Journal

On 11 June, I did a Zoom call with Daniel Christian Wahl, a global leader in the field of regenerative everything. Today he sent me the video version, which at 80 minutes long may require at least several glasses of wine and a tub or two of popcorn, but I have to say I’m quite pleased at the way it turned out.

A welcome opportunity to test out our thinking on regenerative capitalism, and everything that goes with it, with someone deeply steeped in the back story, philosophy and science.

And, as it happens, our third Green Swans Book Club tomorrow evening features Daniel and his book Designing Regenerative Cultures.

The road to getting the first trio of Green Swan Awards to their awardees has been slow and complicated. But Nicola brought her son Will, his partner Bee (who took the photos above) and her son Albin. She also brought the latest two trophies more or less direct from the Talos foundry, so I can now affix the nameplates and send them out at last. The new ones are a brighter green, which I very much prefer.

Amazing how much pleasure can come from good company, something we – or at least I – have been starved of for months. Nicola went home and, apparently, then flew her plane to the south coast with her daughter, no other planes in the sky.

Am feeling slightly punch-drunk, meanwhile, though did a particularly jolly Zoominar yesterday with the UN Global Compact team – and a range of social intrapreneurs from around the world. Maggie du Pree – who coined the term social entrepreneur – when we were working on a project together at SustainAbility – was part of the webinar, dialling in from Portland, Oregon. The spirit was caught in this photo:

Amazing how one’s memory can drift over time. Our daughter Hania sent us this link to an amateur film made in Barnes, London, by John McCready in 1974 – the year before we arrived from central London.

At one level very little seems to have changed, and yet the film can’t show the construction of the river wall, that occluded the Thames to a degree; the village pond that drained overnight and had to be restored over quite some years; the fire that raged through the church, in the event providing the opportunity to rebuild in a wonderful way; and the intensification of flights overhead into nearby Heathrow, a nuisance that has been radically abated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Interesting, too, to see the building in the High Street where Gaia (aged perhaps 3 or 4) and I stopped to watch a coral reef on a colour TV screen. She dropped to a crouch and was utterly rapt. Case made. I went in within days to buy a tiny but wonderful for those days) Sony Trinitron colour TV – and it provided a remarkable window into the natural world.

If only we had been able to see then the sort of TV screens that are increasingly standard today. They would have seemed more like a cinema. And that’s another thing that has changed. The music studios where people like The Beatles, The Byrds and Queen recorded, is now a cinema. Or at least it was until the virus hit – hope it will still be when the pandemic subsides.

Cheering news via the Sustainable Eel Group, which we helped release 30,000 elvers back in 2014. That was a happy day:

I have never much liked the idea of fan clubs, but it’s a little different when you attract elements of your own. The launch of Green Swans on 7 April triggered an extraordinary groundswell of good will and enthusiasm, with abundant commentary on social media and a growing number of major media channels covering the book.

Here is a screenshot of the Financial Times review, pairing the book with Rebecca Henderson’s impending book, Reimagining Capitalism. The first time that I have been described as an “elder statesman” of the sustainability field …

Other mainstream media coverage has included pieces by Forbes and Reuters, with last week also seeing publication of a short piece by Board Intelligence. among the coverage on GreenBiz was this write-up by Shane Downing of an interview I did with GreenBiz Editor-in-Chief Joel Makower. Articles by me on related themes have appeared in places like the BMW Foundation’s TwentyThirty platform, Ethical Corporation, GreenBiz and Sustainable Brands.

Working with Louise Kjellerup Roper’s son Noah, I also created a map of the “Green Swan World Tour” to date, which has been posted on the Green Swans page of the Volans website. It plots activities from California to Japan, from Norway to South Africa, and from Australia to the United Arab Emirates.

In fact, recent weeks have been a blizzard of podcasts and webcasts and webinars and the like. Here are a few of the events:

We have also launched a Green Swans Bookclub via Goodreads, where I did the first one and Denise Hearn the second, that one focusing on her book The Myth of Capitalism.

The reactions on Green Swans have been pretty much uniformly positive to date – but why the sense of the fan club dynamic? Well, it’s because of the photos people have been posting of the book in the context of their own lives, as in the following:

By no means finally, we soft-launched our new Green Swan Observatory in my keynote for the Catapult Cloud event hosted from Oslo on 19 May. The idea is to scout for, analyse and support emergent Green Swan trajectories around the world. The next stepping stone will be my webinar in Tokyo (see below, though again done from our front study in Barnes) on 5 June, World Environment Day 2020.