Search Results for: Tim elkington

Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Dubai

Small ship passed in the night (©JE)

Back from Dubai late last night, having spoken at the First Middle East Conference on Corporate Social Responsibility. Yesterday morning, before leaving for the airport, visited the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture, with Joppe Cramwinckel, sustainability advisor at Shell. He has been part of the team we work with at Shell – and has also been very active in building up the Center’s work. Although I went with my brain full of images of salt deserts and salt-polluted aquifers, I was most impressed by the quality of the Center’s staff (we met Drs Abdullah Dakheel, Bassam Hasbini and John Stenhouse, and Jugu Abraham and Sandra Childs) – and by the way that sustainability principles are built into the DNA of the operation. More details from www.biosaline.org.

On the flight out to Dubai, which involved touching down for a couple of hours in Gatwick, I read What Might Have Been, imaginary histories by twelve historians, edited by Andrew Roberts. Some interesting hypotheticals, including one in which Stalin flees Moscow in 1941 and another in which the IRA succeed in killing Mrs Thatcher with the Brighton bombing. One of my bags (with my library) went AWOL, somewhere between Atlanta and Dubai, but came in on a later flight. Am now reading Truman, David McCullough’s astounding profile of President Truman. At least as good as his biography of John Adams, which I adored.

International Center for Biosaline Agriculture (©JE)

Window on Islam (©JE)

Joppe Cramwinckel (©JE)

Quality of the ‘soil’ (©JE)

Test plot of Atriplex halophile plants (©JE)

Thursday, April 22, 2004

Speciality Coffee

Arrived in Atlanta, Georgia, midday, having taken an earlier plane than planned. Nice weather, easy taxi ride into the city – only to find that there had been a driver waiting for me at the airport. Last time I was here was some years back, after a Ben & Jerry’s board meeting, held on an island off the coast, but disrupted by the untimely arrival of Hurricane Floyd. This time it’s the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA), whose 16th annual conference I am giving a keynote to tomorrow evening. This evening, went out and watched children playing in fountains in front of the hotel.

Boy in fountain (©JE)

Small fraction of SCAA exhibition (©JE)

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

New York Buzz

Start the day with keynote to the National Environmental Performance Track annual conference, again with lots of people from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) world. Nice to catch up with Gill Friend of Natural Logic and Paul Tebo of DuPont. Later, Katie and I take the train from Baltimore to New York. Headed for a meeting of the New York Buzz, a group of people who advise SustainAbility US, dating back to the time when we established our first US toehold with a New York office.

As usual, we meet in the wonderful Old Carriage House, East 38th Street. Those attending include Dorothy Bowers (ex-Merck), Barbara Fiorito (chair, Oxfam US), Leslie Hoffman (Earth Pledge, and Nurture New York’s Nature), Jean Horstman (now of Citizen Schools), Tzipora Lubarr (who used to work in our NY office, now with Green Order), Gavin Power (Global Compact) and professor Peter Sandman (an expert on ‘outrage’). Wonderful, delicious, sustainable cuisine, courtesy of Earth Pledge (www.earthpledge.org).

Evening is a mix of catch-up and testing of some of the thinking in our draft Global Compact report, though because those attending had so much to report we did less of the latter than we had intended. Amazing what people have been doing. Peter, for example, has been working for WHO on how to help the world handle future pandemics like SARS. Details on his website: www.psandman.com. Virginia (Terry), one of the two SustainAbility directors who founded our New York office was meant to be there, but had hurt her back kayaking.

Gavin Power (©JE)

Barbara (accidental shot, but quite like it) and Peter (©JE)

Tzipora (©JE)

Tuesday, April 20, 2004

We’re Here to Help You!

National Aquarium, Baltimore, and USS Torsk (©JE)

Second day in Baltimore, giving a keynote to the National Environmental Assistance Summit. These people are here to help business and others tackle environmental issues. Use a photo I took yesterday of a shark-jawed sub moored outside the National Aquarium to introduce our NGO typology, which I relabel the NGO Aquarium. In passing, the submarine, USS Torsk, apparently dived more than any other sub in history: 11,884 times. Doesn’t look bad considering, though the birds roosting in the holes between its teeth give the bow a slightly odorous look.

Interesting attempt to break down the silos in the field of environmental assistance. Fascinating opportunity to talk to people I wouldn’t normally come across, from the worlds of environmental governance, regulation and enforcement. In the evening, take a cab out of the city to have dinner with Katie Fry Hester and her husband Bill. Interesting journey back afterwards, with a taxi driver who has only been driving for a month and doesn’t even know his way to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. In the end, my sense of direction is better than his: I get out and walk.

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Aracruz

Up early yesterday to take what proved to be a badly delayed flight to Vitoria in Espirito Santo, with Jodie, Peter (Zollinger: just in – via Sao Paolo – from Zurich) and Carlos Roxo of Aracruz Celulose, then we are driven an hour north to Aracruz, with colleagues from Atitude. Visit the company’s eucalyptus nurseries, some growing and cleared plantations, a watershed project and the Aracruz pulp mill. Then did a 60-minute presentation to senior managers. Then, today, we did a 4-hour session with the Aracruz Executive Board.

Then flew back to Rio in the evening. Rio is in the news at the moment because the state government is threatening to build walls around the favelas, or slums, in an attempt to control drug-controlled vioence. More than 1,600 police officers occupied two slums yesterday: recent days have seen a wave of violence between rival gangs, with at least nine dead, including gang members, police and civilians.

Bonsai eucalypts – less than 12″ high – that produce clones (©JE)

Cloning nursery (©JE)

Driving through the plantations (©JE)

Termite nest (©JE)

Monday, April 12, 2004

Sugar Loaf

Jodie atop the Sugar Loaf (©JE)

Read much of The Da Vinci Code on the flight, which I enjoyed tremendously. Travelled with Jodie (Thorpe), who has been leading our work with Aracruz. We are staying in the Caesar Park Hotel on Ipanema Beach. The Girl from Ipanema playing wherever we go. Happily, though, Jodie and I sit on the beachfront and are regaled by a series of Stones tracks, among them Paint It Black, Get Of My Cloud and The Last Time. She and I are taken up the Sugar Loaf, with spectacular views of the city and an array of frigate birds and vultures wheeling overhead, then around the historic core of Rio de Janeiro and to the funicular railway which heads up to the Christo figure that overlooks the city, past the most extraordinary spider webs – with the most extraordinary spiders. Appropriately, given that the artist Christo is known for shrouding things, the statue was wreathed in cloud. You could only see up to the giant statue’s knees even when standing by its ankles. But the cloud did part for a moment, which allowed me to take a fleeting shot.

Christo clouded (©JE)

Friday, April 09, 2004

Flying Down to Rio

Getting ready for the flight to Rio this evening. Watched a cat making its way around the garden this morning, rubbing itself against the potted box trees in fitful early morning sun. Then read in The Times that archaeologists have found a grave containing a cat at Shillourokambos in Cyprus. The interesting thing was that the animal seems to have been a pet and its skeleton dates back 9,500 years, more than 4,000 years before the pet cats bred by the Egyptians. It is thought that wild cats first started associating themselves with humans when we began farming.

And those time scales put into perspective the similar time-frames now being discussed in terms of climate change. Our entire history of civilisation will almost certainly prove to have flowered in an interglacial period, book-ended by ice ages. Earlier today, I proofed an edited version of an invited mini-profile I have done for Time magazine on BP’s Lord John Browne. Spotlighted his role in raising the climate change issue way ahead of his competitors.

Meanwhile, the oil-lubricated war in iraq has shifted into a higher gear, with a widespread insurgency. As coalition troops fight street-to-street in places like Fallujah, some brains turn back to the siege of Hue during the Vietnam War. Mine turns to Cyprus, where I grew up in the midst of the EOKA-B campaign to oust the British. Old hatreds and antipathies consider to simmer there, undermining Kofi Annan’s efforts to get a peace settlement. I had imaginedthat the Turks would be the problem, but yesterday Tassos Papadopoulos, the Greek Cypriot president, rejected the latest plan as “unworkable”.

If things continue to unravel in Iraq, however, Shia/Sunni tensions could dwarf the Greek/Turkish Cypriot problems. Cyprus may have a painfully strategic location, but it doesn’t sit on huge reserves of oil which, I suspect, the world will continue to want to burn even if, as many of us suspect, climate change turns out to be the central 21st century challenge.

Wednesday, April 07, 2004

We Have Lift Off

SustainAbility Board meeting most of the day, with Sophia Tickell (now of Just Pensions, previously of Oxfam) joining as our second non-executive director, alongside Tom Delfgaauw. Fascinating to feel the organisation beginning to lift off, with our new governance processes being a bit like the fly-by-wire systems introduced a while back in commercial jets. Very different from the early days, when you almost had to crawl out onto the wings to adjust the flaps – and your face had great white oil-ringed circles around the eyes when you took your goggles off at night.

Some photos taken during and after the board meeting:

Geoff Lye, who chairs the Board meetings (©JE)

Sophia Tickell, our new non-executive director (©JE)

Peter Zollinger, SustainAbility’s executive director (©JE)

Tuesday, April 06, 2004

Slipping and Sliding

Working on four separate slide presentations today – for Rio, Baltimore, Atlanta and Dubai – I managed to give myself my first migraine of the year. Slip in and out of coherence. Peter (Zollinger), who is staying with us in Barnes, had to put up with me being partially sighted on the way back by Tube this evening. But it could have been very much worse. The Government announced this evening that it thinks it has foiled a plot to put a chemical bomb in “a crowded place”: you don’t have to be an Einstein to read “Tube” between the lines.

Thursday, April 01, 2004

Skoll Foundation

First day cycling for a while. Once in the office, Jodie (Thorpe) and I race to get the Global Compact report text in a fit state to send through to the UN. Last two days spent at the Skoll Foundation World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship at the Saïd Business School in Oxford. Travelled with Tell Muenzing from SustainAbility, which was fascinating, not least because he has just come back from Germany, working among other things on our project with DeutschePost. Germany seems in a flat spin at the moment, with the political class unable to turn things around.

A rather happier story at the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship (www.skollfoundation.org). It was founded at the Saïd BS late last year with £4.44 million provided by the Skoll Foundation, in turn founded by Jeff Skoll, the first employee and first president of eBay. The Centre connects social entrepreneurs through its online community, at www.socialedge.org. Great fun catching up with people from the social enterprise world, among them Simone Amber (SEED, part of Schlumberger), Jeroo Billimoria (Child Helpline International), Jed Emerson, Pamela Hartigan, Mel Young (Big Issue, Scotland) and Roshaneh Zafar (Kashf Foundation).

Saïd Business School, Oxford (©JE)

 

Monday, March 29, 2004

London’s Living Room

City Hall (©JE)

Odd to think that Norman Foster’s City Hall will one day look dated, as my sepia portrait suggests. Chaired a debate on the top floor, The London Living Room, this afternoon on the CSR agenda for the advertising industry. Launching Opportunity Space, the report we did on the sustainability agenda for advertisers for the European Association of Communication Agencies (EACA: see www.eaca.be). Organised by Soli Townsend of FUTERRA and backed by the likes of the Institute of Public Relations, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, St Luke’s Communications and UNEP. Panel included Nicky Gavron (candidate for Deputy Mayor), Mike Longhurst of McCann Erickson, Peter O’Donaghue of BT and John Sauven, Greenpeace UK’s Campaigns Director.

Erotic Gherkin from top of City Hall (©JE)

Afterwards, we wandered out onto the balcony, and Nicky gave a group of us a guided tour of the building – which is extraordinary. One intriguing sight: the carpet on the ground floor which shows more or less all of London. Everyone promptly went looking for their patch. I found Barnes, with Nicky’s boots straddling the Thames. Walking back by the river to Blackfriars, I was bowled over once again by how beautiful Thamesside London now is.

Nicky Gavron’s boots over Barnes (©JE)

Thursday, March 25, 2004

Prius Armada

Westminster Abbey’s bells were sounding an extraordinary carillon, and silver Toyota Priuses (hybrid-powered) whisking back and forth, as I emerged after a day at the ‘Business & Society’ conference organised by The Guardian and The Observer at Church House. On my way there this morning, I walked past Abbey Orchard Street, site of our first office for Environmental Data Services (ENDS) in 1978. Amazing how much has changed since then.

At the conference I was part of a panel discussing a case study put together by Roger Cowe on a high-end tropical fruit importer facing a whole raft of commercial, governance, human rights and environmental problems. Others on the panel were Alison Austin of Sainsbury’s, Chris Marsden of Amnesty and Jules Peck of WWF.

The Prius fleet was in promotion mode, silently ferrying people to various stations for their trips home. I walked, enjoying the sound of the bells.

Wednesday, March 24, 2004

Void of Memory

Inside the Holocaust Tower (©JE)

This afternoon, before leaving for the airport, I visited the Jewish Museum (www.jmberlin.de), designed by Daniel Libeskind. Weird that the zinc-covered building, slashed and gashed with razor-thin windows that slice through the structure at odd angles, has no obvious entrance or exit. You have to go in through the old Baroque-style Berlin Museum, then descend underground.

Libeskind has done an extraordinary job. The Axes of the Holocaust, of Exile and of Continuity are literally stunning. The exhibits of wallets and packages thrown from the transports as people were shipped off to the concentration camps connect viscerally. I stood for some time in the dark concrete entrails of the Holocaust Tower. But the most traumatic experience was the ‘Void of Memory’, where the floor was covered in layers of round face-like metal cut-outs. Like Spielberg’s girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List, the eye searches among the endless faces and figures for one that stands out. As you walk on the faces, they clink, like the points in the railways as the heavy-laden cattle wagons passed.

Outside, racing around the Garden of Exile, were a bunch of young teenagers, mindless, aggressive, the sort who when all this starts to happen again will be wearing the smart uniforms and loading the transports. As I walked past a Boss store this afternoon, I recalled that Hugo Boss designed uniforms for the SS. And a strange fact about the Jewish Museum in Prague, where I spoke at the previous VW AutoUni event: the wealth of items displayed there survived because Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, had his men collect all the Jewish memorabilia they could find for a museum he planned to open after the war on how the Jews were exterminated.

‘Fallen Leaves’ (Shalechet), by Menashe Kadishmen (©JE)

Bugati and Isle of the Dead

How much is that Bugati in the window? (©JE)

Did my 90-minute session with the Volkswagen AutoUni this morning. Took place in VW’s AutoMobility Forum, a veritable temple to cars. In the front windows were a Bugati and two extreme Bentleys. Spent the afternoon in museums – and found myself wondering what archaeologists in the 25th century AD would make of our fixation with cars, autobahns and the like? Are billionaires buried with their Bugatis as Pharaohs or Bronze Age chieftains were with their chariots? Perhaps it’s only a matter of time. In the Alte Nationalgalerie, I came around a corner to find Böcklin’s ‘Isle of the Dead’, one of my favourite paintings – and the first time I had seen the original.

Isle of the Dead (©JE)

Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Newton’s Naked Wives

Romeo & Juliet, Berlin-style (©JE)

Berlin. Arrived at Tegel airport around 18.30 and took a taxi into the city. Had been sitting alongside a screaming baby in the plane, which I considered a form of torture, until I got talking to the taxi driver. Iranian, in Berlin for 15 years, spent seven years in an Iranian prison – out of a sentence of 10 years as a “spy” for the “Russians and Americans” (sic). Babies pale into insignificance.

A self-confessed Communist, he apparently never belonged to the Party. Made it up in his head as a teacher. His brother, who lives in the UK, basically bought him out, paying smugglers $5000 to get him across the Iranian border. We had a ‘wide-ranging discussion’, as politicians tend to say, extending from the reactions of different European societies to ethnic minorities to the philosophy of the likes of Bertrand Russell, Hegel and Spinoza. He said that Berlin has 800 Iranian taxi drivers – and 700 Iranian doctors!

On arrival at the Berlin Hilton, in the old East Berlin, I walked around the Under den Linden area. Extraordinary buildings. Hearing American accents in the streets, though, I couldn’t help but wonder what the American and British bomber pilots who flew overhead in the 1940s would have made of the city now. Strange feeling of walking on shattered glass, broken bones. Walking past the Maxim Gorki Theater, light-washed in lime green, I took some photos of their illuminated hoardings of plays they are doing or have done. An extraordinarily German version of Romeo and Juliet, and another picture of half a dozen men being hung on a gallows, but with at least two smiling. Not sure I’ll include that one – but I will drop in below the one of Frederick the Great throwing a big shadow: Magic Moment.

Bumped into Dr Stefan Wolf of Volkswagen when I got back to the hotel, together with a number of his colleagues. We repaired to the Newton bar a block or so away. I had walked past it ten minutes or so earlier, thinking Isaac. Helmut. I sat in front of a massive, wall-sized photograph of the man’s wives, all naked. But it was a nice Cabernet Sauvignon.

Frederick the Great’s statue on Unter den Linden (©JE)

Thursday, March 18, 2004

Wine & Cheese

Tell Muenzing, Katie Fry Hester, Kavita Prakash-Mani, Nick Robinson (©JE)

Meetings with advertising industry, Greater London Authority and an American ‘green’ author – Karen Christensen – who we have known for years, in parallel with a major meeting in the office with half a dozen companies on the reporting agenda, followed by a celebration of our first anniversary in the Holborn office. After I took it, it struck me that the photo, taken during the celebration (which included a blind tasting of half a dozen wines and a selection of cheeses from Neal’s Yard), illustrates SustainAbility’s diversity: Tell is German, Katie American, Kavita Indian and Nick from New Zealand.

Wednesday, March 17, 2004

ECGD

Day spent working flat out on the Global Compact study, except for a trip across to Canary Wharf for a meeting of the Export Credits Guarantee Department’s advisory council, where we went through the issues surrounding the extraordinary Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, which runs from the Caspian to the Mediterranean.

Monday, March 15, 2004

Spanish Government Falls

Spanish election throws up a major surprise: government out, opposition under Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in, promising to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq by 1 July. One reason commentators think the reverse happened is that the government had defaulted to blaming ETA, criticising those who suggested that this was 3/11, another Al-Qa’ida extravanganza.

Sunday, March 14, 2004

The Social in CSR

Evidence starts to point towards Al-Qa’ida. A new tape claims responsibility on behalf of the group and the Spanish authorities have arrested a number of people whose nationalities point away from ETA.

Today’s Observer notes that the Government will shortly publish draft regulations requiring over 1,000 top UK companies to publish their social and environmental performance. And The Sunday Times contains a Business in the Community supplement entitled ‘Companies That Count’. Subtitle: ‘Measuring, Managing and Reporting Responsible Business Practice’. My op-ed appears. The original text, which may have changed slightly in the published version, ran as follows:

Begins:

What a difference a single word can make, particularly if it happens to be social. In the wake of the Enron, Andersen and Global Crossing scandals, the US economy rocked on its heels as the Bush Administration and the New York Stock Exchange scrambled to bolt a series of stable doors after a stampeding herd of corporate horses. Under roiling political dust-clouds, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was whipped through to rein in corporate boards and their financial auditors. And the mantra on the lips of most American politicians and business leaders was corporate responsibility (CR).

Across the Atlantic, the language and thinking seem very different. Even in the wake of the Ahold, Equitable Life and Parmalat scandals, most Europeans still prefer to use the phrase corporate social responsibility (CSR). But, while it may seem that there is an ocean of difference between these two terms, recent marketplace controversies suggest that the difference may be more apparent than real. Lets look at just three.

First, the access to medicines issue. With some four billion ill-served people worldwide, there is growing interest in how they can be provided with things like clean water, affordable energy and drugs for diseases like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. As a result, pharmaceutical companies like GSK, Novartis and Pfizer are under intense pressure to supply their products at or below cost to developing countries. The threat to conventional business models in the pharma sector is alarming.

Second, closer to home, we have obesity. Companies like Coca-Cola, Kraft and McDonalds have come under mounting pressure as the fat issue caught fire. Even companies likely to benefit mightily from obesity-related disease are worried. Take Denmarks highly ethical Novo Nordisk, which makes drugs for diabetes. On the face of it, obesity should be great for Novos business model, since overweight people are more likely to develop diabetes. But the longer term implications for health care systems are so dramatic that Novo has linked up with the World Health Organisation and Oxford University to find ways to slim down the problem to a manageable size by 2020.

Third, there is the geography of jobs crisis. As globalisation spurs major western companies to export jobs to places like Eastern Europe or to developing countries like Mexico, Vietnam or China, the flame of public indignation has ignited under companies like BT (with its call centres in India), Nike (with its habit of continuously shifting garment and shoe production to lower-cost countries) and Wal-Mart (accused of single-handedly hollowing out the US economy).

Whereas BT and Nike are now working energetically to engage their stakeholders on such issues, some companies will find it almost impossible to persuade the wider world that they are socially responsible. Think of Microsoft or the sheer aggression of the Wal-Mart business model, with some critics dubbing the worlds largest corporation a retail cancer. But whatever their motivations, businesses that ignore or fail to understand – hardening demands for responsibility, accountability and real sustainability risk paying a hefty price. Ask Monsanto.

Ends.

Saturday, March 13, 2004

The Great Drain Robbery

A weird globalisation story in The Times, entitled ‘Police look into Great Drain Robbery’. Apparently the effects of the economic boom in southern China can be felt in the streets of towns and cities as diverse as Gloucester, Grantham, Moldova and Shanghai. Holes are appearing in the said streets as manhole covers are stolen to feed China’s growing appetite for scrap metal. What started out as a manhole cover will probably end up being re-exported to Europe or wherever as a car, refrigerator or cooker. The problem is worst in China itself, where 1,826 covers were apparently stolen in the space of 45 days in Shanghai alone, and eight people who fell into the resulting holes drowned.

When I first came to London, I noticed that even if the streets were not paved with gold the pavements were festooned with manhole covers sporting the name ‘Elkington’. Ironically, it was shortly after I had been working in Egypt, trying to help protect some of the Nile Delta’s major wetlands, that I learned that the firm that makes the covers was started by a relative. Apparently he got his start when he rammed a metal rod one day through the puddled clay bottom of a flooded piece of land, which promptly drained. Given the appetite for productive farmland, his drainage business boomed – and the total area of wetlands shrank in lock-step.

Contribution, 1970

And the news also stirred the memory vaults, reminding me of a track by Shawn Phillips (see under Influences, ‘Other People‘), called Manhole Covered Wagon. Not my favourite song off his 1970 album Contribution, which was Withered Roses. All can be heard, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, at www.shawnphillips.com. Amazing to think that it’s now 34 years since we met him in Positano, on our way to Greece.

Baying for Shell’s Blood

Shell’s travails continue to attract much media attention. The Financial Times reports that the ousting of Sir Philip Watts hasn’t stopped the baying for blood. Other top executives, including Jeroen van der Veer, the new chairman, and Judy Boynton, the company’s chief financial officer, are also said to be vulnerable. It will be interesting to see what impact all of this will eventually have on the corporate social responsibility and sustainable development agendas, which Shell had embraced so wholeheartedly in the wake of its Brent Spar and Nigerian travails from 1995 on.

However close in you get to a company, and SustainAbility has been working with Shell since 1997, it’s impossible to know everything that’s going on. Another example of that uncomfortable fact turns up elsewhere in today’s FT, with commentary on the just-published Penrose inquiry report on Equitable Life, the pensions provider Elaine and I were with before it hit the wall.

John Chapman notes that in its heyday, which is when we joined, Equitable Life was very different from the rest of a highly exploitative industry, riddled with malpractice. In particular, he says, it was marked out by its “super efficiency, low charges, honest surrender values and avoidance of commission-hungry IFAs” [independent financial advisers]. Stupidly, we ignored the advice of our previous IFA, who warned against putting all our pension eggs in one basket.

Perhaps Equitable could have been saved if the Government had had a broader vison, Chapman suggests, being merged with the Post Office or a building society to break the hold of the current commision-hungry culture that dominates the UK pensions industry.

Milky Way

Part of The Creation of the Milky Way, 1637

Extraordinary painting in The Times Weekend Review today, showing The Creation of the Milky Way, painted in 1637 by Rubens. The immediate reason why it took my eye was that three streams of milk are shooting out from Juno’s breast past the head of a rather middle-aged looking infant Hercules, sitting on her lap. The milk curves through a dark night sky to become the star-fields of the Milky Way.

And those streams, in turn, caught my eye because of the conversation Hania and I had as we walked to the Yatra restraurant in Dover Street on Thursday evening, with Elaine and Peter Kinder of KLD. I was recalling what happened at an Oxford University Press reception at Ely House, in Dover Street, in 1977 – shortly after Gaia was born. Elaine was still breast-feeding at the time, but Gaia was at home with me. As Elaine stood talking with a man she had once worked with at OUP, she noticed to her horror that a jet of milk was arcing through her blouse and splashing off the man’s suit. She turned away before the damage was too great – or perhaps before he noticed!

As the four of us walked along, I was carrying a bag of books I had bought at Waterstone’s, including Felipe Fernadez-Armesto’s new book (incidentally published by OUP), So You Think You’re Human? An interesting question when the newspapers are awash with words and images on man’s inhumanity to man. I first met Felipe in New York at the 2002 World Economic Forum, held there in solidarity with a city rocked by the 9/11 attacks. Now today’s Guardian wonders whether the Madrid attacks represent Europe’s 9/11? Or perhaps 3/11?

But today’s Guardian also also runs a story purporting to show a far bigger disaster even than 9/11, with Manhattan being inundated by a tsunami – a still from a new film, The Day After Tomorrow, which is designed (but not necessarily destined) to make global warming an election issue this year in the US. It’s a tough sell in the US.

Had e-mail exchanges during the week with Peter Goldmark, a new member of SustainAbility’s Council who also recently joined Environmental Defense to run their climate change campaign. He has just written a play, which I’m reading, on what might happen if Osama bin Laden were to be captured. At the dinner on Thursday, someone mentioned a rumour that bin Laden had been captured nine days previously in Pakistan and was being held incommunicado. The news suggests otherwise, but who really knows? If it were true, though, it would put the Madrid bombings in a somewhat different light.

Strange times, strange rumours, strange calculations – will Madrid help or hurt the Bush re-election campaign? Whatever, we have to be optimistic that we can change American hearts and minds, but one of yesterday’s papers noted that Arnold Schwarzenegger, California’s Governor, owns no less than seven Hummers. presumably each one needs its own oilfield. Schwarzenegger, at least in his Terminator role, has the wherewithal to fight for his oil, but it’s worth asking where our appetite for fossil fuels and the gathering processes of climate change will take us.

The Guardian piece on The Day After Tomorrow mentions the Global Business Network (www.gbn.org) scenario on climate change, which got headlines recently largely because it was prepared for the Pentagon. And the Pentagon, it was reported, is increasingly alarmed by the security implications of climate change. I use a slide drawing on the GBN scenario in some of my presentations at the moment, as an indication of just how far climate change could push us in the coming century.

Friday, March 12, 2004

Madrid

Two minute silence today in the middle of my speech to MBA students at London Business School, in memory of the nearly 200 people who died and the many injured in the Madrid rail bombings.

When the news first began to come through yesterday, my reaction was that this wasn’t ETA but Al Qa’ida, partly because of the scale and partly because of the multiple, simultaneous attacks. Spain’s involvement in what Al-Qa’ida not surprisingly see as a repeat of the Crusades makes the country an obvious target. But there’s a deeper, longer history of antipathy between the Spanish and the Arabs (or ‘Moors’), who it’s easy to forget occupied much of Spain for close on 800 years.

When in Barcelona recently, I talked to people who thought the ETA threat very much under control: my reaction then was that it’s almost impossible to exitinguish such movements, but this just feels different to anything ETA have done before.

And my next thought was how vulnerable many western cities now are: three of our offices are in cities with subway-like systems: London (Tube, and probably the likeliest target), San Francisco (BART) and Washington, DC (M).

In the taxi across to LBS (I had to carry a good deal of propaganda), I chatted to the driver about his time working on the Tube, years ago. He told hair-raising stories about how drivers and other colleagues consumed Gargantuan quantities of alcohol and drugs, one taking flagons of cider with him in the cab as he drove. Once when he couldn’t drive a train, the supervisor told him to go off to the pub until a train was available. When he said he hadn’t any money, the supervisor apparently gave him £10, a lot of money in those days. When the time came to drive, he was totally, incoherently drunk and couldn’t even make it out of the pub. He said the King’s Cross disaster tightened things up a lot, with spot tests for alcohol at least.

Arguing that the Tube system was wide open to attack, and even telling me how it might be done, he then commented that at times it seemed that the Underground staff didn’t need the IRA or Al Qa’ida to cause mayhem: it was a DIY job. And as for terrorists boarding overland trains, he said they would probably be scared off by how dangerous the trains are these days!

Monday, March 08, 2004

Good Migrations

Spent the day in Den Haag. Had planned to interview Pieter Winsemius for the Global Compact study before an ING advisory board meeting, but BA flight was delayed due to de-icing at Schiphol airport. Luckily, Pieter offered to drive me back to the airport and we did the interview on the road, driving along under the leading edge of a massive storm front. He was the Dutch environment minister, then led the McKinsey environment practice. Now, among other things, he chairs the advisory board for ING’s sustainability fund.

Got back to London to find excellent article in the Financial Times on SustainAbility’s just-launched report on responsible offshoring, carried out for BT and posted on their website (www.btplc.com/societyandenvironment/index.htm). Title of Alison Maitland’s article: ‘Offshoring: How BT achieved good migrations‘.

Sunday, March 07, 2004

Jet Lag and Bondage

Lovely piece in today’s New York Times on jet lag, by Pico Iyer. I quote: “I often think that I have traveled into a deeply foreign country under jet lag, somewhere more mysterious in its way than India or Morocco. A place that no human had ever been until 40 or so years ago and yet, now, a place where more and more of us spend more and more of our lives. It’s not quite a dream state, but it’s certainly not wakefulness, and though it seems as if we’re visiting another continent, there are no maps or guidebooks to this other world. There are not even any clocks.” Somewhere that emotions run riot.

Maybe jet lag (which I always say I don’t experience) is why I enjoyed two bouts of TV last night so hugely: Status Anxiety on Channel 4, by Alain de Botton, explored the fragility of self-worth based on the opinions of others, while 1999’s 007 film The World Is Not Enough, I confess, was the most enjoyable Bondage I have seen in over 20 years.

Jet lag also features in a stunning novel I’m reading at the moment, William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Have always loved his books, but this one is particularly engaging. The main protagonist, a ‘coolhunter’, has just arrived in London from New York, Gibson noting that “her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of feet over the Atlantic.”

Gibson later has one of his characters, Bigend, say that our notion of the future is very different from that enjoyed by our parents, let alone our grandparents. It’s almost as if we are suffering from a cultural form of jet-lag. “For us,” Bigend says, “things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.”

For me, one form of Hell would be a world with no future, another one with no books. Trawling around the Harvard Book Store and nearby Co-op, I came back with a case-full, among them: 1968, by Mark Kurlansky (whose Cod I adored); Emotional Design, by Donald Norman (sub-title: ‘Why we love – or hate – everyday things’); In Defense of Globalization, by Jagdish Bhagwati; Our Final Hour by Britain’s Astronomer Royal Martin Rees; Truman, by David McCulloch (whose biography of a previous US President, John Adams, was given to me some years back by Peter Kinder); The Change Makers, by Maury Klein; What Ifs? of American History, edited by Robert Cowley; and Wheels for the World, a huge book on Henry Ford and his company by Douglas Brinkley.

The last of these I largely bought because of Ford’s spectacular $5 a day offer to workers, made in 1914. One of those totally counter-intuitive steps from which an entire world then spooled, which I plan to reference in the Global Compact report we are working on.

And, finally, someone else who has been experiencing culture shock has been Gaia, after her move to Wiltshire last weekend. Alone for several days in the house, she writes of the “uninterrupted silence”, except for “the cow barn opposite, which sounds like a crate-load of tetchy brachiosaurs at dawn and dusk.” She also mentions colliding with celebrity cook Jamie Oliver and family in the gardens of nearby Babington House, “goslinged by about twenty uniformed ex-unemployed youths”. Maybe it’s jet-lag again, but I find the imagery ‘pops’ like corn in my simmering brain.

Saturday, March 06, 2004

Cambridge, MA

Memorial to ‘The Great Hunger’, Boston (©JE)

Arrived back this morning from Boston/Cambridge, where I have spent the past few days. Mainly there for the launch of the Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative by Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. The Faculty Chair for the CSRI is Professor John Ruggie, the Director Jane Nelson (a long-standing friend and member of SustainAbility’s Council). The project pulls together four existing KSG centres: The Center for Business and Government, The Center for Public Leadership, The Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations and The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Given the nature of university politics, which tend not to favour interdisciplinary ventures, this is quite an achievement. More details from the CSRI website (www.ksg.harvard.edu/cbg/csri.htm).

On the flight across, I read The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running the World, by Ann Florini. As I told her when I found myself sitting next to her at the CSRI launch, I took the book intending simply to skim it – and found myself absolutely gripped. A rare occasion when the adulatory blurbs on a book’s cover are more than mutual back-scratching between colleagues!

I stayed with Peter Kinder, co-founder and President of socially responsible investment firm KLD (www.kld.com). On the first evening, he suddenly said that Robert McNamara was talking at the Kennedy School, so off we went – to find an absolutely brimming-over audience in KSG’s John F. Kennedy, Jr. Forum, tier upon tier, to hear a man who both Peter and I loathed during the Vietnam War. As Secretary of Defense for Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, McNamara was a key architect of the Vietnam War. Even though he left government in 1967 to head the World Bank, his reputation among Baby Boomers has always been Darth Vaderish, to say the least. But he turned in a stellar performance on Wednesday evening, drawing on Errol Morris’s film The Fog of War, that has just won an Academy Award (www.errolmorris.com).

Among the things he talked about was the Cuban missile crisis, which he described as the “most dangerous moment in human history”. When he explained how far Cuba had actually got with stockpiling nuclear warheads, the case scarcely needed arguing further. President Castro, he said, admitted to McNamara himself many years later that he knew the missiles were there, that he had advised the Russians to use them, and that he knew (but accepted) the fact that much of Cuba would be wiped off the map as a result. No wonder McNamara warned the KSG students present about the deadly risks in having 7,500 strategic nuclear warheads in US hands alone, with one man’s finger potentially between us and Armageddon.

McNamara also noted that a key factor behind the US misreading of the Vietnamese situation was a total lack (at least among the US top brass) of understanding of – and empathy with – the Vietnamese themselves. He warned that the same issues are now surfacing in relations with the worlds of Islam. He asked the audience how many Arabic degrees we thought had been awarded in a recent year by all US universities. The answer: eight!

Given that I am currently reading, among many other books, Frederick Taylor’s insightful new book on the fire-bombing of Dresden on 13 February 1945, I was particularly interested in McNamara’s description of what it had been like to be involved in the B29 fire-bombings of Tokyo and other Japanese cities in WWII. The first fire-raid on Tokyo alone, he recalled, burned alive an estimated 83,000 people. If we had lost WWII, he said, he and many others would have been branded war criminals.

But perhaps the most thought-provoking point McNamara made in the entire evening, pretty much as a coda to the discussion, was that the key thing that those present could do in their later careers would be to “surface the divisive issues”. Looking at the man, and listening to the sheer power of his delivery, I have to confess I wondered how much quarter he would have given to dissidents in his heyday?

Given the family histories of people like the Kennedys and (possibly also) McNamara, my eye was even more taken than usual by the memorials around Boston and Cambridge to ‘The Great Hunger’. Even the fire-raid tolls in the US pale in comparison. Reading the plaques around the memorial outside a Borders bookshop in Boston (see above), I was reminded that one million Irish people died and two million were driven into exile. The memorial recalled the ‘Coffin Ships’ that bore them (or at least the lucky ones) across the ‘Bowl of Tears’, their name for the Atlantic. The memorial attributed the disaster to crop failures, absentee landordism, colonialism and weak political leadership. It looked forward to the day when “history finally ceases to repeat itself”.

On the basis of what I had heard about the nuclear game of ‘Chicken’ between Castro, Kruschev and Kennedy, I can’t say I left Logan airport last night confident that we would break the cycles of human history, short of removing humanity from the scene entirely. But the sheer intellectual firepower of the CSRI event gave me some hope that we might be able to make at least some progress.

On the Thursday, for example, we had a high-energy debate between Gro Harlem Brundtland (former Director-General of WHO and Prime Minister of Norway), Conference Board President and CEO Richard Cavanagh, Accenture International Chairman Vernon Ellis, Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School and David Gergen, Director of KSG’s Center for Public Leadership.

And before leaving for the airport, I had lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club with Paul Hodge, who directs the Harvard Generations Policy project – and is founding editor of the new Harvard Generations Policy Journal, which can be downloaded at http://www.genpolicy.com/. Jane (Nelson) had put us in touch. Although Paul’s main current concern is the financial shockwaves that will be created as the Baby Boomers get to retirement age – with the first cohort turning 60 in two years – we got into all sorts of other areas of generational policy. One of his ideas: governments, and ideally companies too, should carry out generational impact assessments before taking major decisions.

Idle thought: Where would that have left British politicians during what we prefer to call ‘The Irish Potato Famine’ in the 1840s, let alone President Castro in the 1960s?

 

Sunday, February 29, 2004

Grand Theft Parsons

Sense of achievement, with major progress on the speeches, after huge brain-ache earlier in the week. Day spent getting Gaia off to her new home in Wiltshire, with two vans (one medium-sized, one tiny) heading west in convoy. Real sense of a watershed, with Hania also starting her new job at a film and TV agency tomorrow. Weirdly, the agency represents Gollum (see 21 February entry).

Yesterday, Hania showed me an advance video of a new film on the life – or rather death – of country-rock star Gram Parsons, Grand Theft Parsons. Though he disliked the term country-rock, that genre was pretty much of his making. The only time I saw The Byrds live, in 1969 in Covent Garden’s Middle Earth club, Gram was playing – this was the time of the vastly underrated Sweetheart of the Rodeo album. Also loved his later work with The Flying Burrito Brothers and with Emmylou Harris. The new film is a delightful tribute not only to Parsons but to the people behind the scenes who have helped keep the whole rockn’roll show on the road. A somewhat elaborated storyline, but a lovely vignette at the end.

Saturday, February 28, 2004

Corporate Predators

The last few days have involved preparing speeches for Atlanta, Baltimore, Berlin and Dubai, on a range of issues, including corporate social responsibility, pollution prevention and sustainable coffee production. Have been struggling to simplify the messages, given the need not just to entertain people but to inspire action.

My other big project at the moment, working closely with Seb Beloe and Jodie Thorpe, is for the UN Global Compact. We are looking at what needs to be done to take business-led voluntary initiatives ‘to scale’. The project also looks at the future responsibilities and roles of governments in this respect. And one of the things I set in train a few days back was a poll of fellow members of the Commission on Globalisation, operated by the State of the World Forum (www.worldforum.org). The replies have started to come in – they’re hugely interesting and provocative. Yesterday, for example, I heard from David Korten (www.davidkorten.org), who has written books like When Corporations Rule the World and The Post-Capitalist Future. He sees corporations, by their very nature and design, as predatory.

And today’s Finanical Times provides eloquent evidence of the continuing fall-out from predatory business like Equitable Life (the pension fund to which Elaine and I once belonged) and Enron. In the latter case, the UK Government – via its Export Credit Guarantees Department, whose Advisory Council I sit on – is now the subject of the largest suit in ECGD’s 30-year-plus history. Standard Chartered, ABN Amro and ANZ are seeking $60 million in relation to losses incurred with the Enron-backed (but ultimately mothballed) Dabhol power project in India. The $2.9 billion project, near Mumbai, was the largest single foreign investment in India. Enron managed to negotiate extremely high power tariffs and was accused of profiteering. The Corner House (www.thecornerhouse.org.uk), one of the most effective NGOs pressuring ECGD and other organs of government on such issues, noted that while non-one was accusing the banks or ECGD of wrong-doing, the project had long been dogged by allegations of corruption and human rights abuses.

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

The Afterlife of Brian

The Afterlife of Brian (©JE)

Just back from the Royal Festival Hall and, thanks to an invitation from Gray (brother), one of the musical highs of my life: Brian Wilson’s Smile concert. It was like witnessing a latter day rising from the almost-dead.

It’s no accident that the musical element of the Influences section of this website contains both the front cover of the Beach Boys’ Surfing USA and, in my ‘Desert Island Discs‘, Good Vibrations. Surfing USA was the first album I ever bought, in 1963 or 64, Good Vibrations remains my favorite pop song, and the Beach Boys feature massively in my music collection.

But this concert was really something else: Brian’s band was staggeringly good, the lost masterwork way beyond my expectations. Interesting, given the sunken wrecks theme of Sunday’s Journal entry, that Brian Wilson once said that reviving Smile would be like raising The Titanic. The Financial Times, no less, had given the opening concert in the series ***** and The Independent went so far as to compare the “perfect mosaic” of Smile to Bach. Gershwin or Cole Porter might be a bit more apt, but to hear songs like Good Vibrations, Heroes and Villains and Surf’s Up in the matrix Wilson had intended was pure magic. Wonderful, too, that the extraordinary lyricist Van Dyke Parks was invited back into the game – and got his own ovation on the first night.

And to have Brian Wilson resurrect first himself and then Smile 37 years after the whole thing disassembled in 1967 was little short of miraculous. But just as striking was the way the band played classics like Surfing USA, California Girls, Dance, Dance, Dance, Help Me Rhonda and Barbara Ann. The music was extraordinary both in terms of how close it was to the originals and of how wierdly 21st century it sounded.

Thank you Gray, thank you Brian.

Sunday, February 22, 2004

HMS Hood

HMS Hood (US Naval Historical Center)

Wonderful white blossom erupting as we walk around the reservoir this afternoon. High wind, with a heron on an island holding itself like a submarine on legs, to minimise wind resistance. Talking to Pat (mother) this evening about recent TV programs on the Dunkirk evacuations; she recalled going down to Chatham shortly before Dunkirk. Remembers the cherry blossom. Whistled aboard HMS Keith, on which her brother Paul’s godfather was serving at the time. Shortly afterwards, the Keith went to Dunkirk, where she was sunk by enemy aircraft: a bomb went straight down her smokestack, apparently. And shortly after that, a friend came by Coalbrookdale and told Pat, Paul and their family what had happened. But it’s alright, he said, Paul’s godfather had been posted before the Keith was sunk. Where? To HMS Hood. She was sunk less than a year later, in May 1941, by the Bismarck (her wreck discovered by Robert Ballard, see ‘Journal’ entry for 30 September 2003). Only three men out of over 1400 survived. Paul’s godfather wasn’t among them. The wreck of the Hood was found 60 years later, in 2001, 2800 metres down in the Denmark Strait (http://hmshood.com).

Saturday, February 21, 2004

Gollum and Dunkirk

Gollum (© New Line Productions)

Finally saw The Return of the King last night with Elaine and Hania: unbelievable. Gollum must be one of the most perfectly realised characters in film history. And, sadly, there seems to be a Gollum-like character at work nearby. A large black Samsonite trolley suitcase that washed up not far away in Barnes, and was first reported when I was in Barcelona, turned out to contain the remains of a Pakastani woman, Mrs Ahmed, 27, who was a check-in clerk at Heathrow and had vanished on her way to a hairdresser’s on Valentine’s Day. Walked past the spot this evening and the police appeal for witnesses and information: she looked a lovely young woman. Behind, the curving river looked like hammered, blued steel in the dark, a long launch with a brilliant stern light giving the scene a John Buchan touch.

At least she was found. What will palaeontologists millions of years from now, perhaps descended from rats or coatimundi, make of the compacted fossil layers of 20th and 21st century flotsam and jetsam?

On a happier note, Julia (Hailes) stayed with us on Thursday night, en route to speak at an Economist conference, and yesterday afternoon Fran(cesca) van Dijk – who used to work with SustainAbility – dropped in for tea at SustainAbility, with her husband Ken and children Freya and Finn. At a time when I seem to spend much of my life hauling trolley suitcases through airports, it’s tremendous to renew long-standing friendships. And that’s what I feel with The Lord of the Rings. Reading the 3-volume series in the late 1960s was one of the most powerful experiences of the era – and Peter Jackson has more than done Tolkien justice.

This evening, we watch the Battle of France program, featuring No. 1 squadron and the excavation of Billy Drake’s Hurricane (see 6 February entry). Reminiscent of the excavation of Tim’s own Hurricane (see Influences/Family/The True Battle of Britain). Very moving, as was the following BBC2 program on Dunkirk, featuring extraordinary archive footage and interviews of veterans. Julia’s father Jack was captured during this period and spent the war as a prisoner of war.

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

Barcelona

Just in from Barcelona, having seen a quite spectacular aerial view of what can only have been Beachy Head, its chalk cliffs brilliantly lit by the early morning sun. Last night I gave a lecture to several hundred people at a leading business school, ESADE (Escuela Superior de Administracion y Direccion de Empresas). When I arrived, I unexpectedly found myself pitched into a TV interview and then back-to-back interviews with two major newspapers. One issue that came up repeatedly, both in the interviews and in discussion with ESADE Faculty members over lunch and dinner, was what they called “the sustainability of employment”. I was asked by one professor whether we had worked in this area and initially answered no, then recalled the fairly extensive piece of work we have just done with BT on the “geography of jobs“. That will be published imminently.

The immediacy of the issue in Spain was brought home forcefully this morning when I picked up a copy of The International Herald Tribune. ‘Spanish labor clashes at dockyards leave 60 hurt’ was the caption of a photograph showing damage from a violent confrontation between dock workers and police in Seville, which left 38 workers and 12 policemen hurt. Another 10 officers were injured in a related battle in Cadiz. From our US office, Philippa (Moore) sent me a listing of US companies today that are being pilloried for exporting jobs by a CNN program hosted by Lou Dobbs (http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/lou.dobbs.tonight/).

The US presidential election is certainly turning the heat up under this one – and the rest of the world is going to get an idea of just how committed the US is to globalisation on anyone’s terms but their own. A semi-sore point with me, having been stopped a couple of times when entering the States, particularly in Detroit, and asked by aggressive immigration officals why Americans can’t do the work we’re doing?

Sunday, February 15, 2004

Up A Tree

Gaia, with para boots, chainsaw and family heirloom

Last night, Elaine, Hania and I watched the New Zealand film Whale Rider, the story of a Maori girl who has to fight her grandfather to become chief of her tribe. The dramatic tension flows from the fact that women are not allowed to be chiefs, or to take part in the training of chiefs. The high point is when she rides a right whale after a mass stranding of a pod of right whales, which she appears to have caused.

The story put me in mind of a picture of Gaia (see above) which I couldn’t use in the main body of this website because its dimensions didn’t fit Rupert’s design. After her time with the anti-road-campaigners, she got her teeth into the arboreal world and went off to Merrist Wood to train to be a tree surgeon. The only female student on the course. She succeeded and then went back to Edinburgh to set up The Lumberjills, to do tree work in the city and its surroundings. This picture was taken for a profile of her in The Glasgow Herald. Wearing an old family heirloom: I think because the journalist wanted to cover both her forestry antics and her exploits in the field of fashion. It all comes to mind, I suspect, because she is folding her tent in Edinburgh and moving south in a week or two.

As to Gaia and Hania’s surviving grandparents, I spoke to Pat and Tim today. Pat talked of the attrition rate in the group of pilots in the photos I had sent them (see 6 February entry). Only two of the pilots in the group shot survived, Tim and Pat Hancock (in Mae West jacket) – who died last year. One of the group with the Hurricane, F/Lt Demozay, wearing a dark French uniform, was a French pilot who had been flown out of France sitting in the lap of a Spitfire pilot. He, too, was killed.

Tim said he had just been to have an X-ray for his knees. Apart from the arthritis, the doctors were surprised to find his knees splattered with dark spots. It’s shrapnel from when he was shot down in the Battle of Britain. Asked whether he wasn’t worried about contamination, he said it had all been pretty well cauterised when the Hurricane’s fuel tank blew up.

Friday, February 13, 2004

Great Whites Et Al

Great white shark (www.animalyawns.com/sharksleft.htm)

Started yesterday with my mouth open wide, in the arms of the dentist. Then, last night, I gave the second in a new series of Linacre Lectures at Oxford University on the subject of NGO accountability, following on from the first lecture last week by Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth. Nice welcome from Paul Hannam and Dr Paul Jepson of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI), then on to tea with Professor Paul Slack, Linacre College’s Principal, and a number of his colleagues, including Professor Diana Liverman, who now runs ECI (www.eci.ox.ac.uk).

To get things off to a lively start, my second slide was of a great white shark, as a trailer for our NGO typology of Sharks, Killer Whales (Orca), Sealions and Dolphins. This resulted from a project we did for BP’s board in 1996, but also featured in our recent report The 21st Century NGO. The original idea was suggested by the thinking of Max Nicholson, who argued that NGOs could be broken down into polarisers and integrators on one axis, and discriminators and non-discriminators on the other. We took that idea and dropped marine creatures into each of the resulting four cells, as follows:

Shark (non-discriminating polarizers): Acts on instinct, tactical at best, attacks any target in distress, often attacks in packs, and happiest in feeding frenzies; not particularly receptive to new information once there is blood in the water.

Orca (discriminating polarizers): Highly intelligent, strategic, hunts over long distances, operates in ‘resident’ and ‘transient’ modes (‘residents’ hunt salmon, therefore keep their dorsal fins above water and make a good deal of noise, since their prey – salmon – can’t hear and doesn’t spend much time looking about above water; while ‘transients’ hunt marine mammals which can both see and hear, so run deep and silent), and attacks not only seals and sealions but also, sometimes, dolphins.

Sealion (non-discriminating integrators): Keen to please, attractive to mass audiences, ‘performs tricks for whoever has the bucket of fish’, often professional and well trained, prefers inshore waters, and gets anxious if separated from the group.

Dolphin (discriminating integrators): Great capacity to learn, adapts strategies and behaviours to context, creative, playful, can fend off sharks.

Happily, the debate with the capacity audience took off, with a forest of hands when the open forum was announced. And it’s interesting how well the 1996 work has stood the test of time. When we did the original research for BP, we found a great many NGOs heading, or wanting to head, into the ‘Dolphin’ space. Hence the title of the resulting report: Strange Attractor.

Last night I was asked, once again, where I would place SustainAbility in the matrix? At the time of the original research, a fair number of people saw us operating in – even defining – the Dolphin space. But as a number of us walked back from the lecture last night, I wondered – tongue very firmly in cheek – whether we aren’t sometimes a bit like a Portuguese Man’o’War, drifting in from outside the frame, stinging everything in sight and then drifting off into the blue? In reality, though, we have always been very much pro-NGO, are often taken for an NGO ourselves (we have been described variously as a ‘for-profit NGO’ and a ‘campaigning company’), and are determined to help NGOs wake up and adapt in good time to the emerging accountability challenge.

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Cannes

‘Eagle owl’ in Second Port, Cannes (©JE)

Having signed a confidentiality agreement, probably all I can say is that I was in Cannes on Monday and Tuesday, speaking at a conference organised in the Inter-Continental Carlton Hotel by a major pharmaceutical company. One key issue we discussed was the sustainability of their business model.

In the morning, I walked east along the Boulevard de la Croisette, hard by the Mediterranean. The sky was brilliant blue, the pavement recently washed, roller-bladers scooting by. The thin strip of sand between the boulevard and the Baie de Cannes was densely pock-marked by footprints and caterpillar tracks. Everywhere the sound of motors: cranes, bulldozers, jackhammers, scooters, cars, buses, trucks, motor-boats. As I walked around the Second Port and Port Canto, marvelling at the size of the yachts, and at the number of ‘For Sale’ notices they sported, my eye was caught by one boat whose brilliant paintwork was protected by a large model eagle owl. Odd, end-of-the-world feeling.

Saturday, February 07, 2004

Angels

Covent Garden 07-02-04 (©JE)

Bridges and angels’ wings seemed to be everywhere today. The bridges corkscrewed aerially between buildings in Covent Garden, in the show Anything Goes (with the SS American as a floating bridge between the New World and Old), to which Hania took us as a birthday present for Elaine, and then again in Angels in America (with angels bridging this world and the next by crashing through ceilings), which ran on Channel 4 from 21.00 to after midnight. Extraordinary television.

I remember being blown away by Cole Porter’s Anything Goes (dating from 1934) when it was covered by Harper’s Bizarre in 1967 (still have the LP, one of the first I bought on going to university), but this afternoon I was particularly taken by ‘Blow, Gabriel, Blow’, the mock-spiritual belted out by Reno and the Angels.

So maybe, on reflection, it was angels that were ubiquitous? This evening, Tim (father) e-mailed photos of a new painting Caroline (sister) has just done of Gaia (daughter) dressed as Amelia Earhart (who disappeared in the Pacific in 1937), complete with aviator’s goggles (see sample, 30 November 2003). And that reminded me of when Gaia used to go to school (St Paul’s) wearing a huge pair of home-made angel’s wings, which she would sit and quietly flap during morning assembly.

My memory is that the High Mistress decided that the wings should be banned. Unfortunately for the authorities, there was nothing in the school’s rules allowing wings to be banned – so they were redefined as a hat and banned as such. That sparked something of a rebellion, with students and staff divided on whether this wasn’t a bit dictatorial? Gaia was summoned and asked whether the wings were being worn with seditious intent? She replied that she wore them because they made her – and others – happy. So the ban was removed. Contrary creature that she is, Gaia promptly shed the wings.

Friday, February 06, 2004

Sgts Berry and Albonico

Sgts Berry and Albonico

Pilots of No 1 squadron, with Tim (my father) third from right

Fascinating unsolicited e-mail from John Hayes-Fisher today, linked to the Battle of Britain story told elsewhere on this site (see under Influences/Family, then click on Battle of Britain).

Dear John

I have come across your name on many occasions, probably initially through my degree (Environmental Studies) and in the New Scientist and almost certainly when I made a programme over 10 years ago on sustainability for BBC2’s Nature Series, when Michael Buerk was the presenter.

However the reason why I’m writing is completely unrelated. I am making a programme about the RAF’s No 1 Squadron in the Battle of France and I was searching the web for references to armour plating being fitted to Hurricanes. I think it was with this search that I came across the article you had written in the Guardian about your father’s time with the Squadron and noticed reference to Sgt Berry who was one of the pilots with No 1 Squadron in France – and as you say was later killed in the Battle of Britain.

I believe that Berry was instrumental in saving your father’s life and I thought you might be interested in seeing a photo of Berry taken outside the town hall at Neuville, where the Squadron were billeted for the Autumn of ’39 and first part of 1940. I am also sending a copy of another photo I have found in the No 1 Squadron scrapbook which we are borrowing for the programme. Needless to say, you will probably recognise the man third from the right.

Our programme is probably going out on BBC2 at 8pm on Saturday 21st February and is called Billy and the Fighter Boys. As I say, it’s about No 1 Squadron’s time in the Battle of France and in it we follow aviation archaeologists as they discover the remains of Billy Drake’s Hurricane, which he bailed out of in May 1940, and excavate it while he is present. Maybe your father might be interested in watching? Being in Billy’s company has left with a deep sense of humility and admiration for the pilots of 1940, one which I hope comes out in the programme.

Regards

John

Thursday, February 05, 2004

Nike

Statue in Hotel Lucia symbolises multidimensional stakeholder process – at least in my mind.

Just in from supper with Elaine and Mark Lee, who is joining SustainAbility from BSR. Arrived back in London earlier today from Portland, via San Francisco (which, coincidentally, is where Mark is based). Had gone to take part in what was billed as Nike’s first major multistakeholder event, on Tuesday and Wednesday. Nike, to be fair, have already done a fair amount of stakeholder engagement – indeed, I took part in one interesting session they hosted in Portland a few years back. This time, though. the event was on a much larger scale and was held in the Tiger Woods building on the Nike campus. Stakeholders were broadly very positive – and keen that other companies should do similar sessions.

The three key themes focused on what Nike should do in relation to: the imminent ending of the multi-fibre arrangement (MFA); gender issues in the supply chain; and China. A fascinating learning experience on all fronts – and remarkably well run by Nike. Facilitated by David Sibbett of The Grove Consultants International (www.grove.com), who charted the evolving debate on vast sheets of paper. So quick and accurate was he that one person said it was almost as if he was “chaneling”.

The MFA issues were almost all news to me. I had read about the planned ending of the MFA quota system for textiles and clothing around the time of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial meeting in Doha, when most developing countries were gung-ho about ending what they then saw as an unfair trade system. At the time, Sri Lanka claimed that the end of the MFA would boost its share of trade in these areas, while the Bangladeshis actively lobbied for a quicker phase-out of the MFA. Today, by contrast, as the International Textile Garment & Leather Workers’ Federation (ITGLWF) puts it, “panic is the order of the day in most textiles and clothing exporting nations as governments contemplate industrial meltdown.”

A key reason for the shift in opinion is that other developing countries have only recently woken up to the degree to which China is likely to win in the new game. And the likely impact on their own economies – reflecting huge dependency on exports of textiles and clothing – is illustrated by the fact that for many least developed and small developing countries the sector now accounts for more than 90% of industrial exports and more than 50% of total employment. On current evidence, the impact on employment in countries like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka could be profound. The question for Nike and the other stakeholders present: What can be done to at least moderate the negative impacts?

On the flights out, I read Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons, which Geoffrey Chandler gave me recently. Published in 1932, the book is delightful, funny and very much a work of its period: it talks of a “Jew-shop” and looks forward into a near-future in which there have been modest little wars (there is mention, I recall, of an Anglo-Nicaraguan war of ’46). Weird that people couldn’t sense the disturbance in the force-field caused by the impending WWII. What are we missing in the same way today? On the flights back, I read most of Steve Kemper’s book Code Name Ginger: The Story Behind Dean Kamen’s Quest to Invent a New World. Kamen (www.dekaresearch.com) was the man behind the Segway Human Transporter, launched a while back after a period of intense secrecy and hype. His interest in technologies like the Stirling engine and water treatment technologies for the developing world potentially make him someone to try to talk to for the social entrepreneurs book.

Sunday, February 01, 2004

It’s the System Stupid

A WEF piece I wrote today. Edited version posted on http://www.opendemocracy.net on 5 February.

‘IT’S THE SYSTEM, STUPID!’

Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jose Maria Figueres (©WEF)

Even when jet-lagged, Bill Clinton knows how to hold Davos Man and Woman in the palm of his hand. Count me more or less in their number. Kicking off this years World Economic Forum (www.weforum.org) on 21 January, he used language which was to resonate through the rest of that high-octane, high testosterone week. Nothing new there: Google the phrase Its the Economy, Stupid! – the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign slogan – and youll find its echoes everywhere. But now, it seems, Clintons implicit message when on the broad range of economic, social and environmental challenges we face is, Its the System, Stupid!

Instead of making flying visits to people like the Grameen Banks Muhammad Yunus, he suggested, we should bring Yunus and folk like the property-rights-for-the-poor campaigner Hernando de Soto in from the cold. Mainstream them. No doubt some corporate bottoms shifted uneasily in their seats at this call for some sort of Third Way revolution, but what exactly was Clinton prescribing, exactly? Sadly, at least in my memory, he was long on concept and short on detail.

He was, he said, all for systematic change, but the scale of the challenges we now face requires systemic change. Well, fine, and no doubt he would have won nods from many of those across the road at the Public Eye on Davos (www.evb.ch) and, indeed, at the anti-WEF World Social Forum, held this year in Mumbai, India (www.wsfindia.org). But most of these people, I suspect, would have soon parted company with the Davos crowd even with Clinton – in terms of how much, how far, how fast and at whose expense.

Thinking back, though, it strikes me that it would be easy to over-dramatise the chasm between Davos and Mumbai. The divides are there, of course, but, willingly or not, both sides are in the process of adjusting their mindsets. In fact, this was the third time I had attended the World Economic Forums annual summit and I was forcefully struck by just how far both the nature and content of the debate have shifted over the past three years.

At WEF, many once forceful globalizers are now off balance, some even taking part in sessions on corporate social responsibility and sustainable development. Its not yet a question of Globalizers Anonymous, but the agenda is a lot more nuanced than it was just a few years back. And, for the most part still in a parallel universe, a growing number of former anti-globalizers are trying on labels like alter-mondialiste and talking in terms of responsible globalisation.

Several swallows never did make a summer, but the basis for some form of convergence is clearly there. That really wasnt the case a few years back. The first time I got the call, in 2002, the WEF event was held in New York, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The following year, 2003, most of the caravan returned happily to snowy Davos, in Switzerland. This time, though, there were bitter recriminations between America and its allies – who were actively planning for war and those who opposed invasion, with or without UN sanction. One of the sessions I remember best was the one where General Wesley Clark pointed energetically to places on the map of Iraq where the coalition forces expected to be attacked with anthrax and other weapons of mass destruction.

What a difference twelve months can make. This year, by contrast, US Vice-President Dick Cheney was in conciliatory mood. And my overall impression, while British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw drew no cheers for his lacklustre defence of the Iraqi venture, was that most participants were much more interested in what would happen to the US recovery and to the dollar. Most seemed to have little appetite for major changes in the economic architecture.

And something else had changed too, it seemed to me. Looking back, 2002 saw the WEF summit in New York invaded by a fairly considerable number of NGOs and fellow travellers, myself included. The trend evolved further in 2003. On both occasions, demonstrations in the streets outside helped keep the political pot bubbling. You could almost feel the steam percolating up through the floorboards into some of the sessions. This year, by contrast, the security forces choked off most of the protests in and around Davos, and whether it was a related trend or not the NGO voices seemed muted.

Behind the scenes, true, there were clashes between WEF officials and some NGOs on the best ways forward. Afterwards, the head of one highly reputable NGO told me that he they – would not be coming back. I could understand the frustration. A couple of the parallel sessions I attended were surprisingly glib and ill-informed, although in my experience they were the exception. While you hear some of their research partners seethe that the relationship with WEF is pretty one sided, with the Forum claiming most of the credits, it has positioned itself as the most coherent global platform for integrated debate in this area.

When I challenged WEF co-CEO Jose Maria Figueres, a former president of Costa Rica, on the issue of whether the Forum would ever take a stand position on a major policy issue, he stressed that it is essentially neutral in what it does. But, however you judge that claim, it really is leaning into the debate a bit more these days.

This year, for example, the WEF Global Governance Initiative launched its first annual report . And it is surprisingly critical of current efforts to tackle the priority issues identified at the 2000 UN Millennium Summit, in the form of the Millennium Development Goals. Scoring each of seven areas of activity out of a maximum of 10 for 2003, WEF set the numbers such that a 0 means retrogression, whereas a 10 means that the world that is, national governments, businesses, civil society and international organizations taken together – essentially did everything needed to be on track to reach the goals.

The report came up with the following results: peace and security (3), poverty (4), hunger (3), education (3), health (4), environment (3) and human rights (3). Reading the numbers, it struck me that the world really deserves a school report I got some time late in the 1950s: Sets himself low standards and consistently fails to achieve them.

Whatever you think of WEF, this is an important contribution. Nor is this the only initiative WEF is helping drive forward in this area. Indeed, one of the reasons the NGOs probably seemed a bit muted to me this year was that the voices of the social entrepreneurs in Davos had been wound up several notches. Convened by the Schwab Foundation (www.schwabfound.org), also founded by WEF founder Klaus Schwab and his wife Hilde, the entrepreneurs came together for the first time at the WEF summit in New York. After a slightly wobbly start, more of them hit the ground running in Davos in 2003 and most really got into their stride this year.

Most social entrepreneurs today are unknown to the general public. Some, like Muhammad Yunus or Bunker Roy of the Barefoot College, may be well known to Bill Clinton and be covered fairly regularly in the international media, but for most of us most of what they do tends to disappear into the background noise. Nor are they guaranteed to succeed. Many of them will fail, some more than once. Such is the life of entrepreneurs, perhaps even more so of social entrepreneurs. But these people have the potential to transform the way in which hundreds of millions of people live, learn and work.

A huge and growing variety of social entrepreneurs are tackling such issues as environmental protection, family planning, the empowerment of women, fair trade, food security, the homeless, HIV/AIDS orphans and youth development. Where markets fail, as they do in relation to many of these issues, social entrepreneurs are working on leapfrog thinking, technology and business models to do the previously undoable. They are not primarily motivated by profit although many are more than happy to make a profit.

In short, the phrase The impossible takes a little longer could have been coined for them. It has been my great good fortune to be in the passenger seat as they began their WEF breakthrough. In 2002, I sat in on the first WEF social entrepreneur session in New York. In 2003, I facilitated the first Davos social entrepreneurs session. And this year, with Pamela Hartigan, who runs the Schwab Foundation, I had the extraordinary privilege of interviewing 15 or so social entrepreneurs for a book we are planning. Thats around a quarter of the Schwab Foundations current network – and I emerged supercharged.

No wonder Clinton name-checks these people in his speeches. Both he and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan have every excuse for pleading exhaustion in the wake of their continuous efforts to get these issues onto the political agenda. But an hour with any of these entrepreneurs is like the shot of monkey gland extract that some rich people apparently used to come to Switzerland for. (And, who knows, perhaps some of the Davos crowd still do?)

Whatever, the real question right now is how we can initiate the necessary top-down changes to the market system to help social entrepreneurs bring their bottom-up activities to scale. Maybe it will help if we adopt the Its the System, Stupid! mantra, even sticking it on our fridge doors. But we can all be sure of one thing: only if we are prepared to throw our collective weight behind these extraordinary pioneers can we hope to see evidence of real progress in future Global Governance Initiative scorecards.

 

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)

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)

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)

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)

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 (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)

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.

 

Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Little Rissington, by Caroline Elkington 2003, 11 x 3 feet (©JE)

Once again, New Year’s Eve sets the mind thinking about time, intentions and ambitions. “Everything fears Time,” said the old Arab proverb, “only the pyramids laugh at it.” In recent days I have been reading Miroslav Verner’s fascinating account of the history and archaeology of The Pyramids. Mind-boggling. It’s amazing how far people will go to ensure some form of immortality.

Stumbled across a quote from Anne Frank this morning, as I prospected for a title for a new (and totally unrelated) book I’m planning. “I want to go on living after my death!” Anne wrote in her diary on 4 April 1944. “And therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me.” Amazing what she managed to achieve by the age of 15 with a few notebooks, as opposed to the 40- to 60-ton blocks of granite and limestone the Egyptians struggled to haul up to 70 metres into the sky.

It’s almost 30 years since I visited the Pyramids of Giza and Saqqara, when working in Egypt in 1975. Interesting to learn from Verner that under certain conditions, with varying temperatured layers near the horizon, an optical illusion can turn the sun’s disk into a step pyramid, like those at Saqqara. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen something of the sort. The early stepped pyramids would therefore have expressed the idea that the buried ruler was as immortal as the sun, dying on the western horizon every evening and then reawakening in the east every morning.

Sometimes strikes me that compiling a personal website like this is a bit like building a virtual pyramid, which others can later discover and wander around. Had an e-mail on 19 December from Soli(taire) Townsend of Futerra, saying that she had stumbled on the site and noting that she felt as though she had been given the chance “to rummage around inside someone’s head.” She suggests a bulletin board, or similar, to establish a more interactive conversation with visitors. Will ask Lynne (Elvins) to work out how this could be done. Certainly this would be an advance on the Pharaohs: I haven’t heard of any of them entering into direct conversation with those pillaging or studying their tombs.

Having bought Verner’s book together with The Rough Guide to Cyprus a few weeks before Christmas, I seem to be limbering up for further Near and Middle Eastern travels, with Crete, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran and Iraq all apparently on the ambitions list. But there are endless wrinkles: quite apart from the ongoing troubles in Iraq, I have always said I wouldn’t go back to Cyprus, where we spent a couple of years in the late 1950s, until Northern Cyprus was reintegrated. Many of the places I want to return to are on the Turkish side of the ‘Green Line’, including Kyrenia.

Still, to keep the fires burning, I borrowed a copy of Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons from my parents yesterday. And on page 28, I came across the words of a Turkish song:

If you should come to Kyrenia
Don’t enter the walls.
If you should enter the walls
Don’t stay long.
If you should stay long
Don’t get married.
If you should get married
Don’t have children …

Clearly since 1974, when the Turkish army invaded, Turkish refugees from the south and settlers from the mainland have done all of the above, and been buried there to boot. Fascinating how people’s lives interweave with the places they live – and, as in the Holy Land, how the social, economic and political implications then fan out through the generations.

Walking around Little Rissington (where we moved when we returned from Cyprus in 1959) on Tuesday morning, with Elaine and my sister Caroline, it was extraordinary to reflect on how much the village has changed since we were children. We were visiting the Village Hall, where Caroline’s huge (11 feet by 3) new painting of the village and its environs, from the perspective of Bobble Wood, now hangs.

Interestingly, too, there was a map on one of the walls showing all the field names in the parish, including ‘Upper Heaven’ and ‘Lower Heaven’, over towards Great Rissington. A lot easier to ramble downhill in 20 minutes, it struck me, than to spend 20 years building a vast limestone mountain like the Great Pyramid, but it takes all sorts to make a world.

Sunday, December 28, 2003

Elaine, in blue, masked by snowflake, asks for directions on Kleine Scheidegg (© HE)

Elaine, Gaia, Hania and I returned last night from a stunning week in Wengen, Switzerland, staying at the delightfully eccentric Hotel Falken. I used the opportunity to plough through a stack of books, including The Discovery of Slowness by Sten Nadolny, Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald and John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (the last of which which E, G and H had also all read or re-read on the trip). All three books are extraordinary, albeit in wildly different ways. Also dipped into The Quark and the Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann and A Terrible Beauty by Peter Watson, which I plan to read cover to cover, eventually.

The four of us went for mammoth walks every day, the first day in an unexpected blizzard. Thereafter, we enjoyed wonderful clean snow pretty much until the last day, when a partial thaw started. One day, we went up to the Schilthorn/Piz Gloria, where we had lunch in the remarkable revolving restaurant, looking out across the glittering peakscape, including the dark North Face of the Eiger. On the last evening, among other things, we went ice-skating at the Wengen rink. I had trouble keeping my feet to begin with, which made me happy that Maddy I had sat out the Somerset House skating a few weeks back, but soon I was managing to make a reasonable fist of it. Skating around in the midst of those amazing peaks is pretty much the ultimate way to take one’s mind off the day-to-day travails of sustainable development – until, that is, people start talking about why the glaciers are retreating and the Alpine permafrost thawing.

While we were away, I learned from ploughing through the papers that had arrived in our absence, Iraq hadn’t been the only source of bad news – over 20,000 Iranians had been killed by an earthquake in and around Bam, and over 200 people had died in a release of hydrogen sulphide from a natural gas field in China.

Cloudscape on Christmas Day (© JE)

Thursday, December 18, 2003

Yesterday was Amsterdam, speaking at the launch of CIMO, a new centre for innovation and sustainable business at the Free University of Amsterdam. Arriving mid-morning, I went to lunch at IMSA (www.imsa.nl), an organisation very like SustainAbility and originating in 1985. Lunch hosted by IMSA founder Wouter van Dieren and colleagues. Marcel Bovy had asked me to come by to discuss how SustainAbility manages values-based dilemmas and issues with 15 members or so of the IMSA team. Very interesting and lively debate.

Later, after the main part of the CIMO meeting, I was one of the people taking part in a series of so-called ‘tableaux vivants’, mine being with Alois Flatz of Sustainable Asset Management (SAM), in a darkened room, with a draped piano and a mystic pond, answering ‘burning questions’. In his speech, Alois noted that he had been doing calculations on his new son Joachim. He estimated that if Joachim had kept growing for a full human lifetime at the rate that he grew in the first few months, he would have ended up with a headroom problem: 780 kilometres tall!

Monday, December 15, 2003

Spoke at a conference this afternoon in Cabot Hall, Canary Wharf, focusing on extent to which London’s pitch for the 2012 Olympics could be linked to the sustainability agenda. Seems that it could be done, though it’s anyone’s guess what chance London would have of winning. The main Olympic Zone, it appears, would be built in the Lower Lea Valley.

Then, in the evening, along to the Royal Society of Arts, where we held a farewell dinner for Charles Muller, as a trustee of the Environment Foundation, and for Helen Holdaway, who has been our Director since 1998. She has been involved in the Foundation since the early 1980s, has orchestrated pretty much all our consultations at St George’s House, Windsor, and kept our lines steady when we were under determined, Dickensian assault by the Charity Commissioners. The fact that we eventually won the case, ensuring that sustainable development would henceforward be a charitable objective (www.environmentfoundation.net) in the UK, is probably the biggest single thing the Foundation has done, other than catalysing the process that led to the Queen’s Award for environmental achievement. The obvious question now: what next?

Saturday, December 13, 2003

Exhausted, but hopefully in recovery. This evening, watched a TV programme on the North African campaigns of Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) and the Special Air Services (SAS), the sort of special forces once dubbed the ‘Funnies’. Elaine’s father, Stanley, my late father-in-law, was in the desert for six years during WWII. Not PC to say so, I suspect, but I have always been attracted to the out-of-the-box style of warfare of people like the Chindits, LRDG and SAS. In Cyprus as a child I was forcibly impressed by an ex-Chindit, Douglas Walker-Brash. He came to the breakfast table heavily armed, sporting sidearms in the same way that General Patton did.

In The Guardian Review today I also read a review by William Dalrymple of Words of Mercury, a collection of the best of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s writings. Like Geoffrey Chandler (see 9 December and 27 October entries), he was involved in the unconventional fighting in Greece.

Asked Pat, my mother, who had read the same review, whether she had read Leigh Fermor’s Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water? I had, years ago, and loved them. She hadn’t, so I sent her all three for Christmas this evening, couresy of Amazon, after watching the grand finale of the BBC’s ‘The Big Read’. Of the final 5 books out of 6,000 originally entered, three were favourites of mine: Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Tolkien won. I can still recall the smell of rain on the earth outside at 06.00 one morning as I finished the third volume after a marathon 2-day, 3-volume reading session in the late 1960s.

Wednesday, December 10, 2003

Skaters: Back row – Oliver Dudok van Heel, Jan Scherer, Nick Robinson, Tell Muenzing, Peter Zollinger, Jeff Erikson; front row – Kavita Prakash-Mani, Frances Scott, Jodie Thorpe, Kizzi Keane, Philippa Moore (© JE)

Took part in SustainAbility Board meeting through to around 14.00. One key development: our 3-person US team has broken the $500,000 revenue mark for the first time and with Mark Lee joining us from Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) in January, the prospects there look pretty healthy. Later, a large bunch of us (people from the London, Washington and Zurich offices) went across to the skating rink at Somerset House.

Only time I have skated on ice was in the Cotswolds, at least 40 years ago, when the village fishmonger was out on his wooden skates, doffing his hat to everone he passed. You could look down through the ice to see trapped autumn leaves, with frozen streams of bubbles – a bit like skating across the boundary layer with an alternate universe.

Maddy (Rooke-Ley) and I sat it out, with hot chocolates, watching the passeo. One glorious moment when the SustainAbility folk linked up into a long gliding conga, and the Future Forests people (who just happened to be there same day, same time) linked on. Too much fun, though: the ice marshalls intervened and broke the conga up, but not before I had caught a fragment naughtily skimming by.

In the evening, the team and their partners head off to Yatra in Dover Street, for a delightful evening. As a gimmick to get people talking, Kizzi had allocated everyone with an identity: I turned out to be Samson and found my Delilah in the form of Nick’s Fiona. On the way home with Elaine, I mused that we have some fair old challenges ahead, but as long as we can get our management issues sorted we have the makings of a stunning team for 2004.

Outlaw conga: From the front – Oliver Dudok van Heel, Frances Scott, Nick Robinson, Yasmin Crowther, Tell Muenzing, Seb Beloe, with Jeff Erikson leaving picture on the left (© JE)

Tuesday, December 09, 2003

Council interlude: Craig Mackenzie (Insight), Sophia Tickell (Just Pensions/Oxfam), Peter Zollinger, Julia Hailes (co-founder of SustainAbility), Vernon Jennings (a Director of SustainAbility for nine years before leaving for Novo Nordisk), Yasmin Crowther, Sir Geoffrey Chandler (© Nick Robinson)

Our first face-to-face SustainAbility Council meeting for perhaps three years opens at the Royal Society of Arts. I introduce RSA Director Penny Egan by saying that Hania has been studying US and EU (particularly UK) approaches to film script writing – and discovered that Europeans (particularly Britons) tend to start with some history before getting into the real story, whereas Americans get straight to the story. As good Europeans, I say, we are going to start with a bit of context. Penny kicks off with a welcome noting that the Society is 250 years old next year – and that it has always had many aspects of the sustainability agenda among its priorities. Indeed, its genesis took place in the coffee shops of 18th century London, which many see as the origins of what many would call today ‘civil society’.

The RSA provided a platform – and something of a refuge – for the environmental debate through the Thatcher years in the UK, so in a sense it’s nice to come home. I also note that (Sir) Geoffrey (Chandler), present as a member of our Council, was also a regular denizen of the RSA in 1986 as Director of Industry Year. Apart from members of our Council and Faculty, the meeting also drew together people like Monique Barbut (the new Director of UNEP’s trade, industry and economics division), George Dallas (head of rating agency Standard & Poor’s governance unit), Craig Mackenzie (Insight Investment) and James Wilsdon (Demos).

Our focus during the day is primarily on SustainAbility’s research and think-tank priorities for the next 3-5 years, with the process run by Seb Beloe (our Director of Research & Advocacy) and Peter Zollinger (Executive Director). By the time we report back to the full Core Team late in the day, we have made a huge amount of progress, with a series of new perspectives and ideas surfacing. But perhaps the key outcome is that the team re-discover the value of our Council and Faculty. Many of the team hadn’t been around when we last held a Council meeting, that one at the Royal Aeronautical Society.

Thoughtful: Professor Tom Gladwin (University of Michigan), George Dallas (Standard & Poors) (© Nick Robinson)

Thursday, December 04, 2003

Hand in claw: Sophia Tickell, Lise Kingo and friend (©JE)

Wake up in the Old Bank Hotel, Oxford. Second day of fascinating conference at Magdalen College on non-communicable diseases, including obesity, cardio-vascular disease and diabetes. The purpose of the ‘Oxford Vision 2020’ event, sponsored by Novo Nordisk and organised by the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metalbolism, is to help the World Health Organisation (WHO) develop a strategy for dealing with what is expected to be an epidemic of chronic or non-communicable diseases (NCDs).

A paper circulated ahead of the meeting, and co-authored by Derek Yach of WHO, says that in 2003 there will have been an estimated 56 million deaths globally, of which 60% will be due to NCDs. Yach and his wife wrote another paper last year, which he sends me after the event, arguing that NCDs are emerging as a major threat to any chances we may have of achieveing sustainable development.

In my summing up late in the afternoon I say that the discussions have put me in mind of three characters: Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen (because the NCD challenge is one where the world will have to run faster and faster and yet will continue to slide backwards), Alexander the Great (except that here there is no way to slice to the heart of the Gordian Knot) and Kofi Annan (because of his emphais on partnerships for change – and because of the Global Compact project we are ramping up at SustainAbility, where I am now determined to include a component on NCDs).

The evening’s dinner is at the Pitt Rivers natural history museum, where just about the first case I come across contains a horseshoe crab, a reminder of our Cape Cod jaunt. As we leave, I take a couple of shots of Lise Kingo (VP for the triple bottom line at Novo Nordisk) and Sophia Tickell (just standing down from Oxfam, now part of Just Pensions and a much-valued member of SustainAbility’s Council), with a raucous, toothy passer-by.

Monday, December 01, 2003

Flew last night to Brussels, to speak at Fairer World Forum (www.humanitarian-review.org). Held at the Bibliotheque Solvay, in the shadow of the new European Parliament complex. Among the questions asked: Are multinational corporations the ‘unsung heroes’ of development aid? Is ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ the same in the First and Third Worlds? And, How are global commodities markets rigged against the Third World? Most of the proceedings left me strangely unstirred, but there was one extraordinary statement from a US company representative. He effectively argued that his transport and courrier group should be allowed to adopt different laws and standards in different parts of the world, one of which I happen to know is Burma/Myanmar. He was quickly scrabbling to make good the damage done, insisting that this wasn’t at all what he meant to say even if it was what he said. I wonder.