the Panasonic Centre.

Eco-efficient mini-dishwasher

21st century luxury at finger-tip command

Tomoo sees future of transport

Judy views over-bed dream machine

Dinosaur sculpture and solar cells

And so goobye: Elkington-san, Otsuru-san, Kuszewski-san

Our team: Tomoo (second from left), me, Judy

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

SPELL GINKGO

Spot the missing ginkgo. To my left: Mr Chung Haebong (Chief Executive Officer of Eco-Frontier), and to my right: Professor Byoung-Hoon Ahn (Korea Advanced Institution of Science and Technology Graduate School of Management).

One of the nice touches of this visit has been that Antonius Papasiropoulos of Shell came up with the idea of having a small golden badge struck for the occasion, in the shape of a ginkgo leaf (gingko also seems a permissible spelling). The point being that the ginkgo tree is a symbol of longevity in Korea – and has been around as a species for some 270 million years. By the end of the day, half Seoul seemed to be wearing them on their lapel. I’m normally not a great badge-wearer, indeed I avoid them like some lapel plague, but have rather enjoyed the sense of confraternity bestowed by this one.

Monday, May 09, 2005

CHEONGGYE CLEAN UP

Seoul

Arrived very late last night, after storms reduced Hong Kong’s airport to chaos. When I had flown to Melbourne, BA lost one of my bags, whereas this time Cathay Pacific manages the feat of losing both. As longstanding colleague Antonius Papaspiropoulos of Shell Gas & Power kindly greets me and travels with me in the limousine into Seoul, where we’re staying at the Lotte Hotel, it’s around midnight and I’m wondering what it’s going to be like greeting Mayoral folk and the British Ambassador tomorrow in jeans.

In the background, the news continues to be about Pyongyang’s continuing threats to test a ‘plutonium-based nuclear device’, or bomb as Tom Lehrer long ago encouraged us to call such things. But, as someone says to me today, the further away from Korea you get the more fearful such issues seem – and vice versa. People here seem surprisingly relaxed about it all.

Today starts with a breakfast with Dr Colin McClune, Chairman of Shell Pacific Enterprises, and some of his colleagues, followed by a session with a number of Korean journalists, mainly from business magazines and media. Much interest in how Korea stands in relation to the rest of the world in relation to our issues. Well briefed by Shell, my hosts here, local NGO Eco-Frontier and Insight Communications, I was able to say that Korean companies have been making a fair amount of progress, albeit from a relatively low base.

Some 2,500 are now registered under the ISO14001 environmental standards, perhaps 50 have published environmental reports and seven – with Samsung SDI having jumped in first – have produced at least one sustainability report. Several banks have signed the Carbon Disclosure Project and a fair number of companies also now have product-related environmental certification. But my sense is that most of this driven by concerns about the environmental and sustainability concerns of major international markets and customers rather than by any great local appetite for sustainable development.

One of the most interesting meetings is a session with the Vice Mayor of Seoul. (The Mayor, we are told, has lost his voice but see below.) The Vice Mayor turns out to have an attractive sense of humour, as do many of the Koreans I meet. We talk about a number of sustainability-related issues, including air quality problems in the city and the ‘yellow dust’ problem caused in Korea by soil erosion in nearby China. But the subject that I was particularly interested in was the Cheonggyecheon restoration project, which involves removing an elevated stretch of highway and uncovering a long-buried stretch of stream in the city centre.

In some ways this is a matter of national pride, in that the environmental defects now being addressed reflected the exigencies of post-war reconstruction, at a time when Korea’s GDP per caoita stood at a mere US$100, compared to US$10,000 today. The Vice Mayor and I hover over maps of the scheme while photographers happily snap away.

Diplomatically, none of us mention the latest news: a second Vice Mayor, Yang Yoon-jae, has just been arrested as part of an investigation of the stream restoration project – and charged with allegedly accepting 200 million won (US$200,000) from a real estate developer, in exchange for relaxing height limits for a building due to be built alongside the stream. If proved true, this could be a major blow to the Mayor’s own presidential hopes. But, whatever the facts of the matter, the financial corruption charges should not blind us to the very real environmental and civic benefits of a project designed to clean up past ecological corruption.

By late morning, one of my bags – and my suit – turns up. So I am at last respectably turned out, though am still wearing an unfamiliar dolphin tie lent to me this morning by Colin McClune. One oddity: as we drive through the city today after one of two events I spoke at – a British Chamber of Commerce lunch at the Grand Hyatt Hotel and a ‘Sustainable Korea’ workshop organised by Eco-Frontier – someone points out that most of the cars here are white, off-white, pale brown, grey or black. The overall impression, coupled with the Eastern bloc aesthetic of much of the building, is dusty, workaday, drab.

By contrast, our dinner this evening with the British Ambassador, Warwick Morris, is a welcome respite in a small green oasis, complete with lawns and even a newly constructed – and thatched – bird table. Sadly, though, bird life is in short supply here, given the general hostility of the surrounding environment to wildlife. Many interesting conversations, but one in particular sticks in my mind – with Dr Chul-Hwan Koh, a profesor of marine biology and member of Korea’s Presidential Commission on Sustainable Development. Having spent seven years as a member of the European Commission’s Consultative Forum on Sustainable Development, which proved unwieldy at around 30 members, I am interested to hear that Korea’s version is having a real impact with 80 members.

In my small thank you speech as the dinner winds down, I note that the day’s conversations have encouraged me to do my homework on Korea when I get home. And the process is already starting. When I get back to the hotel, there is a new book on my bed: The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies, by Michael Breen (St Martin’s Press, 1998/2004). Something to read on tomorrow’s flight as my bags no doubt go AWOL again.

Sunday, May 08, 2005

CATHAY PACIFIC TO HONG KONG

What do you do? we are often asked. One of the SustainAbility team recently found it all so hard to explain that he began telling people that he was a banker. But every now and then you get into a conversation where it’s easier. I had one of those today.

The day started in Melbourne and, if all goes well, will end in Seoul. Up at 05.15, after a much-disturbed night of riotous noise in the streets outside: post-football revels, I learned. The hotel’s Indian receptionist â originally from Hyderabad – said (despairingly) that this was pretty typical for a weekend. My taxi driver, originally from the Punjab, agreed. The back seat of his car was covered in the vile debris from previous passengers who, he sighed, were generally drunk. Not surprisingly, he wasnât enamored with Australian youth or sports culture.

Brilliant white banks of mist stand between trees, over river courses as the sun rises over the airport. I am flying Cathay Pacific to Hong Kong, then on to Seoul. Business class is bursting at the seams, with two travelers ahead of me being involuntarily downgraded because no-one is prepared to accept money to switch to Economy. Another sign of the growing importance of the ‘China trade’?

I find myself sitting next to a white-haired Australian farmer, traveling to China and Japan as part of a delegation from a dairy cooperative. They sell powdered milk and cheeses to Asia. He asks me what I do, and when I tell him, he regales me with some of the many issues the farming community now faces, particularly the long-running drought and incipient problems of soil salinization caused by irrigation. His farm’s water allocation has been cut back again this year, which makes life progressively tougher. Many people are leaving the land, though the fact that water rights are now tradable and they can sell their increasingly valuable allocations often helps ease the transition. He’s not at all sure that he will encourage his children to stay on the land.

We trade notes on some of the politicians I have met on this trip, among them Victoria Premier Steve Bracks, Deputy Premier John Thwaites and Treasurer John Brumby, and he comments that they are all more aware of environmental and other sustainability issues than their predecessors. But he wonders whether we are acting fast or effectively enough.

Our talk roams back and forth over decades. And, as it happens, today is my parents’ 58th wedding anniversary. As we head north over the old, scoured, arid wastes of the Australian outback, I find myself musing how all our issues will be seen 58 years from now, in 2063. I shall be long gone, of course, but I muse to my farmer friend that a world of 9-10 billion people is going to be radically different, with growing problems in such areas as climate change and human and livestock pandemics.

Rick Murray of Swiss Re used an extraordinary slide during our conferences this week which underscored the ways in which the impact of diseases such as foot-and-mouth, BSE and SARS already impact the insurance and reinsurance industries. Both Australia and New Zealand are now highly expert at biosecurity, with intensive checks as you land to ensure visitors don’t bring in diseases, but no system is perfect. And there will be those who intentionally introduce diseases as acts of terrorism or economic warfare.

In fact, one of the most interesting bets Wired magazine ‘Senior Maverick’ Kevin Kelly told me about when I visited him in San Francisco a few weeks back and we talked about the predictions open for wagers on the www.longbets.com website was that one million people would die in a single bioterror or bioerror incident in the first few decades of the 21st century.

Having read the latest issue of Scientific American on the flight up from Auckland a few days back, I would say that the chances were high. Scientists researching ice cores have found evidence of falling carbon dioxide and methane levels accompanying massive historic die-backs in the human population, as when 25-40% of the European population were killed by bubonic plague in Roman times, and again when similar proportions were killed in the Middle Ages. But perhaps most dramatic was the period of die-back of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas when the Europeans arrived, bringing with them diseases such as smallpox. Perhaps as many as 50 million died.

Sustainability may be hard to define, but that strikes me as one form of unsustainability.

THE MURRAY EDMONDS FLYING CIRCUS

This is the seventh time I have led one of Murray Edmonds’ Flying Circus tours of Australia and New Zealand – and it’s great to be on the road again with Murray and Dobrina – and with a wonderful new bunch of speakers. Here is a miscellany of images accumulated during the 2005 tour. Some say this was the best tour yet, but each tour has had its own strengths, joys and nail-biting moments. None of them, however, would have got airborne had it not been for Murray and Dobrina’s Herculean efforts (www.edmondsmgt.com.au).

I do not envy my neighbour’s plate

On our first day in Melbourne, we visit a school that is ‘going sustainable’

Dobrina awaits

The Circus warms up on the runway

The CSR ‘crusade’ builds

I lie cheek-by-jowl with David Grayson and Adrian Hodges

Peter Nelson (CEO, NZ Business Council for SD), Debra (Dunn), (Baroness) Barbara Young

Pamela Hartigan and Peter Nelson

Richard (Murray), right, in conversation

David Smith, CEO, IAG New Zealand

Murray and Debra unwind at the farewell dinner in Auckland

Red shoes: Kerry Griffiths, Principal Sustainability Consultant, URS, New Zealand

And so good night.

Saturday, May 07, 2005
THE COLOUR INDIGO

Rooftop reflections

One of the questions I had been sent in advance for a session with the Melbourne City Council team yesterday was an oddball: ‘What is your favourite colour?’

In preparing for the session – which mainly meant scratching my head on the flight across from Auckland – I had pondered this one at some length. The strange thing was that no particular colour fitted the bill. What came to mind, instead, was a sequence of diverse, mixed colourations: so, for example, lapis lazuli, rainbows, the Northern Lights. But, after discussion, I finally settled on some form of midnight blue, or – as Adam Briscomb prompted me to conclude – indigo. A blue-black, mysterious colour.

Primed with that thought, I was walking along Flinders Lane earlier on this afternoon, on my way to the National Galleryof Victoria (where I decided not to see the Adny Warhol ‘Time Capsules’ exhibition largely on the basis of the fact that I wasn’t sure I had enough money both for that and for a taxi tomorrow morning), when I spotted some delightfully variegated and colourful painted lines on the entry ramp to some sort of parking facility. As I took photographs, an Asian employee who was smoking outside the building approached me with a nervous smile and asked whether I was planning to sue someone?

Then I went swimming in the pool on top of the hotel, at several points swimming out over the street. And there were touches of indigo in the water, I thought. Since I can’t work out how to dimension the photos on my laptop, this is the only picture I will post until I get back.

Saturday, May 07, 2005

AM I AN INVASIVE SPECIES?

Don’t drop names, I say, unless you can drop a barrow-load. So here we go. I’m back in Melbourne, after a whistle-stop tour of Australia and New Zealand with our annual traveling circus. We have done major conferences in Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland, though I have also been doing a number of other speeches and sessions on the side, including a session for the New Zealand Business Council for Sustainable Development, a lunchtime session yesterday for Melbourne City Council (www.melbourne.vic.gov.au) and, last night, an Alfred Deakin Innovation Lecture (www.deakinlectures.com), in memory of one of Australia’s most influential historic politicians, in Melbourne Town Hall.

The theme of the Deakin session was ‘Using Capital Creatively’, the chair was Victoria’s Premier, Steve Bracks, and the other speakers included Bendigo Bank CEO Rob Hunt, Dr R.A. Mashelkar (Director General of India’s Council of Scientific & Industrial Research) and, though a paper presented on his behalf, Senator Aden Ridgeway, an Indigenous leader and Democrats Senator for New South Wales.

Once again, our 2005 conference tour has been organized by Murray Edmonds, a long-standing member of our Faculty (www.edmondsmgt.com.au). This year the focus has been on the practicalities of implementing sustainable development and our line-up has included (Baroness) Barbara Young, who runs the UK Environment Agency, Richard Murray, who is Chief Risk Strategist for Swiss Re, Debra Dunn, senior vice-president at Hewlett-Packard (HP), Pamela Hartigan, who is Managing Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, and two people from IAG, the Australian insurance group, Sam Mostyn (she toured with us in Australia) and NZ IAGCEO (are you keeping up?) David Smith, who joined us in Auckland. I have been enormously impressed by the way that IAG are embedding a range of corporate responsibility and sustainability-related priorities.

Before coming out, I did an interview with George Dallas, who heads the corporate governance practice at credit-risk-raters Standard & Poor’s (S&P), which I brought with me in the form of a DVD and which we have shown at each of the conferences. It has gone down very well – and can be seen on the SustainAbility website. Note, incidentally, that George and I weren’t in the same room when the filming was done – we were on different continents, filming at different times, so I was interviewing an empty chair.

Among other folk I meet again as we travel round: Ros Kelly (a former federal Environment Minister in Austrlaia, married to the CEO of Westpac Bank, David Morgan) and, in Auckland, Ann Sherry, who is Westpac’s CEO in New Zealand. Ros reminds me, when we meet in Sydney, of the time – some years ago – when she invited me to dinner with David and some of his Westpac colleagues. She often remarks that this was a key milestone in the evolution of Westpac’s sustainability thinking.

This is the seventh time I have done the Oz-NZ tour; last year I couldn’t make it and my place was taken by ex-New Zealand Premier Mike Moore. Originally, in 1998, the focus was on environment, but the agenda opened out rapidly thereafter. Indeed the triple bottom line concept, which SustainAbility originated in 1994, has exploded in Australia and New Zealand – a bit like such introduced species as rabbits and cane toads in Australia and possums in New Zealand.

I’m still pondering whether to try swimming in the pool here at the Adelphi Hotel, a pool which is apparently cantilevered out from the hotel’s roof, over the street, so you can swim over the transparent bottom and see pedestrians walking around many floors below. But, while I’m sure the perspective would be interesting, I suffer from vertigo and discretion may well get the better of valor. And this trip is already proving all sorts of bottom-up, top-down and inside-out perspectives that provide more than adequate compensation.

Three things that have been borne in on me are these:

First, the extraordinary impact that SustainAbility’s work has had in different parts of the world.

Second, the way in which sustainability issues are now penetrating the political debate, both on this side of the world and in the UK – where Tony Blair is pledged to bring climate change into the agendas of his EU and G8 presidencies, while the Conservatives had threatened to eviscerate Barbara’s Environment Agency and to drop the just-introduced Operating & Financial Review (OFR) requirement for companies, one of the most interesting recent advances in corporate governance legislation.

And, third, the way that markets are beginning to pick up on the social and environmental priorities that make up the sustainable development agenda. Debra Dunn noted that HP now wins contracts each year worth several billion dollars where the project criteria include social and/or environmental specifications. And, she added, that area of business is growing at 30-50% a year.

Oh, and a final thought. Our addition of Pamela’s social enterprise component this year has gone down a storm. The ‘can do’ attitudes of social entrepreneurs chimes in very powerfully with the ‘it’s time to walk the talk’ theme of the 2005 tour.

BLAIR, ERUPTIONS AND EELS

Well, Blair – along, presumably, with his pledges to bring climate change onto this year’s G8 and EU Presidency agendas – is back. But his significantly reduced majority – and the fact that he has tapped Gordon Brown as his successor within the next Parliament – raise a forest of question marks over his future effectiveness. But at least the Conservatives aren’t in and energetically disabling Barbara Young’s Environment Agency or removing the newly introduced Operating & Financial Review (OFR) requirement, both things they had promised (threatened) to do.

A world away, Barbara tees up in Melbourne

Now that the blasts of hot air are over, we can settle back to politics as usual. Meanwhile, today’s Australian Financial Review reports on a blast of 200 degree steam which erupted here a few weeks back. It was produced as part of attempts to exploit geothermal energy from the arid northeeastern corner of South Australia – by drilling four kilometres down into hot granitic rocks thought to contain twelve times as much energy as the fossil fuel reserves of the North-West Shelf. Apparently, these are the hottest rocks of their sort known worldwide other than beneath volcanoes.

Which reminds me of a conversation last night with Victoria’s Deputy Premier, John Thwaites, after a dinner atop the city’s ANZ Tower. He had just flown in from the Mount Eccles region, where he had visited an area where indigenous people some 8,000 years ago had cut into basaltic lava flows to divert local water flows and, by creating a series of wetlands, constructed a series of elver-rearing ponds. The spectacular wraparound views from the ANZ Tower and that blast of superheated steam the other day may have been pretty impressive, but the ponds (and the nearby clusters of stone-built homes) underscore the fact that the aboriginal peoples were often a great deal more sophisticated than many imagine. I thought I had been knocking off most of the places I still wanted to see in the world, among them northern Cyprus, but people just keep adding to the list!

Thursday, May 05, 2005

TALL POPPIES

In the final session of the Auckland conference, Professor Brian Springett once again raises an issue that has surfaced a number of times as we traveled around – that of the ‘tall poppy syndrome’. The problem is that people who excel in Australia and New Zealand tend to be cut down. Indeed, as Brian puts it: ‘There’s a ruddy great mowing machine operating.’ Given the importance of generating waves of successful social entrepreneurs, this potentially poses a major challenge. Interestingly, Pamela (Hartigan)’s presentations have addressed the issue of which cultures around the world support entrepreneurship – and which don’t.

Brian and Delyse Springett part-hosted my first visit to New Zealand. When I ask Delyse this evening, at an end-of-tour dinner at the No. 5 restaurant in Auckland, when that was, she says it was in 1995. Thank heavens for external memory modules. That time, I was speaking at a sustainable tourism conference in Wellington. Air New Zealand flew Elaine and I out first class – the first and only time I have flown first class – and Gaia came with us too, traveling steerage at our own expense.

Typically, I had brought only summer clothes and we arrived in Wellington in the midst of their first snowstorm for 40 years. When we eventually crossed to South Island and started to drive south, we were turned back by the police, who said the roads were impassable. In the event, we discovered the delights of Farewell Spit and of whale-watching off Kaikoura. Most impressively of all, however, we pitched up at a winery in the Marlborough district late at night, to find it closed for the winter. It turned out to be owned by Jane Hunter, a well-known New Zealand vintner. She opened up her restaurant just for us, lit a huge fire and made us feel wonderfully at home.

When we finally flew out, after a visit to the hot springs of Rotorua, Gaia appeared in the first class lounge at Auckland airport as a post-Apocalyptic vision, wearing dreadlocks, paratroop boots and finger-drawn facial markings of Rotorua volcanic mud. Luckily, four or five minutes later, Roger Daltrey and The Who pitched up, too, and Gaia spent much of the flight back to London with them.

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

SYDNEY HARBOUR

A moment out, in the dark. Debra (Dunn) and I walk back from The Wharf restaurant, hard by Sydney Bridge, to the hotel. Great restaurant, where I had been taken when I first came to Australia, by Paul Gilding of Ecos. One test of The Wharf’s flexibility this evening: Debra, Pamela and I all ask for grilled barramundi, rather than fried â as it appears on the menu. And they oblige.

Anyway, Debra and I walk right around the harbor front, pausing to watch gulls circling like moths in the spotlights above the bridge – and later I learn they are themselves hunting for moths, attracted by the lights. How extraordinarily privileged we are to be able to have conversations like these in such places.

Pamela leaving The Wharf

Sydney Opera House

Sunday, May 01, 2005

100 MILLION HEARTS EN ROUTE TO OZ

Arrived in Melbourne around 04.30 this morning, to find BA had lost one of my bags in transit. Apart from anything else, it was the one with all my plugs and cables, making me realise – once again – how umbilically connected one is to the rest of the world, and how truncated when such things go AWOL. Roll on total wirelessness. Arrival takes a little longer than normal – and Murray (Edmonds) puts me in a car into the city with me still having no idea if and when the bag will arrive. But great to see him and, as I tell him, its extraordinary that he would greet a plane at such an uncivilised hour. Still, (Baroness) Barbara Young, another of our speakers was arriving not long afterwards, so it was two birds with one stone.

As flight BA17 flew in across bulldozer-scalped landscapes towards Changhi airport, Singapore, its shadow racing across the cleared areas and green pimpled oil palm plantations, I was just hitting page 181 in Kerri Sakamoto’s astounding book One Hundred Million Hearts (Harcourt 2003). She writes about two sisters in today’s world whose father was a (failed) kamizaze pilot. And the sequence on page 181 is about the Peace Park and museum in Hiroshima. Their reactions – or at least the reactions of the younger sister, Hana – were exactly mine when I visited the city in the 1980s. No sense of the historical context, nothing on the rape of Nanjing, just a story of an aerial holocaust wrought upon innocents.

The current row between the Chinese and Japanese about sanitised Japanese history books underscores the issue.

 

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

MONKEY GLANDS AND WORLD TOUR

Since getting back from San Francisco, I have mainly been absorbed in two things: working with SustainAbility’s board on our future strategy (with the SF trip having had a similar re-energising effect on me that ageing millionaires and rock stars used to get, apparently, and pre-Green-Monkey-disease scares, via injections of monkey glands in Swiss clinics), and preparing for my impending tour of Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan and China. Since a key emphasis of SustainAbility’s new strategy is likely to be on emerging markets, the trip is timely – and will be the first time I have visited South Korea and China.

SYRIA PULLS OUT

Not front page news, perhaps, but I have been watching the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon in peripheral vision. The last forces crossed the border yesterday. The possibility would have seemed outlandish when we were there a few years ago, but the assassination of Lebanon’s popular former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri catalysed trends that have brought to an end three decades of occupation. The longer term implications for the Syrian regime are unclear, but things are very unlikely to stop here.

Sunday, April 17, 2005

MONTEREY & CARMEL

On our last day, Ian and Alda drive us south to Monterey. I had wanted to visit the Monterey Aquarium (www.mbayaq.org) for pretty much as long as I can remember, having taken Elaine and the girls on a coast-to-coast tour of US aquariums 20 years ago or so. Fascinating to see the old canneries, prettified fossil remains of a more or less extinct industry, which was responsible in large part for destroying the regional fisheries. Steinbeck has long been a favourite of the Elkington family, particularly Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday.

Though time is pressing, we make our way further south along the coast to Carmel, where the beachside homes, trees and detailing are about as highly distilled a version of the Californian dream as one is likely to find. Then – after a whistlestop visit to one of the area’s orginal missions – we head back home and out to the airport for the long trip home.

Girl and shark, Monterey Aquarium

Mobile cells

Elaine and Ian

I vote for Charlton Heston

Carmel surfer

Jesus and birds

Saturday, April 16, 2005

BAY BRIDGE & PAINTED LADIES

Mark drives us – in their Civic hybrid – across to open-air breakfast alongside farmers’ market at the Ferry Building, from where we watch the Bay Bridge gain and lose a long white scarf of cloud. Ongoing conversation about where we should drive SustainAbility in future.

Under the bridge, on the far shore, we can make out massive port cranes. I muse that they look like the giant white dinosaur-like armoured vehicles from Star Wars, which prompts Mark to say that the cranes originally gave George Lukas the idea for the monsters. On the way back, we take a walk around the Presidio and Golden Gate area, and take a peek at the ‘Painted Ladies’, the wonderful Victorian homes of Alamo Square.

By the time we get back, our friends Ian Keay (our best man many moons ago) and Alda Angst have arrived. We pack our bags into their BMW and, after stopping off to see energy efficient NOW House, we drive up to a high point to look back over the city. We also take a tour of some of the houses that Ian and his team have painted in the city, including some zillionaire homes where the cost of the painting alone was equivalent to that of an average London home.

Then we head south towards Palo Alto. On the way, we cruise through the grounds of Stanford University, walking around the Rodin exhibition and a serpentine wall construction by my favourite artist, bar none: Andy Goldsworthy. Then back to Ian and Alda’s new home, out for a Thai meal, and bed.

Bay Bridge

A serpentine Goldsworthy

Headless woman by Rodin

Ian Keay

San Francisco in perspective

Friday, April 15, 2005

SOCIAL FUSION & ZUNI

Elaine and I meet Amber Nystrom for lunch, agreeing that both Elaine and Amber would be wearing items of red. We turn out to be well matched in a number of ways – indeed, when I get back to London, I shall tell the team that these meetings with social entrepreneurs are pretty much akin to what millionaires apparently used to get when they flew decades ago to Switzerland for their annual injections of monkey gland extracts!

We meet in the Ferry Building, which has been massively revamped since we were last here. A great lunch and a really invigorating conversation. Amber, who had been suggested by a friend of our San Francisco colleague Mark Lee, is the founder and Director of Social Fusion (www.socialfusion.org), a business incubator that builds the resources and knowledge to launch and grow highly innovative nonprofit and for-profit social ventures. The basic idea is that “sustainable innovation requires an ecosystem of support that bridges business expertise, proactive investment, and a community of social entrepreneurs advancing new solutions for systemic social change.”

Later in the afternoon, after a Yunnan Black tea at The Slanted Door restaurant, Elaine and I trundle through various bookshops. Among other things, I buy Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat, Joel Kotkin’s The City, Kerri Sakamoto’s One Hundred Million Hearts, and Gary Snyder’s Axe Handles. Snyder has been my favourite poet since the Sixties. Buy a second copy for Gaia, partly because she likes him too, but also partly because Part Two of the book is entitled ‘Little Songs for Gaia’. Then on to the San Francisco MOMA art museum, before catching a cable car back towards Fisherman’s Wharf, to pick up our bags from the Sheraton. The cable car system breaks down, so we decide to walk most of the way, which actually turns out to be a treat, with glorious sunshine coupled with a cool breeze.

Then across to the Folsom area of the city to stay with Mark and Val (Lee). They live in the most extraordinary home, in the midst of a light industrial area. Wonderfully hospitable, and in the evening the four of us wander across to the Zuni Cafe, on Market Street. Great sense of occasion, but delightfully informal and with wonderful service – in this case from a young Canadian woman. Elaine and I work our way down the west coast with 20 oysters in groups of four, representing different regions from Canada down to California. Mark chooses a stunning Syrah wine from Spencer & Roloson (www.punched.net).

San Francisco MOMA

Thursday, April 14, 2005

BSR BROWN BAG

Elaine and I head across to Business for Social Responsibility (www.bsr.org) to do a brown-bag with many of the team. Great session: many similarities, but also some significant differences in approach. Then a nice afternoon session near Union Square in Maiden Street (or similar) with Sara Olsen, who specialises in social return on investment (SROI). Among other things, the conversation helped me map out the overlapping space between corporate sustainability, social entrepreneurs and bottom-of-the-pyramid markets.

We walk back to Fisherman’s Wharf via Chinatown. On the way we stop into the extraordinary City Lights bookstore (www.citylights.com), where I buy George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant!, subtitled “Know Your Values and Frame the Debate.” Recommended by Aron and Berit Cramer earlier in the week. Ever the magazine-aholic, I also buy an armful of US publications such as Entrepreneur, Fast Company and Technology Review, the latter highly recommended by Kevin Kelly yesterday.

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

KEVIN KELLY AND DRIVING OFF AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER

We visit the Pier 39 aquarium, not knowing we would be at the Monterey aquarium a few days later. The highlight here was the pulsing of the Moon Jellies. We grab lunch in the Virgin record store, with Roger-Dean-esque twins and dragon over the door. Then we take BART out to Colma, to see Kevin Kelly in Pacifica. He was involved in the Whole Earth Catalog/Review business, then was editor of Wired, and wrote two of my favorite books: Out of Control (Addison Wesley, 1994) and New Rules for the New Economy (Viking Penguin, 1998). His extraordinary website is at www.kk.org

We are driven from Colma by a semi-blind taxi driver who has no idea of where he is going. In the end, we are rescued by a Good Samaritan in Pacifica: she gets in her car and drives ahead of us to the head of the valley where Kevin’s wood-clad house is to be found. Most of the house seems to be library, with one entire wall covered in images for new graphic novel or comic?, as Kevin puts it. He gives us a copy of his book Asia Grace, published by Taschen. Among the initiatives he is involved in: The Foundation for the Long Now (www.longnow.org) and the All Species Foundation (www.all-species.org). When I ask him about the conversion experience in Jerusalem which set him on a new path, he reaches into the shelves and hands me a CD of a radio interview on the theme. The man’s seems to be prepared for everything, including – in some way – Armageddon.

In the evening, back in San Francisco, we head across to Portrero Hill to see Denise Caruso, of the Hybrid Vigor Institute (www.hybridvigor.org), a member of SustainAbility’s Faculty. She is racing to finish a book on risk and genetic engineering – by Monday. Huge great model neurons stride like mega-spiders across her staircase walls. We arrive courtesy of a Latvian taxi driver, who loses his way and even switches off his meter, driving all the while like his life depended on it, as do ours. A perfectly fabulous meal, surrounded with views of the city lights and Bay.

We bring a white wine, but when asked opt for red – at which Denise pulls out an extraordinary selections of wines, from which we choose a Rabbit Ridge red. A fabulous wine. Later she drives us home, turning the corner of her street to plunge over the edge of a hill towards the broad scape of the city, very much like plunging off the leading edge of an aircraft carrier.

Pier 39 aquarium shark and fish

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

CHINESE DIG, IRISH BLAST

Day starts with, of all things, creme brule, French toast and chicken sausage, half of which we refuse immediately, half of which we leave on our plates. Some American cuisine seems like an attempt to get a bit of structure into sugar.

Later in the day we visit the Beringer winery, including their caves, largely dug out by Chinese labourers, though our guide Tom says the Irish probably did the blasting. Started in 1876, this is the oldest continuously operating winery in Napa Valley, mainly because it continued to produce wine through the Prohibition era, ostensibly for medicinal and sacred purposes. As we leave, we buy a copy of Sideways. Then on to another winery whose wines we have bought, Ravenswood. Something of a disappointment: all the wines taste the same and quite raw.

As we move deeper into the Napa, so the traffic pressure builds. Eventually we decide to drop the car off in Berkeley and take a taxi across the Bay Bridge to SF. Find ourselves in a smoking room, one of the hazards of internet hotel booking. Then across to the Blue Mermaid, which is quite pleasant, though their idea of New England clam chowder turns out to involve a good deal of bacon – which I spend much of the evening picking out and piling up on the side of my plate. But the draft Anchor Steam beer is great.

Napa vineyard (JE)

Monday, April 11, 2005

RAINBOWS, STEELHEAD TROUT AND PHOTOVOLTAICS

Wake to cries of the rooks, ravens. In the Vignonier room of the Grape Leaf Inn, Healdsburg, with morning sun coming through restrained stained glass, splashing rainbow effects. Reminds me of my attempts to reproduce San Francisco in my attic bedroom at Little Rissington in the mid-1960s. Outside, the sound of street cleaning. Inside, the hum and throb of all the pumps needed for people’s showers and Jacuzzis.

We take a picnic out into wine country settling at the Quivira winery, where we drink a delicious Petite Syrah under the trees. The winery is covered with huge arrays of photovoltaic cells and there is a sustainability scheme for the local steelhead trout, linked to a wine, Steelhead Red (www.quivirawine.com). Vines along the river banks have been ripped out and replaced with willows, woven together to slow soil erosion that has been sedimenting the fish spawning grounds. (When later in the day, we drive a huge circle through the mountains to the coast and then down to the mouth of the Russian River, we are struck by the vast amount of silt coming out into the Pacific.)

Later, we happen on the Raymond Burr winery, set up by the actor who played Perry Mason in ‘Ironside’ in the long-running TV series. Their port, originally planted for family and friends, has apparently got on to menus at upscale San Francisco restaurants and in 1996 took Double Gold at the Harvest Fair there. Well, maybe, but I can’t say we took to the wines, though they were served by a delightful woman.

Sunday, April 10, 2005
ECHO BOOMS IN SONOMA
We rent a car from Avis, then drive out on the 580 and 101, across the Richmond Bridge. The car is a Ford Taurus, a bit like driving a middle-aged sea-cucumber on wheels. The roads have also seen better days, but it’s great to be free for a while. As we head up towards Sonoma, we are both struck by the number of vineyards that seem relatively newly planted. Will Rosenzweig tells us later in the day that much of the planting was driven by New Economy money, with a perhaps inevitable echo boom and, to a degree, a perhaps inevitable bust.

Following Will’s hand-drawn map, done the previous evening because I had lost the detailed instructions he had sent by e-mail, we find both the Russian River and his magical home, the IdeaGarden (www.ideagarden.com). A Victorian house, with wrap-around porch, extraordinary garden, spiral wind mobile and Paolo Soleri bell at the entrance. Parked in the drive: a black hybrid Prius. The San Francisco area seems to be awash with Priuses, partly – someone tells us – because Toyota decided to focus its marketing efforts on a few key cities in the US.

Great lunch with Will (once known as Bill, and a serial entrepreneur, who among other things was President, CEO and Minister of Progress at the Republic of Tea and Director of the Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) conference), his wife Carla and daughter Lily. Will is a member of SustainAbility’s Faculty, and something of a stepping stone for me as I venture into the world of social enterprise. A blue jay enjoys splashing in the bird bath as we lunch, while we enjoy a couple of wines from the Belvedere winery, immediately below. Will was also CEO of Hambrecht Vineyards & Wineries, which is how he came to find this house in the first place.

Later, as we walk around the IdeaGarden, we see many lizards and a pretty lively snake. There are rafts of herbs, trees thick with orange blossom and delicious oranges, California poppies, a date palm, olive, almond and pear trees, and a great many roses. A wonderful afternoon, with Louie Armstrong playing as Will drives us around local wineries in the Prius. A really great wine tasting at the Gary Farrell winery (www.garyfarrell.com), with Lily energetically taking photographs with my digital camera.

Then on to the Armstrong redwood reserve, the first time Elaine and I had been into a redwood grove: awe-inspiring. After a winding drive back to the IdeaGarden, we head off to our hotel and dinner at Willi’s Seafood Bar, where I try and enjoy a Vision Cellars Pinot Noir, licorice, and Elaine a cabernet sauvignon from Michel Schlumberger. It really is turning into something of a Sideways adventure, albeit a great deal more civilised than the book.

IdeaGarden

Buddha and leis

Lily and Colonel Armstrong

Will in Prius

Saturday, April 09, 2005

SIDEWAYS INTO SUSTAINABILITY

We take part in a number of interesting sessions on social performance metrics and social return on investment (SROI). Gavin Power of the UN Global Compact does a brilliant lunchtime speech. The final session is chaired by Will Rosenzweig, who we are due to visit tomorrow. Late in the day, we have a wonderful dinner with Aron Cramer of BSR (www.bsr.org) and his wife Berit, at a delightful restaurant called Oliveto.

The wine was extraordinary, a Russian River pinot noir by Merry Edwards (www.merryedwards.com), one of the very few women wine-makers in the region. Haven’t yet seen the film Sideways, or read the book [Note 1: we will buy it next week at the Beringer winery, and Elaine – reading it first – will tell me that it’s too raucous for me], but it feels as though we’re starting the sideways slide into the winery world. Whether that has anything to do with sustainability remains to be seen. [Note 2: apart from sheer pleasure of most of the wines, we find sustainability projects at several wineries, particularly Quivira, www.quivirawine.com.]

Berkeley campanile

Berkeley umbrella

Friday, April 08, 2005

HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

I get up a number of times in the night to try to fix a radiator which – despite not being on – makes sounds like gnomes hammering, distant forges of the mini-Vulcans. The hotel sends up an engineer in the morning, but apparently this is normal.

Start day with an interview for Wall Street Journal on the new Nike sustainability report, which comes out in a few days. Today sees the beginning of the conference on social performance metrics, organized by the University’s of Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and, more particularly, by the Center for Responsible Business (www.haas.berkeley.edu/responsiblebusiness/). Launched in 2003, and led by Kellie McElhaney, the Center is developing a series of conferences with the Boston University School of Management and London Business School.

My keynote begins by comparing measurement across the triple bottom line as somewhat akin to broccoli: we all know it’s good for us, but I for one find it difficult to get passionately excited about metrics. Even so, measurement and performance metrics are becoming increasingly important, and I focus in on the four areas that have been preoccupying me for a while: Balance Sheets (accountability, accounting, reporting, assurance), Boards (the cross-connects between sustainable development and corporate governance), Brands (the conversations between companies and their consumers, customers and investors) and Business Models (the basic processes of wealth creation).

Lots of conversations afterwards, plus an invitation to write a paper for a special edition of the California Management Review.

Gavin Power, Kellie McElhaney, John Elkington

Thursday, April 07, 2005

BERKELEY

Elaine and I fly to San Francisco. We first went there on our honeymoon in 1973, five years after we met. That, too, had turned into a mix of work and pleasure, with visits to interesting people right across the United States. As usual, I use the flight to plough through books. Finish off The World Is Not Enough and then turn to Why Blame Israel? Read the first hundred pages and learn a good deal I didn’t know about the history of Israeli-Palestinian relations.

When we arrive at San Francisco International, the PhD student who was meant to be picking us up wasn’t there, so we hopped a cab across the Bay Bridge to Berkeley. Sign of the times: Apple’s big “Life is Random” ad hoardings for their new mini-iPod.

When I go online from the Hotel Durant, there are far fewer e-mails than usual and I wonder whether maybe the world has forgotten me? No, as it turns out. Instead, SustainAbility’s new spam filter is now working effectively, knocking out huge numbers of spurious mail that I once had to trawl through each day. One interesting e-mail notes that the new SustainAbility website is attracting three times as many CVs as the previous one, and from a wider range of people.

In the evening, Elaine and I walk around the Berkeley campus, with the Bay glittering in the background. Although I have been to San Francisco a number of times, this is the first time I have made it across to Berkeley – even though events here in the late 1960s made the place feel almost like a parallel alma mater. We are quite surprised by the extraordinary number of Asian students. When Elaine finds two very healthy and quite vigorous caterpillars in her salad at supper, the hotel gives us the meal free – even though we had only mentioned the caterpillars in passing and had tried to insist that we wanted to pay. Thanks, Crystal.

California poppies (©JE)

Wednesday, April 06, 2005
DIGITAL INCLUSION
Spent an interesting day in Reading, chairing a digital inclusion roundtable for Microsoft. I often note that the human rights agenda has mutated strikingly in recent years, increasingly taking in a range of ‘access’ issues: for example, access to clean water, access to affordable energy and access to drugs for HIV/AIDS, malaria and TB, with huge implications for the relevant industries – and for their underlying business models. The digital inclusion agenda increasingly raises similar issues for the ICT hardware, software and service provider sectors. An extremely constructive session.

Monday, April 04, 2005

OYBIKE

Multifaceted day, kicking off with a visit to OYBike in Hammersmith, a social enterprise aiming to bring high-tech cycle hire to London and other cities. Idea, as explained to me by OYBike Director Gordon Keenan, is that you will use your mobile phone to unlock cycles for hire. Hammersmith, bounded on three sides by motorways and on the fourth by the Thames, was chosen as a testbed.

I definitely wish the initiative well, but was struck by the number of challenges they still have to overcome, not the least of which will be loosing at least some innocents onto London roads. Having twice been left unconscious while cycling in London, once with three broken ribs, I’m slightly sensitive to the risks that they would face. That’s why SustainAbility has supported the London Cycling Campaign (www.lcc.org.uk), which aims to turn London into a world class cycling city.

Then back to office, on to Soho for a meeting with Ford, and back to office for meeting and teleconference with Nike people on their impending new report. Wish I’d been able to cycle home: the Piccadilly Line had signal problems, which meant that we sat there alongside a man who was playing his personal hi-fi at Concorde levels. I’d rather risk life and limb in London’s roads than put up with that sort of acoustic aggression.

Gordan Keenan with OYBike cycle stand (JE)

Saturday, April 02, 2005

STELLATA PERFORMANCE, BUT …

Couldn’t resist shooting the Magnolia stellata that has erupted in the front garden. Real sense of Spring breaking loose, with cascades of cherry blossom streaming down from the trees around the corner as I walk home. And my favourite perfume of the moment: the flowering blackcurrant on the other side of our block, albeit interspersed with the peppery odour of fox. And, overhead, the wild screech of the parakeets. How long before they turf the pigeons out of Trafalgar Square?

6 April cautionary note from (Sir) Geoffrey Chandler, among other things a member of SustainAbility Council: “The Magnolia stellata is correctly identified and admirably photographed, but I suspect your ‘flowering blackcurrant’, unless it has insipid yellowish flowers and is therefore Ribes americanum, is in fact the flowering currant (no ‘black’) Ribes sanguineum, its flowers either pinkish, red, or possibly white. With any luck no one visits [your] site and their education will therefore not be blighted. But you never know.”

He’s right, of course. The flowers are pinkish, mauveish, whiteish. I stand, or currently sit, corrected.

Friday, April 01, 2005

SKOLL FOUNDATION ANNUAL SUMMIT & AWARDS

Awards ceremony, including Sir Ben Kingsley (fifth from left), Jeff Skoll (sixth) and Sally Osberg (seventh), who heads the Skoll Foundation (©JE)

Just back from three fascinating days at the Skoll Foundation summit on social entrepreneurship, held at the Said Business School, Oxford. Chaired a session on governance, but mainly got a chance to catch up with social entrepreneurs and fellow travellers from around the world.

Last night we had the latest set of awards from the Foundation, which can be accessed by clicking the title of this item. Award winners shown in the photo. One of the highlights of the event: a showing of part of the film Gandhi, starring Ben Kingsley who now presented the awards, dubbed into Palestinian Arabic – for showings in Palestinian refugee camps. The sequence shown was where Gandhi, abed, told a Hindu he could atone for his murder of a Muslim child (in revenge for the murder of his own son) by adopting a Muslim child – and raising him or her as a Muslim.

Today started with a small, invitation-only breakfast session with people from Participant Productions (Jeff Skoll’s new Hollywood film production company, www.participantproductions.com), and from media organisations like the BBC and PBS. Left me thinking we should do more with the media.

For more on the event, go to either www.skollfoundation.org or to www.social edge.org. After the summit ended, Geoff Lye and I did a session for MSc and PhD students from the Environmental Change Institute in Oxford (http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/). Great fun.