If there is a ground zero for observing the impacts of a changing global climate the Maldives are definitely a front-runner.
Photo by Jon Bowermaster
It is a place many have heard of but few could easily pick out on a map. Comprised of twelve hundred islands and atolls, most pancake flat, the highest reaches no more than five feet above sea level … making the Maldives the lowest country on earth. Only two hundred of the islands are inhabited, by roughly 320,000 people. It is an always hot, exceedingly beautiful, Muslim country stretching about 600 miles from north to south in the heart of the Indian Ocean off the tip of Sri Lanka.
I have been visiting the islands since 2005, when I first went to assess the damages wreaked by the massive tsunami that rolled from Indonesia to Somalia. The Maldives were largely spared; its coral reefs absorbed the brunt of the wave. In the years since, as rising sea levels and warming sea surface temperatures have gained more and more headlines, so has this tiny island nation.
Today erosion is a big problem on many of the islands and most of its coral is badly bleached.
In the past few days an invested crowd of thinkers and doers, including the Maldives’ President Mohammed Nasheed and several members of his cabinet, gathered on the small island of Kunfunadhoo, for the third annual S.L.O.W.L.I.F.E Symposium.
Daryl Hannah and Richard Branson, photo Six Senses
Organized by the owners of the resort company Six Senses, Eva and Sonu Shivdasani, the barefoot conference brought together environmentalists from the United Kingdom including Jonathan Porritt, Tim Smits and Jeremy Leggett, National Geographic Emerging Explorer Mark Lynas (author of “Six Degrees” and the new “God Species”), renewable energy and island nation leaders from as far away as Reunion and Bali, ocean mariners including Fabien Cousteau and some incredibly dedicated headline-makers (Richard Branson and the actors Edward Norton and Daryl Hannah).
The subject of three days of talks was, What can be done fast to slow climate change, before it’s too late.
Topics ranged from how small island nations can become energy independent, how to engage local communities in ambitious carbon reduction plans and the challenge of adapting transportation in a low-carbon economy.
It’s clear there are no easy answers. Soon after arriving by float plane President Nasheed delivered a harsh message. “Carbon dioxide emissions are going to kill us,” he said. “Here in the Maldives our goal of becoming carbon neutral is not to scare the world, but simply to make a step in the right direction.”
Sonu Shivdasani, SLOWLIFE Symposium, photo Six Senses
While Nasheed leads an effort to make the Maldives the first carbon neutral country on the planet, by 2020, there are some good things to brag about here on the Laccadive Sea. Last year the country banned all shark fishing and any tuna in the Maldives are caught only by pole. Recently the Baa Atoll was declared a UNESCO Biosphere.
While the Maldives, with few natural resources but a growing population and energy demands, is on the forefront of nations attempting to take themselves off the grid it’s clear the problems are not a lack of knowledge and information. But the Maldivian government officials reiterated what stands in their way is not lack of knowledge but of money. It’s one thing to have great ideas and access to information; paying for progress is something else, especially in a country with a fledgling democracy and a history of high debt and bad credit.
But it is trying. By 2020 the Maldives hopes to generate 60 percent of its electricity from solar, without raising the cost of power to its consumers. It has introduced a new import regime by the Transport Ministry to ensure that in the future electric cars will be a third of the price of conventional gasoline cars. And it has pledged to spend two percent of its national income on renewable energy deployment in the country. If that figure were matched worldwide, we would be collectively be spending $1.25 trillion a year rather than the $260 billion we spend today on renewable energy sources.
Worrying to all island nations of course is that CO2 in the world’s atmosphere is not declining but growing, as development and growth continue to mount globally. The goal of reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million — what scientists regard as the safe limit for humans — may fast becoming an unreachable goal, since it has already risen to above 392 ppm.
One industry that prospers in the Maldives of course is tourism. Nearly 1 million visitors a year, including increasing numbers from China and India, fly into the capital city of Male each year and jump out to various island resorts by float plane or small boat. Taxes on resort development — and potentially new tariffs on visitors to support renewable energy projects — are the lifeblood of the Maldivian economy.
Another lovely, provocative day at the SLOWLIFE Symposium in the Maldives, as reported by its team:
Surrounded by the deep blue of the Indian Ocean, the fate of the world’s seas has been a central topic for speakers here at the SLOWLIFE Symposium in the Maldives. Friday morning’s panel session ‘The lifeblood of the planet – preserving ocean biodiversity’ brought together four people who are passionate about this theme: chairing was Chris Gorrell Barnes, of Blue Marine Foundation; joining him was Fabien Cousteau; Jon Bowermaster, the writer and explorer; and the actress and environmentalist Daryl Hannah.
Jon Bowermaster, Daryl Hannah, Fabien Cousteau, Chris Gorell-Barnes
Chris opened by setting the scene, reminding us that as 70% of the Earth is ocean, we are an ocean planet more than a terrestrial one – and yet the oceans are in crisis. It is true also that a majority of the world’s population lives near the coastline: 17 megacities are located on the coast, so what happens to the sea directly impacts two thirds of the people on Earth, and ultimately all of us.
Jon reported that having travelled by sea kayak to a number of continents – on one trip paddling from, for example, the Aleutian Islands to Vietnam – several issues kept coming up over and over again. The first was climate change, with the associated impacts of more frequent and stronger storms, sea level rise, and a rising of sea surface temperature. The second was plastic pollution, which is now evident in remote places and faraway islands, and the third is overfishing, which is dramatically impacting the whole global ocean.
Fabien Cousteau, the grandson of the great oceans exploration pioneer Jacques Cousteau (who would have been a hundred last year) spoke about how the seas have changed in just three generations of his own family, with 60% of the world’s total fish stocks destroyed since the 1950s. But Fabien is far from despondent, citing an example of a successful project in El Salvador which recruited local people – who had previously made a living by taking and selling the eggs of endangered turtles – to protect the hatchlings instead, transforming a 0% survival rate to 1.6 million turtle hatchlings in the space of a year.
Daryl Hannah praised the Maldives government for banning shark fishing, an unsustainable practice which is destroying these great ocean predators, with shark finning still responsible for the destruction of 200,000 sharks per year. She also pointed out how just one year after the ban, sharks were already seeming to become more numerous – a point noted by many in the audience, who have been entranced by the sight of as many as a dozen juvenile black-tip reef sharks circling in the shallow waters under the main Soneva Fushi jetty.
One of the issues being tackled at the moment is how to protect the newly-created Baa Atoll UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, the region in which Soneva Fushi – the host for the SLOWLIFE Symposium – is located. Blue Marine Foundation has already made a donation, whilst resorts are now cooperating to raise further funds to recruit rangers from the local fishing population. Maldives Vice-President Dr Waheed, who was also in the audience, spoke about how most Maldivian schoolchildren had never seen a coral reef, simply because they did not have access to snorkelling equipment – and how simply providing masks and snorkels to schools could do much to promote awareness of marine biodiversity amongst the next generation of Maldivians.
The broad consensus was that for the depletion of marine biodiversity to be reversed, both the fishing and tourist industries have to be engaged in driving forward innovative solutions – in the Maldives and further afield. Both these economic sectors in the Maldives depend entirely on the bounty of the sea – whether hooking and canning tuna for the overseas export trade, or reef fish for tourists to see on a dive or a snorkelling trip – and both must surely work together to protect the seas for today and for future generations.
This entry was posted in Blog Highlight, Highlight and tagged blue marine foundation, chris gorell barnes, climate change, Fabien Cousteau, Jon Bowermaster, Maldives, marine conservation, oceans, Six Senses Laamu, SLOW LIFE Symposium by slowlife. Bookmark the permalink.
I met Wangari Maathai in the same hospital she passed away in, in Nairobi, almost exactly twenty years ago. In those two decades her fame grew, based largely on her mission of planting trees everywhere she went, she won the Nobel Peace Prize and her life’s work of enlightening African women to the wider world around them had spread globally. She died yesterday of ovarian cancer; my story of our meeting.
NAIROBI, 1991
The first thing Wangari Maathai did when she regained consciousness was call a press conference. When she came out of her club-enforced daze, she was in a Nairobi hospital, having been badly beaten by Kenyan police during a demonstration the day before. It was a Saturday and I was one of a dozen hangers-on who showed up to hear her side of the conflict.
The police had already been to the papers, claiming the outspoken environmentalist-cum-political activist had “incited” them. Upon hearing her clubber’s account, Maathai couldn’t help but smile over its ridiculousness. She looked a mess – one eye blackened, her forehead labeled with a knot the size of a Spalding. The thrashing administered her 51-year-old legs made it hard for her to walk to the bathroom, where she vomited blood. The mornings paper carried other stories of a kind found only-in-Kenya: A pair of Maathai’s friends had been jailed for “rumor-mongering” and local bus operators had decreed that anyone heard talking politics on their public carriers would be handed over to police.
The day before had begun typically for Africa’s best-known environmentalist. Maathai had joined a long-planned protest by mothers of political prisoners, calling for the release of their sons. The outspoken Maathai felt a responsibility to the jailed men, who had been locked up for the crime of speaking out for democracy in a country run by autocratic thugs.
Merely showing up at the rally made her a target for authorities. .. once again. The founder of Kenya’s 15-year-old Green Belt Movement, this was not her first hospitalization thanks to government goons. In the past few years, as her worldwide notoriety has grown, as she’s traveled abroad to accept award after award for environmental and political heroism, she has come home to be harassed, arrested, beaten, and threatened with rape. Her Nairobi office was first ransacked, then “confiscated” by the government. On that day she’d come back from lunch to find security forces from the president’s office throwing her papers and books out a second story window onto a crowded downtown street.
Her activist roots were mild in First World terms. The first Kenyan woman to earn a PhD (in anatomy), and the first to become a professor at the University of Nairobi, in 1977 Dr. Maathai took on a formidable challenge: To hold back Kenya’s advancing desert. Rampant tree cutting and unchecked population growth had stripped much of the country’s land, playing a hand in generating both hunger and poverty. Her response, dubbed the Green Belt Movement, was a national tree-planting program run by women. “Because women here are responsible for their children,” she explained at the time, “they cannot sit back, waste time and see them starve.”
With Green Belt’s support, women across Kenya established nurseries within their villages and then persuaded farmers to accept and raise tree seedlings. Green Belt paid the women two cents for each native plant they grew; exotic species were worth one-fifth as much. Farmers received the plants for free. In a decade she had recruited more than 50,000 women, who had spurred the plantings of 10 million trees. While the seedlings took root, Maathai traveled the country speaking out for women’s, and human, rights. She has been rewarded for her efforts with a bevy of awards and acclaim from around the world for environmentalism and political activism.
None of her activities were looked upon favorably by Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi. Her gravest sin – either her biggest mistake or success, dependent on whose side you take – came three years ago when she very publicly scuttled Moi’s plan to build a 60-story office story in Uhuru Park, adjoining downtown Nairobi. The building was to be flanked by a large statue of the 17-year president. Both were to be paid for by foreign aid monies. By personal plea and public rally Maathai persuaded donors that the project was environmentally, aesthetically and fiscally unsound and Moi’s dream was defeated.
While that victory may have earned her popularity among the workers who used the park, it assured her the eternal enmity of the ruling party, in particular Moi and the government-owned newspaper and television stations which were to have gotten luxurious new offices in the building. The day after the project was officially announced dead, headlines in “The Daily Nation” accused Maathai of “having insects in her head.” A year later, when she won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, CNN International ran a story about the six winners from around the globe. Government-employed censors edited out the three-minute segment on Maathai when the piece was aired in Kenya. She is rumored to be on Moi’s short-list for either extradition, or . . . an “accident.” (Not out of the question from a government whose finance minister once threw a political opponent out of a helicopter . . .)
Yesterday’s beating was part of a constant campaign of harassment against Maathai. Soon after his office building was k-o’d, Moi ruled that foreign assistance to women’s development projects must be channeled through the state women’s organization, effectively cutting off outside aid to the Green Belt Movement. She is currently awaiting trial on charges of incitement and “rumor-mongering.” Yet she continues to be publicly critical of the police state that her homeland has become.
After reading the front page of the newspaper, sitting up in her hospital bed, Maathai looks up at the crowd gathered in her hospital room. “They don’t understand, do they? I’m not being critical of the government, I’m just talking the truth. Perhaps President Moi believes I should protect the image of our government, just because it is our government. But I know that I am talking about a government that does not like to be criticized. That is why I have been in trouble.”
Despite her bruises, she comes off more steadfast than scared. “I know I am in danger and I know that the government has tried to push me aside. At the moment, because of the political turmoil in my country, one cannot rule out the possibility of the worst, so I do feel that I need to take care of myself. I need to stay away from ‘dangerous ground.’
“But that doesn’t mean that I will back down. I will not just ‘go away,’ which is what they would like. Because this is where I am needed most. My message has not shifted, if anything it has become less subtle.”
Floodwaters and winds wreak havoc on the narrow ravines and shallow-rooted forests of Vermont and New York; wildfires torch the desiccated Texas plains that have gone 300 straight days without rainfall; buckets pour down on the Gulf Coast once again, drowning ecosystems, hopes and dreams; and the great rivers of the American West are running dry. Sounds downright Biblical in its apocalyptic-ness, doesn’t it? Blame whomever you like, from heaven to hell to politicians to the Army Corps of Engineers to mall developers, but this is the reality of our environment in the first decade of the 21st century.
Photo by Pete McBride
Among all that doom and gloom, who would have predicted that those big American rivers—especially the granddaddy of them all, the Colorado River—would today be so imperiled. Yet tapped for the past 80 years for farms, drinking water, urban growth, suburban sprawl and recreation by a human population of more than 25 million, the Colorado currently no longer even reaches the sea. The 1,450-mile-long river, which not so long ago boasted a fertile, life-enriching delta covering 2 million acres, peters out about 90 miles from the Sea of Cortez.
Thanks to the work of two Colorado-based journalists, writer and adventurer Jon Waterman and photographer Pete McBride, the Colorado’s near-demise and its future were the subject of a seven-month-long descent and new accounts in a pair of books, photos and a short film.
In June 2008 Waterman—an experienced wilderness guide, park ranger and writer—set out to paddle the length of the Colorado, from its headwaters to south of the Mexican border; McBride joined him for parts of the descent and spent months capturing powerful photographs of its length from a small plane (often piloted by his father John), often from just a couple hundred feet above.
The river’s complex history of dams and diversions, the construction of massive canals to further drain it down, and its natural power and beauty all lend drama to their modern-day stories. But it is the anecdote about where the river runs dry that is the most powerful of all.
The conclusion of the descent in January 2009, in Waterman’s words, (from an essay for the Patagonia company’s fall catalog), paints the harsh reality: “Two miles into Mexico, my hopes of a complete 1,450-mile descent ended in a foamy pond of congealed fertilizers, distillate of countless American lawns and 3.4 million thirsty farm acres. I splashed out in bare feet, worried that our most iconic white water river would make me physically ill. (Pete) stayed clean by climbing out through the tamarisk trees. We tried to wipe the river shit off our pack rafts with tamarisk fronds, cursing the system that has diminished the Mighty Colorado to a stinking cesspool.”
“The 1,450-mile-long river, which not so long ago boasted a fertile, life-enriching delta covering 2 million acres, peters out about 90 miles from the Sea of Cortez.”
What happened? “Engineered to death” is Waterman’s conclusion, detailed in his book Running Dry: A Journey From Source to Sea Down the Colorado River: “…more than 100 dams and 1,000 miles of canals divert its water to most every farm, industry and city within a 250-mile radius of the river. Each year, seven western states and northern Mexico take 16.5 million acre-feet (enough water to supply 33 million American households) of river water. Amid the 12th year of drought in the Southwest, climate models show that conditions will continue to dry the snowmelt-fed river. Add explosive population growth, increasing the demand for water, and the river’s future becomes a ticking time bomb.”
McBride’s dramatic book of photos and film (Chasing Water) are bringing the river’s sickness to an ever-bigger audience across the West. An exhibit of words and pictures—“The Colorado River: Flowing Through Conflict”—is currently on display at Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Having grown up on a cattle ranch near Aspen, McBride admits to having taken the river’s abundance for granted; now he’s an advocate for its continued protection, “alarmed” by what he’s seen.
Like most of our environmental messes, parts of this one are reparable. The Tucson-based Sonoran Institute is leading an effort to save what remains of the Colorado River delta and has specific steps for how individuals can help. Cooperation between Mexico and the U.S. would be a big help and is being encouraged by the International Boundary & Water Commission. Patagonia’s yearlong “Our Common Waters” campaign points to a handful of organizations working on water-related clean-up projects.
For the full story, check out Waterman’s book-length account and the pair’s book of photo-and-text.
(For the rest of my dispatches go to TakePart.com)
Photo by Pete McBride
Photo by Pete McBride
Photo by Pete McBride
Photo by Pete McBride
Long-distance desert walking is, by its very nature, a retro means of travel in our modern speed-and-efficiency-fixated world. When even the driest desert on Earth — Antarctica — has been crossed by Toyota pickup, why bother walking?
Seventy-five to 150 years ago, such epic exploratory walks were done almostregularly — most famously by charismatic Brits with a penchant for putting their feet where no white man had gone before. And for the past several years, 28-year-old Londoner Jeremy Curl has been inserting himself into some of those very big footsteps.
In 2008, Curl became the first non-African to cross the Tanezrouft region of the Sahara by foot and the youngest to traverse the vast 1,900 kilometres by camel — from the Hoggar mountains of Algeria through Timbuktu to Mali in just 50 days. Along the way he encountered Tuareg nomads and tribesmen of the Kel Ahaggar and Kel Ifoghas. Curl not only experienced their little-seen lives; he collected enough knowledge along the way to write a dictionary of their language en route.
Early in 2010 he crossed the Lower Omo River Valley from southwestern Ethiopia to Kenya, again travelling solely by foot and accompanied only by tribesmen and scouts, becoming one of a handful of Westerners in history to trudge across the arid region. I tracked him down in Mekele, Ethiopia, just a couple days before he was setting out to attempt a 640-kilometre walk across the Danakil Desert in eastern Ethiopia. (The trip has been done successfully just once by an outsider, British gold prospector L.M. Nesbitt, who reported temperatures as high as 68 degrees Celsius.)
Born in Tokyo to English and Irish parents, educated in the U.K., Netherlands and Sweden, Curl trained as an Egyptologist and became a writer, filmmaker, and photographer — though it was another book, written by the king of desert explorers, Englishman Wilfred Thesiger, that first turned him on to the desert. Like his previous two desert expeditions, his team this time out is small and aided by camels. It will be just himself, an anthropologist from Harvard, two riflemen, a cameleer, and a scout from the local Afar tribe.
“The aim is to be the first to cross the hottest place on earth — the Danakil Desert — on foot, from north to south,” he says. “Which I hope — I hope — should take us just one month.”
A month later, Curl called with an update: He’d been home in London for a couple days, his effort to cross the Danakil cut frustratingly short.
You had to quit after 15 days — what happened?
Curl: Well, I’m quite annoyed that we didn’t succeed, but we ended up having to play a lot of tribal politics. We were two-thirds of the way across the Danakil when we ran into the chief of the southern region’s clan, who was very suspicious and decided that we couldn’t pass through his land simply because he didn’t know who we were.
The other tribes in the north had been quite cooperative. They had essentially given us members of their tribe to travel with us, a kind of hostage system, so that our safety would be guaranteed.
But this guy refused to do that for us. He simply said, “No, I won’t let you go on” and escorted us off his land. We tried to go around him again and one of his minions caught us.
They kept us for about a day and a night, all shoved into one hut. It was quite tense. They said the chief wanted to speak to us, so the hut filled up very quickly with lots of people with lots of guns. I asked if an interpreter could come in, and they wouldn’t allow him, which made everything more difficult. They kept us there under gunpoint while I considered our options. We could walk back the way we’d come, back to the starting point, which I didn’t want to do because it would really be bad for morale. So I managed to broker a deal where we could leave the desert to the west in order to get out, which he supervised. And that was it — the expedition was over.
You did manage to walk more than 320 kilometres across one of the hottest places on Earth. How was the crossing?
Very, very hard. Which is what annoys me the most about having to quit, because despite the difficulties, we were doing very well coping with the heat. By eight in the morning it was 96, 97 degrees [Fahrenheit, or 35, 36 degrees Celsius]; by 10 o’clock, it had climbed to between 125 and 130 [51 and 54].
In the area known as the Afar Depression, there is absolutely no life — no vegetation, thus no shade at all, which means you try and walk through the day as best you can, because stopping just makes it worse.
We brought a tarpaulin with us, which took a good 10 minutes to set up if we needed some kind of shade. You have to stop, unload the camels — and during that 10 minutes, your brain will fry. So we tried to just keep walking.
The only real trouble we had was that the water was very bad because it’s such a salt-encrusted area. We carried as much as we could from the start, but when we ran out and had to dig holes in the sand for water, that’s when people began to become very ill. Three in the group got very sick because the water is so salty.
The Harvard anthropologist who accompanied us was the most ill. We ended up finding a small village, just three huts, where we stopped for about a day and a half as he tried to get better. Ultimately he improved and we continued.
How did the Danakil compare to your previous desert expeditions?
It was definitely hotter. But because it was very flat, it was almost easier to walk. In the Sahara you’ve got big ridges and mountains and sand dunes to cross. This time the navigation was very direct.
The hardest part was that a string of volcanoes runs down the centre of the Depression, and as a result there are huge lava fields surrounding them, which were a pain to get through. Big, sharp rocks and boulders everywhere, terrain the camels really don’t like.
But the most difficult part, by far, was dealing with the people who live there — the Afar — who have a fearsome reputation as aggressive and bloodthirsty. When Wilfred Thesiger — the great British explorer and wanderer — spent time in the Afar lands, he described them as wearing the testicles of their victims around their necks.
It didn’t help that I wasn’t able to communicate with them very well. Theirs is a very difficult language, and while some speak Arabic as a second language — and I can speak a little Arabic — it was hard for me to talk with anyone we met.
Thankfully, a few days into the expedition I came across an 18-year-old boy walking from one village to another across the desert, and amazingly he could speak passable English. I offered to pay him a daily wage if he’d come with me. Until then, I’d been employing four or five people who I couldn’t actually speak with, so for the first time I could actually speak to the people travelling with me.
I’m assuming you want to go back and try again?
Absolutely. The only thing I’m up against now is that as we moved further south, we came across some Land Cruisers in the desert. When we asked about them it turns out the Chinese are planning on building a road all the way across the desert. As far as I can tell it’s a pointless route, just a goodwill thing.
So I’ve got to get back before that road is built, since it would be pointless for me to walk across the desert if there is a road. And roads get built very fast in Africa. I hope I can get back in September.
With several desert crossings under your belt, are you an expert in how to pick a good camel by now?
Yes and no. The problem is that every culture has slightly different breeds, because they use them for different things. Some tribes ride them, while some use them just for a show of wealth. The tricky thing is that if someone says their camel is well-trained, it’s hard to know for what purpose. It may be trained for nothing more than lying around and looking good.
For big journeys like ours, it’s much better to buy camels than rent them. We then resell them at the end of the expedition. If you rent them, even for half of the price, they then have to be returned.
For a recent trip in Kenya I picked one fine camel and one that was not so good, which I very much regretted. The bottom line is that if the camel won’t lie down — if it won’t “go to the ground” — then you can’t get anything off of it, can’t unload it. That’s what happened with this one. If you have to wrestle with it for an hour or two to unload it — which makes you even more thirsty — it defeats the purpose.
When we discovered this, we had to spend an extra two days training the camel to lie down. There’s nothing to be gained by shooting your camel in the middle of an expedition.
You took riflemen with you. Why?
In this area, by law, you have to take a policeman with you, allegedly for safety reasons. But my experience with policemen is that they are not terribly good walkers and are not very interested in helping with the food and water, that sort of thing.
Part of me thinks requiring a policeman is just a way to create employment. But the reality is that not many people go into this desert, and the tribe — the Afar — are historically famous for being rather aggressive. They’ve got a very strict hierarchy based on how many men they have killed. If you haven’t killed anyone, you’re at the very bottom of the tribe; when you’ve killed someone, you get to move up. Apparently they can be quite aggressive in climbing the ladder. But the truth is, it’s very hard to assess the risk without being there.
Prior to the Danakil, what’s been your closest brush with trouble?
With the Surma tribe in the very southern part of Ethiopia — where it meets the Sudan and Kenya — we had some very, very tense moments. We met tribesmen from different villages who had gotten together to drink a lot of homemade alcohol and then fight each other with sticks. They also all carry guns and, of course, they thought it would be funny to put a bullet past the head of the only white guy there, just for a laugh. Obviously I ducked, which they found very, very funny.
The only time I’ve been in the Sudan, it reminded me of the Wild West — except no one wore any clothes. The men walked along the boardwalk sidewalks completely naked, carrying weapons.
Exactly. It’s strange that the only modern thing of any value to them is a gun. They couldn’t care less about anything else we have other than guns.
What were you hoping to learn from crossing the Danakil?
I studied Nesbitt’s route across the desert and saw an opportunity for a slightly different route — and in reverse, from north to south — and thought I would do it to see what has changed, and to try and learn more about the tribe that is still there.
Is there a particular draw in retracing the steps of the explorers that have gone before you?
I’m a bit of a romantic in many ways. I read a lot of Thesiger, for example, and while it’s a terrible cliché, it was after reading one of his books — Arabian Sands — that I wanted to change career. Or really, the truth is, I was only halfway through the book when I booked my ticket to the Sahara. So he obviously grabbed me pretty quickly, within the first few pages. It just made the world outside Europe, or the West, seem incredibly alluring. But I wanted to do it in a way that was challenging in itself.
I’d studied Egyptology before, so I’d looked at these cultures previously, but with a colder, more critical, more scientific eye. I didn’t feel connected to them because I hadn’t seen them properly or experienced the place for myself.
Do your friends at home in London have similar career aspirations?
My friends have pretty much stopped telling me about their lives; I think that they think I’m going to cut them down. But while I quite like where I live, I can’t stay there for too long. It feels like the world is changing very fast, and if you don’t see as much of it as you can before long, everyone on the planet will be wearing Manchester United shirts and drinking Coca-Cola. Diversity is slipping away very fast.
Yet there are still some remote corners out there. . .
Yes, but they are becoming increasingly hard to find and harder to get to. Which is a problem, even in Africa. The last really wild places are already being promoted to visit because they are exactly that: the last wild place.
Ah yes — “See it now before it’s gone” promotions from so-called adventure-travel companies.
It’s inevitable I guess, but the idea of the world being all the same one day horrifies me. So I for one am trying to see it while I can, while it is still diverse.
What do you say when someone asks you what you do?
That’s a very good question. I hesitantly say “explorer,” because I have been to places no other white man has been to in a very, very long time — if ever. It’s a little presumptuous to say you’re “exploring” a place when a tribe and a culture has lived there for thousands of years, but I think that if they have been there and nobody has properly talked with them or recorded their lives or brought back photographs of them, they haven’t been really “discovered.” So I would still say, very hesitantly, that I am an explorer — though I feel I was born a bit late. I would love to be able to venture out on expeditions without maps. I’m actually carrying a satellite phone on this expedition for the first time.
is always thirst. And if you are thirsty, you’re not hungry, you’re just thirsty. You never get much sleep on these expeditions anyway, so that’s not an issue. Far and away, thirst is the biggest concern, every single day. I normally carry enough water to last between wells or watering points, which can sometimes be seven to nine days apart. The camels can only carry so much. In the Sahara we had very strict rationing of water, which I imagine will happen this time as well. I’ve spoken with some people from the region who report the wells are very spaced out.
Rationing water is a very unpleasant task. In the Sahara we averaged about a litre of water a day per person. At the worst points we had as little as one pint per day.
And if the temperature is 48 degrees Celsius or more and you’re burning 5,000 or 6,000 calories a day. . .
If you’re drinking just a pint of water a day, thirst consumes you. All you can think about is water. You even dream about water. But the worst is when you’re walking next to the camels and you can hear the water sloshing around in the skins, which is torture knowing you can’t have any.
At the risk of sounding daft: What do you consider to be the rewards for this kind of travel?
The biggest reward is just seeing how people survive in these environments. While these places are hard for me to survive, it is tremendously rewarding to see how the native people live surrounded by hardship. I think travel like this teaches you a lot — about the region, about people’s lives, and about yourself.
And what do you learn about yourself?
A lot. And you learn it again every morning when you wake up and are reminded exactly where you are and that you have to crawl out of your sleeping bag and do it all over again, despite knowing exactly the hardship that is coming. You learn a lot about yourself by just how willing you are to get up and do it all over again.
One of the side effects I’ve grown to like about adventuring is that when you’re back home in civilization, the minor irritations of the day — a traffic jam, a delayed plane, a line at the bank — don’t seem so bad.
I completely agree. For me when I’m first back home, there’s nothing worse than going to the supermarket and being asked if you have a Club Card or a Loyalty Card. It is the kind of thing that all of a sudden seems extremely trivial relative to where you’ve just been yet which tend to pollute people’s lives back home.
Still, gaining a perspective on the world at large is one of the privileges of a traveller’s life, don’t you think?
Absolutely. One thing travelling does is that it reminds you that people are the same everywhere — that human behaviour is the same, no matter race, colour, religion, etc.
Even the Tuareg?
Even the Tuareg! Though I found it took a very long time to understand them and their ways. They do their best to remain as veiled to the outside world as possible. They were very, very suspicious of me in the beginning but did eventually loosen up. In the group I travelled with, only one of them spoke a bit of French, and I speak a bit of French, but that was the only way I could communicate with them all. But the similarities are as many as the differences. They have families. They love their children. They all want slightly better lives, yet they have realities in their lives that we don’t have to deal with — such as being surrounded by a vast, dry desert. To have seen that life and realise that they live in a way they’re extremely proud of and wouldn’t swap it for anything else — that’s remarkable to me.
Have you ever been tempted to just stay on in the desert?
Yes. It normally happens when it’s time to sell the camels and someone says, “Why don’t you just keep the camels and use them when you return?” That’s when I start asking myself if I’m ever going to come back. I fantasise often about living in the desert six months of the year.
But so far, no Tuareg princess has invited you to stay?
No, not yet, unfortunately.
So what’s next?
I’m planning an expedition in June to northeast Angola, to a region that has been cut off for the past 30 to 40 years due to land mines left over from the war. It’s a very difficult area to travel — few people have been there — but when it was last visited there was a tribe of unique hunter-gatherers living there. The idea is to go and see if we can find the last example of persistent hunting — where men run down animals — which is believed to be a very important stage in human development. Of course, they may not even be there anymore — they may have moved across the border into Zambia or died out. But since no one’s been there, it’s hard to know.
That “not knowing” is the very essence of adventure.
Yes — I’ve learned that if you’ve got a slightly cold feeling in your stomach, that probably means you’re about to set out on an adventure.
And you do realize that Angola is not a desert. . .
I know. It will be my first expedition using Land Rovers, which I’m not wild about. I’d rather we try and do it with donkeys.
(For the rest of my interview with Jeremy, go to Lotus Magazine)
One year ago last Friday (July 15) the gusher in the Gulf of Mexico—brought to us by the team of BP and Transocean— was successfully capped after hemorrhaging 4.9 million barrels of crude oil.
Photo by P.J. Hahn
One year ago today (July 15) the gusher in the Gulf of Mexico—brought to us by the team of BP and Transocean— was successfully capped after hemorrhaging 4.9 million barrels of crude oil.
One year later impacts of the spill continue to affect the health of Gulf Coast residents, the safety of the region’s seafood and the economies of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Arguments continue over exactly who should be compensated from the $20 billion pot BP set aside for those whose lives and livelihoods were most impacted; so far less than $5 billion has been handed out, and BP, citing the area’s “robust recovery,” says that should be sufficient.
Meanwhile, around the globe, as our demand for oil continues to grow—now over 91 million barrels a day—oil leaks are hardly a thing of the past, nor relegated to the Gulf of Mexico.
Four big leaks and one very dangerous leak-in-the-making have been reported in just the past two weeks:
An Exxon Mobil pipeline burst beneath the Yellowstone River, flooding the pristine waterway with more than 42,000 gallons of crude oil. While the line was reportedly shut down within seven minutes, the leak managed to continue for more than an hour. With the river descending at five to seven miles an hour, the oil spread fast and far, making it tricky for the 350 emergency personnel armed with absorbent boom and pads to successfully capture it. With flashbacks to the Gulf spill—a slow response by the oil company, underestimations of how much oil was spilled, and a clean-up effort led by an oil company—it’s a reminder of how little has changed in our preparation for such spills since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in April 2010.
On the other side of the planet, a pair of undersea leaks in the ConocoPhillips oilfield—Penglai 19-3, China’s largest—spilled up to 7,000 barrels of oil into Bohai Bay, spreading over more than 325 square miles. Slicks seven miles long and 500 yards wide were reported. This being China, the spills were not reported to the public or media for nearly a month; the initial fine was estimated to be about $30,000. But China’s top ocean watchdog, the State Oceanic Administration, predicts compensation could be far higher. At the request of the SOA, the faulty platform has been temporarily shut down.
An explosion and oil spill at the Pengrowth Energy Facility near Swan Hills, Alberta, dumped 1,000 barrels of oil into nearby Judy Creek, which flows into the Freeman River, a tributary of the Athabasca River. The company has given few details of how or why the mile-long, eight-inch round pipe carrying oil from a wellhead to a larger pipeline blew up. Earlier this year the company reported a fire and spill at an adjacent gas processing plant.
Back in the USA, a New Hampshire company—Sprague Energy—leaked up to 100 barrels of oil into the Piscataqua River via a “small hole” in a delivery pipe. Company officials admitted a pinhole resulted in a “spraying” of fuel for up to two hours. While much of the spill appeared to be contained within the company’s docking area, some of the river’s shellfish beds were closed out of caution. The fast-running river parallels the border of Maine and New Hampshire before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean at Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
A potential spill with historic roots was reported by NOAA, off the coast of Ocean City, Maryland, where hundreds of World War II shipwrecks lie deteriorating on the ocean floor. NOAA is documenting more than 30,000 ships sunk along the coastline and its biggest concerns are for the battleships sunk by Nazi submarines in 1942. Nearly 400 ships, many with full fuel tanks, were sunk within 60 miles of the coast. So far the agency has put 233 ships on its “worst-threat” list, including an unarmed tanker—the W.L. Steed— which was carrying 66,000 barrels of crude oil. The concern is that as the tanks rust and leak, the holds filled with crude oil, fuel oil, diesel fuel and explosives, could have “devastating” impacts on nearby coastal communities. Once identified it’s hoped the tanks could be emptied, paid for by the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, which is funded by the oil industry.
One year later impacts of the spill continue to affect the health of Gulf Coast residents, the safety of the region’s seafood and the economies of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Arguments continue over exactly who should be compensated from the $20 billion pot BP set aside for those whose lives and livelihoods were most impacted; so far less than $5 billion has been handed out, and BP, citing the area’s “robust recovery,” says that should be sufficient.
Meanwhile, around the globe, as our demand for oil continues to grow—now over 91 million barrels a day—oil leaks are hardly a thing of the past, nor relegated to the Gulf of Mexico.
Four big leaks and one very dangerous leak-in-the-making have been reported in just the past two weeks:
An Exxon Mobil pipeline burst beneath the Yellowstone River, flooding the pristine waterway with more than 42,000 gallons of crude oil. While the line was reportedly shut down within seven minutes, the leak managed to continue for more than an hour. With the river descending at five to seven miles an hour, the oil spread fast and far, making it tricky for the 350 emergency personnel armed with absorbent boom and pads to successfully capture it. With flashbacks to the Gulf spill—a slow response by the oil company, underestimations of how much oil was spilled, and a clean-up effort led by an oil company—it’s a reminder of how little has changed in our preparation for such spills since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in April 2010.
On the other side of the planet, a pair of undersea leaks in the ConocoPhillips oilfield—Penglai 19-3, China’s largest—spilled up to 7,000 barrels of oil into Bohai Bay, spreading over more than 325 square miles. Slicks seven miles long and 500 yards wide were reported. This being China, the spills were not reported to the public or media for nearly a month; the initial fine was estimated to be about $30,000. But China’s top ocean watchdog, the State Oceanic Administration, predicts compensation could be far higher. At the request of the SOA, the faulty platform has been temporarily shut down.
An explosion and oil spill at the Pengrowth Energy Facility near Swan Hills, Alberta, dumped 1,000 barrels of oil into nearby Judy Creek, which flows into the Freeman River, a tributary of the Athabasca River. The company has given few details of how or why the mile-long, eight-inch round pipe carrying oil from a wellhead to a larger pipeline blew up. Earlier this year the company reported a fire and spill at an adjacent gas processing plant.
Back in the USA, a New Hampshire company—Sprague Energy—leaked up to 100 barrels of oil into the Piscataqua River via a “small hole” in a delivery pipe. Company officials admitted a pinhole resulted in a “spraying” of fuel for up to two hours. While much of the spill appeared to be contained within the company’s docking area, some of the river’s shellfish beds were closed out of caution. The fast-running river parallels the border of Maine and New Hampshire before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean at Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
A potential spill with historic roots was reported by NOAA, off the coast of Ocean City, Maryland, where hundreds of World War II shipwrecks lie deteriorating on the ocean floor. NOAA is documenting more than 30,000 ships sunk along the coastline and its biggest concerns are for the battleships sunk by Nazi submarines in 1942. Nearly 400 ships, many with full fuel tanks, were sunk within 60 miles of the coast. So far the agency has put 233 ships on its “worst-threat” list, including an unarmed tanker—the W.L. Steed— which was carrying 66,000 barrels of crude oil. The concern is that as the tanks rust and leak, the holds filled with crude oil, fuel oil, diesel fuel and explosives, could have “devastating” impacts on nearby coastal communities. Once identified it’s hoped the tanks could be emptied, paid for by the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, which is funded by the oil industry.
(For the rest of my dispatches go to takepart.com)
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