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Journal entries prior to May 2008 can be found in the old archived site here
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Journal: October, 2008
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Star-crossed
A week to leave behind in my wake
26 October 2008
The hour going back today was one of few good things about the week, aside from a highly successful joint SustainAbility-Volans evening event at The Hub on Wednesday and a decompression session with Charmian, Sam and Smita on Friday evening. Otherwise, the week's character is summed up by what just happened with my treasure trove of photographs taken during the week, both by myself and by Sam. I was uploading them to my laptop, when a message appeared to say that disk space was precariously low. So I came out, thinking the 120-odd images to date would have been saved, only to find - after deleting them - that they had disappeared. Must be tired - partly after putting up with a trip in and out of London this afternoon for a meeting at 2 Bloomsbury Place.... more >
More of a Godfather ...
... than a father of the sustainability movement
19 October 2008
One of the spooky aspects of Googling your own name, as I did this morning in search of a column that appeared in yesterday's issue of Le Monde, is that you come across references you didn't know existed. Today it was a Wikibook chapter on 'The Ones Who Made History'. ... more >
Crying over spilled - and contaminated - milk
Our subrime and melamine piece in Le Monde
19 October 2008
A column I co-authored with Pierre-François Thaler and Sylvain Guyoton of EcoVadis appeared in yesterday's issue of Le Monde. It explored similarities between the U.S. suprime and Chinese melamine-in-milk scandals.... more >
The Horse's Eye View
One in 62,000
18 October 2008
When I cycle to Volans, I pass the Animals in War Memorial by Park Lane. But until today I hadn't realised that of the one million horses shipped from Britain to France during WWI, only 62,000 had returned to this country. Nor had I realised how many of the animals were shipped from the US and Canada when our own stables ran dry. Those animals that weren't killed outright tended to end up on the butcher's block. All this was brought home by War Horse, which I saw this afternoon with Elaine's sister, Christine. ... more >
Cursing in Church
With Organic Exchange in Porto
16 October 2008
The full Moon seen from Taylor's
As the financial crisis continued to deepen, I flew to Porto, Portugal, on Tuesday, to do a keynote address at an Organic Exchange conference on opportunities to use organic approaches to strengthen sustainability, resource and investment strategies. The focus of Organic Exchange, which involves companies like C&A, Nike and Patagonia, is on organic cotton.... more >
Happy Birthday, Land Rover
But has a favourite vehicle lost its way?
12 October 2008
Our Land Rover with Blue, the whippet, as bonnet mascot
It's sixty years since the first Land Rover took to the road, in 1948 - the year before I was born. Its registration number was HUE 166. For close on 20 years in the 60s and 70s, my family had a vehicle which didn't look much different, JBW 797. It was old even when we got it, the story being that it had been twice around the world already and at one stage had served as a logging vehicle.... more >
In the eye of the storm
11 October 2008
En route to the London Accord
With the financial world tumbling around our ears, Charmian and I went early in the week to find out more about the London Accord from Michael Mainelli of the Z/Yen Group. A fascinating initiative which aims to blend social, environmental and financial agendas and that deserves to be even more widely known. A little later in the week, Doug Miller of the European Venture Philathropy Association kindly came in and did a 101 session for a group from Volans and SustainAbility. Spent a fair amount of the week doing client work, writing articles and preparing presentations, all of which are tending to refer back to the work of Nikolai Kondratiev and Joseph Schumpeter, two economists whose work had a profound influence on the way I see the world.... more >
Black or White, can the next President Green the White House?
11 October 2008
As I pushed my cycle through the front door last night after arriving back late from Volans, Elaine asked me whether I wanted to watch Simon Schama on BBC - the first programme in a new series on the American Future. We proceeded to do so and it proved to be the most extraordinarily powerful indictment of a particular style of development that has pushed much of the US economy ever-closer to water scarcity, just as pioneers like John Wesley Powell warned that it would.... more >
Now I'm in this Big Black Book
... among 'London's 1000 most influential people'
06 October 2008
Went along to an event at The Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, this evening, not knowing what to expect. Found myself featured in a 116-page 'Big Black Book' - the Evening Standard's version of 'London's 1000 Most Influential People'. Among the people I caught up with was Koy Thomson, now CEO of the London Cycling Campaign, whose full-page photo (cycling across Tower Bridge with a phalanx of other cyclists) graces the page opposite my entry. Love what they do. Merited or not, it's great to be in such distinguished company, though something of a shock to see my age listed as 59. Again, some part of the brain protests, some mistake surely? ... more >
Ghost bikes
Spectral trend spotlights death on two wheels
05 October 2008
In St. Louis, during 2002, Patrick Van Der Tuin began memorializing bicyclists killed or injured by motorists with white-painted bikes. He dubbed his project 'Broken Bikes Broken Lives'. (Photograph courtesy of Carrie Zukoski)
Haven't yet seen one in the flesh, but am mightily impressed by a very different take on white bicycles, the viral campaign splashed over two pages in today's Observer. Starting off in the US, it uses skeletally white-painted cycles to mark the spots where cyclists have been killed or injured. Given that a young woman cyclist was killed by a bendy bus just around the corner from our London office a week or two ago, and having been left three times unconscious over 35 years of cycling in London, twice with three broken ribs, the ghost bike movement is one I whole-heartedly support. ... more >
The aphrodisiac effects of Zeppelins
Incendiary memories and Isabel's First Blitz
04 October 2008
One of the things my father's mother Isabel left us was a collection of diaries - and a couple of weeks back I was reading one from late 1916. At the time she was working as some sort of designer at the Admiralty, so it is written in a pale covered notebook, standard Admiralty issue she admits part way through. ... more >
Crossing the social Gulf
Painting poverty a cheery Convivial Yellow
03 October 2008
Sunset 1: View from my room
Arrived in Naples, Florida, late on Tuesday, after a flight from Gatwick via Charlotte, NC. Hurricane country - and when I got to the beachfront Ritz-Carlton in Naples, there was a warning that work would begin at 09.00 Wednesday morning on hurricane hardening of the hotel. It did, right on the dot. But before that, I arrived in my room to find the most spectacular sunset in progress, after a number of storms that has passed through earlier in the day.... more >
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