Journal

Drove across with Elaine to the Talos Art Foundry this morning, located outside the village of Quarley, Hampshire, near Andover.

Nicola (Godden) was putting the final touches to the first two castings of our Green Swan trophies. Wonderfully, one of the first two awardees, Sasha (Dench), had also driven across from Dartmoor to see the pieces come together.

Delightful team at the foundry, which itself is part of a cluster of artistic studios and endeavours at Lains Farm. Geoff Moate took us under his wing and steered us around the various stages of the mould-making and casting processes.

Had genuinely never realised how much effort goes into making a bronze sculpture. Afterwards, Elaine, Nicola, Sasha and I repaired to The Hawk Inn in the nearby village of Amport.

Wish I had had time to tramp down to see the swollen stream that runs alongside the village, with glorious kingcups (aka marsh marigolds) flowering on its banks. Seemed a little early for them – but happy to see them whenever they grace the landscape.

As someone who has long loved both biomicry (having served on Biomimicry 3.8’s board for some years, for example) and flight (from Leonardo via Otto Lilienthal to Bertrand Piccard of the Solar Impulse, who I met some years ago via Covestro), I was thrilled to see a piece in the latest Financial Times ‘How To Spend It’ supplement on the MetaFly.

Flight is built into our 12-year-old Volans branding.

And I always remember the ornithopters in the science fiction novel Dune, by Frank Herbert, who I also had the privilege of meeting way back. Here, finally, is a living (well almost), working example of ornithoptering. Well done Bionic Bird – and well done KickStarter, for helping fund.

Am sure these plastic wonders will cause unintended consequences, but I love the spirit of the thing. And given the way we are going, who knows, but we may well end up with similar nanorobots pollinating future landscapes …

Delighted to see Greenhouse PR flagging my next book, Green Swans: The Coming Boom In Regenerative Capitalism, as one of their 2020 “must-reads” on climate solutions. Am sure there will also be critical media coverage once the book appears, but nice to start with a bit of a tail-wind. Greenhouse had picked me as one of their “New Green Radicals” last October, which was encouraging, too.

While in Florida with CXL, I stayed in the Los Piños building on the old White Oak Plantation. Many of the buildings were strongly reminiscent of my long-since-departed cousin Hollister Sprague’s home, Forestledge, overlooking Puget Sound – on the outskirts of Seattle.

Despite the glowing coverage of the current denizen in the linked article, I hear that he has been bulldozing much of the wild woodland on the property, with the result that landslips are becoming more common.

Particularly sad since Elaine and I shared such happy times with Hollister at Forestledge, and his family across the state, from Vashon Island to Yakima, back in 1973.

When I arrived back from the States this time, I re-read my copy of our great-great-grandmother Clara Witter’s diary of her family’s move west to the Rockies in the 1860s. She was the grandmother of our paternal grandmother, Isabel Griffin/Elkington/Coaker.

In the diary, she describes setting up a post office in the mountains, where the local miners would pay in gold dust. Every weekend she would pan the dirt floor, making a fair amount of money in the process. I was interested in digging back into the mining elements of the family story because one theme CXL has been pursuing is artisanal mining.

I asked my brother Gray for some background on the Griffin side of the family – Isabel having been one, via her father, Francis Griffin. Turns out that a number of members of that generation owned and operated gold and silver mines in the USA, mainly in the Rockies, which is presumably how Francis met Isabel’s mother-to-be, Hattie Witter.

Also turned out, according to a document called “The Griffin Mystery”, that one of the Griffin brothers, Clifford, committed suicide at the 7:30 Mine near Silver Plume – giving rise to endless theories, rumours and ghost stories. False facts have deep roots.

Gray attached a long document giving the true story, which I must find a way to post here at some point. It’s genuinely fascinating – and references tailing dam failures that ended up wiping out part of the nearest settlement.

Somewhat relevant since, while I was in Florida, I received a request from a major mining company which recently had a terrible tailings dam disaster, asking me to write a contribution for their latest sustainability report. I set such a high bar that they withdrew the offer.

But at some level we are all complicit in these tragedies and catastrophes.

I have been at work this week on reversing retention. Flew American Airlines to Miami on Sunday, 23 February, then north to Jacksonville. Picked up at Jacksonville airport and shuttled across to the White Oak Conservation Center for my first board meeting with Conservation X Labs (CXL).

Great to see CXL co-founders Paul Bunje and Alex Dahgan – and to meet the rest of the team. Very much liked the other board members.

During the visit, which saw more or less endless rain, I went on two tours of the 17,000-acre conservation center, with the absolute highlight for me being the cassowaries, billed as the world’s most dangerous bird. About as close to velociraptors as I hope I am ever likely to see. The male and female have to be kept apart – and when the female performed a running, thumping aggression dance along her side of the fence it was fairly obvious why.

Am genuinely thrilled to be part of the CXL team – and was able to stay on for a further day and a half after the board meeting, to take part in the full team retreat. Hugely impressed by what I heard about the various programs designed to help “reverse extinction.

On the flights back, I read an initial 160 pages of CXL CEO Alex Deghan’s extraordinary book, The Snow Leopard Project And Other Adventures In Warzone Conservation. The story of the unbelievably challenging task of setting up Afghanistan’s first national park. Beyond inspiring.