March 18, 2020
Keeping the Spotlight on Palm Oil
It feels, in these COVID times, as if literally everything is shifting from what once seemed like a ‘steady state’ to disintegrating chaos. With so much up in the air, is there…
May 22, 2019
Memo to Conservation CEOs: The Population Countdown Starts Here!
Today (22nd May) is the International Day for Biological Diversity – which I want to celebrate in the following way. You know those clocks that you see on websites like Population…
December 20, 2018
Paul Polman: Role Model for Today and Tomorrow
There are few positions in society more rarified than that of a FTSE 100 CEO. The financial rewards are staggering, and out of all proportion to the task in hand, however…
July 26, 2018
Staying Sane in a Stressed-Out World
A good friend of mine emailed me recently to tell me that ‘burnout’ felt imminent, and that she was intent on doing something about it before it was too late. This has become an…
October 24, 2017
Why Sheffield’s Trees Matter – to All of Us!
I’ve had a really odd summer – with a knee replacement operation that went badly wrong. And this somehow blocked my creative juices, both in terms of campaigning stuff and…
July 6, 2017
When Will Environmental NGOs Step Up to Help Some of the World’s Poorest People?
Through the partnership that Forum for the Future has with Sime Darby (the world’s largest palm oil company), I visited Liberia back in May. To see some of their ongoing…
May 22, 2017
The Campaign to Save Wicklesham Quarry: Now or Never
When I was Director of Friends of the Earth, many, many years ago, I picked up a lot of knowledge from someone called Andrew Lees, who died, tragically, out in Madagascar in 1994.…
April 27, 2017
Why the Wonderful Wendell Berry Should Still be on Your Reading List!
I’m just reading ‘Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist’, Paul Kingsnorth’s collection of essays written over the last 15 years or so. It’s a good read – and very…
March 1, 2017
Sustainable Development Still the Only Big, BIG Idea Worth Bothering About
Eighteen months ago, leaders of nearly 200 nations meeting at the United Nations agreed a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to guide their governments – and people…
February 10, 2017
Better Business, Better World – but Better for Whom?
So what exactly is the appetite for ‘reinventing capitalism’ – amongst capitalists, rather than amongst campaigners? A very interesting new report has just been published that…