“As young people wake up to the crisis we are facing they will demand more from their parents, their communities, their financial institutions, their religious leader and their elected officials and decisions makers – change will then happen. This is how systems tip”.
| Paul Gilding 2019
History
How do you define who you are, professionally, in a word or two? I ask myself this whenever I have to fill out my immigration form! However, on more serious reflection, if I had to choose one word to define my ‘working life’ – i.e. beyond the personal - it would be ‘activist’.
What is an ‘activist’?
It is more than just active engagement in society, though it is that. It is more than the traditionally defined activism of protest and civil disobedience, though it is also that. It is more than a life lived with a sense of purpose, though it is also that. Activism is acting to change the world around you but doing so with a determination to make an impact. It is not quite ‘whatever it takes’ but it is often framed by that idea in terms of determination, commitment and passion – though in my case, and for most activists, with strict adherence to the principles and practice of non-violence.
It is also a strong belief that, despite often being a small minority up against the dominant world view, you really can make a difference. This belief is best described in every activist’s favourite quote : “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” from Margaret Mead
As I define the term, I’ve pretty much always been an activist and always will be. Whether acting through NGOs, as a social entrepreneur and business owner, as an advisor to global corporations or as a writer and influencer, my approach is clear. I have been determined to make a difference and had sufficient strength of conviction to push boundaries and ignore the fact that I was often up against the dominant world view. In my case, I was sometimes up against the dominant world views in activism as well!
This section overviews my history as an activist by these definitions - not just in the NGO world but also through my writing, speaking and business life.
50 Years of Activism
1970’s - Student Activism | Walker* Press | Anti-Apartheid | Aboriginal Land Rights
1980’s - Builders Labour Federation | Royal Australian Air Force | Nuclear Disarmament
1990’s - Greenpeace | Ecos Corporation
2000’s - Single Bottom Line Sustainability | Scream Crash Boom | Easy Being Green | ReachOut | Cockatoo Chronicles | 1MillionWomen
2010’s - One Degree War Plan | The Great Disruption | Disruptive Consulting | Changing Markets Foundation | ClimateEmergency.com
2020’s - Circular Economy | Methane | Food System Disruption
1970's
My first clear recollection of personal activism is when I joined the Victorian Secondary Students Union in 1972 at the age of 13 and attended my first street protest in Melbourne, Australia. It was a vibrant time in politics and activism, with enormous Vietnam war protests and the election of a reforming Labour government in Australia after 23 years of conservative rule.
I continued on through the 1970’s working on various social questions, including deep involvement with issues around racism, such as chaining myself to the gates of the South African embassy over apartheid, working to support Aboriginal Land rights and living on a remote Aboriginal community in Cape York, Queensland. In hindsight I can see this decade largely defined my activism and my world views – even if at times they became defined by contrast to what I saw and experienced at that time.
1972 - Joined the Victorian Secondary Students Union and became involved in student strikes and street protests in Melbourne over education and student rights issues.
1975 - Having first left school in early 1974 at the age of 15, I returned to school for one year in 1975 at an alternative school ‘ERA’, where I co-ran the school newsletter. This role taught me a great deal about the power of words and communications, when my fellow students and I ran a successful campaign to get the headmaster removed!
1974-1977 - Lived and worked at Walker* Press, a printing coop established by my brother Jack Gilding and Sue Hawke (daughter of the later to be Prime Minister Bob Hawke). In this era, before computers and printers, the ability to print leaflets and posters was critical and Walker* Press became a central hub for many activist groups as well as housing a number of them including key players in the anti-apartheid movement. During these years I was involved in many social issues including Aboriginal Land Rights, anti-apartheid campaigns, massive protests against uranium mining, the invasion of East Timor, the sacking of the Whitlam government in 1975 and then many protests against the perpetrator, the Governor General John Kerr. Some of these protests became pitched street battles with the police. For a time I was the Coordinator for the Campaign Against Mining Aboriginal Land.
I then moved to Canberra where I worked at the Australian Council for Overseas Aid – the umbrella organisation for aid and development organisations. This gave me considerable exposure to these issues and particularly the historical impacts of colonialism and the ongoing issues around trade and development - perhaps triggering my fascination with economics as a social change question. I became very active in the anti-apartheid movement in Canberra where a local branch of the Campaign Against Racial Exploitation (CARE) formed as a very intense group of young activists who undertook powerful direct actions against the South African embassy in Canberra. This was my first personal direct action when I chained myself the gates of the embassy.1977-1979 - This period saw various levels of further involvement with Aboriginal issues but now largely in North Queensland. I first travelled there with one of my key mentors, Lyndon Shea, visiting Palm Island Aboriginal community and then staying on in Cairns. While there, I volunteered at the North Queensland Land Council (NQLC), living with the family of Mick and Barbara Miller, who founded the NQLC. I then lived at Mapoon on Cape York – an Aboriginal community that had been thrown off their land in 1960s for mining company CRA (later Rio Tinto). Living there I learnt a great deal about Aboriginal culture and history – and how to fish and hunt – including wild pigs! Key influencers on me at this time included Mick Miller, Barbara Miller, Clarrie Grogan and Shorty O’Neil.
Mentor - Lyndon Shea
A key influencer and mentor of my political education and development as an activist – especially on Aboriginal issues - was Lyndon Shea who passed away in 2012. Lyndon instilled in me the risks in taking a narrow ideological view of the world and the enormous importance of working across sectoral and issue boundaries. His personal influence on issues around mining and Aboriginal issues was very significant, as well summarised here by Aboriginal leader Marcia Langton.
1980's
After the birth of my first child Callan in 1979 and a move back to Sydney, life of course changed – with earning an income become rather more critical! After various labouring roles, I settled on work as a builders’ labourer. The activist in me soon took over and I became a union organiser with the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF). I was also engaged in broader issues around Australian independence from both US and Soviet superpower influence, via the Australian Independence Movement. This movement celebrated Australian bushranger history as resistance to authoritarianism and argued that the Aboriginal people fought a powerful resistance to white invasion – vs the dominant view that it was a passive massacre.
After being hit by a car on a union picket line and suffering a back injury, I moved to Western Australia with my first wife for the birth of our second child Asher in 1982. It started a long period out of work in the middle of a recession – it also not being easy to get a labouring job as a former Union Organiser! Sustained unemployment gave me very useful insights into the importance of work for people’s self esteem .
1983-1986 - After 18 months unemployed, I joined the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). The combination of disaffection with ideology - and the reality of having two kids and living on welfare – made it seem like getting a trade and having an income would be an excellent idea. I trained as an instrument fitter, and then specialised in being a flight simulator technician based in Richmond near Sydney. This process was very useful to rebuilding my confidence after unemployment.
I was very comfortable in the RAAF, but it was heady times in the outside world. It was the height of the cold war and there was a widespread sense of nuclear war being likely – even if by accident or miscalculation. As a result there was a strong global anti-nuclear weapons movement – sometimes called the Peace Movement. While obviously I was not a pacifist, I was very much opposed to the spread of nuclear weapons. Given I was living on a military base that was the staging post for supply aircraft to the key US military facility in Australia at Pine Gap, it was hard to ignore my connection!1985 - In 1985, I made contact with a member of an anti-nuclear group, Peace and Nuclear Disarmament Action (PANDA), a group formed by former Nuclear Disarmament Party activists, including musician Peter Garrett. Peter and I become close friends over the years to come, working together on many campaigns. As an advocacy rather than a protest group, PANDA was low risk in terms of my serving military career. However I soon become more passionate about these issues and joined the Sydney Peace Squadron – a direct action, civil disobedience group that organised water based protests against visiting nuclear armed warships from our allies the USA and the UK.
1986 - This was the period when I spent my weekdays as a military serviceman and my weekends involved in civil disobedience protests! This was clearly not a career enhancing approach for a serving member of the military and it led to a mutually agreed departure from the RAAF in August 1986 and my return to full time activism.
1986-1988 - As well as being where I met Michelle, now my wife of 33 years, this period strongly defined my activism and locked in a deep belief in the power of peaceful civil disobedience and protest. The Sydney Peace Squadron was an amazing group of people with consensus based decision making and a strong commitment to peaceful but powerful direct action protests. Their basic objective was to stop nuclear weapons being on Australian territory as part of a wider global campaign against nuclear weapons. Driving small inflatable boats in front of gigantic nuclear armed warships and aircraft carriers, in a cat and mouse game with the police, watched on by the media from boats and helicopters with the magnificent background of Sydney Harbour certainly gave me a sense of purpose and impact.
After several years in these direct-action protests, and living with Michelle, we co-founded The Intercept Foundation with our activist colleagues Jim Dixon and Margaret Boyes. We did quite sophisticated research and published papers on the defence policy and safety implications of nuclear weapons being present in Australian waters.
As a natural progression I then went to work for Senator Irena Dunn in the National Parliament Canberra. Dunn had been on the Nuclear Disarmament Party ticket in the previous election and was promoted to the Senate after her predecessor Robert Wood was disqualified on legal grounds. Her focus was very much on promoting activism and profile for the issues, so as her Chief of Staff, I also travelled the country helping to coordinate anti-nuclear groups via the Warships Initiative Network. Perhaps more than anything else though, my experience of working in the National Parliament was that elected politics would never be my chosen path!
1989 - Having worked with Peter Garrett on the nuclear warships’ campaigns, we had developed a strong relationship around activism. In 1989 Peter initiated a process, which I supported, to establish the National Save Jervis Bay campaign. Jervis Bay south of Sydney was an extraordinarily beautiful and ecologically significant bay that was of critical importance to the local Aboriginal community. It had been saved from over-development by the strong activism of local environmental groups and the Aboriginal community, aided by the presence of a number of military facilities including a bombing range. This was all now threatened though by a proposal to move the East Coast Fleet base for the Australian Navy to Jervis Bay which would require massive construction and dredging.
At the first meeting of the various local and national groups involved in this issue, held at the offices of Peter’s rock band, Midnight Oil, a national coalition was formed and I was appointed National Coordinator and worked out of the Midnight Oil office. We needed to get the issues on the national stage and with my history in direct action I proposed taking such an approach. So, in 1989 we hid a number of activists on Beecroft Peninsula – a live fire bombing range for the Australian military – just as they were about to hold a joint live fire exercise with the Australian, US and NZ navies. Despite all the fire power and military aircraft available, they were unable to locate our people. After days of humiliating media coverage – orchestrated by my wife Michelle - the exercise was cancelled, and our issue was established on the national stage. I then moved to Greenpeace but with Garrett’s determined leadership and strong campaigning by local and national activists, success came a few years later with the plans to relocate the navy being cancelled and Jervis Bay was declared a nature reserve.
Sydney Peace Squadron protesting the arrival of US Guided Missile Frigates - the USS Reid and the USS Brooke.
1990's
In 1992 I was appointed as the global head of Greenpeace - probably the ultimate role for an activist. This was partly because of its global influence, but it was more than that. Deeply defined by its principles of non-violence and independence, Greenpeace had, since the 1970’s, come to symbolise to the broader public what ‘activism’ was. It meant putting yourself on the line, often physically, to demand a stop to destructive behaviour and to communicate the absolute and real possibility of profound and lasting change. I have been involved in many forms of activism since – including publicly supporting new players in civil disobedience like Extinction Rebellion. But I will remain forever particularly grateful and proud of the time I worked at Greenpeace.
1989-1994- I joined Greenpeace Australia in November 1989 as the Coordinator of the Toxics Campaign. For an activist schooled in voluntary activism with no resources, Greenpeace was like the proverbial “kid in a candy store” Not only did you get paid a modest salary – in itself remarkable – but they had action departments with loads of gear, a media department with amazing connections and credibility, and a global network.
1990 - As the Toxics Campaign Coordinator I led the Clean Water Clean Seas Campaign, which involved plugging up the discharge pipes of 'corporate bad guys’ and a 6 month tour with the boat Redbill and visits by the Rainbow Warrior. This created massive media coverage and I did literally 100’s of media interviews. In mid 1990 I was appointed the Executive Director of Greenpeace Australia.
1992 - I was appointed Greenpeace International Executive Director and moved with Michelle and my two boys to Amsterdam in January 1993. I was appointed to this role with a clear and publicly communicated belief that markets were a powerful vehicle for social change and that to achieve this we should sometimes work with the better companies while still strongly going after the more recalcitrant ones.
1994 - I was stood down as Executive Director of Greenpeace International after disagreeing with the Board about various reforms I was arguing for, including some controversy about its self perception as “anti-corporate”. I argued that Greenpeace should oppose bad environmental behaviour , not an institutional structure, and that some forward-thinking companies could be agents of change. While my departure was painful at the time, Greenpeace was a wonderful teacher. It opened my eyes to limitless possibilities as well as making me a global citizen. Greenpeace is both its own phenomenon and has been the home for thousands of courageous campaigners and their ground-breaking activism for over five decades. I’m very proud of my time there.
1995 - After leaving Greenpeace I got to test my theory of whether businesses and more broadly the market, could be used to drive social change. To understand business, I needed to be in business, so formed my own company Ecos Corporation. Ecos consulted to major businesses around the world, driving change by creating value for business through sustainability. While not seen as ‘activism’ by some, I believed this was the most substantial way I could next personally contribute to the social change I was passionate about. This was my new activism.
2000's
The turn of the new millennium saw issues that I had been working on for decades, start to also emerge in boardrooms, newsrooms and politics across the globe. Issues like climate change, overconsumption of resources, unsustainable economic growth and inequality were becoming issues of increasing concern for everyone. I continued to use my businesses and increasingly my writing, to draw further attention to these issues and the type of transformational change that would be required to truly address them.
1995 - 2008- My first company Ecos Corporation operated as a successful business for 13 years. We built a team of twenty incredibly committed and skilled professionals working around the world advising companies on how to see sustainability issues as market forces and therefore integrating them into business strategy. We helped our clients get ready for what was coming, while learning a great deal about how companies change - and why often they don’t. We stayed focused on our purpose, enjoyed ourselves, earned a living and did some good.
2002 - Saw the release of our ground breaking report, Single Bottom Line Sustainability. The paper caused quite a stir in the corporate sustainability community around the world as it went against the then focus for corporate responsibility on the ‘triple bottom line’ - a phrase coined by my good friend and one of the world’s outstanding corporate sustainability pioneers John Elkington. The triple bottom line meant that companies should deliver and report on social and environmental performance as well as profits. Don Reed, Murray Hogarth and I argued in our report that companies should take only those actions in sustainability that delivered definable financial benefit to the company - as unless these actions delivered value, companies would not continue with them. We argued that to drive sustained action on sustainability, action had to deliver measurable financial reward for the companies involved and if it didn’t then it was the role of policy maker to change the rules so it did.
2005 - To mark the 10 year anniversary of Ecos, I penned a letter to colleagues, clients and anyone else who’d listen, titled Scream Crash Boom. In this I argued it was now inevitable there would be a crash of the global ecosystem but that the resulting economic and social crises would then drive a new industrial revolution and radical economic transformation. Over the months that followed, I received hundreds of responses from around the world as it spread virally to thousands of people. It had clearly struck a chord, with responses from CEOs to government ministers to grassroots activists and invitations to speak with business executives at corporate retreats, activists, policy makers and university seminars.
While I had many reactions of agreement, I also had many that thought I was exaggerating the threat as a shock tactic to get people to respond more urgently. I took this response seriously and went back again and again to challenge myself: Was it really this serious, was I getting carried away with the emotion of it all? And if I was convinced, what was the right thing for me to do? Run away to a far flung corner of the world with my wife and kids and grow vegetables? I concluded that given who I was and what my skills were, I needed to fully acknowledge the challenging times and inevitable suffering ahead, but stay focused and determined to move forward and past this - and convince others to do so too.
2005-2007 - Easy Being Green was acquired by Ecos in 2005. This innovative company had been founded by Nic Frances in Melbourne but was on the verge of going out of business. Working with Nic and his co-founders, the Ecos team applied all we’d learnt about business strategy and turned the business around. Together we broke new ground globally using carbon trading to drive mass consumer action on energy efficiency. I served as CEO and helped build a team of more than 200 passionate people who delivered energy efficiency products into over 600,000 households. In doing so we achieved 4,300,000 tonnes of CO2 reductions and helped established domestic energy efficiency as a mainstream consumer and policy priority opportunity in Australia. Easy Being Green’s operations were suspended in November 2007 when the NSW State carbon price collapsed and the company was sold. This also led to the sale of Ecos Corporation because of Easy Being Green related debt. Although these businesses failed by traditional criteria, they were great successes in social entrepreneurship, dramatically breaking new ground and showing the way for many other businesses to follow. The example of Easy Being Green’s success led to much stronger State and Federal government programs in energy efficiency, including for low income households.
2007 - My friend Jack Health had an idea on how we could use the internet to connect with young people in the 14 to 25 age group who needed mental health support. Driven by the tragic loss of young people close to him, he presented the idea to myself and to our friend and McKinsey consulting partner, Michael Rennie, and asked for our backing. In 1997 the Inspire Foundation, now known as ReachOut Australia, was established by Jack to harness the potential of the internet, becoming the world’s first online mental health service for young people. I served as Chairman for some years. Today, ReachOut is accessed by more than 2 million people each year, it is the most accessed online mental health service for young people and their parents in Australia.
2008 - By early 2008, it was clear to me that the ‘Crash’ I spoke of in Scream Crash Boom, was no longer a forecast but actually under way. As a result, I got to work on my follow-up, this one called ‘The Great Disruption’. The response was very strong as, unlike my 2005 letter, this time people could feel something was wrong. There was a sense that the world was facing a serious, destabilizing period. While the financial and economic consequences were yet to unfold and the mainstream market had yet to feel any substantial effects, there was sufficient evidence— for those wanting to see it— that something was deeply wrong. The responses, even from corporate leaders, generally acknowledged the system was shaking, that there were now risks that could bring it all down. The strong response, combined with my continued observations of system collapse all around us, inspired me to pen a regular blog called the Cockatoo Chronicles - with the hope of drawing attention to the radical intervention required.
2009 - In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis and its fiscal recovery, my thesis, that what the world and economy needed, was businesses that could make make money by being ‘sustainable’, was becoming increasingly evident. Contrary to the popular belief that the GFC would side-line sustainability, I argued that the exploitation of resources for profit, at the expense of the planet and its people was a recipe for a collapse - and that the ‘economy’ was not stupid enough to let this happen. My thoughts on Sustainability and the Global Financial Crisis were published in WME magazine.
2009 - With the support of my wife, Michelle, Natalie Isaacs a mum of four and close family friend founded the I Million Women campaign. I joined as a founding Director, along with my Ecos colleague Murray Hogarth. Driven by frustration at the lack of action on climate by the men in politics in Australia, Natalie realised her best response was to do something concrete and practical. Women are in influential positions both at home and in the workplace, they make 70 percent of consumer decisions in the house hold. The campaign realised that emissions could be reduced by 1 million tonnes if just one million women across Australia could commit to reducing just one tonne, by taking simple easy steps, saving money and feeling good. It took 1 Million Women just a year to have one of the highest membership numbers of environmental organizations in Australia. In 2019 1MW celebrated their 10 year anniversary, it is now a movement of over 950,000+ women and girls (and growing everyday). I’ve written about 1MW here.
2010's
My activism in the 2010’s focused on writing and speaking about the looming climate emergency and how it would transform the global economy. I argued in book The Great Disruption that we faced a broader system wide ecological and social crisis with our model of economic growth, but that it was the climate issue that would hit first and hardest. Throughout the 2010s, a steady drumbeat of every more urgent scientific reports started to breakthrough the resistance, particularly the IPCC’s 5th assessment report in 2014 and then the IPCC 1.5 degree report in 2018. The Paris Agreement two years later was widely acclaimed as the world waking up to the threat and deciding to act, but it was clear this was not the case given we were on track for 3-5 degrees or warming - a level that posed an existential threat to human civilisation. Truly addressing this would be a herculean task; requiring radical and disruptive, economy transforming action - commensurate to the economic mobilisation of WWII but at a global scale and for longer. I’d been arguing the inevitability of this since 2005 and had been researching, advising on and writing about it since.
2010 - In an effort to convince the world that limiting warming was possible AND could be good for the economy my friend and colleague Jorgen Randers and I wrote The One Degree War Plan. This was Jorgen and my rational response to the threat posed by climate change – a response that would require the world to come together and mobilise like it had before in war time, doing whatever was necessary to prevent dangerous climate change and the resulting collapse of the global economy and potential collapse of civilisation. This paper was first published in the academic journal, the “Journal of Global Responsibility”.
2010 -2011 - My Great Disruption Letter was picked up by acclaimed Pullitzer Prize winning journalist Tom Friedman in the New York Times . The attention his article and my thesis then received, triggered an invitation from Bloomsbury Publishing to write a book on the subject. This allowed me to expand on the argument and collect the evidence necessary to establish my case with a broader global audience. The Great Disruption was then released around the world to wide acclaim in 2011, giving me a credible global platform to drive impactful change.
2010 - Carbon Induced Financial Disruption This paper, written with Phil Preston an experienced financial professional, argued that the inevitable market response to climate risk posed the threat of global financial disruption, including the collapse in value of some of the world’s largest companies.
2012 -I wrote The Mother of All Conflicts which was published in the Brown Journal of World Affairs. This paper examined why the military and security establishments should see climate change as the defining threat to global stability in the twenty-first century.
2015 - Along with Chris Hope and Jimena Alvarez I wrote an analysis Quantifying the Implicit Climate Subsidy Received by Leading Fossil Fuel Companies for the Cambridge Judge Business School. This paper examines how implicit subsidies provided to fossil fuel companies may misrepresent their profitability and as a result increase their exposure to climate risk. In 2015 Disruptive Consulting was also formed with my business partner and long term friend Joakim Bergman - supporting sustainability leaders to disrupt and transform their own markets.
2016 - Pursuing the climate emergency focus, I became a contributor for Breakthrough - National Centre for Climate Restoration. Breakthough is an independent think tank that develops critical thought leadership on how to deliver safe climate restoration. Through Breakthrough I have published War - What is it good for? in 2016; Climate Emergency Defined in 2019 and Climate Contagion 2020-2025 in 2020.
2017 - Using the resources we had built with our company Disruptive Consulting and other business activities, myself and Joakim Bergman co-founded the Changing Markets Foundation to create campaigns and support the campaigns of other NGOs to shift market share away from unsustainable products and companies, towards environmentally and socially beneficial solutions. This was an acknowledgement that creative entrepreneurial companies with solutions still needed successful NGO campaigns to drive the social change such companies needed for commercial success.
2019 was the year that the Climate Emergency went main stream. Extinction Rebellion stopped traffic in London, millions of people across the globe took part in climate strikes, hundreds of regions signed climate emergency declarations, bushfires, hurricanes, floods and droughts destroyed communities and livelihoods and Greta Thunberg delivered stern and cutting warnings to politicians across the globe on behalf of the generation who would bare the brunt of decades of denial, neglect and inaction on climate change. Despite the noise, action at the scale required was nowhere evident. Many clients and colleagues were asking what a climate emergency really meant in terms of action. So together with my friend and colleague Emily Cracknell we created the report Climate Emergency Defined and the website ClimateEmergency.com to answer these questions.
2019 was also the year, the ‘new kids in town’ of global activism did a far better job of grabbing the attention of the world than any environment group that has previously tried. Excited by their enthusiasm and success I made a small contribution by advising and writing for both Extinction Rebellion and The Climate Mobilisation.
2020's
This decade began with a firm reminder of the reality of our global context. We live in a highly stressed and unstable economic and social system which is prone to shocks, inherently lacks resilience and faces a number of systemic risks. Despite this being clear for some time, we spent the 2010’s barrelling ahead with more of the same. Despite the overwhelming evidence that it is wrong, we pursued the “growth will fix everything” mantra. Then COVID-19 hit and we were forced to stop and think. The weaknesses in our system - varying significantly by country - were exposed for all to see. There are many lessons we may or may not learn, but the clearest one for me is that being rich doesn’t protect you from systemic risks. Indeed some of the world’s richest countries, notably the USA, fared the worst. And thus we have a macro example of the problem. At the personal and at the global system level, if you focus on economic growth and wealth, in simple monetary terms, you ignore the most profound lesson of history. Money doesn’t make you happy. Wealth doesn’t protect you from systemic risks. We are all in this together.
As I argued in The Great Disruption, the problem we have is that our economic system doesn’t work - after basic needs are met - at making our lives better. Then add on that the current system is also destroying the ecosystem - on which our economy and our social resilience depends - and the problem is clear. Yet despite many decades of this knowledge, nothing has profoundly changed. Thus my conclusion in the book stands. Until we face - and acknowledge that we face - an existential crisis, we will not change. So all the work today is not really to “fix it” but rather to get us ready for when that moment arrives. So we can then move at the extraordinary speed and scale we will then need to.
So what am I now doing ? How am I contributing, given this conclusion that we have to build momentum across a complex interconnected system to have the critical mass we need to tip into the radical and transformative action we now need? You can see more detail in the Current Activities section of this site, but in summary in this decade I’m continuing my efforts to intervene broadly across the system into as many sectors and points of influence as I can.
I’m still very much writing, seeking to interpret global events in the broader context that I see very clearly. I do this primarily via Cockatoo Chronicles with a good example this article “It Will Get Darker Before the Dawn” which tries to put the pandemic in this broader context.
My advisory work remains active, I sit on various corporate advisory boards and also work, through my main advisory business, Disruptive Consulting, with top business leaders on their personal and corporate strategies to drive transformational change and disruptive business success. I continue to believe that the market will be a critical avenue for social change and what’s more that it is on the edge of doing so, as I argued in this paper Climate Contagion.
I’m also still teaching and researching as a Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s CISL and working actively with a research fellow we finance there to develop the academic rigour around radical and disruptive economic change. I argue this change will primarily be delivered by new disruptive companies rather than the incumbent businesses and that economic history shows this to be the case.
With the resources generated from my various historical and still ongoing business and investment activities, I’m a co-founder and director of Changing Markets Foundation based in the Netherlands and UK, which supports market focused NGO campaigns designed to accelerate disruptive change across the economy.
Now in my 60’s I’m also making sure I have an enjoyable as well as impactful life. I’m living with my family in a rural area of southern Tasmania. We live on a farm which is linked to our local enterprise, Port Cygnet Cannery, which promotes food and agriculture to young people, locals and visitors and by doing so promotes local resilience and economic development that is built on the European history of the region. So I get to think about the future of the world while enjoying cold beer, beautiful pizza and having amazing plant based fine dining experiences based on the output of our farm.
With my objective to ‘lead a life well lived’, I think I’m doing OK.