Search Results for: Tim elkington

 

One of my favourite authors as a child was Thor Heyerdahl, with The Kon-Tiki Expedition profoundly shaping the way I thought of team-building, the natural environment and internationalism.  Now David de Rothschild of Adventure Ecology is planning to set sail in the Plastiki, setting out on 28 April, the sixty-second anniversary of the start of the Kon-Tiki expedition.  The Kon-Tiki, which is now the subject of its own museum, was built of balsa wood, the laster Ra II raft of reeds.  On both, Heyerdahl could see evidence of the growing population of the oceans, because of their intimate contact with the blue face of the planet.  The Plastiki will be built of more modern materials, empty plastic bottles encased in a plastic skin.  The goal: to sail into an area of plastic debris that has accumulated between California and Hawaii, in an area of the northern Pacific gyre, an area five times the size of Britain.  According to the Sunday Times today, of the 100 million tons of plastic produced each year, fully 10 per cent ends up in the oceans.  

Gaia took a number of us to the Soho Curzon this evening to see Slumdog Millionaire, the film she has been working on at Celador.  Wonderful to see her name rolling up in the credits at the end. Absolutely stunning film, though puts you through the emotional wringer any number of times on the way.  The kiss on the scar will live on in my memory.  Struck me that tthis could help raise awareness of a number of issues we have been associated with at Volans, particularly our work with Jeroo Billimoria’s Aflatoun, which helps teach children (including slum and street children) – in India and elsewhere – how to manage what little money they do get their hands on. 

 

IGP 2009

As the fields opened out by pioneering social and environmental entrepreneurs begin to mainstream, we will see a secondary wave of professionalisation.  Although I have tended to shy away from the conventional professional institutes in these fields, because they have often struck me as pursuing the narrow self-interests of particular groups of professionals or as being obsessed with strapping letters after people’s names, I do see a growing need to network across the hugely diverse disciplines and fields that social entrepreneurship, human rights, cleantech, sustainable development and so on now embrace.  Which is a key reason I was happy to accept this week the Honorary Fellowship offered by the Institute of Green Professionals, based in the USA.

As background, IGP is “an independent, professional, education, credentialing, research and philanthropic “social enterprise” organization for sustainable development professionals and academics.  Multi-disciplinary in its scope, the Institute of Green Professionals is the only credentialing and ethics code-based global organization that brings together individuals and organizations from diverse areas of sustainable development expertise. The IGP specialties currently include accounting, appraisal, architecture, engineering, land planning, landscape architecture, real property valuation, law, including participants in CSR capacities.” 

What caught my interest, though, was IGP’s Mission Statement, which referenced the thinking of both Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson and economist Brian Milani. Professor Wilson noted that: “A balanced perspective cannot be acquired by studying disciplines in pieces but through pursuit of the consilience among them.” As IGP points out, the term ‘consilience’ was used in Wilson’s 1998 book of the same name, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, and means “the joining together of knowledge and information across disciplines to create a unified framework of understanding.” 

Milani applied this concept to participants in the transition to a Green economy when he said: “The environmental movement in particular should put more emphasis on establishing an educational network that both formalizes its educational tasks and systematizes connections with the rest of the community.” 

These are sentiments, ambitions and pursuits that I wholly buy into.

Blur 1 Blur 2 Blur 3 (Roka)

Elaine, Gaia, Hania, Christine, Mickey and I went to see Slumdog Millionaire at the Curzon Soho this evening – in my case for the first time.  Totally blown away.  Then across to Roka in Charlotte Street for supper.  On the way across, my camera seemed to take on a slightly slumdog personality.

 

My profile of entrepreneur Albina Ruiz Rios, executive director of Ciudad Saludable, based in Peru, appears in the January-February issue of Ode Magazine – which spotlights 25 ‘Intelligent Optimists’.