Journeying to the most hopeful place on Earth

By Cassandra Mascarenhas

Motivational speaker, Polar explorer, environmental leader and the first person to ever have walked to both the North and South Poles, Sir Robert Swan, is currently in Sri Lanka promoting environmental sustainability and addressing various stakeholders on climate protection through his inspiring stories.

Brought down through the initiative of Coca-Cola Sri Lanka, with whom he has partnered, Swan is also in the country to create awareness and support the company’s sustainability initiatives in Sri Lanka. One of the programs Swan attended was an inter-school PET collection competition in Biyagama and together, the students picked up 500 kilograms of PET bottles, which Swan praised tremendously, calling it an absolutely fabulous effort.

“Coca-Cola has consistently been doing trendsetting work across the globe in the arena of water and environment sustainability. Together with their partners, they have worked towards rebuilding communities, preserving the environment and helped in the spreading of awareness of climate, energy and environmental protection,” he stated.

“I hope that through their efforts, they empower the younger generation to contribute towards environmental protection and I urge stakeholders to partner with corporate like Coca-Cola for the greater good of humanity.”

Swan travels to Antarctica every year, where he has established an education centre fully powered by renewable energy, accompanied by a group of young people from across the world. He in fact took the first Sri Lankan to Antarctica a couple of years back, Imalka de Silva, and hopes to repeat the experience by taking more Sri Lankans with him in the near future.

In fact, he revealed that on 13 December 2014, he will be back at the South Pole and will retrace the steps from his journey made over 25 years ago – the only difference being that it will be completely powered by renewable fuels.

“Interestingly, the first thing you die from in Antarctica is dehydration,” he explained. It is vital to have fuel to melt snow in order to keep oneself hydrated. This has always been done through the heavy use of fossil fuels – which he hopes to change. “Top experts are already telling us we’re going to die but that’s not stopping us. We’ll also have a big outreach program and will be live on YouTube every night.”

The explorer shared his truly inspiring story with the media earlier this week and went into detail about his many environmental awareness initiatives, difficulties encountered along the way and the great work done by harnessing youth from all across the globe.

Humanity threatened by nature

“We are essentially threatened by our environment. Imagine what it was like to be in New York City a couple of days ago, where you would have really felt the power of our environment coming to threaten you. I ask you to look out of the window here and probably, sadly, I hope not, but there could be somebody dying in Sri Lanka now because of floodwater. It is quite likely sadly. I want you to imagine feeling threatened,” he stated somewhat ominously in his opening remarks.

The places he travels to threaten humans every day. Places like the North and South Poles want you dead from the time you get there and if you forget that, you never get home. In New York City before he came to Sri Lanka, Swan observed that it is an interesting thing to imagine that you leave a place and then a few days later, the vey subway you were on is flooded.

“The point I am making is, is that what is out there is a lot stronger than us. We can surround ourselves with technology, buildings, 25 mobile phones and be sending texts to each other every five minutes but that will not protect us from being killed.”

“I am actually the first person in history stupid enough to walk to both poles – you have to be stupid to walk to both poles. If you are that person, you are sure of four things forever: you hate walking, you don’t like having ice in your underpants, no insurance company will ever give you life cover and most importantly, most people you meet are negative about what you do,” he said.

People are always telling him, “You’re going to die, you’re going to fail,” which doesn’t get you anywhere, he stated. “Have you ever been in a room with really negative people and come out feeling positive, excited? Without being too controversial, open up your newspapers and see what the balance in news is today between negative and positive. It is very unbalanced with mostly negative stuff. So if none of us in this room has never been inspired by negativity, how can our media inspire people when they are largely negative?”

 

Polar explorer Sir Robert Swan – Pic by Kithsiri De Mel

A journey fuelled by a dream

At the age of 11, Swan watched a film about the Antarctic and one day said that he will become the first person in history to walk to both poles. The seventh child in a family of accountants, he had no prior experience and he admitted that it was really hard to raise the required capital but finally, they bought a ship and sailed past Africa, across to New Zealand and then to the Antarctic 25 years ago.

He described that once south of New Zealand, the ocean starts to get quite rough. “Our destination was the most hopeful place – Antarctica is such a positive place. Did you know that you own a piece of Antarctica the size of a football pitch? Because if you divide the population of our planet into the size of Antarctica, all of us on Earth have a piece the size of a football pitch. It is the only place on Earth that we all own.”

It may be dangerous but it is the most hopeful and positive place on Earth, the last great wilderness and five people were left in Antarctica with no communications, trapped inside a hut for the next whole year of their lives, 6,000 kilometres from the nearest rescue. The expedition was done in an incredibly traditional manner and the team was in complete darkness for four months. Temperatures fall to minus 65 degrees Celsius and as a team, they had to make it work.

After nine months of waiting, three of them strapped on their sleds and attempted something that everybody said could not be done – the longest unassisted march ever made anywhere on Earth in history. Eighty days of food and fuel, each sled weighing 180 kilograms, no radios, no GPS and their destination was one building – the South Pole Scientific Station – one building the size of the Hilton lobby here in Colombo, in the middle of an area twice the size of Australia.

“We crossed 6,000 crevasses. I lost 33 kilograms in 70 days. It was hard work and we were all on our own. Beneath our feet, there was 4,200 metres of solid ice, 90 per cent of the entire world’s ice and 70 per cent of the world’s fresh water. It’s probably not the best idea if we melt it. I think the sea levels around the world would rise by 150 metres and an estimated five billion people would die if that happens,” Swan added.

As they got closer to the pole, according to their plans, a plane was to fly to the pole and look for them and they were to board it and go back to the base and do something they promised to do for Jack Cousteau, an explorer from France who was Swan’s patron, helping him raise the money and put this expedition together.

“In return, I promised him that at the end of our expedition, we would take away all our garbage and leave Antarctica tidy. After 70 pretty tough days, there it was the South Pole Scientific Station. Just as we arrived at the Pole, disaster struck. Our ship hit an iceberg and sank. Everyone was alive but we had a few problems. The biggest problem was removing our 60 tons of equipment from Antarctica and it was 6,000 kilometres back to New Zealand,” he revealed.

“In a world often dominated by things being complicated, I think sometimes we make them complicated but it’s a complex world and I think on this day, it wasn’t the best day I’ve had, but if you make a promise you should keep it. I’m proud to say that our team pulled together and three of them stayed behind and spent another year in Antarctica.”

Swan found an aeroplane, got the rest of the team back to civilisation and he promised those three people that he would return one year later with another ship, load up the garbage and do what they promised to do, which he did.

“What we saw 25 years ago, was wrong. Rich, powerful nations with their scientific operations in Antarctica just putting their garbage into the ocean so we in our own small way, we tried to make a change.”

Climate change is happening

“Now I have to be honest with you, one of the reasons I went to the South Pole in the first place was because the idea went down well with girls. I didn’t do this for the planet – I did it to do it! But something changed me. I got hit from the environment and it hurt,” he stated.

His eyes are a pretty strange colour and that is because they changed colour through damage walking to the pole. The explorers had blisters in their eyes, their skin blistered out. In fact, they would take off their facial covering and the inside of their faces would be left on the inside of the covering.

Why? This hadn’t happened to the explorers a 100 years before them. This was because they walked under the hole in the ozone layer the year it was discovered. “It was even more of a shock to come home and realise that most people really didn’t care. Unfortunately, I promised to walk to both poles. I’m the first person to walk to both poles because it hurts.”

The next expedition to the North Pole was much more different, made up of eight explorers from seven different nations. To engage young people – which is Swan’s mission in life, to inspire them – it’s best to actually have them with you, so they had 22 young people from 15 different nations at the base camp. Eight of them went to the edge, walking the distance from Sri Lanka to Singapore across the ocean, for 56 days in a row.

“For those who say climate change is not happening, first, all of us are living at a time of natural warming – it’s definite. It looks increasingly likely that we are making that warming happen faster, perhaps making it happen more. Just about every single weather record on Earth has been broken in the last 10 years but it’s not been made definite by science,” he asserted.

People, he added, should be hopeful, positive and doing the right thing – just in case we are creating climate change – simple deal. People tell him that it’s going to cost a lot of money to invest this insurance. He pointed out that it will cost a lot more money to patch up the planet if we don’t do those things now.

“If people still don’t believe climate change is not happening, they should go and visit the polar bears. They live on ice, which is their home, and in 20 years this species has gone from being untouched to dying. I’ve seen this with my own eyes. The saddest thing I’ve seen in the animal world is see a polar bear swim its way to death as it can’t find its home. That’s a bit fast isn’t it, in 20 years, that we are melting the Antarctic that much.”

First and last person to walk to both poles?

“I could be the first and last person in history to walk to both poles – because there would be no ice to walk on. Even 20 years ago, we faced disaster. 1,100 kilometres away from the safety of land, the whole ocean melting beneath our feet, four months before it ever had,” Swan said.

However, it was a great day when they finished their 56 day trek. It is pointless to walk to both poles, he admitted, but they were all proud and happy on that day.

Twenty years ago, Swan went to the first ever world summit on the environment – the Rio Earth Summit 1992, which he said was really exciting. “I spoke to all the world leaders for five minutes, unfortunately the whole lot of them were asleep but that’s what you face at 8 a.m.!

“There I met the great Jack Cousteau and he gave me a 50 year mission. He said that in the year 2041, the treaty that protects Antarctica stops so he asked me to get out there to educate people to leave one place on Earth alone forever – to leave one place as a natural reserve, for science and peace. That’s my mission and because no one owns it, we may have a chance.”

At the summit, Swan also made a commitment to the world leaders that he would do a global and local mission lasting 10 years and that he would come back to the second world summit in 2002 showing them what was possible to achieve through young people.

He then took to the Antarctic once again for the global mission, this time with 35 young people from countries that suffer misunderstandings. Israel and Palestine, Russia and Chechnya, Northern Ireland Catholic and Protestant, India and Pakistan – he took boys and girls to a place that humanity will never fight about – Antarctica.

There, they saw 1,500 tons of garbage left in Antarctica by the former Soviet Union. This took them eight years to remove and 12 million dollars. “It was great,” Swan said emphatically. “We could only go there three months of the year and that is why it took so long. We packed it up, took down a ship, loaded it by hand and recycled it in Uruguay, South America.

“Do remember that I had a team of four people, myself and three amazing ladies. I had to raise every penny. I am 56 years of age, I don’t have a pension plan yet and we put every single thing we’ve got to everything we do.”

When he is speaking to young people, he now has every right to say to them that if they could take garbage from Antarctica and recycle it in South America, a person might just manage to move their arm and put a bottle or can in a recycling bin and, he said, they listen to what he has to say.

“On this day, when we cleared up that beach, the penguins came ashore after 41 years onto their clean beach and I realised that to keep things going in life, you have to be relevant and I realised that I couldn’t save Antarctica by clearing garbage. I had to be business-like, make sure that money to talk to save Antarctica.”

Powering the word through renewable energy

Swan’s dream was to build the first ever education station running only on renewable energy in Antarctica to showcase and inspire young people that if renewable energy could work in Antarctica, it could work elsewhere.

They have a battleship named 2041 and she sails the seas powered entirely by renewable energy. They got back to South Africa for the second world summit in 2002 in Johannesburg and joined a local organisation to do something spectacular.

“We put the 52 ton yacht on a train and we made the longest overland voyage ever made in history. We took the yacht to visit kids who had never seen the sea or boat and 750,000 kids came to see it and educated them on looking after the environment.”

Swan and his team arrived at the second world summit with the global mission done in Antarctica and the local mission done in Africa. “On the whole, world leaders are completely useless. Every time I meet them at these summits, they say ‘Well done Rob, we’ll see you at the next summit!’ What is interesting is that between the first and second world summits, there were only two world leaders still there – Fidel Castro and Robert Mugabe!”

“These things might not achieve what they hope they would but again, I look for the positive and I will go to as many world summits as I can possibly manage to go to because achieving something is better than achieving nothing.”

At the second world summit, he promised the world leaders that he would make a voyage for cleaner energy from 2002 to 2012. Since then, he has travelled to Antarctica every year and every time, he admitted he feels more threatened there, with icebergs half the size of Sri Lanka breaking away.

The education centre was completed in 2007 and he now tests brand new renewable energies at this base every time he visits it. He has also taken 17 women from the Middle East to Antarctica, from Oman to Yemen to Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, Swan assisted in the construction of the first education centre in India, build in a tiger reserve which is now visited by scores of people every year. This was done when he made a 5,200 kilometre bike ride across India to educate people on climate change.

“Did you know that the ozone hole has now fixed itself in one place? This is because 23 years ago, governments from across the world signed the Montreal Treaty which banned the use of CFC gases.”

On the way to the third world summit, they encountered a difficulty when its location was switched from Singapore to Rio once again as they had no funds to make it to the new location. It was then that Swan partnered with Coco-Cola COO for the Northern Division Phil Humphreys when in China and it was Coco-Cola who helped them get to Rio, Swan explained.