Jacob Rothschild

My parents divorced. There was the usual awkward business of going between them, but I was mostly with my mother. She remarried to a Greek painter Nico Ghika, so we were always around artists and intellectuals.

My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her.

Unilever, Nestle and SAB Miller are all taking a long-term approach to investing in sustainable resource consumption. Each is driving through better resource management, which is expected to yield positive returns in the future.

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

I want to tell mayors, county chiefs and heads of big companies: don't just chase GDP growth; don't chase the biggest profits at the expense of our children and grandchildren and at the cost of sacrificing our ecological environment.