Going Down the Road
by
Hunter Lovins
When last I wrote you in November, I had just returned from London,
bringing with me Qais Akbar, a young Afghan entrepreneur Natural
Capitalism was hosting. For two years Nancy Johnston, who
handles all of my logistics, Stephen Landrigan, a colleague in
Afghanistan and Dr. Bernard Amadei and Robyn Sandekian of the
University of Colorado worked to get Qais a U.S. visa so that he could
come study with us and at the University of Colorado.
Qais is a fourth-generation carpet merchant. He had been
extremely helpful to me the various times when I was in Afghanistan,
translating and looking after me on trips into the Central Highlands,
and around Kabul. I had told him that if he ever wished to
study in the U.S., I would bring him over.
Qais is working to transform the carpet industry in Afghanistan into a
sustainable, fair-trade operation. At the moment, it is
anything but. Carpets are woven by children, washed and
treated with very nasty chemicals, and the resulting products sold as
commodities that compete badly with Chinese factory-made
carpets. This approach risks losing the brand quality of
Afghan carpets, once among the world’s finest, and is
delivering very little development value for Afghans.
Little did I know how xenophobic our foreign policy has
become. Despite this, the tireless efforts of our team and
the great folks at the University finally got Qais a visa.
Stephen put Qais on a plane in Dubai heading for London, where I met
him, flew with him to the U.S. and walked him through immigration snarl
in Chicago.
It is no mean feat getting a young Afghan male into the U.S., but after
missing our flight out of Chicago, we finally got all the paperwork in
order, and got Qais officially admitted to the U.S. The
ever-resourceful Nancy got us new bookings and I brought Qais home to
Colorado.
Qais lived with us until late February. During his stay, we
got him together with waste water treatment experts, green chemists and
people who were selling carpets retail around the country so that he
could better understand the available high-end markets.
I
showed Qais the California redwoods, Presidio, an ocean, sushi, the
Colorado high country and every thing we could think of about life in
America. We even held a carpet sale at NCS supporter, Dan
Friedlander’s, house in Boulder, at which Qais and I spoke
about the work we are doing in Afghanistan. Anyone who missed
out can go to Qais’ website, www.kabulcarpets.com
and order
fine Afghan carpets, a purchase that will help fund the rebuilding of
Afghanistan.
As Qais settled into my ranch, I scrambled east to speeches in
Michigan, then on to New York City to speak at the United
Nations. This was an effort by my Dr. friend Tariq Banuri to
reframe the climate debate away from arguments about imposing top down
timetables, mandates and targets for emission reductions. He
believes that that the only answer that will work is find ways to
enable the poorest people to meet their needs for energy services in
ways that won’t destroy the climate. International
and American efforts to create carbon regulation have stalled, so
Tariq’s approach might solve the problem faster and more
predictably. It is a bit of a bold proposition because the
U.N. is, after all, the association of the world’s
governments, but at the same time, it has stated a commitment to
sustainable development and to meeting the millennium development
goals, so it seemed worth a try. Tariq had called this
meeting in preparation to the U.N.’s Climate Change
Conference in Bali a few weeks later, when the world’s
governments were coming together yet again to try to restructure the
climate protection regime.
For several days, our group presented work we’re doing in
developing countries using renewable energy, and particularly energy
efficiency to meet basic human needs and provide access to energy
services better than the fossil-based technologies. This is
cheaper and leverages the creation of real jobs and businesses on the
ground in developing countries. Dr William Moomaw from the
Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy gave a brilliant presentation on
work he is doing in Indian villages making biofuels from jatropha
seeds, and implementing solar and other technologies. I spoke
about the work Selco
(Solar Electric Light Company) and other are doing
in India, selling solar lighting services to the poorest people, using
micro-financing. The payback rate is less than people had
been paying previously for batteries and kerosene. Families
are getting a net financial benefit and light, and when the loan is
repaid, have solar light for free. Selco’s market
approach creates jobs in the villages and leverages the creation of
Indian jobs making photovoltaics.
Similarly, SEKEM is
an Egyptian company that employs some of the
poorest people of the desert growing organic vegetables, botanical
feedstocks for cosmetics, and cotton for clothing. Badging
their products as fair trade and organic, they sell them at high prices
in Europe. The proceeds provide housing, health care, and
education for the workers and their families. SEKEM is even
creating a four-year university. It is the only company to
have ever won the Right Livelihood Award that I received in 1983.
These and similar examples from around the planet show that sustainable
technologies can better increase human well-being and leverage genuine
economic development. The transition to these technologies
will break the stalemate in which China and India say they
won’t give up their coal plants until the United States does,
giving the Bush administration the rationale to do nothing.
The fact that we are stupid enough to continue relying on coal does not
mean that the rest of the world must.
I described the business case for climate protection showing that smart
companies here are cutting their green house gas emissions and making
more money. See the paper the Economic
Case for Climate
Protection.
As always, of course, the least-cost option is efficiency.
California has recently reinstated a provision whereby the utility
commission gives the utilities a share of the savings realized when the
utilities invest in improving the efficiency of their
customers’ buildings and facilities. The utility
can then pay higher shareholder returns and the customers get as
immediate cut in their energy bill. It also came as news to
many that coal is no longer the least-cost option—wind is,
and several public utility commissions cited this in 2007 when 79 U.S.
coal plants were cancelled.
Such programs should be implemented in developing countries.
Instead, the World Bank is financing the so-called Ultra-Mega coal
plant in India, and China continues to build a coal plant every couple
of days.
We spent the time in a windowless room in the basement of the U.N.
headquarters, a building I detest. It’s one of the
more inefficient buildings imaginable: incandescent light bulbs all
over the place, huge single glazed plate-glass windows facing the East
River that aren’t even caulked. The wind comes
whistling through. Its occupants strut around as if they are
the salvation of the planet. I tell them, “No,
you’re not, you’re the
problem!”
Even in such surroundings, we set forth what I thought was a very
convincing business case for implementing more sustainable energy
options for Tariq to carry to Bali a few weeks hence.
At the end of the meeting a Pakistani diplomat walked in and reacted to
our reports by saying, “We’re just going to burn
coal. We need it to fuel our development, and you can’t tell
us not to.” I said, “Have you not been
listening? We’ve spent two days explaining that if
you want to meet the legitimate development needs of your people, you
will do it better by investing in efficiency and renewables.
It will give you more development, faster and cheaper. Did
you not listen to what Bill Moomaw has been doing in India?
Or the work I have been doing in Afghanistan?”
He looked around the room and said, “I don’t trust
you.” He looked at me and said, “Hunter,
I don’t trust you.”
Well that tore it—you tell a Colorado cowgirl that you
don’t trust her and you had better be ready for a
fight. I looked at the guy and said,
“Mister—either we’re all in this together
and the nations of the world all work to together to cut our carbon
emissions. Or there are going to be winners and
losers. And frankly, you are going to be a loser.
Me, I live in Colorado, I’m rich. Global warming,
bring it on—we’ll have ocean-front
property. You, Pakistan, won’t have water because
the glaciers in the Himalayas are disappearing.
You’re not going to have agriculture because the monsoons are
shifting. Your country is going to dry up and blow away and
frankly I flat don’t give a damn.”
Yeah, I was just a mite annoyed.
I guess you don’t say that sort of thing in the UN.
The ol’ boy looked shocked. About that time, my
Crackberry rang, and one of my students who lives in New York, asked if
I wanted a drink. “Boy howdy!”
So, I put that inefficient edifice on the East River behind me, and
gave up all pretense of being a diplomat.
As various people asked me to go to Bali, I answered,
“no.” I’d spent all fall on the
road and wanted to be nowhere but home.
It the end, my little indiscretion might have accomplished
something. In the last hours of the Bali meeting, when it was
clear that nothing else was going to emerge from the meeting, the
developing nations and the western nations agreed to a joint funding
mechanism to help developing nations implement clean, non-fossil
development. Several people subsequently told me that I was
referenced.
We’ll see if anything comes of it. I give any
credit to the people like Tariq who can stomach the endless tedium of
such meetings. The real transition will come from the people
working in villages, entrepreneurs bringing renewable energy to
countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, countries of Africa and the
policy people in businesses and communities around the world that are
working to cut their carbon footprints. I don’t
hold out much hope for the big international meetings. But,
it would please me no end if those days spent in that windowless
basement came to some good.
The Holidays went to finishing the editing on Natural
Capitalism’s manual to help small businesses profitably cut
their energy use and thus their carbon emissions. This
web-based learning platform, Solutions at the Speed of Business (see
lead article) is the most exciting tool that I have ever found, and one
that will enable all small companies to become part of the solution.
Of course, like the recipe for rabbit stew: first catch the rabbit; the
first step in building the tool is to get the material
finalized. So I spent a truly delightful December at home in
Colorado writing up the excellent work that Brianna Buntje, our
Director of Research, and her team of interns and researchers had
beavered away at all fall, and watching the news reports emanating out
of Bali.
With January, Jeff Hohensee and I were back on the road, first out to
California to help Sun Micosystems roll out what they called the
“Un-conference,” and launch the website called Open
Eco, www.Openeco.org,
a
web-based center for the sustainability
conversation. I wish it well—there is certainly a
need for more voices and much greater participation.
A fun event, the Unconference attempted to incite a conversation with
the participants around sustainability issues and not merely parade a
group of talking heads across the stage. The morning began
with Ted Nordhouse and Michael Shellenger who wrote the paper,
“Death of Environmentalism,” and the book
Breakthrough, debating me on energy policy. I actually agreed
with much of what the boys had to say: how the environmental movement
has done much better at pointing out what is not working than
implementing solutions that will deliver real value in better
ways. But Ted made the mistake of claiming that the only
solution is nuclear, so we lived up to Sun’s invitation to
have a fun fight in front of all the folk, much to audience’s
amusement. I promised to send lots of people various papers
showing why nuclear is not carbon neutral, and is anything but the
least-cost option. They also document why the wide array of
real solutions, starting with energy efficiency, will meet our needs
better and cheaper. Any of you fighting nuclear
power’s return from a well-deserved grave, check out the work
of Nuclear Information and Resource Service, (www.nirs.org).
In January, Presidio welcomed an incoming class of about 65 bright-eyed
business students. It really is fun to see our enterprise
mature from a struggling little start-up of 18 students to a student
body of 230 with over 50 new MBA candidates entering each
semester. The quality of students goes up each semester and
along with the skills they bring to implement their new ideas.
Back in Colorado, Jeff and I met with Tom Plant, a friend who is now
running the Governor’s Energy Office. We briefed
his staff on Solutions at the Speed of Business, our web-based learning
tool for small businesses. They expressed keen interest in
that and subsequently asked our help in bringing our Cities Climate
Protection Manual to Colorado cities.
Next came a day trip to Munich, Germany, to address a group of European
industrial leaders at the Volvo Design Conference. I
literally landed in Munich at dawn, rushed to the conference, grabbed a
few bites of sausage, gave the presentation, did a filming and jumped
back on an airplane to Washington D.C., en route to Orlando,
Florida. Despite the insanity of spending all of six hours on
German soil, it was very cool, driving to the venue, to crest a rise on
Munich’s outskirts and see a gi-normous wind machine, slowing
spinning in the morning sun generating clean electricity. The
Europeans, especially the Germans, are serious about the transition to
renewable energy. The renewables sector there is now
providing more new jobs for what would be otherwise out-of-work men and
women than any other German industry.
But, why do a day trip? Months before the Volvo folk called
up, I had promised Eban Goodstein of Focus the Nation that I would join
him in Florida on 30 January to do a live webcast to help kick-off of
the national day of teach-ins on climate change on college campuses all
across the country. The goal was to get college students on
over a thousand campuses to demand that the nation implement climate
protection. In the end, over 1,700 campuses and over one
million students participated. That part went very well.
The
webcast. . . well. . .
our team has
a bit to learn
about technology. Our delivery was just fine. We
settled into a PBS studio in central Florida and turned out what we
thought was a fabulous show, webcast live to thousands of
viewers. Dr. Steven Schneider, Stanford’s world
renowned climate scientist, appeared via tape, Van Jones, the leading
proponent of green collar jobs and founder of Green For All, joined us
via satellite, Eban Goodstein, various National Wildlife Federation
folk and I all talked about the challenge of climate change and the
answers. We really nailed it. The cameras shut off
and we high-fived each other.
‘Til one of the techs said, “It didn’t
work. It didn’t go out.”
What?! We were stunned. Apparently, despite
Eban’s best efforts to get assurances from the outfit that
offered to host the event that they had sufficient bandwidth to do a
webcast with thousands of sites logging in, they
didn’t. The whole thing crashed within minutes of
starting. As it turns out, it was a good
thing—someone had managed to scroll nasty racist subtitles
across the screen. Most places never saw that—the
hundreds of college campuses set up to watch the webcast real-time live
just thought their equipment was bad. It
wasn’t—it was our fault.
But not all was lost. The studio taped what we did, and you
can watch it now by logging onto the Focus the Nation website download
the
“Two
Percent
Solution” and see why I rushed back
from Germany.
After grabbing my third night of too few hours sleep, I keynoted the
University of Central Florida’s morning Focus the Nation
event before winging back to Colorado just in time to give a talk as
part of CU’s Focus the Nation activities on the connection
between the genocide in Darfur and climate. The droughts in
the Darfur area, caused by climate change, are a major reason for the
conflict. That we are allowing genocide to go on before our
eyes is bad enough, but similar conflicts could become commonplace
throughout Africa and the rest of the world if we don’t get a
handle on global warming.
After a February trip to Houston to keynote the conference of quality
control professionals, I jetted to a meeting with Newsweek in San
Francisco. Each year prior to Earth Day, the magazine gathers
a group of experts to help it prepare its environmental
issue. I laid out for the group the business case for
sustainability (described in Jeff’s article, above) and did
an interview in which Presidio was profiled, which described me as
“the green business icon.”
March meant Kansas City, Missouri—a trip to meet with local
government officials, business leaders and a film crew and to give a
public speech on the Drivers of Change facing business today.
The Kansas City region has set itself the laudable goal of being the
greenest in the country. More power to them. While
I was there, the courageous Governor Sebelius upheld the public utility
commission in canceling a couple of coal plants out in the west, noting
that coal is no longer the cheapest option, and that its carbon
footprint makes it unacceptable.
Jeff joined me for a run down to St. Petersburg, Florida, to help to
the members of the Association of Corporate Philanthropy enable their
companies to go beyond mere compliance with environmental and social
regulations. We obviously had a few suggestions.
Next morning, the front page of the St. Petersburg’s paper
reported that the cost of the two nuclear units the utility outside of
Tampa is still trying to build had risen to $17 billion, with no end in
sight. The utility had initially promised they would cost $1
billion each, then the price tag rose to $4 billion apiece—a
figure the nuclear industry continues to quote. Clearly
that’s now wrong. Indeed, recent numbers indicate
that nuclear units will probably cost more like $12 billion
each. At that point even solar photovoltaics are competitive.
After Florida, it was back to San Francisco to teach at Presidio, speak
to the business students at University of California, Davis, then fly
to Canada to address the Green at Work Conference in Thunder Bay,
Ontario. Coast to coast, from the deep south to a First
Nations’ Community in the Northland: the issues are
the same whether you are a Canadian, American, or live in the middle of
the ocean. Coal is on its way out, nuclear is unaffordable,
and drives nuclear weapons
proliferation. . . .
Isn’t it time we quit subsidizing all the wrong
technologies? Why don’t we just do the right thing
first?
At the end of March, I flew to Hawaii to the Henk Rogers’
“Blue
Planet Summit.”
Billed as a coming
together of experts on energy policy, the purpose was to put forth
solutions to the energy and climate challenges facing the
world. A great group of people convened: young Bobby Kennedy;
Denis Hayes, who runs the Bullet Foundation; former head of the CIA,
Jim Woolsey; Will Semmes, number two in the California Government
managing their buildings and assets; Andy Revkin from the New York
Times; Frank Sesno, correspondent with CNN; Hawaiian activists, Jeff
Mikulina of the Sierra Club and Henry Curtis of Life of the Land; solar
entrepreneurs; native American leaders; native Hawaiian leaders; and a
great group of participants.
We spent three days conversing and filming material that Blue Planet
will put into documentaries. The Fred Friendly seminars, a
famous PBS policy series, filmed a very interesting segment with a
group of us: the climate expert, Steve Schneider; Bobby
Kennedy; Andy Revkin; an executive from General Electric; Jim Woolsey;
Mina Morita, an Hawaiian legislator; a mayor of a small town in
Indiana; the editor of an energy magazine and me. We waited
onstage as Frank Sesno walked on, turned to camera and said,
“I am the President of the United States, and this is my
cabinet. We have just gotten word from the CIA that there is
a 50/50 chance that the price of gasoline is going to $12 a gallon
before the end of the year. What should we do?”
This was the first that we, sitting there being filmed, had heard
anything of this challenge. No time to prepare, no
notes—they wouldn’t even let me have my computer on
the table. Happily, some of us have actually put some thought
into the question of solving the oil crisis (You can read my Yes
Magazine article on the topic on our website.
Jim Woolsey jumped right in saying that now was the time to do what we
should have done long ago, and that we can get off oil. Jim
drives a plug-in hybrid that he fuels from his roof-top solar
system. He and I described how if you want to cut oil you
implement better transportation policies, and talked about the options
from far greater efficiency and plug-in hybrids, to efficiency
standards, a war-time push for decent public transport and better land
use planning.
We described what can actually be brought online fast enough to solve
the posed problem. I asked folks to recollect that when we
went into WWII, in 90 days Detroit went from making cars to making
tanks and airplanes. We can do that again—we know
how to make cars that get 100 miles to gallon. We can
ride-share, using the web-based systems that allow people to link up
car trips with others going the same place. There are
car-sharing companies that enable people to reserve a local car on the
web, use a smart card to open the car, track your miles and time, and
away you go.
We set out a whole litany of solutions: communities designed so that
you already are where you want to be—work at home programs;
“fee-bates”—when you register a car you
either pay a fee or get a rebate depending upon the car’s
efficiency. We ranged through fast-term measures, mid-term
measures, longer-term measures—we could put an package into
play that would enable the country to get off oil in about two years.
Bobby
Kennedy
was brilliant—he jumped in with facts and
figures: the U.S. is now borrowing a billion dollars a day to finance
our oil addiction, which worsens not only our economy, but also our
security and our climate. Steve Schneider talked about the
climate implications of burning fossil oil and why we must get off oil
anyway.
Andy Revkin summed it up best, “Mr. President, call the
country to undertake an energy quest.” He then laid
out a brilliant plan describing what such an energy quest ought to
contain. See Andy’s blogs at:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com.
Sesno turned to the camera and said: “These are difficult
challenges and there are no easy answers. We’ll
talk more about this. We’ll talk next
week”
“Wait,” I tried to say, “There are easy
answers—we’ve just laid them out! We
don’t need to talk, and certainly not next week. If
this is a crisis, let’s implement what we know how to do that
will solve this problem, save us money and create a better
world. . .
”
But it was over. They’d cut. The Fred
Friendly folk came bouncing up; saying what a great show it was going
to be.
I was steamed. “Who scripted the ending?”
I demanded. When they said that they did, I
unloaded. “You’ve just undercut any good
that this whole hour’s worth of filming might have had.
You’re about to tell the country they’re facing
hard times and that doing anything about it will be hard.
That won’t inspire anyone to want to change until
there’re absolutely forced to. End the show with
Andy’s call for a Quest. Give people some reason to
act now so that this sceario does not have to come to
be. . .
Otherwise, we’ve all blown a lot of jet fuel getting there,
only to tell the country that there aren’t any
answers.”
I dunno. Times like this, I’m not sure whether
anything we do going down the road is worthwhile—we all
burned a hell of a lot of carbon (even if all of mine is offset) to fly
a long way to be expensive stage props.
If they had asked the assembled experts to drill down and present a
coherent plan: How do you get the islands off oil? How do you
restructure the Hawaii tourist industry to be sustainable?
How do you get the world off oil? How do you de-carbonize the
planet? Any number of nice juicy challenges they could have
given us. . . We’d hinted at
solutions in sound bites,
but
only that. We need to spend such opportunities laying out the
details, signing up the people who will take the next steps.
Otherwise, it’s all just talk. It’s just
theatre.
But film people live by sound bites—everything we did was
quick. When I figured out that game, I found ways to amuse
myself. One guy was unduly fond of nuclear, believing it to
be the only way to get off oil which would take away the
Arab’s big foreign policy stick—he must really love
the Administration’s current plans to subsidize the Saudis
getting nuclear power, from which they can build a bomb.
We locked horns on a panel in which young people posed us
questions. A very bright young Navajo woman asked:
What energy solutions are there for Hawaii? This guy jumped
in and started touting nuclear. Having learned the sound bite
war, I jumped right back, saying, “Whoa, there. Nuclear is
not the answer. It has the highest cost and cannot solve the
problem here on the islands, which is liquid fuels.” He
snapped back, “You just don’t like nuclear
power.” I smiled and retorted that I loved
nuclear—remotely sited, 93 million miles away was just right.
The audience predictably burst out cheering, and the guy
didn’t say anything for the rest of the session, which
pleased me fine. But the young Navajo wasn’t
finished. She fixed on him, saying, “My people know
nuclear. Uranium was mined on our reservation and my people
were poisoned. Their animals were sickened, our land
ravaged. The workers brought the dust home on their clothes
and our children were poisoned. We know, nuclear,”
she said, “Thank you, we don’t want any more of
it.”
In a sound-bite world, that was sure a good’un.
Still I wish that the format had allowed a real conversation on what
would make sense for Hawaii, for the U.S., for the world. There are
answers, but they won’t be found in sound bites.
There were other rewards. Michelle, (NCS’
accountant) who came with me, had never been to the islands
before. She got to swim with turtles and watch whales
spout. And join me as I went with a marvelous traditional
leader, Papalii Tusi to a haiao—an Hawaiian shrine.
Papalii spoke a blessing for me, and for this work that we are
doing. As he spoke, it suddenly came to matter a
lot. The last time I was in the islands, various folk from
the electric utility took a dim view of the work I was doing killing
power plants. When some of the activists suggested that it
might be just a bit healthier if I didn’t come to the Islands
for a while, I’d not been to Hawaii in a decade. It
felt good to be welcomed back.
After a delicious traditional meal, Papalii gave me another blessing:
the Polynesian staff of the orator, to be used to call the four winds
to carry my voice where it needs to go. Papalii said that he
hopes to convene the heads of state of the Pacific Islands to talk with
me about climate change and better approaches to sustainable economic
development. Perhaps my path will turn west to the Islands
again.
After a day at home, I headed to Sacramento to keynote the Green
California Summit, to speak at a community meeting organized by one of
my students in Palo Alto. Then it was up to Presidio again to
teach. Gwendolyn Hallsmith our co-author on the LASER (Local
Action for Sustainable Economic Renewal) manual for community economic
development (www.global-laser.org)
spoke to our classes. She
shared her years of experience implementing community sustainability
from the townships of South Africa to post-communist Serbia to, serving
now as the Planning Director for the state capital of
Vermont.
May gave me a bit of time at home, to write six articles and prepare
for a summer on the road. Being home, I could attend the
release of the Boulder County Energy Plan that I’ve helped
work on for the last two years. It is a good plan and will
help Boulder get serious about cutting energy use and carbon
emissions.
As part of Natural Capitalism’s effort to do more virtual
work, I gave a webinar for Net Impact, the association of MBAs working
to enhance sustainability, and was filmed for a PBS documentary,
standing in Jeff Hohensee’s backyard with a high mountain
lake, with the snowfields of Rocky Mountain National Park gleaming
beyond in the morning sun.
But sitting still was short lived. The usual mid-monthly trip
to California took me west to teach, to speak in a film that will help
teach people at Wal-Mart just what sustainability is, and to lecture to
Executive MBA students at the University of California,
Berkeley. I also spoke to the Financial Women Association of
San Francisco luncheon, and the San Francisco Green Business Conference.
After wrapping up the semester at Presidio with a great student party,
I poured myself on a plane to Oklahoma to serve as Scholar in Residence
for the University of Oklahoma’s Scholar Leadership
Enrichment Program. It was fun to take the material that I
teach to MBAs and offer it to bright under-grads. I only
whimpered a little changing planes in Denver, to watch my beloved Rocky
Mountains slip behind the wing as I jetted off again,
Three trips to New York followed, meeting with health products, IT,
chemicals, hedge funds and other executives, companies Natural
Capitalism Solutions is helping to refine their thinking about
sustainability.
Then back to California to help graduate the best crop of Presidio MBAs
yet. Meetings with entrepreneurs creating the technologies of
the next wave of innovation, before jetting off to New Orleans to work
with the city and others reconstructing the region on the value of
doing it right the first time, building sustainability into everything
that they do.
As I write, it is the Solstice. Summer is full in the
Colorado air: time for riding the high country, for rodeos, for hauling
hay and working with our new crop of interns at Natural
Capitalism. Tomorrow I will take my good little mare barrel
racing one last time before climbing on an airplane bound for New York
to give the inaugural Buckminster Fuller Award to my dear friend Dr.
John Todd. Natural Capitalism Board member Janine Benyus and
I both sat on the jury that awarded the prize. I
can’t think of a more deserving candidate. See: http://challenge.bfi.org/prize/winner_2008.php.
At about the same time I found that I seem to have been nominated into
the Environmental Hall of Fame. And my colleagues at the
Business Leaders Forum at the University of Cambridge wrote to say that
they have selected me as one of the World’s Top 50 Thought
Leaders in Sustainability. When I am in London in July
I’ll do a filming for that.
But first I’m bound next week to Upstate New York for a
climate leaders summit. Then I launch into a truly manic
summer travel schedule: launching the inaugural Presidio Executive
Certificate program in July, rock festivals, keynoting the World
Renewable Energy Congress in Scotland, helping green the London
Olympics, and even a quick run to Australia.
If you see that airplane going overhead, wave. . . and know that
I’m thinking of you.
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