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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:

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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”

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

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 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

They 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

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

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.

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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.

Sibling Elkingtons

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

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

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

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

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

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 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 

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

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

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”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 

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 

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

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

Gavin Young

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

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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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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

With huge thanks to the IdeaGardeners, Will and Carla