Why Green Alliance was 45 years ahead of its time – Inside track

This post is by John Elkington, founder and chief pollinator at the London-based change agency, Volans.

Being ahead of your time can be excruciating. After five decades working on the environmental and sustainability agendas, I know that only too well, and Green Alliance, founded in 1979, is only five years behind me. All of which makes me old enough to remember the dinner, hosted by people like Maurice Ash and Gordon Rattray-Taylor, during which Green Alliance was conceived.

As I recall in Tickling Sharks, a candid memoir of my first half century as some sort of green, Maurice told the Green Alliance launch party that, “We’re a bunch of optimists. We’re not the doomsters.” Still, among other early players was my friend Teddy Goldsmith, founder of The Ecologist magazine, who – on the right day – could out-doomster anybody.

Beat them senselessTeddy was among those who wildly disapproved of what we were doing in the late seventies in launching Environmental Data Services (ENDS). Our aim: to engage businesses to get a sense of, and then influence, how they thought about the environment.

Alongside Greenpeace UK’s director Peter Melchett, Teddy would routinely beat me up, on the grounds that it simply wasn’t worth engaging business. The only way forward, they insisted was to beat companies senseless and then chain them down to ensure they couldn’t offend again. Still, years later, Teddy told me he had changed his mind.

Nigel Haigh, a former chair of Green Alliance, has provided an excellent summary of those early days, driven by directors like Peter Beaumont, Tom Burke and Julie Hill. As I recall in Tickling Sharks, their version of Green Alliance proved a welcome respite from the pushback elsewhere.

Then, as we hacked our way deeper into the business jungle, we collided with the money people. One of my favorite activists on that front was Tessa Tennant, who I first bumped into, literally, when I had to climb over her desk in the tiny Green Alliance office at the time to get to Tom Burke’s space.

Capitalist greensA former executive director of Friends of the Earth, and a co-author with me on books like The Green Capitalists, Tom had taken Tessa under his wing. Just back from the USA, she had understudied Joan Bavaria, a pioneer in responsible investing.

Before long, I was on Tessa’s advisory board at the new Merlin Ecology Fund, the UK’s first green investment fund, alongside Robin Grove-White, who led the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE, the countryside charity), and Nigel Haigh, who led the Institute for European Environmental Policy.

In such ways, and while its founding purpose was to “ensure that the political priorities of the United Kingdom are determined within an ecological perspective,” Green Alliance proved catalytic in accelerating the evolution of green (or, later, sustainable) business.

When we founded SustainAbility in 1987, our strapline was ‘The Green Growth Company’ and our purpose was “to drive change with business, through markets.” Once again, Green Alliance was a key ally. Indeed, it is easy to underestimate how today’s mainstreaming of our agenda tracks back to such early experiments.

Now, as our focus expands from business to the market system, posing a growing existential threat to anyone with strandable assets, the pushback is intensifying. Whether it’s the anti-heat pump folk in Germany, the anti-green farming movement across Europe, or the anti-environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment frenzy in the USA, the counter pressures are growing, and would intensify further under another Trump regime.

It’s the politics, stupidWherever we look, the green agenda is becoming political, and politicised. That was something that, fully 45 years ago, the Green Alliance was founded to catalyse, at least in UK politics. Now, with the new Labour government seeming more open to these challenges and opportunities, it’s not hard to imagine Green Alliance’s influence expanding greatly.

One question exercising us at Volans, meanwhile, is what the role of business should be in shaping tomorrow’s politics. Clearly, the way the Big Tech companies are now bankrolling some parts of American politics reeks to high heaven, to put it mildly, with Trump also energetically courting the fossil fuel industry, promising that he will let it rip, if elected.

So, what should we encourage business leaders to do? One answer: they must urgently review their memberships of trade and industry federations. To model how this is best done, we worked with Unilever on a critical review of the alignment (or misalignment) between the company’s declared climate policy positions and those of the largest federations and associations it belongs to.

Our goal was to show that, using the extraordinary trove of data on industry associations’ climate lobbying, collated by InfluenceMap, it is entirely possible for companies to find out what their associations are doing on their behalf and then pressure them to become advocates for science-based policies.

A suitably hot topic, perhaps, for a future Green Alliance event?

John Elkington co-founded Environmental Data Services (ENDS) in 1978, SustainAbility in 1987 and Volans in 2008, coining terms like “green growth” and “triple bottom line” along the way. He has served on over 80 boards and advisory boards. Tickling Sharks is his twenty first book. His personal website is here.