Learning on Staycation
Learning wherever you travel. Climate Tech. Philanthropy and cause areas. My conversation with Kana Chan, who is living in a zero waste village in rural Japan.
I’m on staycation but managed to put out my conversation with Kana Chan, who is living in a zero waste village in rural Japan. I gain a fascinating glimpse into her life. Check out the podcast/transcript.
You are still invited to come to the UnConference on Sep 16. Do come!
This week I had thoughts on finding art and appreciation wherever and however you travel. I put together some thinking on what might make a new cause area for Open Philanthropy (an Effective Altruism aligned foundation). I made a small poem. I reflected on climate and the success/failure of progressive climate movement.
Sustainability Accelerator UnConference on Sep 16 on the long-term. I’m co-hosting this and if you are interested in the future of humanity, you should come. London, Chatham House. Register here.
Climate: Roger Pielke takes a skeptical look at the IRA and US decarbonisation;
Climate Tech VC (Sophie Purdom) looks at IRA and climate investment opportunities
I reflect on Westgate, art, waiting for mythical trains; I respond to Rishi Dastidar’s poem
I reflect on what a progressive large tent might be
Open Philanthropy, and why I looked into cause areas
Story telling jobs: leading Storytelling Institute London (link end), looks great role for a creative to move into impact; also Long Now, SF, great roles.
My podcast with Kana Chan on living in a rural “zero waste” village in Japan
Links (end): Start-ups looking for investment (off-grid solar), UK energy costs, social impact study, octopus intelligence, AI and protein folding, Long Now jobs.
On travelling and learning. I travelled a lot in my childhood, teens and 20s. Visiting around 40 to 50 countries before I was 25, and every continent bar Antarctica and Australia. While in particular my trip to visit the remote Wana tribe in Indonesia was one of the most adventurous (link here to part of it) I think I learned new aspects of humanity and myself on every single trip. I still recommend travel (as my parents did to me) as a way of learning.
This past decade my travel has been much closer to home. This was unplanned. I think I expected to have family adventures as I had when young. But seeing England (and Wales and Scotland) though a different lens I still feel I learned a lot. This summer, we spent a few days at Westgate-on-sea. This is a 10 - 15 minute bike ride away from Margate, on the Kent coast in East England, but already at such a short distance the character is different. Margate in the height of summer has a frenetic energy about it. A mix of families, partying youth (and those who think themselves young; also too much drink), a creative regeneration (anchored by its art gallery), an old school theme park (Dreamland with a 100+ year old roller coaster), fish and chip shops, aspiring restauranteurs and host to all types of festivals from folk to reggae. Westgate is sleepy in comparison.
Another aspect of staycation and following an autism interest is that holidays are quite tiring. There is little lounging about a beach reading a novel which made up a small part of my 20s travel. I don't even have much time to hunt for shells on the beaches I do get to now. (Shells we collected on the beaches of Sri Lanka went into the first engagement ring I made for my wife).
That I made with my own hands from a cedar of Lebanon that lived in the grounds of Salisbury Cathedral until it was blown down in a storm, and a shell we collected from the beaches of east Sri Lanka.
This 2008 blog from the days of generation blog 1.0!
This holiday, I’ve been hanging around train platforms waiting for mythical trains (mythical as this train we are waiting for is mostly not in service any more). Still - as I’ve recounted in previous blogs - there is always something to find or learn or admire if you look.
Art around Liverpool St Station. JP calls the garden above Liverpool St Station a sky garden, with flower fields. It has running water and patches of lawn. Good for lounging on. Or, if you are us, cartwheels and rolling. We are often hanging out here, so I visit Richard Serra’s sculpture Fulcrum often.
Fulcrum is made of self-weathering Cor-ten steel and is spot welded. I spent quite a few hours (OK, probably hundreds of hours, all told) in the Carpenter Center (mostly designed by Le Corbusier) for the Visual Arts at Harvard. In a light filled concrete room, I learned to spot weld and think about sculpture. And so I have a fondness for welded objects, especially free standing ones. I’ve seen Serra’s sculpture in Bilbao (in Northern Spain cf. to travel is to learn) and so passing by Fulcrum so often reminds me of Spain (the pinxtos, the Matter of Time exhibition), my time learning something of the language and story of art. Fulcrum stretching out high and monumental echoes the ambition of the development around Liverpool Street Station and to my mind some echo of the ambition of the “City” of London financial centre of its influence on the world.
In the station, I often snatch a few seconds - before JP saunters off - at the Kindertransport sculpture. It commemorates the 10,000 orphaned Jewish children who escaped Nazi persecution and arrived at the station during 1938–1939.
It reminds me that our history has at times welcomed immigrants. I, the son of immigrants.
The last sculpture I tend to pass is the Venus of Broadgate. This is in the sky garden that JP likes.
I prefer Fulcrum as it resonates with my personal travels and experiences but this Venus in her oversized glory does fill her corner.
I received a postcard poem from my poet friend Rishi Dastidar. Below.
I’ve replied (thinking of the Serpentive Pavillion, see thread above).
Outside a building that’s outside-in
I’m hiding in plain sight
There’s space for art but no art
Outside a building that’s outside-in
Hiding in plain sight
Perhaps - we echo the Japanese and Chinese poets who would write each other back and forth. We know from Sei Shonagan and others that the quality of writing was a much admired trait in Japanese Heian times (794 - 1185). I doubt my poetry is as great as Shonagon’s but its pleasing to riff on a tradition over a 1000 years old as a reflection on being human.
In climate and ESG world: I note Sophie Purdom and Climate Tech VC have looked at what the new US bill has possibly in store for climate related funding.
Roger Pielke jr is more skeptical on what the bill has to offer in terms of increased US decarbonisation.
McKinsey’s have a piece looking at ESG. Nothing new for ESG folk and I’d suggest that there are items that ESG folk might disagree with. But they are one of the leading corporate consultancies. They argue for a social license amongst other items.
“Although valid questions have been raised about ESG, the need for companies to understand and address their externalities is likely to become essential to maintaining their social license…. Companies must approach externalities as a core strategic challenge, not only to help future-proof their organizations but to deliver meaningful impact over the long term.”
Hugh Wheelan has written a defence of ESG in Responsible Investor. Such an article needs to be in an outlet like the Economist really - the article answers the Economist critique, but only to the converted choir.
(I’m guessing along with most jobbing portfolio managers of all investment beliefs) I am grappling with the multitude of challenging factors: energy crisis/prices now and coming; inflation with no consensus over causes (balance between supply or demand factors) or future pathway; likely recession coming in some form; China-US tensions; ongoing war; and on and on…
Amongst this, I have been pondering the “progressive tent” or the “climate tent”. Is there a coalition that can cover the range from de-growth to techno-optimists?
Can the ESG movement cover the range between the likes of Tariq Fancy, Stuart Kirk and Ken Pucker - who all have criticisms and who represent genuine stakeholder opinions - is the range wider between AOC and Manchin than it is between say Yang (who has formed a centrist US party) and Trump ? I’m unsure, but I do hear that the greatest legitimacy for the movement is to carry a large tent.
I ended up writing up my notes on thinking about cause areas for Open Philanthropy (OP). If you are interested in “impact”, I think OP is worth pondering.
Short philanthropy background. In modern history, I trace back a certain philanthropic philosophy to the time of Rockefeller and his foundation created around 1913 (also note Kresge, 1924, Duke 1924). In Europe you had Wellcome Trust (pharma, 1936) and the Wallenburg’s (industrials, 1917) shortly after. You then in the US had Ford (cars), Lilly (pharma), Kellogg (cereals) in the 1930s. Through the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, there was an industrialist builder mentality, I judge.
[I’d like to note Novo, Wellcome, Lilly (which are top 10 global Foundations for wealth and giving) all have biopharmaceutical roots.]
Then in 1994, Bill and Melinda Gates (now she goes by French Gates) founded their foundation. This starts an era of tech tinged philanthropy. The Gates Foundation attracted many other billionaires (in particular, to my mind, Warren Buffet).
More recently we’ve had the potential advent of a crypto tinged flavour of philanthropy, and of Effective Altruism (EA) minded giving.
Nadia Asparouhova discusses this in her essay and my podcast. See:
The foundations have a flavour of how its founders made their money and how they think.
From the EA school of thinking, Open Philanthropy (which is EA influenced and has Cari Tuna, Dustin Moskovitz among its founders) and more recently FTX Future Fund are significant organizations. I believe having a plurality of giving and impact ideas is desirable. It is great to potentially go beyond or, at least, in a different direction to Gates (I would also have nod here to Mackenzie Scott formerly Bezos, who I also think has done a different fast type of giving recently).
OP and EA in general are very open to critiques and ideas that they have missed and so recently had an open call out for funding ideas, or new cause areas. I think this was very under-advertised except if you are adjacent to EA communities. I thought I would try and think in the mind of an EA-aligned impact philanthropist and write up some ideas. OP looks for a 1000x return and 3 broad principles using the ITN framework this is the importance, tractability and neglectedness framework, or ITN framework for short.
ITN is a framework for estimating the value of allocating marginal resources to solving a problem based on its importance, tractability, and neglectedness.
Importance: How many individuals are affected by this problem, and by how much?
Tractability: How can a philanthropic funder help to make progress on this problem? Can you estimate what impact per dollar you would expect for different types of interventions?
Neglectedness: Who else is working on this problem? Why are other funders not pursuing the strategies you think are most promising?
I noted quite a few useful similarities between investing (and indeed some areas of policy, expected utility areas) and cause evaluation. Impact is like “market size or TAM”, neglectedness is related to “is there something the market has missed, an edge, or an externality; also eg, why some investors advocate for “small companies” as they are more neglected than large companies), tractability it related to ease of execution. What can someone do is related to assessing management teams execution ability and strategy.
I judge a fundamental investor (say of 5 years experience, so plenty of time thinking about how to invest) from across the range of assets from VC to public equities could transfer many skills to this type of assessment (and vice versa). While OP end up supporting a few quite quirky areas (due to weight on neglectedness and perhaps around how they weight their expected value calculations), they also end up in the areas of health and development much like Gates does, and Rockefeller before them.
My summary notes:
I view this as a very very shallow investigation into the possible impact of using advanced market commitments (AMC), possibly prizes, for chemical industry transition, climate transition in general, cultured meat, and (large value) public goods in general (I look at sleep/wake cycle productivity, education, and sleep/wake drug development). I mention two meta/other ideas of possible interest on the power of story/art/narrative, and on cohort training for cause evaluation
And if you want to read the 8 page write-up, you can at this link. The whole paper is only if you are interested in this area, but how OP itself thinks is worth checking out as well.
I chat with Kana about living in Japan’s “zero waste” village, Kamikatsu.
I ask Kana about how she arrived in Kamikatsu.
I ask what people should understand or misunderstand, how Kana finds Japanese culture and how it differs between rural and city. What she misses about the city.
What people have learned coming to Kamikatsu, all the farming knowledge she has learned growing and harvesting her own food, and what the process of tea farming (awa bancha) has been like.
Kana explains that zero waste currently means here that 80% of all waste in the village is recycled (in 45 different categories!) and how the villagers manage their waste systems.
We play overrated/underated on toilets that play music, sitting in hot baths and Japan train journeys.
Kana ends on her latest projects and her advice on what can be learned from disconnecting from a culture of convenience.
I think being able to just see a diverse amount of the way people live and seeing how people choose to spend their time, how people choose to spend their money, I think can be just a really enriching experience. And so you have those things to contrast and see, "Oh, that's probably something I can take into my own life or not." I don't think the countryside is necessarily for everyone, but I do think that people can incorporate aspects that bring more nature into their lives or bring more self-sufficiency into their lives and I think a good starting point for that is spending time in the countryside and then being able to see what you can take back to wherever home is for you.
If you do decide to move to the countryside, just changing your frame of mind and seeing the things that are inconveniences as opportunities for you to spend your time in other ways, and disconnecting from a culture of convenience can be just a really personally enriching thing. That's what I've found for myself and so, yeah, I hope everyone gets to spend some time in the countryside; whether it's permanent, temporal, or just transient. If Kamikatsu interests you in particular or sustainability from a countryside perspective, I'd be happy to welcome you here to Kamikatsu
Transcript/video here, podcast below. Podcast available wherever you get podcasts or below.
Links:
UK energy costs are going to be a crisis from this winter into 2023.
Long Now have jobs
One of my plays - Nakamistu - was performed at the Gate Theatre, and now it is moving away from Notting Hill.
Explaining the influence of EA
UK River flows
My Chat with Larry Temkin
Story telling job
Octopus seem intelligent
Ai innovation for protein structure
Social impact study on friendships
Start-ups: Bottles of Hope (BOH) Aviva Community Fund. BOH is fundraising for their pilot of 200 Build Your Solar Lamp Kits, which will directly impact 400 beneficiaries. They wish to harness the passion of Friday for Future marches and create a sustainable climate change awareness scheme whilst impacting those across the world. For every one sold, a solar lamp will be distributed through our project partners in South and East Asia.
Check out: https://www.avivacommunityfund.co.uk/p/bottles-of-hope-build-your-own-solar-lamp-kit
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