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John Elkington

John Elkington

A world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development.

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Search Results for: mill cottage

Website

In its 2020 version, this website embraces the Green Swan agenda

Looking back, I have been fairly early into areas like personal websites, blogging and tweeting, always interested to find new ways to learn and communicate. The origins of this website lay in a desire to capture what it was like in the relatively early days of the evolving environmental, social innovation and sustainability movements.

The idea was also to explain to the wider world what we were doing and what was working, and what wasn’t.

A decade in, however, our original webmaster absconded to New Zealand. Still, dark clouds, silver linings. I am still immensely grateful to Geoff Kendall, Sam Lakha and Chris Wash for wading in and rescuing the bulk of the old content.

Now the site is evolving for the next stage in my thinking, built around the idea of the Green Swan. More, as they say, anon.

And, by way of background, here is some archive text from the old site which explains some of the original reasoning behind the site:

Archive text from 2003, updated 2008

THE BABELFISH AND THE WEBSITE

I am often asked what exactly it is that I do. Difficult. When filling in the ‘Please state profession’ line on passports and other forms I have long been tempted to write ‘Babelfish’, which I’ll explain in a moment.

And the website? It’s a fairly natural outflow from work I have done under the guise of John Elkington Associates (JEA), founded by Elaine and I in 1983. Later, I changed the name to CounterCurrent.

In compiling the original version of the website, with the help of Rupert Bassett and Lynne Elvins, I was forced to plumb my core values, powerfully shaped by pressures and opportunities described elsewhere on the site.

Eight values that bubbled to the surface were:

– Evolution: Real change happens over generations

– Sustainability: Future generations as stakeholders today

– Diversity: Evolution feeds on difference

– Transparency: Sustainable economies are see-through

– Conversation: Wellspring of insight

– Memory: Capture lessons of experience

– Intuition: Facts only get you so far

– Serendipity: Learn from mistakes and accidents.

These values also eddy through the visual aspects of the site, including the logo. Click here for Rupert’s explanation below of how the original imagery evolved.

And the Babelfish? My work has often run counter-current, hence the imagery of fish swimming against the flow. At Volans and SustainAbility, too, we have aimed to drive the discussion of problems upstream – from symptoms to causes in pursuit of real cures.

But maybe the story runs deeper still. I was born in a mill-house cottage on an island in the Kennet, a tributary of the Thames. Later, as a child, I would find myself surrounded by elvers on a moonless night in Northern Ireland, or communing with wildlife along rivers in Gloucestershire, Somerset and Dorset.

And once we had decided to use fish for our new logo, the imagery proved surprisingly apt. Fish, it turns out, symbolise reproduction, life, freedom, the emotions, our unconscious, the quest for enlightenment, flashes of intuition, prophecy, fertility, plenty, prosperity, good luck, longevity and rebirth. Salmon, the ultimate homing fish and recently returned to the upper Thames, near our London home, symbolise wisdom – vital in a world flooded with data and information.

And that’s where the Babelfish fits in. Brainchild of the late, great sci-fi author Douglas Adams, it was billed as the universal translator. Slip the creature into your ear, we were told, and you could suddenly understand all the Galaxy’s languages. If any one organism symbolises my aspirations, and my work across the turbulent, blurring boundaries between business, financial markets, governments and civil society, this is it.

Finally, for the record, here is the text in which the original logo designer, Rupert Bassett, explained the origins of the fish logo:

fish

Part of the original CounterCurrent design for this website, by Rupert Bassett

Pre 2008 Design by Rupert Bassett

rupert.bassett@btinternet.com

John’s original design brief was to produce graphic imagery which would convey the idea of “swimming against the stream”, a strong metaphor for his campaigning lifestyle. In addition to this, as he communicates using many different forms of media, I was looking to create a flexible graphic system which could be applied quickly and consistently across multiple formats.

The Generic Form
After some study of streaming water and the mechanics of fish propulsion, I found an answer to the brief in the similarity of the forms involved in “swimming against the stream”. Wave patterns, scale textures, shoal paths and river flows all employ the same sweeping curves.

The solution was to create a single generic graphic form, from which all other graphic imagery required could be built by the simple process of repetition. The generic form was constructed using two dynamic sweeping curves, giving an apparently organic and naturalistic shape, without closely representing any specific identifiable aquatic lifeform.

Repetition
The most effective orientation for the generic form is moving “upstream”, emphasised by a background pattern generated by the repetition of the form which moves “downstream”. The background employs a diagonal repeat in the direction of the “head” of the form which emphasises the movement. More naturalistic patterns can be created by the deletion of a random number of shapes from the regular pattern. Colour transparency adds depth to the background.

The curves of the generic form were very carefully located within a grid structure of regular squares. This grid structure is an essential device to facilitate the regular repetition of the generic form in the creation of graphic imagery, and for the integration of other design elements. Any typographic or photographic forms can be sized and positioned according to the dimensions of the grid.

Other Influences

JE + Sandy and Jim 2 With Sandy and Jim Lovelock, on a road trip with John Gilbert in 2013

JE CRY group 2 With CRY (Child Rights & You) team in Mumbai, the gender balance even more wildly and wonderfully askew

Once you start a listing of people who have influenced you, it becomes a Sisyphean task to keep it updated. Several times I have more or less given up, but in the spirit of acknowledging at least some of the debts owed, and in addition to all those already mentioned below, I am enormously grateful to my colleagues at Volans for making our small organisation such fun to be part of. Others I would like to thank include David Christie of The Value Web, my literary agent in New York, Doris Michaels, John Maas and Karen Murphy at Jossey-Bass, Nick Bellorini (formerly with Earthscan), and Jochen Zeitz, my co-author on a recent book.

JE Maiden Castle 2 The English landscape was a huge shock to me when we returned from Cyprus in 1959, so green, but I learned not only to live with it but to love it—particularly features like Iron Age hill-forts. Favorites were Hambledon Hill and Hod Hill in Dorset, near Bryanston School. This is Maiden Castle, en route to see the Lovelocks in 2013.

This section is not really for wider consumption. It began as part of a process of identifying all the people who had had a major impact on my being and thinking over the years. As the listing went through various iterations, a few names dropped out and a few dropped in, but overall it stayed pretty much the same. and in reading it through while updating the website, it strikes me once again both how many people I have inevitably left out – and how privileged I have been with my family, teachers, colleagues and friends.

Unmasked: Ian Keay
Unmasked: Ian Keay

One of the longest-standing influences has been Ian Keay, shown here at a former home in California. He was at school with me, the brother of an early girlfriend and, in 1973, and—when Elaine and I finally got married—our best man. He introduced me to the work of a bunch of people when we were at Bryanston and afterwards, among them Buckminster Fuller and a half dozen science fiction writers. But more of that in a moment.

Although the first time I did this listing I did it according to the year I met the person, this time I have opted for a straightforward A-to-Z, starting with Douglas Adams and ending with Peter Zollinger. The ‘accordion’ listing below acts rather like an Advent calendar. Click on a name and an entry pops up. My ultimate aim is to get images for all the entries, but that will have to build over time, particularly as the list grows.

Douglas Adams

Adams

Born 1952, died 2001, but his work lives on. I adored the BBC radio series of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The Babel fish notion took deep root in my brain. Douglas helped us with 1992’s ‘Holiday Extravaganza’.

Major ‘Ned’ Adams”

Glencot 2

He and Mrs Adams ran our prep school, Glencot, near Wookey Hole and Wells, Somerset, where I arrived in 1959. The size of the school is indicated in the photo. He taught me various things: French, Maths, Latin. A tremendous teacher, but also a frantic caner and, it turns out, paedophile. He was eventually committed to an asylum.

At one stage I was getting caned more or less every week, mainly for things like throwing sticks in the river and then throwing stones at them. For years I thought I must have been a masochist, or just plain stupid, but then read that the part of the brain that handles the trajectories of stones, spears and the like also handles thinking about the future.

But then there was a ‘Lord of the Flies’ element to the proceedings. One weekend when staff were largely away, we created fortresses out of the new hay bales on the playing field, and bows and arrows out of bamboo from the cane grove by the river. One boy ended up with an arrow in his knee.

On the upside, when I broke a leaden calm between window panes, by throwing a hairbrush at a friend, a salvage mission worthy of a prison camp swung into action, with new glass being cut and put into place with chewing gum coloured with pencil lead. Character-forming.

Jacqueline Aloisi de Larderel

Larderel2

From the moment Jacqueline took over as director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)’s Industry & Environment Office in Paris in the late 1980s, we were co-conspirators. SustainAbility’s work on reporting (‘Engaging Stakeholders’, ‘Global Reporters’) would have taken a very different course if she hadn’t been there to support us through thick and thin. We continue to work together via the EcoVadis Advisory Board (see ‘Boards & Advisory Boards’).

Jamie Arbib

Along with Kelly Clark (q.v.), Jamie and his Tellus Mater Foundation have been a long-standing supporters of our Breakthrough Capitalism work. We admire their work on mapping Sustainable Capitalism.

Rupert Bassett

Rupert Bassett 2

Rupert has been a profound influence on the evolution of SustainAbility’s and Volans’ branding and design. I have rarely been happier than working with him to design reports, books and other aspects of the businesses, as is clear from the photo. (Rupert is far right.) He also helped design the first iteration of this website, together with the CounterCurrent logotype (q.v.).

The Beatles

RubberSoul 2They helped create an opportunity space for my generation for which I am eternally grateful. They appear in my ‘Desert Island Discs’ selection (q.v.), in the form of Revolution. Whether we made sensible use of that opportunity space is another matter entirely. The Rubber Soul album came into my study at Bryanston and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

Seb Beloe

Now with WHEB, Seb was a key member of the SustainAbility team for many years, co-evolving our work on the lobbying industry.

Amy Birchall

A long-standing colleague at Volans. She waded in as Managing Director at a critical time and did work way above and beyond the call of duty.

David Blood

Along with Al Gore (q.v.) and Colin le Duc of (q.v.) Generation Investment Management and the Generation Foundation, David has been a long-standing supporter of our Breakthrough Capitalism work. We admire their work on Sustainable Capitalism.

Stewart Brand

whole_earth 2

The man behind so many things, but the key was his Whole Earth Catolog series, which I devoured through the 70s. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. Met him properly at Jim Lovelock’s 100th birthday party in 2019 (q.v.).

Chuck and Jeanne Branson

Via Hollister Sprague (q.v.), we met his sister Joan (pronounced Jo-Anne) and her husband Elon, who lived on a ranch near Yakima, on the other side of the Cascades. Closer to hand, indeed just along the bluff on which stands Hollister’s extraordinary house, Forestledge, lives his niece, Jeanne and her husband Chuck and family. Hollister, Joan and Elon are long dead, but some of the links live on.

Lester Brown

lesterbrown_blog 2

One of the iconic figures in the sustainability field more or less forever. I reviewed his Breaking New Ground autobiography in a 2014 issue of Resurgence magazine. That was then sampled on the Earth Policy Institute’s website. This is the bit they quoted:  “I read the book cover-to-cover in a couple of sittings and learned an immense amount in the process, not just about Brown’s extraordinary life and times but also about the mind-boggling spectrum of challenges he has taken on.” The photo below was taken when I visited Les and his colleague Janet Larsen at the Institute in 2006.

DC Brown 2

Tom Burke

I met Tom when he was still executive director of Friends of the Earth in the UK. Later he contributed to The Green Capitalists and Green Pages, and was a co-founder of SustainAbility, introducing us to Dorothy Mackenzie (q.v.). Now with E3G.

Fiona Byrne

Fiona and Annie Dimmock (q.v.) were SustainAbility’s first proper employees – and tremendous allies and great friends in the early days.

Rachel Carson

Stamp2-180

I can’t remember when I started reading her work, but books like The Sea Around Us and Silent Spring (the first on the world’s oceans, the second on the way insecticides like DDT were ravaging wildlife) helped transform the way I looked at the world – and at the future.

Sir Geoffrey Chandler

Sir Geoffrey Chandler

Geoffrey had an extraordinary career, straddling industry, government and the NGO sector – where he founded and chaired Amnesty International’s UK Business Group. He endlessly provoked me over the years, changing my thinking more than he knew. I was delighted when a photograph I took of him many years ago (above) was used to illustrate obituaries in The Financial Times, The Guardian and The Times. And was also thrilled to see a bat flying around the church belfry at his memorial service; he would have loved that.

Sir Winston Churchill

Winston_Churchill_1941_photo_by_Yousuf_Karsh

A Briton to be proud of. His 6-volume History of the Second World War sits on my shelves waiting to be read, if and when I ever retire. A distant cousin, I found his life story and speeches incredibly inspiring. An even greater honour, then, to have been awarded a Churchill Fellowship in 1981, which among other things resulted in my book Sun Traps. Photo by Yousuf Karsh, 1941.

Kelly Clark

Along with Jamie Arbib  (q.v.), Kelly and their Tellus Mater Foundation have been long-standing supporters of our Breakthrough Capitalism work. We admire their work on mapping Sustainable Capitalism.

Robin Clarke

Previously editor of the Science Journal, a precursor of New Scientist, Robin founded Biotechnic Research & Development (BRAD). BRAD was somewhat akin to theNew Alchemy Institute in Cape Cod, co-founded by John Todd (q.v.). It was a fascinating combination of solar energy, windmills, fish ponds and the sort of social dysfunction you often found in low-discipline intentional communities or communes.

Isabel Coaker (née Griffin, then Elkington)

isabel-coaker-160px

Well, of course she was family, but she was also a great friend, too, over many decades.

My father’s mother, half-American, Isabel gave an aura of sophistication to our childhood. When Elaine and I lived alongside her in Knightsbridge in the early 1970s, we traded stories of transcendental experiences, she having had an out-of-body experience when she almost died as a child in South Africa.

Joan Davidson

One of the best teachers I ever had. Loved her. She taught me rural environment subjects at UCL in 1972-74, as part of an urban and regional planning M. Phil. course – and was one of the first people to recommend that I take up writing professionally.

Tom Delfgaauw

SustainAbility’s first non-executive director, Tom was previously vice president for sustainable development at the Royal Dutch/Shell Group. A client during the early years of our post-Brent Spar re-engagement with Shell. We worked on Shell’s first sustainability report, for which he chose my phrase People, Planet & Profit as the title. A friend and, again, more influential than he imagines.

Anne Dimmock

Annie and Fiona Byrne (q.v.) were SustainAbility’s first proper employees – and tremendous allies and great friends in the early days.

Bernard Dixon

As editor of New Scientist, Bernard was a long-standing sponsor of my writing.

Murray Edmonds

Murray first turned up on our doorstep in High Street Kensington in 1997. Later, we  helped Murray and Dobrina Edmonds to develop a series of agenda-setting conference tours of Australia and New Zealand. Murray has been a world-class guide to both countries. he and Dobrina are now retired.

Irene (‘Kerry’) Countess of Effingham

I met Kerry, alias Irene, Countess of Effingham, when she lived in Rose Cottage, Little Rissington. I was in my early teens, and she was one of my closest friends until she died at the age of 89 in 2001. Raised in India, she worked for Eisenhower in WWII and, among many other things, taught me to weave and dye.

Elaine Elkington

Elaine in Wengen 2

In retrospect, meeting Elaine in 1968 was the pivotal point in my life. We married in 1973 and she has been a Muse and hugely powerful influence in every aspect of my life since. She looks particularly happy here because we are winter walking near Wengen, Switzerland, which she loved. Her blog series can be found here.

Gaia & Hania Elkington

I always said to Elaine that I wanted two daughters. When Hania arrived in 1979, Elaine said words to the effect of: “There you are, that’s your lot!” Their influence is so pervasive it’s hard to know where to start.

John Francis Durham (‘Tim’) Elkington

tim wwii

My father, John Francis Durham (‘Tim’) Elkington was born in 1920 and was an RAF pilot in the Battle of Britain. He is the tall one, third from right. Later in the war, he served in Russia, the Battle of the Atlantic and India.

He stayed on with the RAF until 1975, when he retired as a Wing Commander and set up an art and picture-framing business. An independent spirit. I inherited at least some of his stamina. Lower photo shows him about to fly in a Spitfire aged 90.

Tim died on February 1, 2019, while I was speaking at three conferences in a day in Copenhagen. My coverage of his memorial service can be found in several posts here, including a video clip of the flypast by the sort of Hurricane which he once flew.

Kay Elkington

My father’s stepmother, Kay was also my godmother. She long provided a peaceful refuge for family holidays in Solva, Dyfed.

Patricia (‘Pat’) Elkington

pat-307w

My mother, Patricia (Pat) Elkington, born in Birkenhead, Merseyside in 1922. She and Tim met at Castle Gogar (see below), inhabited by her aunts, Brenda and Dorothy. Brenda was married to Gogar’s owner, Sir James Steel-Maitland. At the time, Tim commanded nearby RAF Turnhouse and met Pat when making a courtesy call. The courtesy continues. I inherited her love of words and reading. She died in 2019.

Pat on garden bench 2

Sibling Elkingtons

Line-up final

A huge influence, in one way or another. My brother Gray (and his former wife Christina) and my sisters Caroline and Tessa (and her husband John Chambers).

in this photo, Tessa is far left, Caroline fifth from left, and Gray fifth from the right, hidden in the ivy. Better photos will no doubt follow.

Lynne Elvins

Working alongside Rupert Bassett (q.v.), Lynne helped put together the first iteration of this website.

Jed Emerson

Venturing where others fear to tread, Jed’s ‘Blended Value Proposition’ mapped the future ‘beyond the triple bottom line’.

Jeff Erikson

A key member of the SustainAbility team in New York and then Washington, D.C. Now with Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room.

Amanda Feldman

Amanda

A long-standing colleague at Volans. The best of America. I love her insight and energy. A born social innovator.

Shelly Fennell

A long-standing colleague at SustainAbility. Some of the things we talked about some 20 years ago are only now bubbling to the surface.

Lynne Franks

LynneFranks

The PR queen and a model for TV’s Absolutely Fabulous, Lynne helped us propel The Green Consumer Guide and linked Green Consumer Week into orbit in late 1988, with the aid of a £6,000 grant from WWF.

Mike Franks

I met Mike when working with TEST. He was an architect-planner at the GLC office across the road in London’s Covent Garden. We shared a common interest in cities as ecosystems. Later, we (ENDS) took an office in the huge office complex Mike’s company, Regeneration, had redeveloped in Clerkenwell.

Richard Buckminster (‘Bucky’) Fuller

Fuller

I read most of his books, though it wasn’t always easy, and finally met the man in Reykjavik in 1977. His concept of ephemeralization and notion of ‘doing more with less’, as with geodesic domes, were direct precursors of eco-efficiency. More recently, I was a judge for the Buckminster Fuller Institute’s Challenge.

Claude Fussler

Both when at Dow Europe and later at the World Business Council on Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Claude supported early work on green consumerism and life cycle assessment, plus our 1995 report Who Needs It? We also worked together in the early years of establishing European Partners for the Environment (EPE).

John Gilbert

John Gilbert 3

My companion on the adventure of exploring the next stage in the evolution of Gaia science. Seen here with Jim Lovelock.

Tom Gladwin

A long-standing member of the SustainAbility Council – and the man who probably more than anyone else put me on the track toward the triple bottom line.

Edward (‘Teddy’) Goldsmith

Edward_Goldsmith

Much missed. He and I ended up sharing a hotel bedroom for most of a week in Reykjavik in 1977 during Nicholas Polunin’s Second International Conference on the Environment Future. I had long admired Teddy’s work with The Ecologist, although didn’t always agree. Elaine, Gaia (aged around three weeks) and I stayed with him and his family in Cornwall while I did a New Scientist piece on English China Clays. Among others staying were Laurence D. and Hilda Cherry Hills, who founded the Henry Doubleday Research Association (HDRA).

Al Gore

Along with David Blood (q.v.) and Colin le Duc (q.v.) of Generation Investment Management and the Generation Foundation, Al has been a long-standing supporter of our Breakthrough Capitalism work. We admire their work on Sustainable Capitalism.

Rex Gowar

Also a friend from Essex days he kept an eye on me during my first (and only) LSD trip. Life-transforming, literally.

Rob Gray 

Professor of accounting and director of the Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research (CSEAR). A considerable influence in accounting and reporting. Also huge fun.

Julia Hailes 

Julia_Hailes_pic 2

How do you put it into words? We met when she arrived at Earthlife, having spent a couple of years travelling around Latin America. She joined me to help produce Green Pages and we then co-evolved The Green Consumer Guide. When Earthlife went down in flames part way through both projects, we co-founded SustainAbility in 1987. We co-wrote 8 books and she remains a close friend.  Her eldest son Connor is my godson.

Pamela Hartigan

pamela-hartigan

As Managing Director of The Schwab Foundation, Pamela helped introduce me to the extraordinary world of social entrepreneurs. She was a co-founder of Volans, and co-authored The Power of Unreasonable People, before becoming Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. She has served for many years as a Non-Executive Director of Volans.

Denis Hayes

A co-founder of Earth Day in 1970, I first met Denis when he was at the Worldwatch Institute, then again – on my 1981 Churchill Fellowship travels – when he was director of the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI), in Golden, Colorado.

Almost a decade later, he invited me to join the international board for Earth Day 1990, an experience which helped broaden our international connections. Later President and CEO of the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle.

I interviewed him by Zoom for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, in 2020, with four short videos here – including the one in which I present him with the third Green Swan Award.

Frank Herbert

Frank-Herberts-Dune-early-paperback

Herbert’s Dune series entertained me for years. I tried to meet up with him but somehow our paths never coincided – until we finally made it happen as I flew in from Seattle and he prepared to leave London for the reverse trip. The conversation was captured in a couple of articles, including a piece for Earthlife News.

Thor Heyerdahl

ThorHeyerdahl 2

I read The Kon-Tiki Expedition and, while Heyerdahl (1914-2002) was probably (gloriously) wrong in some respects, the Kon-Tiki (1947) for me was a metaphor for casting forth – and of small groups of people of multiple nationalities learning to get along together, as we have at SustainAbility.

Helen Holdaway

I first met Helen, and Timothy Cantell, when they were running the environmental section at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). The RSA played a key role in sustaining environmental thinking through the 1980s, co-hosting the UK Conservation and Development Programme (a response to the World Conservation Strategy), for which I wrote the Industry report.

Later, Helen I were both trustees of The Environment Foundation. Then she became Director and I became Chairman. Having won a victory against the Charity Commissioners to get sustainable development recognised as a charitable objective, the Foundation celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2003. Helen stood down as Director after the November Consultation. Sinceher death, I will miss her enormously.

Elliot Jackson

Elliot has helped keep both SustainAbility and Volans (mainly) on the financial rails over many years.

Vernon Jennings

Joined SustainAbility from Unilever and represented a major investment for us at the time, which we largely funded out of royalties from The Green Consumer Guide. He was with us for nine years and helped turn SustainAbility into the organisation it is today. A Vice President for social and ethical accountability with Novo Nordisk and later an independent consultant.

Ian Keay

iankeay

I first met Ian and his sister Jane when I was 14 – and had just had my appendix out after a school emergency before the Christmas holidays. Ian, who would be our best man in 1973, introduced me in the mid-1960s to the thinking of Buckminster Fuller (q.v.) and to a whole raft of science fiction writers.

Jane Keay

Line-up final

Though a couple of years older, Jane asked me to Charleston a few weeks after my appendicectomy. I was, as they say, sorely tempted. My first real girlfriend and still a very close friend. She is in the middle of the photo, seven from the right.

Peter Kinder 

A leader in the area of socially responsible investment, and a founder of Kinder Lydenberg Domini (KLD), Peter and I met back-stage in Stockholm while waiting to speak at a conference. We found we shared a fascination for military history. Once when I visited Boston, Peter took a day off and took me walking around the War of Independence battlefields of Concord and Lexington.

Lise Kingo

We started to work with Denmark’s Novo Nordisk in 1989 and continue to do so today. Lise Kingo was there when we started, as a marketing assistant; today she is an executive vice-president for the triple bottom line aspects of Novo’s operations. Throughout, together with the company’s president (and now chairman) Mads Ovlisen, she has been both ally and inspiration. Novo Nordisk rechartered itself around the triple bottom line. Lise and I continue to work together via the Tesco Scale for Good Advisory Board we are both members of.

Rudyard Kipling

udyard-kipling 2

Unfashionable today, perhaps, but his Just So Stories left a huge impression, particularly drawings such as ‘The Whale and the ‘Stute Fish’ and ‘The Cat That Walked by Himself’. Painting of Kipling by John Collier.

Liz Knights 

Slide14

Liz edited a number of our books, most notably The Green Consumer Guide. Various editions of various of our consumer guides with Victor Gollancz, and from around the world, are shown in the image. She was pretty much a third author on several books, indeed both A Year in the Greenhouse and The Young Green Consumer Guide was her idea. She died of cancer in 1996 and is much missed.

Sam Lakha

Sam 3

By the time this website was revamped early in 2014, Sam and I had worked together for nine years, three at SustainAbility and then six at Volans. She has been the axis of my working life throughout that time. It is hard to imagine Volans having succeeded without her. The Times did a profile of our working relationship while we were still at SustainAbility, in their ‘Creme de la Creme’ section. Little did we imagine where the future would take us. Thank you, Sam.

The Hon. David Layton

Part of the family that founded The Economist, David had himself founded Incomes Data Services (IDS) – and now wanted to do something in the environmental world. The result: Environmental Data Services (ENDS). A profound influence in terms of how to write for a business audience.

Colin le Duc

Along with David Blood (q.v.) and Al Gore (q.v.) of Generation Investment Management and the Generation Foundation, Colin has been a long-standing supporter of our Breakthrough Capitalism work. We admire their work on Sustainable Capitalism.

Mark Lee

Variously CEO and Executive Director of SustainAbility for many years, Mark took the firm into a new stage of its development when I left in 2008.

Jeanne-Pierre Lehman

A member of the SustainAbility Faculty for many years, Jean Pierre was a professor at IMD – and also founded the Evian Group, of which I was a member.

Jonathan Levy

A friend at Bryanston, Johnny helped reinforce my love of the popular music of the 1930s and 1940s. The son of actress Constance Cummings and playwright Ben Levy, he was like a human gramophone.

John C. Lilly

John Lilly

Mad as a hatter, at times, probably because of all the LSD he took. But his work on dolphins, (including building channels that brought them into his home), sparked something in my imagination. The bad news about dolphin abuse came later.

Jacqueline Lim
J and O

A long-standing colleague at Volans. She was for a long time the quiet, still force at the heart of Volans, in addition to being our “token Singaporean.”

Martin Lindsay

Another friend at Essex University, Martin introduced me to the music of Fairport Convention (It’s Alright, Ma, It’s Only Witchcraft) and to the more esoteric aspects of America’s West Coast sound.

Alejandro Litovsky

CF 3

Now heading the Earth Security Initiative, Alejandro was a member of the Volans core team in the early years, when we produced The Biosphere Economy, of which he was the main author. Ale is on the left in the photo I took while we were working together.

Charmian Love

CL family

The best of Canada. Introduced by Pamela Hartigan (q.v.), Charmian has had a powerful influence on the evolution  of Volans pretty much from the outset, not least as COO and then CEO for a number of years. A dynamo, even with two sons who are dynamos in their own right (see photo). An increasingly influential voice in the fields of social innovation and entrepreneurship.

James (‘Jim’) Lovelock

gaia_cover_copy-300 2

I saw a piece he wrote in New Scientist in 1976 on his Gaia Hypothesis (later Theory) and decided if Elaine and I ever had a daughter, she would be Gaia. Gaia was born the following year. Many years later, on 22 March 1985, Elaine’s idea of a time-capsule of seeds and books (including The Gaia Atlas of Planet Management) resulted in a capsule that you can still see in the Princess of Wales greenhouse at Kew Gardens. I later worked alongside him on the sustainability panel for the ill-fated Millennium Dome. I have also played a marginal role in the acquisition and exhibition of the Lovelock Archive by the Science Museum, alongside the much more active John Gilbert (q.v.). Went to his 100th birthday party at Blenheim Palace in July 2019.

Geoff Lye 

GeoffLye

Geoff joined SustainAbility as a director in November 1995. He has transformed my thinking on the business aspects of what we do and has been a much valued friend and invaluable ‘thought partner’ through a series of adventures, including our relationships with Shell and Ford. Later he would help co-found Volans, where he serves as a Non-Executive Director.

Dorothy Mackenzie

Dorothy Mackenzie 2

After several years based in our Barnes home, SustainAbility moved to the Notting Hill area, to share offices with Brand New Product Development, run by Dorothy Mackenzie. We did pioneering work with her on green consumerism and joint projects with companies such as Dow Europe. In 2003, we worked with her again on SustainAbility’s rebranding.

Georgina McAughtry

Georgina was at Environmental Data Services (ENDS) from the outset, while we found Marek (Mayer) through Elaine knowing the novelist Sue Gee, later his wife. When I began to unhook in the early 1980s, aided by the Churchill Fellowship, Marek and Georgina evolved ENDS into an organisation I am enormously proud to have been involved with.

Roger McGlynn

A colleague at TEST, Roger moved to Barnes – a visit to him in the summer of 1975 resulted in our decision to buy the house in the next street that we have lived in ever since.

Molly, Terry and Peggy March

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We spent the late 1950s in Cyprus, growing up alongside Americans, including the March girls. They helped give me an appetite for America, including the Beach Boys. Molly has been to see us a number of times in London, as indicated in the photo.

Robert Kinloch (‘Bob’) Massie”

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Both in his work at CERES and the Global Reporting Initiative, Bob has been a major influence. He and his wife Anne Tate have also been longstanding friends.

Marek Mayer

Marek Mayer

The late and sadly missed Marek took over from me as Editor of The ENDS Report, and – with Georgina McAughtry – took the organisation to new heights.

Charles Medawar

Charles Medawar

A founder of Social Audit. I wrote of his work in New Scientist in 1978. In 1996 he became a founder-member of SustainAbility’s Council.

Sara Menguc

We first worked together on Cannibals with Forks, Sara was hugely helpful as my third literary agent.

Doris Michaels

Doris, based in New York, is my fourth literary agent, and has represented me on three books to date: The Power of Unreasonable People, The Zeronauts and The Breakthrough Challenge.

Tim Moore

Among other things, he helped me put together Earthlife News. 

Tell Münzing

Both at SustainAbility, and later at Performance Consultants and Impact Solutions, Tell has been both a colleague and a friend. He has played a key role in bringing our Breakthrough Capitalism agenda to Germany.

Jane Nelson

I met Jane in 1994, having just made a panic flight in by small aircraft to Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, for a keynote speech, following a problem with flights from London. She has been a close friend ever since. Her work at the International Business Leaders’ Forum has closely paralleled our own – and she has been another loyal and inspiring ally. A founder-member of SustainAbility’s Council in 1996. She moved to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 2003. She has served as a Trustee of The Environment Foundation, which I chaired, and as a member of the Volans Advisory Board.

Max Nicholson

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Max asked me in 1978 to help set up Environmental Data Services (ENDS) with David Layton. I had read his book The Environmental Revolution: A Guide for the New Masters of the Earth (1970) years before meeting him. I spent several months doing a feasibility study, and mocking up early editions, before we decided to press the button. He was from a very different generation, but a joy to work with. We worked together for 4-5 years directly, then continued to conspire over the years until his death in April 2003.

It turned out he had influenced me early on, when I was 11. I had asked all the boys at my prep school [see Major ‘Ned’ Adams] for their pocket money for two weeks for the just-formed the World Wildlife Fund (WWF: later the World Wide Fund for nature). Could never recall where that idea had come from. One day when we were driving down to WWF (which he co-founded) in the early 1980s, I told Max the story – and he said he had got four pages on WWF into a newspaper in 1961. Suddenly I remembered going into the school library and seeing the paper on a reading stand – that’s where seeds were sown in the fertile ground Mother Superior had prepared.

So Max influenced me for more than 40 years. His obituary in The Times (30 April 2003) covered only a few of his extraordinary contributions. But one aspect it did touch on was telling: I remember being fascinated by his appointment during WWII as head of the Ministry of War Transport’s allocation of tonnage division. Among other things, he oversaw the Pool of London at a time when Britain was being progressively starved by the U-boat campaign. His efforts then meant that he attended wartime summit meetings in Cairo, Quebec, Yalta and Potsdam. He told me that managing the complex dynamics involved in the Pool of London (including the interplay between ship arrivals, the tides and bombing raids) was much easier for an ecologist.

Max was born in 1904 and was 98 when he died. He and I were from very different wings of the environmental movement: he much more scientific, me more emotionally engaged, but we both agreed that ecological principles have to be fully integrated into our economies, a challenge that is no less urgent than when he and I first met. I wrote an obituary for Resurgence.

Max’s memorial website is here.

Sally Osberg

Jeff and Sally

Anyone who knows Sally (seen here with Jeff Skoll), and her work at the Skoll Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, will know why she has such an impact on all those she interacts with. A Muse in so many ways. I am enormously grateful to her, Jeff and his Foundation for their support at a critical juncture.

Mads Ovlisen

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One of the wisest CEOs I have ever come across. We collided when Novo Nordisk was impacted by the ripple effects from our 1988 book The Green Consumer Guide. But he pulled us in, embraced the challenge and Novo Nordisk would eventually recharter itself around our triple bottom line agenda.

The Palmers

Cousins of the Keays (q.v.) and living in the same village, we also grew up alongside Nigel, Cally and Debby. Their parents, Judge Jack and Vanda (Bunny) Palmer were wonderful hosts.

Roger S. Payne

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One of my favourite records during this period was Songs of the Humpback Whale (CRM Records, Del Mar, California), recorded at sea through hydrophones by Dr Roger S. Payne.

I used to turn the lights out and play the sounds of humpback and blue whales singing to Gaia and Hania late at night. It was like being immersed in a totally different realm, with these great creatures all around. Also had his album Deep Voices. As Payne said at the time, the world was “turning on to whales” – and he played a key role in the process.

Shawn Phillips

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A musician we met in Positano, Italy, on our way to Greece in 1970. Three of us, Rex, Ian Lovell and I, spent an extraordinary night in Shawn’s hilltop house, listening to music he had just recorded with the likes of Paul McCartney and Stevie Winwood. For more details, look here.

Kavita Prakash-Mani

A long-standing colleague at SustainAbility, Kavita went on to Novartis and the World Economic Forum. Was on Volans Board for some years. A true friend, whose company on a major trip to India was particularly appreciated.

 John Roberts

John contacted me a few weeks before the end of my M. Phil. course at UCL. We worked together for four years, on a range of projects in such areas as environmental impact assessment and the role of ecologists in the planning system. A huge influence, not least in providing a model of an independent think tank and consultancy, of which TEST was one of the very first.

Will Rosenzweig

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Will has been a very good friend for many years. I think I first met him at  the World Economic Forum, at a session in 2001 organised by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.

Later, I served for several years on his Advisory Board at Physic Ventures, in San Francisco. he has recently chaired the Vitality Commission’s inquiry into the implications of health and chronic illness for the U.S. economy. Elaine and I love the place he and his wife Carla have in the Sonoma Valley, the IdeaGarden. A home from home.

James (‘Jim’) Salzman

How to pin the man down? He was at S.C. Johnson when I first came across him, then at the OECD, then a professor at American University, then at Duke University. He was a founder member of the SustainAbility Council. And he has been a long-standing friend.

John Schaetzl

Played a key role at SustainAbility since I moved on to Volans, which I enormously appreciate.

Sir Peter Scott

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I met him first when he was one of the judges when I was interviewing for my Churchill Fellowship and later when we had produced The Green Consumer Guide. I can’t pass his statue at the nearby Barnes Wildlife Centre (his sculpture shown here) without feeling a huge surge of affection and gratitude. Peter and Max Nicholson were both involved in setting up WWF, where I would later be a member of the Council of Ambassdors.

Jonathan Shopley

Jonathan arrived on our Barnes doorstep late in 1983, 20 years ago, after riding from South Africa to London on a motorcycle that looked like something out of Mad Max. He worked with us at John Elkington Associates (including co-authoring two of the WRI reports mentioned above) and Earthlife, remains a close friend, and now runs Future Forests.

When I was doing this section and asked him when he arrived, he replied: “I arrived in the UK in September 1983, and probably took a month or two to get settled and make the JE connection. I had been researching opportunities in the UK, and on one particular day came across your name in three or four different places (The Guardian, Science Reference Library, bookshop where your books were selling, conversation with someone) and I decided I had to meet you. I had Jack [Jonathan’s father] send me my suit from South Africa for our appointment, and I pitched up at Cambridge Road all smart and formal – and your girls answered the door-bell and immediately flung their arms around me, and made me feel very welcome from the first instant.” He subsequently went on to LBS and the Carbon Neutral Company, and remains a good friend.

Jeff Skoll

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Alongside Sally Osberg (q.v.), Jeff and his Skoll Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship funded a key part of my evolving work at SustainAbility and Volans, helping to catalyse a new mindset and a new venture.

Paolo Soleri

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In 1973, Elaine and I visited Soleri’s Cosanti Foundation and Arcosanti project, which led to my first speech and article. Originally a pupil of Frank Lloyd Wright, who had dreamed of ‘Broadacre City’, with every family allocated a 1-acre lot, Soleri went for something more like human termitaries, super-dense cities built into massive dams or other giant structures. Arcosanti was fascinating, but a storey or two high at best. My 1974 AAQ article mused that it would make a great set of ruins.

Andrea Spencer-Cooke

A Muse, no question, both in developing my triple bottom line thinking and in establishing SustainAbility’s long-running ‘Engaging Stakeholders’ programme. Now lives outside Sydney and is part of Onestone Advisors. The name came from an early triple bottom line conference we organised in the Kensington Roof Gardens in the mid-1990s called ‘Three Birds, One Stone.’

James Gustave (‘Gus’) Speth

I met Gus at the 1984 World Industry Conference on Environmental Management (WICEM), in Versailles. Later, as president of the World Resources Institute (WRI), he commissioned a series of reports we did on the implications of biotechnology, information technology and advanced waste management technology.

Hollister T. Sprague

Elaine on bearskin

A WWI American fighter pilot, he later worked as Mr Boeing’s lawyer in Seattle. A first cousin of my grandmother Isabel, he looked after Elaine and I on our 1973 honeymoon, escorting us across the Cascades and up into the Olympic Peninsula.

His home, Forestledge, overlooking Puget Sound, became a regular holiday destination for us. This link I stumbled across gives some of the background on Forestledge – and I didn’t know that an Alice In Chains drummer had been one later resident … The photo is of Elaine on a bearskin there when we were on our honeymoon in 1973

Sir James Steel-Maitland

As my godfather, he sent me gifts I loved as a child – a silver christening mug made from part of a section of elephant’s tusk, hairbrushes made of ivory and whale bristle – gifts that I later learned to see with radically different eyes.

Ulrich Steger

A Professor at IMD when I first knew him through the European Commission’s Consultative Forum on Sustainable Development, of which we were both members, Ulrich had previously been a board member at Volkswagen and a state environment minister. He was also a founding member of the SustainAbility Council

Mother Superior

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I don’t know what her name was; all I know was this was Limavady, Northern Ireland, in the mid-1950s. I was perhaps 6 or 7, and I clearly rattled her with an innocent question about whether animals went to heaven? Her response has unintended consequences. The image is part of a painting, I am fairly sure done by Greg Becker, that was done for one of a series of columns I did for The Guardian many moons ago.

Sophia Tickell

After a high-impact with Oxfam, Sophia took over my role as Chair of SustainAbility a few years before I moved on. She also left to found Meteos.

Jodie Thorpe

For several key years at SustainAbility, Jodie was my mainstay. She later moved to Oxfam.

John Todd 

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The photo and design are of the New Alchemy Institute’s Ark on Cape Cod, in the 1970s. For me at the time, it was distant Mecca, though I did work for a short while at the UK equivalent, BRAD (Biotechnic Research & Development), set up by Robin Clarke, formerly Editor of the Science Journal.

My shelves still contain several editions of The Journal of the New Alchemists. A pioneer in such areas as intentional communities and aquaculture, particularly tilapia farming.

Nigel Tuersley 

Nigel Tuersley

Founder of the Earthlife Foundation, Nigel was a consummate entrepreneur. Earthlife pioneered in areas that most other NGOs took years to get into. Although Earthlife eventually crashed, it was like a neutron star, spraying rare, life-promoting elements through the rest of its universe. One thing the experience taught me, however, was that rapid growth can be dangerous.

Clark and Charlotte Turner

Once the process of meeting cousins started in the Puget Sound area, it continued. Most notable were Charlotte and Clark Turner, whose house fronting directly onto Puget Sound on Vashon Island was a wonderful retreat – with Hania catching her first and only salmon from the foreshore. Among the things that stand out in memory are horse-riding in the hills around Yakima with Elon, sailing with Clark and Charlotte around Puget Sound, and being taken to our first and only drag race with (not entirely in character) the Bransons.

Wouter van Dieren

A colleague and friend over decades, Wouter had co-founded Friends of the Earth in Holland, then founded IMSA, a consultancy that I long saw as a sister organisation of SustainAbility’s.

Fran van Dijk

Both when at SustainAbility and after, Fran has been a wonderful colleague and friend, and introduced us to Rupert Bassett (q.v.). She is part of Onestone Advisors.

Steve Viederman

Previously president of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation in New York, Steve was a long-standing member of SustainAbility’s Faculty. He regularly reminded me that NGOs are not confined to brand names like Greenpeace or Amnesty; that there is a huge array of grassroots organisations that it is all too easy to overlook – and which do most of the grunt work.

Stanley and Margaret Waite

They weren’t at all sure of what to make of me at the outset. The fact that I had (very) long hair, beads and an antique Dior jewelled waistcoat probably didn’t get us off on quite the right foot, nor did the fact that all my grandparents had got divorced, and at least two had subsequently divorced again. But things soon improved – and I’m hugely grateful to them for helping us buy our Barnes home, even though they were horrified when they saw the ruinous state we were living in.

Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker

I first met Ernst in Tokyo in 1981 and later served alongside him on the European Commission’s Consultative Forum on Sustainable Development. Wouter I have seen as a competitive benchmark, Ernst – who later founded the Wuppertal Institute and served as a member of the German Bundestag – as a towering feature in our landscape, providing a powerful reference point.

Steve Warshal

A Director of Greenpeace UK for many years, Steve organised an early conference for Marketing Week on the green consumer, alongside his wonderful wife, Sandar. We became close friends and have taken each other to various concerts, including evenings with Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn.

Henry Williamson

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Stories like Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon had a profound influence on me as a child. Portrait by Charles Tunnicliffe.

Gavin Young

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I was fascinated by Gavin‘s experience of living with the Marsh Arabs of Iraq (see his Return to the Marshes), to whom he was introduced by Wilfred Thesiger, and by his sense of Vietnam’s history, where he had spent a great deal of time. His mother Daphne was a good friend, via my grandmother Isabel. He and I spent a memorable weekend in Paris in 1973. He invited me to go on the trip that would turn into two books, Slow Boats to China and Slow Boats Home, but I chose to stay in London with Elaine. The roads not taken. He died in 2001.

Jochen Zeitz

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I first met Jochen at an event outside Geneva some years back, organised by Richard Branson’s Virgin Unite foundation. Not long afterwards, we agreed to write a book together. The Breakthrough Challenge is due to launch in September 2014. Jochen is now co-Chair of The B Teamwith Richard.

Peter Zollinger

Like Kavita Prakash-Mani (q.v.), Peter came to SustainAbility from the World Resources Institute (WRI). He was CEO of SustainAbility for a fair few years, before moving back to Zurich to co-founded a green bank, Globalance Bank. Some of the nicest evenings I have had were spent with Peter watching episodes of The West Wing.

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Education

JE Cutty Sark 2

Cutty Sark, after restoration, simultaneously satisfying my love of history, technology and geodesic design

Oddly, I didn’t include Education in the first iteration of this ‘Influences’ section. Perhaps it was because I recalled one of my more memorable school reports, in which the assessment of one teacher went like this: “John sets himself low standards—and consistently fails to achieve them.”

“Education,” as W.B. Yeats put it, “is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.”

My own fire was ignited in many ways, in many places, by many people. In retrospect, much of my education happened on the edge of things, from schools in outposts of a fading empire in the 1950s to a new university shuddering on the edge of revolution in 1968 through to an emerging movement—environmentalism—that for many years scarcely dared speak its name, at least in the business world where I chose to focus my efforts from the mid-1970s.

Nuns and EOKA-B

Fire burns, too. The most searing experience I remember from my early years came when, as one of three notionally Protestant children in a Catholic convent school in Northern Ireland, I asked Mother Superior whether animals went to heaven. (Living out in the country, we were surrounded by every variety of wildlife and saw life and death daily on the nearby farm.)

She replied, with an emotional intensity which I can still feel more than half a century later, that I was “either a pantheist or a pagan”—and, she said, she didn’t know which was worse! I have a highly visual imagination and my memory of that instant is of a pair of clawed hands coming through a curtain in my brain, tearing the fabric asunder.

In a matter of seconds, it seemed, such faith as I had evaporated. A day or two previously I had another pivotal moment, at least it later came to seem so. Walking home from a farm labourer’s cottage in the pitch dark, between disused flax ponds, I had found myself surrounded by migrating silver eels, or elvers. I have no idea now whether they were headed to or from the ponds, but there was a moment of profound connection with Nature that has never quite left me.

In contrast, while the RAF school outside Nicosia may have had its moments, I remember very little about it—except a big map of the island and a large jar of cotton stalks and bolls used to explain something or other. Much more influential was growing up alongside American families, the Marches and Sanders, with their open horizons, and imbibing the extraordinary history of Cyprus, particularly through visits to the chain of castles and monasteries in the northern mountains (see Cyprus 2005).

Immersion in the Protestant-Catholic tensions of Northern Ireland, the Greek-Turkish-British tensions of Cyprus (at the time in the midst of a nasty set-to between British forces and EOKA-B) and Israel, where everybody tends to hate pretty much everybody, fed my deep suspicion on religiosity, so often used as an excuse for baser human instincts and tribalism.

Prep school at Glencot, near Wookey Hole and Wells, Somerset (1959-61), was the first real separation moment, except for a three-day trip my brother Gray and I took around Cyprus in a minesweeper, HMS Fiskerton. In many ways, this was a distillation of the prototypical prep school story, with at least one homosexual master and a headmaster, Mr Adams, prone to outbursts of violence (he was eventually committed to an asylum, I believe).

But he—despite his cupboard of canes, many burned or scorched when one boy had set the cabinet alight, taught me subjects like English, History and Maths, and I doubt I would have had any chance of getting into Bryanston without his help. He used to cane me regularly, as he did others—indeed, at one period, he took to caning a whole floor of boys at a time. His excuse with me was that his study overlooked the river and he would often catch sight of me throwing stones at targets out in the water. Can’t really imagine why I persisted, but many years later I read that the same part of the brain that handles trajectories in missile-throwing also handles thinking about the future.

If true, perhaps I was exercising my futures muscles?

JE spirals 2

I love spirals, symbolising life, evolution and inquiry; these were at David Oakey’s Pond Studios in Georgia

Two things stick in my mind from Glencot, apart from the camaraderie between the boys.

The first was the wildlife, from sticklebacks, grass-snakes and kingfishers through to the mysterious spring and wildflowers in the grounds. On one unforgettable occasion, I returned to the dining hall and remained silent when the formidable headmistress, Mrs Adams, suddenly asked the assembled boys who had been eating garlic? No-one replied, so she embarked on a circumnavigation, suspiciously sniffing every boy. When she came to me, she erupted. Did I have garlic sausage in my tuck-box, she demanded? It took me a while to rumble what was going on, but eventually I said I had been eating (once again, largely out of an appetite to experiment) wild flowers and roots in the woods, Ramsons or wild garlic, it turned out. If possible, she was even more agitated at this evidence of my (wildly dangerous, she concluded) feral nature.

The second thing that sticks in my memory is of getting permission from the Adams to stand up one day in the dining hall and ask all the boys to part with their pocket money for two weeks. This was for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), founded that year, 1961. Given how acutely shy I could be, I never understood where this had come from, though I was pleased to get a letter of thanks from one of Prince Phillip’s equerries.

Then after I co-founded ENDS in the late 1970s, I was driving down to Godalming to see WWF with Max Nicholson, one of the organisation’s original founders—and the author of books like The Environmental Revolution. He asked me where my environmentalism had started. I told him about the eels and about the Glencot story—and he said he thought he knew what had happened. He and colleagues had managed to get a large supplement on WWF into one of the major newspapers of the day.

As soon as he said that, I could remember going into the school library, finding the newspaper on a lectern and plunging in. There were quite a number of libraries at Bryanston (1961-66), in Blandford Forum, Dorset, where I absolutely adored history—and spent much time reading around the edges of the curriculum, particularly about civil and religious wars, which I came to see as crucibles in which the deeper identities of peoples and nations are often forged—or exposed, as if placed in an X-ray machine.

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Part of Bryanston School

In the end, it was the A-grade and S-level I got in History that got me into university, not the D’s I got for French and Economics, or the A for General Studies, whatever they were.

Bryanston was almost perfect for me, again in retrospect. It celebrated and supported freedom of thought and inquiry, which I took full advantage of, though many of my happiest moments were along the nearby River Stour and atop Hambledon and Hod Hills, a delightful cycle ride away, though often made slightly more complicated by the half-gallon flagons of illicit cider we toted past the yew grove and over the shudderingly wonderful Iron Age ramparts.

So successful was Bryanston in fuelling my spirit of independence that I had no interest at all in staying in touch when I left, spurning invitations to join the Old Boy’s society—replying that I was by then involved in import-export activities, but not mentioning that this involved semi-illegal movements of gold coins to Germany and reverse movements of VWs, to sell to Continent-bound American students. Despite it all, I found myself profiled many, many years later in the school newsletter, though no mention there of coins or Beetles.

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A sculpture near San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, resonated with my appetite for pushing the envelope

No-one had ever thought in terms of my going on to university, least of all me. Indeed, I sometimes thought that I would end up in the hardware shop, Hartwells, in Bourton-on-the-Water, near the family home. Later, the suggestions for careers—such as they were—ranged from the armed forces to merchant banking.

To boost my chances of getting into university, I attended Cheltenham Technical College for a brief period, until I heard I got into the University of Essex. And in many ways thank God I went there, on the edge, rather than Oxbridge—which I think I effectively had turned my back on when I gave up Latin at 14, despite all the advice of my tutor.

This new university was a seething brew of new thinking, new music and drugs. One of my favourite teachers was Andy Tudor, who set Frank Herbert’s book Dune as required reading in his course on the sociology of religion—and unwittingly launched me on a path which ended up with my meeting Herbert many years later.

Prising open the doors of perception

Hashish was everywhere and fascinating, but LSD genuinely opened doors of perception I had until then only read about in books by the likes of Aldous Huxley. New connections were made, as when I talked to my paternal grandmother, Isabel, about the out-of-body experience I had had at one point. It turned out that she had had a similar episode when she almost died in South Africa, aged around 12.

As the Chinese proverb put it: I hear, and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do, and I understand.

Or at least it sometimes seemed so. I went to Essex (1967-70) to study Economics, but gave it up after a year, in 1968, because it (or at least the way it was then taught) seemed to have precious little to do with what I saw going on in the world—and the streets—at that time.

Instead, I took up Sociology & Social Psychology, which got my first degree. My thesis was meant to have focused on Latin American militarism, because of a nice young lecturer who wanted to take me with her to Venezuela, but then I met Elaine. Over time, the thesis subsequently morphed into a much longer work on the similarities—including at the level of adrenal chemistry—between hallucinogenic drug experience, mental breakdown and religious ecstasy. I’m sure the examiners wondered what I was on, but I seemed to pass with flying colours.

Feeding the flames

Then, after several years of trying every which way to avoid getting a grown-up job, I went on to the School of Environmental Studies at UCL to do an M. Phil. (1972-74). Here again my thesis headed off in directions that stupefied some of the Faculty, though the resulting tome—almost four times the allowed length—was later almost published by Heinemann.

I focused on the psychological, sociological and economic links that people forge with their built environments, links that are too often disrupted by insensitive forms of urban regeneration. With system building all the rage at the time, this amounted to some form of heresy, and the thesis was almost turned down as nothing to do with the subject I had been meant to be studying—urban and regional planning.

Once again, the fates intervened, in the form of my tutor, the late Professor Peter Cohen, who had a wider-than-normal perspective on much of this than many of his colleagues. During this period I worked on a number of alternative technology farms and related ventures, including Robin Clarke’s BRAD (Biotechnic Research & Development) and visited Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti project in Arizona. Soleri’s thinking around arcology had quite an impact on me, as did the writing of Ian McHarg on landscape design and Buckminster Fuller on just about everything. Elaine took the photo below when we were visiting the Cosanti Foundation outside Phoenix, in 1973. This was a period of maximum exploration for me, aided and abetted by a travel fellowship from UCL.

JE Arizona + skull 2

On a quest for the future: in Arizona, at the Cosanti Foundation, in 1973

Much of this stuff I got into by spending my lunch-times in the RIBA and RTPI libraries in Portland Place, while spending nine months micro-filming nurses’ records for the General Nursing Council.

The Arcosanti visit in 1973 spurred my first published article, which appeared in 1974 in the Architectural Association Quarterly. Typically, it ran over many pages, with a profusion of photographs of the extraordinary structures which, I concluded at the end of the piece, would make wonderful ruins.

Through Peter (Cowan), serendipitously, I got my first real job, with the late John Roberts and his tiny team at TEST, initially in King Street, Covent Garden, and then Floral Street (where, later, on the floor below, Elaine found a job with Wildwood House). Her work in publishing over many years had kept me fed with books on everything from medieval castle architecture to oceanography.

This was where my education really got into its stride, particularly when I began to write regularly from 1975 for New Scientist. Later, I did the same for The ENDS Report, The Guardian and, for fifteen years to 1995, Biotechology Bulletin. Suddenly, I was meeting scientists, technologists and business people around the world, visiting hundreds of companies and research institutes.

In the process, the fires of my imagination were energetically stoked. I wrote literally thousands of articles, nearly 50 published reports to date and, by 2014, 19 books (about half solo, the rest with co-authors like Julia Hailes, Tom Burke, Pamela Hartigan and Jochen Zeitz), each a powerful opportunity to learn. Writing a book is a wonderful way of learning.

That said, I sometimes reflect on how much I once knew that I now don’t, which aggravates the main effect of ageing in this area—that the older I get, the less I feel I know about anything. Once lit, those fires have needed constant feeding. I have long had a voracious appetite for magazines (emerging from airports with armfuls) and other people’s books. As a result, any office or home I have inhabited has been more like a library.

But, on reflection, I have probably learned most from talking to people, from conversation. So if I were trying to pick an iconic symbol of my learning over the decades, I would oscillate somewhere between a sofa and a moonless field of elvers. But some psychological elements, which have surfaced seemingly from within, remind of me of the coelacanths that were thought to have been extinct for millions of years, until hauled up from the depths off the coast of Africa.

JE PE and coelacanth 2

A coelacanth at a reception for PE International in Stuttgart

Looking back, I suspect that the part of my education that I have most overlooked, though it’s hopefully not beyond remedy, is the inner life.  This has been borne in on me when spending (all-too-little) time in natural surroundings or in gardens. An example here would be the IdeaGarden developed by my great friend Will Rosenzweig, of Physic Ventures, in the Sonoma Valley. So, to close this essay , I will drop in four images from the IdeaGarden, as a sort of promise-to-self to do more of this sort of thing:

JE Will's home in Sonoma 2

JE Will's bees 2

JE Will's garden tools 2

JE Goddess reflected at Will's 2 With huge thanks to the IdeaGardeners, Will and Carla

June 2004

John Elkington · 30 June 2004 · Leave a Comment

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

SPOUTING IN BRUSSELS

Doesn’t often happen, but have more or less lost my voice. Partly a result of something I picked up on the flights to or from New York, partly a function of speaking for a couple of hours at a European Institute for Industrial Leadership (EIIL) conference in Brussels on Monday evening, then for another three hours the following morning. But, though I missed the funeral in Edinburgh of a family friend (oddly, his brother organised the EIIL event), it was worth it. The focus of the two sessions in Brussels was on sustainability and engineering – and engineers are prime targets for conversion, alongside chief financial officers (CFOs), brand managers, line managers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

Sunday, June 27, 2004

BETWEEN THE LINES

Struck me this morning, in re-reading previous blogs, how much one leaves out.

So, for example, there have been ups. Hania arrived back from Los Angeles on Thursday, where she had been invited to see the screening of a short film based on her first script. This was co-authored with a close friend, who is studying film-making there. They then drove north along the coast. She brought me back an interesting CD by a group called ‘Iron & Wine’.

And there have been severe downs. The last couple of months saw disaster for our best friends, with one of their sons breaking his back in China and having to be airlifted to Hong Kong for surgery. We heard the news before his parents, who were away for the weekend. He is now back in the country, has had further surgery and the saga continues, though the latest news sounds a bit better.

Both stories, though, illustrate just how dependent many of us have become on air travel. Indeed, while I was in New York, Malcolm McIntosh told me that the ‘CSR Blokes’ network recently circulated an e-mail suggesting members look at this site and calculate how many Air Miles I had accumulated. However many, the poetic justice element is always there: the air traffic streaming in towards Heathrow and, today, various helicopters buzzing around, presumably for Wimbledon.

Saturday, June 26, 2004

AND THE GLOBAL COMPACT IS 5

The UN Global Compact (www.unglobalcompact.org), catalysed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 1999, is 5. The idea has been to give a “human face to global markets”. The ‘Leaders Summit’ at the UN HQ in New York was designed to attract CEOs of companies that have signed the Global Compact. It triggered a counter-summit by NGOs, on 23 June, which seems to have concluded that the Compact is a giant corporate monster that has taken over the UN. It’s great that the civil society world keeps the UN under pressure on this, but the view from inside was rather different. In fact, so many participants wanted to attend the formal Global Compact session on 24 June that the UN had to remove the wall between the conference area and the delegates’ dining area.

The recurrent theme: the need to move from talk to action. The most convincing inputs came from the likes of President Lula of Brazil (focusing on poverty) and Lord John Browne of BP (focusing on climate change), both of whom are trying to drive change in the real world. Oded Grajew of Instituto Ethos (www.ethos.org), one of the organisations we work with in Brazil, built on Lula’s line of argument by saying that we ought to pay at least as much attention to the 30,000 children who die every day as we do to the victims of terrorism – or, I reflected, the victims of terrorism of our own nationality.

One of the announcements that attracted most attention was that Brazil’s leading samba school is adopting the Global Compact principles as its theme for its contributions to next year’s Carnival in Rio. Great. The sexier we can make all this, the better, but I was more interested in the work that the Global Compact team is now doing to convert the world’s stock exchanges. And they seem to be making a measure of progress.

Kofi Annan also announced the launch of a tenth Global Compact principle, on anti-corruption. We were told that corruption costs the global economy something like a trillion dollars a year, “a cancer”, “a hidden tax”. A great tribute to the work of people like Transparency International (www.transparency.org).

Much of the day involved roundtable discussions. In one, designed to envision what might have happened by 2015, I got our table to work up an idea based on Brazil, South Africa, India and China launching a 21st century, global version of the 1940s Marshall Plan for the rebuilding of Europe and Japan. The result: a shamed rich world queues up to join. The EU, the US and also – this bit wasn’t my idea – the Arab-Israeli Economic Union. One can but dream! Given that the table started out thinking about whether sending a diverse team of astronauts to Mars would unite the world, I thought this was progress of a sort.

Met masses of people, some of whom I knew, others – like Mary Robinson, now of the Ethical Globalization Initiative (www.eginitiative.org) – I didn’t. At one point, Jane Nelson and I strolled along one of the corridors to look at a sculpture given to the UN by Nigeria. Encouraging, perhaps, that something of such beauty can come out of such a radically corrupt country. Later, on my way out, I came across a glass case containing a gift from Mauritius, this a gilded dodo. I confess that I wondered whether changing global conditions might not consign the Global Compact – and perhaps even the UN itself, like the League of Nations before it – to such museum cases during the coming century. If either is to survive, the level of change likely to be required will be be profound.

Four themes where I think action is needed are these:

(1) Legitimacy: Voluntary initiatives – and particularly the Global Compact – are likely to come under growing pressure from civil society organizations. The appetite to go ‘wider’ (e.g. recruiting more corporate members to such initiatives) instead of going ‘deeper’ (e.g. encouraging members to expose their boards to some form of the Challenge we proposed on page 37 of SustainAbility’s new report, Gearing Up: see www.sustainability.com) raises real concerns about potential longer term risk to the UN’s reputation. At least that was the point I was pushing in the corridors.

(2) Scale: This was the theme of the main morning session at the Global Compact event. How do we take good experiments and pilot projects and grow them to the scale that will be needed in a world of 7-9 billion people? Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that most companies’ CSR departments currently have little idea about market creation, business models or other areas that are becoming increasingly relevant.

(3) Governments: To ensure scalability, governments will need to take a much more active role, e.g. through fiscal and financial instruments, shaping markets with rewards and disincentives. A point we address in Gearing Up – and Francis Fukuyama tackles in his latest book, on state building.

(4) Corporate lobbying: And if governments – which currently lean over backwards to protect the interests of business – are to become more courageous, more attention will need to be paid to the extent to which corporate lobbying by companies (including Global Compact signatories) aligns, or doesn’t, with their stated commitment to the goals of such voluntary initiatives. Also covered in Gearing Up.

Several speakers at the NY event – among them Kofi Annan and Harvard’s Professor John Ruggie, one of the Compact’s original architects – argued that the Compact was a sign that the UN can re-invent itself. An experiment that could have wider implications for the entire institution. Perhaps, but if it is to play that role my sense is that the Compact will need to develop some teeth. The announcement of new ‘integrity measures’, to ensure that fewer companies can use their Compact membership as an alibi for inaction on other fronts, is a welcome step in the right direction.


Kofi Annan in the General Assembly Hall, John Ruggie on left (©JE)


A Nigerian gift to UN (©JE)


A gift from Mauritius (©JE)

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

NOW I’M 55

Wonderful flurry of birthday cards this morning as I gird my loins for New York. En route to UN Global Compact’s fifth anniversary event. 2004 is my 55th year and, it hits me, marks my 30th year of professional work in this field, whatever that may be. It’s amazing how much has changed since 1974 – and how much will need to change over the next couple of decades.

Saturday, June 19, 2004

PRUNES THE MULBERRY

Today’s papers full of the news of another beheading in Iraq and the agreement yesterday that promises to move the EU towards a new constitution. Having been a member of the European Commission’s Consultative Forum on Sustainable Development for seven years, I take more than a passing interest in the evolution of the Union. Among other changes in prospect – though member states will need to ratify, with 6 (including the UK) now pledged to hold referenda – are a full-time President (an ex-PM), double majority voting (which will mean that new policies will be approved if voted for by at least 15 of the 25 member states, and by more than 65% of the EU population) and, by 2014, a pruning of the 30-member Commission to just 18 members.

Pruning was also on our minds in Barnes today. Less ‘Dances With Wolves’, more ‘Prunes The Mulberry’ this afternoon as Gaia, Elaine and I cut back the mulberry, apple, crab apple and bay trees that were threatening to cut our small London garden off from the fitful sun. In the background, aircraft rumbling into Heathrow (see photos: at least Concorde has gone) and Hank Williams. Gaia had brought back a double CD and we were amazed how many well-known songs he wrote. Among them: Cold, Cold Heart, covered by Norah Jones (among my Top 16), Hey, Good Lookin’, Your Cheatin’ Heart and Jambalaya.

Also listening to a CD by Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony, sent to me via Amazon a few days back by John Manoochehri in Nepal. Reading this website, he had noted my encounter with Bocklin’s painting The Isle of the Dead in Berlin earlier in the year – and sent the CD because it contains a rendering of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Op. 29, The Isle of the Dead. Thanks, John.


Gaia 1 (©JE)


Gaia 2 (©JE)


Gaia 3 (©JE)

Friday, June 18, 2004

GLOBAL REPORTERS TASTING SESSION


Cornis samples a report (©JE)


Nice colours … (©JE)

In the past, I often used to describe sessions where we sampled the latest corporate environmental, social or sustainability reports as akin to wine tastings. Today, Nick Robinson hosted the judges panel for our forthcoming Global Reporters 04 report benchmark survey at SustainAbility. The judges included Jon Hanks, who I first met years back in South Africa and who has done a great deal of work with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Cornis van der Lugt of UNEP, Nick Robins of Henderson Global Investors (who co-wrote our second reporting on reporting with me, Company Environmental Reporting, way back in 1994) and Stanilas Dupre of Paris-based Utopies. The team included Judy Kuszewski, who used to run the Global Reporting Initiative when it was still at CERES, and a number of interns.

Some photos of the session are posted above and below. Among other things, they include a picture of a coffee cup – a tongue-in-cheek reference to the story we used to tell ten years ago that some of our reporting ideas, a number of which swept around the world, were created over a cup of tea. German academics were incensed that we hadn’t taken many years and hundreds of thousands of deutschmarks to do the work. Well, we have spent many hundreds of thousands of pounds over the past decade in developing our report evaluation methodology, but the cups of tea and coffee still play a vital role.


Coffee-fuelled … (©JE)


Jon reflects among hundreds of reports … (©JE)


Nick, Daniel, Cornis, Stanislas (©JE)


Stanislas, Cornis and Nick (©JE)

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

ECGD AND SD

Today’s Financial Times argues that UK exporters and their customers are suffering because of ongoing uncertainties around the future of the Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD), where for several years I have been a member of the Advisory Council. It certainly is hugely frustrating. But the FT also notes that the House of Commons inquiry which has spotlighted these concerns also calls for a “clearer statement of the ECGD’s policy in support of sustainable development.” Rather than being a ringing endorsement of the inclusion of SD in ECGD’s policies, however, this reflects exporter concerns about the effects of requiring the ECGD to take non-financial objectives – including environmental impacts – into account.

LIVINGSTONE, I PRESUMED

Ken Livingstone is back as Mayor of London. I filed a postal ballot for him before leaving for the US – the first time I have voted Labour. Not that I like Labour at the moment, but Livingstone has shown remarkable courage for a politician, particularly with his congestion charge system for central London. Even though his majority this time is slimmer than in 2000, his re-election is a significant victory in the ongoing political battles around sustainable mobility.

AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHT DAYS

Having left for US on 7 June, I got back last night from Tokyo, having flown round the world in eight days. Series of visits with NGOs and companies. Both mornings I was in Japan, I did breakfast interviews with newspapers, the Asahi Shimbun and Nikkei (Nihon Keizai Shimbun). They’re interested because there has been a huge growth in activity in Japan in the area of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Big controversy in the papers currently is the cover-up at Mitsubishi Fuso, which has admitted that it has concealed defects in its trucks for eight years. The company recalled 220,000 trucks in March and another 180,000 in May. Now it says it will recall a further 450,000.

Monday, June 14, 2004

GRI JAPAN

Arrived at Narita airport from JFK and, after some hiccups, made my way to Le Meridien Pacific Hotel in Shinigawa. I had a delightful dinner with Goto-san, who runs the Japanese end of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and a couple of his colleagues, Sugimoto Hiroko (GRI: wwww.gri-fj.org) and Ayako Sonoda Ecotainment Group: www.cre-en.co.jp).

Ecotainment have just done an interesting short sustainability report, which features a lot of people smiling – something you wouldn’t have seen in Japanese reporting a few years back. Indeed, one of the things we called for in one of our reports on reporting was more smiles – not as ‘aren’t-we-friendly’ PR, but to end the era during which Japanese executives in almost all environmental and sustainability reports looked as if they were having teeth pulled.

One thing that struck me about Japan today, compared with the last time I was there, seven or eight years ago, is how the cell phone craze has spread – and the way that people use them to take photos these days.


Sugimoto Hiroko, Ayako Sonoda and Goto-san


The photographer


And now let’s try a mobile


Thank you and goodnight

Friday, June 11, 2004

REAGAN SNAKES HOME

Walked up Park Avenue to Borders, the bookshop, to browse. Weird and wonderful selection of magazines, though I return with a somewhat pedestrian foursome: The Economist, which praises Reagan for defeating Communism; MITs Technology; Scientific American, which is frothing with nanotech and stem cells; and Strategy & Business, which has an article (not yet read) on the art of scaling up business ventures, one of the themes I developed in my summing up earlier today.

On the way back, around 20.30, the western sky, glimpsed down skyscraper corridors, was a rather delightful gold-flecked tangerine. Glimpsed on several wide-screen TVs in a store window: without sound, I assume this is the snaking cavalcade of vehicles returning Ronald Reagans body for burial.

Passed the Waldorf-Astoria, only a block from The Barclay, recalling when Elaine and I stayed there during the extraordinary 2002 World Economic Forum event. At the time, the area was surrounded by mounted policemen and rumbling white-painted trucks filled with sand, designed to prevent suicide bombers.

The trauma of 9/11 is still powerfully shaping events here. Several people at the conference yesterday were wondering what would happen if something similar happened on US soil ahead of the impending Presidential elections: the consensus was that it would guarantee a third term for the current regime.

MARS ORBITS VENUS

On Wednesday morning, I took part in SustainAbilitys roundtable with companies (including American Honda, Dow Chemical, IBM, Procter & Gamble and Shell US), hosted by ChevronTexaco in their DC offices, on the question whether the Atlantic is getting bigger as the US and EU takes on issues like security, human rights and CSR diverge. A very interesting discussion, with a sense that the divide is growing, and a clear appetite among the companies for further sessions.

Those present were at pains to distinguish between reactions to President Bush, the US Government and America generally. One of my points, though, was that while the reactions to date have mainly focused on the President, the collateral damage of what he has been doing is progressively undermining Americas position in the world particularly when we now have lawyers saying that Bush would be within his rights to authorise torture.

Late on Wednesday, I flew from Reagan National Airport (a couple of hours before the late Presidents body arrived in DC) to New York, and have since been at The (Intercontinental) Barclay. Did the summing up keynote today for the Conference Boards 2-day event on Business and Sustainability, which was held here. Tongue in cheek, I equated the Business of the conferences title with Mars and Sustainability with Venus. Started with the photo of Venus against the Sun earlier in the week and went on from there.

Very positive reactions. This website, though, bit back to a degree when Katherine Reed (3Ms Staff Vice President, Environmental Health and safety Operations), as part of her introduction, not only mentioned Douglas Adams and the Babelfish but also said that she had seen that my early travels had exposed me to world music and then, of all the tracks discussed on the site, noted that I had been influenced (see Influences) by the Davy Crockett song I had heard in 1950s Northern Ireland!

True, but only in that later I realised that the song was akin to a perpetrator-eyes-view of one of the greatest tragedies of recent centuries: the extinction of North American Indian culture and peoples.

Last night, finally, while preparing my slides for today, I had an urgent e-mail from the London office, asking what had happened to the riposte I was meant to have done to an article on CSR and philanthropy by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer. This was for European Business Forum. The two pieces to run in parallel. When I get back from Tokyo, where I fly tomorrow, I must try to get permission to post both pieces here and also update the articles section of the site.

Thursday, June 10, 2004

SUSHI AND WWII IN DC

Having arrived in Washington, D.C. yesterday afternoon, I was delighted to see the statue of Gandhi striding purposefully along outside my hotel bedroom. ‘My life is my message.’ Awoke at around 04.00 with head full of ideas for conference presentations and possible book, then just after 06.00 – as I typed away on my ThinkPad – the sun popped above the horizon, and there was Venus in transit across the reddened orb. Had known it was due to happen, but it was complete serendipity that I actually got to see it.

According to NASA, transits of Venus across the disk of the Sun are among the rarest of planetary alignments. Only six have occurred since the invention of the telescope (1631, 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874, 1882). The next two will occur on 2004 June 08 and 2012 June 06. See http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/transit/venus0412.html


Venus mini-eclipse of Sun (©JE)

Spent the day with the US team: Jeff, Katie, Mark, Philippa and Rebecca. Very energetic and fruitful session. Then, after lunch, four of us took time out to visit the new WWII monument that was dedicated on 29 May. While the site, between the Lincoln and Washington memorials, is very striking, and the fountains add verve to the scene, I found the design of the WWII memorial leaden, uninspired. A bit like part of the Atlantic Wall in places.

Indeed, the most interesting aspect of the thing was the scatter of personal tributes stacked here and there, with photos of the dead or of veterans, and stories of what they had had to endure. One commentator is quoted in today’s USA Today as saying that this generation didn’t want to talk about their exploits, so their families are now doing it for them.

But there has been something of a squabble, with the National Park Service saying the memorial wasn’t designed to include all these other tributes, which are collected at the end of every day and will be stored in a Maryland warehouse. A shame: the thing should have been designed from the outset to attract, spotlight and build on popular memories of the 16 million Americans who served in WWII – and the 400,000 who died. There are some 4000 stars, each representing 100 American dead.

The monument dates WWII 1941-1945, which while accepting the scale of the US contribution slightly overlooks the fact that other parts of the world had been at it since 1939. And the top name on the credits is President George W. Bush, which we found slightly peculiar. His father may have fought in the war, but George Bush II’s personal war record could scarcely be described as glorious. Overall, a mixed experience, but there’s no doubt that the US contribution in the 1940s did save the world as we know it.


Stars (©JE)


Lincoln memorial (©JE)


Stars and Stripes (and Missing in Action flag) at half-mast, in honour of Ronald Reagan (©JE)


Poring over memorabilia (©JE)


Washington Monument through the ‘teeth’ of WWII memorial (©JE)


Germany’s wreath in tribute, near Atlantic War memorial (©JE)

In the evening, we went out and had a sushi dinner. Though the waitresses were Asian, some of the music seemed to have a distinctly American military feel to it, I thought. But it struck me that the US taste for sushi must have had at least soimething to do with the US occupation of Japan post-WWII.

And Gandhi was still striding along when I got back to the hotel. His extraordinary wrong-footing of the British Empire, by choosing to attack it via the salt tax and his walk to the sea to boil seawater to produce salt, was a contributory factor to my brainstorm at 04.00 this morning.


Gandhi on the march (©JE)

Sunday, June 06, 2004

METAL FATIGUE

Weird. While in Wiltshire, I finished Nevil Shute’s book No Highway, which is all about metal fatigue. Something I had read in my teens and wanted to revisit. Then working away this afternoon, my chair collapsed under me. Metal fatigue. Made by Verco, it has done excellent service. Indeed, I think I’ve written 16 books seated in it. And Julia (Hailes) worked from it for a couple of years, too. Now, some 24 years on, it has decided it has had enough. A portent, perhaps? Maybe next time I should get one with an ejection module?


The chair it was that died (©JE)

THE GREATEST GENERATION

Working on our report for the UN late last night, I heard that Ronald Reagan had died. Odd, since I had found myself wondering what had happened to him 3-4 days back. The further we get away from him, from Margaret Thatcher and from the collateral damage they caused, the better they look. Visted Reagan’s website (www.reaganfoundation.org) this morning and was struck by just how fast we are moving away from the world of the ‘Greatest Generation’, a sense that has been reinforced by reading the McCulloch biography of President Truman – and by today’s ceremenies marking the 60th anniversay of the D-Day landings.

One quote of Reagan’s which has always struck me was this one, from 1982:

“…I know it’s hard when you’re up to your armpits in alligators to remember you came here to drain the swamp.”

Reading the accounts of what it was like to be pinned down on Omaha Beach, this resonated, but it must also resonate with those pinned down in Iraq. Longer term, though, I’m pretty sure that Bush II will not look better with the passage of time. Indeed, I suspect that much of what the Bush nexus got up to with the Saudis and others will begin to look like the swamp that had to be drained for the good of all.

Saturday, June 05, 2004

WHITE SHEET DOWN

A psychotic peacock, a neolithic hill fort and a herd of wapiti: highlights of the last couple of days, which we spent with Gaia near Maiden Bradley, Wiltshire. The peacock had appeared out of nowhere to terrorise The Spread Eagle inn, where we wandered the Stourhead grounds literally across the road shortly after arriving on Thursday evening. That night we were periodically woken up by the peacock, which seemed quite close by. When we went out in the morning, it turned out that the wretched thing was roosting on the inn’s roof, not much more than a dozen feet from our bedroom window. And the racket was much worse the next night.

One of the women in the inn said that no previous peacock has behaved this way, making a ferocious racket from the early hours (Elaine says 03.30 onwards). But the woman also said that the bird has taken to attacking the paintwork of her car, presumably seeing its own reflection as a potential rival.


Floral lava plunges into Stourhead lake (©JE)


Psychotic peacock, Spread Eagle (©JE)

Today, we went back to Gaia’s cottage – the lane to which is awash with pheasants, partridge, the scattiest hares and, last night, what I think was a muntjac deer – and walked up onto nearby White Sheet Down. Through flocks of several different types of sheep, one of which, though otherwise white, looked as if all its members had put their heads into a bag of soot – and thence along the ridge to the spectacular neolithic causeway camp.

Overhead, a little tug plane puttered as it hauled gliders up into the sky, while unseen larks poured a cascade of song upon our heads. Something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before was the white footprints and trails left by the rabbits emerging from their burrows, dug deep into the underlying chalk. As we walked, the hill sides were aflutter with Chalk Hill Blues. On our way back to London, Gaia took us to Bush Farm (www.bisonfarm.co.uk), near West Knoyle, where they have a herd of bison – and another of elk (wapiti).

They had a strangely pin-head look viewed face-on, but then their heads looked extruded when viewed sideways on. No doubt we looked strange to them, too. Looked up the word wapiti when I got home: Shawnee word for ‘white deer’ (wap being white), to distinguish them from moose. Bought a pair of red deer antlers for Gaia: they suited her.


Glider and tug over White Sheet Down (©JE)


Wapiti at the bison farm, West Knoyle (©JE)

Wednesday, June 02, 2004

CROWS AND ANGEL


Winged sculpture in Montreux station (©JE)

The crows that had provided such a raucous wake-up service at the hotel seem to spend their days picking over the platforms and rails of the nearby station. Their black bodies, beaks and eyes almost disappear against the oiled sleepers and rain-darkened rails. Imagine myself lying on a battlefield, my armour plate already rusting in the drizzle, their beady eyes on the joints and cracks. I love to watch them them doing aerobatics and playing ‘chicken’ with one another, but have no illusions about their omnivorous tendencies.

Nor should they have about ours: in the Truman book I was reading a section in which journalists who made the wrong call on the 1948 US presidential election offered to “eat crow” while Truman, who had semi-miraculously won, “ate turkey”. Truman’s response spoke volumes about the man, but if push comes to shove most of us would eat crow as readily as they would eat us. Even as a 30-year non-carnivorous omnivore I’m sure even I would succumb.

And while on the subject of winged entities, most people seem to walk beneath it without an upward glance, but we rather liked the spectral angel hanging from the roof of the station as we waited for the train to Geneva airport.


Rhone (vessel) heading counter-current to Rhone (river) (©JE)

 

January 2004

John Elkington · 31 January 2004 · Leave a Comment

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Energetic day, including intense 2.5 hour brainstorm on our Global Compact project. Facilitated by Jodie (Thorpe), the session involves Seb (Beloe), Yasmin (Crowther) and Peter (Zollinger). Leave slightly early to join a meeting of most of the Environment Foundation Trustees: (Dr) Malcolm Aickin, (Sir) Geoffrey Chandler, Jane Nelson and Tim O’Donovan. We are joined by John Lotherington of the 21st Century Trust. The idea of to merge our activities – with an annual Consultation on sustainable development. We make considerable headway.

Monday, January 26, 2004


Cast of The West Wing

Went down by train to Oxford, to spend the day with Geoff Lye and Peter Zollinger, both Directors of SustainAbility, to think through our future aims and strategy. After a tour of Geoff’s new home, which among many other things has a solar roof and ultra-high-tech instrumentation that tells you how much of the current energy use is being supplied by the sun, we surveyed the landscape SustainAbility is moving into – and worked through plans for the London, Washington and Zurich offices. Peter is planning to move into new offices in the old quarter of Zurich, in a building which dates back to the 1400s. Later, Peter returns with me to Barnes, where we end the evening by watching a couple of programmes from the second series of The West Wing. Incredibly funny, hugely thought-provoking and, paradoxically, wonderfully relaxing.

Sunday, January 25, 2004

Back from WEF. The absent-minded-professor sequence continues: when we arrive at Zurich airport, I discover I have lost the air tickets. Probability is that I jettisoned them in Davos along with some of the mountain of paper we collected during the five days of the conference. We buy new, standby tickets. On the flight, I start marking up my notes of the social entrepreneur interviews – and am struck by their richness.

Saturday, January 24, 2004

Mira, Simon and Elaine struggling with scarf (©JE)
Mira, Simon and Elaine struggling with scarf (©JE)

Four more interviews, plus innumerable conversations through much of the day. It’s in danger of becoming a production line. Then walk across to the Hotel Derby with Tae Yoo, who heads Cisco Systems’ philanthropy side, for the launch of HP and Visa International’s Global Giving program in support of social entrepreneurs. Afterwards scoot back to the hotel and then on with Elaine to the Hotel Gentiana for a wonderful dinner with Simon Zadek of AccountAbility and his partner Mira Merme. It’s snowing quite heavily when we leave. But we hardly notice, since we are semi-catatonic with Davos syndrome.

Friday, January 23, 2004

Social entrepreneurs Chief Fidela Ebuk of WHEDA and Bunker Roy of Barefoot College(©JE)
Social entrepreneurs Chief Fidela Ebuk of WHEDA and Bunker Roy of Barefoot College(©JE)

Yet another busy day. Start off with four interviews, with Alan Khazei of City Year in the US (www.cityyear.org), Dr Ibrahim Abouleish of SEKEM in Egypt (www.sekem.org), Millard Fuller of Habitat for Humanity in the US (www.habitat.org) and then Vijay Mahajan of BASIX in India (www.basixindia.org). Then speak at a roundtable session chaired by Gordon Conway (President of the Rockefeller Foundation) on strategic alliances between business and NGOs. Followed by an ultra-high-powered ‘atelier’ on ‘Reducing Inequity’ with people like the heads of AID, UNDP and the World Food Programme and Hernando de Soto, facilitated by Ged Davis, previously head of Shell’s scenarios unit and now with WEF. So high-powered and pressured I end up just listening. In the evening, I speak at a dinner on the theme of ‘Does Social Activist Generate Light or Heat?’ Smallish group, but turns into remarkably animated discussion. Find myself saying that we may well be moving beyond the “Golden Age of NGOs”.

Thursday, January 22, 2004

Mrs Mbeki and Pamela Hartigan (©JE)

Mrs Mbeki and Pamela Hartigan (©JE)

Busiest day yet. Start out with an interview with Richard Jefferson of CAMBIA. At one juncture I ask him what happened to his siblings? “I shot and ate them,” is his instantaneous reply. He has an ultra-broadband brain, indeed Elaine notes that one of his hobbies – juggling – is known to boost synapses. Then I speak at a private lunch of food and textile sector CEOs, facilitated by Anthony Ruys, Chairman of Heineken.

Next I scoot across town for the latest round in the ‘CSR Leaders Summit’ process organised by Bob Dunn of BSR. Some great people there, but frustrating for a number of reasons, not least because we run out of time as several of us have to flit back across town for a brainstorming session with WEF and the Swiss Agency for the Environment, Forests and Landscape (SAEFL). A lively session, chaired by Jose Maria Figueres, now co-CEO of WEF, but previously President of Costa Rica. He asks us to reconvene later in the year to discuss the sustainability agenda – and what more WEF can do in the area.

‘Can Science Take Sustainability Seriously?’ is the theme of the dinner session we go to this evening. Facilitated by Baroness Susan Greenfield (Director, UK Royal Institution), the session promises to be lively. Unfortunately, Greenfield goes for pizazz rather than understanding. The speakers – including Eileen Claussen (President, Pew Center on Global Climate Change) and Claude Martin (Director-General, WWF International) – struggle to keep the session on the rails. Find myself agreeing time and again with film producer (Lord) David Puttnam, for example on demographic pressures.

But, in a section of the debate on how we can build trust in science and other institutions, I suggest that maybe the very nature of science is part of the problem. Every time you have a major issue like climate change you always have dissenting voices arguing that there is no problem – providing a comfy alibi for polluters. (The unspoken question: ‘Can we trust scientists regardless of who pays them?’) The good Baroness manages to turn my spoken question in a split-second into an argument for mainstream science, as if more of the same is guaranteed to solve all our problems.

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

I paid a CHF10 fine, though I don't totally trust UNICEF (©JE)
I paid a CHF10 fine, though I don’t totally trust UNICEF (©JE)

For me, the highlight of the day was Bill Clinton’s speech over lunch, in which he called for systemic change, rather than just piecemeal initiatives. Slightly under parr performance, indeed I found myself worrying about his health. Since he had flown in that morning from the Middle East, it may have been simply a case of jet lag, but maybe the man’s pushing himself a little hard? Start the sequence of social entrepreneur interviews with Pamela Hartigan (MD, Schwab Foundation), for the book we are planning: hugely energising.

In the evening, Elaine and I go to a dinner entitled: ‘Why are GMOs such a hard sell?’ Facilitated by Guy de Jonquieres, World Trade Editor of the Financial Times, it includes contributions from Gordon Conway (President, Rockefeller Foundation, who I’ve known for over 20 years), Hugh Grant (Chairman, President and CEO of Monsanto, who I first met when we were working with the chemicals-to-biosciences company in 1996-97, before our public resignation of the contract) and Jacques Diouf (Director-General, UN Food and Agricultural Organization, who I find myself sitting next to).

But the liveliest input by far comes from Richard Jefferson (Chairman and CEO, CAMBIA), one of the social entrepreneurs on my interview list. First met him last year at a similar Davos session, where we shared a table with the likes of Bill Joy, Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems – and one of the wierdest people I’ve come across. First came across Joy’s thinking in any depth when he contributed a piece to Wired in April 2000, entitled ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need us’. More specifically, he argued that technologies like robotics, genetic engineering and nanotech threatened to make humankind a threatened species. Surprisingly little of that sort of thinking this evening.

Tuesday, January 20, 2004


Barbed wire and snow in Davos (©JE)

Elaine and I fly to Zurich, then take a conference coach to Davos for the World Economic Forum summit on ‘Partnering for Security and Prosperity’. Spend part of the ride reviewing the proofs of the latest issue of SustainAbility’s newsletter, Radar, then chat with Ed Mayo, now chief executive of the National Consumer Council (NCC) about possible joint projects. Arrive in snow, then find our way to the Hotel Club, out on the trailing fringes of the Milky Way. Still, we walk into town and find the Gentiana restaurant, which we had failed to get into last time we were here. Luckily, we are the last people allowed in – and Elaine is beside herself because they serve snails.

Saturday, January 17, 2004

The World Social Forum (www.wsfindia.org) is now under way in Mumbai, or Bombay. Motto: ‘Another World Is Possible.’ Sadly, Kavita (Prakash-Mani), who was going to represent us, has damaged her back and can’t fly. Thought of her this morning when I finally started William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns, which she lent me many moons ago. Wonderfully funny introduction to the multi-layered worlds of New Delhi, but also in part a clear-eyed account of the massacres that have created strata of bones on which later versions of New Delhi have been built.

Meanwhile everyone at WSF, The Guardian reports this morning, “is sure of what they are against – capitalism, imperialism and George Bush.” But, Randeep Ramesh notes, “Nobody can say what precisely they are all for.” It will be interesting to see how, with India hosting, the WSF folk handle the caste issue.

Three images stuck in my mind from today’s papers. Two appeared in The Times: these were two grotesque photos found in a clear-out of an Argentinian photographic laboratory. They show how commandos were trained to torture dissidents during the country’s “dirty war” in the 1970s. But foul though they are, they seem like a cottage industry compared to the operations shown in an aerial reconnaissance image of Auschwitz featured in The Guardian. This shows inhumanity taken to an industrial scale. Smoke billows from mass burial pits, as the sheer volume of bodies in the “climactic frenzy of killing in 1944 and early 1945” outpaced the camp’s crematoria. Those waiting to be gassed had to queue for a day near one crematorium, in a rain of ash from the bodies of earlier victims. The photos can be found at www.evidenceincamera.co.uk.

Once again, the question arises as to why we didn’t act to halt or at least slow the killing? One reason, John Ezard suggests in The Guardian article, is that “technology outstripped its operators. The RAF’s photographers fired their cameras as fast as machine guns, bringing home millions of images – too many to inspect properly.” The resolution of this one extraordinary image of Auschwitz is so good that apparently inmates can also be seen standing at roll call. Somewhat reminiscent of the way images from NASA’s Nimbus 7 satellite showed the growing Antarctic ozone hole for years before British balloons revealed the growing crisis. NASA’s computers had apparently been programmed in such a way that anything like an ozone hole was considered “impossible”.

What are we missing today?

Friday, January 16, 2004

Moleskine world map by Stamen Design
Moleskine world map by Stamen Design (http://www.stamen.com/projects/books/)

Started day by turning up at Waterstone’s, Piccadilly, just after 09.00, to find them closed until 10.00. In pursuit of Moleskine notebooks for the interviews I’ll be doing at the World Economic Forum next week, with 18 social entrepreneurs in the diary at the last count. With a high, buffeting wind, I had decided not to cycle to the office, instead taking the Tube and reading Into the Arms of Strangers, by Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer, the story of the Kindertransport – which brought Jewish children out of Germany before WWII.

Was sent the book a few days back by Robert Crawshaw, originally a friend of Elaine’s in the late 1960s when they both worked at Oxford University Press. He has been staying with us on occasion recently when working in London and the book came up when we were talking a week or two back of ways weaving an book from multiple stories, something I’m hoping to do with the social entrepreneurs book. The Harris/Oppenheimer book starts with a wonderfully touching preface by Richard Attenborough, whose parents took in two German girls when their onward passage across the Atlantic became impossible.

Made the best of the interlude, dropping into Tower Records, a frequent haunt: bought a double CD by Mahalia Jackson and Dev’lish Mary by The Hot Club of Cowtown, the latter to send to Gaia in Edinburgh. Then the W doors open and I found they don’t now do the particular style of notebook I have used for some while, so I gritted my teeth and bought three irridescent violet variants. At least they’ll stand out if I leave them on a table somewhere.

And that’s very likely to happen. Find my brain’s off on its own travels at the moment. So, for example, David Grayson of Business in the Community came in this afternoon to talk about his new book on how we can turn the responsibility agenda into a opportunity space, but my grey cells really struggled to get into gear. Maybe because I’m chasing too many hares – or, to bring things up to date, exceeding my bandwidth. But David suggested it might also because I had just found that I had mislaid by current Moleskine for the second day running. As I explained to Maddy, using Moleskines (www.moleskines.com) has become so much of an unconscious ritual that their absence may well be derailing me. The wrong sort of notebook, as Raitrack might have said. Yesterday, at Shell, Joppe Cramwinkel asked why I wasn’t using my little black book? Interesting what one becomes notorious for …

As I wrote this entry, I surfed in search of Moleskine images and came across the website of Stamen Design in San Francisco. Have always adored artists’ notebooks, and Stamen’s use of Moleskine notebooks and sketchbooks took my fancy. The rapid response e-mail from Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen giving permission to use the map image above is signed ‘with verdancy’.

Thursday, January 15, 2004

Having teased it out for the sheer wonder of the thing, I finished Bitter Lemons last night. It concludes with a rising tide of violence as EOKA tries to prise the island from the grip of the British Empire. Durrell’s idyllic life is brought to a rude end as the government hangs the young Greek Karaolis, convicted of a terrorist killing. I still remember, as a child, hearing the prelude to at least one hanging in Nicosia. The other prisoners rattled their plates and anything else they could lay their hands between the bars of their cells. On a still night you could hear the noise for miles. For years afterwards I imagined I might end up at the end of a rope. The banning of capital punishment in Britain came as a relief.

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

By train to Downing College, Cambridge. Had agreed some time back to help judge entries for a new award scheme for entrepreneurs, CU Entrepreneurs (www.cue.org.uk). Founded in 1999, CUE’s main award scheme is the Business Creation Competition, with a top prize of £30,000. I have been asked to help judge a brand new competition, focusing on a slightly modified 3P: ‘People, Planet and Productivity’. CU Entrepreneurs is a student-run initiative, working with Cambridge Enterprise and the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning. Top prize: £20,000, with a further £20,000 available for protype development. We managed to shake down the field with relatively little disagreement to six strong candidates – and a couple whose champions we would ask to do further work. Another round of judging will come later in the year when each team has put together a business plan.

Sunday, January 11, 2004

Cyprus (Ministry of Commerce, Industry & Tourism)
Cyprus (Ministry of Commerce, Industry & Tourism)

April shower-like weather, thumping rain one minute, ragged blue skies the next. Am loving Bitter Lemons, much of which takes me back to the late 50s in Cyprus. Durrell’s book came out in 1957 and we were there in 1958 and 1959, when the EOKA terrorists/freedom fighters were really getting into their stride. Durrell seems to have unwittingly come across a couple of early EOKA arms shipments when sleeping on beaches near Kyrenia. We were in Cyprus mainly, I think, because my father, Tim, was involved in trying to monitor and intercept the arms shipments.

An extraordinary moment not long after the US invasion of Afghanistan, when I was flying back from Australia and the plane made a long diversion to avoid the trouble spots. We came up over Dubai, where I looked down on the extraordinary new palm-shaped complex stretching out into the Gulf, and then out across the Mediterranean. There was a great deal of cloud, but I suddenly had an urge to look out the window, and there was most of the Cyprus panhandle. I couldn’t see the curvature of the Earth, as in the satellite image above, but it was a heart-stopping moment nonetheless.

One of the things that is interesting about the book is the unconscious references to things that (hopefully) would be totally unacceptable these days. For example, alongside the Enosis graffiti in Bellapaix, the village where he buys a house, there are painted records of when the area was last sprayed with DDT to control mosquitoes. And another thing I remember as a child was seeing the asbestos mining in the Troodos range. Durrell notes that “Amiandos made us catch our breath in pain. It lies against the side of a mountain which has been clumsily raped. The houses, factories and shacks are powdered white as if after a heavy snowfall; mounds of white snow rise in every direction, filling the cool still airs of the mountain with the thin dust of asbestos. Men and women walked about in the moon-landscape, powdered into ghoulish insignificance by the dust.”

And that, in turn, reminded me of the arguments I had while editor of The ENDS Report in the late 1970s with people from the asbestos industry, both from companies like Cape Industries and their trade association. Despite the growing evidence of the links with asbestosis and mesothelioma, most such people were still in total denial. A few years later, The Environment Foundation was founded, its funding coming from insurers who were underwriting risks linked to asbestosis, contaminated land, radioactive wastes and so on. (I have chaired the Foundation since 1995, but have recently catalysed a discussion about where we should head next. We have had an extremely productive exchange of e-mails among the Trustees this weekend.)

In one exchange today with (Sir) Geoffrey Chandler, an Environment Foundation Trustee, I asked whether he had ever come across one of the people who pops up a number of times in Bitter Lemons, Patrick (Paddy) Leigh Fermor. I knew that they had both served in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in WWII – and in Greece. Geoffrey replied: “I think Bitter Lemons is Durrell’s best book, though I much enjoyed the first two volumes of the Alexandrian quartet. His other Greek books I find precious. Paddy Leigh Fermor is in a totally diffferent class. In 1945 we travelled together to Corfu in a small caique which just transported my Jeep by placing it athwart-ships. I had a bag of sovereigns to pay those who had helped us in the German occupation. I can’t remember what Paddy was doing, but even in that short acquaintance he came across as a truly remarkable person. I wish – as do so many – that he would write the third volume of his travels. But, damn it, I am told he is translating Wodehouse into Greek instead!”

But back to asbestos and insurance, despite the distractions of caiques and bags of sovereigns. At the risk of sounding hugely argumentative, I also remember having arguments with some of those then carrying out environmental audits in the US for the insurers (including Bain Clarkson, who funded the Foundation from a ‘social tithe’ on their environmental impairment liability policies) on the basis that you really couldn’t expect to identify material risks in the space of a half-day visit to a company – which, in any event, would have a vested interest in pulling the wool over your eyes. It wasn’t long before those toxic chickens came home to roost. The US Superfund legislation was enacted and the concept of ‘joint and several’ liability adopted. If you had dumped asbestos into a landfill site, for example, and you were the only company surviving out of all those also dumping such problem materials, you became liable for their problems, too. The resulting costs for industry were staggering. Some 20% of the liabilities that almost sunk the Lloyd’s insurance market resulted from such problems.

The financial sector is increasingly aware of such risks, though it doesn’t always know quite what to do with them. This weekend I’m reading through a draft of a new SustainAbility report, by Geoff Lye and Francesca Muller, which focuses on the ways in which liability regimes are evolving around the world. What started with issues like asbestos and tobacco, then morphed out into areas like breast implants and ‘Nazi’ gold, is now broadening out to embrace sector such as fast food (obesity and diabetes) and climate change.

Wednesday, January 07, 2004

Finally got around to responding to Paul Hawken’s request for nominations for the Natural Capital Institute (NCI)’s proposed 100 Best Companies in the World index. The criteria being used are different from those used by most socially responsible investment (SRI) funds. As Paul explained: “Most funds accept a company’s business model (with the exception of tobacco, nuclear, gambling, and armaments) as sacrosanct or neutral, and then grade the company on how well it performs within its chosen mission.” NCI, by contrast, plans to “reverse the perspective, and weigh the company heavily on what it actually does. The reasoning here is simple: If a company is heading down a questionable path, it matters very little how it gets there.” More details from www.naturalcapital.org.

Monday, January 05, 2004

Nice start to working year: Oliver (Dudok van Heel)’s birthday means cake in the afternoon – and most people have had wonderful holidays, decompressing well. The exception is Judy (Kuszewski), who contracted a case of the ‘bends’ while diving off Dominica, in the Caribbean. She ended up in a decompression chamber, having had to be airlifted to Martinique. But she is apparently feeling much better now.

Thursday, January 01, 2004

A weird coincidence this morning. In 2001, Gaia’s friend Mahalia had compiled his version of Brian Wilson’s missing album Smile, or Dumb Angel as it was originally called. Wilson, who Mahalia describes as “the half-deaf, half-mad, non-surfing genius of the Beach Boys”, had promised that the album would exceed even the glories of Pet Sounds. ‘Good Vibrations’, which appears in my own ‘Desert Island Discs 16’ compilation (see ‘Influences’), gave every sign that the promise would be honoured. Then Wilson had a breakdown and The Beatles overtook with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band. The Beach Boys allowed various bits and pieces of Smile to dribble out onto later albums, but the project as a whole became one of the great mythical might-have-beens.

Anyway, just before Christmas, Gaia gave me a copy of Mahalia’s CD, with 25 tracks starting with ‘Our Prayer’ and ending with ‘You’re Welcome’. The compilation contains two tracks attributed to Dennis Wilson, ‘Little Bird’ and ‘Never Learn Not to Love’, which were in fact at least part-penned by Charles Manson. The second song, apparently, was originally titled ‘Cease to Exist’. I wonder whether he gets royalties in prison? Well, whatever, I have been listening to the CD, much of it unclassifiable, if – like ‘Good Vibrations’ – outlandishly well produced. But also often a bit cloying. Indeed I suspect that when some of this stuff is played live later in 2004 it will be considered over-rated. What they really needed was their own version of George Martin riding shotgun on the project.

And then this morning, in The Times, there was a short note that Brian Wilson will be “performing the legendary Smile for the first time in February.” His voice may be pretty ropey these days, but what intriguing news to start to the New Year: the Holy Grail disinterred?

NOTE: When I visited cider-makers HP Bulmer in the early 1980s, I learned that the word ‘ropey’ comes from the times when cider-makers would often get off-fermentations that resulted in white, ropey strings of rogue yeasts. They would dump the off batches in the hedgerows, and there were then tales of cows, horses, pigs, chickens and all sorts of other animals staggering around the landscape in a state of advanced intoxication. And that, it seems, was a key part of Brian Wilson’s challenge in getting to Smile. Finally, still on subject of music, while watching Jules Holland’s eleventh New Year’s Eve extravanganza last night on BBC2, I heard the Hot Club of Cowtown for the first time. Can’t imagine how I’ve missed them all these years.

 

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Introduction

I began this blog with an entry reporting on a visit to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, on 30 September 2003. The blog element of the website has gone through several iterations since, with much of the older material still available.

Like so many things in my life, blog entries blur the boundaries between the personal and the professional. As explained on this site’s Home Page, the website and the blog are part platform for ongoing projects, part autobiography, and part accountability mechanism.

In addition, my blogs have appeared on many sites such as: Chinadialogue, CSRWire, Fast Company, GreenBiz, Guardian Sustainable Business, and the Harvard Business Review.

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John Elkington is a world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development. He is currently Founding Partner and Executive Chairman of Volans, a future-focused business working at the intersection of the sustainability, entrepreneurship and innovation movements.

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