Journal

Across to Essen, via Düsseldorf Airport, yesterday. Then a very cold day’s filming today for Covestro’s new media campaign. Delighted to be able to spend some time with Gianna Heintges of Covestro – and to meet Baratunde Thurston, who interviewed me on camera in various spots around the old Zollverein coal mine, and Gator Halpern of Coral Vita, who is working to regenerate coral reefs, profitably. Enjoyed myself immensely.

My long-gone friend and colleague Max Nicholson would be shocked rigid to see what is happening with the Sixth Great Extinction, but at the same I suspect he would relish some of the news. Learned today that my long-standing colleague at SustainAbility, Kavita Prakash-Mani, now also a member of the Volans Board, has been appointed WWF’s new Global Conservation Director. My heart lifts.

Also in recent news on the conservation front, I have been asked to renew my term on the WWF UK Council of Ambassadors, and to join the Board of Conservation X Labs – delighted to accept in both cases.

Wildlife projected me into environmentalism and sustainability. Now it seems, conservation is becoming a real Thing in my life. Pay-back time?

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.

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.

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.