John Elkington Journal / Blog

Having enjoyed cider so much - or so much cider - at Bryanston, and having enjoyed Dabinett cider in recent years, and having met Sue Clifford and Angela King of Common Ground at Romy's last night, two people who have done more than pretty much anyone else to preserve and rebuild this country's apple varieties and orchards, it seemed a good idea to drop in on the Cider Museum in Owermoigne. So we did.

Tolpuddle Martyrs
Closed for repairs

Having learned about their courage and ordeals in history at Bryanston, I felt we should stop off at the museum dedicated to the Tolpuddle Martyrs, but we found it closed for repairs, following flooding. Not sure what to make of the sculpture of George Loveless outside, but it was striking from some angles.

Maiden Castle

Finally realised a childhood dream of making my way up Maiden Castle. We walked around the ramparts in a haze, but the experience was spellbinding. Several times we bumped into a delightful couple, once by the pit that held a series of much-the-worse-for-wear skeletons that Sir Mortimer Wheeler dubbed long-ago war victims. Whatever the truth, there was a sense of generations of lives lived out here, through thick and thin, and the spearpoint found in one spine was graphic evidence of the distress caused by the Romans turning up in the neighbourhood. In the distance, Poundbury shimmered through the haze, like something out of that old TV series, The Prisoner.

Frampton House
With thanks to Alastair Sawday

A while back, I bumped into Alastair Sawday when I spoke at an event organised by Tomorrow's Company, and tahnked him for his extraordinary guides - which Elaine has used for years. Yesterday, we arrived at Frampton House, which was another Sawday treasure, landscaped by no less than Capability Brown. Wonderfully sunny when we arrived yesterday afternoon, en route to Musbury, but pouring down at times as we got ready to leave this morning - after a wonderful breakfast.

Hambledon Hill
Almost 360 degrees

Arrived late afternoon at another Sawday find, Manor Barn in Child Okeford, which Elaine had chosen in large part because it looks out onto Hambledon Hill, the extraordinary hill fort where I spent many charmed days during my time at Bryanston, just down the road. A sloping window allowed a star to peep in as I went to sleep - but that was after we had walked to the top of kestrel-accented Hambledon, in the gathering twilight, taking in the breath-taking views, that are almost 360 degrees,and has supper at the nearby Talbot.

Trill Farm
Gathering of the tribes

Drove down to Frampton, Dorset, to drop our bags at a rather grand B&B, before heading further west to Trill Farm, near Musbury, Devon, for a celebration of the launch of the Trill Farm Trust, This has been set up by Romy Fraser, who founded Neal's Yard Remedies - and recently sold a majority holding to Peter Kindersley. Wonderful dancing to ceilidh band as the sun set.

Apart from Romy and Amrit Ahluwalia, who used to work with SustainAbility many, many moons ago and then worked with Romy, we bumped into people like Ed Posey of the Gaia Foundation, Richard St George (who used to work at the Centre of Alternative Technology) and Schumacher, Jude Smith Rachele of Abundant Sun, nd Sue Clifford and Angela King, who run one of my very favourite NGOs, Common Ground.

Driving back to Frampton very late, we found all the petrol stations closed and ourselves almost running on vapours - but found a station just about to close after some 25 minutes of heightening anxiety.

Video of ITT watermark panel

A video of the panel session I took part in as part of the launch of the launch of the ITT watermark initiative in Stockholm (see 24 August blog entry) can be found at http://www.ittwatermark.com/.

Riders for Health

Day started with a brainstorm session at SustainAbility on the future of our accountability, reporting and stakeholder engagement work - a timely and vibrant discussion. Then, after drafting an article or two, walked across to Volans for a session with Andrea and Barry Coleman of Riders for Health. They updated our team on some of the stuff they are now doing and on their plans for the future. I really love what they do - and it was interesting that at last night's dinner someone from a major mainstream organisation waxed lyrical about them, without initially knowing that we knew them.

Environment Foundation, woodpecker and Melody

A fairly energetic day, starting with a train trip down to Newdigate for a meeting of the Trustees of the Environment Foundation, hosted by (Sir) Geoffrey Chandler. Others there were Malcolm Aickin, Ian Christie, John Lotherington (of the 21st Century Trust), Tim O'Donovan and Halina Ward. A key decision was to push forward with the theme of 'Democracy & Sustainability'. Geoffrey's wife Lucy and their dog Pickles ducked in and out during the day, as did a Great Spotted Woodpecker.

Later, Tim drove me across to Dorking station for the trip back to London, where I met Elaine in Berkeley Square, before heading to the Lansdowne Club, to meet Melody Haller (who I first encountered at a Wall Street Journal conference in Santa Barbara, California) earlier this year, and her husband Michael (Tyler). A fascinating group of people, working in areas as diverse as advanced silicon technologies and neuroscience.

I have always had antibodies to the world of clubs, but was fascimated when Michael noted that Britain had conceded independence to the United States in the Treaty of Paris, drawn up with Benjamin Franklin in this building's Round Room. Sadly, we were all too busy talking to take up his offer of a guided tour.

Man on Wire

Dreading vertigo, I went along with Elaine, Gaia and Hania to see the film Man on Wire this evening. We were totally enthralled by it - and couldn't stop discussing it as we walked from Soho to Charlotte Street to have dinner at Roka, in Charlotte Street, with Hania's long-standing friend Emma.

The food was exquisite, with a green plum sake that reminded me of a dinner I had many years ago in Tokyo with the Vice-Chairman of Sony. Then we had three different sakes, each made from a different part of the rice grain and each from a different part of Japan. After the first, he asked me what I thought of it. I replied that it was like putting your tongue into an icy mountain stream - and being able to taste, in at least three dimensions, every pebble back to the source. A quite remarkably delightful evening - and another today.

Homo volans
How we learned to take flying jumps

Otto Lilienthal

Homo Volans; The phrase occurred to me a few months back - and, Googling, I found a number of East European references to Faust Vrancic. He was brought back to mind yesterday when I read about the exploits of the Swiss airline pilot and adventurer, known as 'Rocket Man', who is now significantly closer to becoming the first jet-powered bird man to cross the Channel - and saw the final programme in Andrew Marr's excellent Britain from Above, in which he took to the skies below a giant parasail.

On the Rocket Man front, as The Times reported yesterday:

"Yves Rossy completed a 10-minute test flight last week with his jet-powered wing strapped to his back. He flew for more than 22 miles, equivalent to a flight from Calais to Dover – the route first flown by Louis Blériot in 1909. The test flight, which had been postponed several times because of engine problems, saw Rossy jump out of a small plane 7,500ft above the town of Bex, in Switzerland. Reaching 180mph, he flew through clear skies to Villeneuve and back. Rossy, wearing a heat-resistant suit similar to those worn by racing drivers, steered by shifting his weight or simply turning his head and shoulders. He deployed two parachutes at 5,000ft and 4,000ft to land at Bex airfield with two litres of fuel left. Rossy used an 8ft carbon-fibre wing powered by four jet engines."

A sad concatenation, with the news of the Madrid air crash cheek-by-jowl with the article on Rossy.

Meanwhile, Marr's parasail reminded me of the early experiments on parachutes and wings, including those by Vrancic. He apparently collaborated with Tycho Brache and Johannes Keppler, was fluent in at least seven languages and is now best known for his book of inventions in Machinae Novae, published in Venice in 1595. Among his numerous inventions the most famous is the parachute, which he tested in Venice.

Whenever I attempt to sum up where we stand with Volans, the image that comes to mind is that of Otto Lilienthal, the early pioneer of aviation, whose exploits inpsired me to do several pen-and-ink drawings back in the early 1970s.

As time goes by
Life becomes a bit of a blur

Life is becoming a bit of a blur at the moment, mainly - I suspect - because my head is full of the various sections I am drafting for the new Volans website, due to launch early in September. One thing we did recently was to present the latest developments at Volans to the SustainAbility teams, in London and Washington, DC.

Meanwhile, Sam and I continue to hang out at SustainAbility for much of the time, because BT and others have been distinctly Stone Age in their wiring of the Volans offices in Bloomsbury Place. Phones and printers are now stacked on the floors, but a glitch means yet another delay. More positively, we have been building the Advisory Board at a rate of knots and now have some quite extraordinary people aboard, all to be announced in a couple of weeks.

This week kicked off with a flying visit to Stockholm, to speak on a panel at the Stockholm World Water Week event. This was to launch the ITT Watermark. Outside the conference centre, an extraordinary series of water cannon fired coloured columns into the air, though by the time I came out into the evening they seemed a little flacid and tired.

Apart from the endless typing away on the website content, I seem to be doing a fair number of telephone interviews at the moment. It seems that despite the gathering clouds of recession various media are still intersted in the corporate responsibility agenda - and where it might take us next.

The Humpback's back
Memories of Roger Payne

When I came into the environmental movement in the 1960s, the emblem of what we are losing that meant most to me was the humpback whale. Later, in the 1980s, I played The Songs of the Humpback Whale - which I had bought way back in 1970 - to Gaia and Hania in the dark when they were very young, songs recorded by Dr Roger Payne. For more on all of this, see Wikipedia entry. Today, happily, The Times reports that humpback numbers are back up to around 40,000, suggesting that the magnificent creatures have managed to haul themselves back from the edge of the precipice. But climate change, by impact ingthe evailability of food, particularly krill, could still reverse the process.

Mobile library
... transporting books across to Volans

Spent the morning ferrying boxes of books from home - and from my desk SustainAbility - across the the new Bloomsbury Place offices of Volans. Nice and bright when we started out, but by the time Elaine and I got to Bloomsbury Place the wind was fairly thumping through the trees there and in Bloomsbury Square nearby.

Then we found I was missing one key of the front door set, so - while we sat on the steps in the wind with our boxes and no doubt looked like refugees to the steady stream of foreigners making their way to the British Museum, poor Sam had to streak across to let us and our pile of boxes in. Nice feeling, though, to be building up the library in a building which the man who lives in the basement told us today dates back to the 1600s.

As we drove back through Trafalgar Square, a giant screen was showing swimming races from the Beijing Olympics, something I find excites me not a jot. But it was nice to drive back along the Embankment and see the bridges, which I always find a delight.

Britain from Above
... and London

Just watched Andrew Marr present two quite stunning programmes, on BBC1 and BBC2, the first on Britain from Above, the second on London ditto. Seeing the pulsing webs of energy, telecommunications and road, air and sea traffic reminded me of the ecosystemic perspectives on landscapes and cities that first drew me to planning in the early 1970s - and then the Abercrombie Plan sequences in the London programme reminded me of some of the reasons why I fled the discipline once I had my M. Phil.

The sequences of London's Docklands at the same time prompted memories of my solo jaunts around the derelict docks, with my Leica M3, including one early morning horror where I found myself alone in an area of warehousing, triangulated upon by three guard-dogs - two Alsatians and a Doberman. I had to stand in the same spot for an unconscionable time before their owner arrived to liberate me - and chastise me for trespassing.

The sequence of the Luftwaffe bombing the docks was extraordinary, with the aerial photographs catching one stick of bombs splashing into the Thames, but also reminding me of the stick that went along our road in Barnes - and of the day when Elaine was turned out of the house, maybe six or seven years ago, when neighbours digging a hole for a tree about five feet from our kitchen found an unexploded bomb from that same stick.

Remobilising the Space Maggots
A night out with Wall-E

Across to Leicester Square this evening to meet up with Elaine, Gaia and Hania and see Wall-E, the new Pixar/Disney robot-loves-robot film. Absolutely stunning and, while Elaine spent much of the film with her hands over her ears because of the volume of the Sensuround sound system, I was transported. Best of all, the grudging remobilisation of the human space maggots gave me a degree of hope that America might still reclaim its soul.

Sisters

We had our first joint meeting of SustainAbility and Volans yesterday, in which Charmian (Love), our new Volans COO, expained the progress we have been making on our visual identity (very exciting), organisational structure (clarity can be a wonderful thing) and Advisory Board (some stunning developments there, too). We are working on a range of changes in anticiaption of the Volans 'soft' launch early in September, follower by a 'hard' launch in November.

One of Charmian's slides noted that SustainAbility and Volans are 'sister' organisations. True, but I almost commented that they are step-sisters: same father, different mothers -- Julia Hailes with SustainAbility, Pamela Hartrigan with Volans. But thought better of it. Still, I find myself increasingly thinking with real interest about how the two organisations can best work together in the coming years.

Journal

Journal: August, 2008

Cider Museum

Tolpuddle Martyrs Closed for repairs

Maiden Castle

Frampton House With thanks to Alastair Sawday

Hambledon Hill Almost 360 degrees

Trill Farm Gathering of the tribes