It’s some decades since I visited Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills that rise up from America’s Great Plains—and then, seventeen miles to the

A Mount Rushmore For Sustainability? - by John Elkington

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2024-05-02 22:30:12

It’s some decades since I visited Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills that rise up from America’s Great Plains—and then, seventeen miles to the southwest, we also dropped in on the evolving monument to one of my all-time heroes, Crazy Horse.

To be honest, I have never quite fathomed what the Oglala Sioux shaman and war leader might have made of his one-time enemies dynamiting a mountain in his memory, but a recent conversation with a living hero had me wondering who we might short-list for a sustainability-themed version of Mount Rushmore? Alongside, say, Rachel Carson, Gro Harlem Brundtland, or Denis Hayes?

In my pursuit of people with a deep understanding of how to tune markets to solve sustainability challenges—in this case a life-long passion for markets—one name sprang to mind very early on.

He and I first met when we were part of the founding group, convened by Sustainable Asset Management (SAM) in Switzerland and Dow Jones Indexes in the USA, for the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI)—a family of best-in-class corporate benchmarks now owned and operated by S&P. Some of the stepping stones are sketched here. I served nine years on the DJSI advisory board, helping push me further up the learning curve in relation to financial markets.