Journal

Today, Green Swan Day 2020, further builds the momentum around regenerative capitalism, with the announcement of a new partnership between our rapidly evolving Green Swans Observatory and Shizenkan University’s Centre for Sustainability & Innovation, in Tokyo. More details here. And more on the first Green Swan Day, on 23 June 2019, can be found here.

And here’s a working paper we have just launched, based on our recent Green Swans webinar with Shizenkan.

We have also announced the beginning of a new project with the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), focusing on the regeneration of the Leven river valley in Scotland. A Medium piece on the project by our colleague Richard Roberts also appeared today.

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: