Mike’s combined list of abilities and achievements are pretty rare – some say unequalled, but Mike would argue we are all different.
Academically at the age of 10 he came top in the 11 plus exams in Middlesex with 100% in all papers. He gained scholarships to Harrow, Mill Hill and Christs Hospital; the latter being for boys from poor families, and the school his parents chose for him. He specialised in mathematics and the sciences and gained a double distinction in maths at ‘A’ level. He went on to Dartmouth Royal Naval College where he came top in navigation amongst other things.
After leaving he qualified as a Member of the Institute of Transport, coming top and winning the Road Haulage Association prize.
At the age of 32 he qualified with an MBA at Cranfield, winning the business prize, the practical course and the business game single handed, as well as scoring 98% in the statistics papers – never done before – besides straight A+’s in all 5 final finance papers.
It is no surprise therefore to learn he is a member of Mensa and was separately estimated academically at 1:10,000 including his creative capacity.
Life Experience: While in the Royal Navy as an engineer, Mike qualified as a yachtsman, navigated the biggest ships, flew helicopters, went down in a submarine and spent time with land forces in combat. He is now a qualified glider pilot as well. Mike is well travelled having been through more than 70 countries but as he says he goes ‘deep’ so doesn’t expect to meet any other Westerners where he goes. He has even been in places white man has either never been or has almost never been, and in some of the world’s wildest and most beautiful environments which include the deserts (Sahara, Red Sands, Arabian Peninsula and Danakil), rainforests (Borneo and the Amazon), high mountains (Andes), sub Saharan Africa, temperate forests, the big lakes (rift Valley, Titicaca and Tana) and the plains. His primary motivation is to understand the various environments and to watch for climate change effects – so he has travelled Ethiopia extensively.
Work experience: After leaving the Royal Navy he ran a dockside in London including a big transport operation, following which he ran transport for a number of other businesses including food. While working on the earliest computer routing systems he was invited to give a presentation at Psicon’s Open day, though it was on ‘Optimum Stockholding Policy’ (they were then BP’s computer division) and was later told he had been voted best speaker of the day. He did internal consultancy for some major companies, one of which involved setting up the huge parcel sorting depot for TNT at Atherstone which was the biggest in the world by a long way. It was designed to continuously sort 12,000 parcels an hour, and that was back in about 1981, a very long time before Heathrow Terminal 5 tried a much easier task with its baggage handling system.
He then set up his own property company and built very low energy houses (by the then standards) for several years.
Environmental Work: Back in 1962 he had written about renewable energy as he was even then worried about man’s assault on the planet’s resources and environments, and was even that long ago worried about the possible impact we were having on climate. He proposed 3 tidal barrages around the UK which would have provided continuous power 24 hours of every day – so he was well ahead of his time in all ways.
Then in 1995 he had one of those eureka moments when he decided he was going to dedicate the rest of his life to helping the planet. He was troubled by the extremely conflicting reports in the world’s media about the state of everything from fish and the oceans through the forests and even climate and determined to discover the truth (good or bad) and publish his findings. He spent over a year researching each major subject (forests, water, food and agriculture, oceans and fish and energy and realised climate was probably a huge problem which might dominate. However he had concluded that climate change or not – we still had a monster problem.
By 2002 he was ready to write and publish, but while many Publishers were extremely interested in his work, writing and findings – none were finally prepared to publish. So in 2004 he decided to design a build the lowest energy house he could manage as at least he was potentially helping to solve 27% of the UK’s carbon emissions. So Tranquility was built, and now he is going to publish his work through his web site.
Summary: Mike therefore now has an extremely wide understanding of the state of our resources and the interactions between them.
