Sam Lakha, Manager, Volans Outreach.
Back to my old life - same problems but new hope!
Volans’ Alumni Network member Juliana Velloso refects on life post-London
After spending a year in London, I feel re-empowered: the power of the academic environment and being in contact with inspiring people like John (Elkington) brought back hopes that I had almost forgotten, hopes not just for myself but also concerning my city, my country. After two months back at my hometown, Rio de Janeiro, I am reminded again how great the scale of various challenges are and realize how ‘change’ is difficult to bring about. However, I remain hopeful because there are so many others like me here - Brazilians that want to change this country for the better.
Given the sheer size of my country, I find it useful to roughly rank a diverse list of problems that we have to deal with: on the one hand we are reasonably stable, economically speaking, and have advanced some social indicators, such as the number and dimension of poverty that have decreased in the last decade, yet we still face several problems in our day-to-day lives that obstruct our (sustainable) development (as I learned from Amartya Sen from his book Development as Freedom, one of my great influences from my academic years at university in Brazil).
For instance, I do not feel I can walk about so freely here in Rio as I was used to doing in London: when I hear gunshots, I remember that I am living in an undeclared civil war. I feel guilty when I drive my parents’ car through the city while on the streets around me hundreds of children are begging or are trying to sell things under streets lights to earn some money. I read the newspapers and see how the politicians elected by us publicly disrespect the citizens of our country and use our money in mind-boggling ways and that an iron company will be established in my state (Rio de Janeiro) and will increase C02 emissions by 9.7 million (thats 76.3% above the current levels). I want to ride my bike but discover that we have no place or space for bicycles on our streets, unless you live near a bike-lane which generally tends to only be in the areas around the beach (rich areas) .
Ok, I know I sound very pessimistic about all the problems: I’m not usually like this, I assure you. I actually believe in the power of the human race and in our power to change the world for better. It’s easy to think of so many examples of the ‘bad things’ developed by people but it’s important to keep in mind too the many ‘good things’ created to benefit our civilization. And so, with regard to my country, after listing some of the key problems, I now have the duty to list the good things that I am observing in my new life here too and they are extraordinary: we see social entrepreneurs trying to address inequality, such as the developed by the Rede Asta, that scales the work of several people that live in low-income communities producing various crafted goods. There are initiatives being led by small entrepreneurs, young people that want a better world for future generations. For example, Henrique Bussacos, 26 years old, founded TEKOHA in 2007, a virtual company that promotes the handcraft work of several artisans and has already started to export sustainable products to countries such as Switzerland. Also, Alessandra França, 23 years old, founded in 2009 the Pérola Bank , an institution that lends small amounts of money to informal entrepreneurs in São Paulo, so a micro-finance initiative. And Tiago Dalvi, 23 years old, founder of Solidarium a fair trade design company that has begun to supply big corporations like Wal-Mart in Brazil with sustainable products. These are a few examples of initatives that fill me with hope that a different future is possible.
So, in this light, even if I have many reasons to be disappointed and frustrated with how my country is developing, I also have a growing list of reasons to not give up and am inspired to be one of the young agents of change that are moving my lovely country towards being more equitable and sustainable. I don’t know how it will turn out but I do feel that progress is being made towards paving a better world overall for coming generations. I am among a strong group who believe in our future here! I have mentioned just a few examples of progressive initiatives and will be keeping a close watch on these, seek them out in fact, and report again soon.
- Rio de Janeiro, 07/01/2010
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2010/01/and-my-old-life-comeswith-the-same-problems-but-new-hope/.
- Sam LakhaSOTP CLIMATE CHANGE
No, its not a typo, but a rather astute way to kick-off a series of blogs from the COP15 summit in Copenhagen: Geoff Lye, a Volans Co-Founder who is there with Gary Kendall of SustainAbility writes:
I subscribe to the view that perfection must not stand in the way of the good in all things including COPs, but let’s hope the final version of the draft text is better than this:
I laughed out loud.
Read their insightful blogs here
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/12/sotp-climate-change/.
- Sam LakhaGODAVARI COMPLEX
Guest blog by Sanjiev Johal, Freelance TV Producer and Journalist
There’s always an attendant confusion when I visit India. It’s a liberation and revulsion unique to the subcontinent. I was there last month in the western state of Maharashtra, polluting the skies to scatter my mother’s ashes in the waters of the river Godavari. Second in size only to the Ganges with its banks freckled by sacred sites for both Hindus and Sikhs, the Godavari is sometimes referred to as ‘Old Ganga’ or ‘South Ganga’. Just like the dangerously putrid Ganges, the waters of the Godavari are ever more hazardous than holy.
Dams restrict the free flow of the river, allowing mosquitoes to breed and disease to fester. Domestic and industrial pollution has contaminated agricultural land and groundwater leading to significant increases among local populations in diseases such as cancer and Hepatitis A and B. Sustained activism from a people’s movement a quarter of a century old claimed a ‘triumph’ when a pipeline of drinkable water was built to supply some river-basin towns, but still, after numerous court rulings, petitions and state governmental orders, industrial effluent, unfiltered by treatment plants, continues to be discharged into the Godavari.
I’ve never liked the term ‘disconnect’ when used in noun form. It sounds abortive, lazy. But I understand how it works, where it works. The will of the people whose lives are entwined with the fate of the Godavari demands that the river’s pollution be controlled, monitored and reduced. This will is, on the surface, substantiated by the judiciary and the legislature, and yet, the companies responsible for discharging untreated effluent into the Godavari continue to do so with crass impunity – I sense something of a disconnect.
In India, the fate of rivers and that of the so-called largest democracy in the world are inseparable. The troubled displacement of some fifty million people, the unaccountable bodies extolling the dubious virtues of dams and the cold face of government turned away from the plain sight of a co-ordinated, national resistance movement, point to an endemic democratic deficit. The largest democracy in the world may just be the greatest fallacy in the world.
Last year the Indian government released its National Action Plan on Climate Change as well setting up the National Water Mission. Sounds great. Just what the people wanted, a government that understands the concerns of the population and openly serves a common interest. However, the NAPCC and the NWM continue to serve the same tired and misguided agenda that seeks to build more dams, more hydro projects and interlink more rivers. Flawed policies that fail the people, the economy and the environment. What’s more, there is nothing even remotely transparent or participatory in the formulation of the NAPCC or its specific mission plans. Indian democracy, to paraphrase the Mahatma, would seem like a very good idea.
The Godavari River Pollution Control Scheme that promised fully functioning effluent treatment plants by 2008, is yet to be completed. Various levels of government have intervened, had their say and delivered laudable sentiments of intent. The courts too have issued bits of paper requiring industrial polluters to mend their ways but the Godavari continues to be a toxic lifeline for the people of the river-basin.
Those fighting for a pollution-free Godavari do so without violence. Their struggle is no proxy ideological war; the battleground is the river itself. Without a clean river they and their way of life cannot be sustained. If democracy is the tool by which the sustainable development of the Godavari river basin can be secured, then there’s a lot of sharpening yet to be done. Allowed to remain the self-serving play-thing of the ruling elite, Indian democracy’s blunt edge will be used to bludgeon the will of the people instead of implementing it.
The will of the Indian people…
It was, we are told, the will of the Hindu majority of the Indian people to raze entire towns populated by Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, slaughtering innocents with blood-curdling inhumanity. However, the collusion of the state and its apparatus, principally the Governor and the police, knowingly stoked the fires of religious intolerance whilst fanning the flames of an ancient rage. In fact the police, with orders to turn a blind eye to the carnage, actively participated in the rape of young girls, the burning of babies and the mutilation of citizens they were honour-bound to protect. The will of the people can be systematically manipulated and discontent is easily manufactured when the scapegoat is a sitting duck. It’s all so sickeningly unoriginal.
In a country riven by caste, divided by over a thousand spoken languages and beholden to myriad religious identities, ‘the will of the people’ becomes the private intellectual property of those who are able to control access to information. In India, power is knowledge. You believe what you are told because you don’t know any better. If you do know better, then, well, what you know is wrong. If you are not signed-up to the now defunct ‘India Shining’ movement or Indian ‘progress’ as the project for interminable economic growth is couched, then you are anti-prosperity, anti-democratic, antediluvial.
So if you point to the evident fact that more dams for example will not lead to more and cheaper electricity, they will not lead to rural development but will lead to social and ecological disaster, then you are an idiot, unpatriotic or even a terrorist. Name-calling is the first line of defence but then sticks and stones quickly turn into batons and bullets. India has one of the highest rates of deaths in police custody anywhere on the planet. Taking a stand to stop a dam being built or to demand a cleaner river can cost you your life.
But there is simply no substitute for ground-level, blood, sweat and tears mobilisation. The organised people’s movements when constructively allied with counterparts in the rich nations of the ‘developed world’, can achieve notable success.
A nexus of international organisations from countries such as Germany, Switzerland and the US did just that when they supported the Indian resistance group Narmada Bachao Andolan in its fight against India’s first private dam project. By making a singular local cause a common global concern, the combined pressure from these groups led to a number of multinational corporations and international banks withdrawing from the project. It was a small victory, but a template for resistance had been established, one built on grass-roots activism and bolstered by a vocal overseas network.
Our indignation at the human and environmental impact of spurious hydro-electric dam projects must also extend to the sponsors and profiteers of such ‘development’. The British Government’s Department for International Development is one such backer of Indian dams. The democratically elected government of one nation in cahoots with the democratically elected government of another in its devastation of its people and its ecology. The sham of DfID’s benevolence, dishing out conditional aid and expertise to the less developed, is the sham of democracy itself. With one hand it giveth…
If Indians stand in the way of ‘progress’ by standing up to the authorities and the big companies that want to hijack India’s resources for their own gain, then it is incumbent on those of us in the countries that support such ‘progress’ to actively demand that this support be abrogated. Democracy isn’t just putting an ‘x’ on a piece of paper once in a while, it is about putting your neck on the line to demand justice. The act of voting can change a government but sometimes little else. Acts of resistance, of civil disobedience, if India’s fight for independence is anything to go by, can change the fate of a nation, maybe even the course of a river.
What happens to the Godavari will offer a portent into India’s engagement with the ideas of democracy and sustainable development. I know I’ll be paying close attention – those waters contain a little something of me.
sanjiev.johal@gmail.com
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/11/godavari-complex/.
- Sam LakhaMISSION MOST-POSSIBLE: CLEAN & COOL
Volans is working in partnership with Polecat in pulling together a “mission” to San Francisco in February 2010 (Polecat last year took the top 20 ‘Web 2.0’ companies out there). In brief the Clean & Cool Mission is a competition to identify the top 20 fast growing Clean & Cool companies in the UK. Those companies selected will travel to San Francisco from 20 Feb to 26 Feb to meet peers, investors, media and potential partners from all around the world; they will also engage with experts on the financial and public policy agendas relevant to ‘Cool Economy’ businesses operating in the US.
It’s exciting to think of the game-changing ideas and partnerships that could arise from bringing these players together, a framework akin to our Pathways to Scale program at Volans.
Polecat will be using their very cool (read ‘funky’) MeaningMine product to map the key trends, influencers and discussion around the event, which will then help build key market intelligence in this field – no spreadsheets or boring bar-charts here, we are talking gorgeous graphics, heatmaps, article carousels and the like to get you close to critical quantitative data about your business, such as where conversations about you or your field are occurring: hear more here
Mission is set for take off on Tuesday, November 17th at the London Stock Exchange, sponsored by the Technology Strategy Board, UKTI and Enterprise UK and supported by Polecat and Volans, with our own trailblazer John Elkington very much at play in the cock-pit. See Clean & Cool website here
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/11/mission-most-possible-clean-cool/.
- Sam LakhaVOLT-ING INTO THE FUTURE
A guest blog by Dr. Gary Kendall, Director of Climate Change Programs, SustainAbility
The future is bright, but in my case it isn’t orange, it’s electric. As I ease into lane 2 of the three kilometre banked circular test track at the Millbrook Proving Ground, my passenger - Don Cochrane, Sales & Marketing Director at Tesla Motors‘ UK arm - exhorts me to “floor it!”. So I put my foot down in a bright red Mark II Tesla Roadster, and I giggle at the instantaneous acceleration provided by a few thousand laptop batteries hooked up to an electric motor. ”No, I said: ‘floor it’!”, Don chides me. “Back off and do it again.” I slow to a crawl, and then slam the pedal to the metal as so heartily encouraged; now I’m clinging on for dear life as I’m thrown back into the driver’s seat and this life-sized Scalextric car whizzes silently to 100 km/h in less than four seconds. The disadvantage of such lightning acceleration is that three kilometres of tarmac pass me by all too quickly, and before I know it we’re gliding back to the car park. Phew!
We are often frightened into believing that the post-petroleum age necessarily means returning to a primitive world of back-breaking manual labour where mobility services are provided by the horse and cart. Electric traction, we are told, is suitable for forklift trucks and golf carts, not for mass appeal and certainly not for enjoyment (if golf is indeed ‘a good walk ruined’, where does that leave golf carts?). However, the simple reality is this: if primitive is what you’re looking for, there are few better ideas than digging pre-historic sticky black liquids from a mile below the Earth’s surface and setting their derivatives on fire in a relic of 19th Century engineering called the internal combustion engine.
While the Tesla Roadster itself may not be the answer to the coming oil crunch and the spectre of climate change, it certainly dispels the myth that electric vehicles are essentially boring. It is not only thrilling to drive, it’s SIX TIMES more energy efficient than its closest oil-powered equivalent, the Lotus Elise. This means that even when powered entirely from dirty coal-fired electricity, the Tesla cuts CO2 emissions per kilometre in half. And of course, it can run entirely on sustainable renewable energy, generated from wind turbines and solar panels. It can cover almost four hundred kilometres on a single charge and can be recharged for pocket change. Does any of this sound remotely primitive?
The future is bright indeed, and it’s coming around the corner faster than you might think.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/09/volt-ing-into-the-future/.
- Sam LakhaWORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY
The Volans team wishes you a happy World Environment Day, an occasion launched by the fledgling United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1972. Much progress has been made in recent decades, but some of the underlying trends are profoundly worrying—as spotlighted, for example, by the work of the Global Footprint Network, one of Volans’ Phoenix 50 organisations .
Still, WED brings some happy memories to mind: seventeen years later, on World Environment Day 1989, John Elkington and Julia Hailes were elected to the UN Global 500 Roll of Honour for their work with SustainAbility, founded in 1987, and the green consumer agenda, with The Green Consumer Guide first published in 1988. Around the same time, too, John served on the International Board of Earth Day 1990, the first to reach beyond the USA and go global.
Earlier this year, during the Business for the Environment (B4E) summit in Paris, John took part in the ceremony in Paris where UNEP announced the latest round of Champions of the Earth, the successor to the Global 500, where people like Yann Arthus-Bertrand and Janine Benyus were celebrated.
Champions of the Earth, 2009: Yann Arthus-Bertrand and Janine Benyus
Over more than 25 years, years John has worked a good deal with UNEP, for example helping them with 1984’s World Industry Conference on Environmental Management (WICEM), where he coined the term environmental excellence—which has since enjoyed a long and successful run. From the early 1990s to date, UNEP has been a consistent partner in work SustainAbility has done on stakeholder engagement, sustainability reporting and supply chain management—and, in the past year, in work done by Volans which resulted in The Phoenix Economy. We are now in negotiation in terms of a significant extension of that work, whose details we hope to be able to announce soon.
Commemorated yearly on June 5th, WED sees the United Nations spotlighting efforts to boost worldwide awareness of the environment and encourage political attention and action. The agenda is to:
· Give a human face to environmental issues;
· Empower people to become active agents of sustainable and equitable development;
· Promote an understanding that communities are pivotal to changing attitudes towards environmental issues;
· Advocate partnership which will ensure all nations and peoples enjoy a safer and more prosperous future.
Climate change is the overarching theme this year, reflecting the urgency for nations to agree on a new deal at the crucial climate convention meeting in Copenhagen some 180 days from now, plus the links with overcoming poverty and improved management of forests. And this is an area where Volans, in the wake of our participation in the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen, is also now working up an exciting pair of projects, to be announced during the summer.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/06/world-environment-day/.
- Sam Lakha