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My first involvement in the Blue Earth Summit in Bristol today, where I chaired a panel session on the theme: ‘Is Regenerative Business Possible?’ My kick-off comment was yes, but the real challenge is how you bring it to scale. My panellists were Kresse Wesling of Elvis & Kresse, Good Energy founder Juliet Davenport, and Andres Roberts of the Bio-Leadership Project. Bit of a scamper with time constraints, but some great questions from the audience – and great feedback afterwards.

Evening before I had walked across from the hotel to Clifton for a dinner with Julia Hailes, Jeremy Bristol, Amanda Aitchison, Anna Guyer and others. Great fun and intriguing peek of the masts of the SS Great Britain below. This evening it was a dinner at the Coppa Club in Clifton, with the likes of Julia, Ed Gillespie and Mark Stevenson (the Futurenauts), The Wave’s Nice Hounsfield, and explorers Belinda Kirk and Roz Savage.

It was 20 years ago today that I posted my first blog on this website. It ran as follows:

Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Alvin (©JE)

Today Elaine and I stood on the tiny deck of Alvin, the submersible used to find an accidentally dumped H-bomb off Spain in 1966 – and to investigate wrecks like those of the Titanic, Bismarck and Thresher. Extraordinary sensation.

Here’s the background. Ever since the late 1960s, I had wanted to visit the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). I think I first heard of it via (Dr) John Todd, who founded the New Alchemy Institute and whose work on aquaculture, particularly the farming of tilapia, I was hooked by in the early 1970s. I even went off and worked with (Dr) Robin Clarke at his UK equivalent, BRAD (for Biotechnic Research & Development) for a short stint in 1973. But my burgeoning interest in oceanography and aquaculture lost steam by 1974, after timely, kindly advice from several professors in the field that you really needed a PhD to make any real progress.

But as the climate change issue grew in importance, so did my interest in the work of WHOI. Then Elaine and I met WHOI President and Director (Dr) Bob Gagosian at the 2003 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. He arranged for us to be taken around the Woods Hole set-up by (Dr) Dave Gallo, Director of Special Projects. Among the things we talked about was Daves work with (Dr) Robert Ballard, who among many other things discovered the Titanic.

We also got to see some pretty interesting technology. Dave took us around the 274-foot-long support ship Atlantis, on whose deck we saw and scrambled onto Alvin. Then there were the REMUS torpedoes, which were like something Q might have offered James Bond. Since I am just finishing off Robert Harriss novel Pompeii, whose hero is a Roman aqueduct engineer, I was interested to hear that REMUS torpedoes have been used to inspect a 45-mile stretch of the Delaware Aqueduct, which carries some 900 million gallons of water daily, and loses 10-36 million gallons each day.

I was even more interested to learn that REMUS machines have been used in Iraq to detect mines a job otherwise undertaken by US Navy-trained dolphins. The Navy also came up in discussions we had with a whale scientist whose work involves analysing blue whale calls picked up by SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System) and other Navy offshore hydrophones, normally used to detect submarines. One of the whales they have been tracking this way, and for years, is easy to detect, because it sounds different turns out to be an unusual blue/finback hybrid. Another interesting finding: there seem to be more whales in some areas than anyone had expected.

But my key interest today was in WHOIs work on climate change, particularly of the abrupt variety. New data show North Atlantic waters at depths between 1,000 and 4,000 metres becoming dramatically less salty, especially in the past decade. The concern is that large-scale freshening of the North Atlantic could cross a threshold that would disrupt ocean circulation and trigger abrupt climate change.

Links: www.whoi.edu

Across to 999 3rd Avenue, Manhattan, for the 10th anniversary celebration for The B Team. The message: ‘Time to be Bold’. Couple of hundred people, many of whom I knew, and wall-to-wall conversation with interesting folk. Then I was somewhat bouleversé when Jean Oelwang, who runs Richard Branson’s charitable arm, Virgin Unite, name-checked me from the stage.

One result was that there were queues to talk to me afterwards. Not a situation I particularly enjoy, but nice to be acknowledged. What with things like a lunch with Paul Bunje of Conservation X Labs and a second jaunt to a wine shop in Grand Central Station, to buy a bottle of a Quivira wine for Elaine (according to this blog, we visited the Sonoma Valley winery on 11 April, 2005), I walked around 100 city blocks today – and the walk home was marked by thumping rain. Thank heavens I had brought a large umbrella.

In very much the same way that I have long loved to visit the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., when there, so I try to do the same with the Museum of Modern Art, or MoMA, when in New York. Walked there today, around 20 blocks either way. Long queue to get in, but it moved quickly.

One thing I love about the D.C. setup is the waterfall by the restaurant – and today I dropped into Paley Park, near MoMA, with its glorious water cascade.

And now for some images from the MoMA visit proper:

I always forget how late even major Brazilian events are in kicking off. The second day of the UN Global Compact event for Brazilian business today started 30 minutes late, precisely when I was meant to speak – and time-keeping didn’t improve much thereafter. Great fun, even so.

Note to self, though: ensure you deliver what your title promises. My title was Cleaner Fish, Dirty Waters. The idea was that we spend too much time thinking about cleaning up individual companies, too little time cleaning up the markets into which we then re-release them. But then I said too little on markets.

Knew it myself, but it also attracted a comment from my friend Peter Senge – who it was wonderful to see again. On the upside, I attracted separate three invitations to speak in Brazil while at the event – and did three on-camera interviews for the Global Compact and for Exame, which should keep the messages rippling out.