Search Results for: Tim elkington

To Cambridge and a 6-hour Skype call

Jorgen Randers on left And on right Paul Gilding lsitens to Tom Gladwin’s ‘Sustainability Blues’ Ditto Ditto ditto

Despite my wilting blogging output, it’s time to catch up on  a busy week, as the rain continues to gurgle in the gutters outside. It has been a week of highs and a low. T

he low was when I attempted my first-ever PechaKucha presentation (20 slides, with the computer giving you just 20 seconds per slide) at a green entrepreneurs event and left feeling it had misfired.

But a wave of highs soon had me cheering up. Maybe I had been tired: the previous day, Monday, I had ended off with a 6-hour Skype call to New York for the final judging of this year’s Buckminster Fuller Challenge awards. The session ended at 22.00 and I confess Skype isn’t my favourite environment, but will try almost anything in memory of the hallowed Bucky.

Also among the ups were two days in Cambridge, the first with Jorgen Randers and perhaps 20 other contributors to his book 2052. Great to catch up with Jorgen, and with other contributors (and friends) like Paul Gilding, Tom Gladwin, Nick Robins, Mathis Wackernagel and Peter Willis. On the evening before the session, picking up a thread of deep pessimism in Jorgen’s analysis in the book, I asked what the average age (and sex) of we contributors had been? The answer, in essence, was older white males – and my reaction was that, even if the outlook is dire, the mood and creativity would have been significantly improved had we had more women and more younger voices.

One set of images that sticks in my brain came from Australian David Butcher, a former CEO of WWF Australia and Greening Australia, He lives on an Illawarra property which is 30 percent tropical rainforest, and described to me seeing (I think from a bridge across a river on the property) a red-bellied black snake catching and eating an eel, and (separately) a large python dangling from a tree to catch passing birds on the wing. He only rumbled what was going on in the latter case when he saw the explosion of feathers.

The following day, Paul, Tony Juniper, Karl Wagner and I did an all-day session with some 12-15 chief sustainability officers, and similar, for the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership. A wonderful opportunity to take the temperature of a sample of these key change agents. They came from companies like Jaguar-Landrover, Lend Lease, Nestle, Sainsbury and Unilever. My sense is that many of them have been banging their head against some fairly dense walls and ceilings, but there were many examples of great work being attempted.

The first time I had been at the Moller Centre, part of Churchill College, which turned out to be an excellent venue for both meetings. A nice link back to Winston Churchill’s support for Denmark in the Second World War. He apparently borrowed the Maersk fleet for the duration and, if I was correctly informed, made good the losses (which must have been pretty substantial) after the war.

Another great thing this week: Jo(sephine) Living, our new OnPurpose Fellow, has joined the team for six months. Still recall Susie Braun, our first OnPurpose Fellow, with huge gratitude and affection. Checking the Volans website, it strikes me that we need to update her entry – she went on to become a senior strategic planner at Comic Relief.

A few days off, with clippers

Cutty Sark 1 The distant Shard from the deck of the Cutty Sark Rigging Hullscape 1 Hullscape 2 Emily Young 1 Emily Young 2 Emily Young 3 Church of St John, Clerkenwell St John’s: floorscape St John’s Gate Museum: galley St John’s Gate Museum: helmets St John’s Gate Museum: the other side

Took a few days off this week to recuperate. Went to Greenwich for the first time, on a Thames clipperwith Elaine, to see the Cutty Sark, and various other delights–including the National Maritime Museum and the extraordinarily beautiful exhibition, Visions of the Universe. Not sure which is my favourite nebula, but a number of them features. Dropped into Waterstones to buy some books, and among other things came away with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which I had been meaning to read for ages. Dived in and haven’t surfaced since. Overwhelming.

Among other things, we went to the exhibition of work by one of my favourite sculptors, Emily Young, at the Fine Art Society. We had a wonderful lunch at The Modern Pantry in St John’s Square, Clerkenwell, and then dropped into the Church of St John across the way, where I loved the 12th century Crypt. Fascinated to see physical evidence of the history of the Knights Hospitaller, aka the Knights of St John. We also visited the Museum of the Order of St John, at inside nearby St John’s Gate, which brought back an extraordinary era that still sends out its repercussions today.

Sustainability Summit, take 2

The ribbon is cut, by about 20 pairs of scissors CEO panel Tigers

Headed out early to the conference venue for the Walmart sustainability event, the second in a series that started in 2010. The ribbon was cut by an extraordinary number of dignitaries, everyone ending up with their fragment. The working day started with a session with perhaps 20 CEOs listening to the Secretary for Environment and Natural Resources. Parallel sessions included people like Paul Simpson of CDP, who I would have very much liked to hear, but I was repeatedly hooked away to do interviews for business magazines and a green TV channel.

When it came to my 60-minute plenary session, I was introduced by Juan Carlos Carmago of Walmart de Mexico, who also moderated the discussion. One of my themes here has been corruption, not just for Walmart but for Mexico as a whole. I have always felt that corruption narrows vision when we want open minds, shrinks time-scales when we want people to build their Future Quotient, and skews investment in critical sectors like urban infratsructure construction.

On the upside, I was very impressed by the commitment to change of the Walmart people I met–and one of the surprises was how much renewable energy Walmart is now producing in Mexico.

in the evening, in a torrential downpour, I was driven from the hotel to the residency of the British Ambassador for a dinner including people from CDP, Walmart and PEMEX. Once I had dried out, I really enjoyed the discussion, and found myself sitting next to Daniel Zapata, an advisor to the CEO of PEMEX, who reminded me he came to see me at SustainAbility when looking for a job perhaps as long as ten years ago. Remarkable guy. A highlight of the evening was the signing of an agreement between CDP and Brazil’s Business Council for Sustainable Development.

Arriving in Mexico City

Hotel Camino Real 1 Hotel Camino Real 2 Camino Real flowers

Even though it is overcast, and inclined to toss down buckets of rain several times a day, among the first things to strike me about Mexico City was the colour. And the interminable queue to get through immigration, though I was met by a charming young woman and driven into the city. And the bad roads.

Sampling Bruno Loubet again, in King’s Cross

Livening up King’s Cross

Elaine, Gaia, Hania and I had lunch today at Bernard Loubet’s new restaurant, The Grain Store, in King’s Cross. Glorious food and, because we were serendipitously able to celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversary, I also ordered a bottle of Nyetimber ‘champagne,’ grown in West Sussex. Extraordinarily good–one of the very, very few good things I can think of to say about climate change.