Search Results for: Tim elkington

Monday, January 30, 2006

DAVOS 2006

Back very late tonight from Davos, which turned out to be the best WEF event I have participated in to date, for a variety of reasons – but one was what I think of the SETI effect. On my Mac at home, there is a SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program, which analyses batches of the latest electronic signals received from space. At times at such WEF events, it’s easy to feel like a SETI researcher, sending endless signals into space but getting nothing – or only echoes – back. But this time the messages started to come back, strongly, and from every direction. I soon lost count of the number of times I was stopped by people I had never met who said that they had been told by X, Y or Z to track me down at Davos. Chaired a session on Global Risks and was a discussion leader for two others events. Will write and post a summary of the event in the next few days.

One of a number of masks in reception area of Congress Hall

Klaus Schwab mask during protest

And another mask

Security fence

Peter Eigen of Transparency International spotted on Bloomberg

Social entrepreneurs spotlighted in Schwab Foundation corner of Congress Hall

Limos wait with their engines running

And more …

On his first trip to Davos, Richard Branson sells everything, up to and including Virgin Galactic

On the train between Davos and Zurich

Elaine on the way back to Zurich

ZURICH

A few photos from our trip to Zurich, and overnight stay for a Sustainable Asset Management (SAM)/Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes advisory board meeting today. Last night we had a wonderful dinner with Alex Barkawi, Managing Director of SAM Indexes (http://www.sustainability-index.com/), and his wife Kecia, plus Michelle Chan-Fisher of Friends of the Earth (also just back from Davos, where she launched a new report on the banking sector,
http://www.commondreams.org/news2006/0127-11.htm) and Dow Jones Editor John Prestbo.

Horizon from train yesterday

Fish in shopfront diplay – caught my eye in part because of sustainable fisheries discussions at Davos

Statue on water front

One of many beautiful signs …

… and another …

Peter in his spectacular offices

My reflection in a VW

Peter and Alex Barkawi at SAM

Monday, January 23, 2006

ENVIRONMENT FOUNDATION

End of 3-day consultation at St George’s House, Windsor Castle, organised by The Environment Foundation, which I chair. This time, though, we were working alongside the 21st Century Trust. The subject: the prospects for sustainable development in the emerging economies, particularly China. One thing I discovered from Tessa Tennant of ASRIA was that Mandy Cormack, previously of Unilever and another of our speakers, is her older sister. Tessa’s language around the transition from bamboo to plastic is picked up in the scenario group I am part of and becomes one of the axes of the 2 x 2 matrix we develop to explore the interrelationships. We will develop summaries of the scenarios when I return from WEF.

After lunch, I jump in a taxi to Terminal 2, to catch a flight to Zurich with Elaine for the 2006 World Economic Forum event in Davos. Last time, I managed to lose the air tickets both on the way there – and on the way back. Elaine virtually refused to travel with me ever again. This time all I do is leave my jacket, and with it my wallet and passport, at Windsor Castle. Discovering the fact only when I get to Terminal 2, I then embark on a manic taxi ride to and fro to collect the jacket, making frantic calls to Sam (Lakha) as I do so. Miraculously, we make out flight – and get into Davos, finally, around midnight.

Friday, January 20, 2006

WHALE IN THE THAMES

Great excitement today as a bottle-nosed whale turned up alongside the House of Commons (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4631396.stm). Our Portuguese cleaner, Fernando, SustainAbility’s second-longest-running employee, was almost beside himself with joy.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

SIERRA GORDA

Day started with a visit from Pati Ruiz Corzo and Laura Perez Arce, the prime movers behind the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve, in Mexico, who I first met via the Schwab Foundation (http://www.sierragordamexico.org/eng_entrada.html). Then into a wildly productive two-day strategy meeting for SustainAbility, with Yasmin Crowther, Mark Lee, Sophia Tickell and Peter Zollinger.

Monday, January 16, 2006

MEN WHO SHOT THEM DOWN

Across this evening to Buck’s Club in Clifford Street for the launch of the 21st Century Trust’s 2006 programme by Lord Patten. Arrived to find Lord Moore, formerly private secretary to the Queen, talking to a Polish architect I know about the Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp in the country. Lord Moore said he had spent two-and-a-half years there in WWII, having been shot down on his first mission over Europe – in a Lancaster on a bombing raid against Munich.

I asked how many of the crew survived. He was the only one: as navigator he had been sitting towards the middle of the aircraft when it broke apart in mid-air. I noted that my father had had the good luck to be shot down over England during the Battle of Britain. I mentioned that in the 1960s Tim had subsequently met – quite serendipitously at an event at the West German embassy in London – the German Me109 pilot who had shot him down. Lord Moore seemed mildly thunderstruck. Said that when he once went to Germany with the Queen he found himself talking to a German who, again quite by happenstance, turned out to be the Me110 pilot who had shot him down.

Oddly, when I went to the same 21st Century Trust event last year, I met Baron Hermann von Richthofen, a direct descendant of the Red Baron. My Baron was once German Ambassador to the UK – responsible for the embassy where Tim met his would-be nemesis. A weird sense of wheels-within-wheels, or perhaps simply of the human brain as the ultimate in (sometimes spurious) pattern recognition organs.

Friday, January 13, 2006

BOMBAY CHAMBER OF COMMERCE & INDUSTRY

Kavita – trying, as usual, to find out how to get to mysterious addresses

We stay at the Taj Hotel, hard by the Gate of India. In stark contrast to the grinding poverty we have seen in Delhi and, to a lesser degree here in Mumbai, the hotel today hosts a conference on ‘Luxury’. We see signs advertising it as we drive around the city.

Morning begins with a visit to the Tata Council for Community Initiatives (TCCI), where we meet Anant Nadkarni, Vice President – Group CSR. More or less wherever you go in India, the Tata Group (http://www.tata.com/) seems to be the dominant feature in the business landscape. The TCCI is chaired by Kishor Chaukar, who took an active part in the CII CEO Forum earlier in the week. An early broadening of focus moved the TCCI spotlight beyond community relations to environmental management, and now social entrepreneurship and sustainable livelihoods are also key focal areas. The 2006 ‘Tata Workout Session’ will be on sustainability.

Anant Nadkarni, left

Then on to PricewaterhouseCoopers, where we meet Drs Ram Babu and Muna Ali to discuss the nature and scale of the Indian markets for professional services in corporate social responsibility and sustainable development. Then back to our hotel on the train, which is an experience in itself, for separate (but ultimately overlapping) meetings with Deepa Ruparel of ISDC (Integrated Social Development Consultancy: http://www.isdcindia.com), who does social audits for companies, and with Nirja Mattoo, Chairperson of the Center for Development of Corporate Citizenship at the S. P. Jain Institute of Management Research (http://www.spjimr.org).

Train in the other direction

Women waiting to board their own carriage – and this is off-peak

Under way

Lunch on its way

Then a quick walk around the Gate of India before the day really starts in earnest. Kavita and I make our way over to the Hilton Towers to see the Bombay Chamber of Commerce & Industry. I speak at a meeting of their Management Committee. Walking into the meeting, with those present mainly being CEOs, company chairmen and the like, I decide on the instant not to use my slides and instead do a 25-minute presentation off the top of my head. In the event, it works rather well. Then on hot foot to give ‘Global Leader Lecture’ on the subject of ‘Sustainability and the Rise of India as a Global Power’. Then a reception, then into a taxi and out to the airport for a 02.40 flight back to London.

A cameo as the taxi blares its way airportwards. Under a huge underpass, 50-60 people are settling down for the night, on sheets of cardboard or rugs. On one, a young boy and – I assume – his mother are caught in an emotional exchange. She is crying her eyes out, in full view of the passing traffic. Few things I have seen here have touched me as deeply.

Gate of India through streaming water

Gate of India, from the sea side

Taj Hotel

Security men

Mother and child

Hitchcockian moment in front of the Taj Hotel

Thursday, January 12, 2006

‘BLACK MONDAY’ SHOWS DARK SIDE OF INDIA’S GROWTH

Our India visit coincides with a major political controversy about the killing of twelve tribal people protesting against – and demanding compensation for – land seized by the state on behalf of business. Sonia Gandhi, as president of India’s Congress Party, used a visit to the mineral-rich state of Orissa yesterday to condemn the slaughter on January 2 of people trying to stop the construction of a perimeter wall by Tata Steel – part of the giant Indian group we will visit in Bombay tomorrow.

Today’s Financial Times sees the attention being given to these deaths as likely to encourage other popular protests against development projects, including a modernisation project designed to bring Mumbai airport – where we flew this evening – into the 21st century. As the FT puts it, “The myriad regulations governing land ownership are a bonanza for venal politicians.” For eveyone else, as the Confederation of Indian Industry puts it, they are a nightmare – to use the FT’s words – “of Kafkaesque proportions.”

NGO FORUM FOR RESPONSIBLE BUSINESS

Another stretching day. Starts with a meeting with many of the environment/sustainability team at CII, including KP Nyati (who heads the environment management division) and Dr Aditi Haldar, Counsellor – Environment. Brian Kelly and Paul Tebo also take part. The plans for the new Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Development are exciting. Next, Kavita and I are off to the International Finance Corporation (IFC), who have partnered with SustainAbility on our work on the business case for corporate responsibility and sustainable development. Meet with Robin Sandenburgh and Sameer Singh.

Main part of the day, however, involves taking part in a conference organised by the new NGO Forum for Responsible Business, initiated by Partners in Change (PIC: http://picindia.org/what_we_do_NGO%20Forum.shtml). PIC CEO Viraf Mehta is also a member of SustainAbility’s Faculty, another indication of how seriously we are now taking the challenge of developing some sort of platform in India in the coming years. I talk about the conclusions of SustainAbility’s recent study, The 21st Century NGO.

Then across to the domestic airport for our flight to Bombay/Mumbai. Excellent flight with Jet Airways, reading a book I bought in Delhi a few days back, Travel Writing and the Empire, edited by Sachidananda Mohanty. A bit academic in parts, but fascinating nonethless. And, as usual, William Dalrymple’s contribution on Fanny Parkes and the process of ‘going native’ is spellbinding. Try to take part in a SustainAbility strategy meeting by cell phone as Kavita and I head into Mumbai by taxi, but my phone betrays me yet again.

HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PRESS

Pamela Hartigan is in New York today and, among other things, signs the contract with Harvard Business School Press for our new book on social enterprise. Many thanks to our agent, Doris Michaels – who Elaine met when we were in California early last year, when I was giving a lecture at the Haas School of Business, Berkeley. Now the really hard work begins.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

RED FORT AND HAMAYUNA TOMB

The serious, grown-up parts of today’s program included a visit to India’s Institute of Directors (much more interested in sustainability issues than its UK equivalent, from which I resigned a while back because of their policies). But the real high points of the day for me were: lunch with Shankar Venkateswaran, Executive Director of the Indian end of the America India Foundation (AIF: http://www.aifoundation.org/) and a member lof SustainAbility’s Faculty; a visit to Kavita’s delightful uncle and aunt; and, later, visits to the Red Fort and to the Hamayun tomb complex. Sign of the times: surprised to see as we headed towards the latter in our car a street vendor selling the Harvard Business Review, among other publications. We arrived at the Hamayun Tomb as the sun was setting, which added immeasurably to the beauty and the pervading sense of melancholy.

Red Fort

On the road

Raju Prasad, our driver in Delhi

Hamayun Tomb

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

CII CEO FORUM

Kavita and I spend all day at the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) CEO Forum, where I do a plenary keynote in the morning. Among those taking part from outside India are Brian Kelly, who is a key mover and shaker in the Sustainable Enterprise Academy (SEA: http://www.sustainableenterpriseacademy.com/SSB-Extra/sea.nsf/docs/SEA) and Dr Paul Tebo, recently retired from DuPont, where he led the charge on the giant US chemical company’s ‘sustainable growth’ strategy. They had invited me out to dinner on my first evening in Delhi, which had been a nice way to find my feet. Weirdly, and coincidentally, an email came in this morning asking whether I might be able to speak at a DuPont board meeting in March. Delightful dinner with a dozen or so people, hosted by Yogendra Kumar Saxena of Gujarat Ambuja Cements Ltd. Talked much of the evening with Ambreen Waheed. She is Executive Director of the Responsible Business Initiative, based in Lahore, Pakistan (http://www.RBIpk.org).

CII CEO Forum: podium and two shots of Paul and Brian

Monday, January 09, 2006

AN NGO DAY IN DELHI

If there’s one thing that India – where Kavita (Prakash-Mani) and I arrived yesterday – is not short of it is NGOs. But they come in all sorts of sizes and styles. Today we visited some of the bigger, more influential and better known ones. We did so in the midst of what is billed as Delhi’s coldest winter for 70 years: when we arrived at the airport yesterday, the temperature had fallen as low 0.2 degrees C. Quite pleasant, though finding our way out of the airport raised my temperature slightly – the place was bursting at the seams with hundreds of Indian blue berets and their kit, and our driver disappeared in the melee.

NOTE: My Indian photos look as though they have been shot through pollution haze and at night. Some, particularly the shots of the Hamayun tomb complex, were taken in evening light, but for the rest the camera seems to be in a slightly depressive mood.

We kicked off today with the Centre for Science and the Environment (http://www.cseindia.org/), where we met Chandra Bushan – who among other things leads the Centre’s work on the environmental ranking of companies and industry sectors. As we talked, we could hear the mewing of kites in the background: they seemed to be perching on the roof overhead, monitoring the passing traffic in pigeons. CSE was founded by the late Anil Agarwal, who I first met in the 1980s when he was with Panos in London. He commissioned me to write a piece on water issues dogging countries like India, particularly India. They have become dramatically more important since – indeed, CSE led the charge recently when Coca-Cola came under fire for alleged over-use of groundwater and for the levels of insecticide residues in its Indian products.

Smog from my hotel window

Kavita and Chandra Bushan

Anil campaigned on many fronts, but – although you can taste the air pollution even as your plane drops in towards Delhi – one of his greatest successes was in getting the country’s government and judiciary to drive the shift from petrol and diesel to compressed natural gas (CNG) for taxis, ‘autorickshaws’ and buses. One of CSE’s latest projects is a sector study on the cement industry, particularly interesting since one of the companie we plan to meet here ranks No. 2 in the CSE sector survey.

Later in the day, we visited WWF (http://www.wwfindia.org/), to see Ravi Singh, Secretary General and CEO – who I first met early last year at the WWF summit in Vancouver. As we spoke, and against a backdrop of whirling kites, a small squirrel with a three-banded tail fidgeted its way along his window sill – which made me take rather more seriously the notice on the door to his personal rest room declaring that the place is a squirrel sanctuary.

Rest room home for the restless

Next, we headed across to Development Alternatives (http://www.devalt.org/), founded by Dr Ashok Khosla, someone else I have known for a fair few years. We had lunch with Ashok and colleagues on the roof of DA’s interim building, which they are occupying while their new premises are built. Their motto: ‘Creating Large Scale Sustainable Livelihoods’. All hugely relevant to our growing interest in social enterprise and the scalability of small-scale experiments and pilot programs. A truly impressive organisation and team.

Askok Khosla (right), Vijaya Lakshmi (left) and George C. Varughese (second left)

Finally, we head back to the India Habitat Centre (http://www.indiahabitat.org/main.htm), where we had started off with CSE. The Centre, in fact, ends up serving as a ‘strange attractor’ throughout our visit, with our peregrinations routinely looping back through its vast air-pollution-hazed spaces. Our last formal meeting of the day was with TERI (http://www.teriin.org/), where we had an interesting session with Director-General Dr R K Pachauri, who I first met 4-5 years back when we helped organise and facilitate a stakeholder engagement session for Ford in the US. He chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an issue that has even India exercised – though the unusually cold weather here at the moment apparently has some Indians querying the whole notion of global warming. One of the most impressive features of his office: a collection of cricket memorabilia, alongside probably the most extensive array of Christmas and New Year greeting cards I have seen anywhere, anytime. No question, the man’s connected, though I wonder (and doubt) whether there was anything from President Bush.

India Habitat ‘roof’

Dr Pachauri and part of his collection of cricket memorabilia

Friday, January 06, 2006

SHOULD WE RETHINK NUCLEAR?

SustainAbility has always refused to work with tobacco, defence and nuclear companies. There are many reasons for this, but key among them on the nuclear front were the risks associated with nuclear breakdowns and meltdowns, the timescales involved in the disposal of radioactive wastes, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Such concerns were already in the air after the US Three Mile Island accident in 1979, but they became even more urgent in 1986—the year before we founded SustainAbility—in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster. Now the twentieth anniversary of Chernobyl will provide some of 2006’s great media stories. Mark Lee and I got one in early late last year, as part of our regular column for Grist (http://www.grist.org/biz/fd/2005/12/13/nuclear/).

The statistics that will be rolled out will do nothing to help politicians trying to sell nuclear power to the public. Take thyroid cancer, normally a rare disease, with just one in a million children falling victim. In the highly abnormal conditions found in the main Chernobyl fallout zone, perhaps a third of children who were under four years of age when they were exposed are likely to develop the disease. In Belarus, where perhaps 70 percent of the fallout landed, around 25 percent of the country’s farmland has had to be removed from production, and nearly 1,000 children die each year from thyroid cancer.

All of which makes the nuclear industry a very difficult partner for NGOs and others wanting to advance sustainable energy. Indeed, when the Chernobyl site was closed down in 2000, activists celebrated the beginning of the end for the industry. Today, they can point to the trend line for nuclear reactor construction starts as evidence that the industry is dying. The line begins by leaping upwards from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, peaking in the wake of the first oil shock, but then falls back sharply over the subsequent 20 years.

And yet growing numbers of people—including several well respected environmentalists—argue that the industry has a bright future, thanks to climate change. In 2004, for example, green activists were shocked when one of their idols (and one of mine), James Lovelock, the independent scientist best known for his ‘Gaia Hypothesis’, warned that global warming is now advancing so rapidly that only a massive expansion of nuclear power can save our industrial civilization.

There has even been talk of a ‘Nuclear Renaissance’. Climate change is one driver, but so is the ‘Peak Oil’ debate, the idea that global oil production has passed—or will shortly pass—its peak. The World Energy Council says that the nuclear industry is “poised to expand its role in world electricity generation. Plant life will be extended in some markets, such as Finland or Sweden; new plants will be built in Asia; governments and voters will accept the inevitability of new nuclear power stations in Europe, Africa, North America, Latin America, and even the Middle East.”

Meanwhile, some of the world’s biggest users of nuclear power are signaling that they will soon have to decommission many existing reactors. Strikingly, Tony Blair warns that by about 2020 coal and nuclear plants generating more than 30 percent of the UK’s electricity will have to be decommissioned. “Some of this will be replaced by renewables,” he notes, “but not all of it can be.”

Having written a book on the prospect for renewables as long ago as 1984 (Sun Traps: The Renewable Energy Forecast, Pelican Books, see http://johnelkington.com/pubs-books-science.htm), I’m about as pro-renewables as it’s possible to be – with a long-standing mistrust of the nuclear industry, having watched them fairly closely during periods like the Windscale/Sellafield THORP planning inquiry and via visits over the years to the Windscale area to see cousins. Nor do I want to see nuclear siphoning off funding that would be better spent on energy efficiency and renewables.

It seems to me fairly clear that we can count out nuclear fusion for the foreseeable future. For the west, the fission future will very much depend on things like the forecast price of fossil fuels, the cost of the carbon permits needed by fossil fuel power plants, and the extent to which governments subsidize nuclear power. New technology, like the much-vaunted pebble-bed reactor, will also likely play a key role in determining the relative acceptability of the nuclear option. So, whatever the outcome, we probably do need to review our ban on nuclear industry work at some point. If you have views on the subject, please e-mail me at elkington@sustainability.com.

Monday, January 02, 2006

NEW YEAR IN PARIS

Arrived back in London via Eurostar late last night, after four wonderful days in Paris with Elaine, Hania and her boyfriend. It was snowing lightly when we arrived in Paris. Walking through the Luxembourg Gardens (where we were taken with the graffito assuring us that ‘Life is not bed of rosese’), it became distinctly Siberian. Later, as we emerged from the catacombs on the first full day it seemed that the cold weather was set in for the duration, but not long after it turned to rain.

‘Life is not bed of rosese’

Some denizens of catacombs would have agreed, presumably

Happier times underground: Le Franc Pinot Jazz Club, Ile Saint Louis

Great meals at places like Le Dome and Angelina’s, near where we had to give way for a troop of 8-10 Segways semi-cruising, semi-tottering, along the pavement. Despite the extraordinary technology, which I learned about when reading the book Code Name Ginger on Dean Kamen’s attempts to revolutionise transport, there is something ridiculous about them in such surroundings – particularly when compared with conventional bikes, also in evidence.

Segways on the Rue de Rivoli

One day, Elaine and I walked around old haunts, including the Place des Vosges. I had come here in 1973, to stay with Gavin Young, the Observer foreign correspondent, in an apartment owned by part of the Rothschild family. I was interested in the Place des Vosges for a number of reasons, one was that it was an early attempt at town planning, which I was studying at the time, and it is now the oldest square in Paris, apparently. My main memory of the apartment was of a giant wood and canvas Siamese cat, perhaps six feet high. An extraordinary time in all sorts of ways, mainly because of Gavin’s company (our jaunts took in everything from La Coupole to the Marx Brothers and A Night at the Opera) and deep knowledge of the city. But it also sticks in my mind because Paris at the time was like a ghost town in parts, policed by CRS forces – because, I think, Golda Meir was visiting. And because Elaine’s brother had just had a near-fatal car accident and was in a coma.

Place des Vosges

Among the visits this time, we went to a great jazz gig at Le Franc Pinot jazz club on L’Ile Saint Louis (to hear a quartet led by by Pierre Christophe, playing in the style of Erroll Garner) and to the Centre Pompidou, to see the extraordinary Dada exhibition (http://www.cnac-gp.fr/Pompidou/Manifs.nsf/0/9F43A653A3897921C1256EBD00476011?OpenDocument&sessionM=2.2.1&L=2). Wish I had had a couple of days to wander around the exhibition, particularly once I realised it ran chronologically. Have always loved Max Ernst and Man Ray, of whose work there were masses of examples, including Cadeau, shown in my photo below. It was only after taking it – with no flash, as is my way in such circumstances – that I noticed that no-one else was carrying a camera, so tucked mine away.
Struck me as I walked around the exhibition that we may now be moving towards another period like the one that spawned Dadaism. We don’t have WWI, thank heavens, but the world as we have known it is in flux because of the impact, among other things, of the Internet, terrorism and counter-terrorism, and the entry of China and India into world markets. There’s no name yet for the deep stirrings under way, or maybe there are too many names, but 50-100 years from now the future (and exhibition designers) will no doubt have a name for what we are living through – and headed towards.

Dada exhibition poster

Man Ray’s Cadeau

A (very) distant view of the Eiffel Tower

Elaine and Hania at the Centre Pompidou

On the last day, yesterday, we walked until I almost collapsed, through at times fairly heavy downpours. Walking the streets suits me much less well than walking in the fields or mountains. So the last few images are studies in (fairly dark) blue of New Year’s Day 2006.

Dark clouds hung over the city, at the end of a year that has been traumatic for the French, what with the state of the economy, the voting down of the proposed European Constitution, the loss of the 2012 Olympics to London, and the recent race riots. In many ways, the Chirac era will be seen as a time of missed opportunities, but France will recover. Hopefully, while retaining and re-energising its culture, it will come back less arogant, friendlier. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but there was already some sense of that in the streets. People stopped and asked if we needed directions more often than I remember from past visits. Or maybe that was just post-Christmas good cheer?

The Eurostar home gave me an opportunity to read another 150 or so pages of Juliet Barker’s extraordinary book Agincourt, though I felt a need to hide the cover each time one of the French attendants arrived alongside. One of the most insightful books on medieval history I have ever read – and one that also brings home the startling emotional, family and social impacts of what happened just north of the Somme in 1415.

Roof-top knights caught my eye because I’m reading Juliet Barker’s Agincourt

Seine-borne evidence of the night before

We’re lost, looking for Priori a The

Tuileries 1

Tuileries 2

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

GONDOLIER’S NUNBUN

Apparently a week or so before she died, Mother Teresa approved the name ‘NunBun’ for the cinnamon bun discovered at a Nashville coffee shop in 1996 – and widely held to show a striking resemblance to herself. She agreed on the basis that the Bongo Java cafe, where the thing originally emerged from the oven as part of another routine baking, desist from using her own name to describe the bun. Now it has been stolen, The Times reports today.

The paper then recalls similar stories, where an Indian woman in 2003 chopped open an aubergine to find the seeds spelling out ‘Allah’ in Urdu, the Florida woman who found the likeness of the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich (she sold it for $28,000 on eBay when it – the sandwich – was a decade old) and the burnt fish finger thought to be a likeness of Jesus, and dubbed ‘The Son of Cod’.

The reason all of this caught my eye was that in 1970 Elaine and I were returning with friends from a long journey through Europe to Greece, and found ourselves in Venice. She and I had wandered off down a maze of alleyways, where we stumbled across a workshop where a wood-carver sat in a state of shock, or ecstasy. A day or two earlier, he eventually told us, he had split open a block of wood to start carving a prow for a gondola, only to find a startling likeness of Jesus in the heartwood. He hadn’t been able to do anything since. Yet more evidence that the human brain is a pattern recognition organ primed to see whatever it wants/expects to see.

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

PARAKEET AND SNOWFLAKES

As huge snowflakes – some the size of small chicken feathers – fell thickly from the sky this morning, a lone parakeet flew among them, trying to grab them in its beak. The snow was falling so hard it was difficult to see the bird’s colours, but the shape of its tail was unmistakable. Wasn’t sure whether it was being playful or, because this was its first experience of snow, bewildered.

Sunday, December 25, 2005

CHRISTMAS DAY’S A BLUR

Hania at electronic shrine

The four of us drive down to Little Rissington for Christmas with my parents, my sister Caroline and brother Gray – and his family. Or at least that was the idea. We so rarely use the car these days that it apparently feels neglected – and refused to start. We had to call the RAC. Still, we got there by lunchtime, though by some electronic demonry the fact that we had lost power meant that the CD player refused to work unless we gave it the magic word – and after all these years we had no idea what it was meant to be. So we did quizzes as we sped westward and G and H harmonised around Elvis songs, which was much more fun. Once there, we unwound. Gray’s daughter, Lydia, commented how much he and I look alike. When I looked back at the photographs, I could see what she saw. At some point, however, someone seems to have touched the wrong button on the camera, so many of the images came out blurred – some spectacularly so. People didn’t just look unwound, but unravelling. In the end, though, I got to quite like the spectral effects.

Pat goes spectral

Saturday, December 24, 2005

CHRISTMAS EVE

Reindeer

Jack Black: our Christmas fairy

Wonderful Christmas Eve dinner, cooked by Gaia and Hania, featuring inter alia scallops and gilthead bream – and the wildest chocolates, from a family friend. Made by L’Artisan du Chocolate (www.artisanduchocolate.com). My favourite: Sea Salted Caramel, made with unrefined sea salt from Brittany. As the day ends, Gaia and I watch Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. Can’t imagine why it didn’t do better. Unbelievably beautiful cinematography. Even as I was watching I couldn’t wait to see it again – the first time that’s happened to me.

Kitchen 1

Kitchen 2

Unbaconed scallops are mine

Chocolate heaven

Gaia’s cake

Friday, December 23, 2005

SEASON’S GREETINGS

Racing between worlds, it has been a huge, ongoing pleasure to receive emails from people – some known, many not – around the globe, a fair number of whom have simply stumbled across this site. So for anyone who has come upon this entry, for whatever reason, let me extend my very best wishes for 2006 – and everything that comes before.

The image is from an exhibit (referenced in the 24 August and 4 October entries) I wandered back and forth across when with VW in October. The legs belonged to a boy who came sliding through as I took the picture. An assisted case of serendipity (see CounterCurrent, http://johnelkington.com/babelfish.htm), in that I saw him coming in peripheral vision. That’s the nature of my job, really. Scanning slightly wider horizons than most people’s work schedules allow them to. And, for me at least, the image caught the multifarious ways in which we all severally view the Earth and all that rides with it around the Sun.

THE YEAR WINDS DOWN

The week has been a blur of activity, trying to get various projects tidied away before the break: among them, the OFR process with USS (see 16 December entry); working on content for the pilot issue of Value magazine, which I have been developing alongside Laurance Allen (former publisher of The Harvard Business Review) and Jed Emerson (www.blendedvalue.org), particularly on the slightly provocative article I have done on the Davos 2015 agenda; a proposal to a major foundation; and down-to-the-wire discussions with Harvard Business School Press on the new book with Pamela Hartigan – which now looks quite hopeful, though the writing schedule looks perfectly horrid. Still, that’s next year …

Meanwhile, I have also been receiving a steady flow of emails from people who have been prowling around this site and reading the blog, which is very encouraging. Some 28 months after I started the blog, it has become more or less second nature – and, often, a useful prop for a sometimes erratic memory.

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

FORD SUPPORTS CLIMATE STABILIZATION

When SustainAbility first began to work with Ford, quite a few years ago, we raised climate change as a key issue. This stance was reinforced when we co-organised (with BSR) a major multi-stakeholder event for the company – and one of the three priority issues that surfaced was climate change. Not a message that most of the auto industry wanted to hear at that stage, with so much of its future fortunes seen to ride on the back of highly profitable (if highly climate destabilising) SUVs. Now, several years later, Ford has become the first auto-maker to embrace the concept of climate stablisation – in its first climate report, published today (http://www.ford.com/NR/rdonlyres/e6vzmdwyz2ycyehpwvuj5sdkrmfknipsreoyznmwwfqtzlwqfbfbcq44ckquxgn5xfir532knjvkq3ovbyhuscz7sfh/fordReptBusImpClimChg.pdf).

Friday, December 16, 2005

SA/USS OFR ROUNDTABLE

In recent days, I have been working with (Dr) Raj Thamotheram of the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) on pulling together a roundtable of those concerned about the Treasury’s recent announcement of the abandonment of the Operating & Financial Review (OFR) requirements on major UK companies. I chaired the event today, at USS’s offices in the City. By pooling our contacts, we attracted an impressive turnout from companies, the financial world, NGOs and consultancies that have helped clients up the OFR learning curve.

The summary of the session, which was held under the Chatham House Rule, will be published shortly.

On a personal note, it’s clear that Gordon Brown has set a cat among the corporate responsibility pigeons. Indeed, I can’t help feeling that he is becoming dangerously cloistered, with little personal feel for the corporate responsibility and sustainability agendas – despite his statements on the international poverty agenda. The sense is that he didn’t really know what he was doing, throwing the CBI and other business interests what he imagined to be a bone, only to find his ankles being snapped at by a growing army of NGOs, socially responsible investors and leading companies. The Government is now saying that what it was really trying to do was to ‘recalibrate’ reporting requirements …

Now we have to reclaibrate his recalibration. Although SustainAbility hasn’t been at the vanguard of the OFR movement – largely because our work on corporate transparency, reporting and accountability is more international – the OFR requirement has been seen as one of the leading models in this area. So we are doing everything we can to ensure that this issue is properly aired and addressed. Our new Chair, Sophia Tickell, wrote a letter on the subject to the Financial Times in the immediate wake of the announcement (http://www.sustainability.com/news-media/news-resource.asp?id=399) and we also signed a letter of protest from NGOs (http://www.sustainability.com/news-media/news-resource.asp?id=404).

Then back to the office to take part in a (very energetic and productive) teleconference with the SustainAbility Board.

Thursday, December 15, 2005

SONAE SIERRA IN PORTUGAL

Flew down to Lisbon yesterday to speak today at the annual top management meeting of Sonae Sierra, the shopping mall developer (http://www.sonaesierra.com). Hadn’t heard of them before the invitation arrived, though was given a very useful background briefing by Julie Hirigoyen of David Cadman’s Upstream Consulting. It’s a sector with many challenges, though Sonae Sierra turn out to be way ahead of their competititors in the responsibility stakes – and this year, the fifth in this series of top management forums, the theme was ‘sustainability’. Hence my keynote.

Confess, though, that Richard Sandbrook (see previous entry) was very much on my mind as I was whisked at 140 kph through Portugal in a succession of taxis, against a backdrop of blurring tower blocks, shopping centres and windmills, both ancient and modern. Would our 1970s incarnations have seen what we have managed to achieve in the subsequent decades as real progress As I type these lines, Alvin Lee is singing the line ‘Getting Nowhere Fast’ on my Mac. But I think that Richard – like me – would say that, while demographic and commercial pressures continue to undermine global ecosystems, we have made significant progress in waking up many parts of business and the financial world. The real problems today are often, paradoxically our failure to truly convert citizens and – as a result – politicians and governments.

I started my keynote with three astounding images of the plume of smoke from the Hemel Hempstead explosion on Sunday. Made the point that we noticed the combusion of that oil because it happened in an instant, whereas if it had been burned on our roads or in the jetlanes of Europe we wouldn’t have noticed. As I stood by the Atlantic while waiting to do my session, a thin pall of smoke streamed out to sea from a fire on a nearby headland, a micro-scale version of what happened on Sunday. Most people probably saw it as cloud.

After the presentation, had a fascinating lunch with Belmiro de Azevedo (Sonae Sierra’s chairman) and Álvaro Portela (CEO and a great supporter of the triple bottom line approach), before another breakneck journey back to Lisbon, where I took part in a SustainAbility strategy session by mobile phone – with people coming in from as far afield as Zurich and San Francisco. The wonders of modern technology, though for my money nothing beats sitting together on a sofa.

Santa flies past in Lisbon airport

Atlantic 1

Álvaro Portela, CEO, addresses not just bottles but Sonae Sierra top managers

Pool, with smoke skein

Shadowed as I wait to speak

Atlantic 2


Windmills and pylon

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

RICHARD SANDBROOK

What a year: Marek Mayer, David Pearce and now Richard Sandbrook. Though I knew it was coming, the announcement of Richard’s death in The Times today was still a shock. He had a quite extraordinary influence on our agenda. First met him in the very early days of Friends of the Earth UK, then periodically worked alongside him on projects at IIED in the 1980s, when I was between my ENDS and SustainAbility incarnations. As with many activists of the era, my mental image is of him in wreathed in cigarette smoke, a whirlwind of activity.

One thing that sticks in memory: driving together down to a conference in, I think, Malvern when we were both rapporteurs for the UK response to the World Conservation Strategy, which resulted in the 1983 publication of the UK Conservation and Development Programme. We were so deep in conversation, I managed to hit one of the gateposts driving into the yard at my patents’ home in Little Rissington. The collision hardly disturbed Richard’s stream of consciousness delivery.

While I did the industry report, Seven Bridges to the Future, which formed the first chapter in the eventual, encyclopaedic tome, Richard addressed the UK’s ‘overseas environmental policy’. Much of the process happened at the Royal Society of Arts, one reason why I have since had a great deal of affection for the RSA. It helped keep the green flame at least sputtering during the often-grim Reagan and Thatcher years.

Most recently, I caught up with Richard (who had gone on to a range of roles, including helping to found Forum for the Future) courtesy of Tim Smit of The Eden Project, where Richard was a non-exec director. Tim convenes a ‘Breakfast Club’ in Cornwall of long-standing environmentalists, partly in an attempt to broker a burying of hatchets and to build new constellations of effort designed to crack problems which, if at least in the realm of climate change, seem even more challenging than we started out in the late 60s and early 70s.

POSTSCRIPT: Nice that Jonathon Porritt’s obituary of Richard in Friday’s Guardian notes that “with people like John Elkington and Tom Burke, [Richard] pioneered a collaborative way of working with big business which has become common practice” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1668531,00.html).

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

KING KONG AND BT

Great breakfast with Carlos Oppe, followed by a sofa session with a couple of the Ecodes team, exploring ways of working together. Then back to Stansted, where I waited in a cold, ghostly environment overseen by a glowing King Kong poster for the next train to London. In the evening, headed across to the BT HQ for a dinner hosted by Larry Stone (BT’s company secretary) and Chris Tuppen (who has long led the charge at BT on issues like the environment and corporate responsibility). Around a dozen people had been invited to hear the results of an MBA dissertation-related survey that had been carried out by Herman Schepers. On a side table, a new game that BT has developed: The Better Business Game. Lively discussion in the BT boardroom, high above a glazed atrium and looking out onto the Dome of St Paul’s, then home.

King Kong waits for a train

The Better Business Game

Monday, December 12, 2005

ZARAGOSA

Flew to Zaragosa, via Stansted – first time I have flown Ryanair. Functional, but hardly a pleasure. Zaragoza (frequently rendered as Saragossa in English, derived from the Latin, Caesaraugusta), is located on Ebro river – and is the capital city of Aragon. Was invited by Ecodes (http://www.ecodes.org), the Fundacion Ecologia y Desarrollo, to speak in a series of ‘Tomorrow’s Company’ lectures, previous speakers being Hernando de Soto and John Kay. Walking to the Ecodes office, spotted a stork nesting high overhead: apparently they used to migrate south, but these days often don’t bother. Lunch at the Club Nautico de Zaragoza, alongside the churning Ebro, with people representing government, busienss and NGO sectors.

Ecodes did the Spanish translation of SustainAbility’s recent report, The 21st Century NGO, and that was a key part of my theme for the evening, the event held in the Hotel Boston. In the audience, Carlos Oppe, a longstanding family friend, who asked a challenging question: with a major Expro on water due in Zaragosa in a few years, will anything be done to clean up the highly polluted Ebro? The answer wasn’t reassuring. Really liked the Ecodes team – and am hopeful we can develop a closer working relationship with them in future.

Just around corner from Ecodes office

Stork and nest

And again

Lions guard bridge over Ebro

Bridge footing ploughs upstream

Words like sustainable, development and dialogue feature in Ecodes decor

Sunday, December 11, 2005

UNDER A DARK CLOUD

Geoff (Lye) woke to a boom and his Oxford house shaking early this morning, as did our neighbour – and they were some 80 miles apart. Then Elaine noticed a dark black cloud overhead here when she went out to get milk later on. Apparently an oil depot has blown up in Hemel Hempstead. Given that a fair amount of aircraft fuel is stored there, one of my first thoughts was whether my flight to Spain would still be happening tomorrow morning …

Satellite’s eye view

Saturday, December 10, 2005

TORTURE, THE BUTCHER’S BUSH & A GREEN CHRISTMAS

Spent much of the day with the Trustees of the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, in their new office in Charlotte Street. Huge progress has been made with the B&HRRC website – and with the organisation’s expanding global network. Listening to Annabel Short recounting the story of having to clean the floors and assemble the Ikea bookshelves put me in mind of when Julia (Hailes) and her mother led the cleaning up of the Augean Stables at The People’s Hall, providing SustainAbility with our first truly independent offices many years ago. Just as SustainAbility started off in our Barnes home, so the Resource Centre – while supported by Amnesty – has been housed in Chris Avery’s flat. I think I have a reasonable sense of what a liberation the team’s move to Charlotte Street must have been for him.

One of the highlights, for me at least, was when Annabel gave a potted history of the denizens of Fitzrovia, including a nearby brothel in which flagellation was a speciality of the house. When I Googled one of the women involved, a certain ‘One-Eyed Peg’, I discovered that “the queen” of flagellation “was undoubtedly Mrs Theresa Berkley, of No 28 Charlotte Street, Portland Place” (http://public.diversity.org.uk/deviant/ssflg1.htm). She ended up a very wealthy woman, apparently.

“Her instruments of torture were more numerous than those of any other governess. Her supply of birch was extensive, and kept in water, so that it was always green and pliant: she had shafts with a dozen whip thongs on each of them; a dozen different sizes of cat-o’-nine-tails, some with needle points worked into them; various kinds of thin bending canes; leather straps like coach traces; battledoors, made of thick sole-leather, with inch nails run through to docket, and currycomb tough hides rendered callous by many years flagellation. Holly brushes, furze brushes; a prickly evergreen, called butcher’s bush; and during the summer, a glass and China vases, filled with a constant supply of green nettles, with which she often restored the dead to life. Thus, at her shop, whoever went with plenty of money, could be birched, whipped, fustigated, scourged, needle-pricked, half-hung, holly-brushed, furze-brushed, butcher-brushed, stinging-nettled, curry-combed, phletbotomized, and tortured till he had a belly full.”

And here we are campaigning against torture! More positively, the early social entrepreneur Robert Owen had lived literally next door while founding things like a labour exchange and a school.

At one point during the day, I tool a photo of a rather lovely ginko tree in the street below, which still had a blaze of yellow leaves. Chris Marsden, who chairs the Board of Trustees, noted that many trees are holding on to their leaves much later this year. Indeed, The Independent this morning noted this could be Britain’s first “Green Christmas”. Once again, as the sun began to set, the Millennium Wheel turned up on the horizon, several of its capsules glistening to the south.

Friday, December 09, 2005

CHRISTMAS PARTY

A slightly frantic day, trying to get various articles and slide presentations done ahead of next week, alongside celebrating the tenth anniversary of Geoff Lye joining SustainAbility – which represented one of the major turning points in our history. Then, after most of the team had gone off to ice-skate at the Natural History Museum (with my bruises and workload, I didn’t go), 5-6 of us headed off from the office to the Angel, where we had booked a delightful upstairs room at Frederick’s for our Christmas party.

First time I had been on one of those giant accordion-like buses that I struggle to pass on my cycle as they clog up London’s streets. sadly, this week also saw the final demise of the old Routemaster buses, one of the truly great aspects of the London ecosystem over the 30-some years I have lived in the city. The Routemaster’s passing is a tragedy, in many respects, not least the ability of riders like me to jump on and off at will. But this was a wonderful evening, with younger members of the team bringing in CDs to play on the restaurant’s sound system – which, to my delight, included everything from Nina Simone to Elvis and The Kinks. There’s hope for future generations yet!

Kavita skating, taken by Tell

Suzi, Tell, Kelly, Geoff and Ritu

Thursday, December 08, 2005

2010 + 2012 OLYMPICS

When I was in Vancouver earlier in the year, I suggested to Linda Coady – who heads the team trying to build sustainability principles into the 2010 Winter Olympics, to be held in Vancouver and Whistler – that the 2010 team should meet up with the 2012 London Olympics team. One reason was that I had recently intereviewed David Stubbs, wholeads the sustainability side of the London Organising Committee’s work, for SustainAbility’s newsletter, Radar (http://www.sustainability.com/network/global-influencer.asp?id=244), and had instinctively felt that they would get on. This afternoon, as a result, I found myself chairing a joint session between the 2010 and 2012 teams at Canada House, involving a range of external stakeholder organisations, from Bioregional, Demos, IIED and the International Business Leaders Forum through to the London Sustainability Exchange and WWF-UK. Overall, an excellent discussion – and Linda noted that this was an historic moment, the first time that two Olympic organisers had convened to discuss how to collaborate on the sustainability dimensions of their work. Afterwards, a delightful dinner at Inn the Park, in St James’ Park. Emerged very late to see the Millennium Wheel hovering over the Admiralty in the east.

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

BLACK & BLUE ICE

Cycling in to the office this morning, I hit a patch of black ice at a fair speed and whilst cornering – mercifully with no other traffic around – and ended up with swollen joints and a mass of bruises. Having returned home to get patched up, and receive a lecture on not cycling on frosty mornings, I cycled on. A wonderful morning, though by the time I got in various bits of the body were starting to seize up.

Frost patterns on our Volvo

Sunday, December 04, 2005

WINTER FROGS

As Elaine and I left for a walk in Richmond Park late this morning, I noticed the winter sun slicing in low and catching a pair of frogs on a vase in the front room. Later, as we walked around the Park, it seemed so mild we even thought of looking in a pond or two for frog-spawn, partly because some of the plants in the garden seem to be coming into blossom weirdly early. But we didn’t: couldn’t imagine that frogs would be that stupid.

That said, there have been some strange selection pressures at work. Over the years, we have loosed a fair few frogs in the Park that we have found and rescued in the streets of Barnes – largely, I suspect, because people bring frog-spawn or even tadpoles back for garden ponds, and the inevitable happens. Even had a fair old row once in the Isabella Plantation with a man who was carrying a great big black plastic sack of spawn. But frogs haven’t been the only things on our mind, not least because Jim Salzman, a professor at Duke University and a long-standing member of the SustainAbility Council, is staying at the moment, en route to a regular teaching jaunt in Sweden.

FREEPLAY IN TIMES

The Times carried a front page teaser on the Freeplay Foundation yesterday, as Kristine Pearson had said they would – and a two-page spread featuring the Salvation Army (one of the older social enterprises in the UK) and Freeplay (one of the newest, http://www.freeplayfoundation.org). Slightly weird concatenation, but wonderful breakthrough for Freeplay.

Friday, December 02, 2005

INVESTING IN THE FUTURE

Drafted in late in the day as rapporteur for the Climate Change session at the UK Presidency of EU conference on ‘Investing in the Future’ (http://www.csr.gov.uk/feature.shtml), which focused on the finance sector’s take on corporate social responsibility. Fascinating gathering of the tribes, four floors below ground level along the Albert Embankment. Someone said, as I checked in my coat, that I must get bored with attending all these events, meeting “all the usual suspects,” but it turned out to be quite stimulating: there were a bunch of people I hadn’t seen for ages – and many more I had never met.

(Lord) Richard Holme chaired, noting that the bird design for the event (see photos) could be interpreted either as wild geese or dead ducks. Truth be told, at least to my mind, the event hovered somewhere in the middle: an extraordinary advance on the situation a decade or so ago, but – as ActionAid put it towards the end – not brilliantly effective in terms of identifying actionable new steps for the UK and EU.

One highlight was the report tabled by the CORE Coalition (www.corporate-responsibility.org), A Big Deal? Corporate Social Responsibility and the Finance Sector in Europe – although it contains a case by The Corner House of alleged bribery on behalf of Halliburton in relation to a 2002 project part-financed by the Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD), whose Advisory Council I chair.

The man of the meeting, though not present, was Chancellor and would-be Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He is increasingly seen – by all sides of the debate – as having screwed up royally in terms of his arbitrary cancellation earlier this week of the Operating & Financial Review (OFR) for large UK listed companies. Speakers from every side of the debate expressed emotions ranging from incredulity to incredulity (sic). As I noted in my summing up, while I have sometimes argued that we need a new generation of political leaders, if this is what we can expect from Brown I’d almost prefer to have the Conservatives. Better the enemy you know.

Investing in the Future 1

Investing in the Future 2

CHIEF ENTREPRENEUR

The reaction to the announcement on Monday of my new role and job title – ‘Chief Entrepreneur’ (http://www.sustainability.com/about/about-article.asp?id=374) – has been uniformly positive, even excited. Except for the heavenly (Baroness) Barbara Young, Chair of the UK Environment Agency, who declares it: “… the ultimate in poncey titles. One definitely for Private Eye. Does the man have no limits, I ask myself …”

When we were celebrating the management changes at SustainAbility yesterday evening, Matt (Loose) asked me whether I felt any diffeernt as the result ? The answer is yes, in the sense of in-the-process-of-being-liberated, but also no, in the sense that much of what I have done in recent years I will continue doing – only, hopefully, in a higher gear. But it’s odd how one result, God help us, is a strange sense of permission for leaning even further out into the future, the unknown …

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

BUILDING THE GHERKIN

Flew to Zurich yesterday with Geoff Lye for a meeting today with Swiss Re CEO John Coomber and a couple of his colleagues. Flight from Heathrow three hours late, due to need to grit a runway. On the way, read a new report on climate change, Climate Change Futures, by UNDP, the Harvard Medical School and Swiss Re (downloadable from the Swiss Re website). A bit like the Book of Revelations. As we left the Hotel Helmhaus this morning, saw a poster on the facing wall across the street for a movie of the building of Swiss Re’s London HQ, the ‘Gherkin’. And there was Sara Fox, who managed the project and who I interviewed some time back for SustainAbility’s newsletter, Radar (http://www.sustainability.com/network/global-influencer.asp?id=197).

Poster for Building the Gherkin

A Swiss Re perspective

Birchscape

Sunday, November 27, 2005

BOOMERS AND THINGS THAT GO BOOM IN CHINA

The Baby Boomers are getting a fair amount of press at the moment, as they start to head towards retirement. Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times today argues that one thing that marks out the Boomers is their unwillingness to accept the processes of ageing and, ultimately, of death. He is writing a book on immortality that argues that Boomers, more than any previous generation, yearn to live forever.

I’m not so sure, particularly having spent several years researching a book on how previous generations thought of the afterlife. The appetite for some form of afterliving has now been a constant of human thinking for tens of thousands of years. Maybe the twin facts that Boomers have led what Appleyard describes as “charmed lives” in an increasingly secular world helps explain why there has been a growing interest in technologies that promise to help people live longer and look better in this world, but there are other ways of looking at all this.

For example, Elaine and I went to a 60th birthday party last night. Inevitably, many of those present were Boomers – and several were current or ex-Greenpeacers, among them Robin Grove-White, Peter Knight, Peter Melchett and Steve Warshal (a long-standing friend who edits Greenpeace Business). So my reaction to the Boomers-deny-death line is that it has been one of the most pronounced characteristics of the Boomers that they have affirmed and embraced life, in all its myriad forms. Environmentalism itself has been pretty much a Boomer phenomenon.

Which makes me wonder whether we will see last week’s events in Harbin, China, helping to spawn new generations of environmentalists in what looks set to be the twenty-first century’s largest economy? A 50-mile slick of toxic chemicals, including benzene, has spread down the Songhua River, forcing the authorities to cut off water supplies to more than three million people.

The scale of the disaster, of the attempted cover-up by Petrochina (a company I met at a dinner while in Beijing in May) and of the resulting media and public fury reminds me of the way in which the post-WWII boom in the USA and Europe resulted in a proliferation of disasters that, quite unintentionally, helped reprogram Boomers. Having talked to such people as Minister Pan Yue of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration, I think it’s very possible that we may see similar trends there. But we can’t count on it. The challenge for all of us, Boomers included, will be to work out how we can influence what happens in China. If we fail to help the Chinese make their forms of capitalism more sustainable, Boomer retirements may be rather less comfortable than many of those now moving into their sixties hope and expect.

And then, just as I was preparing to post this item, an email arrived from a young Chinese student I met in Oslo last week, reminding me that she and I had agreed to meet in London next month. One more indication that if we work this one well, the traffic isn’t going to be all one way. The next generation of Chinese movers and shakers will be reaching out for solutions to the problems their country of 1.3 billion will inevitably face in the coming decades. I see part of my task in the coming years as helping to position SustainAbility – and our wider movements – to rise to the challenge. And the resulting solutions could just help us turn the corner in terms of shoehorning a predicted 9 billion people into a planet whose ecosystems, to put it positively, are already straining at the seams.

AL-JAZEERA

As I flew back and forth to Oslo this week, I read Hugh Miles’ book Al-Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World (Abacus, 2005). A fascinating story – and particularly useful background given the current controversy about an alleged conversation last year between Bush and Blair about whether Al-Jazeera’s offices should be bombed (a story which features in both today’s Observer and Sunday Times). While it is clear that they are far from even-handed, I have nothing but respect for the physical and political courage of the Al-Jazeera editors and journalists in bringing freer media to the Middle East – and, in these days of active news suppression, the wider world.

One of the most memorable lines comes early on in the book (page 11), when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak asks to make a surprise visit to Al-Jazeera’s offices during a state visit to Doha. He and his staff are taken aback by the tiny size of the operation. “All this trouble from a matchbox like this?” he asks. On a different scale, we have had similar reactions from people who have visited SustainAbility over the years, particularly – for some reason – Japanese companies.

STAG’S LEAP, GLOBAL WARMING & NOAH’S WINE

Got an email from Tell (Muenzing) as Elaine and I Tubed in towards Marylebone to say his car had broken down and he had had to take a train from Castle Cary – net result being that we would have to go to a Stag’s Leap (http://www.CASK23.com) wine-tasting on our own. Not something we would have chosen to do, but in the event it turned out to be truly fascinating. The Decanter Masterclass was given by Stag’s Leap founder Warren Winiarski and his daughter Julia. The Winiarski family had opened the Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in 1972 – and shocked the French when, in a blind tasting arranged in 1976 by an English wine merchant in Paris, with tasters who were French wine experts of impeccable credentials, the Stag’s Leap 1973 SLV triumphed over first-growth Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, Chateau Haut Brion and other famous wines.

Warren Winiarski explained how the French concept of terroir works in his part of the Napa Valley, giving us wines that showed the extraordinary influence of his ‘3Gs’ (grape, ground and ‘guys/gals’, the latter his attempt to capture the human part of the wine-making equation). The interplay between the seismic geology of the region and water-driven erosion was demonstrated in wines that were taken from different parts of the resulting alluvial fans across the Stag’s Leap lands, alternately fiery (the ones grown closest in to the eroding hills, where the soil structure was coarsest) and more subtle (where the soils were finest). He also explained how he applied the ‘Golden Rectangle’ approach to winemaking, but the most interesting exchange – for me, at least – came when he was asked a question about the potential impact of global warming in the region.

Long used to the temperature oscillations driven by the current systems off the California coast, he concentrated on them. But then Julia came in and addressed the question directly, perhaps indicating the way in which understanding of the climate change challenge varies across the generations. She noted that rising temperatures are already showing up in terms of “sunburn and shrivel” in the grapes. The result is that picking now often happens with scissors rather than knives, to remove damaged grapes from the bunches. Other strategies involve pruning the vines to form outward branching Vs, to shade the grapes, and picking the grapes at night – to allow them to cool down.

Then, a final, extraordinary flourish, Warren W said he had something special for us, a wine we would be unlikely to taste again. Because the commercial varieties of vine are now genetically impoverished, he has been travelling to places like Kashmir to find the original wild varieties. And he gave us each a tiny little vessel of a wine that he has made from some of these grapes, which he called “archaeological wines”, akin to Noah’s wine, high in both acids and tannins, very much like an alcoholic fruit juice. It was a wonderful opportunity to savour the roots of winemaking – an art which more than most encourages us to understand and appreciate the wonderful interplays of geology, geochemistry, ecology, biology, microbiology and the human intelligence.

Thursday, November 24, 2005

OSLO

Spent past couple of days in Oslo, mainly at the Norwegian School of Management, after staying last night with Jan-Olaf Willums, a long-standing colleague and friend. This was after an excellent dinner last night with people like Professor Atle Midttun, Jan-Olaf and Jorgen Randers, who I first heard of as one of the co-authors of 1972’s Limits to Growth study.

This was a major conference on corporate social responsibility, which I kicked off alongside Professor Norman Barry of the University of Buckingham. The idea was that I would be pro-CSR, Norman anti. And as we were driven in from the airport it seemed we would find it possible to disagree on just about everything: he didn’t like rock’n’roll, whereas I love it; he loves Broadway musicals, which I don’t. And so on. But then the dykes began to leak as he admitted to an interest in Cream …

In the event, though the School’s new premises are truly spectacular and we got an excellent turn-out, I’m not sure we really engaged the fundamental issues robustly enough in the debate. It’s odd how academic some of these anti-CSR folk are, defaulting to long tracts on the history of company law. All very well, but as the world moves towards a human population of 9 billion and with the climate beginning to wobble, business needs to raise its sights a little. A point that the head honcho from Norwegian insurer Storebrand acknowledged forcefully during the first day of the event.

Inside the Norwegian School of Management

Studying wasn’t like this in my day!

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

THE LANCASTRIA

Postcard of HMS Lancastria in happier days

Trawling through e-mail ahead of a flight to Oslo, I came across yet another (this time alleged) cross-link to Flt-Sgt Berry, who saved my father’s life during the Battle of Britain (see 29 October and 14 September entries). A Frenchman e-mailed to say that he was researching a book on the 1940 sinking of The Lancastria off St Nazaire, the worst maritime disaster to affect Britain, with many thousands of British soldiers and sailors drowned. He also said that he thought that Berry had shot down the plane that bombed and sank The Lancastria (http://www.lancastria-association.org.uk/). A few moments of Googling, however, turned up the assertion (courtesy of the BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/A4103056) that the German aircraft that put a bomb down the ship’s funnel was a Ju88, not a Heinkel 111 – the type of aircraft Berry was credited as shooting down over St Nazaire. But, apparently, Berry’s citation for the DFM mentioned that he had knocked down the Heinkel that had sunk The Lancastria. In any event, Tim – my father – is on the case.

But whatever the facts of this particular matter, I am continuously amazed at the extraordinary power of search engines in general – and of Google in particular. The power to surface accurate facts and inaccurate. Recently hugely enjoyed John Battelle’s amazing book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, one of the best business books I have read in a long time.

Sunday, November 20, 2005

RICHMOND PARK

Day of reading and writing. Wonderful midday walk with Elaine around Richmond Park, with fog still hanging over landscape, though by the time we got back most of it had burned away. The Canon IXUSi comes in handy again:

Strawberry grapes over our front door

Deer in the mist

Winter sun

Tree taking a rest

Pond 1

Pond 2

Saturday, November 19, 2005

THE ART OF COARSE WHALING

Various newspapers are bombarding us these days with free film DVDs. Last night I watched the Ray Bradbury/John Houston version of Moby Dick, which I can’t remember seeing before. Elaine’s sister Christine was here with her husband, Michael Green, author among other things of a series of books like The Art of Coarse Acting, The Art of Coarse Sport, The Art of Coarse Sailing, and so on. Turned out that many years ago he had also done a coarse acting version of Moby Dick for the Edinburgh Festival, although as we watched it sometimes seemed that the film scarcely needed lampooning. But it was extraordinary for its time. And fascinating to see so many elements of the 1956 film that would be echoed – intentionally or not – in future films, for example the whale-circling seagulls in Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and the marine monster modelling in Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). The whaling scenes that involved real whales reminded me, though, of the role whaling played in triggering early environmentalism, my own included.

Friday, November 18, 2005

CENTRE FOR INTEGRAL ECONOMICS

Lively day, including lunch with John Manoochehri. Wrote several articles, one for a South African publication, Opportunity. Facinating session in the afternoon with Donna Morton of Canada’s Centre for Integral Economics. The Centre was originally launched in 1998 under the name NEW BC, initially as an affiliate of the Seattle-based Northwest Environment Watch (NEW). Those involved recognised the power and potential of economic instruments (like London’s congestion charge) to transform society. CIE projects range from airshed management through municipal ‘tax shifting’ to the future of grizzly bears in British Columbia. I emerged even more persuaded that this is an area where we need to invest a good deal more effort.

Thursday, November 17, 2005

MISSION, VISION AND VALUES

Day begins with an extremely productive session with Sophia (Tickell) and Yasmin (Crowther) on the revamping of SustainAbility’s Mission, Vision & Values. At one point, President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address comes to my mind and, when Sam prints it off, it turns out to be a wonderful, emotionally charged stimulus for the task in hand. Other meetings during the day include one with Verity Haines of the Royal Society of Arts, on possible themes that the RSA could address in future, and another with Laurence Shorter, who is researching a very interesting book on the nature of optimism. Have always said I’m an optimist, though my (I think realistic, if painful) vision of where we are headed strikes many as profoundly pessimistic. For me, the optimism is in believing we can make headway despite the extraordinary scale of the challenges that face us.

On the way in – and yesterday – have been playing with an IXUSi camera that Canon very kindly gave me when we were with them in Tokyo. Fits into the palm of the hand, yet rates 5 megapixels. The photos below were mainly taken from the bike as I cycled in this morning:

Fence in Holland Park

Albert from behind

Horses along Rotten Row – more or less opposite our old offices

Achilles

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

ECGD

Back from Geneva in time for a lunch with Lucy Siegle, who writes a column on ethical consumption for The Observer. The range of ethical and green consumer choices is expanding, but it’s amazing/worrying how often the same few products surface in discussion. Much work to do. Then on to ECGD, trundling my case on wheels through Docklands, after which I meet up with Elaine for Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer’s pre-Christmas party at Shell Centre. Then home.

Millennium Dome

Crane

Entry to ECGD building

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

CHINA EUROPE BUSINESS SUMMIT

Whatever else it has been, 2005 has been the Year of China. The giant country has loomed every larger on our radar screen as the year wound by, not least because of my first visit to the country in May[1]. In addition to speaking at the Fortune 500 Global Forum in Beijing, I had wonderful opportunities to meet people from the Chinese government, business and NGO sectors courtesy of people like CGA, the China Business Council on Sustainable Development, Shell and WWF. Then, yesterday and today, I have taken part in the first China Europe Business Summit, held in Geneva by Horasis (The Global Visions Community[2]), which helped me to pull many of the loose threads together—although not all the conclusions were comfortable ones.

The China Europe event—now set to become an annual series—is the brain-child of Dr Frank-Jürgen Richter, who I had first met when he was the World Economic Forum’s Director of Asian Affairs. Now President of Horasis, he had asked me to chair a session on ‘The Chinese Approach to Corporate Citizenship’, which sounded intriguing. In welcoming delegates to Geneva, he stressed that “China’s rise to global eminence is providing formidable opportunities for European firms.” True, but the event also underscored the uncomfortable fact that European—and North American—firms are facing increasingly formidable competitive challenges from the same direction.

In the wake of CNOOC’s recent attempt to take over the US oil company Unocal[3], one panellist wondered aloud how long it would be before a Chinese company had a go at taking over Wal-Mart? Tongue-in-cheek, perhaps, but today’s lightly dismissed improbabilities have an uncomfortable way of becoming tomorrow’s probabilities and realities. And the same, inevitably, is going to be true for the Chinese. Issues that would have once have seemed impossibly remote to them, alien even, are now racing up the business agenda for Chinese companies with international aspirations.

CNOOC President Fu Chengyu was one of the top Chinese business leaders who made frequent reference to issues like climate change during the Geneva meeting. But perhaps the most interesting voice for the future of Chinese capitalism was the extraordinary Zhang Yue, who Forbes magazine listed—with his brother—as No. 25 in its 2001 survey of China’s 100 Richest Business People. Given that he was once a public school teacher, Zhang’s rise to success is even more striking. In 1988, he founded Broad Air Conditioning, where he is now CEO, and which has boasted an 80% share of the energy-efficient air-conditioning market in China. His personal quest, he says, is “to make society a better place to live.”

Zhang was also one of the panellists in the session I chaired. And while several speakers—including Serge Berthier who founded the quarterly Asian Affairs[4] and chairs Oriental International Strategies and the Asia-Europe-Forum—questioned whether China could afford to adopt foreign standards of corporate citizenship any time soon, Zhang repeatedly stressed the stunning nature and scale of the environmental challenges his country faces. Like a number of the companies represented at the Geneva summit, he noted that Broad Air Conditioning’s ambition is to go global. In the process, he noted, the aim will not be to become a “big company, but a great one.” And for that to be sustainable, the international corporate citizenship agenda will become increasingly important.

Several other speakers discussed the rising expectations and standards that all high-brand businesses are now expected to meet. Perhaps most strikingly, we had Eva Biaudet, a member of Finland’s Parliament and a former Minister of Health and Social Services. Modestly introducing herself as “a typical Nordic woman politician”, with an interest in such areas as human rights and climate change, she accepted that it might seem strange that a country of 5 million could have something to offer to a country of 1.3 billion. But she noted that Finnish companies are increasingly active in China, with over 200 firms now employing some 24,000 local Chinese.

That was the positive side. More challengingly, she explained how she is teaching her children to choose between products offered by different companies on the basis of their environmental performance—and, she warned, the behaviour of such companies will increasingly be vetted by western consumers for their performance in relation to such issues as environment, working conditions and human rights.

In headlines, we discussed three main areas of the citizenship agenda: international companies moving into and operating in China; national Chinese countries operating in the domestic market; and, the big long term trend, the growing number of Chinese companies operating abroad.

From the presentations of people like Nick Butler, BP’s Group Vice President for Strategy & Policy Development, it was clear that the best of overseas investors in China are doing their best to ensure that their operations in the country are state-of-the-art. But several speakers underscored the political challenges that will surface as China moves onto the international stage.

Tom Spencer, Executive Director of the European Centre for Public Affairs at Surrey University, and a former Member of the European Parliament, recalled this year’s ‘Bra War’. This resulted in over 80 million items of clothing – including sweaters, trousers and bras – piling up in warehouses at European ports. Spencer accepted that Zhang Yue was highly unlikely to face a consumer boycott against air-conditioners any time soon, but continued to say that the range of contentious issues is growing rapidly. Among others, he spotlighted the continuing problems international companies trading into China face in terms of intellectual property and counterfeiting. In fact this issue surfaced repeatedly through the summit, with some participants arguing that this has been one of the features of Chinese business practice (or, more accurately, malpractice) that has been preventing more EU companies from getting involved.

Interestingly, Spencer also raised the distinct possibility that the early twenty-first century vision—in the West, at least—of ‘turbo-capitalism’ evolving along Anglo-Saxon lines will prove illusory. Instead, our session concluded, the future is likely to be one of multi-polar politics and multiple capitalisms, with huge implications for the types of ‘corporate citizenship’ that will take root (or fail to do so) in the various world regions.

Our last speaker—but one of the most interesting—was Zhao Min, the Harvard-trained President of Sinotrust Management Consulting. When he and two colleagues resigned from China’s former Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation in 1992, Zhao scarcely dared tell his parents that he was venturing into the private sector—and met with sarcastic comments when he went to register the new company with the Beijing Industry and Commerce Bureau. Now Sinotrust employs over 600 people at its offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong.

Zhao joked that in the old order, the smartest Chinese became government officials, the next level down went into education, and (by implication) the bottom of the barrel went into business. Although he commented that there are very few companies anything like Broad Air Conditioning, he reported that business is becoming increasingly popular as a career path for bright Chinese youngsters—and, in a parallel trend, many business leaders are beginning to acknowledge the need not just to pursue raw profitability but also to manage against a “balanced scoreboard”.

The relatively low turn-out for our corporate citizenship session—which faced competition from parallel events on such themes as intellectual property, intangibles, corporate governance and innovation—led some of us to conclude that the title should have been more along the lines of ‘How To Make Billions From Corporate Citizenship’. But it will be fascinating to track the evolution of the emerging Chinese scoreboards as Frank-Jürgen Richter and his colleagues continue to build their series of summits.

[1] See blog entries for 17-23 May at http://johnelkington.com/weblog/2005_05_01_arc.htm
[2] http://www.horasis.org
[3] CNOOC is the China National Offshore Oil Company (http://www.cnoocltd.com)
[4] http://www.asian-affairs.com

Monday, November 14, 2005

FRANCISCO ANSELMO DE BARROS

Arrived earlier this evening in Geneva, for an EU-China conference. In trawling through e-mail after the reception, I came across an exchange among a group I’m working with on an environmental status report for the World Economic Forum. The report will be fairly gloomy, but even gloomier is the news from Brazil, where on Saturday a leading Brazilian environmental activist, Francisco Anselmo de Barros, is reported to have doused himself with gasoline and did what Vietnamese priests used to do at the height of that conflict. Badly burned, he died a day later.

Apparently, he had lost hope in his 20 year battle to protect the Pantanal ecosystem from the impacts of sugar cane farming, taking his life in a desperate attempt to stall the plans of the Governor of Mato Grosso do Sul to allow the construction of 23 sugar/alcohol plants in the Pantanal region. Having just co-written a piece for Grist arguing that those of us who engage business need to remember the activists who have created our agenda, with the focus of the article on the late, great Rosa Parks, this tragedy underscores the point even more energetically. The Grist piece is due to post tomorrow.

Friday, November 11, 2005

GLOBESCAN, LEAD & FORUM FOR THE FUTURE

A day spent skimming around London, first with Sam to High Street Kensington for a meeting with Doug Miller of GlobeScan (www.globescan.com) and Dr Simon Lyster of LEAD International (www.lead.org), to discuss possible joint venture. Then back to Bleeding Heart Yard for lunch with Peter Madden, the new CEO of Forum for the Future (www.forumforthefuture.org.uk). Interesting that so many of us now sense impending change in our field – and are aiming to drive our organisations in new directions. Easy to feel competitive, but there will also be a growing need for different players to come together to achieve scale.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

CAPITALISM AS IF

Walk across to the London Review of Books Bookshop in Bury Place for the launch of Jonathon Porritt’s new book, Capitalism as if the World Mattered. Published by Earthscan (www.earthscan.co.uk). Wonderful gathering of the tribes, but then had to race back to Barnes for a late teleconference with a US publisher.

SHELL FOUNDATION

Walked both ways from Holborn to Waterloo, partly to clear my head. Bumped into various people – including John Sauven of Greenpeace – returning from the South Bank celebration of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s life as I walked across Hungerford Bridge to a lunch at the Shell Centre to celebrate the first five years of the Shell Foundation (www.shellfoundation.org). As Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer noted, the Foundation team under Kurt Hoffman have made a good deal of progress. I particularly like the work they are doing to tackle the indoor air pollution problem in developing countries, caused by cooking and open-fire heating, and currently having a particularly devastating impact on the health of women and children (http://www.shellfoundation.org/index.php?menuID=3&smenuID=10&bmenuID=7).

One of the people who spoke at the Foundation was Nancy Kete, who runs the extraordinary WRI EMBARQ program (www.embarq.wri.org). And she was remarkably candid about the political problems faced in major world cities as the EMBARQ team try to co-develop more sustainable mobility systems. But they are making progress. One statistic that struck me was that a fast-transit corridor in Mexico City they have helped develop now handles 250,000 people a day and saves them an average of something like an hour a day, either way.

A key strength of the Foundation’s work is its focus on leverage and scale. Sir John Houghton, one of the Foundation’s trustees but perhaps best known for his work on climate change, noted that it used to be said that rather than give a poor man a fish you should give him a fishing-rod and teach him to fish. Today, he suggested, the challenge is to build a fishing-rod factory – or even a chain of fishing-rod factories. A great way of putting it, as long as someone keeps an eye on the long-term health of the fisheries.

REMEMBERING KEN SARO-WIWA

Today is the tenth anniversary of the executions of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni. Puts me in mind of the not-yet-published column I have just co-authored for Grist on the absolute need for all of us interacting with business to continuously assess our progress (or lack of it) in the light of the values and priorities of earlier generations of activists. In this case, we were talking about the late, great Rosa Parks, sometimes described as the “mother of the civil rights movement.” But Ken Saro-Wiwa’s agenda and legacy must also be a key benchmark for anyone professing to be a change agent in such areas as human rights, national and global governance, and sustainable development.

Sunday, November 06, 2005

ZHENG HE AND PAN YUE

Woodcut of Zhang He’s voyaging (from Wikipedia)

Back late – thanks to almost medieval levels of service on First Rail – from a lunch in Oxford with Vice Minister Pan Yue of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration and Zhang Xuejun, Deputy Director-General of the International Cooperation Center at the National Development and Reform Commission. Geoff (Lye) also took part and the conversation was a wonderful continuation of our conversation earlier in the year (see 19 May entry).

Minister Pan gave Geoff and I collection of Chinese stamps commemorating the 600th anniversary of the ‘Voyages to the Western Seas’ made by the ‘treasure ship’ fleets of eunuch admiral Zheng He (AD1371-1433). A Chinese Columbus, but on a much larger scale, Zheng He set sail at least seven times, but the voyages eventually petered out because of the lack of any underlying economic purpose (other than tribute-gathering) and attacks from northern tribes, which distracted the Emperor. I said that I seemed to recall that the admiral’s ships were burned after the last voyage, and Pan Yue said that many of his maps were destroyed too.

For each step forward …

Saturday, November 05, 2005

DRAGONFLY IN DISTRESS

On Thursday morning, ahead of taxiing out to Narita airport, Judy, Tomoo and I walked around the park in front of the Imperial Hotel. Odd how the robotic, bird-like call of the traffic lights – presumably to help blind people – are echoed by the crows in the park. As we walked by a pond, I saw a dragonfly (wish I could say damselfly) in distress and, stepping over the don’t-step-here ropes, I cantilevered out over the water to rescue it. As I scooped it up on a long stick, a mound of water built up ahead of a Jaws-like carp that obviously saw the insect (much admired in Japan) as lunch. Later, we strolled by a wedding and around a flower show, featuring chrysanthemums, bonsai trees and other plants that had been induced to mimic everything from jellyfish through maiden aunt hair-do’s to exploding neutron stars.

Tomoo, Judy and pond with Speilberg-worthy fish

Neutron flowers

Maiden aunt hair-do flowers – or Portuguese flowers of war

TOYO KEIZAI IS 110

On Wednesday, we started the day with a session on corporate social responsibility at Nippon Keidranren, the Japanese Business Federation. Interesting discussion with Hiroshi Hirose, a Managing Executive Officer at Sumitomo Chemical and Chairman of the Keidanren Committee on Socially Responsible Management, on Sumitomo’s efforts to produce millions of insecticide-impregnated mosquito nets for the developing world (http://www.sumitomo-chem.co.jp/english/society/).

Then, in the afternoon, I did a keynote for the conference celebrating the 110th anniversary of Toyo Keizai (www.toyokeizai.co.jp) They are the country’s leading business publishing group, rather like our Economist group. One reason I know them is that they launched a Green Reporting Award in 1998 and then – in 2004 – a Sustainability Reporting Award.

The event was kicked off by Toyo Keizai President Hiroshi Takahashi, who was followed by Morio Ikeda, Chairman of Shiseido. When I began, I said that I didn’t know what it was like to be 110, since – at 56 – I was only half way there. Optimistic, given that when I returned home I found Elaine had cut out an obituary for someone I knew quite well over the years, Robert Lamb, who had died of a heart attack at 56 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1591737,00.html).

In any event, I said that if the amount of energy, imagination and professionalism that Toyo Keizai had shown in developing the conference were any guide to what it would be like to be 110, then I was happy to think I might still be alive in 2059. But then I noted that by 2050 the world’s population is expected to have reached 9 billion, Japan’s population is predicted to have fallen fairly dramatically, many of the fisheries on which the country’s diet depends will have collapsed, and climate change will really have got its claws into our global economy. After that I cheered up a bit and went onto a more positive footing!

The second phase of the conference was a panel discusion, with Professor Katsuhiko Kokubu of Kobe University’s Graduate School of Business Administration facilitating. We had presentations from people like Masamitsu Sakurai (Ricoh’s Chairman, President and CEO) and Yoshiya Hara (Chairman, Daiwa Securities). Then I summed up. Overall, it’s extraordinary to see how the corporate social responsibility agenda has pushed into the mainstream here.

In the evening, Judy, Tomoo and I joined Peter David Pedersen of E-Square and Takako Okamura (not the singer of the same name) for dinner at a wonderful restaurant on a hill overlooking Tokyo. She is an extraordinary young woman: used to be a newscaster, then lived with hippies in Australia and discovered alternative, low-impact lifestyles. She returned to Japan and founded the ‘Organic Concierges Association’, to train people to help citizens make the transition of an organic, more sustainable lifestyle.

Friday, November 04, 2005

CANON & THE SPIRIT OF KYOSEI

Flew to Tokyo late on Sunday, arriving late Monday. Stayed in the Imperial Hotel with Judy (Kuszewksi) and Tomoo (Machiba). Slightly disappointed to find the – admittedly luxurious – Imperial is not the one designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and opened in 1923, but a successor opened in 1970 – after the original building had been reduced to a shadow of its former self by floods, earthquakes, wartime bombing and air pollution. We did, though, manage to find the bar inside the hotel where elements of the old hotel are preserved.

Much of Tuesday spent with Canon, where among others we had a session with Yusuke Emura, Managing Director of Canon’s ‘Global Environment Promotion Heaquarters’. The company pursues what it dubs kyosei, which translates as “the spirit of cooperation”. Canon’s honorary Chairman, Ryuzaburo Kaku, wrote a piece for the Harvard Business Review in 1997 (July-August), in which he tracked the roots of the concept back to the period between 1500 and 1640, when Japanese traders were among the most successful in the world. At the time, however, “cultural differences led to considerable conflict. (Some things have not changed.)”

In response, a successful Japanese trader teamed up with a famous Confucian scholar to develop a set of guidelines known as Shuchu kiyaku. The central gist, “that trade must be carried out not just for one’s own benefit but also for the benefit of others. The regulations also stated that despite differences in skin color and culture, trading partners should be considered equals.”

Japan’s subsequent history included the shogunate, when the country entered a period of self-imposed isolation, and its subsequent, ulitmately disastrous period of militarism, which ended with the nuclear attacks of 1945. And it was while trying to evolve a philosophy which presented Japan as part of a wider world that Kaku-san came across the Shuchu kiyaku – and made its principles central of his corporate philosophy of kyosei.

After our meetings, we wandered around the Canon Gallery, which as a long-time photography addict I found fascinating. You could see the long march – or evolutionary ascent – of camera and lens technology, with many early designs closely modeled on Leica’s look and feel. Given that one of my earliest cameras was a Leica M3, I recognised that in a flash. But one of the most interesting exhibits, at least for me, was a cabinet showing some of the hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of components from Canon photocopiers, printers and other products that have been forced into exinction by legislation (particularly in markets like the EU and US) banning the use of such substances as cadmium. It was like looking down at the truncated branches of a fiercely pruned tree of technological life forms.

Ascent of the paparazzi

Cutaway

Mirror, mirror

Canon’s cabinet of extinctions

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

ANIMALS AT WAR

Every day I cycle in to the office, I pass the new David Backhouse ‘Animals at War’ memorial at Brook Gate, Park Lane (http://www.indielondon.co.uk/events/att_animals_warmemorial.html). It struck me more forcefully today after conversations we had yesterday at CFS in Manchester about animal welfare and animal testing. So I dismounted and took a few photos. It is thought that – to take just one species – 8 million horses died in WWI, so the memorial is richly deserved. But few other countries would erect such a thing. And, on the way back from Manchester, I reflected on the legal ban now in force on fox-hunting in this country, which I both support and yet in some odd way also regret. The thought stream was prompted by the sight of a great red dog fox sitting upright in the evening sun, alongside a canal.

HORSE CHESTNUT PLAGUE

Driving Gaia and a guitarist friend across to a concert in Putney earlier this week, she and I both noted that pretty much all the horse chestnut trees on the Common are in dire shape. Gaia said she thought a Macedonian moth was to blame, but promised to check on the Net and send a link. Here are three links she sent today for what turns out to be a real little horror.

http://www.forestry.gov.uk/forestry/INFD-59YJKP
http://www.forestry.gov.uk/fr/INFD-68JJRC
http://www.forestry.gov.uk/fr/INFD-5ZXGXZ

DAYS AFTER TOMORROW

It’s not quite The Day After Tomorrow in New Orleans and its environs, but CNN reports that, “survivors are facing dire conditions — no power, little drinking water, dwindling food supplies, gunfire in the distance — with no way to get out. And the waters are still rising, at times dotted by the bodies of those who perished when the hurricane roared into town Monday morning” (http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/31/katrina/).

SustainAbility has long argued that it would take one or more really major climate-related disasters in the US to begin to shift the Bush regime. Hurricane Katrina probably won’t be enough to swing things, but it will contribute to the steady drip-drip pressure on the climate Neanderthals. One key factor: unlike people in most of the areas hit by the tsunami, Americans tend to be insured. And that means big insurance bills — and major headaches for the reinsurers, who are already among the most vocal champions of more serious action on climate change. That is a central theme of SustainAbility’s latest report, The Changing Landscape of Liability (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/liability.asp), one of the sponsors for which was the international reinsurance giant, Swiss Re.

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

CFS BANISHES FATIGUE

CFS stands for many different things around the world, among them Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Having known several people with this version of CFS, I know it’s no joking matter. But as something of a reptile myself, unable to stir until the sun is in the heavens, I felt more than a little dissociated from reality as I got up at 04.45 this morning to head up to Manchester, courtesy of Virgin Rail, and spend a day with CFS – as in Co-operative Financial Services. It was like a shot of adrenalin. The issues ranged from climate change to the risk of creating a genetic underclass. Part of the discussion focused on the future of reporting. In SustainAbility’s 2004 benchmark survey of corporate reporting, the latest CFS report came top (http://www.cfs.co.uk/servlet/Satellite?cid=1108109697271&pagename=CFSSustain/Page/tplCFSPageStandard&c=Page). But the two sessions I did with different CFS groups also woke me up to the longer term potential of a re-energised co-operative movement, if that could be achieved.

Monday, August 29, 2005

APATHY OUT OF FASHION

An ex-colleague, Nick Robinson, currently with BP, just sent me a link to a website I hadn’t come across, http://www.antiapathy.org/. We have been thinking about the fashion industry recently, largely because of its huge impact on other industries, and Anti-Apathy is active in that area. Anyone interested in this area might want to roll up for the Ethical Fashion Show on October 7-9, in Paris (http://www.ethicalfashionshow.com/index2.htm#).

SKYWHALESONG

Spent most of the long holiday weekend working, but the weather over the last couple of days has been glorious, the sky an extraordinary deep blue, the temptation to dawdle immense, but largely resisted. And the skies have had me thinking of fin whales and – in the wake of a piece I read in The Observer yesterday – about new ideas about life in space, alien life-forms. The fin whales came from today’s Times, which reports that fin whales, humpbacks and something like 2000 dolphins have been pursuing fish which have been pursuing plankton in warm currents reaching much further north than usual through the Irish Sea. Climate change, it seems, maybe also linked with Hurricane Katrina, which today just missed New Orleans.

And the skywhales? These are from a Channel 4 TV series (Alien Worlds) that will apparently begin on 4 October, alongside a new exhibition on the ‘Science of Aliens’ at London’s Science Museum (http:www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/aliens). They are reputed to live on Blue Moon, which has a super-dense atmosphere of oxygen and carbon dioxide. The ‘skywhales’ float through the soupy atmosphere on 10-metre wings, preyed on only by ‘caped stalkers’, eagle-like predators that sound like killer whales on amphetamines.

One of the questions raised by the Science Museum website’s alien section is whether someone out there is listening to us? As I sat down to file this blog, my Mac’s screen was dark, with the SETI at home scan running in the background. This uses down time on the computer to process signals received from deep space (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/). I haven’t seen any signs of intelligent life as yet, but having always loved whalesong (particularly as recorded many years ago by Roger Payne), I would quite like to hear skywhalesong.

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

WORLDPROCESSOR

With flood tides of data and information sluicing around the world, there is growing interest in visualisation techniques. That’s one reason why I have been experimenting with the notion of the ‘Value Palette’ (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article.asp?id=322). And was fascinated to see a feature in the August issue of Wired on the work of New York artists Ingo Gunther. He and Worldprocessor (http://www.worldprocessor.com) plot data from newspapers and NGOs onto 12-inch plastic globes. Although the statistics are forever morphing, the impact of some of these globes is extraordinary.

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

CHINA SYNDROMES

The first in the series of columns Mark Lee and I will be doing for Grist magazine went live today at http://www.grist.org/biz/fd/2005/08/23/china/

COMING DOWN FROM SOLVENTS

Hania in repainted kitchen

Finally able to blog again, after further problems with hosting agency. Having taken a couple of weeks ‘off’ at home to concentrate on a range of writing projects, particularly the social enterprise book, I have found myself working as hard as ever on a range of SustainAbility and related projects. But, still, the writing projects have gradually been cranking through, and that in spite of the fact that I have been breathing a very heady, solvent-rich atmosphere for the past week. We have had our kitchen repainted, after twelve years, and there still seem to be limits to what you can achieve with water-based paints. But that’s something to look into again if and when a possible consumer-focused project we are discussing materialises.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

PEOPLE TREE

Dinner last night with Safia Minney of fair trade fashion company People Tree (http://www.ptree.co.uk or http://www.ptree.co.jp), based in London and Tokyo, and her husband James and Elaine. Had met Safia some time back, via the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, and had interviewed her for SustainAbility’s Radar (http://www.sustainability.com/network/global-influencer.asp?id=258). Emerged re-enthused about SustainAbility’s long-standing idea of tackling the fashion sector as a ‘gatekeeper’ industry that sets the specifications (and, often, horrendous deadlines and pricing levels) that drive so many other industries, among them those producing fibres, textiles and a range of chemical products – including the pesticides used to protect crops like cotton and the dyes that may delight the eye but too often pollute the rivers of major producer countries like India.

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

GRISTWARD HO!

Three painters – one on his way shortly to Iraq as a member of the Territorial Army – are repainting our kitchen after 12 years. But the smell of solvents from the gloss areas has me wondering whether my enthusiasm for various projects during the day has had more to do with what I’ve been inhaling than with what I’ve been hearing. That said, one of the bits of goods news today came as a result of a teleconference Mark Lee and I had today with an editor of Grist (http://www.grist.org), the US electronic magazine. Unusually, they apply humo(u)r to the environmental challenge. Mark and I will be starting a new monthly column for Grist in the autumn.

Sunday, August 14, 2005

BARNES WETLANDS

Overblown dragonfly

Spend a quiet afternoon walking around the Barnes Wetland Centre with cousin Simon Mills and his family. Apart from a few edge-of-vision frogs and the usual birds, real wildfowl are relatively scarce, but the transformation wrought on these once-vast reservoirs is an extraordinary example of what can be done with imagination and determination. Every time I walk past the wonderful sculpture of Sir Peter Scott at the entrance, who drove the whole process, I can’t help but recall the times he helped me – particularly, when as a Trustee of The Winston Churchill Trust, he helped sway the panel towards awarding me a 1981 Fellowship, which I took in the US. And the visits I did during that period represented a big step towards my first Pelican, Sun Traps.

Friday, August 12, 2005

WIRELESS, AT LAST

Working at home this week on a bunch of writing tasks and future presentations, with a trip down to Oxford on Monday with Elaine for a session on SustainAbility’s future format. Today, a couple of IT engineers – one PC, one Apple – came to sort out longstanding issues with my home IT system, which is built around an Apple G4 desktop, one of the most exquisite bits of technology I have ever used. Turns out that the Hermstedt NetShuttle box I had bought some time ago was dysfunctional from the outset, whereas I had thought it was just my incompetence.

While I am constantly confounded by how far computers have come since I began using them in the late 1970s, from the perspective of 2010 it seems unbelievable that we still need engineers to sort out dysfunctional boxes, VPN connections and the like. Hopefully, tomorrow’s computers will be able to sort themselves out, with a dollop of artificial intelligence. In fact, only this morning, I was browsing through a book by John Edwards, The Geeks of War (Amacom, 2005) while waiting for the e-surgery to finish upstairs. If the military can have things like self-healing databases, which Edwards discusses, why oh why can’t we? The answer, of course, is that their budgets help develop such things, then they cascade through what’s left of the world at large.

Monday, August 08, 2005

SOLAR HOME

Drove to Oxford with Elaine, for session with Geoff (Lye) and Sophia (Tickell). Once again hugely impressed by Geoff’s solar home – which continuously informs you on how much electricity the house is using, how much is being captured by the solar panels, and how much is being bought from (or sold to) the national grid. The repayments from the power company may be somewhat token to date, but you catch a whiff of the future.

Geoff shows Elaine what’s watts

Sunday, August 07, 2005

TANGLEY

Caterpillar hedge

Peter, Eleo, me, Elaine

Elaine, Gaia and I drove down to Tangley, beyond Andover, to have lunch with age-old friends, Eleo Gordon and Peter Carson. Elaine and I had arrived to stay for two weeks with Eleo in her tiny Pimlico flat in the early 1970s, when I was at UCL, and ended up staying 18 months. Wonderful – if somewhat fitful – weather. Countryside looked idyllic, though the drive to and fro along the M3 was enough to persuade us that we are fundamentally urban creatures.

Driving in motorway lava streams drains me, whereas cycling to and from work recharges me. Got my bike back from the repair shop yesterday: one set of gears had collapsed, so they have put in new, stainless steel cables. The charge was very reasonable, given today’s labour costs, but it struck me that for not much more than three times the repair cost I could have bought some sort of new bike, made in Korea or China. But the huge amount I spent on the bike (a Dawes) over 15 years ago has repaid itself many times over, not least in standing up to a couple of major spills.

LEAVING SOCIAL FOOTPRINTS

Heard again yesterday from Mark McElroy, who is joining a team of researchers at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands for a three year project as Visiting Researcher. The ultimate ambition is to evolve a systematic methodology for computing ‘blended’ TBL (triple bottom line) scores for companies and others. Further details of his social footprint work from:
http://www.sustainableinnovation.org/the-social-footprint.html

Saturday, August 06, 2005

THE VALUE PALETTE

One of the things I have been working on in recent weeks has been what I dub ‘The Value Palette’. As I have become more impatient with some of the reductionist ways of using triple bottom line (TBL) thinking, which we have been so instrumental in developing and spreading, my brain has been heading off in two related directions: the first towards greater integration across the TBL agenda of economic, social and environmental value added/destroyed, which pushes me in the direction of ‘Blended Value’ (www.blendedvalue.org); and the second is towards a much finer grain focus on the different forms of value that entrepreneurs, companies and investors will increasingly have to understand and blend.

And that’s where the Value Palette potentially comes in. It started of as a thought experiment which began to evolve in my mind as I was toying with an invited paper for the California Management Review – which I’m finishing off this weekend. It took a big jump forward when I bought and read John Gage’s Colour and Culture (Thames & Hudson, 1993/2001) while in Paris recently. And now it features in the latest issue of SustainAbility’s Radar (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article.asp?id=322).

Saturday, July 30, 2005

AWAY DAYS

Jodie Thorpe and Brompton cycle

Much of the week has been taken up with a process of strategic reflection with the entire SustainAbility team. We started with all members of the team bringing something that spoke to them of the future: among them, Seb (Beloe) brought his Brompton cycle, Geoff (Lye) a picture of his new granddaughter, Jodie (Thorpe) a piece of string (she spoke of the need to manage the tension, ensuring there wasn’t so much that it snapped yet making sure there was enough so that we could play good tunes) and Kavita (Prakash-Mani) a snow leopard (shown in the picture), which she linked to a whole mass of themes, from the fact that it was an endangered species to the fact that it was ‘Made in China’.

I took the Vertical Speed Indicator from my father’s shot-down Hurricane (see 25 June entry), arguing the need to recall the security side of our agenda – and the growing need for tools that tell us where we are in terms of the climb towards sustainability.

One of my other inputs was a survey of our Council, Faculty and a small sample of clients and partners, which provided a hugely helpful mapping of the trends, risks and opportunities for us through to 2010. We are now planning to evolve the survey into a twice-a-year fixture, with the results posted and debated on the SustainAbility website.

Thursday, July 28, 2005

BELU

Old (glass) bottle

Jeff Erikson (who runs SustainAbility’s Washington, DC office) and I boarded a river boat at Butler Wharf this evening and sailed east down the Thames, celebrating the launch of a new bio-bottle for Belu, the ethical bottled spring water. Aboard: folk like Anita Roddick of The Body Shop and John Bird of The Big Issue. Caught up with a fair few people from the social enterprise world.

Belu’s new bottle is made from a polymer, polylactic acid (PLA), produced by NatureWorks (http://www.natureworksllc.com/corporate/nw_pack_home.asp), originally a joint venture between Dow Chemical and Cargill. SustainAbility did a stakeholder engagement process for them some time back, identifying only one major issue with PLA in the EU market: it is produced by fermenting corn – and corn in the US in now generally genetically modified. Against this, the profits from Belu’s products are invested in clean water projects in the developing world. And Belu say they are thinking of an ‘offset’ policy, ensuring an equivalent acreage of non-GM corn is grown.

Then Jeff and I walked back across Tower Bridge to catch the Tube west. The river looked beautiful, as did the Gherkin, poking up behind the Tower of London.

Looking west, towards HMS Belfast

CODE TALKERS, PREGNANT AEROPLANES

If anyone wanted an example of the value of diversity – human diversity – they would be hard placed to find a better illustration than the amazing successes of the Native American ‘code talkers’ used by American forces in WWI and WWII. Have long been fascinated by the story, which was brought back to mind by today’s obituary in The Times for Charles Chibitty, a Comanche code talker who served in Europe from the landings on Utah Beach through the liberation of at least one concentration camp (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1710775,00.html).

The code talkers used a language in radio transmissions which the Germans had no way of cracking. The bitter irony was that the US Government had for years tried to drive the Comanche tongue into extinction. Chibitty, too, was punished at school if he ever tried to speak his native language. One of the things I found most fascinating about the code talkers was the way they worked around the fact that their vocabulary had few words for modern warfare: they made terms up. When they wanted to refer to a machine-gun, for example, they spoke of a “sewing machine”. A tank became a “turtle” and a bomber a “pregant aeroplane”. Adolf Hitler was known as posah tai vo, Comanche for “crazy white man”.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

MAREK MAYER

Enormously saddened to hear yesterday of the death of Marek Mayer, one of the foremost environmental journalists of his generation. Richard Macrory’s obituary appears in today’s Independent. Richard quotes me to the effect that when I first recruited Marek to Environmental Data Services (ENDS: http://www.ends.co.uk) he failed to produce much copy at all for the first six months – but then went critical, like a nuclear reactor, and thereafter poured forth a steady stream of very high quality, highly critical and profoundly influential coverage of the issues of the day.

As with Carol Crashaw, whose memorial service Elaine and I went to on Friday, there was an odd cross-connect here between Elaine’s world and mine. She knew Sue Gee (later Marek’s wife) via Wildwood House, the alternative publisher she worked with in Covent Garden in the early 1970s. (TEST, where I then worked, was on the top floor of the same building.) And it was through Sue that we heard of Marek when ENDS was looking for new talent. He took over from me as Editor of the ENDS Report in 1981, three years after we (David Layton, Max Nicholson and I) started the company, while I became Managing Director.

A key enabler was the Churchill Fellowship (http://www.wcmt.org.uk/) I received in 1981, which enabled me to travel to the US – and meant that Marek and Georgina McAughtry (the first ENDS team member, later a Director) had to take over in my absence. I left the company in 1983 to start the progression of activities that would lead to the founding of SustainAbility in 1987. And have felt profoundly grateful ever since to both Marek and Georgina not only for taking ENDS off my shoulders but also turning it into such a thundering success over the years.

Sunday, July 24, 2005

ADDER

As Elaine and I walked through the Swiss mountains last week, I would often take a look at the dung heaps and other decomposing mounds of agricultural waste in hope of seeing breeding snakes. No such luck. Then when we arrived in Little Rissington to see my parents a couple of days back, it was to hear that they had just found a large (for the species) adder in one of their compost heaps.

Can’t recall them being found so close in to the village before. But I do remember one very hot summer’s day maybe four decades ago when several of us walked up over the hill towards the RAF camp. There was a large field with a Cotswold stone barn along the way, which often sported a sign warning passers-by of adders. People tended to think it was a (largely unsuccessful) ruse to keep teenagers out of the barn. Then that afternoon, as we walked through the long grass, we saw adders and grass snakes curled up in pretty much every available nook in the hedgerow, sunning themselves, many intertwined with other snakes.

Saturday, July 23, 2005

CAROL CRAWSHAW

Elaine, Gaia and I drove up beyond Lancaster yesterday to the memorial service for Carol Crawshaw, who died while we were on holiday. Born the same year as I, 1949, she was an American who decided to make her life in the UK. I first met her when we both did an M. Phil. at UCL, 1972-74, but in one of those coincidences that so often seems to happen, Elaine already knew her husband, Robert, because they worked together at Oxford University Press (OUP).

One upshot of our meeting Carol was that Elaine and I moved into a small room she had been occupying with Eleo Gordon (later a Director of Penguin); we came to impose on Eleo’s hospitality for two weeks and stayed – in a bedroom the size of a broom cupboard and a flat which wasn’t much bigger – for 18 months.

Denied the chance to work in the Department of the Environment because of her nationality, Carol became a leading light in English tourism. Ferociously intelligent, quite competitive (American sense of ‘quite’) and hugely effective, she was someone I liked tremendously and respected hugely. Robert did perhaps the most extraordinary tribute I have ever heard, although Blair’s tribute to Princess Diana also comes to mind. Carol will be sorely missed.

The traffic we encountered on the way up and the way back, to Little Rissington where we stayed the night with my parents, reminded us of why we so rarely use our car.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

LONDON FROM THE GHERKIN

Geoff Lye and I spend part of the day with Swiss Re atop the ‘Erotic Gherkin’, with mind-bending panoramas during lunch across London. Overcast, so hard to take photos that do justice to spectacle. While waiting for our meeting, I had bumped into Sara Fox again: she ran the construction project. It’s amazing how visible the building is: I caught sight of its top floating above the trees as I cycled across Hyde Park this morning. Taken to and fro in a silver Mercedes: just as well, as someone has been detonating – or mis-detonating devices – in the Tube and on at least one bus again.

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

DAY TO REMEMBER

Finished a 5,500 word chapter for a Canadian book on Tube, a chapter I’m doing with Jodie (Thorpe) and Seb (Beloe). (Strangely, she also has contracts today for authors’ signature on two other chapters we have written for other books.) With the Piccadilly Line still out, am using the District Line when I can’t cycle. While the trip takes much longer, one gets to walk – from Temple – through bits of London which one doesn’t normally see. Wonderful.

Start with a session with the team on the latest issue of SustainAbility’s bi-monthly newsletter, Radar, following which I write a letter to the British Airways complaints department. Then off to Canary Wharf and ECGD, for the first meeting in my new role as Chairman of the ECGD Advisory Council. Main subject: corruption.

Then home, where I find a growing number of replies from our Council, Faculty and clients to an e-mail survey I sent out this morning, in preparation for SustainAbility’s away days next week. The two questions I asked were: What are the biggest risks for SustainAbility in the period through to 2010? And the biggest opportunities?

There was also an invitation to the 2006 World Economic Forum event in Davos. But the highlight of the evening came when I spotted that the third and final programme in the To the Ends of the Earth trilogy was showing on BBC2. Hadn’t seen the previous two, because we were in Switzerland. Benedict Cumberbatch, who played the lead role, is someone we know through a friend of the girls. I was totally blown away by his performance – and by the quality of the programme. A rising star.

Sunday, July 17, 2005

FOR BA, READ BALLSUP AIRLINES

Finally home, despite the best efforts of British Airways. How sad to see a great airline unravelling, as we now unquestionably are with BA. After decades of favouring BA, my experience of the last 12 months suggests an accelerating, spectacular spiral of decline in levels of service and quality in the UK’s national carrier. Nor is it just me: we heard the same message today from people from countries as far apart as Canada, the USA, Thailand and India.

Among recent symptoms, BA lost my bags on a flight to Melbourne, Australia. Nor was I traveling zoo class, as one Australian friend puts it: these days BA is just as ready to abuse you in Business Class. Yes Cathay Pacific mislaid the same bags a week or so later in Hong Kong, but they had a real excuse: they had to connect flights from Tokyo and to Beijing in the midst of a tropical rainstorm that had knocked Hong Kong’s airport for six.

Then, a week or so ago, BA added insult to injury by losing both our bags on the flight from Heathrow to Zurich. Now, adding insult to insult, they cancelled our flight from Zurich to Heathrow, and we were told we couldn’t be home for a further 24 hours, and would have to go via Paris.

And – at the risk of sounding like a Grumpy Old Man – as if that wasn’t enough to complain about, the customer service by BA at Zurich was scandalous. They didn’t announce they had problems with BA 717: instead, you had to pick it up from the screens. More or less at the head of the queue, we hoped to get a place on the other BA flight, 715, which (it hardly merits mentioning) was delayed by three hours, but like pretty much everyone else found this wasn’t possible.

No-one from BA turned up at any point to explain to the 50 or so people at the Transfers desk, who stood in line for many hours as they slowly processed a passenger every 30-40 minutes. Again there were no announcements or explanations. BA were very lucky not to have had a riot on their hands – and I wish their customer service people could have heard the ire among would-be passengers, some of whom would have been satisfied with just basic civility.

On current evidence, BA is developing something of a death wish. It seems hard to imagine, but I can now begin to see BA following Swiss Air into the vortex which ends in bankruptcy and forced rebranding. Any airline that takes the Union Jack as its emblem really ought to try harder. BA is in danger of becoming a national disservice.

Friday, July 15, 2005

IN PASSING

Two images shot in passing, as we walked today, the first truly sunny day of the holiday.

A Six-spot Burnet, says Sir Geoffrey Chandler

Thursday, July 14, 2005

AUSTRALASIA 2006

Elaine and I had a great breakfast session this morning in Vals with Murray and Dobrina Edmonds, who for many years now have helped us organise our missions to Australia and New Zealand – and, increasingly, Asia proper. We are already discussing the 2006 round, which will likely coincide with the international launch of SustainAbility’s latest Global Reporters benchmarking project.

Dobrina, me, Murray

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

ON FUTURE GENERATIONS

If sustainable development is about anything, it is about protecting the opportunities available to future generations. So the following sequence from James Meeks’ extraordinary book The People’s Act of Love struck a chord yesterday:

‘Who are you really?’ said Alyosha.

‘Destruction.’

‘Destruction of what?’

‘Of everyone that stands in the way of the happiness of the people who will be born after I’m dead.’

And this from a character who merits a place in The Silence of the Lambs. Then we walked up into the mountains today and simply looking at flowers like the pair shown below, from the Sempervivum (everliving) family, put it all in perspective. And the milk churns? Well they reminded me of the eternal cycles of life and death growing up on farms in Northern IIreland in the 1950s.

Monday, July 11, 2005

CHEZ ST JOHANNES BAPTISTA

A time of stone and water. The new thermal baths at the Hotel Therme, Vals, which we are using at least once a day, are constructed in the most beautiful stone. Perhaps not incidentally, across the valley there are several quarries where they periodically blast stone from the mountains. On our first day, as we walked along the valley’s opposite flank, there was a big rolling bang that could have been thunder or a Swiss airforce jet breaking the sound barrier, but then a plume of dusty smoke rose from the flank of a nearby hill.

This morning Elaine and I walked up the mountain behind the hotel to a small chapel dedicated to St Johannes Baptista. Last time we came across his trail was in Damascus, where his reputed head is reputed to lie in a small chapel inside the unbelievably beautiful Ummayad Mosque. The little chapel here, though, is every bit as dramatic, with spectacular views across the valley to a tumbling waterfall – albeit in peripheral vision you can’t help spotting the large factory in which the local water is bottled under the ‘Valser’ label.

Elaine and chapel

Therme 1

Therme 2

Therme 3

Chapel and waterfall

TERROR IN A TUBE

Some thoughts stimulated by the 7 July London Transport attacks follow. They will be edited when I get back to London.

Now terror comes in a Tube. And terrible though the events of 7 July were, and not for a moment wanting to discount the long-term effects on the physical and mental health of survivors and of the families and friends of the victims, it has to be said: whatever the ultimate death toll, London got off relatively lightly this time. There will be other attempts on mass transit systems like London’s Underground. Some will succeed, on a much greater scale.

So-called ‘asymmetry’ in the distribution of political and military power more or less guarantees further growth in terrorism-related activities. In parallel, the war in Iraq, right or wrong, is proving to be a highly fertile breeding ground for future generations of terrorists – or freedom fighters, if you prefer. As a child exposed to the internecine hatreds and tensions of places like Northern Ireland, Cyprus and Israel, I was forced to recognise early that the sort of hatreds currently being stirred have been around for generations – and will continue to cascade through the generations.

Meanwhile, modern terrorism increasingly finds itself in a ‘target-rich’ environment. Consider these simple facts: Demographic trends are driving huge numbers of people into the world’s burgeoning mega-cities. There they are best served by mass transit systems. At the same time, the weapons of terror are getting ever-more powerful and portable. Some people are perfectly happy dying alongside their victims. And even where they are not, there are plans to install cell phone systems in subways, systems of the sort that helped trigger the Madrid bombs.

There are many implications of all of this, not least because – in contrast to London’s Blitz and V-weapon ordeals of the 1940s – it is much less clear these days where the bombs are coming from. Who now do we blame? Who do we begin to mistrust? And who do we expect to provide solutions? I expect increasingly high-energy links between already volatile areas like security, identity and human and civil rights.

Are there links to sustainable development? Yes, indeed too many to list. But here are a few. Democracy, in its various forms, depends on at least a degree of trust among the peoples living alongside one another – and our definitions of ‘alongside’ are being continuously stretched by entities like the EU, by overseas travel and by the Internet. Capitalism, in its various forms, depends on ‘low friction’ access, mobility and transport systems, implying a minimum of traditional security intrusions. And our capacity to think long term, always in precariously short supply, is little helped by concerns that we may not survive the journey to work.

Several of the e-mails I received in the aftermath of the bombings expressed total surprise about what has just happened. That fact itself should surprise us. Let’s be clear: this was inevitable. The twenty-first century will see more such attacks. Their sophistication and scale will grow. So will the casualty lists. ‘Big Brother’ solutions will be proposed and, I fear, citizens will often accept constraints on their civil liberties that would once have seemed unimaginable.

Few skills are as critical in ensuring a sustainable future as the art of foresight. We cannot afford to be taken totally by surprise in terms of mass transit security, but many people will be. Even less can we risk being surprised by the enormously greater scale of the environmental, social, economic and political shockwaves that will follow the sorts of climate change now thought inevitable in the coming decades. But, again, many of us will be.

No doubt the Bush administration’s skeptics will express great ‘surprise’ when climate change really gets its claws in. So let’s spell it out. The evidence suggests that we are our immediate descendants will live in an increasingly unstable natural environment. Unstable natural environments mean unstable economies. Unstable economies mean unstable societies. Unstable societies create perfect breeding grounds for future rounds of insurgency and counter-insurgency. And – this is where the cycle becomes particularly vicious – such conditions make it increasingly unlikely that effective strategies will be developed for ensuring stable environments.

We owe it to the victims of New York, Madrid, Baghdad, London and a growing list of cities, towns and villages to ensure that we consciously and effectively work to break this vicious cycle – rather than using their deaths as an excuse to accelerate it.

Sunday, July 10, 2005

FROGS

We walk slowly, thoughtfully this afternoon in the drizzle and rain, along the river bank. The mountains wear swirling boas of cloud, the peaks winking in and out of view. We pass an algally challenged pond around which there are signs suggesting the presence of salamanders and the like. The thing looks rather like an aquatic version of the abandoned mini-golf course a little further along the same bank, but the grass around the pond and nearby marshy ground is alive with froglets. Restorative.

Saturday, July 09, 2005

HAY SOUP

Zerfreilahorn 1
Zerfreilahorn 2

Dam

Reservoir turns corner

Wildflowers

Apparently carvivorous caterpillar pretending to be a curled-up leaf

The death toll in London continues to mount: 49 last time I looked. And it’s getting closer: one e-mail today mentioned someone in an organisation we know who was in the King’s Cross area and has now been missing for three days. But, though it’s terrible to say, it could have been infinitely worse. The investigators are now saying that the bombs may have been the work of local terrorists, because they weren’t particularly sophisticated. At some point, someone is going to have a sophisticated go.

With e-mails continuing to come in from places like Wales, California, Nepal, China and Japan, from people wondering how we are, we feel an umbilical connection to the news events, but are also trying to unhook to some degree.

So a day of swimming and walking around the man-made lake above Vals. Wonderful flowers and wildlife, including a vole which briefly communed with Elaine. Am also reading – and hugely enjoying – a new book by James Meek, The People’s Act of Love. Published by Canongate, where Gaia’s great friend Francis Bickmore works. She was completely taken over by it. Francis, who is credited in The People’s Act, was the man who found the original submission for The Life of Pi in Canongate’s ‘slush pile’.

This evening, Elaine was so tired that she hovered between consciousness and sleep throughout dinner, despite the fact that we were served such things as Vallser Hay Soup and Olive Oil Ice Cream. The hay, which is being gathered into the small barns here between the rainstorms, smells heavenly. Wouldn’t easily have thought of making it into soup, but it worked wonderfully well.

Friday, July 08, 2005

SWIMMING IN THE RAIN

Elaine walking down to river

Front elevation

Not quite Gene Kelly, but last night – at the end of a day in which mobile phone calls and e-mails poured in literally from around the world asking how we (family and SustainAbility team) were – Elaine and I went swimming in the thermal pools here in Vals. Swimming in the rain. There are many pools to choose from – indoor and outdoor pools, Fire Pool, Ice Pool, Flower Pool, Flower Pool and so on. This was around 23.00, in the outdoor pool, with the raindrops kicking up reverse images of themselves in the luminous water. The pool was illuminated from underneath, which made the swirls kicked up by one’s feet look like boiling liquid crystal.

The waitress earlier this evening, from East Germany, near Dresden, asked whether we were from London? Told that we were, she expressed her sympathy. After what the RAF and USAF did to Dresden during the latter stages of WWII, this struck me as particularly big-hearted. Perhaps coincidentally, just down the slope from the hotel and on the way to the river, we pass a Trabant on our walks, a squat reminder of the very different world that intervened between 1945 and 1989.

 

Thursday, July 07, 2005

7/7

The first we knew of the London bombings – Elaine and I have just arrived in Vals, Switzerland – was when Gaia called to say she and Hania were OK. Extraordinarily touching how many e-mails I have had today from different parts of the world to check whether we and the team were still among the living. Answer, on all counts so far as I can determine, is yes.

Even though as I write the death count stands at 33, I can only say it’s a relief that it isn’t way higher. I have been expecting an attack on the Tube for years, indeed have often warned of the danger. But what to do? Even now we know of the risk, what are those responsible for running the Underground to do? In the end, we are going to have trade off freedom of movement against the risks of terrorist attacks. But it does make me think that (post Madrid) Elaine’s constant concerns about ever allowing cell phones to be used on the Tube are well placed.

Interesting to ponder the 21st century prospect. As more and more people live in mega-cities, which are best served by public transport, particularly mass transit systems like the Tube, the risks of terrorist mass murders grows almost exponentially. Can’t help but think that the Tokyo sarin attacks, the Madrid bombings and now 7/7 are just the stuttering beginnings of a long-running saga.

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

GAYLORD NELSON

Wildlife, of sorts, abounds even in London: last night, for example, I was woken by the screaming of foxes and this morning I awoke to the shrieks of the parakeets that are taking over the skies here. Even the vile lamprey has taken up lodgings a few blocks from here in the Thames, which is a sign of a clean river, apparently.

Someone who did a great deal to drive forward the conservation and environmental agenda, Gaylord Nelson, is obituarised in today’s Times. He was 89. I first heard of him many years ago via Denis Hayes, who I saw again a few weeks back in Seattle. They had worked together on the first Earth Day in 1970. “The reason Earth Day worked,” Nelson is quoted as saying, “is that it organised itself.”

Well, up to a point. The organisation may have been catalytic rather than command-and-control, but it worked wonders. I still recall the extraordinary enthusiasm of the young team in Palo Alto who helped Denis organise the 1990 Earth Day, which went truly international for the first time – and for which I served on the international board. Sad, though, that Nelson died in the wake of yet another series of Republican roll-back of so many of the environmental advances he and his colleagues had achieved.

Monday, July 04, 2005

FREEPLAY RINGS NASDAQ’S BELL

Among other things, am continuing to work on the book on social entrepreneurs with Pamela Hartigan of the Schwab Foundation (www.schwabfound.org). Interesting to see that on 28 June, in New York, Kristine Pearson, executive director of the Freeplay Foundation (www.freeplayfoundation.org) and a Schwab Foundation social entrepreneur, participated in the ringing of the opening bell at the NASDAQ Stock Exchange in Times Square, along with a group of ten Tech Museum Award laureates. Meredith Taylor, president of the Tech Museum, singled out the Freeplay Foundation’s work in Africa with orphans to illustrate the importance of technology benefiting humanity. The picture is of Kristine on the giant NASDAQ plasma sign. The Foundation is linked to Freeplay, run by Rory Stear, another Schwab Foundation social entrepreneur.

Sunday, July 03, 2005

8 MEN IN A ROOM

Spent several hours writing articles for Nikkei Ecology and Grist, but for most of the day I watched the London Live 8 concert agog. To my mind, the Sixties bands pretty much blew every one else off the stage: The Who, the reformed Pink Floyd, McCartney and U2. And Sting, with his “We’ll Be Watching You,” with the G8 leaders in the background. But maybe that’s just age. I was also impressed by Madonna, Joss Stone, Annie Lennox and – though I don’t like their music – Velvet Revolver. Now we shall see what effect all of this has on the “eight men in a room” next week. But hats off to Geldof: what an extraordinary achievement.

Saturday, July 02, 2005

CYCLING AROUND LIVE 8

Cycling home last night, through fitful drizzle, I joined a number of cyclists cycling around the edges of the Live 8 concert area of Hyde Park. Would have been up in Edinburgh this weekend for SustainAbility’s G8 event, but we had a board meeting today. Sophia (Tickell), one of our non-executive directors, was wearing the white band. If any readers haven’t yet signed up for the Live 8 campaign, it’s easy to do at http://www.live8live.com/whatsitabout/index.shtml.

When I got home, Gaia and Hania had cooked a dinner in celebration of my recent birthday, and among their presents were two CDs by Madeleine Peyroux. Careless Love, in particular, is extraordinary.