Rowan “Mr Bean” Atkinson got a CBE, while his sidekick Baldrick (aka Tony Robinson) trumped him with a knighthood

I sometimes feel like a bit of a fraud calling myself a “solo” rower. Sure, when I’m out on the water, with a satellite phone my only connection to dry land, I do feel very alone. But in truth, I am the tip of a very big iceberg, the visible bit of a huge human endeavour that encompasses everybody who has helped to get me out there, and who motivates me along my way, and who celebrates with me when/after I arrive.

For this I thank you.

An acquaintance of mine, a recipient of the OBE (higher than an MBE), rather cynically (or self-deprecatingly) described it as an acronym for “Other Buggers’ Efforts”. Maybe MBE should stand for “Mostly Because of Everybody”. Or “Much Brave Encouragement”. Or “My Beautiful Entourage”.

Or do you have any better suggestions?!

[Featured image: Buckingham Palace, here I come! Date TBD.]

The Beatles receiving their MBEs in 1965

The MBE is the humblest of the honours, the others being (in ascending order) the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire), CBE (Commander of the etc), with the highest honours being KBE (Knight) for men or DBE (Dame) for women.

Sometime in the next 7 months I’ll be invited to an investiture. There is more information about the investiture online. The medals are presented by the Queen, Prince Charles, or the Princess Royal. I’ll be sure to let you know when I’m on my way to Buckingham Palace!

My mother and I have known about it since a letter arrived at Mum’s house in early May, but it is a condition of the process that we had to keep it top secret until the Honours were publicly announced. I can’t tell you how hard it has been to keep it to ourselves! I confess that a tiny number of very close confidantes might possibly have had an inkling that the award was in the pipeline, but we’ll just have to put that down to telepathy.

Congratulations to all the other people honoured today, for all kinds of amazing and significant work that varies from entrepreneurship to hospices to heritage to the Olympics. Sometime in the next few days I’ll post a blog about some of the other people named in this year’s Birthday Honours. For now I’m just hoping I get to go to the Palace on the same day as the awesome singer Adele, also receiving an MBE - I just love her voice!

I am, of course, over the moon about receiving this accolade – and determined, as ever, to continue my endeavours for sustainability. With our environmental challenges growing more urgent every day, this is no time to rest on my laurels!

[Featured image is of violinist Nicola Benedetti receiving her MBE from the Queen last month.]

I joined the voyage in St Petersburg in Russia, and disembarked in Bergen, Norway, having travelled via Helsinki (Finland), Tallinn (Estonia), Riga (Latvia), Copenhagen (Denmark) and Bergen (Norway). As well as considerably improving my knowledge of Baltic geography, I also learned a lot about the Japanese – all but one of the 800 participants being from Japan, the one exception being a German guy who is fluent in Japanese – and about some of the great work that Peace Boat does to promote global understanding, and hence peace.

Here is how the Peace Boat describes its mission:

“The ship, as a neutral space beyond borders, becomes a floating peace village, encouraging a sense of community and enabling direct dialogue between those onboard and in the ports that we visit. Our programmes, both onboard and in port, explore the main aspects of Peace Boat activity – peace, human rights, sustainability and respect for the environment – and aim to develop travel as a tool for peace and sustainability.”

Me in a yukata

My reality while I was on board included giving two lectures and a Q&A session, dressing up in a yukata (a less formal type of kimono), having my name written in kanji (the symbols mean something like “road across the ocean” – or should that be “rowed across the ocean”?!), and meeting all kinds of wonderful people, ably supported by my three interpreters and two coordinators.

I am going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that it is all too easy to hold prejudices about a country, often dressed up in humorous stereotypes of its tourists overseas. I won’t describe here the stereotype of the Japanese tourist – you can probably think of your own! And yes, I do know there is a stereotype of the English tourist too…..

Yet when you actually meet people as individuals, and find out about their lives, interests, the valuable work they are doing and their concerns for the future, the stereotypes melt away.

With my marvellous translator/interpreters (from left): Ryoko, Mariko and Masami

We need much more of this. To rise to the challenge of creating a sustainable future for all humans and other species, we need to pull together as one. We all have to live on the same planet, breathe from the same atmosphere, depend on the same ocean. In the past we were able to operate as individual nations, but now, thanks to globalisation, we are now utterly interconnected.

This reminds me of an extract from a book I am reading at the moment: Cancel the Apocalypse: The New Path to Prosperity, by Andrew Simms. It quotes Joseph Tainter, writing about the collapse of various ancient societies. He concludes, “Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilisation will disintegrate as a whole.” Our compatriots, then, are not just the people with whom we share a nationality. It’s all the people with whom we share a planet.

If you’re interested in traveling on board the Peace Boat, take a look at their website. It’s possible to take part even if you don’t speak Japanese, as most events are translated into English and some of the participants speak English, but please be aware that the vast majority of participants are Japanese. Speakers are from anywhere and everywhere. I believe it costs around $12,000 for a 3-month trip around the world, but you should verify this. What I can say, for sure, is that it is an unparalleled opportunity to open your mind to new ideas, people, and places.

The Hermitage in St Petersburg

Tallinn, Estonia

Riga, Latvia

Nyhavn, Copenhagen

Fjords near Bergen, Norway

The No-Growth Imperative: Creating Sustainable Communities under Ecological Limits to Growth, by Gabor Zovanyi, is a deliberately challenging read. As an antidote to the “10 simple things you can do to help save the Earth!” ethos, his epilogue (okay, another confession, I skipped to the epilogue before I’d read the book!) describes “10 difficult personal actions needed to save the world”. His point is that changing lightbulbs, turning the thermostat down one degree, or draftproofing your windows is NOT going to be enough to adequately meet the challenges that we face. As Captain Matthew Webb said, “Nothing great is ever easy”, and what could be greater than safeguarding the future of humanity?

Zovanyi’s suggestions include:

- Ecologically responsible childbearing is “one or none”

- Ecologically responsible car ownership is also “one or none”

- Eat much lower on the food chain, shifting to “one or none” meat meals per day

- Become an advocate of ecologically responsible consumption, shutting down exponential economic growth

- Insist on the management of human behaviour as the most pressing unmet need of the current era

Can we turn the ship in time, or are we heading for the rocks?

As you can see, few of us would feel smug after reading such a list. It challenges some of the most basic tenets of modern society. And yet I found, as I read through his reasoning, it was hard to fault its ecological basis. Many books talk about what CAN be done. Zovanyi writes about what NEEDS to be done.

On a more optimistic note, I am also reading Cancel The Apocalypse: The New Path To Prosperity, by Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation, an excellent think-and-do tank based here in London. So far (I am up to Chapter 4, with no cheating), he has pointed out that human wellbeing and economic extravagance are not linked, that we can in fact be happier human beings with good jobs, living in stronger communities, while at the same time reducing our ecological footprint. His thesis is grounded in solid research and analysis, and certainly presents a compelling argument. But even he does not shy away from the fact that we need to make enormous changes if we are to achieve true sustainability.

I see a rowing metaphor here. Longtime readers might remember a large amount of dithering going on in mid-Pacific while I tried to decide whether to go for the easier route to Tarawa or whether to bust a gut to try for Tuvalu. I did my best to steer sufficiently south for Tuvalu, but all the time the currents were pushing me west. My efforts to get south were not enough to counteract that relentless westwards drift, and the angle I would need to achieve became steeper and steeper until my weatherman concluded that, simply put, “you can’t get there from here”. I’d done too little each day to push south, until eventually it became impossible to reach my goal.

As I see it, we’ve been drifting along with the current of “business as usual”. If we’d have taken action forty or fifty years ago when these issues were first raised, we’d have had smaller, easier adjustments to make. In the intervening years we’ve drifted a long way from the course of sustainability, so now we’ve got a difficult angle to steer. We are very nearly at the point where we won’t be able to get there from here.

What do you think?

Are you content to keep drifting in our present direction, or do we need to change course?

How soon?

How much?

Or is it already too late?

My view is made pretty clear in the title of my next book, Stop Drifting, Start Rowing (US link), Stop Drifting, Start Rowing (UK link).

Other Stuff:

Last month I spoke at the inaugural YaleWomen Conference at the National Geographic Society HQ in DC (see featured image), alongside amazing ladies such as Arianna Huffington and US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Kamala Lopez has blogged for the Huffington Post (thanks, Kamala, for your kind words!), and the video of my presentation is online on YouTube. Thanks to all the Yale Women who made it such a terrific event, and to the intrepid organisers. A very enjoyable and thought-provoking conference, and I am already looking forward to the next one.

Dee Caffari, Ben Fogle, and me at Row2Win for Plastic Oceans and Crew Clothing

Last Wednesday I got back in a boat for the first time since I finished the Indian Ocean in 2011. Not an ocean rowboat this time, but a coxed quad on the Thames Tideway, in a benefit event for the Plastic Oceans Foundation, organised by Crew Clothing to commemorate their 20th anniversary. We had a fun race over 500 metres between three quads, captained by myself, Ben Fogle (who with James Cracknell rowed the Atlantic at the same time that I did) and Dee Caffari (who was also on the water at that time back in 2005, becoming the first woman to sail single-handedly and nonstop around the world). There is now an online challenge (currently open to UK residents only) to beat the time that Ben set on the rowing machine over 200 metres, with Crew Clothing giving a donation to Plastic Oceans for every 100 online participants. Also a tour of the UK Crew Clothing stores, with competitors having the chance to win a signed Concept II rowing machine.

If you’ve tried sending me a message via my Facebook page, and haven’t received a reply, my apologies. For some reason the notifications stopped coming, and with my being so much on the road and offline I didn’t pay attention, and I’ve just discovered a massive backlog. I’m slowly working my way through it. Thanks for your patience!

It’s not Mothers’ Day here in the UK. We had ours back in March. But to all US moms (as opposed to UK mums!) HAPPY MOTHERS’ DAY!!

The pursuit of happiness is seen, by some, as a selfish mission. But there is growing evidence that if you pursue happiness selfishly, you’re doing it wrong. Not only does generosity to a cause or a person make you feel good, it might actually make you healthier too.

Dr David Hamilton, author of Why Kindness is Good For You, says, “When you do something for someone else, your brain produces hormones: dopamine – which makes you feel happy, and gives you the feeling that what you are doing is right – and opiates, the body’s own secret stash of heroin and morphine.” Read more here.

Psychological studies show that kindness makes you happy, and happiness makes you kind, in a virtuous feedback loop that spreads ripples of positivity.

If you’re one of those poor people tasked with the tough task of nonprofit fundraising, you might want to point out to your potential donors the benefits of giving, and check out Michael Norton’s TEDx Talk on how altruism is the best way to use your money if you want to be happy.

Happiness is rowing to Hawaii

Having been on the receiving end of so much generosity over the course of my ocean rowing career, I used to wonder how I could possibly repay all the kindness that was being bestowed on me. Then a wise friend told me that I didn’t need to – that wasn’t the point. I only had to pay it forwards. And so I did all I could to succeed, I used my blog to share my adventures with the armchair adventurers back home, and I pursued my environmental mission, surrendering myself to a cause that was greater than I was. All of these things, in turn, gave me great happiness.

And of course the right kind of giving – of time, energy, or money – has no adverse environmental impact, either.

Here’s my one-minute message about happiness, recorded shortly before I ended my time as a World Fellow at Yale last year: But Does It Make You Happy?

Other Stuff:

Speaking of happiness, I am feeling very happy right now. I am sitting in a coffee shop in Wimbledon, London, having just completed the final (I hope) draft of my forthcoming book, Stop Drifting, Start Rowing: One Woman’s Search for Happiness and Meaning Alone on the Pacific, due for publication on 15th October this year.

While I was in the US earlier this month, I recorded a podcast with Jim Moriarty, CEO of the Surfrider Foundation. You can check it out here on his blog.

Also earlier this month I spoke with Vinit Allen for the Spring of Sustainability series. Our conversation is available for download here: Redefining Success, for a Happier, More Sustainable Future.

Shortly before I left the US, I gave a presentation in Winsted, CT, on behalf of the Rose B. Nader Foundation “for the agitation of caring minds”. Rose was the mother of Ralph Nader, 3-time presidential candidate, and Claire Nader, who very kindly hosted me. The following morning I stopped in at the local NPR station for a one-hour conversation with John Dankosky, host of Where We Live, which is now online here: Roz Savage, The Environmentalist Who Rows Across Oceans. I also had a great conversation with Kathryn Broughton of the Litchfield County Times, who wrote it up here: Roz Savage, Around-the-World Solo Rower, Brings Save Earth Message to Winsted.

Trekity is a daily newsletter for women who love travel. I did a recent interview with them, Roz Savage’s Guide to Rowing the World’s Oceans and Saving the Environment.

Tickets are now on sale for the West Cork Literary Festival, where I will be speaking this July alongside the likes of Melvyn Bragg, Callum Roberts, Mary Robinson and Tim Severin. Regular updates on their Facebook page.

A greener, cleaner future

The Spring of Sustainability is a FREE online sustainability conference, in which you can hear from more than 30 leading sustainability pioneers including John Perkins, Joanna Macy, Francis Moore Lappé, Bill McKibben, Mark Spalding and Andrew Harvey. I was delighted to be asked once again to take part. We recorded my interview on Wednesday – sorry for the belated notice! But there are many more stellar speakers still to come, and past interviews from 2013 and also from 2012 are still available online. I would urge you to check out 2012′s conversation with Julia Butterfly Hill – still one of the most enjoyable on-air conversations I have ever had.

As the blurb says, Spring of Sustainability can help you to:

• Learn how to transform fear and frustration into hope and inspiration
• Discover simple daily actions you can take NOW that actually enhance your lifestyle while helping to create a sustainable world
• Be inspired to create stronger communities and a greener world by engaging your family, friends, neighbours, and co-workers in simple, fun activities
• Learn about the latest cutting-edge research into sustainable solutions

And much more…

Remember, the Spring of Sustainability is completely FREE. You can register here.

It’s easy to worry about the state of our world. There’s no denying that there is a lot to worry about. We just have to shift our focus a bit to see that progress is being made. We are beginning to shift the direction of our world toward a truly sustainable, thriving planet.

As more of us make a commitment to more sustainable choices we accelerate the process. We have the power to co-create a sustainable planet for ourselves, our children and grandchildren, and for all living beings.

But first I want to send my commiserations to the crew of the James Robert Hanssen, attempting to become the first crew to row from mainland Africa to mainland US. A couple of days ago I found out that on Day 73 of their epic row, they had suffered an irrecoverable capsize and were rescued after spending 12 hours in their liferaft.

Jordan Hanssen

When I first heard the news, I was astonished. I have known the skipper, Jordan Hanssen (their boat is named after his deceased father) since around the time of his crossing of the North Atlantic in 2006. We have traded tips on rowing equipment, media, books, etc, and I wrote a blurb for his excellent book about that adventure, Rowing Into The Son. I know that he is disciplined, professional, and runs a tight ship. So I was mystified as to what could have gone wrong. Provided that a boat is properly ballasted and the cabin hatches are closed, it should always self-right. I couldn’t imagine that Jordan would allow anything less than the strictest safety standards.

As the facts emerge, it turns out that they were just plain unlucky. Even if you keep the cabin hatch closed 99% of the time, at some point some rowers have to go in and others have to come out. It seems that it was at precisely this moment, during the shift changeover, that a big wave struck the boat and water started to rush through the closing hatch into the sleeping cabin. This is every ocean rower’s worst nightmare. It was impossible to close the hatch against the pressure of the inrushing water, and within seconds they were upside down with no chance of recovery.

It sounds as if the crew stayed calm and swung into standard survival procedures as they retrieved items and deployed the liferaft. This is a great tribute to their seamanship. And after what must have seemed like an interminable wait in the liferaft they were rescued.

Sarah Outen

This news comes as the ever-intrepid Sarah Outen prepares to set out once more to row the North Pacific, this being her second attempt after being rescued last year when she was viciously clobbered by a typhoon about a month after she set out from Japan. She is currently on standby, waiting for a suitable weather window. She is relying on my tried and trusted weatherman, Lee Bruce, so I know she is receiving the best possible advice.

Commiserations to the crew of the JRH, and good luck to Sarah. It’s a tough choice to entrust your life to the vagaries of the ocean, but as those of us who have been out there know, the rewards are enormous too.

Other Stuff:

Crazy-busy time since I last blogged. Too much to tell here, but a quick round-up:

ExplorOcean exhibition opening

My boat is now on exhibit at ExplorOcean in Newport Beach, California. We opened the exhibition on April 4. I hadn’t seen the show until that very day, and I can honestly say I could not be more delighted with the way they have chosen to display dear old Sedna. A video of a stormy ocean projected onto the back wall creates the ambience, while videos of my Atlantic row play in a continuous loop. There are also interactive elements in the shape of a WaterRower rowing simulator (a previous sponsor), and a laptop on which you can answer the question “What would you take to sea?” Someone had answered “Roz Savage”!! (better photos forthcoming – this an iPhone placeholder…)

Nice article recently in Wanderlust, following on from my talk at London’s Adventure Travel Show.

Video interview recorded during my visit to Syracuse, giving a lecture to kick off their University Lectures series.

Speaking in Hendricks Chapel at Syracuse University

My talk at TEDxYale gave me a good excuse to return to New Haven to catch up with friends made during last year’s stint there as a World Fellow. The new cohort of World Fellows has just been announced – I can’t wait to meet them at this year’s Return to Yale forum in October.

Delighted to be interviewed once again for the Spring of Sustainability series. Recorded just yesterday. I talk about my new ideas about how we need to redefine success if we are to have any hope of achieving genuine sustainability for humankind.

A standing ovation and a marvellous time speaking alongside the likes of Wayne Dyer, Caroline Myss at Ignite! I Can Do It conference in San Jose for Hay House, publishers of my forthcoming book Stop Drifting Start Rowing.

And finally, a special hello if you are a first-time visitor to this website, especially if you are checking me out after reading the feature in May’s edition of O, the Oprah Magazine. I haven’t actually seen the magazine yet, but am assured I will be in there….!

TEDxYale – 23rd February in New Haven, CT. I’m on stage in the final session of the day, which starts at 3.45pm in the Schubert Theater – although of course it would be wonderful if you can come for the whole day.

The blurb says: “The theme of this year’s conference is ”Solve for y.” As a theme, “Solve for y” challenges our speakers to do two things: explain their unique “y,” the key ingredient to their ambition and inspiration, and tell us “why” it is significant. We’re looking for speakers with both extraordinary work and extraordinary purpose. The “y,” as opposed to other variables, also references the speakers’ common ground, Yale.”

My talk will be on the subject of The Prosperity Paradigm, a new way of measuring human progress, moving away from financial measurements towards a more holistic measure of wellbeing. I will explore the concept of happiness, why it matters, and how it can help us create a better, more sustainable future.

Lecture at Syracuse University, NY – 27th February. 7.30pm in Hendricks Chapel. I will be talking on “The Human Condition: An Ocean Rower’s Perspective”.

Speaking tour for the Royal Scottish Geographical Society – 4th-13th March.

4th March, 7.30pm at University of Aberdeen, King’s College, Aberdeen

5th March, 7.30pm at University of Dundee, Perth Road, Dundee

6th March, 7.30pm at Carnegie Hall, East Port, Dunfermline

7th March, 7.30pm at Appleton Tower, University of Edinburgh, Crichton Street, Edinburgh

11th March, 7.30pm at The Highland Council Chamber, Glenurquhart Road, Inverness

13th March, 7.30pm at Logie Lecture Theatre, University of Stirling, Stirling

St Peter’s Hospice, Bristol – 15th March. Fundraising event. Contact me for further details.

I Can Do It! Ignite Conference in San Jose, California – 17th March. Keynote 5.20-5.40pm - ”The Human Condition: An Ocean Rower’s Perspective”.

Planet & Oceans Lecture on 20th March in Vero Beach, Florida for ORCA (Ocean Research and Conservation Organisation). Tickets available here.

Opening of Sedna exhibit on 4th April at ExplorOcean in Newport Beach, California. My rowboat will be on exhibition in Newport Beach for the foreseeable future.

Interview live and online for Spring of Sustainability on 11th April. Details to be confirmed nearer the time.

Speech at inaugural YaleWomen Conference in Washington, DC, on 19th April. Sorry, only open to Yale women alumnae. The theme is Vision, Values, Voice: Women Changing a Changing World, and the conference will feature a conversation with Justice Sonia Sotomayor ’79 J.D., Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and speakers including Donna Dubinsky ’77 (CEO, Numenta), Arianna Huffington (Editor-in-chief, Huffington Post), and Anna Maria Chavez ’90 (CEO, Girl Scouts of the USA).

Peace Boat from 18th to 27th May, giving 3 presentations on board during the days at sea on this, the 79th voyage of the project. During my time on board, the ship will travel via:

St Petersburg, Russia

Helsinki, Finland

Tallinn, Estonia

Riga, Latvia

Copenhagen, Denmark

Bergen, Norway

West Cork Literary Festival, Bantry, Ireland, from 7th-12th July. Details to be confirmed nearer the time.

I feel quite exhausted just writing this list. And it hasn’t even started yet! Thankfully, last week I had a chance to take some time out and recharge the batteries when I went on a short vacation to Finland with my mother to see the Aurora Borealis, a lifelong ambition for both of us. Amazing! If you’re fascinated by the aurora, check out this book written by a friend of mine, Tatiana Slepukhin.

And finally, a link to a nice interview with the Well-Travelled Postcard conducted a few weeks ago at the Adventure Travel Show in London.

Roz and Rita about to go for a reindeer sleigh ride

Aurora! Photo courtesy of Andrew Lovell

The final instalment, Part 8…..

The environmental challenge – a many headed monster?

Although the environmental challenge may seem like a many-headed monster, the basic question is very simple: if everybody did what I am doing, day after day, what would the consequences be in a year? In five years? In a hundred years? In a thousand years? That is the fundamental criterion of sustainability.

The good news is that shifting consciousness does not cost anything, and can be achieved in an astonishingly short space of time. Cultural shifts have happened before, and can happen again. As the bumper sticker says, Shift Happens.

We are seven billion souls, adrift on our tiny liferaft in the vastness of the universe. If we lose this, we lose everything. We must do what we have to do. Let’s rise to the challenge we have created for ourselves. We can do it. We just have to want to. Our future lies in our hands. Let’s surprise ourselves with our own courage, and do what we know is right.

This work isn’t always easy. I know a bit about tackling projects that aren’t easy. There are many times at sea when my motivation wavers, and I wonder what the hell ever possessed me to do this. But the thing that keeps me going is that I have a powerful reason why. I just have to keep my eye on the goal, and know that in the end it will all be worthwhile, because I am fighting for something that I care about. Ask yourself, is our continued survival as a species something that you care about? In your heart of hearts, do you believe we are worth saving?

You are somebody too

For all our many faults, I absolutely believe that humanity is worth saving, and that we can do it. If we all pull together, we can build a better, greener future, the same way that I row across oceans – one oarstroke, one mindful action, one wise decision, at a time.

Part 7…..

Real happiness

There is a widespread belief that economic growth is a good thing. But is that really true? If we are not sure whether or not it is true, let’s take a different tack; does this belief serve us well? Does economic growth make us happy? Does it make the world a better place? If not, then would a different belief serve us better?

Look at the United States and its prevailing faith that bigger is better in all things, including the economy. It is the most affluent society in the world, yet is rife with disease, addictions and unhappiness. It would be easier to understand our obsession with consumerism – or at least forgive it – if it was making us happier, but in most cases it isn’t. It has been demonstrated scientifically that beyond a certain level of income where our basic needs are taken care of, further income delivers very little additional happiness, but can have a major effect on levels of consumption, and hence on our environment.

I would like to see a world where we move the emphasis away from material wealth and conspicuous consumption, to an era where appreciating nature, living a healthy life, and nurturing our relationships matter more than having the latest model car or flat screen TV. I would like to see us focus less on standard of living and more on quality of life.

I find it a tragedy that we are trashing the Earth in the mistaken belief that happiness can be found in things, whereas in reality the only true riches in life are to be found between our ears. Happiness is a state of mind, not the state of our bank balance.

Being environmentally responsible does not have to be self-sacrificing. Doing the right thing feels good, because it should. A species that felt good about putting itself on a path to destruction would die out very quickly. Our instincts tell us that we are doing the right thing when we act in harmony with nature. This is our natural reward that encourages the preservation of the species.

Busy, busy – but why?

Looking at contemporary society from the outside, I see consumerism, obesity, excessive busy-ness, hiding from the big questions like; why are we here? What is our life purpose? What makes us happy? The computer revolution was supposed to give us more leisure time, but we seem busier than ever, caught up in a whirlwind of largely pointless activity. Do we all know, on some level, that we are on an unsustainable path, that we are doomed if we carry on as we are, and all this busy-ness serves to distract us from the uncomfortable truth?

Fear makes people do strange things. It can push people into denial. When faced with incontrovertible evidence of our past mistakes, we feel ashamed and guilty. Rather than admit that we screwed up and try to rectify the problem, we deny that the problem exists, or that it was our fault.

We can try to hide from this knowledge, as I used to – numbing ourselves with TV, over-indulging in food, or burying ourselves in the constant busy-ness of twenty-first century adult life, most of which revolves around stuff – buying stuff, selling stuff, maintaining stuff, fixing stuff, earning the money to buy yet more stuff, all for the greater good of the economy, which is based on our growing demand for stuff. If we ignore the problem for long enough, maybe it will go away. We have become enslaved by stuff rather than liberated by it. But it is our choice. We can choose to own the stuff, instead of it owning us.

Next blog post: Conclusion.

Part 6…..

Bearded adventurer

I used to believe that I could never be an adventurer. Adventurers were almost a different species, those steely-eyed, square-jawed bearded men who sailed around the world, conquered mountains and trekked to north and south poles. I was short, unathletic, and not particularly brave.

Then one day my story changed. I met a woman who had rowed across the Atlantic Ocean, completing it alone because her six-foot-five, athletic husband was unable to cope psychologically with ocean life and had to be lifted from the boat just two weeks into the crossing. This woman was no taller than I was. Suddenly it dawned on me that the size of my physique mattered less than the size of my self-belief.

I have discovered over the past few years that I am capable of so much more than I had previously imagined. I discovered a powerful motivation – to spread the environmental word – and that has enabled me to overcome all kinds of fears and obstacles. When you’ve got a powerful enough reason why, you’ll always manage to figure out how. You just have to believe that it’s possible.

As children, teenagers, and even as adults, there are things that we are told that we absorb into our self-concept. Some are true, some are not. Parents, relatives and teachers can say odd or quirky things that have a much deeper impact on our impressionable childish psyche than was ever intended. Many are matters of opinion rather than objective truth (e.g. that we are timid, or artistic, or athletic) and yet often we internalize them, choosing to believe them as fact.

The same applies to humankind collectively. There are things that we tell ourselves about who we are and what we need that may not necessarily be true. Some of these ideas that we have absorbed into our collective self-concept used to serve us well when times were different – for example, that we need to have as many children as possible so that at least one or two will survive to take care of us when we are old – but now that more of the world has access to modern medicine, and many countries have healthcare for the elderly, such a belief is outdated and needs to be re-evaluated.

We are often afraid to let go of the “old” way of doing things, because that is all we have ever known. We act as we do because we don’t realize we have a choice. But we do. We have free will. We might feel trapped by the myth of perpetual economic growth, or the perceived need for more stuff, more money. But these are all things that we have created. And we can un-create them. It is a leap of faith to try a new world order – but starting is the hardest part. Once we’ve taken that first step, subsequent steps become easier.

Some of our leaders tell us that we can’t take action on climate change, or on industrial pollution, because it will cost jobs, and affect the economy. This is to underestimate the resilience of the human spirit. Since the dawn of human time our economies have evolved, so that as one sector wanes, another one waxes. We can do much more than we think we can, if we just choose to make it so. Instead of hanging onto the past we need to embrace the future.

Hopi Elder

The Hopi Elders say it more eloquently than I can, “There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold onto the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart. And they will suffer greatly. Know that the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above water. Look around, see who is in there with you and celebrate.

“At this time in history we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt. The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner. And in celebration.

“We are the ones we have been waiting for!”

Next blog post: focus on happiness.

Part 5…..

Arriving in Hawaii

As I arrived in Hawaii in 2008, I was quoted as saying, “It’s taken me about a million strokes to get here from San Francisco, and if I’d have stood there under the Golden Gate Bridge and thought to myself that one oarstroke isn’t going to make any difference, then I’d still be standing there. But I’ve demonstrated by putting one oarstroke after another that even tiny actions can add up to something really substantial.” I wanted to draw an analogy to the environmental actions that each of us can take to make a cumulative and collective difference.

We’ve been killing this earth through a thousand billion cuts. There have been a few major disasters, like the Gulf oil spill or the failure to find an accord in Copenhagen, but mostly the damage has been caused by a multitude of consumer decisions, multiplied up day after day, seven billion times across the globe.

So the good news is, that we can counteract those thousand billion cuts with a thousand billion conscious, responsible decisions. We can start to heal the earth, by taking responsibility as individual consumers and by being the change we want to see in the world.

For much of my life I thought I was too insignificant to make a difference. Then I realized that I already was making a difference, and it was not for the better. I was consuming and disposing without thinking of the consequences. I resolved to change my own behaviour, and to do all I could to spread the word and to help make other people more conscious of their personal environmental impact.

Maybe I’ll succeed in changing consciousness, or maybe I won’t – I can’t control how other people react to what I say or write or do. But I can at least be the kind of person who might succeed in changing consciousness. I can keep on doing the right things, for the right reasons, in the hope that I will spread some ripples of change.

Next blog post: we can change our stories.

Part 4…..

Big waves – a stark reminder

There is nothing like twenty-foot waves to remind you that, as far as nature is concerned, we are just another animal. For much of the Atlantic voyage, my first ocean, I took it terribly personally that the ocean was being so mean to me. Winds would blow me backwards. Waves would tip my boat this way and that, and occasionally right over. Currents would whisk me off course. These things happened so often that I couldn’t believe it was just bad luck. There seemed to be a malevolent will at work. A wave would come along at precisely the wrong moment and slosh into my dinner mug, swamping my meal in cold, salty water, or would soak me just as I was about to retire to my cabin for the night.

I tried to figure out what the ocean was trying to teach me. According to the traditional hero’s tale, the hero is made to suffer so that he can learn an important lesson. When he makes this breakthrough, he is rewarded with the removal of obstacles and unimpeded progress towards his goal. For a long time I thought that if only I could work out what lesson I was supposed to draw from my sufferings, the ocean would relent and let me pass.

Eventually I realized that the ocean was not rearranging the laws of physics purely for my edification. It is not a sentient being. The ocean was completely and utterly indifferent. It was not trying to teach me anything. It was simply doing what oceans do.

Likewise, nature will not wreak revenge on us for having made such a mess of our planet. Whether we deserve to live or die is not a moral question. Nature does not recognize right and wrong, deserving and undeserving. Our survival is a simple question of practicality. We are fundamentally changing the ecology of Planet Earth. We evolved to survive and thrive in Environment X, but through our own actions we are transforming it into Environment Y. And we will get our just deserts, not in a moral sense but as the inevitable consequence of those changes that we ourselves have wrought.

Rediscovering our connection to nature

We like to think that we are special, and to an extent we are, but nonetheless we are still a part of nature, and we need to recognize our interdependence with the animals, vegetables and minerals of the Earth. We need them more than they need us. Nature does not exist solely to serve our needs. We currently labour under the delusion that we can continue exploiting it indefinitely, but this take-take-take relationship cannot last. Nature operates on a give-and-take basis. Ultimately, the balance will redress itself.

Next blog post: every action counts.

Other Stuff:

A few months ago I did an interview with Benny Ho for his e-book, The Accidental Career. The book is now available, and you can get a 30% discount if you go to this website and quote this code: SHV47J5E. You will see that one of my colleagues from the Yale World Fellows Program, Patrick Struebi, is another one of the “accidental” interviewees.

If you’re thinking of a career change this year, I hope you will find inspiration in these pages. Here is the description of the book, to whet your appetite…..

How do people find fulfilling careers? How did they get there? Why did they choose those paths? How much of it was planned? How much of it was accidental?

With these questions in mind, this book started as a simple, crowdfunded project:

4 months. 70 interviews. 1 book to shed light into how people “fell” into careers they love rather than walked into careers they planned.

The result is a select collection of full-length interviews with individuals who discovered their careers through an unplanned morphological process rather than in a singular trajectory with foreseeable steps and landings. The inspiration for this book comes from author Benny Ho’s personal experience (architectural designer, McKinsey consultant, internet entrepreneur, and now writer), as well as countless stories of individuals who labored in uninspiring jobs yet never had the courage or opportunity to break the mold. In such, the objective of this book is to highlight how regular people have found linkages in disparate life experiences and have connected the dots into fulfilling careers.

Interviewees include:
- Consultant > turned > World Adventurer and 4-time World Record Holder (that’s me!!)
- Rocket Scientist > turned > Country Managing Director of JP Morgan
- Professional Motorcycle Racer > turned > Lawyer
- Advertising Professional > turned > Food Truck Owner
- Banker > turned > Condom Tailor (!!!)
- Paper Salesman > turned > Sports Marketing Pioneer
- Comedian > turned > Gold Expert and Financial Columnist
- … and more!

Part 3…..

Earth rise

The Earth is plenty big enough when you’re moving across its surface in a rowboat at around two miles an hour, but it is still perfectly feasible for one short, forty-something woman to row around most of our world within the space of a year or so. The astronauts of the 1960s sent back photographs of our Earth as a small blue-green marble floating in space, and for the first time we were struck by how small it looked. Being made aware of the Earth’s finite nature brought it home to us that this is all we have.

This has two major implications. One, we have only the resources that the planet can provide. And two, when we throw something “away”, it is still here, somewhere, on Planet Earth. Survival boils down to managing our inputs and outputs.

When I come back from my voyages after having spent a hundred days or more alone on my boat, focused solely on survival, the insanity of our society strikes me anew. On my rowboat I am keenly aware of the need to conserve resources if I am to stay alive. I know roughly how long my voyage is going to take, and I constantly monitor how much food I am consuming, and ration if necessary so I have enough to last until landfall. Some of my on-board resources are renewable – electricity (from solar panels), beansprouts and water (unless the watermaker is broken), but for the rest I have to keep one eye on the future to make sure I don’t guzzle my way through everything too quickly.

Yet in the world as a whole we seem to have lost sight of this principle. We are using non-renewable resources, such as fossil fuels and minerals, like there is no tomorrow. This is enabling us to grow our population to unprecedented levels, but what will happen when we have used them all up and can’t sustain this population any more? This is not rocket science. Anyone can see that it’s not a great idea to keep taking all the good stuff from the Earth, turning it into rubbish, and throwing it into landfill or the oceans. If we stop and think about it for a moment, we all know instinctively that this is an unsustainable course. Nature works in cycles, cradle to cradle – a cycle of life – while our current model of industry goes from cradle to grave – a line of death.

As to outputs, our Earth is not large enough that seven billion of us can continue polluting it without any thought for the consequences of our actions. On a finite Earth, what goes around, comes around. All the plastic, carbon dioxide, pesticides, and heavy metals that we let loose upon the Earth will end up somewhere, and often not where we intended them to be. In fact, the Earth is now so saturated with our various waste products that many undesirable things are ending up back in our bodies.

There are simply too many of us, using up too many resources. It has been calculated that if we all lived like Americans, we would need five Earths to sustain us all. The numbers just don’t stack up. It is mathematically impossible for this planet to sustain seven billion (and rising) human beings, while those seven billion insist on maintaining a lifestyle equivalent to, or better than, what we have now. Something has got to give.

Optimists may argue that by the time we have used up our resources here, we will have found another planet to screw up, oops, sorry, I mean, inhabit. But a very special sequence of circumstances led to the development of a planet that can sustain complex life forms. We take our Earth so much for granted that we sometimes forget just how amazing it is. Meanwhile, in galactic terms, our explorations have barely even ventured around the nearest corner. We could explore countless solar systems or even galaxies before we discover another planet that is the right temperature, has enough air, and exerts enough gravity for us to live there comfortably. The chances of us finding a second human-friendly planet before we run out of space and resources here are virtually nil, and it would be a reckless gamble to count it.

Next blog: nature makes no special allowances for humans.

Other Stuff:

A final reminder – I will be speaking at the Daily Telegraph Adventure Travel Show at Olympia in London at 12.15pm on Sunday 27th January. More details on the Adventure Travel Show website.

Part 2 coming right up…..

We have a choice to make. We can recognize the seriousness of our situation, accept responsibility for our past mistakes, and take the tough, even humiliating, but essential decisions needed to ensure our continued existence. Or we can continue to be distracted by the very same man-made artifices that got us into this mess in the first place – the all-conquering supremacy of high finance, rampant consumerism, and the myth of infinite economic growth – until we have dithered and procrastinated so long that we end up doing too little, too late. It is time we became our better selves; the mature, wise, evolved beings who understand it is worth sacrificing immediate gain for long-term survival.

However, even though it is simple, it may not be easy. We have been arrogant, and we will be humbled. We have been greedy, and we must learn generosity. We have been selfish, and we must learn compassion. We have been afraid, and we must learn fearlessness.

It has been fear of our own mortality that has led us to stockpile food and eradicate our natural competitors. It is fear of uncertainty that leads us to build our houses, fortunes, and empires, imagining that these fragile things will protect us and give us security. Yet nothing is secure. Nothing is certain. Only when we learn to ride the waves of change do we have any hope of facing the future with optimism and hope.

Paradoxically, change is necessary if we want the world to stay as it is. We have drifted onto a dangerous course, where dramatic changes to our ecosphere have become an inevitable corollary of our addiction to growth. Things are already changing, and not for the better. We just have difficulty seeing this, because although the changes have been rapid in historical terms, they appear slow from the perspective of a single human life.

Generally, human beings are change-averse. Self-preserving ego doesn’t like sudden change – keeping things the same is what has kept us alive so far, so carry on doing the same. But speaking as someone who has made dramatic changes in her life, going from office worker to ocean rower, and from materialist to environmentalist, take it from me that change is possible, and that when I look back from the far side at the changes I have made in my life, I wonder why it took me so long. Before the changes, I was afraid. Since the changes, I am calm.

Hopefully by now I have convinced you that we do not have to continue with business as usual. Just because we have done things this way for the last couple of hundred years, i.e. longer than anybody currently living can remember, that doesn’t make it right. When you look at graphs showing current trends of carbon dioxide levels, average temperatures, species extinction, deglaciation, sea level rise, and world population, and all those lines are curving exponentially upwards, it becomes clear that these trends cannot continue indefinitely.

Sea level rise

The good news is that because we are the authors of our own destruction, we can choose whether or not we are going to continue down that path. Some tipping points have already been passed – the evidence suggests that no matter what we do, the world’s average annual temperature is already committed to a rise of 2 degrees centigrade – but we still have the option to limit the damage. A rise of 2 degrees will have significant and far-reaching results, but will be nowhere near as bad as the catastrophic effects of a 6 degree rise, which would result in massive human migrations, rising oceans, growing deserts, drying up of glacial water sources, and increasingly frequent major weather events. Ask yourself if this is the legacy that you want to leave.

If you’re still reading by this time, I will assume that you have decided that this is not the kind of legacy that would make you proud, and that you want to work with me to find a better way forwards. Our present challenges, once we stop being afraid of them and start engaging with them, are exciting. The responsibility lies with our generation to reverse the current trend, to turn things around, and re-set our course for a cleaner, greener future. We have an incredible opportunity to leave a truly important legacy. I have a few ideas that I would like to share with you, and let’s see what we can do to get ourselves out of this mess.

We are doing the final edits on my Pacific book pending my Feb 1st deadline, and as the writers’ saying goes, I am having to kill some of my darlings – those sections that I was particularly fond of, but for whatever reason don’t fit with the narrative arc of the book.

This hurts me. Rather than see my poor darlings lying dead on the cutting room floor, I would prefer to see them reincarnated as blog posts, where they can at least live on in the ether. So over the next few weeks I’ll be publishing some excerpts from the forthcoming book, “Stop Drifting, Start Rowing: One Woman’s Search for Happiness and Meaning Alone on the Pacific”, to be published on October 15th this year by Hay House. If you’d like to make sure you are notified as soon as the book is available for pre-order, please send me an email via the contact form on this website and I will add you to a mailing list.

Here we go with Part 1….

Although I have spent cumulatively nearly a year of my life alone at sea, taken around three and a half million oarstrokes, and rowed over eleven thousand miles, rowing across oceans has not conferred on me any mystical revelations regarding the human condition. So what gives me the right to deliver my opinions on how to save the world?

Albert Einstein

Good question, and of course you are free to heed or ignore what I have to say. I am not a scientist, or an economist, or a politician, nor any kind of expert or guru. My only source of authority is that during all that time at sea, I have had more time than most to contemplate our predicament and ponder what we can do about it. I have had a number of moments of insight, and believe that some of them are relevant to our environmental challenges. As Albert Einstein said, “It’s not that I’m so smart. It’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

Concern over our future is what got me into ocean rowing in the first place, and remains my driving motivation. I am a passionately concerned individual who wants to do what she can to issue a loud and clear wake-up call to anybody who does not realize how high the stakes are, or, if they do recognize it, imagines that there is nothing they can do about it. We can all do something about it. In fact, we have to.

Anybody who has ears to hear and eyes to see, a mind that thinks and a heart that feels – and maybe a television or an internet connection – knows that we are facing unprecedented challenges. We need no more than the evidence of our own senses to see that our current way of life is unsustainable, and the testimony of our own hearts to know that we, all of us, need to take responsibility for our future.

The way I see it, we are privileged to live at this exciting stage in human history. Many different possible versions of our future lie before us. At one end of the spectrum we have a sustainable future living in harmony with our planet, while at the other end we have a slash-and-burn future in which we gorge ourselves on earth’s natural resources until they are all used up – and, of course, a huge range of options in between. In the slash-and-burn version of our future, not only will the Earth’s resources be exhausted, but the rate at which we have consumed them will have inflicted long-term damage on the fragile ecosphere on which we depend for life. If the scientists are right, this damage could be so severe that our continued existence may be at best uncomfortable, and at worst impossible. We are faced with the very real possibility of extinction at our own hands.

Overpopulated planet

For me personally – and I take the state of the planet very personally – I fully expect to see significant changes within my lifetime. I already have. I was born just before the end of 1967. In that year we had 322 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. There were 3.5 billion people on the planet. As I write this, at the age of 45 in 2013, we have close to 390 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, and there are nearly 7 billion people on the planet. By the time I am nearing the end of my life, aged 82 in 2050, who knows? 43 years ago scientists would not have predicted our current situation. From where we are now, we cannot accurately predict what we will face in 2050. We can only hope that our present rate of exponential growth does not continue. That would mean the kind of world that I would not be happy to live in. Overcrowded, hot, with intense competition for increasingly scarce resources.

There have been times when I have despaired, when I have felt that human beings are a plague upon the earth, and the sooner we make ourselves extinct and allow Mother Nature to heal herself, the better. But I cannot maintain that position for long. I love humanity. We have so much to offer. As far as we know we are unique, and although very fallible, I firmly believe that we have the potential to rise to be our better selves, and to do the right thing.

But we have to wake up and become conscious of what we are doing. The first step in ensuring our survival is to recognize that we are threatened. Like an alcoholic, we need to acknowledge our problem if we are to seek help and overcome our addiction. We need to accept the facts and confront the truth of our situation before we can start to take positive steps towards a better future.

We have a choice to make. We can recognize the seriousness of our situation, accept responsibility for our past mistakes, and take the tough, even humiliating, but essential decisions needed to ensure our continued existence. Or we can continue to be distracted by the very same man-made artifices that got us into this mess in the first place – the all-conquering supremacy of high finance, rampant consumerism, and the myth of infinite economic growth – until we have dithered and procrastinated so long that we end up doing too little, too late. It is time we became our better selves; the mature, wise, evolved beings who understand it is worth sacrificing immediate gain for long-term survival.

And just before we head into 2013, a quick plug for a very worthwhile project….

Some time ago I was invited to contribute to Big Questions From Little People . . . Answered By Some Very Big People, a fundraising book produced by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). The book is now available on Amazon. Alain de Botton explores ‘How are dreams made?’, Kate Humble explains ‘Why do lions roar?’ and Heston Blumenthal answers ‘Why do we cook food?’ I was asked, “If you’re on a boat with no food or water, what do you do?”

Other contributors include Sir David Attenborough, Dame Kelly Holmes, Bear Grylls, Derren Brown, Noam Chomsky, Dr Richard Dawkins, Annabel Karmel, Jacqueline Wilson, Jarvis Cocker, Marcus du Sautoy, Jessica Ennis, Marcus Chown, Tracy Emin, Harry Hill, Dr Christian Jessen and many more.

For each book sold a minimum of 67% of net royalty income is donated to the NSPCC.

On that note, it remains only for me to wish you all a very happy and fulfilling 2013. I hope it will be the best year ever, for people and planet!

This Christmas card seemed appropriate

Following on from yesterday’s blog, Success – Measure What Matters, this Christmas might be a good time to think about what indeed does matter. If you’ve found yourself too busy doing the Christmas shopping to spend time with your nearest and dearest – or worse, if festive stress has put you on a shorter fuse than usual – it might be worth taking a step back and asking what a “successful” Christmas looks like.

Is it about presents, or people? It might be the thought that counts, but giving time and attention counts too.

Let’s reclaim Christmas from the advertisers and retailers, and give it instead to our family and friends.

Have a very HAPPY Christmas, and an even HAPPIER New Year!!

The 2012 Yale World Fellows

One of my goals for the program was to find – or define – a mission that will keep me energised and busy for the next 7 or 8 years of my life, and I would like to cautiously say that I have found it. It’s still early days, so I am not going to say too much just yet, but here is a teaser as to the way my thoughts are headed.

From thinking about psychology and sustainability, I started to suspect that the best way to talk about the environment was in fact NOT to talk about the environment. I felt that too many psychological barriers slammed into place when the e-word was used – scepticism, suspicion, denial, guilt, shame, hopelessness, helplessness, etc. – all of which are inimical to action.

I started thinking about how governments and companies could be incentivised to balance their short term needs to please voters and shareholders respectively against the longer term needs of people and planet. After considering various options, it seemed to me that the most promising direction was to use a new, more holistic metric as a measurement of success.

I was already aware of the Bhutanese concept of Gross National Happiness, spanning 9 domains of human wellbeing – living standards, good governance, education, health, ecology, community vitality, time use and balance, culture, and psychological wellbeing – and thought it an excellent idea.

Around this time, serendipity stepped in. Over Thanksgiving I was on a trip to Seattle, and took the opportunity to connect with John de Graaf, to whom I had been e-introduced some time ago by our mutual friend Betsy Rosenberg. John is the author and filmmaker responsible for bringing us Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic (Bk Currents). At our meeting he gave me a copy of his new book, What’s the Economy For, Anyway?: Why It’s Time to Stop Chasing Growth and Start Pursuing Happiness, which questions our reliance on GDP as a measure of progress. This meshed with the work of Professor Tim Jackson (Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet), which had already been a significant influence on me.

Bhutan – can Gross National Happiness work elsewhere?

John told me that earlier this year the UN had launched an initiative called the New Development Paradigm, under which a working party will consider how to roll out this metric globally. This year the UK’s Office of National Statistics started to report on national happiness, demonstrating that the metric can be applied to a developed country, not just to small Buddhist countries in the Himalayas.

The more I looked around, the more work I found had already been done to find a more holistic approach of measuring human wellbeing. Various NGOs, consultancies, authors and speakers have been talking about these ideas for years, if not decades.

But no matter how good a concept, the timing has to be right. These early pioneers were the outliers on the bell curve, and my intuition is that the time is now ripe for the idea to go mainstream. The loss of faith in the banking system, the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the Occupy movement, and the emergence of intentional communities, transition towns and alternative currencies, make me feel that we are ready for this new measure of success.

This notion really resonated with me on a personal level. Having grown up in a poor family, I was very willing to believe the Thatcher-Reagan ethos that money and materialism would bring happiness. I had to spend 11 years in the rat race, acquiring the big house, the nice car, the foreign holidays, etc, only to find out that these things did not make me happy as promised. Quite the opposite, in fact, with dismal work-life balance and a steadily declining self-esteem as I slaved away at a job I didn’t like to buy stuff I didn’t need. I had to go through a difficult period of soul-searching while I redefined my own personal measure of success, realising that measuring my worth purely on a financial basis was not working. Since that process of self-redefinition, I now measure my success not by what I own, but by my physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing, the quality of my relationships, and having a purpose and passion in my life.

I’d like to add “SHOP LESS”

The new paradigm also meshes well with my environmental passion. I have felt for a while that our excessive consumerism was a misguided search for happiness, an attempt to fill the void created by an increasingly secular and disconnected society. But it has been shown that beyond a certain level, additional material wealth does not increase happiness and in fact sometimes has the opposite effect. We are trashing the Earth and it’s not even making us happy. So if we could get people to look for happiness in the right places, as listed above, we could in one fell swoop be happier and reduce our environmental impact, in a win-win situation for people and planet.

Another blog (a short one) on this subject tomorrow!

Oh, and by the way, Happy Birthday to me!

[Featured image: me between outgoing Yale President Levin, and incoming President Salovey, holding my World Fellows Program certificate]

The good news is that the threads of this semester seem to be drawing together into a coherent picture, and even (dare I say it) a vision of the next chapter of my life. The bad news is that I am in the middle of a World Fellows field trip to Washington, DC, and have only about 20 minutes to write this blog (a blog post normally takes me about 2 hours). So I don’t have time to go into a life-changing phenomenon right now. Tease!

So, in haste, I would like to highly recommend mindmapping as a way to avoid mental meltdown when facing a state of chronic cognitive overload. I have been mindmapping like crazy over the last few weeks as I attempt to assemble my thoughts. Not only do I use it to try and figure out how to save the world (!!), I also use it to plan presentations, prioritise To Do lists, take notes on seminars, and just about everything else. Is there really any problem in the world that can’t be mindmapped?!

Over the years I have tried out many applications. Here are a few super-quick reviews of my favourites:

Goalscape: still love it, still use it, but some recent ideas have just felt better suited to a different kind of graphic. Here is what I had to say about Goalscape back in 2010 when I was using it to plan 2011.

MindManager: used to use it, and it’s good. Can’t remember now why I moved on to something else. Check it out and see if it’s for you. Chances are that it’s evolved a lot since I last used it and it might be just what you want.

Inspiration: recently recommended by a Yale professor. I tried it and liked it, and am still using it for some mindmaps. It allows more flexibility in the positioning of the bubbles than does Novamind (see below), which really matters sometimes when mapping lots of interrelationships. Nice and easy to add  fun graphics to liven up your mindmap. Also available for iPad.

Novamind: my current app of choice. Very handy that you can collapse entire branches of the mindmap when not working on them, making it easier to manage. In a complex mindmap, without collapsing branches, you might find yourself spending a lot of time watching the beachball of death (Mac). It also has tons of top tips on the multiple uses of mindmaps from the founder, Gideon King, which really helped me get up to speed.

iThoughtsHD: this is what I use on my iPad. Quick and easy to use. And it can export to Novamind, or MindManager, or various other apps, via Dropbox, one of my other all-time favourite apps. This is how I get the mindmap off the iPad and onto my laptop quickly, seamlessly, and painlessly.

Other News

Rather a nice interview published on Discovery.com today. Thanks to Stephanie Pearson for the profile.

For those of you in California, a date for your diaries. I will be speaking at the Ignite event, organised by my publishers Hay House, in San Jose in mid-March next year. Check out the Ignite website here. Scroll all the way down to the bottom to find my picture on the left. If they organise the speakers in order of books sold, I suppose that the fact that my Pacific book doesn’t come out until October 2013 would account for my lowly position!

Must run now – am late for our World Fellows dinner at the Cosmos Club!

Oscar Wilde

Throughout history, many great leaders and other prominent figures have kept journals – a blessing to biographers. Oscar Wilde, one of history’s more colourful diarists, wrote: “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.”

Many claims have been made for the benefits of keeping a journal, besides en route entertainment.

Slightly dubious:
- decreases symptoms of asthma, arthritis, and other chronic health conditions
- strengthens immune system

Definitely:
- improves cognitive function
- decreases stress
- clarifies thoughts and feelings
- helps you to get to know yourself better
- helps resolve problems and disagreements by putting things in perspective
- track patterns, trends and growth
- therapeutic

From the neuroscientific perspective, keeping a journal works because the left brain is analytical and rational, while the right brain is intuitive and creative. Regardless of whether you are left or right-handed, while the left brain is busy writing, the right hemisphere is left free to roam. I have definitely experienced this myself. While my hand is occupied, I am already thinking ahead to the next sentence, often considering and discarding several options before my hand catches up. To sum up, keeping a journal allows you to use all your brainpower.

I have also found that it makes a big difference whether I type my journal on my laptop (doesn’t work) or write in a paper journal (does work). I am very nearly a paperless person, a habit forced on me by many years of a nomadic lifestyle in which heavy, bulky paper had no role. But my journal is the one thing that I just can’t do electronically. It seems to use a different part of the brain, so I have done some research, and have found a possible explanation. MRI scans show that in children, the neural activity was more mature in those who had recently practiced handwriting. It seems that sequential finger movements, like writing, activate massive areas of the brain involved in thinking and language, and in storing and managing information.

I have been keeping a journal on and off since the age of about 8 – although admittedly some of the early entries were not particularly exciting. Got up, went to school, came home, did homework, etc etc. There was a big gap from age 18 into my 30s, which I now rather regret, but during the emotional turmoil of that my mid-30s I rediscovered the joy of journaling.

Latte (note: NOT in a disposable cup!)

Now I have a journaling ritual – not exactly a routine, because my life is too here, there, and everywhere for that – but a way that I like to carve out my journaling as a special time. Ideally, it goes like this:
- find suitable coffee shop, where you won’t get the evil eye from the baristas if you loiter for a couple of hours over one latte
- order latte and possibly a cake – doesn’t matter if you don’t want the cake – this purchase is your rental of a table for the foreseeable future
- take seat, ideally in quiet corner far from eyes of baristas, but anywhere will do
- take out journal and pen, open journal, pick up pen, and start
- incidentally, I am snob when it comes to notebook and pen – for the last 7 or 8 years I’ve been using Paper Blanks notebooks, and a good black ballpoint. I just love the aesthetic feel of a smooth pen on thick paper.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what you are going to write when you start. There is no right or wrong way. Some people like to start by posing a question to themselves. It can be anything from the grandiose to the mundane. Who am I? Does God exist? What is the meaning of life? Am I happy? Am I on track? What do I think of religion / politicians / my spouse / my friends / the next door neighbour’s dog?

Some people like to write for a particular audience – themselves, their children, a parent, a hypothetical public, their future biographer (!).

It really doesn’t matter. You can just let the words flow in a stream of consciousness. Or you can use a structured set of questions like these ones from the Presencing Institute. (Sadly, this page seems to have vanished from the online world. If you desperately want to see it, email me via my contact form and I will send you the pdf.) You can include pictures, or diagrams, or mindmaps. This is YOUR journal, and you make up the rules.

I use my journal for different purposes at different times. Sometimes I write about the past, to assimilate, analyse, re-live, or record.

Or I write about the present, to assess and evaluate. How am I feeling? Am I doing the right things for the right reasons?

Or the future – to plan, to wish, even to predict…..

This last is an interesting one. I have noticed an interesting phenomenon. Things that I write in my journal seem to gain a kind of power. If I have a thought about something, the thought has a small amount of power. If I journal about it, it gains more. If I talk about it, it gains more still. You can call this phenomenon whatever you will. Some would call it the Law of Attraction. Personally, I incline more towards neuroplasticity as a plausible explanation. When we have a new idea, a theory, our brain forges a new neural connection. If we then decide that the theory was flawed, or the thought did not serve us well, the connection withers and dies. But if we find value and meaning in it, and ponder on it, and write about it, and talk about it, we are actually physically reinforcing that neural connection – until the notion becomes our new reality. So by writing about our future plans and dreams, we are forging new neural pathways, creating new norms for ourselves.

So even if no other human eyes will ever see your journal, be mindful about what you write. It just might come true!

Other Stuff:

You may have heard of a study allegedly conducted at Harvard in 1979 in which it was shown that those class members who wrote down their goals were phenomenally more successful than those who did not. Apparently that particular study is an urban myth, but then they re-studied it, and found the end result to be true. Details of the investigation and re-study here.

Huge thanks to my friend Martha Kaufeldt for researching much of the material referenced above.

Links:

Daniel Amen on how to journal your way to a better brain

The therapeutic benefits of keeping a journal

How handwriting changes the brain

The benefits of journaling for stress management

I am now in the dying days of my time at Yale – just over a month to go until the end of the semester, and the end of the World Fellows Program. It has been an amazing time, and still much to be done in these last precious moments. In the final week of the semester all the World Fellows have to give a TED-type talk. In my talk, I intend to sum up the headlines of what I have learned here, and announce my future direction – at least partially. I’m still working on the “future direction” bit, as this has been a time of intense cognitive overload, in a tremendously fulfilling way. Suffice it to say that there is a Big Idea brewing, and as soon as I am ready to go public, I will.

Sympathy to all those who suffered as a result of Hurricane Sandy, and in the snow that followed in Sandy’s wake. The debate will rage on about connections to climate change. I can’t profess to know what is “normal” in this part of the world, but I can say for sure that there is a LOT of weather going on in New Haven. And that from what I hear from locals, this is not normal. Nor was last year. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

First thing I said yesterday was to apologise that I might have to use some politically-loaded words, such as “environment” and “climate change” that some might find offensive. Then I asked for a show of hands, to gauge the temperature of the room (pun intended) with regard to climate change. The options were:

1. you believe that climate change is happening, and that it is at least partly related to human activity (almost every hand in the room went up)

2. you believe that climate change is happening, and it’s nothing to do with human activity (one hand)

3. you don’t believe that climate change is happening, and it is in fact a conspiracy by anti-business, anti-wealth, anti-population radicals who want to overthrow democracy and institute a socialist government (no hands but lots of laughter. It’s actually no joke, but an extract from a comment recently posted on one of my video blogs on YouTube.)

Having reassured myself that I was amongst friends, I went on to discuss two issues that need to be addressed in the next 10 years – climate change and oceans. A 4-year presidential term forms a significant chunk of those 10 years. After that there may not be much left worth fighting for.

Climate Change

A hotter world

According to the United Nations models (which historically have tended to be optimistic), carbon emissions need to peak by 2020 if we are to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit). Even 1 degree will have significant impacts: 5 to 10 percent less rain falls in the U.S. Southwest, the Mediterranean and southern Africa; 5 to 10 percent less streamflow in some river basins, including the Arkansas and Rio Grande; and 5 to 15 percent crop-yield declines in corn in the United States and Africa, and wheat in India. (Source: US National Academy of Sciences). Impacts will be even greater in vulnerable nations such as small island states, low-lying countries, and areas around expanding deserts.

If we all lived like US citizens (and most of the world wants to), we would need 5 Earths to support our 7 billion people. I am not for a moment demonising the US. I have spent more time in this country than in any other single country over the last 7 years, and many of my best and most enlightened friends live here. The US is only 12th in the global rankings of carbon emissions per capita.

But the US does punch above its weight when it comes to global influence. Through its role as self-appointed global policeman, and even more through the export of its culture, the US enjoys a privileged position, and with privilege comes responsibility. I would like to see the next US President take the lead on investment in renewables, incentivise resource-efficient houses and compact urban development, stop subsidising fossil fuels, say no to the Keystone pipeline and no to exploration and drilling in the Arctic. (This last development is poignant enough to make me cry – the retreating Arctic ice cap allowing exploitation of oil reserves, thus hastening the complete demise of the ice cap.) I would like to see an emphasis on reducing material consumption while still improving quality of life through better health, job creation, and poverty reduction.

Oceans

The renowned US marine biologist, Dr Sylvia Earle, has said that we only have 10 years left to save the oceans.

Oceans in jeopardy

Ocean acidification has been described as climate change’s evil twin. 30-40% of the carbon dioxide emitted by burning fossil fuels is absorbed by the oceans, forming carbonic acid. Since 1750, the acidity of the ocean surface has increased by 30%, killing coral and some plankton, as well as affecting the ability of crustaceans to form their shells. Shellfish could become a thing of the past.

Then there is shark-finning, destruction of coastal habitats, bottom trawling (that’s your shrimp), overfishing, bycatch, fish farming (that’s your salmon) and pollution – plastic and otherwise. Vast as the oceans are, in just a short space of time we have managed to fundamentally alter their chemistry, to the detriment of marine life and ultimately, to human health.

I would like to see the next US President increase the number and size of marine protected areas. In his final weeks in office, George W Bush created the world’s biggest marine protected area – 200,000 square miles of Pacific Ocean. So protecting the environment is not the sole preserve of the Democrat party. In fact, as little as 4 years ago, John McCain declared that he would take action on climate change. What a difference 4 years makes. The contrast between the two sets of voters on climate change is stark – see this recent Huffington Post article, in which McCain’s daughter challenges the Republicans on climate change scepticism. Just because Al Gore is a Democrat, does this really mean that Republicans can’t embrace environmental causes too?

Where did it all go wrong?

I can see the challenges.

1. A 4-year election cycle does not promote long term thinking. The full benefits of green strategies are not felt during a single term of office. Saving people from disaster is a thankless task. This is not Hollywood. Bruce Willis blows up an asteroid on collision course with Earth and gets a hero’s welcome. But a likely sceptic response to successful action on climate change will be, “See! It was a hoax all along!”

2. Most of the benefits will be felt overseas. As Hurricane Sandy amply demonstrated, the US can be impacted by extreme weather events, but rising seas and desertification will be felt more keenly elsewhere, mostly affecting the world’s developing countries rather than the US or its trade partners. Helping impoverished foreigners does not win votes.

Clean coal? No such thing in the US.

3. Money talks. The New York Times estimated 2 months ago that $153m had already been spent on pro-coal, anti clean energy TV ads, 4 times what Obama has been able to spend defending clean energy.  (By the way, do you know how much US electricity is produced by the much-touted “clean coal”? Zero percent. Nada. Zilch.) The Koch brothers alone spent $60m supporting organisations that deny climate change, just between 1997 and 2010. It is estimated that the oil, gas and coal industries have poured $2.2 million into Romney’s presidential campaign, and I would bet he is unlikely to bite the hand that feeds him if he is elected.

Can appeals to morality and ethics drown out the demands of Big Money? Can we appeal to the next US President as a visionary, ask him to consider his legacy, and how history will regard his term in office? Personally, I am not optimistic. Researching my contribution to the panel caused me some serious despondency this week. Usually I am very focused on what I can to to make a difference, which keeps me plenty busy and hence positive rather than hopeless and helpless. When I start looking at things from the political perspective, however, my optimism falters.

It drives me crazy that protecting the continued existence of the human species has become a political issue. This isn’t about saving the polar bears, or the dolphins, or the rain forests – important though all those things are. It’s about saving our own sorry asses. For a supposedly intelligent species, we are proving to be remarkably slow on the uptake.

What does the world expect from the next US president is one question, but we also need to ask: What does the world NEED from the next US president?How do we give him the mandate to fulfil that need? I don’t have a vote in the US. Many of you reading this blog do. If you care not just about the local and the short term, but have a wider and longer perspective, please vote for the candidate who you believe will best serve the global community not just now, but for generations to come.

Show Notes:

Hurricane Sandy about to hit New Haven. At least my apartment building won’t capsize!

Race Brook Lodge retreat with World Fellows:

Myers Briggs – I was judged to be ENTP (Extrovert (7/30), Intuitive (8/30), Thinking (17/30), Perceiving (3/30)). Interestingly, I retook the test online at Human Metrics, which determined that I was:

• moderate preference of Introversion over Extraversion (56%)
• moderate preference of Intuition over Sensing (50%)
• distinctive preference of Thinking over Feeling (62%)
• marginal or no preference of Judging over Perceiving (1%)

Well, okay, maybe not that interesting. Just goes to show that results can vary according to the specific questions asked, and/or from day to day. But do try it out – it’s intriguing if nothing else!

Neuroscience of meditation by Jud Brewer of newhaveninsight.org

My first ever workshop – on benefits of journaling – to be shared in a future blog.

Pleiades retreat at the Roundhouse, Colrain, MA:

I was fascinated to hear how many women were interested in psychology and communications, from many different perspectives – many interesting conversations, and this seems to be an emerging theme in 2012. Check out who we are, and what we are doing on the Pleiades members list.

I rather fell down on my photography duties this year, but here is the slideshow I made of our 2011 retreat.

Other Stuff:

Wishing the very best to all who live in the path of the upcoming “Frankenstorm” (click here for a balanced view on whether Frankenstorm is related to climate change), and love and sympathy to the families of the 65 who have already died as the storm swept through Haiti.

Please stay safe.

Now I have to go read The Meaning of Life, A Very Short Introduction, in 100 pages, for an upcoming seminar (now postponed from tomorrow, but I’m rather keen to know the answer anyway). Or you can get Terry Eagleton’s video version in 2:16 minutes here. Or get a more controversial, but arguably equally valid, version from Monty Python.

[Featured photo: last year's Pleiades retreat]

Sounds simple, but very difficult. You try it and let me know how you get on.

Meanwhile, I’d appreciate a vote. I’ve got 5 contenders for the 3 slots. Which 3 do you think are strongest? Do they overlap? Do you think there is something entirely different I should have said and haven’t?

Feedback or your own 3 messages welcomed. Please post them as comments – don’t email them to me personally, as I’d love to open this up for discussion.

Here are our 5 contenders:

1. Courage is having such a big reason WHY that it overcomes your fears.

2. You can achieve almost anything, if you take it one oarstroke at a time.

3. Ask big questions and seek big answers – of yourself, of your leaders, of life.

4. Happiness is not what you own, or even what you achieve, but what you are.

5. The stories you tell yourself about what is possible will define – or confine – you.

Votes, please!

My scribblings

Week 2: Confirmation Bias

I’m sure you’ll recognise this one: we make up our mind about something – whether we like somebody, whether climate change is caused by humans, whether or not we are attractive – and then filter out any input that contradicts what we have already decided. Ring any bells? Beware: there is also a “bias blind spot”, more informally called the “not me fallacy”, which refers to the common belief that others are biased but we are not. Did you fall into the trap?

A disturbing new development is the power of the internet to deliver exactly the kind of content – via your circle of online friends, your newsfeed, your usual websites, even beware your blogroll! – that will reinforce your belief that everybody sees the world the way you do, that it is “the truth”. Most violent regimes gain traction by fanning the flames of extreme confirmation bias, especially in the youth, by presenting them with only one point of view and insulating them from counterbalancing points of view. Reference Hitler.

Ollie Cromwell

Confirmation bias becomes really entrenched, and is nigh on impossible to completely eradicate. It would require an incredible degree of self-awareness to overcome all your inbuilt biases, filters, preconceptions, beliefs – whatever you want to call them. The best strategy is to observe Oliver Cromwell‘s plea in 1650, ‘‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken’’. Instilling even mild doubts in the minds of extremists can puncture the armour of their cast-iron belief system, leading to a further softening of their position. But remember that one person’s extremist is another person’s visionary – what are YOUR confirmation biases?

Week 3: Decision Making

There are several theories on decision making, none of which totally tallied with my perception of the way people make decisions.

1. Expected value theory: people choose the alternative that maximises expected value in financial terms. But then why would people play the lottery, or even take out insurance?

2. Expected utility theory: this factors in subjective values, such as why Carrie Bradshaw just HAD to have that pair of Jimmy Choo’s. Pascal’s Wager (whether to believe in God or not) would fall into this category.

But people violate both these theories, all the time, depending on how the options are described to them (framing effect), or because they would prefer to have one bird in the hand rather than two in the bush (certainty effect).

3. Prospect Theory, as devised by Kahneman and Tversky, and it all got a bit mathematical and complicated at that point.

See what I mean? No, I didn’t understand it either. As far as I can tell, it takes into account the evidence that people dislike losing something more than they like acquiring it, that they get diminishing marginal returns the more they have of something, and they hate losing the last of anything. It was based more on how people actually behave, rather than abstract theories of how “rational people” should behave. If you ever actually meet a “rational person”, do please let me know, won’t you?

Rodin’s Thinker. But how rational are we?

My conclusion from the course up to this point was that I do believe that human beings are, on some level, rational. It’s just that there are an awful lot of unrecognised factors that enter into our decisions, a large proportion of which are unconscious. Our decisions will be the sum of our nature, nurture, culture, religion, the books we’ve read, the conversations we’ve had, what we believe other people expect of us, how we rate our chances of actually getting what we want, etc etc etc. It’s complicated, and if they ever manage to build a computer that can even begin to replicate the subtleties of this decision-making process, I would be mightily impressed. And of course there would have to be a different algorithm for every human being on Earth.

But I am determined to learn more about how we make decisions. I suspect much useful data may lie outside the psychology department, possibly with the Marketing experts at the School of Management. I may have to broaden my quest to get closer to the elusive truth of why human beings make the choices that we do.

Other Stuff:

I’ll be back from my various retreats next week. More updates then! And watch this space for further instalments from the Thinking course. Still to come, Judgments, Base Rate Neglect, Systems 1&2, Concepts, Creativity, Thinking about Others, Religious Belief and Moral Reasoning. Don’t worry if this doesn’t mean much to you yet. Most of it doesn’t mean much to me yet, either. Hopefully by the end of the semester it will!

The course has been fascinating in two respects: firstly it has made me much more aware of my own thinking errors, and secondly it has helped me to understand some of the flawed logic I see around me, that explains all kinds of things from how advertisers can make us buy stuff we don’t need, and why many environmental communications have fallen on deaf ears.

[Note: Most of the course reading consists of psychological studies that are provided to us via the internal Yale server, so I can't share the links, and to be honest, they're not all that exciting anyway. What I'm aiming to give you here is a summary of the most important points that I have taken away from the class so far.]

Week 1: Causality

The culprit? Or was it the gallon of wine that came after?

Human beings are programmed to see patterns: if x happens, and then y happens, and this is repeated a number of times, then we conclude that x caused y. But it ain’t necessarily so. For example, when I was a student (first time around) I used to think that champagne gave me a hangover. Much later it occurred to me that the only time I drank champagne was when it was included in the cost of a black tie dinner, at which I would invariably also have drunk white wine, red wine, and probably dessert wine and port as well. It wasn’t the nature of what I was drinking that was the problem, it was the quantity.

The problem is compounded when there is a gap in time between the cause and the effect, e.g. gradual weight gain, or to a more extreme degree, climate change. When you are trying to prove causality over the long term, as a nutritionist or as a climate change campaigner, your work becomes more difficult.

We also tend to oversimplify by ignoring extraneous factors. Our wonderful Professor Ahn gave us this example: a study said that babies’ eyes were being damaged by nightlights, because people exposed to nightlights at a young age tended to have worse eyesight in later life. Only later was it found that parents with poor eyesight were more likely than other parents to use nightlights, so the eyesight problems were in fact inherited, and nothing to do with nightlights. You see the problem? Just because there seems to be a correlation between x and y, doesn’t mean that x caused y.

We block or screen data that does not agree with our working assumption. We tend to notice when x happens then y happens, but not to notice when x happens but y doesn’t, or when y happens but x hasn’t. More about that on Friday, when I get onto Confirmation Bias.

Other Stuff:

Terra Mar: If you haven’t checked it out already, please take a look at the newly-launched Terra Mar Project. They spotted that 45% of the world’s surface is unclaimed by any nation, and decided to create a new oceanic territory. You can become a citizen of Terra Mar and claim a square mile of ocean. I already have. There is one particular mile, just outside English Harbour in Antigua, that I am particularly fond of.

There is all kinds of other cool stuff on the site, like a virtual dive off Heron Island on the Barrier Reef (I’ve dived there), or friend a species, an education program, and a regular roundup of oceanic news in The Daily Catch. Please see especially the latest Catch, called The Truth About Plastic, with a great infographic. I strongly encourage you to become citizens of the weird and wonderful new land of Terra Mar.

Race Brook Lodge

Retreats: For the remainder of this week I will be away at our World Fellows’ retreat at Race Brook Lodge in Sheffield, Massachusetts. It’s easy to get caught up in the Yale bubble and lose track of time, so the objective of the retreat is to take a step back from life on campus to allow each of us to evaluate whether we are achieving our goals, and allowing us the remaining 6 weeks for corrective action if we discover that we are not. I’ll be leading a workshop on journaling on Thursday, which I’m quite looking forward to. I’ve never led a workshop before, but journaling is something that I’m passionate about. It is one of the most self-transforming tools you can find, and costs next to nothing – unlike many retreats! Would you be interested in seeing a blog about my take on journaling? Post a comment and let me know.

I will go directly from the World Fellows retreat to a second retreat, fortunately also in Massachusetts, with the Pleiades network. I went on the retreat last year, which I thoroughly enjoyed. You might remember the resulting slideshow, shot on what was then my brand new Sony NEX-5N camera. The same camera will be coming with me this year, and I hope to capture some images of gorgeous fall foliage around Colrain, where we will be staying at the Roundhouse, boldly called The Center for Cultural Evolution. I hope to come back suitably more cultured and evolved.

Of course, it is virtually impossible to predict accurately. 100 years ago, who would have foreseen the advent and widespread use of cars, aeroplanes, electric lighting, computers, mobile phones and the internet? So I can’t pretend that this blog is anything other than a wild guess. But it’s an interesting exercise anyway, and unless the advances of the next 100 years include freely available immortality, I will be safely dead by the time that anybody can call me to account.

Would these dudes have predicted the iPhone?

I very much doubt that it will be mostly business as usual in 2113, that the world will have progressed smoothly from where we are now. I believe that we will see an increasing number of disruptions caused by environmental challenges and increasing social unrest. I would be surprised if we are not seeing significant population migrations as deserts expand, oceans rise, and glaciers melt cutting off the flow of water to the 40% of the world’s population that relies on glacial meltwater. It is likely that there will be more frequent and more serious storms and other extreme weather events.

By 2113, the descendants of my friends in Kiribati (my second stopping point during the Pacific crossing) may well have had to abandon their country altogether as the ice caps melt and sea levels rise. Storms will more often send high waves crashing over the fringing reefs of their coral atolls, contaminating the freshwater lens that they depend on for their water supply. These and other mass migrations may lead to overwhelm of the infrastructure in the regions accepting the climate refugees.

It is also highly probable that we will have exhausted our supplies of economically viable fossil fuels and will have had to switch over to renewables. However, given the current lack of investment in renewables, there may well be a period when energy supplies are inadequate to meet demand, leading to riots in the streets and interruptions in industry.

Some academics suggest that we will continue to find ways to innovate our way out of trouble. They say that advances in finance will allow us to create mechanisms to regulate our behaviours, and/or that new technologies will allow us to continue our trajectory of growth and rising standards of living. I am not so sure. As Professor Tim Jackson says in Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet, you simply can’t sustain infinite growth on a finite planet.

I have also been influenced by Paul Gilding, author of The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World, who believes that we won’t get to grips with what is going on until we experience a sufficiently serious environmental disaster to really get our attention. This will then lead to the Great Awakening, as he calls it, when we collectively slap ourselves on the forehead and wonder what the heck we were thinking, and resolve to immediately transform the way we treat our planet.

I would like to think that this disaster could be perfectly proportioned, to get our attention while not resulting in too much death and destruction. But from what I have seen of our reactions to disasters so far, this would have to be one seriously big disaster to make us wake up from our apathy and denial.

Thermohaline circulation

Could such a disaster happen in the next 100 years? I believe that it could. I make no claims to scientific expertise, but I can imagine that, as an example, the Arctic ice will continue its current trend of melting more and more each summer. Once that ice is gone, and with it its ability to reflect the sun’s rays (albedo effect), the feedback loop would accelerate and Greenland could also lose its ice sheet. The dumping of a large quantity of freshwater into the North Atlantic could affect the conveyor belt of currents that links all the world’s oceans (thermohaline circulation), with catastrophic results. That is just one example of many different crises that seem likely to happen sooner rather than later. I’m sure you can think of others.

(For a fantastic sci-fi read, check out Kim Stanley Robinson‘s trilogy of books portraying exactly this scenario, Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below and Sixty Days and Counting. I listened to them on audiobook on my way across the Pacific. Highly recommended.)

I don’t know what scares me more – having a crisis, with all its humanitarian and ecological consequences, or what will happen if we don’t have a crisis, which we will take as tacit permission to continue degrading the Earth. Looking at this from the perspective of which scenario would bring the greatest good to the greatest number of creatures, a crisis could be exactly what the Earth needs. (Ever seen The Day The Earth Stood Still? “If you live, the Earth dies. If you die, the Earth lives.”)

While it is immensely challenging to imagine a world 100 years in the future, it is vitally important that we try. Traditional Iroquois philosophy holds that chiefs making significant decisions should consider the impact on the seventh generation into the future (about 200 years). In a Western culture that now seems unable to think beyond the next presidential election, or the next company report, I propose that it would be better for the world if we all were more mindful of the impact of our actions on the people of 2113.

What do you think? Are we heading for disaster? Can we still turn it around in time? Or is everything tickety-boo? What kind of a future do you envision?

Reflections – Roz Savage
21st September 2012

STOP DRIFTING, START ROWING

Just over eight years ago I was drifting. I had decided what I didn’t want – I didn’t want to do a job I didn’t like to buy stuff I didn’t need. In fact, I had decided I didn’t need much stuff at all, and had sold just about everything at a car boot sale one day.

I might have got rid of all my possessions, but I had acquired something more valuable – a clearer sense of who I was and what I wanted out of life: adventure, challenge, a sense of purpose, a feeling that I was making a difference and leaving a worthwhile legacy, particularly in relation to improving the environmental legacy of our generation.

It was in August 2004, one day as I was driving in my camper van, that these notions collided in my head, the lightbulb went on, and I decided to row across oceans, using my adventures as a platform for my environmental message.

Eight years on, and the vision that came to me on that summer’s day has come true. I have rowed around most of the world, witnessing widespread environmental degradation en route, and also finding that the planet is not as big as we might think it is when we assume that we are not capable of fundamentally changing the way it functions. I have published two books, posted over a thousand blogs, and made countless presentations and speeches.

Now it is time for a new chapter, and a new vision, and this is my present challenge. The problem with having done something that I would once have thought impossible, is that now I actually deem most things possible, provided that you have enough determination, dedication, enthusiasm and sheer bloody-mindedness to see them through. So I’ve set the bar rather uncomfortably high for myself.

But I agree with the veteran British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes that “life is too short for second rate ambitions”, and so I want to find a challenge that will once again take me way outside my comfort zone, way out there above the treeline, way out into the ocean of the unknown.

I am trying to replicate that sense of gently purposeful drifting that I had in 2004 – a sense of openness and awareness, not deciding anything but just being open to whatever answers might emerge. I am allowing myself to be drawn towards the things that I enjoy and find satisfying, because if I know one thing for sure, it is that life is too short to spend most of it doing something I don’t enjoy. It just so happens that I enjoy doing things that I feel are worthwhile, and make a difference. Seeking the joy was my guiding principle during shopping period, and it will be my guiding principle when I decide what to do next.

I picture my time at Yale as being on a river, rather than an ocean. I think of my personal values as being my boat, that keeps me afloat on the river and keeps me safe through the rapids. As I drift along the river, I am observing what is happening on the banks – in the outside world, in the wider world of Yale, in the past and in the present. I’m also looking at what is happening in the main current of the river – with all my colleagues on the Yale World Fellows Program, and with the other people I am meeting here at Yale, and with the things I am learning. We’re all in the current together, and you don’t need me to tell you that it seems to be picking up speed. Fortunately I don’t think we’re heading for a waterfall – or not yet, anyway.

No, I think we’re heading for a delta, at the end of this semester, where the river will split into many different courses. Our journey together will end, and we will take our separate paths. Some of us might combine forces again, further downstream. I hope so.

I also hope that by then I will know which of those many courses to take. It might take some frantic last-minute paddling to get me into the right stream, but as in 2004, I hope I will know when the time is right to stop drifting, and start rowing.

[Featured photo: arriving in Tarawa]

In the latest Yale Tale, I am at last settling into the routine of student life in New Haven. I’ve been mostly a reading, writing, note-taking hermit, being a good little student and doing all my homework. I’ve made some notes below about the reading mentioned in the video.

For Yale World Fellows seminars:

Capital Punishment:-

Tomorrow night our distinguished speaker will be Tom Ullman, so the conversation will probably revolve around capital punishment. 15 US states do not allow the death penalty, but 35 still do. Arguments in favour seem to be deterrence and incapacitation. But is this the real rationale? It could be argued that it looks more like revenge. The argument seems to go: “you were wrong in taking a life, so we are going to take your life”. Surely the taking of a life is an absolute wrong – “thou shalt not kill” might be the language that many in favour of the death penalty would understand – so how can it ever be justified?

Albert Pierrepoint was the longest-serving hangman in England, and although numbers are uncertain, probably hanged about 435 people, including about 200 Nazi war criminals. He retired in 1956, and the death penalty in Britain was abolished in 1965, after several controversial hangings. A very good film, Let Him Have It, tells the story of Derek Bentley, who was hanged in 1953 for being an accomplice in a murder, while the actual perpetrator, who was under 18, served only 10 years and has been a law abiding citizen ever since. Timothy Evans was wrongly convicted of the serial murders at 10 Rillington Place, including the killing of his own daughter, which were actually committed by his downstairs neighbour John Christie. Evans was hanged in 1950 and was posthumously pardoned in 1966.

Pierrepoint kept his opinions to himself on the topic until his 1974 autobiography, Executioner: Pierrepoint, in which he wrote:

“I have come to the conclusion that executions solve nothing, and are only an antiquated relic of a primitive desire for revenge which takes the easy way and hands over the responsibility for revenge to other people …”

Also in Yale World Fellows seminars:

- Theories of Change and the challenge of measuring the impact of NGOs

- Microfinance

- Global banking crisis – to get me vaguely up to speed on this, I watched the documentary Inside Job online – it describes bankers in their own little bubble and detached from human consequences of their gambles, deregulation aided by big contributions to political parties, finance regarded as an end in itself rather than a peripheral activity. Quote from the film: ”Why should a financial engineer be paid 100 times more than a real engineer? A real engineer builds bridges. A financial engineer builds dreams. And when those dreams turn out to be nightmares, somebody else pays for it.”

Lots of other reading too:

- Psychology of climate change communications, e.g. Futerra Sustainability Communications, with lots of useful documents available online. See also Yale Panel on Climate Change Communications.

- Global movements for sustainability, e.g. World Future Council. This also gave me an excuse to watch again one of my all-time favourite TED Talks, by Tim Jackson, on Prosperity Without Growth. Tremendously inspiring with his vision for an altogether more sensible and more sustainable way of living.

- On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, by William Zinsser

Coming up – BLUE Ocean Film Festival in Monterey, California, where I will be next weekend, catching up with the great and the good and the blue!

I survived, and was glad that I went. I got to meet some US Coast Guard trainees, in rather more pleasant circumstances than when I met some of their senior colleagues in 2007, as well as countless others who passed by my table in the course of the evening. Overall, it was a fun evening, and I thought you’d like to see some of the photos of me and my colleagues at work.

My exhibit, Larabars (courtesy of my sponsors) to answer the FAQ “So what do you eat?”

Gabriella from Mexico, artistic curator and entrepren

Sisonke from South Africa, human rights campaigner with George Soros’s Open Society Initiativ

Me talking to the US Coast Guard trainees

Wanja from Kenya, LGBTI campaigne

Paula from Chile, high-powered magazine editor for El Mercuri

Martín from Argentina, economist and former politician

Martin Sturgeon, British army officer

Kamal from Morocco, UN peacekeeper

Julien, our French bureaucrat and agriculture wonk

Ayush from India, engineer, designer, recently engaged in the “Potty Project” initiative by Bill Gates to design sustainable sanitation

Bibi from Nigeria, scholar, feminist and publisher

Réda from Morocco, human rights lawy

Ian, our distinguished Chinese banker

Ruchi, supporting elected female representatives in India

So that’s the gang. I haven’t yet introduced you to the awesome team of staff that direct and administer the program, but that will have to wait for another day and another blog. I have to go and do my homework now!

Patrick and I have a lot in common. We both had “proper” jobs, only to decide that our careers did not reflect our personal values. As Patrick puts it, he was working to make rich people richer and poor people poorer. He quit his job and went to Mexico, where he spent 7 years. During this time of soul-searching he came up with the concept for Fairtrasa, a company that links small-scale farmers in Latin America to local and international markets. Fairtrasa supports the formation of farmer cooperatives, provides farmers with technical skills, and fosters community development through health and education projects.

He has also established his own marketing companies in Europe and North America to sell these sustainable and fairly traded food products directly to all major supermarkets. Today, Fairtrasa represents over 3,000 small-scale farmers and operates offices in Mexico, Peru, Chile and Argentina.

Patrick’s goal is to replicate Fairtrasa’s business model in other Latin American countries and beyond. He was recognized as “Social Entrepreneur of the Year” in Mexico in 2009, and as an Ashoka Globalizer Fellow and Endeavor Entrepreneur in 2011.

After the interview had ended, Patrick and I went on chatting for a while, and found a few more similarities. Both our fathers were 10 years older than our mothers, and both our fathers died at the age of 75. We have both been (or still are) on a spiritual quest, reading lots of books and asking lots of questions. And both of us are at a point where, having already made a major career change, we want to carry on basically doing the same thing, but taking it to the next level.

I hope you enjoy listening to our conversation. And maybe you’d like to think about what you would like to do next? The same thing, but at a higher level? Or something different altogether? Post a comment and let me know!

I also need a better title for this series than “Yale Video Blog No.X”. I mean, really! If only I was doing these every day (not possible) I would call them Yalie Dailies. But they’re not. Please let me know if you have any better ideas!

Filmed in my apartment in New Haven on 16th September, 2012.

Featured image: Patrick at Yale World Fellows Night last week talking to Jason Young, one of my two undergraduate liaisons.

We had our seminar on Identity last Monday afternoon with the wonderful Professor Tony Kronman from Yale Law School. It was a lively and enlightening discussion, but didn’t wave a magic wand and provide a cure-all answer. I suppose that, in a complex world, there ARE no cure-all answers. All there can be is a greater understanding, and tolerance, of points of view other than our own.

Anyway, on to my earlier thoughts….

Amin Maalouf writes, “No doubt the scale on which globalization is taking place, together with the dizzying speed of change, make all of us feel as if we’re being submerged by it all and unable to affect the course of events. But we must keep reminding ourselves that this feeling is extremely widespread, and shared by those we tend to think of as safely ensconced on the top of the heap.”

Is anybody really in charge?

In other words, most people perceive that others are in charge, but really nobody is. Identity determines who we perceive as being “in charge” – God, corporations, government, etc. But is anybody really in charge? Most people are running scared, feeling under attack. Even corporate fat cats feel threatened by changing times, social media, exposure of shady practices, being overtaken by the younger generation. If most of the human race is afraid, what will the consequences be? Not good.

The biggest single gift we could give humankind would be fearlessness. In reality, it seems that human society is a process of co-creation, and if more people felt this privilege and responsibility, they would maybe be less afraid as more empowered, less helpless, therefore less threatened.

Of course, some things deserve to be feared. When I contemplate matters such as runaway climate change, or the parlous state of the oceans, I feel justifiably afraid. But I’ve learned from experience to control the things I can, and park my anxieties about the rest. They are just a drain on my energy. But right now, most of our scary stuff is human-made and therefore falls within realm of what we can control.

A different kind of leadership

This will call for a different kind of leadership, that doesn’t subscribe to labels such as capitalist or socialist, outdated notions that have been tried and found wanting. Maalouf again: “The twentieth century will have taught us that no doctrine in itself is necessarily a liberating force: all of them may be perverted or take a wrong turning; all have blood on their hands – communism, liberalism, nationalism, each of the great religions, and even secularism. Nobody has a monopoly on fanaticism; nobody has a monopoly on humane values.”

As much as possible (and I don’t know how much that is), government should be by referendum, bringing politics to the people. Make them feel empowered and they will rise to the challenge, not only considering their own views and getting better informed, but also recruiting others to their views to secure votes. This could be the beginning of genuine democracy.

There would still exist a need for strong and wise government because it becomes crucially important how question is phrased, as Dan Ariely has so eloquently argued in his TED Talk.

Government would also need to ensure that choices are appropriately restricted so as not to be blatantly inconsistent with existing legislation and infrastructure. (Further notes on organizing a referendum are contained in this document at lawandhumanrights.org.)

A better way for the future?

The point is maybe not so much to allow the people to govern, but to make them feel that they are engaged in the process of government, that they don’t just have to choose one party or the other and then put up with everything that party stands for, the bits they don’t like as well as the bits they do.

This increased engagement will increase participation, hence increasing feelings of control, reducing fear and stress. (It has been shown that perception of lack of control is key cause of stress.)

According to Maalouf, individuals shape religion: “it does seem to me that the influence of religion on people is often exaggerated, while the influence of people on religion is neglected.” Likewise, individuals shape society at the same time that society shapes individuals. (I am currently reading a book by Yale Professor Bruce Wexler, which makes this point – Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change.)

So there is no need for individuals to feel disenfranchised or threatened. They just need to know how empowered they are.

What do you think? How does democracy work in your country? Or doesn’t it?

Do you feel that your voice makes a difference, or would you prefer a different system? Maybe smaller units of governance?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Please post a comment and get the discussion flowing!

This has really got me thinking, and in advance of our seminar I would like to share my thoughts with you, in the hope of getting some feedback that might help me to further develop my ideas. The seminar takes place on Sept 10th, and I wonder if it was deliberately calculated to be so close to Sept 11th, the eleventh anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center – surely the most obvious example in recent times of what forces can be unleashed when there is a perceived threat to a cultural identity.

When considering the issue of identity, I wanted to start from what I know, i.e. my own identity.

I have spent more time than most getting to know myself. Finding myself was one of my motivations for wanting to row across oceans, and it was the ideal arena for such a mission, as there is very little else to do when alone on a rowboat in the middle of the ocean.

But I’ve found that the further I go into myself, the less self I find, until my sense of self starts to dissolve altogether. I recall one particular night, in mid-Pacific, when unusually it was calm enough for me to lie out on the deck for a while and gaze up at the stars. I had the strangest combination of feelings, being so insignificant in the presence of such celestial wonder while at the same time feeling so interconnected with the cosmos that I could have been almost omnipresent.

Jill Bolte Taylor brilliantly describes a similar feeling in her wildly popular TED Talk. While a stroke intermittently shut down the logical left hemisphere of her brain, she experienced an intense feeling of oneness with the universe, as the boundary between her “self” and everything else dissolved to create a feeling of spiritual ecstasy.

Jill Bolte Taylor

Part of the trouble is that people confuse what they are with who they are. There was a recent debate in the TED group on LinkedIn, of which I am a member. The question posed was:

“Who am I?” Or have you asked yourself, “What am I?” Is there a difference between “Who” and “What” in regard to yourself? Can we define what it is?

Eileen M replied:

“My daughter was assigned the first question for a school paper, and all that she could come up with was, ‘I am __________________ ___________.’ I told her I thought that said it all, and she ended up with an A. I was relating this story to my younger two children, and I asked them what they would have written. We all ended up generally agreeing that response should be sufficient.

If I ask myself “What am I?”, however, then I could write pages of my roles, what kind of creature I am, from what and who I am descended, what activities or hobbies I enjoy and which help to define me, personality traits, and more.

I see a significant difference because “Who” is my internal, personal identity, and “What” is external or physical things that are not uniquely mine. We are all human, almost any female can be a mother, just about anyone can be a reader or baker or painter or employee or procrastinater or thinker.

Many can be what I am, but no one else can be who I am.”

Well, this is all very beautiful and spiritual, but so what? What does this mean in the real world?

Our sense of identity determines many of our choices

Most of us construct a sense of self, a persona, to create enough structure around ourselves to allow us to function in the every day world, primarily to make decisions. It’s a shortcut. By having a sense of our moral, ethical and cultural frameworks, we don’t have to go back to first principles every time we have to make a decision. As an example, when I am in the supermarket, I know that as an environmentalist I am going to choose this food item over that food item in the supermarket because it is packaged in less plastic, or it is organic, or it is local, or ideally all three. In a world now full of a bewildering range of choices, our sense of identity helps us narrow that range of choices down to manageable numbers.

The problems come when we forget that we have CHOSEN these identities in order to facilitate everyday life, when we start to confuse them with who we actually are, when we identify so closely with our identities (so to speak) that we take it personally when we perceive that one of our identities is under attack.

Again – so what? If we agree with this notion, how can we get everybody in the world to stop taking things so personally? A general raising of consciousness would be great, but it can take a while. A long while.

What do you think? How do you identify yourself? Have you ever felt that a group with which you identify is under attack? What could be done, culturally, legislatively, or otherwise, to ensure that sectors of society do not feel threatened?

In the video I mention our upcoming seminar on identity. I have written a blog describing some of my initial thoughts, which I will publish tomorrow. I would very much appreciate it if you would come back to me with your comments, to help me develop my ideas on the subject.

Paula is the Magazines Editor for El Mercurio, Chile’s foremost newspaper. She oversees six weekly publications, writes regular columns in magazines and newspapers, and is the author of four books. Her next book will focus on the leadership of the Chilean presidents during the country’s transition to democracy.

She also blogs regularly for the Huffington Post. Here are links to some of her recent articles (I’ve chosen from the English-language ones only), that will help give you an insight into Paula’s interests, life, and country:

After The Death Of Chilean Gay Daniel Zamudio: It Takes More Than Tolerance To Change Anti-Gay Culture In Latinamerica

Two Years After 8.8 Earthquake in Chile: Lessons from a Disaster

Quota Girls: The Other 99 Percent

Chilean Indignados: I’m Proud of Our Young Generation

The Chilean Miners, One Year After: Bitter Sweet Memories

Lucky To Be Part of the “New World”

Although I went through Santiago en route to Antarctica, and have extensive experience of Chilean Sauvignon Blanc, I can’t claim to know all that much about Chile. The Wikipedia page is informative. The impression I get from Paula is that Chile is an exciting place to be at the moment, as the ripples of increasing prosperity spread from Brazil throughout the rest of Latin America.

What about you? What do you know about Chile? Have you been there? What is your perception of the country? Drop me a comment and let me know!

In case you’re interested in the technical details, I filmed my interview with Paula on an iPhone 4S, slotted into the back of an ALM mCAM Stabilizer Mount with Video Lens & Mic mounted on a small tripod. It was the first time I’d used it apart from a short test clip, and I was reasonably pleased with the results. Comments? Previous vlogs have been recorded directly onto my laptop, using the Photobooth application.

My next video blog will be me soloing it as I look back over the 2-week orientation phase of the World Fellows Program, and look forward to the start of the semester. Please feel free to give me feedback on these vlogs. It’s a new direction for me, so I am very open to (constructive!) criticism.

So I felt encouraged to continue.

I know that I promised you interviews with my colleagues, and fear not, they will come, but I wanted to allow a little more time for us all to get to know each other before I started singling people out for one-to-one interviews. So for now you will have to make do with another solo performance from yours truly.

Having said that, our motley assembly of Fellows is rapidly starting to feel like a real group, with a strong esprit de corps, and a genuine feeling of mutual respect and support. So there will be new faces coming soon to a computer screen near you.

Lots to catch up on since my last update. I’ll let the video do most of the talking, but my show notes are pasted below.

Orientation:

Day 1: August 15th

Today would have been Dad’s 83rd birthday. He was always academically ambitious for me. I think he would have been proud of me.

Introduction from Michael Cappello, Program Director:

223 world fellows from 79 different countries

Mission statement: “The mission of the Yale World Fellows Program is to cultivate and empower a community of globally engaged leaders committed to positive change through inter-disciplinary dialogue and action.”

The parlor at Betts House, where our orientation takes place

First cohort of second decade of the program. Big reunion and review last October. We are the guinea pigs for the new improved version. “Our expectations for you are incredibly high” – to be best we can be and also to give back to the life of the university, and to the world at large.

We are expected to strike a 50/50 balance between giving and receiving. Also encouraged to participate in college life, especially dinners and Masters’ teas. Over the course of the semester, we can expect to do 8-15 talks on campus.

The new curriculum is shaped around characteristics that a 21st century leader needs:

- Knowledge

- Network of collaborators and experts

- Willingness and ability to collaborate

- Courage, including the courage to fulfill our potential

The new version of the course has an enhanced emphasis on collaboration.

Many of us will change careers. Or will recommit to existing path. Either is fine, so long as the experience is meaningful.

Yale alumni include 4 out of last 7 presidents, 1/3 of Supreme Court, and many ambassadors.

“With any great privilege comes great responsibility” - Chatham House rules – dinner conversations are off the record.

Dinner at Istanbul restaurant with Reda, Kamal, and Julien – consensus that the more we put our hearts into this, the better it will be.

In my office at Betts House. I share it with Julien, Patrick, Martin, Ian and Ruchi.

Day 2:

My hopes:

To grow as an effective leader

To figure out what exactly I’m going to lead!

To devise a plan for next 7 years

To figure out strategy for personal financial sustainability

To achieve measurable impact on campus sustainability

To better understand human motivation across different cultures

Fears:

That I have unrealistically high expectations of how much I can achieve in my time here

That I won’t have a broad enough margin to process what is happening

I gave my introductory presentation, recorded for future comparison so I can see if I improve over the course of the semester. Patrick Streubi from Switzerland also made his presentation. Some parallels between our stories. He also started to question his high-flying career, sold everything, took some time out, and headed off in a new and more rewarding, ethical career direction. He founded Fairtrasa to import organic, fairtrade produce from Mexico and South America.

Day 3:

6.30am Hike to top of East Rock - new horizons

Our two politicians - not convinced politics is best way to go, private sector or NGOs also possible ways to exert influence for change

Dinner at Betts House for spouses and partners in the evening, showed videos of my Atlantic crossing. If you’re interested, earlier versions of the same videos are available on YouTube:

Rowing The Atlantic Part 1
Rowing The Atlantic Part 2
Rowing The Atlantic Part 3
Rowing The Atlantic Part 4

Panoramic view of New Haven from East Rock. Patrick, Réda and Ayush on the right.

Weekend:

Meeting with Prof Bruce Wexler, neuroscientist, interesting conversation about human attitudes to environment and how to create change. Lots of resources and ideas. Discussed courses I might take. Shopping period of two weeks at start of semester, during which we can drop in and out of lectures to see what appeals. Video of interview with Bruce here, and his book is available on Amazon, or, of course, from your local independent bookseller.

Tour of campus from the Yale Visitor Center, found out a little more about undergraduate life. 5,300 undergrad students in 12 residential colleges. 10% overseas students. (I am affiliated with Saybrook College, known for the “Saybrook Strip”. Yes, it is what you think it is!)

New Haven’s claims to fame: home of American style pizza, hamburger and lollipop. There is a restaurant in town that serves pizza with mashed potato and bacon topping. Is it just me, or is that plain wrong?!

A tourist touching Woolsey’s toe for luck

Yale crew is oldest collegiate sport in the US. Yale President Theodore Dwight Woolsey‘s toe rubbed for luck in important events such as sport, exams or on hot dates. (Yes, I did rub his toe for luck on the World Fellow’s Program!)

Back in 1700s, one of the earliest benefactors was called Jeremiah Dummer. But fortunately naming rights went to a later benefactor, called Elihu Yale, otherwise instead of being called Yalies we would be called Dummies.

Tremendous opportunity, at exactly the right time for me. Want to make the most of it, and get every drop of value out of it, while not ending up frazzled.

For the next four months I will be at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, on the Yale World Fellows Program. I’d like to share this experience with you as much as I am able, so I have decided to do a couple of video blogs every week to bring you up to date with what is happening here. One blog per week will be an interview with one of my colleagues on the program, and the other will be my own thoughts and reflections.

I won’t post a full transcription of the video, but I will publish the rough notes that I use as a prompt while I am talking to camera. Any resemblance between what I plan to say and what I actually say will be mostly accidental! Regard them more as show notes than as a full-blown blog post.

So here we go, my first video blog from Yale….

Harkness Tower, New Haven

Experiences so far since arriving in New Haven

-       first impressions of the town – contrast between rich and poor

-       Elm City Market – cooperative

-       settling into apartment on High St

Off to a flying start:

-       Dinner party with power couple Charles Vogl and Socheata Poeuv and PhD friends

-       Meeting with Julie Newman and colleagues at the Office of Sustainability to explore ways we can work together, likely to include moving Yale away from single use plastics

-       Lining up meetings with some professors of psychiatry and neuroscience, research into attitudes towards climate change

-       Very interesting and wide-ranging meeting with CJ May, resourcerer about waste management at Yale

The Cambridge Arms

Met some of the world fellows at dinner:

-       Martin Sturgeon and wife Victoria

-       Daniel Weisfield, one of the three US fellows, and his wife Atara

-       Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, feminist and scholar from Nigeria

-       Paula Escobar-Chavarría, journalist and author from Chile

-       Réda Oulamine, human rights lawyer from Morocco, and his wife

-       Ruchi Yadav, activist for human rights and women’s rights in Delhi

Goals for the program:

-       extend global network of contacts

-       academic credibility to underpin future campaigning with regard to policy-makers

-       time out to study, acquire knowledge, especially interested in motivation in relation to environment:

• Why are we not acting in our own long term interests?
• Why are we so hooked on consumption when it’s not making us happy?
• How can we use the growing knowledge of neuroplasticity, the science of how we respond to external stimuli to rewire our minds, to find a way to shift our culture to a different value system that prioritises happiness, and indeed our long term survival, over short term financial and material rewards.

Probably not, although there is a useful equation that allows us to at least examine some of the variables that govern the extent of our impact, hopefully with a view to reducing it. Some of you may well be familiar with the IPAT equation in environmental literature. Its creation is generally attributed to Paul Ehrlich, although according to the Wikipedia page the equation actually emerged from a debate in which Ehrlich was only one of three participants.

Environmentalism, by Tung Ptri

I think it’s fairly self-explanatory, but do check out the Wikipedia page for a short-but-good definition. It basically explains that what is happening in terms of human impact is a product of our growing numbers and our increasing affluence. If we were achieving sufficient advances in the efficiency of the technology required to produce this affluence, it’s just possible that we could reduce our overall environmental impact, but at the moment our technology is not advancing fast enough to offset the exponential growth in our population and material consumption.

I first came across the equation in Paul Gilding’s excellent book, The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World, an ultimately optimistic book in which he foresees the need for a significant environmental crisis that will lead to a Great Awakening, in which the human race will collectively slap itself on the forehead and wonder what the heck it was thinking when it completely messed up its one and only planet. (You can get the 18-minute version of Paul Gilding’s thesis in his TED Talk, The Earth Is Full.)

More recently, a friend sent me the link to a variation on the IPAT, as explained by Ray Anderson in his TED Talk on the business logic of sustainability. A friend of Amory Lovins, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, and influenced by Paul Hawken’s business writings, Ray Anderson transformed his carpet business into an eco-responsible business that now aims to have zero impact by 2020.

Roz with Paul Hawken at Mountainfilm in Telluride, Colorado (Sedna in background)

He first of all rearranged the IPAT equation so that T is divisor rather than multiplier, then revised it again to what he calls “The New Civilisation” so that A becomes a, symbolising decreased emphasis on affluence, and H added into divisor to stand for Happiness (satisfying all human needs)

I = P x a

T2 x H

I’d like to suggest a further refinement, so that W for Wisdom is factored in, although my algebra isn’t quite good enough to be sure where it would go. I think it would be:

I =    P x a

T2 x H x W

but please feel free to tell me if I’m wrong!

What are your thoughts? What other variables do you think we can or should introduce to the equation to reduce the environmental impact of humankind? Do you think the formula is helpful, or does it just tell us what we already knew without offering solutions? Please post a comment and let me know!

Back to that “H” – there is also a formula for defining happiness. H = S + C + V, where:

H = your enduring level of happiness
S = your biological set point
C = conditions of your life
V = your voluntary activities

Trying to incorporate that into the IPAT formula truly does defeat my algebraic abilities, but it might be fun to discuss the Happiness Formula separately in a future Philosophy Friday. Yes?

Plastic bag world

Then there were the more problematic objects – things for which I have no use, and nor would anybody else, but I can’t bear to see them go into landfill. More and more, I find it incredibly difficult to throw anything away, particularly anything plastic. If it can’t be recycled or reallocated via eBay or Freecycle, I find myself in a real quandary. Now that I know just how persistent plastic is, it seems disrespectful to future generations to leave my plastic detritus for them to deal with.

If you are still able to throw away plastic items without feeling guilty, I want to change that by suggesting you watch one or all of these films. Or, if you are all too aware of the perils of plastic, but you know people who aren’t, encourage them to join you for a movie night. We all need to do what we can to spread the word.

Bag It – started as a movie, now more of a campaign, including educational materials, a blog and a shop

Tapped – why bottled water is bad for your health as well as your wallet

Plastic Shores - an excellent educational film by my friend Ed Scott-Clarke (I’m in it!)

Plastic Planet – Werner Boote investigates the effects of plastic on human health. Look at the expression on his face when the doctor tells him the impact on his sperm count. You can watch the entire film on YouTube.

Plastic Oceans (forthcoming) – to be released in early 2013

I guarantee you that after watching these films, you will never look at plastic – or your garbage – quite the same way again.

(If you want to receive my blog via email, make sure you sign up by entering your email address into the box on the right, under “Stay Updated”, and click on Subscribe.)

Henrik Edberg

1. The Positivity Blog, Happiness and Awesomeness Tips that Work in Real Life, by Henrik Edberg

I always save these into Evernote for future reference. Thoughtfully written, the blog offers sensible tips and inspiring quotes to help you deal with the challenges of life in a positive and uplifting way. Very highly recommended.

Recent inspirational topics include How To Be Less Stressed In Everyday Life, How To Become A Person Of Action Starting Today, How To Handle Criticism, and How To Create An Awesome Life.

As well as lots of great free content, Henrik also offers Premium Courses and Guides. I haven’t tried them out yet, so would be interested to hear of other people’s experiences.

2. The Adventure Blog, by Kraig Becker

My go-to resource for the latest news on adventure, extreme sport, exploration, and cool gear, The Adventure Blog comes out a couple of times a week on average. Kraig does a great job of rounding up the hot topics, and often features jaw-dropping videos of people pushing the boundaries of human potential (and occasionally human self-endangerment).

Max Daniels

3. Max Daniels blog, home of “Stuff My Zen Teacher Says”

I first met Max during the Pleiades retreat in New England last year, when she offered her services as a life coach. I enjoyed her down-to-earth approach, and signed up for her blog which has continued to deliver value, insights and humour ever since. She specialises in coaching on food, weight loss and money, but has wise and funny things to say on many subjects, with an inquisitive let’s-try-this-and-see-if-it-works kind of attitude to new theories of human potential.

4. The Silver Pen, by Hollye Jacobs

I met Hollye last year, when I was passing through Santa Barbara and she very kindly offered me hospitality at her gorgeous home. Hollye is a breast cancer survivor who chose to use her illness as a springboard for an unfailingly upbeat blog, finding the silver lining in everything. I confess that I have not read the entire back archive, but I suspect that it started as a way to keep

Hollye Jacobs

herself focused on the positive during her treatment, and has evolved into a way to help others find the silver linings during their own life challenges. Forbes voted it one of the top 100 websites for women in 2012, although I don’t see why men wouldn’t enjoy it too. Regular features include Friday Fixin’s and Sunday Sweetness, as well as lots of great and inspiring quotes.

5. The TED Blog, by various writers including TED Curator Chris Anderson

I met Chris and the rest of the TED gang when I spoke at TED Mission Blue (or click on embedded link below) a couple of years ago. Even before then, I was addicted to TED Talks, the 18-minute nuggets of some of the world’s foremost thinkers giving the talks of their lives. This may or may not be a good thing, but now when somebody recommends a nonfiction book to me, TED has become my first port of call. Chances are that the author has given a talk, and instead of spending days reading the book, I can get the crash course while I eat my dinner!

Some other time I will post a blog about my favourite TED Talks, but if you only ever watch one, this is my all-time favourite – Jill Bolte Taylor on her experience as a neuroscientist witnessing her own stroke. It has had nearly 9 million views, and if you watch it, you will see why. Mind-expanding!

Other Stuff:

(Featured image of Southwark Bridge, taken on my iPhone) For anybody coming to London for the Olympics, bring a brolly! Designer wellies are now also de rigueur for the trendy young things. While the US swelters, we are experiencing one of the wettest summers on record. John Hammond of the BBC explains why. I will leave you to draw your own conclusions about unusual weather….

My TED Talk.

I hadn’t known in advance who would be at the meeting, agendas and attendee lists not being forthcoming, so I was delighted to find myself at the table in the State Dining Room surrounded by luminaries of British adventure such as:

Chris Bonington

Sir Chris Bonington (veteran mountaineer, first ascent of south face of Annapurna, who I first met last year at Buckingham Palace)

Colonel John Blashford-Snell (explorer, founder of Operation Raleigh, who I met several years ago at a small lunch hosted by the Peruvian ambassador)

Benedict Allen (renowned for adventures involving variously camels, huskies, and prolonged spells living with indigenous peoples, who I first met at his home in London several years ago after we were introduced by a mutual friend)

Dee Caffari

Pen Hadow (see featured image, has trekked solo to both North and South Poles – we have met a few times, initially over dinner in Devon via a good friend of mine, Sir John Rawlins. Sir John also first introduced me to Dr Sylvia Earle, the legendary American oceanographer.)

Dee Caffari (sailor, first woman to sail solo around the world nonstop in both directions – she and I were both regular guests on Radio Solent in 2005, while I was on the Atlantic and she was sailing around the world the “wrong” way)

Rosie Stancer (has trekked solo to the South Pole, and will be making a second attempt on the North Pole next year. She advised me on long-distance expeditions in the run-up to the Atlantic, my first ocean row. She is also a cousin of the Queen.)

Sir Robin Knox-Johnston and Sir Ranulph Fiennes sent their apologies, being in Ireland and Harrogate (!) respectively.

Roz (and somebody’s finger) at Number Ten

Looking around the table in the grand dining room, as we sat beneath the oil-painted gaze of great Britons of the past, I couldn’t help but wonder how many accumulated miles of travel on sea, ice, mountain and air we might represent, not to mention how many moments of terror, and how many moments of triumph. I had read enough books and seen enough films about my fellow attendees to know that the numbers would be quite impressive. This was the creme de la creme of British adventure, and I felt honoured to be there.

But the point of the meeting was not to reflect on past glories, but to plan future ones. The British Foreign Office, along with their colleagues in three other government departments, have launched an initiative called This is GREAT Britain (see their Facebook page for more) designed to attract more tourism and foreign business investment into Britain, capitalising on the momentum generated by the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics in 2012. Various initiatives have already been launched, such as Fashion is GREAT Britain, Music is GREAT Britain, Sport is GREAT Britain, Countryside is GREAT Britain, and Technology is GREAT Britain. The plan is now to create a similar campaign for Adventure.

I’m all in favour. For several decades we seem to have been very apologetic about being British, possibly due to some residual post-Empire guilt. But we’re not a bad little country, and have definitely punched above our weight in terms of our contributions to global culture and entrepreneurship. Yet we seem to suffer from a national lack of self-esteem – and I interpret the way we litter our countryside and cities as one symptom of this. When an individual person stops taking care of their appearance, gaining weight or not dressing nicely, it’s often a reflection of the way they feel about themselves. We seem to be doing this on a national level. It would be nice to stop apologising, and to take a healthy and appropriate pride in ourselves – and our countryside.

Other Stuff:

As for the meetings and conversations that I have been having recently at the House of Commons, I don’t know yet where those are going to lead. For now I am just gathering ingredients for that mental melting pot, and waiting to see what emerges. Stay tuned!

More details, including Mos’s inland route, are on the OAR website. Do please get down to the riverbank if you can, and give him your support. I’d like to take this opportunity to wish Mos all the very best of luck, and I look forward to catching up with him for a beer at some point along the route.

We have put together this short video to explain the difficult decision to cancel this year’s transatlantic row, including never-seen-before footage of some of the icebergs off the coast of St John’s in Newfoundland. Many thanks to John McIntyre of Plastic Oceans for filming and editing.

Other Stuff:

Thanks to Erkki Taada for posting a link to the interview with The Adrenalist: Roz Savage is A Master of the Ocean. Thanks also for all the other comments on my previous blog. Happy to find you hadn’t deserted me during prolonged radio silence!

Houses of Parliament

My meetings this week at Number Ten Downing Street (official residence of British Prime Minister) and at the Houses of Parliament went very well. More in an upcoming blog – including photo of me outside Number Ten’s famous front door!

[Featured image: Roz and Mos in Bojangles off the coast of Newfoundland]

Priscilla, Queen of the Road. I was driving my old camper van when inspiration struck.

It was into this fertile void of uncertainty that the idea to row across oceans to raise environmental awareness exploded like the Big Bang, and the course for the next 7 years of my life was set. These years have been incredibly busy, organising, fundraising and executing one major expedition per year as well as speaking, writing, and campaigning.

This year had looked set to be equally busy, first with Trashmobs and then the North Atlantic OAR project slated to take up most of the summer. When the OAR was postponed indefinitely, I was pleasantly surprised to find I had a bonus three months on my hands. Of course the diary didn’t stay empty for long – a book deal came along, as well as various professional and social commitments. But spending the summer on dry land rather than slogging my way across yet another ocean has presented me with a welcome opportunity to re-create the summer of 2004. And I hope that it may similarly lead to a blinding flash of inspiration that will determine the course of the next chapter of my life.

At Machu Picchu in Peru

I think of the process this way: in 2004 I took a whole load of ingredients and put them into my mental melting pot: the sense of adventure engendered in Peru, a desire to do something useful in the world, curiosity about new places and new experiences, and the need to make a grand gesture about my new personal and environmental values. The melting pot bubbled away for a while and then one day out popped an idea that met all my criteria. Almost immediately I had a clear vision of where I wanted to be several years hence, and after a few days of battling with the little negative voice inside that was telling me I had absolutely no qualifications or experience for this task, I bowed to fate and announced my intention to row the Atlantic. 7 years later on, that vision is now my reality.

Maybe it’s too optimistic to hope to have two blinding flashes in one lifetime. But it’s worth a try. So I am reading books, and spending time with my journal, and allowing my curiosity to take me where it will. And with a bit of luck inspiration may strike again.

Other Stuff:

We are still finalising the publishing contract for my book about the Pacific. As soon as it is signed and sealed, I will be able to let you know more details about the publisher and publication date. Stay tuned!

I’ll be seeing my friend Sarah Outen in a couple of weeks time. Sarah had a traumatic experience recently when she was severely beaten up by a tropical storm during her attempt to row solo across the Pacific. She was picked up by the Japanese Coast Guard, and sadly has lost her boat, Gulliver. Read about her harrowing experience here. But you can’t keep a good woman down for long, and I know for sure that Sarah will be back out there just as soon as she can.

Next week I have several interesting meetings and events, two at the Houses of Parliament and one at 10 Downing Street. Exciting times!

[Featured image: a mountain in Peru]

Having spent over 520 days at sea, I probably know the blue bits better than most. I have been in a unique position to observe the visible impact that humans have had on the ocean. On a beautiful calm day, with sunlight glinting off the waves, it is heartbreaking to see a plastic bottle floating on the water. Mankind’s impact is felt everywhere. When I have been alone for a long time at sea – sometimes over a hundred days without seeing another human – this evidence of our carelessness is especially jarring. Even thousands of miles from land, the ocean wilderness is no longer pristine.

Don't let your plastic bag end up as a dolphin's dinner

In 2008 I rowed past the North Pacific Garbage Patch, an area twice the size of Texas containing an estimated 3.5 million tons of trash, most of it plastic. Plastic outweighs plankton by a ratio of 6:1. There are times when I felt ashamed to be a human being, and apologized to the small community of fish that congregated beneath my boat for the mess we have made of their home.

And it doesn’t impact just the fish. Oceans cover seventy percent of the Earth, and are an integral part of our weather systems, climate control, and food supply. As plastic photodegrades, breaking into smaller pieces but never truly vanishing, it is eaten by fish and other sea creatures. Plastic is not an inert substance – toxins leach out into the flesh of the fishes’ bodies, and works its way up the food chain until it ends up on our dinner plate. We will reap what we sow. We cannot have a healthy planet – or healthy bodies – if we don’t have healthy oceans.

What can we do?

• If something is described as both “plastic” and “disposable”, have nothing to do with it. Plastic bags, plastic silverware, plastic or styrofoam cups, plastic water bottles – you can find biodegradable or reusable substitutes for all of these things at minimum cost and inconvenience.  Everywhere I go I carry my metal water bottle and coffee mug, and my tiny chico bag. You can, too.

• Refuse, repurpose, reduce, re-use, recycle, but of these the greatest is refuse. Just say NO to plastic.

• Consume less. Most consumer goods come wrapped in plastic packaging. The sad irony of ocean plastic pollution is that much of it is not even anything that we use, but merely the packaging that comes with it. If you really want to make the point, return the packaging to the store and ask them to dispose of it. The word will soon make its way up to management.

British TV presenter Ben Fogle swims through plastic rubbish in the Indian Ocean

• Pick it up. If you’re out for a walk and see plastic trash lying on the ground, do something about it. Don’t just turn a blind eye. If left there, it can blow into storm drains, then into rivers, then into the ocean to kill wildlife and contaminate the environment.

• Share the news. Ask friends and family to switch one of their disposable plastic habits for a sustainable, ocean-friendly one: such as bringing reusable food containers from home when eating out for your ‘doggie bag.’ Go to the official World Oceans Day website and register your pledge. We have a lot of work to do, but the longest journey starts with a single step – or oarstroke.

• Organise a screening of a film, like Bag It, or Plastic Shores, for your friends, family and neighbours. Films are a great way to spread the word. And if you serve up popcorn, make sure that it doesn’t come in a plastic bag!

[Featured image courtesy of Plastic Oceans Foundation]

Bojangles flying the flag for Britain (upside down - oops!)

Thank you for all the supportive comments about the sad postponement of our North Atlantic row. The OAR team has very much appreciated your kind words at this rather trying time. After bidding a very sad farewell to our wonderful friends in St John’s, Newfoundland, I am now back in Britain, spending the weekend with my mother in Leeds while the country celebrates the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

Considering that my diary was, until the announcement two weeks ago, completely blank for the next two months while I expected to be at sea, it’s amazing how fast it has filled up. The big news from Team Roz is that I have secured a deal for the book based on my Pacific row. I haven’t actually signed on the dotted line yet, so I won’t jinx it by revealing too much, but suffice it to say that I am absolutely delighted to be working with this particular publishing house. Provisional publication date is April/May 2013, and I will be pushing ahead with rewrites and editing over the next 2 months so I can submit the final manuscript before I head off to Yale this August. More details as contracts are finalised.

A huge archive of photos to organise

There are other projects afoot, such as the humungous task of gathering and cataloging my video footage from the last 7 years, which has been shot by many different people in many different formats. Also organising an archive of around 13,000 photographs, which are semi-organised but could be much better. (I plan to use Lightroom for this – would welcome comments and suggestions from any photography enthusiasts out there.)

I am also getting lots of bookings for speaking engagements for spring 2013, which is exciting. So far mostly in Scotland and the US. I will announce dates of any public events in due course.

While the disappointment of this year’s cancellation still rankles, there is too much important work to be done for me to sit around and mope for long. World Oceans Day is coming right up (8th June) and the oceans need our help more than ever. I may not be on the water for this year’s Oceans Day, but you can be sure that the big blue bits of our planet are never far from my mind.

If you are missing your expected fix of ocean rowing adventure this summer, please do check out the blog and website of my friend Sarah Outen, who is bidding to row nonstop across the North Pacific. Good luck, Sarah!

Also wishing all the best to the spectators and the thousands of boats taking part in today’s Jubilee Pageant on the River Thames. The weather may be cold and wet, but it could be worse – just think how much colder and wetter it would be if you were rowing the North Atlantic! And congratulations to Her Majesty on 60 glorious years. I see she has just been voted Britain’s favourite monarch of all time, followed by Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth I, with a couple of kings trailing in their wake in 4th and 5th places. Go, girls!

And stay tuned. I may not be on the ocean, but will nevertheless be blogging regularly on this site over the summer. Onwards and upwards!

(Featured image: Bojangles goes into the shipping container for her journey back to Britain. Not the way we had intended her to arrive.)

Roz and Mos go to check out the bergs

From Torbay we could see three major bergs, impressive and majestic, especially when you consider that they are made of ice that could be tens of thousands of years old. But it’s not actually these big, conspicuous, impossible-to-miss kind of icebergs that we’re worried about. It’s their evil offspring, the fragments of ice no bigger than a refrigerator that would be so difficult to spot from a rowboat, especially at night or when they are disguised by the whitecaps of waves. As soon as the seas get more than a few feet high, we wouldn’t even see such a fragment until we were right on top of it and it was punching its way through our hull.

A fragment - these are the ones that worry us

We saw many of these fragments today, drifting downwind of the bigger bergs that spawned them. They came in all kinds of shapes, many of them sharply irregular, sticking up from the ocean in strange shapes like witches’ hats or swans or sharks’ fins.

In a few weeks’ time these fragments will be gone. Maybe even their parents bergs will have melted away. We could see the meltwater pouring off them today in waterfalls cascading down their sides. They are diminishing rapidly.

The Big Berg

But we have an immovable deadline to get to London before the start of the Olympics – or at the latest before I have to go to Yale for the start of the semester in mid-August. The clock is ticking.

Up in the air - in so many senses

We may be able to try again later in the week, but pending further visual investigation, I decided to do some research online.

Our present challenges started two years ago, long before I knew I would be doing this row, when a chunk of ice four times the size of Manhattan calved away from the Petermann Glacier in Greenland. It would be tempting to immediately attribute this breaking up of ancient glaciers to climate change, but I want to be sure of my facts before I do so. It does the cause no good to try and establish tenuous links between naturally occurring phenomena and the impacts of humankind. I haven’t had much time to research this (several years of postgraduate study would have been handy) but here is what I have managed to find out in a few short hours online.

“In response to the question: How abnormal is this event? Jason notes: “The August 2010 ice calving at Petermann is the largest in the observational record for Greenland” Falkner et al. (2011) scoured the observations and found no evidence of an event this large in scattered observations since 1876.”

“About 33 per cent of the Petersen Ice Shelf has eroded away between 2005 and 2008.”

“Issues may also arise if the ice islands make their way south into navigable waters.”

“In 2010, Greenland temperatures were the hottest on record. It also experienced record setting ice loss by melting.”

The consequences could be dramatic, and the next 10 years will be decisive. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt, it is projected by scientists that it would create a 23 feet rise in sea level.

The local Quidi Vidi beer, made from 25,000-year-old iceberg water

The featured image on this blog is a map of Britain if sea levels were to rise by 84 metres, i.e. if all the world’s ice melted. It would be nothing more than an archipelago of islands, with London relegated to the lost realm of Atlantis. This might sound far-fetched, but in 2009 scientists were predicting that the Arctic could become ice free within as little as a decade. (Do check out the video on that page, featuring polar explorer and all round good guy Pen Hadow.) The world has been ice-free before, and it could happen again. (More information and a climate animation here.)

This is uncharted territory for humankind, so by necessity there is a certain amount of guesswork involved as to the consequences – and the causes – of our rising temperatures. But how much are we willing to gamble with the future existence of our species while we make up our minds? The worst case scenario would make our present navigational travails seem supremely insignificant by comparison.

Bojangles

On 15th April 1912, the RMS Titanic went down with the loss of 1,514 lives during her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, the largest loss of life at sea during peacetime.

At nearly 883 feet long, the Titanic did not bear a strong resemblance to Bojangles, which measures 23 feet. Her rudder alone was 78 feet high – more than three times the length of our little Bo.

On the one hand, being small could be an advantage if it statistically reduces our chances of making contact with ice. On the other hand, the Titanic was made of one-inch-thick steel, while Bo is made of a much thinner sandwich of foam between layers of carbon/kevlar weave.

The Titanic

It was claimed that the Titanic was unsinkable, but Mother Nature has a way of making a nonsense of the hubristic claims of men. You can be sure that we will be very circumspect before launching ourselves upon a hostile North Atlantic.

Our first waypoint is 45 N, 45 W, not so far from the site where the Titanic sank

There is plenty on dry land to keep us busy. Boats seem to be perpetually a work in progress, so we continue to refine designs, tweaking scupper flaps, enhancing the oar lockers, adding a canopy to provide some shelter while we peel off foul weather gear so as not to track seawater into the cabin.

Meanwhile Naomi and I took a few hours off this afternoon to explore a bit of the north coast of Newfoundland. We left our lodgings with Harry and Diane Spurrell in sunshine, but the weather soon turned to rain showers and wind. But it was still beautiful. I’m actually very happy to have a bit more time to explore this very special place.

Roz out on a walk near Brigus, Newfoundland

By the way, in case you didn’t know, Newfoundland is not pronounced NewFOUNDland, it’s NewfoundLAND. To get it right, say “Understand Newfoundland” so that the two words rhyme, and you’ll be close enough.

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