Journal

Saturday, October 30, 2004

REGIME CHANGE IN LIABILITY INSURANCE

Back late last night from three days in Zurich, attending a conference on the future of liability insurance hosted by Swiss Re, the reinsurance group. Geoff Lye presented the results of SustainAbility’s forthcoming report, The Changing Landscape of Liability – for which Swiss Re was one of the major funding partners. Event held at Swiss Re’s Rüschlikon conference centre. The conclusions were very well received – and I’ll do a more detailed note on them when the report appears late in November.

Great opportunity to catch up with Peter Zollinger, whose home is ten minutes walk from the conference centre, to agree a new program for SustainAbility – and to try out the ‘Mobility’ service he uses rather than owning a car.

Geoff Lye and Peter Zollinger with ‘Mobility’ car (©JE)

Rüschlikon 1 (©JE)

Rüschlikon 2 (©JE)

Rüschlikon 3 (©JE)

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

JOHN PEEL

Text message from Elaine saying John Peel has died of a heart attack in Cuzco, Peru. Pretty much my favorite voice on radio. I first saw Peel at Middle Earth, Covent Garden, in the late 1960s, where he was DJ-ing. Shared his taste for bands like The Incredible String Band and Country Joe and the Fish at the time, but not always his later enthusiasms. The music magazine NME gave him a ‘Godlike Genius’ award 10 years back, which was stretching things a smidgeon, but he will be sorely missed.

Monday, October 25, 2004

DEBATING THE CORPORATION

Spent the morning with a group of Japanese companies exploring the corporate social responsibility agenda in Europe. Then some writing, then across to ERM with Judy Kuszewski to do a session with their Chairman Robin Bidwell and some of his colleagues in the CSR area. Then on to the Soho Curzon to chair a debate on The Corporation, a new film based on the book of the same name – and subtitled ‘The pathological pursuit of profit and power’. Among the panellists were Joel Bakan, who wrote the book and Jennifer Abbott who co-directed the film, plus good people from ActionAid (Ruchi Tripathi, www.actionaid.org), Corporate Watch (Claire Fauset, www.corporatewatch.org) and Platform (Dan Gretton, www.platformlondon.org).

Saturday, October 23, 2004

THE NEWS: KYOTO GOOD, BAGHDAD BAD

The news that the Russian Dura has ratified the Kyoto protocol on climate change is encouraging, given that it paves the way for an international system of emissions trading. It’s inevitable that as these great ecosystem issues become mainstream particular countries will use them to leverage their own interests – in this case, Russia wanted EU support for its application for membership of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

But an even more highly-publicised bit of attempted leverage – dominating the front pages – is the story of the kidnapping of Care International Iraq’s chief, Margaret Hassan. Given how much she and CARE have done for the country over such a long timescale, it brings home even more powerfully both how this war risks spiralling out of political control (e.g. with NGOs dragged into the fray) and how complicit the media can be in feeding the whole process, whether or not this is the intent.

I sent a message of support to CARE today (www.care.org). To do likewise click on the title of this entry.

NATSONS: EXCELLENCE AT MICRO SCALE

Over the nearly 30 years we have lived in Barnes, our newspapers have been delivered faithfully every day by a nearby newsagent, Natsons. As I sat this morning, ploughing through The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent and The Times, as usual, it struck me how easily we come to take such services for granted. Travelling to Zurich on Tuesday, I will sadly miss an open evening at Natsons – celebrating the fact that they have just won the 2004 UK-wide Retail Industry Industry Award for ‘Independent Newsagent of the Year’, which is quite something.

Thursday, October 21, 2004

COMMISSION FOR AFRICA

Started day wandering across Horse Guards Parade in search of HM Treasury, which is at 1 Horse Guards Road. Shows how much I know about the institutions of British governance. Still, the Parade was impressive in the early light, and I did eventually get back on track, thanks to a couple of heavily armed constables. I was chairing a workshop at a Commission for Africa conference hosted by Treasury, focusing on how the private sector can support improvements in public sector governance in Africa.

Then, after lunch, on to Docklands for a meeting of the Advisory Council of the Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD). A series of sculptures caught my eye as I walked from Canary Wharf to the ECGD, including an aggressively canine one outside Canary Wharf Tube station which was like something out of Ghostbusters, a disembodied head (which impresses somewhat differently in the light of the Iraq beheadings) and a bronze rower outside the ECGD building – though the preserved dockside crane is also pretty scuptural.

Horse Guards Parade (©JE)

Canine sculpture (©JE)

Disembodied head (©JE)

Rower and crane (©JE)

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

MONTGOMERY COMES TO LUNCH

Thanks to a link-up effected by Francesca Muller, Stephen Bungay of Ashridge Management College did a lunchtime session for us today at SustainAbility. The author of books like The Most Dangerous Enemy (probably the most insightful book I have yet read on the Battle of Britain) and Alamein (the story of the battle of El Alamein, which is now top of my to-read pile alongside Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, just sent through to me by Steve Warshal), Bungay develops management insights from the thinking and behaviour of WWII leaders.

His tack today was to look at how Montgomery handled his first 100 days in the desert – and particularly the first speech he gave to his new command. Though I find much about Montgomery hugely uncomfortable, his use of language on this occasion, much of it monosyllabic, was quite masterly.

Am reading The Most Dangerous Enemy at the moment and finding it totally absorbing, with new facts and angles on every page. It was interesting that even team members too young to have had parents involved in WWII were rapt.

My father, Tim, was due to be posted to North Africa, but was switched to fly off CAM (Catapult Aircraft Merchantmen) ships, as the convoys fought their way round to Murmansk and Archangel. That was considered at the time to be pretty suicidal, but of the rest of his squadron sent to the desert, only one pilot survived. And Elaine’s father, Stanley, was in the desert for six years, as a doctor treating skin diseases. He was married just before the war, then didn’t see his wife, Margaret, until after the war ended.

I confess I had been slightly fretful about exposing the team to such military history and analogies, but their reaction was hugely positive and engaged, not least because the analysis was so insightful. Odd concatenation of circumstances, though, that I then had a (quite unrelated) meeting with – among others – an anti-defence-industry activist, as preparation for a film preview I have to chair a panel discussion at next week. The film: The Corporation.

Although I was true to type in the Sixties and radically opposed to the military-industrial complex, my view these days is that – given the sort of species we are and our history – the 21st century is likely to be at least as hazardous as the 20th, and that we will always need a defence industry. But the one we have, globally, is massively corrupt and generally motivated by the basest of principles – which makes my argument rather difficult to sustain.

Monday, October 18, 2004

CORPORATE LOBBYING

A weekend largely spent on finalising our new benchmark survey report, developed with Standard & Poor’s and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Poor Nick (Robinson) was holed up for much of the time in the office, holding the reins on the various horses, and working via telephone with Rupert (Bassett) on the design and layout. I really enjoy this stage, particularly the way late-stage thinking bubbles up and creates much of a report’s character.

Eventually, the horses were stabled and the report went off to the printers this morning. One of the issues it deals with is the extent to which even leading companies report candidly and coherently on their lobbying of governments: the answer is very little, though a couple of companies are now breaking ranks.

This afternoon, with Seb (Beloe) and Katie Fry Hester of our US team, I went across to WWF’s London offices for a 3-hour Chatham House Rule session with NGOs and companies on the same theme – how corporate lobbying can be made more transparent and, a closely linked question, how companies in solution-providing sectors can be aligned to lobby more effectively for the sort of market changes that will help drive sustainable development. Then home, on my rather painful sprained ankle, for supper with Jane Nelson. As ever, an enormously stimulating conversation with one of the key figures in this area.

Friday, October 15, 2004

RULES FROM THE HP GARAGE

Across to Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, driven by a Bangadeshi who – it turned out – used to work with Muhammad Yunus of Grameen fame. Like many others, he’s here angling for a role in the continuing Silicon Valley adventure. I spent part of the day being made up with a powder puff in the HP boardroom, prior to shooting several brief commentaries on the e-waste recycling prospect for something that will apparently air on CNN and CNBC. On the way back to the airport (SFO – and a striking contrast to the garage era architecture) to meet Mark Lee ahead of flying out, I had the same driver take me across to the garage where there the HP story started.

Always loved The ‘HP Way’ – and the 11 rules developed by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in the early days:

Believe you can change the world.
Work quickly, keep the tools unlocked, work whenever.
Know when to work alone and when to work together.
Share – tools, ideas. Trust your colleagues.
No politics. No bureaucracy. (These are ridiculous in a garage.)
The customer defines a job well done.
Radical ideas are not bad ideas.
Invent different ways of working.
Make a contribution every day. If it doesn’t contribute, it doesn’t leave the garage.
Believe that together we can do anything.
Invent.

The HP garage (©JE)

SFO detail (©JE)

Thursday, October 14, 2004

JOHN SEYMOUR

Another missed opportunity. Elaine and I were invited earlier in the year to a ninetieth birthday celebration for John Seymour, whose obituary appears in The Times today. Couldn’t go, because I was travelling, so I never got to meet the man – though his writings on self-sufficiency were a key part of the movement that I got embroiled in during the 1970s.

Seymour’s books in this area included The Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency, Far From Paradise, and Blueprint for a Green Planet, written with Herbie Girardet, who I first met in 1976, I think when we both worked on an alternative version of that year’s UN Habitat Conference. The UN did its stuff in Montreal, I seem to remember, whereas we tried to demonstrate alternative technologies and aspects of sustainable lifestyles in, of all places, Surrey Docks.

Much of the movement’s energy has since gone into mainstreaming projects, like the work that we now do with business, but the self-sufficiency strand remains a key part of the DNA of the wider sustainability community.

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

SoL SEARCHING IN DEARBORN

Just spent an entertaining and informative couple of days at the Society for Organizational Learning’s ‘Business Innovation for Sustainability’ Forum in Dearborn, Michigan, cheek-by-jowl with Ford’s manufacturing heart. Bill Ford, the company’s CEO, did the best speech I have yet heard him give by way of welcome.

Other speakers included the likes of Peter Senge (of The Fifth Discipline fame and the prime mover behind SoL), Peem Juan Arcos (from the Ecuadorian rainforest and resplendent in a rainbow of feathers when I had breakfast alongside him), Janine Benyus (of Biomimicry fame), Stuart Hart (who has done more than anyone else to get our sort of issues into the pages of the Harvard Business Review – and whose impending new book I was reading in advance copy on the plane across), Leroy Little Bear (a Blackfoot and former director of the Harvard Native Studies Program) and Amory Lovins (of the Rocky Mountain Institute and co-author of a new report – Winning the Oil End Game, see www.oilendgame.org).

My session focused on ten years – to date – of the triple bottom line, and I had two leading figures in the field riding shotgun: Sarah Severn of Nike and Mike Dupee of Green Mountain Coffee. Ended up with standing room only and an energetic – but time-limited – discussion. It was wonderful to be there and there were some excellent sessions, but I came away acutely and uncomfortably aware of just how big the gap is between where this movement is and where the world needs to be by, say, 2050.

Ford conference center reflects (©JE)

Fuel cell Ford (©JE)

Gil Friend (www.natlogic.com) and David Isaacs (www.theworldcafe.com) (©JE)

Saturday, October 09, 2004

SMILE

Bought Brian Wilson’s Smile (Nonesuch Records – www.nonesuch.com) at the Royal Festival Hall earlier in the week and have been playing it more or less constantly . Unbelievable that much of this was written when he was 24. Recorded after the concert I saw – also at the RFH – earlier in the year. have loaded it onto my iPod for the flight to Detroit tomorrow.

Thursday, October 07, 2004

BILL WYMAN’S RHYTHM KINGS

Much of the day spent in meetings or working to finish the latest Global Reporters benchmark survey. Lunch at the Tate Modern restaurant, overlooking the Thames, with Seb (Beloe) and Kavita (Prakash-Mani) and Mandy Cormack of Unilever. And then …

Thames from Tate Modern (©JE)

… across to the Royal Festival Hall in the evening for an evening with Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings. Glorious music, with Ronnie Wood of the Stones and Eddie Floyd (‘Knock on Wood’) joining the band on stage. Charlie Watts of the Stones in the audience. We took Hania and Steve Warshal, of Greenpeace Business, among other things. First time I had seen guitarist Albert Lee in performance: blazing solos and delightful stage presence. Stunning encore, Johnny Burnette’s Tear It Up, with four guitars going at it hammer and tongs: Terry Taylor (co founder of the Rhythm Kings with Wyman), Lee, Wood and the extraordinary jazz guitarist Martin Taylor (www.martintaylor.com).

On his website, Wyman says that this is the last tour of by the Rhythm Kings. I hope this is just another case of a “last farewell” followed by others, but at his age I wouldn’t be surprised.

Terry Taylor and Bill Wyman (©JE)

Graham Broad, Ronnie Wood, Albert Lee and Frank Mead (©JE)

Wood, Broad and Eddie Floyd (©JE)

Mike Sanchez (© Hania Elkington)

Albert Lee and Nick Payn (©JE)

Tearing it up, with Martin Taylor, second left (©JE)

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

ILLEGAL DRUGS

Attended my first Council meeting at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) and the Society’s 250th AGM, which was a fairly historic moment. The Council meeting included a session on illegal drugs. In the discussion period, where most people had focused on users, I dived in towards the end – just after a judge sitting two seats along from me had spoken – to declare, in the interests of full disclosure, that I had taken illegal drugs in the 1960s, including LSD, and might well do so again if the circumstances were right, before I turned to the subject of the drug producers.

I noted that this is now a huge, highly profitable industry, that is pouring money into R&D. Put together ongoing (mainstream) work on human genomics and pharmacology, I noted, and the chances are that the next 20-30 years will see a flood of new psychoactive substances in our streets and homes that we can scarcely even guess at today. I don’t like this, indeed I think the vast illegal drugs trade is yet another dreadful legacy from the Sixties, but if we simply focus on users the flood is going to be over our heads before we have put together any sort of Ark.

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

THE HOXTON APPRENTICE

Another social enterprise. Elaine and I went to The Hoxton Apprentice for dinner with two long-standing friends, Jonathan and Andrea Shopley. Developed by the charity, Training For Life, this is the first in a planned series of Restaurants For Life that will “combine high quality dining with a training and support environment for disadvantaged people from a local community.” All profits are ploughed back into the work of the charity. Restaurateur and chef Prue Leith designed the menu.

Had slightly wondered what we were in for, but it turned out to be a really delightful evening. The restaurant, housed in what was apparently once a school, proved to be in a high-roofed space which meant that you could hear each other speak, the front-of-house staff were incredibly friendly and professional, and the food was excellent. Keen to go again.

Among other things, caught up on Future Forests (www.futureforests.com), which Jonathan runs, and which has recently been the subject of some critical coverage in The Guardian. One reason, I suspect, is that Future Forests is a for-profit social enterprise, as SustainAbility is. We also had some challenging coverage in The Guardian and The Independent in the late 1980s, the second running a story with a massive cartoon showing a very large wolf in sheep’s clothing – which I think was meant to be me. Another reason, for the challenge, though, is that much of the money raised for Future Forests goes into buying carbon sequestration rights rather than planting trees, which is absolutely legitimate but not necessarily understood by everyone donating money.

It’s actually a fascinating time to be involved in all of this, with a growing range of social enterprises spanning the not-for-profit-through-to-fully-for-profit spectrum. This is another area that would benefit from better communication and greater accountability, but also from what Tim Smith (the social entrepreneur responsible for the Eden project) called for in the interview I did with him for SustainAbility’s newsletter Radar (www.sustainability.com/news/articles/core-team-and-network/john-elkington-tim-smit-interview.asp). In this case, he argued that “the environment movement needs to get closer together and be supportive of each other, forgiving of dissenting views, but working hard to establish those things we can agree on.” Ditto the wider movement that is trying to scale up the response to these challenges through purpose-built enterprises.

Saturday, October 02, 2004

ON BREAKING CODES – AND ANKLES

Back to London last night: distinctly cooler and Heathrow glittering in recent rain. A wonderful break and managed to plough through five books, apart from anything else.

Odd how many of them had something to do with breaking codes: Bill Bryson’s A Short Hisory of Nearly Everything, was the first, with its accounts of things like the breaking of the genetic code; then I read Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress, the sort of thing that John Buchan in an earlier era would have described as a ‘shocker’, which focuses on the US National Security Agency’s six-storey TRANSLATR (sic) code-breaking mega-machine; Andrew Robinson’s The Man Who Deciphered Linear B, an account of the life and work of Michael Ventris, the man who cracked the earliest European writing system pretty much at the same time that Watson and Crick were unravelling the secrets of the double helix of DNA; and, another shocker, Tom Clancy’s The Teeth of the Tiger, which is fairly gripping, but generally struck me as post-9/11 American wish-fulfillment.

By the end of our time on Lake Maggiore, my eye was trying to decode the deep symbolism of virtually everything, from the Moon sailing overhead as we watched bats flitting back and forth in pursuit of insects to workaday signs chasing each other across a hoarding in the backstreets of Locarno.

Maybe that’s why I lost my footing on our penultimate day, walking back from the dock, where we had disembarked from a boat from Ascona. Ended up twisting my ankle fairly badly — and am still wearing an elastic sock with the affected areas sluiced in Arnica cream. Amazing how everyone starts looking at you once you develop something as simple as a limp.

Full-ish Moon (©JE)

Arrows pointing to Locarno’s Castle of the Counts (©JE)

 

Thursday, September 30, 2004

RAMPARTS, IRAQ AND TWO GAVINS

The book I arrived in Orselina reading was Gavin Maxwell’s astounding A Reed Shaken by the Wind, recounting his travels among the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq with Wilfred Thesiger. The book is so beautiful I often found myself reading out whole pages to Elaine. But the nature of these people is not romanticised: they are pretty savage at times, indeed Maxwell on one occasion notes that attempts by the central government to be liberal backfired badly.

Maxwell also credits Gavin Young, the other Englishman linked with Thesiger’s time on the Marshes, noting that he “first towered on my horizon as a namesake against whom the Arabs measured me to my discredit, as a man who could shave with three strokes of a razor and had learned their language in a week.”

I still sometimes wish I’d taken Gavin (Young) up on his offer to travel around the world with him, on the journeys that became Slow Boats to China and Slow Boats Home. No way it would have worked, I suspect, since much of the delight of the books was that he travelled alone and immersed himself in the cultures he visited, but I would certainly have come back a very different sort of Englishman.

And, as Elaine — the main reason I had wanted to stay in England all those years ago — and I wandered around the castle in Locarno, it struck me yet again how lucky we are to live in times of relative peace. Elaine bought a book on the great peace conference held here in 1925 — and we were forcibly struck by the very different looks of the different national delegations.

I know we are all Europeans now, but some of the Germans looked, well, like the sort of people who would do what the Nazis began to do in the 1930s, the Belgians all looked like Poirot, the Frenchmen looked deeply suspect, the Poles looked solidly interesting, the Czechs looked intelligent and great fun (to my memory, only the Czech delegation seemed to feature women as members, and they looked intriguing), and the English, well they looked handsome, a bit straight-laced, well-intentioned but possibly just a little above it all.

How’s that for a fully-fledged set of prejudices? The sort of prejudices that can lead to war? Or, just maybe, those photographs were some weird form of litmus test, distilling elements of national character that were to colour — and in some cases discolour, stain – the European map over the coming decades.

There’s a great deal more travelling these days, but I wonder whether we know other peoples any better as a result? Any culture able to spawn, disseminate and learn from the likes of Maxwell, Thesiger and Young would be better equipped to deal with the cultural collisions forced by our shrinking world. The stunning lack of Arabic speakers among young American students — at least until the recent fracas — speaks volumes.

Ramparts (©JE)

Inside the castle (©JE)

Elaine (©JE)

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

SMOOTH SNAKE, WROUGHT IRON

It’s strange what spools through your head when you move between worlds. From the wakes of the boats on the lake to the intricate ironwork seen through an arch in Ascona, the week has been full of vaguely serpentine forms. Then, when we were walking down the mountainside to Locarno, I came across a great looping smooth snake. Not sure what it had been up to, either sunning itself or dining on lizards, or some mixture of both, but when I looked smooth snakes up in a natural history guide in a bookshop later, the animal in question was being swallowed head-first by a much larger snake. Hope it’s not an omen.

What follows is a grab-bag of images that caught my eye as we strolled around.

Taking pictures (©JE)

Scrollwork (©JE)

Sculpture by Jean Arp (©JE)

Elaine in church (©JE)

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

ISOLE DI BRISSAGO

Took the boat out to the Isles of Brissago. In 1885, these two small island had been called the Saint Leger Isles, after their then owners, and on the larger the Baroness Antonietta had built a small a palace, creating a large garden full of exotic plants. Then, in 1949, the islands were declared a botanical park. Apart from what I think was a golden pheasant that insisted on taking a ferocious dust-bath at our feet, the high point was watching great fish patrolling the foot of the lakeside walls.

Orange blooms (©JE)

Cleaning frenzy (©JE)

Sunday, September 26, 2004

A DIFFERENT SORT OF SUMMIT

Many of the events I go to these days seem to be described as summits, but it’s nice to get to the top of a real one, overlooking much of Lake Maggiore. We took two cable cars up, then — after surveying the scene — walked down. As ever, it took much longer than we had imagined and our legs were aching and wobbling by the time we finally got down to Orselina.

But the view from the top was well worth it — particularly the perspective provided on the alluvial fan which erupts into the post-glacial lake, with Locarno located on the northern, left hand side of the fan in the photo, and Ascona on the southern, right hand side. Reminded me of my time in the Nile Delta in the mid-1970s, which features a very similar shape erupting out into the Mediterranean. I’m seeing the scene a little differently, however, because of one of the books I’m reading: Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Almost literally unputdownable.

Still, the facts given on the likelihood of a new ice age — which I know, but don’t like to be reminded about — are quite literally terrifying. (As is the threat posed by the geological disaster lurking under Yellowstone Park, something that would knock Krakatoa into the proverbial cocked hat.) The evidence of the forces that the ice sheets impose on the areas they ride over was all around us today as we walked.

More happily, the cloud formations were quite beautiful, with many adopting semi-lenticular forms. Bryson also talks of Luke Howard, who named the clouds. I have a book on him beside my bed back home. Must read it. Have always been struck how differently I see clouds when compared with people like my father, whose very life must have depended on being able to see and think about clouds in a much less romantic vein during the Battle of Britain and its aftermath.

The summit (©JE)

The fan on which Locarno and Ascona stand (©JE)

Saturday, September 25, 2004

WATERWORLDS FROM ORSELINA

Elaine and I arrived last night in Orselina, high above Locarno and the northern end of Lake Maggiore. Although we drove past the southern end of the lake many years back, this is the first time we have stayed here. The time-scale has been a bit squeezed by the WEF event earlier in the week, but that was well worth the trip – and now comes the unravelling.

Or at least that’s the plan. In any event, we have brought a caseload of books. And the process is greatly aided and abetted by the outstanding views from our balcony. Both Elaine and I have always wanted to live overlooking water – and this continuously unfolding spectacle of boats, wakes and patterns of light and shadow is unlikely to dissuade us.

Hotel Orselina (©JE)

Elaine’s shadow (©JE)

Acer leaves in the morning sun (©JE)

Looking down onto Locarno’s marina (©JE)

Boat heading south (©JE)

Snake wake (©JE)

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

BLENDED VALUE AT WEF

Back from two days in Geneva, at the World Economic Forum (www.weforum.org), taking part in a workshop on blended value investing, or ‘private investment for social goals’. Hosted by WEF, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Rockefeller Foundation.

Did a panel session on the first day with Bill Drayton of Ashoka (www.ashoka.org) and Will Rosenzweig of the Haas School of Business, chaired by Sally Osberg – president and CEO of The Skoll Foundation (www.skollfoundation.org), launched by e-Bay’s first employee and first president, Jeff Skoll. Wonderful event and came back with my head absolutely buzzing with ideas.

Sunday, September 19, 2004

RICHMOND PARK

Much of the morning spent working on the new reporting benchmark survey – which is going very well. A new landscape is starting to evolve in my brain. All sorts of strands beginning to converge. Then a glorious walk in Richmond Park this afternoon, with Elaine and Jed Emerson – of ‘blended value’ fame (see www.blendedvalue.org). Clacking of fallow deer stags as they clashed horns under the chestnut trees. Then home for a roiling conversation that stretched through the evening.

Red deer stag – and, below, locking horns (© JE)

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

CRUELLA

Glorious, chill autumnal evening as I cycled home through Hyde Park, with cyclists disappearing into a golden haze and pedestrians emerging from it. Day started as it meant to continue, slightly weird, with an early meeting with a venture capitalist interested in the CSR area. Unexpectedly, he came with someone else, an extremely well-known American actress. A very interesting conversation. Told her we would have a plaque struck to hang over the sofa, saying ‘Cruella Sat Here.’

Hyde Park (©JE)

Monday, September 13, 2004

ACRONYM SOUP IN THE COMMONS

Interesting evening at the House of Commons, with the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), discussing the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI)’s Operating and Financial Review (OFR) draft regulations. Sandwiched between a right-wing Baroness (all for blowing up the DTI) and a left-wing Lord (whose daughter he described as the last surviving Communist).

If and when introduced, the OFR will cover around 1300 quoted UK firms, requiring them to provide a balanced, comprehensive and forward looking review of their business operations and prospects. Seems like a reasonable idea to me, though I asked the second question, about what the UK legal profession makes of it all? My fear is that if the DTI misjudges, the lawyers will take over, as they have in the US, and the net result will be considerably less than helpful.

Big Ben (©JE)

MICHAEL ROYSTON

Sad news. Heard over the weekend from David Royston, a son of Michael Royston, that Mike died last Thursday. He was the author of Pollution Prevention Pays, an early book which helped shape the business-and-environment agenda. I first met him in Reykjavik, in 1977, at a conference organised by Nicholas Polunin, then subsequently at a number of business schools, including IMD, where we were both promoting the concept of pollution prevention to the rising generations of managers.

Saturday, September 11, 2004

WORLD TV

Third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Day spent mainly working on our latest Global Reporters report and on a new book idea.

Yesterday, was collected from home at 08.00 by a Toyota hybrid Prius and ferried through lava-like traffic jams to TV studios to film a series of panel discussions for a CNBC TV series being made by World Television on ‘The Business of Development’. Studio anchor was Jane Dutton, now with BBC World, and I did three sessions: one on mobile phones, one on sustainable agriculture and food, and one on computers and the internet.

A couple of the other speakers had PR minders: while I like company, it made me even more conscious of how privileged I am in being able to say pretty much exactly what I think.

Thursday, September 09, 2004

HANDEL AND HENDRIX

Evening out with Francis and Christine Kyle of the Francis Kyle Galleries in Maddox Street (www.franciskylegallery.com). Started with a concert at the Handel House a few blocks away, where George Frederic Handel lived from 1723 to 1759. Given my taste for world music, I was fascinated to hear Clive Bell (North Indian flute), Udit Pankhania (tabla) and Stephen Bull (violin) performing and discussing a range of music illustrating the intermixing of Indian and Western musical traditions, mainly focusing on the 18th century.

Though I pass the Handel House every time I cycle down Brook Street to SustainAbility’s Bedford Row offices, I hadn’t realised it was there – nor that this was the building that Jimi Hendrix had lived in. His top floor flat now serves as the administrative office for the Handel Museum. As I struggle to play even fairly basic sequences on my 30-year-old Gibson, I appreciate even more Hendrix’s mastery of his instrument and art (www.jimi-hendrix.com). As we walked south towards the Worseley restaurant, we pondered what Handel would have made of Hendrix’s music? At least Handel apparently had a sense of humour.

Wednesday, September 08, 2004

TO DTI WITH NGO DELEGATION ON CSR

Afternoon spent with a group of NGOs – among them ActionAid, CORE, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam and Traidcraft Exchange, at Amnesty’s London HQ, then on to the Department of Trade & Industry (DTI) with most of the above – to lobby for changes in the DTI’s international position on corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Friday, September 03, 2004

OXFORD VISION 2020

Just back from a couple of days at the second Oxford Vision 2020 conference, held over three days at the Said Business School, Oxford. Typical trip down yesterday morning: the train was 45 minutes late into Oxford. Found myself staying at The Randolph Hotel, for first time – and recalled the friend who – some decades back – checked in at the hotel as ‘Lucifer’, then started striking matches in an attempt to burn the hotel down. Gray, my brother, had to drive in to Oxford to collect the would-be arsonist from the police cells.

The friend, clearly, was having mental health problems. This time around the subject under discussion was other forms of non-communicable disease. Oxford Vision 2020 agenda has opened out from last year’s focus on obesity and diabetes to this year’s focus on 3 risk factors (tobacco, diet and lack of physical exercise) that cause 4 chronic diseases (cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic lung diseases and some cancers), accounting for 50% of deaths globally (summed up in this year’s slogan 3>4 = 50).

Energetic morning today, with people like Erik Rasmussen (of Denmark’s Monday Morning think-tank) arguing that the Baby Boom generation are going to drive a radical refocusing on patient-centred health care, Sophia Tickell (of Just Pensions) arguing for a much clearer campaigning approach, to avoid the pitfalls that have slowed the UN Global Compact, and Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Rebien Sorensen pledging that his company would support the Oxford Vision 2020 initiative for another three years.

So why is Oxford Vision 2020 needed? “Public health priorities and the attention of most media, public funding bodies and people at large are primarily focused on the scourges of AIDS, TB and malaria,” the website explains. “And yet, 50% of people in the world die due to four chronic diseases: CVD, diabetes, chronic lung diseases and some cancers, which are linked to three risk factors: tobacco, diet and lack of physical exercise. The projected numbers for the year 2020 are frightening, putting an impossible burden on people and healthcare systems alike. If the current spiral continues unabated 400 million people, or one in ten of the world’s population, will be suffering from diabetes alone by 2020.”

Potentially a gold mine for Novo, the world’s largest manufacturers of insulin, used to treat diabetes. But it’s a mark of Novo’s corporate conscience that it is trying to catalyse a multi-stakeholder response to prevent many of the chronic disease problems that otherwise threaten to slow or derail health care systems. No company is perfect, but Novo has to be the most moral company I have ever worked for or come across. Our relationship goes back to 1989, when Mads Ovlisen (still the company’s chairman) called SustainAbility in to do an environmental review after the publication of our book, The Green Consumer Guide.

(And, speaking of chronic health problems, when Elaine and saw Bill Clinton in Davos earlier in the year, we both commented how unwell he looked. The e-news this afternoon reports that he has just checked into hospital for a quadruple bypass operation. If so, every best wish to the man and his family. The most inspiring politician I have ever heard in the flesh, by far – though there are continuing rumbles as the US presidential election builds to a frenzy about the failure of successive administrations to take the threat of al-Qaeda sufficiently seriously. On the train back, I start reading the 9/11 Commission Report – and the news comes in of the latest, horrifying casualities from the hostage-taking at a Russian school in North Ossetia.)

Said Business School (©JE)

Erik Rasmussen of Monday Morning (©JE)

Lars Rebien Sorensen (©JE)

Wednesday, September 01, 2004

STASILAND

Yesterday and today with VW, in what used to be East Berlin. On the way back, I bought a couple of books, one of them Anna Funder’s Stasiland. Complusive reading. Extraordinary account of a society – Communist East Germany – which monitored everything but failed to join up the dots in the right way.

“The Stasi was the internal army by which the government kept control,” Funder notes. “Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around. It was a bureaucracy metastasised through East German society: overt or covert, there was someone reporting to the Stasi on their fellows and friends in every school, every factory, every apartment block, every pub. Obsessed with detail, the Stasi entirely failed to predict the end of Communism, and with it the end of the country.”

The wrong sort of transparency.

In Nazi Germany, there had been one Gestapo agent for every 2,000 citizens, and in Stalin’s USSR one KGB agent for every 5,830 people. In the GDR, there had been one Stasi officer or informant for every 63 people.

When I was born, 55 years ago, the Berlin airlift was still under way. Funder recalls that the bombers flying in from the west were known as Rosinenbomber, or ‘raisin bombers’, because they brought in food. As I was driven through the city, my mind tried to picture where the unexploded bombs that some of the same planes had dropped in wartime still lie underground – like the Luftwaffe bomb discovered a few years back in the garden that abuts our kitchen in Barnes.

Friday, July 30, 2004

DRAGONFLIGHT

Odd coincidence as I left the office for a week of holiday and working at home. A huge black dragonfly (dragonflies are a totemic creature of mine) flew into the office. It took Seb and I quite a while to track it down and then coax it back out into the day. A double sense of liberation as it helicoptered off and I mounted my cycle to pedal into the west. It’s the time of year when I have to keep my mouth shut as I cycle, because of the profusion of insect life. Around this time the swifts, which seem to be around in smaller numbers this year, bomb down the streets towards me, sceeching as they scoop up the buzzing biomass. Diminutive Hell’s Angels, playing some form of chicken, they always break before we collide. Gaia and Hania both at home this evening, with Britt Keay, daughter of our once-upon-a-time best man Ian.

Thursday, July 29, 2004

WHAT IF?

Very lively SustainAbility team lunch today with Kris Murrin of What If? (www.whatif.co.uk). Judy (Kuszewski) had cycled past their front door and been impressed – and then Francesca (Muller) had knocked on the door and promptly been ushered up to see Kris. The session left us with a real appetitite to put the team through a creativity training process, but a number of us were also struck by the way that What If? have set up a (social) venturing arm. This is something we are pondering. One of their recent initiatives has been the launch of the new bottled brand, Belu, where all profits go to help meet the developing world’s growing thirst for clean water.

Monday, July 26, 2004

A ZERO WASTE SOCIETY

First meeting of new Advisory Council of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA: www.rsa.org.uk). I have been a Fellow since the 1980s and was a judge for several RSA initiatives with the Environment Foundation, including the Pollution Abatement Technology Awards and the Better Environment Awards for Industry (BEAFI), the second of which eventually spawned both a Queen’s Award and a European version

The Society was founded in 1754 by William Shipley, a painter and social activist. He brought together a group of individuals to propose a manifesto “to embolden enterprise, enlarge science, refine arts, improve our manufactures and extend our commerce”. The RSA’s revamped mission now focuses on five areas: (1) Encouraging Enterprise; (2) Moving Towards a Zero Waste Society; (3) Fostering Resilient Communities; (4) Developing a Capable Population; and (5)Advancing Global Citizenship. I find myself in the Zero Waste box, though we are encouraged to roam.

Sunday, July 25, 2004

CAN JAPAN HELP RESTORE IRAQ MARSHES?

In 1973, I spent some time in Paris with Gavin Young, who Wilfred Thesiger had introduced to the Marsh Arabs of Iraq – and who subsequently wrote an excellent book on these people, their habitat and their culture. More recently, they fell seriously foul of Saddam Hussein. He ordered the marshes drained to deny rebels cover, turning much of the marshes into salt pans and desert. As yesterday’s Guardian reported, satellite images analysed by the UN Environment Programme in 2001 showed that 90% of the wetlands had been destroyed. Now Japan has pledged £6 million to help the process of restoration, already started since the surviving Marsh Arabs breached the dams and blocked the canals that Saddam built to wreak vengeance on his enemies. No-one expects that the marshes will return to their full glory any time soon, but the news is encouraging in the context of the non-stop bad news coming out of Iraq. The latest hostage is an Egyptian diplomat, representing the country where I was privileged to work on the extraordinary Nile Delta wetlands in 1974-75.

LEARNING FROM OUR MISTAKES

Earlier in the week, I spoke at a Global Action Plan (www.globalactionplan.org.uk) event in Portcullis House, Westminster, alongside the Houses of Parliament. My concluding slide was a picture of the Wright Brothers Flyer in flight 101 years ago. The point I make with the image is that the early years of aviation were characterised by endless crashes and other misadventures. Those who did best learned rapidly from the mistakes they – and others – made. And for that to happen there had to be a reasonable degree of openness. Unfortunately, even in today’s world, bad news often travels slowly.

(In the book on archery I’m reading, the author notes that it took the French over 100 years to successfully adapt their tactics to the advent of the longbow, despite virtual massacres of the flower of French nobility at battles like Crecy and Poitiers. In this case, however, the news travelled fairly fast, but the ability to understand the implcations was seriously impaired. The noble classes couldn’t really afford to accept the fact that they were being brought low by such simple technology wielded by ‘peasants’.)

A day or two after the GAP event, while cycling home, I stopped off at the new Princess Diana memorial in Hyde Park. It’s fairly low profile, but that evening was full of people paddling and splashing about. As I watched, a fat boy lost his footing and crashed into the shallow water, all the while talking on his mobile phone. More fool him. Then, a day or two later, the newspapers were full of reports of people falling over in the ‘fountain’. Shock, horror. The thing was closed for investigation, as it had been when unseasonal leaves blocked its drains.

Exultant journalists were quick to point out that Ove Arup, the engineers involved in the memorial fountain, had also been involved for London’s ‘wobbly’ Millennium Bridge. Once described as a “moat without a castle”, the memorial has certainly had a chequered history, aesthetically and otherwise. And the Royal Parks people apparently had to insist early on that non-slip technology and roughened stone be used. But the key point here is that sustainable development will need an intense period of innovation, over many decades. And, on past experience, most of the new things we try will fail, to some degree.

If we are to innovate successfully – and on the scale likely to be needed – we need to work out ways to prototype and test technologies. And in the full range of circumstances that they and their users are likely to experience. In the case of the Millennium Bridge, I was talking at the GAP event to a woman who worked on the Bridge – and we were recalling that the Japanese had built a somewhat similar bridge some time back, had learned the same lessons, but hadn’t told anyone – presumably for fear of loss of face.

Diana, Princess of Wales, Memorial Fountain (© JE)

Friday, July 23, 2004

THE ARCHER AND THE YEW

Took the day off and, among other things, went to look at guitars in various places around the city: Gibsons, Fenders, Guilds, Rickenbackers. Have fitfully played an Ovation 12-string for 15 years, but am also interested in tracking down an electric 6-string. While playing a vintage Gibson ES-355, one salesman unprompted began to tell me about how these days the rosewoods and other woods used in some acoustic guitars no longer come from the rainforests. Well, maybe. But in discussing the woods used for guitars, it struck me that there were parallels between these instruments and the bows and arrows that are the focus of one of the books I am reading at the moment: The Bowmen of England by Donald Featherstone.

The yew has always been one of my favourite trees, partly stimulated by the strange copse that stalks up the flanks of Hambledon Hill in Dorset. Featherstone, though, says that many of the longbows that so dominated the military landscape of the 12th to the 15th century were not made of English yew, but from yews felled in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Germany. An interesting legend: at one time, Spain had so suffered from raiding English bowmen under the Black Prince, using longbows made from among other things Spanish yews, that the Spaniards felled every yew they could lay their hands on, for fear that the English menfolk would make fatal use of the trees. Well, maybe.

Last had my hands on a bow several years back in Provence, while staying with Jan-Olaf Willums. Various of us spent a happy afternoon firing at a mark set out among the trees. Elaine, weirdly, beat us all. And this memory puts me in mind of the bows we made from garden canes as children. They turned out to be suprisingly powerful. We even fletched the arrows with goose feathers from the nearby farm. Up in Church Field, near Little Rissington’s 12th century church, the site of the old village before the Black Death struck, we spent a jolly afternoon firing arrows up into the fierce blue sky. Problem was that they went so high we lost sight of them – and one came down straight into the face of one of us, Robert Hamilton. We took him home with the arrow still sticking out from alongside his eye. Along the way, shattered, we broke our bows and tossed them over a nearby Cotswold stone wall.

Poor Robert. Some years later, we were at the Village Fete when ashen-faced friends came to tell us that he had drowned in a gravel-pit between the village and Bourton-on-the-Water. I often say I enjoy funerals, because people are more open than at weddings, but that was one grim service, with many people openly weeping. No doubt that passed through my mind on a happier occasion years later, when Elaine and I finally got married in 1973. And, quite coincidentally, earlier this week I found myself e-mailing (at his request) photos of that event to Ian Keay, who was our best man and now lives in California – after going underground in the 1970s and surfacing after a general amnesty.

To get the images, I photographed some of the photos in one of our albums, which explains the quality. Ian has the beard and the longest hair – among the menfolk – and is squiring my sister Caroline. We were lucky to get any shots at all: the photographer who had offered to do all the pictures contrived to destroy the negatives, so we were left with photos that others had taken. We are passing pretty much the spot where the shaft came down from the heavens. And that thought makes the terror of “hissing death” of those Middle Ages weapons of mass destruction all the more real.

Little Rissington, 1 September 1973

Thursday, July 22, 2004

NICK & THE INTERNS

The penultimate day of this year’s Global Reporters benchmarking odyssey. The object: to analyse several hundred corporate environmental, social and/or sustainability reports from around the world – and then pick the Top 50 for in-depth benchmarking. That’s all now done. Because I won’t be in tomorrow, we celebrate this summer’s successful tour of ‘Nick & The Interns’. A really great team. Luckily, a couple are staying of for a while. And now all we have to do is write the report.

On the sofa: Susanna Jacobson, Therese Nicklasson, Nick Robinson, Patrin Watanatada, Daniel Bussin and Ishani Chattopadhyay (© JE)

Sunday, July 18, 2004

KEWING FOR JOOLS

After the Old Quay House breakfast (see separate post), I drove back from Fowey to London yesterday morning, via a series of jams, several alongside crashes, on the M5 and M4. Then, with Elaine, Hania and John Jencks, went to Kew Gardens – where we had a picnic ahead of a Jools Holland concert designed to raise money for Kew. Stunning music and, at the end, a really spectacular fireworks display. And odd to have flitted from the Eden Project to Kew Gardens more or less in the same day, given that at the breakfast yesterday someone argued that Eden is the 21st century Kew.

Jools (© Hania Elkington)


Fireworks

Saturday, July 17, 2004

BREAKFAST EPIPHANIES

Well, I’m not sure there were any epiphanies, but to labour the obvious it rhymed with Tiffany’s. And the phrase ‘herding cats’ might well have been invented for the collection of environmentalists and fellow travellers that Tim Smit and Richard Sandbrook had rounded up for the Smile concert and aftermath breakfast. This was held in the Old Quay House in Fowey’s Fore Street, with a cluster of tables circled on the verandah that juts out into the estuary. To a chorus of gulls, and distant grumble of fishing boats, we tried to get a grip on where we had come from, where we are and where we want to get to.

The breakfasters included the likes of Tom Burke (ex-Friends of the Earth, ex-Green Alliance, special advisor to three successive Secretaries of State for the Environment, a co-founder of SustainAbility, and so on), Chris Hines (founder of Surfers Against Sewage, now responsible for sustainability issues at The Eden Project), Alan Knight (who handles the sustainability agenda for the Kingfisher Group), Malcolm McIntosh (who I last saw at the UN Global Compact event a few weeks back and who apparently now teaches at six universities), Sara Parkin (ex-Green politician, co-founder of Forum for the Future), Richard Sandbrook (ex-FoE, ex-IIED, on the Eden board, among many other things), Charles Secrett (ex-director of Friends of the Earth), Jane Smart (PlantLife) and Richard Wakeford (Countryside Agency).

Tim Smit was impressive, though admitting that his optimism – and that of his Eden colleagues – was “child-like”. He believes that sustainable development is achievable, isn’t as far out as some might assume and that we are currently living through a revolution (with a small ‘r’,” he insisted). He also sees the Eden Project as a metaphor for what might be achieved elsewhere. Not surprisingly, we all came away upbeat, pleased to have had the opportunity to catch up, and determined to find some way of leveraging the success of Eden to wider effect.

Veteran’s Veterans’ day: Sandbrook and Smit (©JE)

Richard Wakeford, Charles Secrett, and – out of Eden – Gaynor Coley, Deborah Hinton (©JE)

Friday, July 16, 2004

BRIAN WILSON GETS HIS TEETH INTO EDEN

Umbrellas sprout in Eden (©JE)

You could tell something was afoot as you entered the St Austell area: I was passed on the road by a huge white stretch limo, with smoked windows, headed out. The original invitation from Tim Smit had suggested the following dress code: Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops. But a heavy sea mist was driving in from the sea as I started off at around 18.30 from the hotel outside St Austell for The Eden Project. By the time I arrived, the cloud was sinking into the old quarry site where the Eden biodomes are sited. A bit like being ushered into a sunken cloud forest.

As I walked through to the VIP area for pre-concert drinks I recalled that I first visited the quarry in 1977, when writing an article for New Scientist on restoration ecology and the old English China Clays. Extraordinary how modern miracles can happen.

The invite had gone out to a bunch of long-standing environmentalists, asking them to come to a Brian Wilson concert and then – the next morning – have breakfast with Eden founder Smit and some of his colleagues, “bury hatchets” and explore ways of working together in future. This was the second time I had seen the ‘lost’ Smile work performed this year – and the extent of Brian Wilson’s resurrection still takes my breath away. On the other hand, the man is clearly frail.

I had never expected to hear Surfin’ USA, lead track on the first album I ever bought, in 1963, played with such vigo(u)r in a Cornish quarry, or anywhere else. Once again, the concert was fantastic, though Wilson’s voice is pretty uneven – and the younger folk who tried to talk to him backstage said his main subject of conversation was his new teeth. I suppose it comes to us all in the end. And if you’re promoting a Californian smile-fest, teeth come into the picture.

Brian Wilson (©JE)

Red-handed (©JE)

Glowing biomes (©JE)

GOODBYE TO TINTINHULL?

Dropped in to see Julia (Hailes) at Tintinhull House, on my way to The Eden Project. Had what will probably be my last walk around the gardens, since the family is moving on after ten years there. Sad to say goodbye to the place where, apart from anything else, Julia and I wrote a couple of books, though the gardens seem slightly the worse for wear in some places. Maybe the season? The lilypond, in particular, looked as though it had been filled with chocolate milk rather than water. But my favourite box trees still clustered together conspiratorially.

Tintinhull House (©JE)

Conspiratorial boxes (©JE)

Julia – and her car, decorated by her sons (©JE)

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

A BELATED HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Two celebrations today: a belated champagne-on-the-sofa celebration of my 55th birthday, followed later in the afternoon by a mass migration to Numa, a bar on Shaftsbury Avenue, to celebrate Frances’s wedding on Saturday. As we say to our cleaner, Fernando, it’s not like this every day.

Happily drowned strawberries (©JE)

Nick pops another cork (©JE)

And then Numa ©JE)

Monday, July 12, 2004

A PATTERN RECOGNITION ORGAN

The human brain, they say, is a pattern recognition organ par excellence. One result, particularly in a world awash in information, is a growing number of apparent ‘coincidences’. Indeed, I recall reading something of the sort in an odd book called The Celestine Prophecy some years back, which argued that the number of coincidences is likely to go off the scale as a major socio-economic transformation takes hold. Whatever, this evening I read the obituary of Dr Henry Adam in the 7 July edition of The Scotsman. It was 93-year-old Henry’s funeral that Elaine went to in Edinburgh recently (see SPOUTING IN BRUSSELS, 30 June). Henry and Elaine’s father first met when they shared digs at medical school.

Well, on TV this evening there were a couple of programmes which caught my eye: Outbreak, the film in which Dustin Hoffman et al fight to control a virus that threatens to wipe out humankind and, secondly, a Secret History story recalling the 1938 expedition to Tibet mounted by five members of an institute set up by Heinrich Himmler to seek (or manufacture) evidence of an erstwhile Aryan master race.

I watched the Tibet programme, which was both fascinating and horrific, particularly the execution-to-order in Auschwitz and elsewhere of Jewish prisoners for related ‘research’ purposes. The coincidence was that Henry’s obituary noted some aspects of his work about which I had been blithley unaware, among many other things on chemical and bacteriological warfare, including his time at the Chemical Defence Experimental Station, Porton Down, and his mission at the end of the war to rescue scientists from Buchenwald – to prevent them from falling into Russian hands. Not at all clear from the obituary – and now I can’t ask him – whether these were imprisoned scientists, or German ‘scientists’ who had been conducting experiments on prisoners using agents like typhus.

The further wrinkle is that when I first met Elaine at Essex University, there was a major protest against a visiting speaker from Porton Down, which by then had acquired a certain notoriety, with one of the protestors who managed to shut the university down for a while being a previous boyfriend of hers.

If Henry had known, I suspect he would have been intrigued, even amused, rather than riled. A pharmacologist, his best-known work was on the role of histamine in sickness and health. He showed that, in addition to playing key roles in such areas as anaphylactic shock and asthma, histamine also plays central roles in digestion and the workings of the brain, the organ that keeps tripping over all these coincidences.

Friday, July 09, 2004

THANK YOU, BOSE

One way I manage to keep myself sane as I shuttle around the world is a set of BOSE noise cancellation headphones. Flying back from Tokyoa couple of weeks ago, I left the headphones on the floor and pressed the button to transform the seat into something like a bed. Thousands of miles later, I awoke to find that the chair had merrily ground through the headphones and through the Truman biography I had been reading. Both left distinctly worse for wear. When I called BOSE, they took the headphones back and mended them for free. Then I found I had lost the cable, which they had advised should be detached from the phones before mailing. Having e-mailed them to see how much a new cable might cost, I returned from Evian to find an envelope with a new cable, again free of charge. I don’t know whether they’re always like this, but this form of customer service builds real customer loyalty.

A TOP FLOOR WEEK

A week mainly spent in paroxysms of coughing, it strikes me, but with some other activities squeezed in around the spluttering edges.

On Tuesday morning, while cycling in to the office via Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, I passed a new flush of Diana imagery on the gates of Kensington Palace – and then skirted the security activities around the new Diana Memorial Fountain, which the Queen was due to open later in the day. The same evening, cycling home, I found Oxford Street packed with pedestrians and a constipated string of buses trying to pass down the great commercial intestine. Turned out to be trials for Formula 1 racing down Regent Street, of all things. Part of the efforts to show that London can host F1 and other major sports events, including the 2012 Olympics bid.

On Wednesday and Thursday, I was in Evian, France, with the top management of Danone (www.danone.com). When the paroxysms became too much, I exited and sat among a cluster of goldfish bowls, atop a glass table full of transparent marbles (I have a marbles fetish) and watched the steamers trundling across the lake way below.

Oddly, as often happens, opened the book I had bought at Heathrow – Stephen Ambrose’s Eisenhower – on page 68, to find him complaining during WWII: “I live in a goldfish bowl.” Remarkable to read this after David McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman: Truman comes off well in McCulloch’s hands, Eisenhower somewhat less well, and vice versa in the Ambrose book. If I didn’t so dislike what I have read of Field Marshal Montgomery, I would now read a book on him to cross-check whether he deserved the evisceration dealt to him by Ambrose. From what I have read elsewhere, however, I suspect he probably did.

Hotel Royal goldfish (©JE)

aka Eisenhower (©JE)

One highlight of the Danone meeting was meeting Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farms (www.stonyfield.com). Turned out that we shared a fair amount of common ground, including an early fascination with the work of Dr John Todd of the New Alchemy Institute (see, for example, www.oceanarks.org). Indeed, Gary had been tapped by John to take over the Institute, but then along came President Ronald Reagan and his radical cuts in public funding for sustainability-related projects. Found Gary also knew Denis Hayes, who I first met when Reagan had just slashed the funding for the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI), which I was visiting in Golden, Colorado.

Elaine and I tried to track down the New Alchemy folk when we were on Cape Cod last year, but found that Todd had migrated and the original site had evolved into a sustainable housing project. Gary also knew Robin Clarke, who founded a UK version of the New Alchemy Institute, the Biotechnic Research & Development (BRAD). I worked there in 1973 or 1974, managing to pick up a case of sinusitis which lasted me threee years until Elaine found a faith healer, a retired seaman from Bristol, who managed to effect a cure. Oddly, I met Robin again a few years back when we were both working for the Dutch agricultural bank, Rabobank. And Rabobank’s name surfaced today in the office when some of us were talking about the latest sustainability reports, which our team of interns are energetically helping us benchmark.

Then, this afternoon, I found myself back in Docklands, on the fiftieth floor of 1 Canada Square, with the organisers of London’s bid for the 2012 Olympics (www.london2012.org). Interviewing David Stubbs, who is coordinating the sustainability aspects of London’s bid, for SustainAbility’s newsletter, Radar. Way below, the ill-fated Millennium Dome, where I was involved in a Sustainability Panel years ago. Once the Dome looked quite exciting: now I find it hard to shake the mental image of a blistered thumb, crossed with the agonising spines of a crown of thorns starfish. [NOTE from Financial Times, 15 July: The Dome’s site will now become a Las Vegas-style casino, thanks to Kerzner International. Of course.]

But, more positively, I left Canada Square believing that a successful London bid might well not only promote the regeneration of the Lee Valley, over which my returning planes often gyrate, but also provide channels to communicate sustainability issues to a wider audience. Put me in mind of the time, several years back, when SustainAbility helped Shell and J Walter Thompson work up their TV advertising campaign linking sustainability (via energy efficiency) to Formula 1 racing. All of which is a long way from the renewable technology and fish farms espoused by the likes of BRAD and the New Alchemists. But that period infected many of us with dreams and values that continue to play through.

David Stubbs (©JE)

Blistered thumb (©JE)

Monday, July 05, 2004

ELVIS, TAKE 50

The latest edition of Rolling Stone magazine (www.rollingstone.com), which I have read irregularly for nearly 40 years, celebrates the 50th anniversary of rock. And it dates the invention of the genre to fifty years ago today, when Elvis cut ‘That’s All Right’ at The Memphis Recording Service, later Sun Studios. If I had to pick a single genre of music, it would be Rock’n’Roll. Truly, aged five when the revolution began, I have been a child of my generation. [See elsewhere on this site, under ‘Influences‘]

Friday, July 02, 2004

BROUGHT LOW

The virus I picked up on the way back from New York really got its claws into me this week. Hacking away, night after night. Elaine made me up some patent cough medicine yesterday, for a long meeting with Shell on the issues and locations they will cover in their 2005 sustainability report. Didn’t need it in the meeting, but on the train back home I started to cough, so downed the small bottle of lemon, honey and, it turned out, Glenmorangie. By the time I got off the train and started to walk across Barnes Common, I was feeling distinctly light-headed.

 

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

SPOUTING IN BRUSSELS

Doesn’t often happen, but have more or less lost my voice. Partly a result of something I picked up on the flights to or from New York, partly a function of speaking for a couple of hours at a European Institute for Industrial Leadership (EIIL) conference in Brussels on Monday evening, then for another three hours the following morning. But, though I missed the funeral in Edinburgh of a family friend (oddly, his brother organised the EIIL event), it was worth it. The focus of the two sessions in Brussels was on sustainability and engineering – and engineers are prime targets for conversion, alongside chief financial officers (CFOs), brand managers, line managers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

Sunday, June 27, 2004

BETWEEN THE LINES

Struck me this morning, in re-reading previous blogs, how much one leaves out.

So, for example, there have been ups. Hania arrived back from Los Angeles on Thursday, where she had been invited to see the screening of a short film based on her first script. This was co-authored with a close friend, who is studying film-making there. They then drove north along the coast. She brought me back an interesting CD by a group called ‘Iron & Wine’.

And there have been severe downs. The last couple of months saw disaster for our best friends, with one of their sons breaking his back in China and having to be airlifted to Hong Kong for surgery. We heard the news before his parents, who were away for the weekend. He is now back in the country, has had further surgery and the saga continues, though the latest news sounds a bit better.

Both stories, though, illustrate just how dependent many of us have become on air travel. Indeed, while I was in New York, Malcolm McIntosh told me that the ‘CSR Blokes’ network recently circulated an e-mail suggesting members look at this site and calculate how many Air Miles I had accumulated. However many, the poetic justice element is always there: the air traffic streaming in towards Heathrow and, today, various helicopters buzzing around, presumably for Wimbledon.

Saturday, June 26, 2004

AND THE GLOBAL COMPACT IS 5

The UN Global Compact (www.unglobalcompact.org), catalysed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 1999, is 5. The idea has been to give a “human face to global markets”. The ‘Leaders Summit’ at the UN HQ in New York was designed to attract CEOs of companies that have signed the Global Compact. It triggered a counter-summit by NGOs, on 23 June, which seems to have concluded that the Compact is a giant corporate monster that has taken over the UN. It’s great that the civil society world keeps the UN under pressure on this, but the view from inside was rather different. In fact, so many participants wanted to attend the formal Global Compact session on 24 June that the UN had to remove the wall between the conference area and the delegates’ dining area.

The recurrent theme: the need to move from talk to action. The most convincing inputs came from the likes of President Lula of Brazil (focusing on poverty) and Lord John Browne of BP (focusing on climate change), both of whom are trying to drive change in the real world. Oded Grajew of Instituto Ethos (www.ethos.org), one of the organisations we work with in Brazil, built on Lula’s line of argument by saying that we ought to pay at least as much attention to the 30,000 children who die every day as we do to the victims of terrorism – or, I reflected, the victims of terrorism of our own nationality.

One of the announcements that attracted most attention was that Brazil’s leading samba school is adopting the Global Compact principles as its theme for its contributions to next year’s Carnival in Rio. Great. The sexier we can make all this, the better, but I was more interested in the work that the Global Compact team is now doing to convert the world’s stock exchanges. And they seem to be making a measure of progress.

Kofi Annan also announced the launch of a tenth Global Compact principle, on anti-corruption. We were told that corruption costs the global economy something like a trillion dollars a year, “a cancer”, “a hidden tax”. A great tribute to the work of people like Transparency International (www.transparency.org).

Much of the day involved roundtable discussions. In one, designed to envision what might have happened by 2015, I got our table to work up an idea based on Brazil, South Africa, India and China launching a 21st century, global version of the 1940s Marshall Plan for the rebuilding of Europe and Japan. The result: a shamed rich world queues up to join. The EU, the US and also – this bit wasn’t my idea – the Arab-Israeli Economic Union. One can but dream! Given that the table started out thinking about whether sending a diverse team of astronauts to Mars would unite the world, I thought this was progress of a sort.

Met masses of people, some of whom I knew, others – like Mary Robinson, now of the Ethical Globalization Initiative (www.eginitiative.org) – I didn’t. At one point, Jane Nelson and I strolled along one of the corridors to look at a sculpture given to the UN by Nigeria. Encouraging, perhaps, that something of such beauty can come out of such a radically corrupt country. Later, on my way out, I came across a glass case containing a gift from Mauritius, this a gilded dodo. I confess that I wondered whether changing global conditions might not consign the Global Compact – and perhaps even the UN itself, like the League of Nations before it – to such museum cases during the coming century. If either is to survive, the level of change likely to be required will be be profound.

Four themes where I think action is needed are these:

(1) Legitimacy: Voluntary initiatives – and particularly the Global Compact – are likely to come under growing pressure from civil society organizations. The appetite to go ‘wider’ (e.g. recruiting more corporate members to such initiatives) instead of going ‘deeper’ (e.g. encouraging members to expose their boards to some form of the Challenge we proposed on page 37 of SustainAbility’s new report, Gearing Up: see www.sustainability.com) raises real concerns about potential longer term risk to the UN’s reputation. At least that was the point I was pushing in the corridors.

(2) Scale: This was the theme of the main morning session at the Global Compact event. How do we take good experiments and pilot projects and grow them to the scale that will be needed in a world of 7-9 billion people? Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that most companies’ CSR departments currently have little idea about market creation, business models or other areas that are becoming increasingly relevant.

(3) Governments: To ensure scalability, governments will need to take a much more active role, e.g. through fiscal and financial instruments, shaping markets with rewards and disincentives. A point we address in Gearing Up – and Francis Fukuyama tackles in his latest book, on state building.

(4) Corporate lobbying: And if governments – which currently lean over backwards to protect the interests of business – are to become more courageous, more attention will need to be paid to the extent to which corporate lobbying by companies (including Global Compact signatories) aligns, or doesn’t, with their stated commitment to the goals of such voluntary initiatives. Also covered in Gearing Up.

Several speakers at the NY event – among them Kofi Annan and Harvard’s Professor John Ruggie, one of the Compact’s original architects – argued that the Compact was a sign that the UN can re-invent itself. An experiment that could have wider implications for the entire institution. Perhaps, but if it is to play that role my sense is that the Compact will need to develop some teeth. The announcement of new ‘integrity measures’, to ensure that fewer companies can use their Compact membership as an alibi for inaction on other fronts, is a welcome step in the right direction.

Kofi Annan in the General Assembly Hall, John Ruggie on left (©JE)

A Nigerian gift to UN (©JE)

A gift from Mauritius (©JE)

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

NOW I’M 55

Wonderful flurry of birthday cards this morning as I gird my loins for New York. En route to UN Global Compact’s fifth anniversary event. 2004 is my 55th year and, it hits me, marks my 30th year of professional work in this field, whatever that may be. It’s amazing how much has changed since 1974 – and how much will need to change over the next couple of decades.

Saturday, June 19, 2004

PRUNES THE MULBERRY

Today’s papers full of the news of another beheading in Iraq and the agreement yesterday that promises to move the EU towards a new constitution. Having been a member of the European Commission’s Consultative Forum on Sustainable Development for seven years, I take more than a passing interest in the evolution of the Union. Among other changes in prospect – though member states will need to ratify, with 6 (including the UK) now pledged to hold referenda – are a full-time President (an ex-PM), double majority voting (which will mean that new policies will be approved if voted for by at least 15 of the 25 member states, and by more than 65% of the EU population) and, by 2014, a pruning of the 30-member Commission to just 18 members.

Pruning was also on our minds in Barnes today. Less ‘Dances With Wolves’, more ‘Prunes The Mulberry’ this afternoon as Gaia, Elaine and I cut back the mulberry, apple, crab apple and bay trees that were threatening to cut our small London garden off from the fitful sun. In the background, aircraft rumbling into Heathrow (see photos: at least Concorde has gone) and Hank Williams. Gaia had brought back a double CD and we were amazed how many well-known songs he wrote. Among them: Cold, Cold Heart, covered by Norah Jones (among my Top 16), Hey, Good Lookin’, Your Cheatin’ Heart and Jambalaya.

Also listening to a CD by Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony, sent to me via Amazon a few days back by John Manoochehri in Nepal. Reading this website, he had noted my encounter with Bocklin’s painting The Isle of the Dead in Berlin earlier in the year – and sent the CD because it contains a rendering of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Op. 29, The Isle of the Dead. Thanks, John.

Gaia 1 (©JE)

Gaia 2 (©JE)

Gaia 3 (©JE)

Friday, June 18, 2004

GLOBAL REPORTERS TASTING SESSION

Cornis samples a report (©JE)

Nice colours … (©JE)

In the past, I often used to describe sessions where we sampled the latest corporate environmental, social or sustainability reports as akin to wine tastings. Today, Nick Robinson hosted the judges panel for our forthcoming Global Reporters 04 report benchmark survey at SustainAbility. The judges included Jon Hanks, who I first met years back in South Africa and who has done a great deal of work with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Cornis van der Lugt of UNEP, Nick Robins of Henderson Global Investors (who co-wrote our second reporting on reporting with me, Company Environmental Reporting, way back in 1994) and Stanilas Dupre of Paris-based Utopies. The team included Judy Kuszewski, who used to run the Global Reporting Initiative when it was still at CERES, and a number of interns.

Some photos of the session are posted above and below. Among other things, they include a picture of a coffee cup – a tongue-in-cheek reference to the story we used to tell ten years ago that some of our reporting ideas, a number of which swept around the world, were created over a cup of tea. German academics were incensed that we hadn’t taken many years and hundreds of thousands of deutschmarks to do the work. Well, we have spent many hundreds of thousands of pounds over the past decade in developing our report evaluation methodology, but the cups of tea and coffee still play a vital role.

Coffee-fuelled … (©JE)

Jon reflects among hundreds of reports … (©JE)

Nick, Daniel, Cornis, Stanislas (©JE)

Stanislas, Cornis and Nick (©JE)

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

ECGD AND SD

Today’s Financial Times argues that UK exporters and their customers are suffering because of ongoing uncertainties around the future of the Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD), where for several years I have been a member of the Advisory Council. It certainly is hugely frustrating. But the FT also notes that the House of Commons inquiry which has spotlighted these concerns also calls for a “clearer statement of the ECGD’s policy in support of sustainable development.” Rather than being a ringing endorsement of the inclusion of SD in ECGD’s policies, however, this reflects exporter concerns about the effects of requiring the ECGD to take non-financial objectives – including environmental impacts – into account.

LIVINGSTONE, I PRESUMED

Ken Livingstone is back as Mayor of London. I filed a postal ballot for him before leaving for the US – the first time I have voted Labour. Not that I like Labour at the moment, but Livingstone has shown remarkable courage for a politician, particularly with his congestion charge system for central London. Even though his majority this time is slimmer than in 2000, his re-election is a significant victory in the ongoing political battles around sustainable mobility.

AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHT DAYS

Having left for US on 7 June, I got back last night from Tokyo, having flown round the world in eight days. Series of visits with NGOs and companies. Both mornings I was in Japan, I did breakfast interviews with newspapers, the Asahi Shimbun and Nikkei (Nihon Keizai Shimbun). They’re interested because there has been a huge growth in activity in Japan in the area of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Big controversy in the papers currently is the cover-up at Mitsubishi Fuso, which has admitted that it has concealed defects in its trucks for eight years. The company recalled 220,000 trucks in March and another 180,000 in May. Now it says it will recall a further 450,000.

Monday, June 14, 2004

GRI JAPAN

Arrived at Narita airport from JFK and, after some hiccups, made my way to Le Meridien Pacific Hotel in Shinigawa. I had a delightful dinner with Goto-san, who runs the Japanese end of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and a couple of his colleagues, Sugimoto Hiroko (GRI: wwww.gri-fj.org) and Ayako Sonoda Ecotainment Group: www.cre-en.co.jp).

Ecotainment have just done an interesting short sustainability report, which features a lot of people smiling – something you wouldn’t have seen in Japanese reporting a few years back. Indeed, one of the things we called for in one of our reports on reporting was more smiles – not as ‘aren’t-we-friendly’ PR, but to end the era during which Japanese executives in almost all environmental and sustainability reports looked as if they were having teeth pulled.

One thing that struck me about Japan today, compared with the last time I was there, seven or eight years ago, is how the cell phone craze has spread – and the way that people use them to take photos these days.

Sugimoto Hiroko, Ayako Sonoda and Goto-san

The photographer

And now let’s try a mobile

Thank you and goodnight

Friday, June 11, 2004

REAGAN SNAKES HOME

Walked up Park Avenue to Borders, the bookshop, to browse. Weird and wonderful selection of magazines, though I return with a somewhat pedestrian foursome: The Economist, which praises Reagan for defeating Communism; MITs Technology; Scientific American, which is frothing with nanotech and stem cells; and Strategy & Business, which has an article (not yet read) on the art of scaling up business ventures, one of the themes I developed in my summing up earlier today.

On the way back, around 20.30, the western sky, glimpsed down skyscraper corridors, was a rather delightful gold-flecked tangerine. Glimpsed on several wide-screen TVs in a store window: without sound, I assume this is the snaking cavalcade of vehicles returning Ronald Reagans body for burial.

Passed the Waldorf-Astoria, only a block from The Barclay, recalling when Elaine and I stayed there during the extraordinary 2002 World Economic Forum event. At the time, the area was surrounded by mounted policemen and rumbling white-painted trucks filled with sand, designed to prevent suicide bombers.

The trauma of 9/11 is still powerfully shaping events here. Several people at the conference yesterday were wondering what would happen if something similar happened on US soil ahead of the impending Presidential elections: the consensus was that it would guarantee a third term for the current regime.

MARS ORBITS VENUS

On Wednesday morning, I took part in SustainAbilitys roundtable with companies (including American Honda, Dow Chemical, IBM, Procter & Gamble and Shell US), hosted by ChevronTexaco in their DC offices, on the question whether the Atlantic is getting bigger as the US and EU takes on issues like security, human rights and CSR diverge. A very interesting discussion, with a sense that the divide is growing, and a clear appetite among the companies for further sessions.

Those present were at pains to distinguish between reactions to President Bush, the US Government and America generally. One of my points, though, was that while the reactions to date have mainly focused on the President, the collateral damage of what he has been doing is progressively undermining Americas position in the world particularly when we now have lawyers saying that Bush would be within his rights to authorise torture.

Late on Wednesday, I flew from Reagan National Airport (a couple of hours before the late Presidents body arrived in DC) to New York, and have since been at The (Intercontinental) Barclay. Did the summing up keynote today for the Conference Boards 2-day event on Business and Sustainability, which was held here. Tongue in cheek, I equated the Business of the conferences title with Mars and Sustainability with Venus. Started with the photo of Venus against the Sun earlier in the week and went on from there.

Very positive reactions. This website, though, bit back to a degree when Katherine Reed (3Ms Staff Vice President, Environmental Health and safety Operations), as part of her introduction, not only mentioned Douglas Adams and the Babelfish but also said that she had seen that my early travels had exposed me to world music and then, of all the tracks discussed on the site, noted that I had been influenced (see Influences) by the Davy Crockett song I had heard in 1950s Northern Ireland!

True, but only in that later I realised that the song was akin to a perpetrator-eyes-view of one of the greatest tragedies of recent centuries: the extinction of North American Indian culture and peoples.

Last night, finally, while preparing my slides for today, I had an urgent e-mail from the London office, asking what had happened to the riposte I was meant to have done to an article on CSR and philanthropy by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer. This was for European Business Forum. The two pieces to run in parallel. When I get back from Tokyo, where I fly tomorrow, I must try to get permission to post both pieces here and also update the articles section of the site.

Thursday, June 10, 2004

SUSHI AND WWII IN DC

Having arrived in Washington, D.C. yesterday afternoon, I was delighted to see the statue of Gandhi striding purposefully along outside my hotel bedroom. ‘My life is my message.’ Awoke at around 04.00 with head full of ideas for conference presentations and possible book, then just after 06.00 – as I typed away on my ThinkPad – the sun popped above the horizon, and there was Venus in transit across the reddened orb. Had known it was due to happen, but it was complete serendipity that I actually got to see it.

According to NASA, transits of Venus across the disk of the Sun are among the rarest of planetary alignments. Only six have occurred since the invention of the telescope (1631, 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874, 1882). The next two will occur on 2004 June 08 and 2012 June 06. See http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/transit/venus0412.html

Venus mini-eclipse of Sun (©JE)

Spent the day with the US team: Jeff, Katie, Mark, Philippa and Rebecca. Very energetic and fruitful session. Then, after lunch, four of us took time out to visit the new WWII monument that was dedicated on 29 May. While the site, between the Lincoln and Washington memorials, is very striking, and the fountains add verve to the scene, I found the design of the WWII memorial leaden, uninspired. A bit like part of the Atlantic Wall in places.

Indeed, the most interesting aspect of the thing was the scatter of personal tributes stacked here and there, with photos of the dead or of veterans, and stories of what they had had to endure. One commentator is quoted in today’s USA Today as saying that this generation didn’t want to talk about their exploits, so their families are now doing it for them.

But there has been something of a squabble, with the National Park Service saying the memorial wasn’t designed to include all these other tributes, which are collected at the end of every day and will be stored in a Maryland warehouse. A shame: the thing should have been designed from the outset to attract, spotlight and build on popular memories of the 16 million Americans who served in WWII – and the 400,000 who died. There are some 4000 stars, each representing 100 American dead.

The monument dates WWII 1941-1945, which while accepting the scale of the US contribution slightly overlooks the fact that other parts of the world had been at it since 1939. And the top name on the credits is President George W. Bush, which we found slightly peculiar. His father may have fought in the war, but George Bush II’s personal war record could scarcely be described as glorious. Overall, a mixed experience, but there’s no doubt that the US contribution in the 1940s did save the world as we know it.

Stars (©JE)

Lincoln memorial (©JE)

Stars and Stripes (and Missing in Action flag) at half-mast, in honour of Ronald Reagan (©JE)

Poring over memorabilia (©JE)

Washington Monument through the ‘teeth’ of WWII memorial (©JE)

Germany’s wreath in tribute, near Atlantic War memorial (©JE)

In the evening, we went out and had a sushi dinner. Though the waitresses were Asian, some of the music seemed to have a distinctly American military feel to it, I thought. But it struck me that the US taste for sushi must have had at least soimething to do with the US occupation of Japan post-WWII.

And Gandhi was still striding along when I got back to the hotel. His extraordinary wrong-footing of the British Empire, by choosing to attack it via the salt tax and his walk to the sea to boil seawater to produce salt, was a contributory factor to my brainstorm at 04.00 this morning.

Gandhi on the march (©JE)

Sunday, June 06, 2004

METAL FATIGUE

Weird. While in Wiltshire, I finished Nevil Shute’s book No Highway, which is all about metal fatigue. Something I had read in my teens and wanted to revisit. Then working away this afternoon, my chair collapsed under me. Metal fatigue. Made by Verco, it has done excellent service. Indeed, I think I’ve written 16 books seated in it. And Julia (Hailes) worked from it for a couple of years, too. Now, some 24 years on, it has decided it has had enough. A portent, perhaps? Maybe next time I should get one with an ejection module?

The chair it was that died (©JE)

THE GREATEST GENERATION

Working on our report for the UN late last night, I heard that Ronald Reagan had died. Odd, since I had found myself wondering what had happened to him 3-4 days back. The further we get away from him, from Margaret Thatcher and from the collateral damage they caused, the better they look. Visted Reagan’s website (www.reaganfoundation.org) this morning and was struck by just how fast we are moving away from the world of the ‘Greatest Generation’, a sense that has been reinforced by reading the McCulloch biography of President Truman – and by today’s ceremenies marking the 60th anniversay of the D-Day landings.

One quote of Reagan’s which has always struck me was this one, from 1982:

“…I know it’s hard when you’re up to your armpits in alligators to remember you came here to drain the swamp.”

Reading the accounts of what it was like to be pinned down on Omaha Beach, this resonated, but it must also resonate with those pinned down in Iraq. Longer term, though, I’m pretty sure that Bush II will not look better with the passage of time. Indeed, I suspect that much of what the Bush nexus got up to with the Saudis and others will begin to look like the swamp that had to be drained for the good of all.

Saturday, June 05, 2004

WHITE SHEET DOWN

A psychotic peacock, a neolithic hill fort and a herd of wapiti: highlights of the last couple of days, which we spent with Gaia near Maiden Bradley, Wiltshire. The peacock had appeared out of nowhere to terrorise The Spread Eagle inn, where we wandered the Stourhead grounds literally across the road shortly after arriving on Thursday evening. That night we were periodically woken up by the peacock, which seemed quite close by. When we went out in the morning, it turned out that the wretched thing was roosting on the inn’s roof, not much more than a dozen feet from our bedroom window. And the racket was much worse the next night.

One of the women in the inn said that no previous peacock has behaved this way, making a ferocious racket from the early hours (Elaine says 03.30 onwards). But the woman also said that the bird has taken to attacking the paintwork of her car, presumably seeing its own reflection as a potential rival.

Floral lava plunges into Stourhead lake (©JE)

Psychotic peacock, Spread Eagle (©JE)

Today, we went back to Gaia’s cottage – the lane to which is awash with pheasants, partridge, the scattiest hares and, last night, what I think was a muntjac deer – and walked up onto nearby White Sheet Down. Through flocks of several different types of sheep, one of which, though otherwise white, looked as if all its members had put their heads into a bag of soot – and thence along the ridge to the spectacular neolithic causeway camp.

Overhead, a little tug plane puttered as it hauled gliders up into the sky, while unseen larks poured a cascade of song upon our heads. Something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before was the white footprints and trails left by the rabbits emerging from their burrows, dug deep into the underlying chalk. As we walked, the hill sides were aflutter with Chalk Hill Blues. On our way back to London, Gaia took us to Bush Farm (www.bisonfarm.co.uk), near West Knoyle, where they have a herd of bison – and another of elk (wapiti).

They had a strangely pin-head look viewed face-on, but then their heads looked extruded when viewed sideways on. No doubt we looked strange to them, too. Looked up the word wapiti when I got home: Shawnee word for ‘white deer’ (wap being white), to distinguish them from moose. Bought a pair of red deer antlers for Gaia: they suited her.

Glider and tug over White Sheet Down (©JE)

Wapiti at the bison farm, West Knoyle (©JE)

Wednesday, June 02, 2004

CROWS AND ANGEL

Winged sculpture in Montreux station (©JE)

The crows that had provided such a raucous wake-up service at the hotel seem to spend their days picking over the platforms and rails of the nearby station. Their black bodies, beaks and eyes almost disappear against the oiled sleepers and rain-darkened rails. Imagine myself lying on a battlefield, my armour plate already rusting in the drizzle, their beady eyes on the joints and cracks. I love to watch them them doing aerobatics and playing ‘chicken’ with one another, but have no illusions about their omnivorous tendencies.

Nor should they have about ours: in the Truman book I was reading a section in which journalists who made the wrong call on the 1948 US presidential election offered to “eat crow” while Truman, who had semi-miraculously won, “ate turkey”. Truman’s response spoke volumes about the man, but if push comes to shove most of us would eat crow as readily as they would eat us. Even as a 30-year non-carnivorous omnivore I’m sure even I would succumb.

And while on the subject of winged entities, most people seem to walk beneath it without an upward glance, but we rather liked the spectral angel hanging from the roof of the station as we waited for the train to Geneva airport.

Rhone (vessel) heading counter-current to Rhone (river) (©JE)

 

Sunday, May 30, 2004

Wild Art

Part of poster for L’Art Brut Museum, Lausanne (©JE)

Across to Lausanne, mainly to see La Musee de l’Art Brut, put together by the artist Jean Dubuffet and opened in 1976. The word brut denotes raw, crude or rough, and – as The Lonely Planet Guide to Switzerland notes, “that’s exactly what you get.” None of the artists whose work is featured is or was properly trained, indeed many were held in prisons or asylums. There are paintings, posters, sculptures made out of broken plates or discarded rags, and – the only thing we would like to have hauled away – a life-sized horse made out of branches, twigs and others bits of wood that was surprisingly life-like. I remember saying that when I started reading Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast some 30 years ago, I felt as though I had taken opium after less than 20 pages. At the museum I felt I was on something darker, something that wouldn’t just have you up in the attics, which is where a lot of thesee exhibits are displayed, but hanging from the beams.

Speaking of hallucinogens, though, when we came down the slopes from Caux the other day, we came across a little shop selling marijuana plants and everything to do with their cultivation and use. When we asked the delightful young man who was minding the store whether it was legal, he said it neither was nor wasn’t. Although I profoundly disapprove of the black market drugs industry, I still wish we had been able to find a way of absorbing hallucinogens into our culture in the way that people Aldous Huxley had in mind. The relatively few times I used them in the Sixties led to the opening of channels in my brain that might otherwise have stayed closed. Maybe that’s why I feel touched by the wing of madness when reading Peake or confronting the outpourings of these artistic obsessives.

La Feuille d’Or (©JE)

Saturday, May 29, 2004

Byron and other Wildlife

Chateau de Chillon (©JE)

Inside the Chateau (©JE)

A long walk, via the Chateau de Chillon, which we last visited many years ago on our way back from Italy with the girls. Did Byron carve his name in the column of the dungeon, which was meant to have housed the Prisoner of Chillon, or did someone else? Not sure I really care: he was there at some point and the place, from its fragmentary murals to its scaffold, is full of the echoes of romance and horror.

After the castle, we went on around the lake, to Les Grangettes, an area of woodland and reed marsh towards the point where the Rhone enters the lake. Saw a fair amount of wildlife, including a woodpecker, some fairly large frogs of variegated colours, a grebe which popped up in a pool almost at our feet, and a beautiful slowworm – the golden-brown, tiger’s eye colour of a humbug, with chocolate brown stripes along its flanks. Wonderful greens and dappled light.

Les Gagnettes (©JE)

Mossy stump (©JE)

Thursday, May 27, 2004

Geneva Brainstorm

Brainstorm with a view (©JE)

Across by train to Geneva and the World Economic Forum, for brainstorm with Pamela Hartigan (far right in photo) and her colleagues at the Schwab Foundation on a conference for social entrepreneurs they are planning to hold in Brazil in November. Process facilitated by Katherine Fulton of the Monitor Institute and Global Business Network (GBN), third from left in photo. Ged Davis (ex-Shell scenarios unit) was also involved for most of the day. Very stimulating, good fun. Also read David Bornstein’s book How to Change the World as I travelled to and fro, to review for Resurgence magazine. Excellent – and particularly illuminating about Florence Nightingale!

Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Marmottes Paradis, Not

Elaine walking down from Caux (©JE)

We took the rack-and-pinion train up to the Rochers de Nayes today, widely advertised hereabouts as a ‘Paradise for Marmots’. What we found, apart from spectacular views, was a set of marmot concentration camps, with electrified fences and the animals, not surprisingly, sulking undergound. We took the train back down to Caux, had a hot chocolate, then walked the rest of the way down vertiginous footpaths.

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Pathology, Poppies and Mint Tea

Poppies along Montreux foreshore (©JE)

Interior of just-painted boat (©JE)

Mint tea at Le Palais Oriental (©JE)

Elaine and I flew in to Geneva yesterday, then by train to Montreux, for a week’s holiday. Weather is delightful and we are enjoying wonderful walks along the lake. Am now back to reading David McCulloch’s stunning biography of President Truman, having read Joel Bakan’s The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power on the way across. The most relaxing thing of all is mint tea in the Moroccan ambience of Le Palais Oriental, just along from our hotel, Eden au Lac.

Saturday, May 22, 2004

Captain Corageous

Have always had something of an immune response to the Daily Telegraph, but we buy three copies this evening because Gaia appears, in a couple of photos, on the front page of the paper’s gardening section today. The piece is a full-page profile of Jonny Norton (the ‘Captain Courageous’ of the article’s headline), founder of the mail-order gardening firm Plantstuff (www.plantstuff.com).

Titanic Melting Away

My eye was caught by the photo in today’s Guardian of the mini-submersible Alvin, whose deck we stood on last year (see first posting, 30 September 2003). Robert Ballard, who found the wreck of The Titanic in the Alvin, is heading back nearly 20 years later to see what has happened to the ship. Not good news, apparently. “The ship is definitely dissolving,” says one lawyer who has worked for the salvage operators. “It’s melting like a candle from the top down.” But, while most of the damage is thought to be natural, there is also a growing sense that the process has been accelerated by treasure-hunters, including a 2002 operation which tried to smash through into the first-class cargo hold that contained a cargo of diamondThursday, May 20, 2004

Missionaries in Porsches?

To Cambridge again, for the entrepreneurs awards ceremony. I give a kick-off speech, introducing the 3P Awards, which now join the £50K and £1K Awards as an annual offering. Open the envelope for the not-for-profit 3P (People, Planet, Productivity) Award, which goes to Aidworld (www.aidworld.org), an IT group that helps NGOs in less developed parts of the word boost the speed of their Internet connections some 30-fold. Suggest that people give their acceptance speeches in tears, but no-one obliges.

Interesting that one of the speakers, from the chip company ARM, starts with a slide showing what he thinks motivates normal entrepreneurs: high-end Porsches and yachts. Before the ceremony, we had a joint session with the judges of the £50K and £1K Awards, which was like being alongside a bunch of CFOs. One or two were fairly dismissive of the 3P idea, describing them as “missionary” and saying that the 3P business plans they had seen they would have “flushed”. But it was also clear that the social entrepreneurs who tended to scoop the 3P awards were motivated by other concerns and interests.

The whole event was built around surprise, but the laptop that held the series of presentations and announcements seemed to be infected with a genie determined to give advance clues as to who had won the next award. With one exception, the organisers managed to cut it off at the pass, however. Even so, once these business plans are out in the real world, the element of surprise will be back with a vengeance. I hope a few years from now we can point to 3P concepts that have gone ballistic, whether or not the innovators are then driving around in Porsches.

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

2009 Visions

Fascinating session this morning, in which 13 of the SustainAbility team – most of the London office – shared their visions for time-scales extending variously to 2009, at the nearest, and 2014 at the farthest. The congruence of some of the visions was extraordinary.

Yasmin (Crowther) had also asked us to bring something significant, so I brought a Japanese-made ‘Global’ transistor radio which I used to listen to under my pillow at Bryanston, in the early 1960s. I explained what it was like to listen to Radio Luxembourg, and made the twin points that one felt connected to a wider world and that the thing you remembered was the tunes.

The implication, I said, was that we should not simply collect information but develop the ‘tunes’ that would ensure our thinking lives on in people’s memories. We had done that with phrases like ‘green consumer’ and ‘triple bottom line’ (Geoff Lye, who was in Rio last week, chipped in that at the conference he spoke at there the triple bottom line was just coming into fashion there, 10 years after I coined the term), and with the name ‘SustainAbility’, a word which had little meaning when we adopted it 17 years ago. Now we needed to develop the next generation of melodies.

Then Yasmin asked who would go next and Nick (Robinson) said he had to. It turned out that he had also been thinking in terms of music – indeed, he held up a bit of score by Bach. Amazing case of parallel invention. And by the end of the session, we had an enormously rich set of ideas to play with. In the afternoon, a different group of us got together to plan the revamp of the SustainAbility website, with a couple of folk from Saltmine.

Nick knows the score

Francesca (Muller), too

Yasmin (Crowther) conducts

Geoff (Lye) shares his 2014 vision

Kavita (Prakash-Mani) muses

Hair piece: Judy (Kuszewski) and Peter (Zollinger)

A reflective Tell (Muenzing)

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Cambridge Entrepreneurs

Afternoon spent in Cambridge with CU Entrepreneurs, a Cambridge University initiative (www.enterprise.cam.ac.uk) to spur entrepreneurial activity – and, specifically, to encourage students to develop business plans and business models based on the 3Ps of ‘People, Planet & Productivity’. Part of judging panel with Professor Charles Ainger, Mary Archer, Anne Cotton, Polly Courtice and Helen Haugh. Ended up with two short-lists of three business plans, one for for-profits and one for not-for-profits. Impressive field made it tough to choose. Results to be announced next Thursday.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

The Day After Tomorrow

Just back from chairing a panel discussion that topped and tailed the preview of the new film The Day After Tomorrow at the 20th Century Fox building in Soho Square. The panel included people from the Energy Savings Trust, Future Forests, Greenpeace, the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University and the Tyndall Centre on responses to climate change at the University of East Anglia, plus Michael Molitor, who acted as science advisor on the film.

Probably the best special effects I have seen to date and one of the best science fiction films, but science fiction it is. Several of the journalists and a couple of the science people present were horrified by the liberties taken with science at some points, one even arguing that this would set back the debate years, but I disagree. Just as Jurassic Park got people talking about cloning, so this film will get us talking about climate change. And that in the US presidential election year has to be a good thing.

One point I made was that I wrote my first report on climate change, for the Hudson Institute, in 1978. I have spent a good deal of time on the issue, but it has only been in the last couple of years that the notion of abrupt climate change has started to surface in my world. That’s why I visited the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution last year (see entry for 30 September 2004). If the film does nothing else, it will ensure that the abruptness of some past climate shifts gets onto the agenda.

For more information, see www.thedayaftertomorrow.com

Monday, May 10, 2004

Human Rights

Human rights session at SustainAbility, with about 7-8 of our people, plus Chris Avery of the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, Chris Marsden (who chairs the Amnesty International UK Business Group) and John O’Reilly, who works with Amnesty but used to be with BP in countries like Colombia and Indonesia. Fascinating and instructive, with growing interest across the team.

Sunday, May 09, 2004

Hill House

Lovely, rainy stay with parents in Cotswolds. Vegetation looking radiant, especially things like cowslips and rainbow chard. Interesting to see the walnut tree that a squirrel regularly strips of its nuts: apparently they puncture the walnuts to ensure that, when buried, they don’t sprout. Malevolent little buggers. Good to see cousin Toby (Adamson) after a long time and to go through some of his photographs (www.tobyadamson.co.uk). Caroline has also been doing some wonderful, large-scale paintings – Toby’s brother-in-law, Don, is working on a website for her. Then Elaine, Hania and I drove back to London, listening among other things to Jools Holland, The Shadows and The Pink Panther theme music. Nothing too serious, though with radio news breaking through periodically to tell us unplesant things about Iraq torture and sexual abuse scandals and the assassination of the Chechen president.

Once back, I got on with working through the business plans for the Cambridge University 3P(‘People, Planet & Productivity’ – slightly mutated from my original ‘People, Planet & Profit’ back in 1995) enterprise competition, the final judging for which is later this week.

Thursday, May 06, 2004

Eagle Squadrons

Cycling home this evening through Grosvenor Square, I stopped off at the memorial to the US Eagle squadrons, which fought alongside the RAF in WWII. Reminded of their role when watching Pearl Harbor on TV the other evening. The Americans may be screwing up royally in Iraq at the moment, but this was a welcome reminder of the best of America.

Eagles in flight (US Air Force Museum)

Wednesday, May 05, 2004

Accidents

Letter from RSA invited me to join their Council. Cycled to work for first time in what seems like ages. Glorious, though almost came to grief when a foolhardy cyclist cut across me in Hyde Park. Am more than usually conscious of the dangers of travel: Heather Brigstocke, High Mistress when Gaia and Hania were at St Paul’s School, was killed earlier in the week when crossing a road late at night outside Athens. The same day The Times carried her obituary, yesterday, it also carried – literally cheek by jowl – the news that Hania’s friend John Jenck’s step-sister Martha Lane Fox, previously with lastminute.com, has been involved in a terrible road accident in Morocco.

During the day, hail storms thumped down and thunder rolled across London. I wonder how many people today had the problem Seb (Beloe) and his family had recently: during a London storm his kitchen filled with three feet of water. They have had to move out. As the rain fell, I worked first on the Global Compact report, then on the media report Seb, Francesca (Muller) and Frances (Scott) have been putting together with WWF. When I cycled back through Hyde Park, some of Rotten Row’s sand had washed out in mini-Mississippi banks and the riding surface was deeply puddled. But this evening when I went out into the garden, the Big Dipper was crystal clear overhead. Waiting to bail us out after the next storm?

Sunday, May 02, 2004

25 Nation EU

Extraordinary weekend, with the EU expanding yesterday to 25 nations, 450 million people and 20 languages. I’m pretty miserable about the Greek Cypriots, though, who managed to spoil Kofi Annan’s attempt to reunite Cyprus. Looks as if any plans to visit the island to see childhood haunts from the late 1950s will have to be shelved for the moment. Someone was quoted in the press yesterday as saying that it was like being trapped in a womb with a stillborn twin. Can’t remember whether it was a Greek talking about Turks or vice versa.

Glorious birdsong over the past few days, with a pair of robins streaking around the garden and swifts quartering the evening skies. Liquid song of a blackbird broken by the squawking of a passing parakeet. Such a delightful day that I took a whole stream of pictures, several of which appear below. Elaine’s handiwork evident all around our small garden. Otherwise, have been working on the Global Compact project.

Clematis (©JE)

Parrot tulip (©JE)

Top of invitation card in kitchen window (©JE)