Journal

SustainAbility Joins ERM Group

One reason I have been quiet for a while has been the holidays – and the fact that I am working on my new book, my twentieth if all goes well. But another reason has been a form of purdah required by the negotiations, over quite some time, through which ERM acquired SustainAbility.

Have been receiving lovely messages since the announcement was made at 16.00 GMT today, from current team members at SustainAbility and alumni, and from others around the world.

As the press release note:

Founded in 1987, SA has helped define and evolve the sustainable development agenda and the role of business within it. Throughout its history, it has worked with business and stakeholders to enable a more just and sustainable economy.

I still had five years to run at SustainAbility when I began this blog back in 2003. But it has now been 32 years since Julia Hailes and I, with help from Tom Burke, founded the organisation – which spent its first 2.5 years in our family home in Barnes, before fledging and moving off to the People’s Hall, north of Notting Hill.

Some people say time flies by, but all that seems centuries ago. In fact it was in the last century, before the Internet and while the Berlin Wall was widely seen to be eternal.

Too soon to know how all of this will turn out, but I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my long-standing friend and colleague Geoff Lye, to other Board members and to Executive Directors Rob Cameron and Mark Lee, and to the literally hundreds of people who have worked with SustainAbility over the decades. I am proud to still call many of them friends – and am seriously proud of the work we have done together since 1987.

Geoff signing the documents

Geoff and I celebrating, with Sam and Louise the other side of the table

Looking Forward Into 2019

Here is a link to my New Year forecast published today by Ethical Corporation. The same issue includes my appreciation of outgoing Unilever CEO Paul Polman.

Gene Pilots His Great-Grandfather

Gene (in bobble hat) buckles in to fly his great-grandfather, Tim

His great-grandmother, Pat, seems to quite like him, too

Lovely photos from Hania after she, Jake, Gene and Gaia trundled across to Hill House today to see Pat and Tim (now one week away from his 98th birthday), alongside my sisters Caroline and Tessa, and niece Lydia. Wonderful, despite various trials and tribulations along the way, to see the generations mixing it up in this way.

James Erlichman: Wolf As Sheep, Or Vice Versa?

Source: The Guardian, 15 December 2018

December has been such a frenzy that I haven’t managed any entries for a while, but am planning to catch up over the holidays. But was saddened to read of the death of James Erlichman in yesterday’s Guardian. Always liked him and admired his stances on major topics, among them antibiotic resistance and the BSE crisis. a lighthouse to steer by.

And I also recall a piece he did, I think for The Independent, on my role at the more commercial edge of environmentalism. It must have been in 1988 or 1989 – a big article, built around a large cartoon, either of a wolf wearing a sheepskin or vice versa. I genuinely can’t recall which way around it was. The cutting is probably in one of the boxes of cuttings in the summerhouse/garden shed.

But I have mightily appreciated the periodic challenges of such fair, honest and determined critics . While it’s comforting when one-time challengers, like the late Teddy Goldsmith, declare their growing grasp and support for a different line of attack, it’s more useful if lighthouses don ‘t drift over time. In my experience, James didn’t

Moving On From 2 Bloomsbury Place

Out and about on our new office quest

Yinka on the phone

Louise, Yinka and Elaine about to go into Somerset House, again

Preparing to ship or store Clover – a version of an image that occasioned a fair amount of comment on Twitter

Yinka’s swansong for the 10-year-old 2BP sofas and armchairs

We move out of 2 Bloomsbury Place on 20 December, after more than 10 years. Quite a milestone. But a fair amount of excitement about our impending move to Somerset House. A big draw for me, apart from the proximity to the Thames (which I wrote about in New Scientist in 1977), is the history of the place. A sense that Volans is finally beginning to emerge from its extended chrysalis phase.

ENDS At 40

Front cover of the 40th anniversary issue of the ENDS Report

Part of the 40th anniversary ‘story so far’

Across to The Wilton Arms in Belgravia this evening for a 40th anniversary celebration drink with some of those who have worked for Environmental Data Services (ENDS) since we founded the cmpany in 1978.

Including myself, there were three (out of six over the decades) former Editors of the ENDS Report present. First double gin and tonic I have ordered in living memory.

Nice piece in the latest issue on the story so far, though if you read it without knowing the history you might conclude that Elaine (who found Marek Mayer through his partner, author Sue Gee, both Sue and Elaine involved with publishers Wildwood House on the floor below us at TEST in our Floral Street offices, now long-since demolished) had gone on to marry Marek.

Something of a surprise for Sue and I, were it true. Particularly since by the time Marek hove in view, Elaine and I had been together for well over a decade – having met in 1968.

To Warsaw With EcoVadis

An indication of the menus here: the air tastes of burning coal

En route to the Spektrum Tower

Memes on an internal window

Andrew Winston illuminated

A view from the Spektrum Tower

Dinner in Romantyczna Restaurant in Old Town Market Square

En route back to the over-grandly named Royal Leonardo Hotel

Ditto 2

Ditto 3

A glimpse of the Stalinist Palace of Culture and Science

Flying back into the UK, a spectacle I never tire of

A fascinating trip to Warsaw, my first, for EcoVadis, where I have been on the Scientific Committee for around a decade. And here’s a bit of the section of the new book I wrote after the trip:

“There is a crack, a crack in everything,” intoned the late, lamented Leonard Cohen, “That’s how the lightgets in.” In the same way, reality sometimes cracks open in front of our eyes—andwe get a glimpse, an X-ray vision, of the future. That happened to me early in December 2018 while I was sketching out the early chapters of [the book].

A dozen of us were sitting in the offices of Paris-based supply chain management firm EcoVadis on the twenty-sixth floor of Warsaw’s Spektrum Tower. Outside, and all around us, impenetrable rain clouds hung low across the city.

Ironically, we were discussing how to illuminate darker corners of the global supply chains that feed today’s globalized economies.

Winking through the murk below were the lights of construction cranes. They were hard at work erecting a new version of a city largely levelled by the Nazis in 1944—and then held in an iron grip for decades by victorious Soviet occupiers.

Indeed, when the cloud began to clear a little, we could increasingly make out the brutal shape of one of Europe’s ugliest skyscrapers. Originally known as the Joseph Stalin Palace of Culture and Science (or Pałac Kultury i Nauki imienia Józefa Stalina), it was stripped of every trace of the dictator during a later period of destalinization.

Originally, positioned as a gift to Poland from the Soviet people, the Babel-like structure has attracted many ungrateful nicknames over the years. Among the nicknames used by Varsovians, I learned, are Pekin (or “Beijing”, because of the building’s abbreviated name PKiN) and Pajac (meaning “clown”, a word that sounds close to Pałac).

Less common—but more memorable—nicknames include Stalin’s Syringe, the Elephant in Lacy Underwear, the Russian Wedding Cake, or even Chuj Stalina (Stalin’s Dick).

 Like the thousands of laborers who toiled on the original Tower of Babel, those who worked on the Palace of Culture and Science could hardly have imagined today’s world. Yet when the Berlin Wall was breached in 1989, a previously unimaginable crack opened up in communist reality, with capitalism increasingly running rampant.

All around the Spektrum Tower we saw high-rise buildings emerging from the murk, many sporting the logos of international companies like EY, Marriott and Mercedes.

But current forms of capitalism are under existential pressure, too, from several directions. On the same day that we looked down on Warsaw, climate leaders from around the world were looking around the city of Katowice, the heart of Poland’s coal-producing region.

And, if media reports were to believed, many were wondering why their annual climate summit had been parachuted into Katowice, the dark heart of Poland’s fossil fuels economy.

A Piece Of E-Type Cake In Vienna

A nicely iced E-type in a Vienna cake shop window

Have never had much of an appetite for sports cars, but there’s something about Vienna. Last time I was here, for example, Elaine had me driving a Tesla around the grounds of a castle.

This time, here to speak at an Austria Glas Recycling event, I caught sight of this Jaguar E-type cake, just around the corner from a Tesla store. For some reason former Foreign Office Buffoon Boris Johnson and having one’s cake and eating it came to mind.

Some Reflections On The Power Of Babel

Source: GreenBiz

My latest GreenBiz column considers some lessons learned from my recent trip to Berlin, Paretz and the like.