Journal

Can’t really express how proud I am to have supported the Sustainable Eel Group for the past 15 years-plus. This media release gives a sense of the impact they have had on one of the defining issues of my own life.

Last week, we took our Tesla Model Y for an outing in Dorset, probably my favourite county. Any range anxiety was quickly and entirely relieved by recharging points at a car park at Corfe Castle, one of my favourite castles in the world – though I’m not sure that the energy was from renewable resources, as it is at home in Barnes. One key interest for me, as we explored Portland Bill, was the story of Portland Stone. Now what follows is less of a travelogue than a photo essay on a glorious week away.

Fast Company’s online platform have run two of my three posts linked to Tickling Sharks: the second today, reflecting on the SG backlash, and the first last week, drawing out the theme of how to persuade powerful people to change their minds and act. The third post is due out next week.

Flew into Belo Horizonte, via São Paulo, on Tuesday – to speak at the 15th CONCRED conference for credit unions, organised by Confebras. Some 3,000 people attending. As ever, loved the spirit of the thing, and was guided through the days by Claudia Luciane Leite, on the left of the last photo.

The plenary session began with a stunningly good Brazilian band, with orchestra, playing a series of Beatles songs. Made me feel right at home. And one highlight was a really interesting talk with Gabriel Galípolo, who some see as being groomed to become Brazil’s central bank head.

Have been hobbling through the proceedings, after somehow cracking a foot bone last week. My left foot has been heavily bandaged for a week now – and have also been wearing new support shoes to get me through all the walking around airports and the like.

Spent much of my spare time in the Radisson Blu hotel working on a long article on the impending next stage of the sustainability revolution. Seemed to make good progress.

But extremely unwelcome news as our driver Marcos dropped me at Belo Horizonte airport for the trip to São Paulo. This afternoon another plane bound for SP crashed, killing all 61 people on board. Got in touch with Elaine to say that it wasn’t my flight, to find Gaia had already told her the same. But startling to think how quickly these things can happen.

Went across to the Isle of Wight yesterday afternoon with Elaine, shepherded by Karen Bearman who runs the WWF UK Council of Ambassadors, for a WWF event – involving harvesting seeds from a seagrass meadow hard by the bridge across from the ferry dock.

This was my first face-to-face contact with some of the Project Seagrass team. For more on the seagrass story, see here, with the explanation helpfully rendered in multiple languages. And further discussion of seagrass’s many ecological benefits can be found here, via the Smithsonian.

The first time that I think I saw seagrass was in the Red Sea back in 1958, when I was nine or so. Looking through the glass bottom of a small boat, I remember the forests of sea snakes and, at least one seagrass grazer, a sea turtle.

Gathering the seed proved a lot harder than I had imagined, partly because of the turbidity of the water and partly because the seagrass leaves were coated in so many epiphytes – making it hard to work out what was seed and what wasn’t.

Had been given a large bag for the harvest, but the only four strands I got were each given to me by different people who apparently (and correctly) felt I needed help. All of them women. Also got distracted by numerous floating gelatinous objects, clear jelly blobs, that may have been some form of salp.

In any event, a great picnic on the beach and I really appreciated the chance to talk to younger influencers now involved with WWF, including Sam Bentley, Haroon Mota of Active Inclusion Network and Kedar Wiliams-Stirling, the actor.

Elaine stayed on the beach while we waded and harvested, where a passing retired fisherman opined that if it comes to a clash between people and planet, people should always win. Elaine’s response was along the lines that this can work – until it doesn’t. another passer by noted that tourists complain that the seagrass washing up “spoils” their image of what a beach should be, in effect all sand.

Clearly, we have a fair amount of work still to do.

And in the background, on the western horizon, stood Esso’s Fawley Refinery, which I visited solo back in the late 1970s when developing early corporate case studies as the first editor of the ENDS Report. Little did I realise then that Esso’s parent company, Exxon, would become the arch-enemy in terms of climate change.

Among many other things, my latest book, Tickling Sharks, covers the very public collision I had with their then Chairman and CEO, Rex Tillerson. Though in that case it was a bit more like trying to whack a corporate shark on the nose with an oar…

Then back onto the train, getting home around midnight – with an intensified urge to learn more about seagrass and do more to help ensure its conservation and regeneration. Meanwhile, the Chief Pollinator part of me loves the idea that, at least as far as I understand it, they are the only sea plant that pollinates underwater.