Journal

The hour going back today was one of few good things about the week, aside from a highly successful joint SustainAbility-Volans evening event at The Hub on Wednesday and a decompression session with Charmian, Sam and Smita on Friday evening.  Otherwise, the week’s character is summed up by what just happened with my treasure trove of photographs taken during the week, both by myself and by Sam.  I was uploading them to my laptop, when a message appeared to say that disk space was precariously low.  So I came out, thinking the 120-odd images to date would have been saved, only to find – after deleting them – that they had disappeared.  Must be tired – partly after putting up with a trip in and out of London this afternoon for a meeting at 2 Bloomsbury Place.

Still, on reflection, there were other good moments.  They included a session with Singapore’s Economic Development Board on Monday, a brown-bag lunch with Monica Araya of Climate Change Capital and members of the Volans SustainAbility teams, a filming session for Accenture on Wednesday, an Environment Foundation Trustees meeting at 2BP on Thursday, and the broaching of a couple of Geoff Lye’s kindly gifted bottles of champagne as things wound down on Friday – after one of the wildest weeks for a while, both externally in the financial markets and internally.   

A couple of folk who came in during the week from the United Bank of Carbon asked me what Volans was about and one phrase I dredged up from previous days was that we aim to be grit in other people’s oysters.  And sometimes the grit lands in our oyster, as it did this week – spurring an extraordinary bout of creative thinking, which has produced a new book idea, a theme for a research programme and a bunch of other things.  Ho hum. 

One of the spooky aspects of Googling your own name, as I did this morning in search of a column that appeared in yesterday’s issue of Le Monde, is that you come across references you didn’t know existed.  Today it was a Wikibook chapter on ‘The Ones Who Made History’. 

There I found myself in pole position in a listing of sustainability pioneers, identified as ‘The Father’, with the others being Stephan Schmidheiny (The Visionary), Bill Drayton (The Prophet), Anita Roddick (The Provocateur), Ray Anderson (The Revolutionary), Oded Grajew (The Benchmark), Yves Chouinard (The Explorer) and Antonio Luiz Da Cunha Seabra (The Philosopher). 

While it’s nice to appear in such lists, if someone asked me who I see as the Father of the sustainabilty movement, I would come up with a list of other, stronger candidates for the tag.  They would include Maurice Strong and Max Nicholson.  Success has many fathers, they say, but these two were among those who influenced my choice of priorities and trajectories.  And don’t get me started on mothers.

A column I co-authored with Pierre-François Thaler and Sylvain Guyoton of EcoVadis appeared in yesterday’s issue of Le Monde.  It explored similarities between the U.S. suprime and Chinese melamine-in-milk scandals.

When I cycle to Volans, I pass the Animals in War Memorial by Park Lane.  But until today I hadn’t realised that of the one million horses shipped from Britain to France during WWI, only 62,000 had returned to this country.  Nor had I realised how many of the animals were shipped from the US and Canada when our own stables ran dry.  Those animals that weren’t killed outright tended to end up on the butcher’s block.  All this was brought home by War Horse, which I saw this afternoon with Elaine’s sister, Christine. 

The staging was incredible, with the main backdrop symbolising part of a page torn from an artist’s notebook. I surreptitiously took photos, without using flash, and though they don’t really capture the full measure of the thing, they’ll remind me of a deeply moving experience.  One image that will live on is the centre of the stage spiralling up to show a cross-section of the carnage beneath the surface, like one of those instruments that they push into a Stilton to extract a sample of the cheese.  Here, instead of the blue veins, you could see the bodies of men and horses. 

Outside the National Theatre   Stage 1   Stage 2

  Cutout   Waterloo sunset

  The full Moon seen from Taylor’s

As the financial crisis continued to deepen, I flew to Porto, Portugal, on Tuesday, to do a keynote address at an Organic Exchange conference on opportunities to use organic approaches to strengthen sustainability, resource and investment strategies.  The focus of Organic Exchange, which involves companies like C&A, Nike and Patagonia, is on organic cotton.

One highlight of the two-day visit was dinner with a small group of people near the old iron bridge across the Douro, hosted by Jill Dumain of Patagonia; the other a dinner with pretty much all the participants at Taylor’s, with spectacular views over Porto – and a full moon hanging in the sky (see photo above).  Wonderful evening sandwiched between Rebecca Calahan Klein of Organic Exchange and Marci Zaroff of Under the Canopy.

The keynote seemed to go very well, with a couple of companies telling me that they had (independently) called or emailed their CEOs to suggest I did a similar speech for them.  That said, I did provoke one participant to protest that I was “cursing in church” when I imagined a future in which demographic pressures – with a global population rising towards 9-10 billion – drove a process by which elements of the organic movement hybridised with aspects of the genetic engineering world.  But then others came up afterwards and said they could easily imagine this happening, as safer GM methods were used to boost the water efficiency of cotton plants – though, admittedly, the definitions of organic would need to change for this to become possible. 

  This bridge is a bit of a blur – because I didn’t want to flash Crossing the bridge en route to Taylor’s   Walking down to Taylor’s   Barrels of port   Walking back afterwards