Blog: travel dispatches

By Travel Editor Jeroen Bergmans

In a valiant effort to do my bit to save the planet, my green recycle box courtesy of Islington council is forever overflowing with every scrap of cardboard, foil, glass and plastic that passes through my apartment. The faint waft of rotting vegetable scraps eminates from the compost box in my kitchen, I don’t own a car and I’m on an eternal quest to find energy-saving lightbulbs that work on dimmer switches. But my green guilt is still far from assuaged - as Travel Editor of Wallpaper* my carbon footprint is hardly negligible.

So when an invitation to interview Sir Richard Branson on Necker, his private island in the British Virgin Islands, about his newly self-styled status as eco pioneer par excellence landed on my desk at Global HQ, I could hardly refuse. I was intrigued to meet this controversial captain of industry – people’s hero and entrepreneurial icon to some and master of spin to the more cynical – and find out how he could possibly offset the gargantuan carbon footprint and green guilt of an entire international airline plus plans to kick-start the nascent space travel industry.

After an early-morning limo pick-up, curbside check-in and a quick turn around the spectacular, Softroom-designed Upper Class lounge at Heathrow, it was down to business and an update on the ever-expanding Virgin empire. I had seen the TV ads of a purring Uma Thurman promoting Virgin Media (a synergy of television, broadband and mobile phones), read about the branded stem-cell bank planned for Plymouth, and admired Sir Branson’s pledge last year to plough all profits from his planes and trains into researching and promoting wind, solar and wave power and inventing the ultimate ‘clean fuel’. Hot off the press came whisperings of new routes to Nairobi in June and to Mauritius in October plus more slick ‘lounge rooms’ also designed by Softroom in Boston by end of year and more in Miami in 2008. By the end of next year, Virgin Ltd Edition’s portfolio of top-drawer destination hotels will also include slick luxury yacht Lady B, country spa retreat and cookery school Natirar, in New Jersey, and boutique ski chalet The Lodge, in Verbier. But as I settled down in my Upper Class flat bed to catch up on the latest film releases, and then whizzed by gas-guzzling humvee, private jet and speedboat to Branson’s Bond-style private island, green guilt nagged me in a trail of CO2.

Necker Island is just as you would imagine it – crystal-clear waters, bountiful bougainvillea, lavish villas in a Balinese style, top-notch food and facilities and a staff of beautiful, blonde, bronzed twenty-somethings. Branson was all smiles, deep tan and easy charm despite the jet-lag-induced fug of flying straight from Washington where he had addressed the Senate urging them to join the Kyoto agreement. And his agenda was pretty impressive. With advice from two eminent professors from Berkeley he plans to make Necker the greenest island in the world in the next 8 months with an organic garden, solar-powered hot water, bio-treated sewage and its own incinerator. He has re-introduced the indigenous flamingo to the island (the locals ate them all), is spear-heading a regional recycling plant and is in talks with the local government to make the BVI the first carbon-neutral country in the world. His latest acquisition, Moskito Island, further along the archipelago from Necker will sport an eco-resort that will set new standards for sustainable hotels. And his eco-evangelism has gained global proportions thanks to his promise of a $25 million prize for a super-brain who can invent a method of sucking the excess carbon from the atmosphere in case we have exceeded the tipping point of ecological disaster. Virgin Fuel is investigating butanol as an alternative to ethanol, the current favourite alternative to petrol. As it is 20% more powerful and doesn’t freeze, it could possibly fuel his fleet of jets. But beyond his impressive empire, Branson is wielding his international profile to preach the long-term investment potential of wind, solar, and wave power in a bid to win over politicians and fellow businessmen.

Since ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, the unanimous proclamations of the world’s most eminent scientists have sent us all into a frenzied hysteria. Political manifestos, newspaper headlines and lifestyles have changed and ‘carbon footprint’, ‘climate change’ and ‘emissions’ have entered our everyday lexicon for good. So has the cynical phrase ‘Greenwash’. It was recently revealed that Al Gore’s personal energy consumption use is 20 times that of the average American and it would be easy to throw stones at Branson’s Brave New World. After all, with the copyright to the ultimate biofuel and the method to cleanse our world of excess carbon, Branson would be a bazilionaire. But I, for one, applaud his new mission – at least he’s putting his neck on the line, which is more than most politicians are doing. And beside him, my obsessive composting and quest for dimmer-friendly, energy-efficient lightbulbs pale into insignificance.

15 March 2007 | Travel