Some rather troubling news for eco-labels this month with the decision by the Alaskan salmon fishing industry to withdraw from the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) programme. A decade ago, Alaska salmon became the first fishery of serious scale (with due apologies to Western Australian rock lobster and Thames herring) to become MSC certified and supermarket chains dutifully snapped up this welcome sustainable alternative to its tasteless and ecologically devastating farmed cousin.  It was a great moment. Or so we thought.

The reason for the decision to leave, says the industry, is that the process of having the fishery re-certified every five years is too cumbersome and expensive. It cites a 50-year history of responsible management, and claims that there are other ways in which it can demonstrate its product’s sustainability credentials. Importantly, some seafood companies argue that the competitive advantage of certification is waning as more and more products bearing the MSC stamp hit the marketplace.

At first sight, this decision seems totally kamikaze from a commercial point of view.  Just as supermarket plans, some of which I have had a hand in designing, call for 100% certified sustainable seafood by this year or that, one of the flagship products that will them help meet those targets pulls out of the most respected certification programme around. But no industry would be stupid enough to pull out of an eco-labelling system without gauging market reaction first. Would it?

Groups like MSC spend most of their working hours being attacked. The industry complains the standards are too rigorous. Environmentalists scream they are too lax. Retailers seek clarity so they can plan for supply. Governments snooze. Certifications stall for months or even years as objections are filed, conditions are negotiated and political wrangles threaten progress at every turn.  You don’t join the MSC for an easy life, and the Alaska salmon industry (made up of some of America’s largest seafood processors) has clearly decided life in the programme is just too tricky.

In the five years during which I ran the MSC, governance rows and standoffs between conflicting parties (including those who should have been on the same side as each other) started life as irritating squabbles and ended up as one big, giant, monstrous farce. I have still never shared in public the manoeuvring and shenanigans that marked my final year at the MSC, and will not do so for fear of undermining the organisation that gave me my start in the conservation world. It would also embarrass far too many people. No-one, myself included, emerges from it unscathed. It represented the conservation movement at its most self destructive and imbecillic, fuelled by foundations spending other people’s money who should have known far better. It was an ugly period that preserved entrenched prejudices but very few fish.

There is a serious point at stake here. Although anyone at the MSC will anticipate regular tantrums from hard line conservationists and frustrated mutterings from seafood buyers and sellers in a hurry to make a profit, I certainly hadn’t banked on a (relatively) uncontroversial MSC fixture like Alaskan salmon throwing in the towel. In my day we spent hours trying to work out how to kick a fishery out of the programme so Greenpeace and others might stop thinking we were a front for the industry or a Satanic incarnation.  We failed, because there was, at the time, no compelling argument to do so. We did not spend even a second preparing for industry itself to say ‘Enough is enough – we’re leaving’. I suspect the current MSC did not either. It's important to understand that the Alaksa salmon certification is among the least controversial and polarising of all major MSC certifications. That's why we should be taking this development very seriously indeed. This isn't a predictable storming out by a college candidate about to fail their exam.

The worrying thing is this sets a precedent and others may be tempted to follow. There is nothing like safety in numbers. There are even bigger fisheries in the programme with bigger complaints about the insane structures that at times make it impossible for the MSC (and other certification groups) to function effectively. And the reality is that supermarkets need high volume fisheries to supply the products they sell. Alaskan salmon is a better sustainability bet than its rivals any day. With or without a label. This is the calculation they have made. What will a retailer that delists the product replace it with? Greenpeace still refuses to support the Marine Stewardship Council, so that often welcome kick up the backside to the big chains doesn't exist either. A good fishery is refusing to use a label granted to fisheries that everyone knows are a lot worse than Alaska salmon. It's not a sustainable proposition, in this form. 

Some will argue that as more and more MSC products flood the marketplace it won’t matter either way, and the Alaskan salmon industry will look like ignorant and hasty rednecks for withdrawing from the programme. Time will tell. But if others follow, it will prove once and for all that the paralysis and bureaucracy inherent in the MSC’s governance (which was light touch by design until it was hijacked by those more concerned with process than outcome) is a multi million dollar death sentence, administered slowy and painfully. If not for the organisation then for the real issue at hand: sustainable seafood.  I have no doubt that the auditing the Alaska salmon industry says will replace MSC will be inferior to the system used for the last ten years. But I’d be hard pushed to tell a retailer to delist the product just because it didn’t carry the blue stamp of approval. And that is something I never thought I’d say. I’ll be watching other fisheries with great interest. Especially in Alaska.

Conservationists are right to attack bad certifications and stand up to big busines and its lobby groups. But if their gift to the oceans is the mind numbing governance that drives progressive and well managed industries away from the MSC table, it will be a poor legacy indeed. 

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One of the best things about a holiday is the opportunity it provides to tackle that pile of books that has been building up menacingly since the last one. What more appropriate place to read Mark Lynas’s latest book, The God Species, than in the Maldives, given the author’s part time role advising the President of that threatened country on climate change and sustainability. Given the amount of technical information crammed into the book, it’s an easy read, if slightly uncomfortable in that it pulls no punches in challenging some of the sacred cows of large parts of the green movement. I think it’s the most important thing I’ve read for some time, although I can hear the knives of some colleagues being sharpened when I say that, by and large, I find the basic assumptions of the book compelling and its recommendations for the green movement and beyond it equally so.

Lynas didn’t endear himself to many environmentalists when he participated in a Channel 4 documentary, What the Green Movement Got Wrong, just over a year ago. Indeed, it was a pretty poor programme, followed by an even poorer studio debate. I don’t intend to get detained for long by the most polarizing elements of The God Species here; the arguments for and against nuclear power and, similarly, GM technology have been well rehearsed by people more qualified than me. Suffice to say I am not dogmatically for or against either, and I don’t think the planet can afford to rule out anything given its perilous state. That peril is brilliantly articulated in The God Species, making the relatively inaccessible research and views of highly respected scientists readable for those of us unlucky enough not to have been born with scientific brains. It’s high time environmentalists thought like engineers and scientists, not policy campaigners, says Lynas. Reading the numbers, it’s hard to disagree.

Lynas is the first to acknowledge the concept of planetary boundaries is not his own, but he views himself as the transmitter of its tenets. He uses his journalistic flair to do so, to great effect. Reading his polemical prose it struck me as odd that in the discourse about business sustainability, the planetary boundary concept has yet to achieve much traction. Laid out as it is by Lynas, it seems so blindingly obvious.

For those unfamiliar with the approach, it essentially identifies nine key planetary boundaries the world cannot afford to breach. These cover climate change, nitrogen flow, land use, biodiversity, aerosols, ocean acidification, toxics, ozone depletion and freshwater.  For each, the Planetary Boundaries Group of scientists has identified the acceptable limit. For climate change, 350 parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide, an extinction rate of 10 per million species per year, and so on. The calibre of the scientists involved (led by Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and including NASA’s James Hansen) suggests one would either need to be supremely confident or utterly foolhardy to challenge their assumptions too much.

As each problem is laid out, Lynas exposes the idealistic wishful thinking that makes progress in limiting our collective footprint seem like a pipe dream. He freely admits to changing his mind on both GMO and nuclear, and it is soon easy to see why. Indeed, one of his strongest detractors in the Channel 4 debate was George Monbiot, who has of course since changed his mind on nuclear too. There is nothing wrong with changing one’s mind and increasingly history may judge those who refuse to more harshly than than those who have. If it is true that opposition to nuclear power is responsible for a billion extra tonnes of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere, then hardline greens certainly seem to have a lot to answer for.

My interest in the planetary boundaries approach is not in revisiting these old debates, but in what business can do to adopt this commonsense approach when thinking about its own impacts, at both single business and wider sector level. If we accept that the planet can only tolerate so much of a particular destabilizing activity (such as disruption to the nitrogen cycle, black carbon or methane release from the seabed), then it follows that businesses, not just governments, must think in these terms when considering their own activities. The tired old waste and carbon reduction measures won’t really cut the mustard given the challenges we now face. The God Species is one of the best accounts of those challenges produced in recent years.

 Lynas is brutal about the blanket orthodoxies on carbon offsetting, nuclear and GMOs that have in his view made the green movement unfit for purpose. He scorns initiatives such as Earth Hour, and sees little hope for mass consumption reductions in the form of ‘behaviour change’. Here I find myself nodding vigorously. And I share Lynas’s view that hoping that developing world nations will somehow develop their aspirations and wellbeing differently to how we did so is naïve and bordering on the idiotic. As Lynas points out, saying we need two more planets to live as we do now is rather a waste of time, as we aren’t going to find them. The question is how to use technology, policy and, of course, business behavior to make existence on this planet both profitable and sustainable. Lynas is no pessimist – he believes we can still turn the corner (only three of the nine boundaries have so far been breached).

For a business wishing to adopt this way of thinking, there could be rich pickings. Although traditional life cycle assessment is a useful tool in identifying where the big wins are in tackling the footprint of a particular product or behaviour, the planetary boundaries concept, applied globally, may offer a great deal more. It’s something I plan to explore in more detail. If we can adapt the scientific wisdom of the Planetary Boundaries Group to commercial thinking, get the environment movement to drop some of its potentially counterproductive stances, and build a framework for companies based on what we can and can’t sustain, we may yet find a diversion from the catastrophic course upon which we are currently embarked. It’s well worth a try.

Naturally, the planetary boundaries framework remains to be universally accepted. And its implications in terms of ‘techno fixes’ will divide politicians, businesses and the green movement for years to come. But it can’t be ignored. I strongly suggest you read The God Species and draw your own conclusions. 

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Here's the regular round up of our founders' latest thoughts on sustainability issues and trends. In this issue, Peter Ainsworth on the anti capitalist protests, Tony Juniper on the big new word for 2012 and Matt Prescott on an innovate blueprint for an alternative economic model. You can view the update here. http://tiny.cc/vitre

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My latest column for Ethical Corporation is here http://tiny.cc/4ohfb 

In it I set out the principles I believe should guide any engagement between NGOs and companies, especially as the behaviour of some NGOs comes under ever greater scrutiny. 

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A brief update to Friday's post on John Sauven's expulsion from Indonesia. First, you can read John's own account of the bizarre episode here http://tiny.cc/6m6jp

There is still to my knowledge no officially detailed reason for the decision, despite John having planned meetings with government officials and big Indonesian companies. Meanwhile, my Twitter feed has received the attention of a follower purporting to work in the Indonesian 'government field'. It all started off in a mundane enough way, stressing how much havoc Greenpeace is causing in Indonesia (not as much havoc as cutting down all the rainforests, I venture) and that the government is trying to crack down on the organisation and so on. All legitimate debate, although some very senior and respected Indonesians seem to be on Greenpeace's side on this one - more on that in the Jakarta Post here http://tiny.cc/e59fr

Then my Twitter dissenter posted something utterly extraordinary. The reason Sauven was deported, he wrote, was because of a secret intelligence document showing he was planning a protest at an Indonesian nuclear reactor. I know for a fact that this is utter nonsense. Greenpeace UK does not campaign on the Indonesian nuclear industry - they have their hands full enough with that issue at home. Clearly this line was not sanctioned officially, and I have not been able to discover which part of the government this individual works for. It does reveal the confusion in Indonesia itself about what has transpired in the last few days. 

On the subject of utter nonsense, a new saga has been developing involving Andy Tait, another Greenpeace UK campaigner. The Jakarta Globe has that story here http://tiny.cc/vua07 Messy, at best.

Whoever is behind these moves, they are not helping Indonesian business or the Indonesian government one jot. Of course, many senior figures in busines and government know this. So presumably they will now use their influence to stop further embarrassment. 

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John Sauven, who runs Greenpeace UK (and very well he runs it too), is a brilliant campaigner. Under his leadership, Greenpeace UK has changed the direction of several multinational companies across several sectors. His organisation is widely regarded as the most effective campaigning NGO in Britain. I agree. 

John is also savvy enough to be able to deal in a grown up and sophisticated way with companies and governments. He is a tough negotiator, but commands the respect of many business people, including people in the businesses who have been on the roughest end of Sauven's campaigns. In fact, especially those people. 

John is not a terrorist or anarchist. He doesn't disrupt public order for the sake of it. He has often found himself on the right side of the argument in some rather high profile battles with government. And he has helped build some remarkable progress in businesses where such progress once seemed impossible. 

The deal on palm oil deforestation between Greenpeace, the Forest Trust and Golden Agri Resources (GAR), was one such example. GAR is owned by Sinar Mas, which also own the notoriously hopeless Asia Pulp and Paper (APP). GAR is now starting to emerge as something of a leader in its sector, and as a result is winning back some of the customers it lost at the height of the palm oil issue's media profile last year. John can take much of the credit for this progress. 

It was presumably to follow up on this success that Sauven planned this week to visit Indonesia, the country in which he married, meeting companies and government officials to further advance the effort to tackle deforestation in the country. Plenty of Indonesians, in companies and government, were planning to meet him, and he had no trouble getting a visa for his trip. 

Odd then, that upon arrival in Jakarta yesterday, he was denied entry and immediately deported. See the Jakarta Globe's coverage of that at http://tiny.cc/9lxyr There are dark forces at work here. The only question is who is behind them. The line being put out is that John's activities are in some way a threat to the national sovereignty of Indonesia. This is of course nonsense - the GAR deal is a big win for Indonesia. Not to mention the fact that one of the greatest threats to Indonesia is the continued loss of its rainforests. 

One can only speculate at how a planned trip with full official approval was so suddenly derailed. The most likely conclusion is pressure from one or more of the companies that have not yet seen eye to eye with Greenpeace on deforestation issues. Ironically, had the visit gone ahead, it would probably have received little or no attention. In deporting Sauven as soon as he entered the immigration hall, Indonesia has scored a spectacular own goal, in the same way that banning advertisements always ensures they are seen by more people than had they been aired in the usual way. 

Should it emerge that this bad decision was the outcome of Indonesian companies applying pressure on the government, those firms will lose even more customers than would have been the case already. That won't do Indonesia any good at all. Time will tell. I have a funny feeling this sinister episode marks the beginning of a new and ugly chapter in a saga that has already gone on for far too long. One day, the full truth will out. It always does.

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We've just released the first of six (free!) annual updates from the Robertsbridge Group. In this edition, we explore the potential for a sustainable ICT sector, the proposed UK planning reforms, the ethics of choosing clients and the challenges facing the NGO movement. We also pay tribute to Ray Anderson and Wangari Maathai, two giants of the sustainability movement.

We know how annoying unsolicited emails can be, and we like to comply with the law, so if you're interested in these bulletins, please do sign up for them! You can do that here  http://bit.ly/nkgSMD and the bulletin itself can be viewed here http://tiny.cc/oaxob

If there are sustainability topics you'd like to hear about from our founders in the future, please let us know and we'll try to include them in future issues. 

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In recent weeks Asia Pulp and Paper (APP)  seems to have all but given up on PR (getting others to say you're good) and reverted to the time honoured tradition of buying up as much advertising space as possible (you saying you're good). My Saturday must-read, The Week magazine, is now defaced by whole page 'APP Cares' ads on biodiversity in every issue. Sky TV, whilst in partnership with WWF on rainforest conservation, runs greenwashing spots from APP at every opportunity. In Australia, APP has resorted to the blunt and aggressive (and counter-productive), as you can see here: http://tiny.cc/y5zbi Could this per chance have anything to do with the loss of one of APP's biggest customers down under in recent weeks? Metcash deserves wholesome praise for doing the right thing and acting fast. See http://tiny.cc/4t8yz

Writing from Holland, my mother informs me that the APP greenwash fiesta is in full swing on Dutch TV. The old 'we plant trees' joke, apparently. She makes the point that no Dutch consumers have ever heard of APP (the same applies throughout Europe) and asks why they would spend so much advertising a brand no-one can buy directly. 

I have no answer to this. One of the many mysteries of APP's communications strategy (see past posts) is that in raising its profile among audiences to whom it was previously unknown, it recruits new foes almost by the hour, since anyone who looks up APP after seeing one of their nonsensical ads will instantly see for themselves what this charade is all about. If I were APP, I'd shut up about the environment.

This company is fast becoming a major embarrassment to the whole Indonesian corporate sector. Perhaps the Indonesian government will exert some pressure and make its bosses see sense.

Meanwhile, a Texas-based advertising agency seems totally oblivious to the nonsense they are peddling for their client. Presumably APP couldn't find an ad agency in any of America's coastal cities. WARNING - don't read this if you're already in a bad mood. http://tiny.cc/4j88v Too ghastly for words really.

So, do keep your eyes peeled for more APP greenwash in the weeks ahead. They seem to think it helps them. And do encourage broadcasters and print media not to take this tarnished advertising revenue.  I had hoped APP might have moved in the right direction by now, as customers continue to look elsewhere and NGOs expose an ever worsening tale of greenwash. Sadly it seems we shall have to wait a little longer. 

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1. Learn to grow your favourite vegetables 
2. Find the word in every human language there is or has ever been for 'respect'
3. Adopt a pet or two from a shelter (or pay to foster some in a shelter)
4. Be your own boss
5. Read Catch-22 (several times)
6. See Petra at sunset
7. Sleep in a tent in the pouring rain with someone you love
8. Write 100 letters to supermarkets demanding they only sell responsible products and get your friends to do the same
9. See whales in the wild
10. Listen to Rachmaninov's second symphony

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Sometimes I can barely keep up with the pace of the sustainability debate. After the great response to my open letter to Asia Pulp & Paper (see http://tiny.cc/sac5j ), no sooner had I put the finishing touches to that blog post when news reached me that Sky is currently running adverts for APP, whilst promoting a 'partnership' with WWF to save rainforests. In turn this coincided with last night's UK Channel 4 Dispatches programme, 'Conservation's Dirty Secret', in which WWF and Conservation International (see http://tiny.cc/e2u09 ) were, to put it charitably, embarrassed, not helped by dismal media performances from their respective leaders. The upshot: when WWF's UK CEO is not on national television saying turtles are amphibians, his organisation is taking money from a conservation partnership with a broadcaster taking advertising revenue from one of the greatest enemies of rainforest conservation in the world. This can't go on. And an awful lot of people are saying so, at least in private. 

 Some people would use this perfect storm to turn on the conservation movement. They would hijack this PR misfortune as proof that the green movement is full of hot air and bad science. That is the wrong reaction. We must not abandon conservation, or the (good) organisations that promote it, but we must do a lot better. My colleague Charles Secrett offers a manifesto blueprint for change in the NGO movement in today's Guardian. You can read Charles's open letter to the green movement here http://tiny.cc/xkvex 

Big NGOs risk becoming a total irrelevance if they do not take a long hard look at themselves. Not only are they jeopardising hard won victories through poor leadership, bad communication and a lack of ideological coherence. They are playing into the hands of those who would like the environment movement to disappear, allowing the world's worst firms to carry on their exploitation of the planet's dwindling resources unhindered. 

Today, I went to a stakeholder forum convened by L'Oreal in London. Their sustainability director, Francis Quinn, was infinitely more eloquent about global challenges and the conservation agenda than most NGO leaders and, needless to say, all politicians. It depressed me that it should take a cosmetics firm executive to reaffirm my commitment to sustainability at a time when its greatest public champions are letting down the cause so terribly badly.  I could have listened to Quinn for hours, whilst I found my finger on the off button for most of last night's Channel 4 documentary. I only stayed with it in the way you stay with a dreadful reality show – you wait for the car crash moment to happen. It did last night, long before the programme ended, along with my respect for big NGOs who take the corporate shilling. 

 In the end, business will tackle these issues and resolve as many of them as possible, for their own self interest. And yes, they will do so in partnership with NGOs. But it will be the NGOs who are truly independent of vast corporate financial relationships, or those that deliver grassroots, ground level, measurable conservation improvement. I'll be backing the kinds of groups in those two categories. Where that will leave the new NGO behemoths, I'm really not sure. 

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Dear Asia Pulp & Paper,

It really is high time that you changed course. And let me pre-empt some of your now standard counter arguments to what I am going to say from the outset. The first is that I am unashamedly pro business. I have worked with very large multinational businesses (as well as NGOs) for many years. I believe business is our best (and possibly only) hope in tackling the planetary crisis.

The second is that I understand that developing nations have different pressures from developed ones. I also understand a little of Indonesia's history and challenges. My late father was an AFP foreign correspondent in Jakarta for four years and after his expulsion by Suharto in 1972, wrote a rather celebrated book, 'The Indonesian Tragedy'. It was banned in Indonesia until Suharto's downfall and used to be smuggled in from Singapore. It has been reprinted six times in the past 30 years. So my family as a whole feels a great affinity with Indonesia. It is a wonderful and fascinating country.

The third is that I do not believe NGOs and campaigners are always right. As you will see here, http://tiny.cc/46vvj  I sometimes criticise NGOs quite strongly. 

I have followed APP's sustainability 'journey' for many years and from many different vantage points. I find it almost incredible that all this time, as you have hemorrhaged the goodwill of customers, NGOs and media, you have continued your arrogant denial that there is any problem with your business practices. You have thrown money at public relations and advertising that has contributed absolutely nothing to your rehabilitation. You have surrounded yourself with completely the wrong advocates and made claims that are simply untrue. You have shown a blatant disregard for customers, and for the people you claim your business serves. So let's take some of these issues and tackle them head on. 

1.You and those who speak on your behalf claim that 'western NGOs' do not understand or care about poverty and development in Indonesia. This is a falsehood on two counts. The first is that western NGOs do, of course, care about poverty alleviation. The second, as you know very well, is there are plenty of Indonesian NGOs who share the collective horror at the destruction of old growth forests in which you have, for years, been implicated. 

2.You give the impression that you are a green company with a deep-rooted commitment to sustainability. If this is the case, why do you feel the need to endlessly advertise your green credentials in print and on television sets around the world? Is it a case of 'the lady doth protest too much'? Your homepage is designed to give the impression you are nothing but a large commercial conservation organisation. It is nonsense, and everybody knows it. Why don't you spend some of your marketing budget on the poverty alleviation you claim people like me do not understand? 

3.You cite independent reports and have been publicly attacked by some of your auditors for abusing information and exaggerating it. You have consistently embellished 'independent' findings about your sourcing practices, with the groups you have hired having to issue embarrassing clarifications about your use of data. 

4.You have lost countless multinational customers around the world. Are they all wrong? Do you really think they are so stupid that they simply take a line from Greenpeace and unravel whole supply chains at great resource cost to themselves? Or do you think it is in fact because in an age where supply chain resilience and security is absolutely key, you have little or nothing to offer?

5.You deploy the arguments of front groups that have no credibility – it is a sign of true desperation that you would see Alan Oxley's efforts as helping you. How do you think this strategy has helped you over the past few years? Are customers and NGOs all falling into line now, on the back of this bogus neo conservative drivel that is pumped out on your behalf? Do you really think that deforestation is good because children need books, one of the more laughable themes of some of your friends in recent years? 

6.Now you are using a new tactic of dialogue and social media, through your nice new Rainforest Realities blog. My views on this foray into thedigital world are here. http://tiny.cc/np998

7.Your parent company, Sinar Mas, is making some progress now that Golden Agri Resources is working with The Forest Trust. So progress can indeed be made. Why don't you follow their lead? 

8.You think that creating an 'eco tourism' village with Habitat for Humanity and tsunami relief will help create the impression that you are a responsible company. They won't, and the first is a risible gesture, by the way.  

I have worked with companies that are far from perfect. I actually enjoy it. But where they differ from you is that they admit this, and they are involved in deep, lasting, behavioural change. They also communicate nothing on sustainability until they have actually done something. You seem to be adopting the opposite approach. Until that changes, it is clear to anyone other than the small inner circle of advisors you deploy, that your reputation and commercial viability with many of your most important customers will continue to free-fall. So many companies and NGOs want you to change, and would be the first to praise you and buy from you if you did so. I yearn to write a blog that heaps praise on your change of direction. So do many others.

But in the APP bunker, it seems this is not understood. I suppose you will carry on as you have been. I suspect you will gradually find most PR and advertising firms close the door on you, as some have already. They won't want to be tarnished by association given many of their other clients are your former customers. WWF, Greenpeace and others are not your enemy – ask the countless companies who have moved from confrontation to collaboration with them. To pretend that this is some western NGO political agenda against poor Indonesians is not only a distortion of the truth, it is a huge insult to your customer base, not to mention the communities you purport to serve. Your communications strategy is a disaster - a global case study on how to get nearly everything wrong at the same time. That is because behind all the greenwash there are too many unanswered questions.

As I have written before – people like me who make a living out of advising companies take something of a risk criticising brands in public. In your case, it is one I am willing to take. The world is changing, and increasingly you will find the most helpful consultants are also campaigners, who take the view that if we sit in silence in the hope of picking up a scrap of business here and there, we have already devalued the advice we have to offer. They are able to judge when to stay silent, but also when to speak out. I have spoken out, not because I want your business. I really don't. But I really want you to change, as do so many others. I write with no agenda, and on behalf of no company, NGO or publication. But it's time you listened to the clamour for progress that is all around you. If that means ridding yourself of some of the internal and external advisors who have done you such damage, then so be it. They are doing more harm to your image than you seem to realise.

Yours sincerely,

Brendan May

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Today I write no more than 50 metres from the sea, in a house overlooking the English Channel. It is right on a pristine pebble beach. There is a clear blue sky, with Brighton and Bognor Regis peering at us far from the distance to my left. This house, which belongs to my wife's family, was built by her grandfather in the early 1970s – a shared family summer retreat that has given three generations and an army of cousins and friends pleasure over countless summer months. 

The next generation of the family may not be so lucky. The one after that almost certainly not. In 50 years' time, the chances are that if I am still blogging and wanted to return to my current location, I'd either be drowning or sitting in a boat. Even the British government isn't pretending that this stretch of coastline is one they can protect. If this little row of beach houses is lucky enough to survive at all, few would be willing to pay the buildings insurance premiums that will surely be demanded. Which presumably means that the balcony from which I write will, perhaps in my lifetime, be gone. 

The harsh realities of what is likely to come have never been starker than in recent days. We've had a report from Oxfam predicting that food prices are likely to double by 2030. The International Energy Agency has revealed that greenhouse gas emissions rose by a record amount last year, despite the global recession, leading to the highest carbon output in history. Limiting global warming to a two-degree rise (the generally accepted threshold for avoiding catastrophic climate change) is therefore probably now a pipedream rather than a possibility. We've seen the effect of a drought devastating crops throughout the UK. Water is being sprayed like mad on the fields behind this house. The National Ecosystem Assessment confirmed that nature's services are worth billions of pounds to the UK, yet around 30% of those services are being degraded. Greenpeace activists are bravely trying to stop the Arctic being destroyed for our lethal addiction to oil, which is the chief culprit for so much of the climate crisis in the first place. 

I fear too many people are sleepwalking through this crisis. In most businesses, governments and indeed in some NGOs. The general public is definitely asleep on the ticking clock whose warning alarm grows ever louder. The media doesn't help. The amount of news space given to Cheryl Cole not getting a job on a television programme in America and then repeating her misfortune in the UK actually symbolises a national disease, far more lethal than the new E-coli strain whose origins will doubtless at some stage be linked to some human interference with nature too. The column inches (not to mention BAFTA accolade) given to a troupe of incredibly stupid people from Essex says a lot at a time when any decent maker of drama, comedy or factual documentary is struggling to get anything of quality commissioned for mainstream television. 

Sitting in the sun as the waves lap over the sun kissed pebbles, a happy wet dog at my feet and a wife reliving her childhood memories, it's hard to get too down about anything frankly. But this simple scene, with its modest homes, quiet community life and gentle seascape masks a calamity that will probably wash this place away forever. It's worth thinking about when you choose your next car, buy your next washing machine, and decide which brands, politicians, media and NGOs deserve your loyalty in the coming years. 

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