Stop Drifting, Start Rowing

by Roz Savage

  “What I would like to see in Copenhagen is quite a lot more common sense than we have seen so far. We need a sense of commitment, of sacrifice. Without that spirit of commitment and sacrifice nothing can be achieved. We have to give up some things. I hope that there will be some compassion. After all, we are human beings, and human beings are blessed with compassion. If we can start off with that, then we have a chance of achieving something.”

  In response to my question about what he planned to say to the global leaders in Copenhagen, President Tong replied: “I think a lot of people know climate change is happening but they don’t want to accept it. For their own different reasons, I think a lot of countries don’t want to do that. I’ve had to argue with leaders from countries like India at different meetings to say, no, no, no, come on, it’s not about economic growth, it’s about survival—we’re talking about the survival of our people here. Yes, I think really what the message should be is: Let’s have some common sense about all of this. We’ve not used that over the last few decades, maybe centuries, in our quest for growth, progress, technological development, and I think it’s time we become a bit more realistic about it, that we realize that everything we get comes at a price. And unfortunately the people who get the benefits don’t always pay the price. It’s those others that pay the price, and I think there’s got to be more responsibility.”

  The words that struck me most came towards the end of our interview. The President looked sad and said, “It’s not just about the polar bears. But also about the people. People will die, in masses.”

  A COUPLE OF NIGHTS LATER, I WAS WATCHING a group of local teenagers playing in the ocean. They were running and jumping off a stone pier, their leaps becoming progressively more elaborate and daring. They were grinning and laughing. I thought of their future as unwilling climate migrants, forced to leave the country of their forebears, and I wondered how I would feel if it were my country. The places where I had been born, grown up, gone to school, got married, and raised children—all gone forever.

  The President’s words came back to me: “When a nation no longer has a land, what becomes of its people?” he had asked, rhetorically. “Its economy? Its sovereign rights?”

  The I-Kiribati themselves had a subsistence lifestyle. Their carbon footprint was inflated by their need to import almost everything, but even taking this into account, their emissions would amount to a fraction of a comparable community of 100,000 Americans or Europeans. Their close neighbour Tuvalu had pledged to be carbon neutral by 2020, which though commendable, was largely symbolic given their negligible contribution to the problem.

  I felt I had seen the human face of climate change. Now it was a brown, broad-featured, Micronesian face. But within the century it would be other kinds of faces too—European, Asian, and African faces—and American faces. Climate change recognized no national boundaries, and we had to work together as humans—as one world, not divided as nations—to tackle this, the biggest human challenge of all time.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DO NOT LOOK OUTSIDE YOURSELF FOR THE LEADER

  “It is time to speak your truth. Create your community.

  Be good to each other. And do not look outside

  yourself for the leader.”

  — HOPI ELDER

  From Tarawa I was whisked into a hectic whirl as I promoted my first book, Rowing the Atlantic, in seven major U.S. cities. The tour kicked off in New York, where I stayed with friends, so my first hotel after the rudimentary Hotel Otintaai was the famous Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills, where Pretty Woman was filmed. The receptionist upgraded me to a junior suite with two bathrooms. The level of luxury felt almost obscene after the austerity of life on board my little boat. Just one month previously, my facilities had consisted of a bucket, a bedpan, and a sponge. Now I had two spotless bathrooms all to myself, stuffed full of more white fluffy towels than I knew what to do with. I firmly closed the door to one of them and tried to make it as clear as possible that it would not require cleaning.

  The book tour was enormously enjoyable, a nonstop blur of presentations, signings, media interviews, airports, and hotel rooms. I marveled at the contrasting extremes of my life, from solitude to sociability, from speaking once every few days to speaking all day, from spartan simplicity to the lap of luxury. The old me, the materialistic, consumerist me, might have had her head turned by the celebrity treatment, but ocean rowing has a way of deflating even the biggest ego, and the effects linger long after the return to land. It would be hard to get too impressed with myself when, within very recent memory, I had been rubbing tea tree oil on my baboon bottom and scrubbing mould out of my sleeping cabin. It seemed I was making progress in staying grounded, finding perspective and some greater meaning that could keep me anchored throughout the dramatic shifts I was experiencing.

  FROM THE SPEAKING TOUR, I RETURNED to the UK to prepare for the climate change conference in Copenhagen. I had resolved to get there in as eco-friendly a way as possible, so with a group of trusty female friends, I hiked 250 miles from Big Ben in London to Brussels, Belgium, taking a ferry across the North Sea. After our two-week trek across wintry northern Europe, I was happy to let the train take the strain for the final leg and joined the United Nations Environment Program’s “Climate Express” for the journey from Brussels to Copenhagen.

  The conference started out well enough. During the first week, I spent several days at the Bella Centre, where the main action was happening. A huge hangar of a conference venue, it was teeming with activists, bloggers, delegates, and politicians. An air of intense activity and a strong aroma of coffee hung over the proceedings. The activists petitioned for support, the bloggers camped out at the huge banks of PCs or trailed cables across the floor to their laptops, the delegates bustled around with bundles of papers, looking important, and the politicians were mostly invisible. Plenaries, the meetings being attended by all official parties, were going on in vast conference rooms behind closed doors, while elsewhere side events, workshops, media interviews, and informal meetings took place in any available space. Already it was a conference of two halves—the decision makers insulated from the hubbub outside by barriers of protocol and security.

  By the end of the first week, the representatives from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were gradually being excluded from the Bella Centre as the top-level negotiations gathered pace. Each day, fewer and fewer entry passes were being granted. This did not go down well with the NGOs, who felt they had a right to be represented, but their protestations fell on deaf ears.

  As we entered the last few days of the conference, all eyes were on the Bella Centre. The global heavyweights had arrived—Obama, Indian leaders, the Chinese delegation—and were in there slugging it out. Or so we assumed, but the building was now an impenetrable fortress. We were not allowed beyond the high chain-link fences that surrounded it. Outside, we held our collective breath and waited to see what would happen next.

  As we now know, what happened next was—not much.

  I KNEW THE WRITING WAS on the wall. I had tried to keep an upbeat attitude, but my relentless optimism was about to run slap bang into reality. As it turned out, Copenhagen comprehensively failed to deliver the hoped-for deal, the draft agreements eviscerated by a powerful cabal of up-and-coming nations who understandably aspire to the same affluence that the developed world has been enjoying for the last 50 years or so. All the numbers that mattered were removed, substituted by meaningless expressions of unenforceable intentions.

  While the climate talks were in their final throes, I was having dinner with President Anote Tong and the rest of the Kiribati delegation in a curry restaurant in downtown Copenhagen. The President was open about his feelings: “We are trying to maintain our composure, but I am very sad … We were naïve and vulnerable … I wish I was so much more ruthless.” That evening the negotiations ended in failure.

  The next morning, as I walked through the cold winter sunshine of central Copenhagen, my
mood was decidedly “morning after the night before.” The city squares, which for two weeks had been full of exhibits, trailers, tents, and people, were almost deserted. Everything had been broken down and removed with almost indecent haste.

  I observed with a little bitterness that it is often the most long-awaited and eagerly anticipated events that signally fail to deliver satisfaction, while the really good and memorable things happen serendipitously and unexpectedly. I had spent much of the last year planning for this event, trying to figure out how I could be of most service. I had been obsessed by COP15. And, predictably, I had woken up the morning after feeling rather disappointed and wondering what went wrong.

  I wrote in my blog that day:

  I will leave Copenhagen more jaded than I arrived, but more realistic too, and hence hopefully more effective. I’m not going to believe that every international negotiation is hopeless. The truth lies somewhere in between my former idealism and my present cynicism. To see the world as it is, rather than as I wish it was, is no bad thing, but having one’s illusions shattered is never a pleasant experience.

  I leave Copenhagen tomorrow, with my heart a little heavier, my head a little wiser. I’ll be pondering on what has happened here, and starting to evolve my environmental mission for 2010. As 2009 draws to a close, I’m looking forward to a period of reflection and rejuvenation, and preparation for challenges of the year ahead.

  And a final note—a definition of Post-COPulation Syndrome: a feeling of anticlimax, disillusionment, cynicism. Leading to increased fire in the belly.

  I had begun to realize that we couldn’t sit back and wait for our leaders to step in and save the day. For too much of my life I had held to the myth of the white knight. Beguiled by fairy tales and Hollywood legends, I expected somebody else to protect me and make sure my world was safe and happy, abdicating responsibility to parents, teachers, boyfriends, husband—or governments. But in Copenhagen I had grown up and realized nobody had a magic wand. This challenge was too big, and too important, for us to leave it to a handful of humans cloistered in a conference room. We would all have to step up and take part.

  AFTER RETURNING TO THE UK to regroup and spend Christmas with my family, I spent the early part of 2010 staying in a borrowed apartment in Devon, writing and working.

  That spring, I spoke at a TED conference that took place on a small cruise ship in the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and their tagline is “Ideas Worth Spreading.” For the last few years, all TED Talks have been available online on YouTube, as I had discovered a couple of years previously when a friend sent me a link to a presentation that he thought would be of particular interest to me. As I browsed the site, I found a treasure trove of presentations from inspiring, enlightening, thought-provoking, mind-expanding speakers, a veritable who’s who of 21st-century culture, all giving 18 minutes of their best.

  This particular TED conference was to be the first of its kind, specifically focused on one particular issue—the oceans—and the conference was accordingly dubbed TED Mission Blue. It had been inspired by distinguished American marine biologist Dr. Sylvia Earle and the prizewinning TED speech in which she described her wish for the oceans: “To ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas, hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet.” The hundred or so attendees on board included the actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Edward Norton, Glenn Close, and Chevy Chase; musicians Jackson Browne and Damien Rice; various top-tier businessmen, wealthy philanthropists, and heads of some of the most respected nonprofit organizations in the world; and a brace of Cousteaux—Jean-Michel, son of Jacques, and his daughter, Céline.

  OVER THE COURSE OF THE PREVIOUS few years, I had unavoidably become aware of the problems facing the world’s oceans. Although I saw myself more as an Earth advocate than an oceans advocate, not believing that we can isolate any one component of our biosphere from the others, I’d inevitably been involved in various conferences, film festivals, websites, and other projects concerned with the 70 percent of our planet that is blue. Acquaintances often sent me links to articles about the plight of the oceans, assuming that I would be particularly interested in news relating to my chosen field (so to speak) of operation. As time went on, by dint of repeated exposure to relevant information, I did indeed become interested for reasons beyond this merely being my place of work. It became increasingly clear to me just how crucial the oceans are to our future well-being. If we want to live on a healthy planet, we can’t afford to ignore the large portions of it that are covered in water.

  As I had thought more deeply about our environmental challenges, I had perceived that a holistic approach was required. There was a bewildering multitude of information and difficulties, but ultimately they were all manifestations of a single fundamental problem: humanity’s estrangement from nature. We used to know on a visceral level that we’re part of nature, unable to survive in isolation from every other component of our biosphere. It made sense to treat our fellow residents of planet Earth with respect, because we knew that we needed them—possibly very indirectly, but in this intricate web of life everything was ultimately interconnected, so to harm or even remove any part of it would be to risk destroying the whole.

  And what was happening in the oceans, I knew, was a cause for serious concern. Over recent years I had received a steady drip, drip of bad news—but it would take TED Mission Blue to make me fully realize just how bad the situation was. It turned out to be a crash course that would bring home to me like never before the scale of the destruction that had been unfolding beneath the hull of my boat while I rowed along largely oblivious on the surface. By the time I left the conference I would no longer have just a shallow, intellectual appreciation of the challenges. Quite literally, my concerns deepened.

  Species extinction, ocean acidification, collapsing fish stocks, coral-reef destruction, fossil-fuel extraction, sewage, runoff, sea dumping, mining, agricultural waste, plastic pollution, and the acronym barrage of PCBs, DDT, POPs—the roster of reasons to be fearful, rather than cheerful, seemed endless. I tried to maintain some degree of optimism, standing by my “every little helps” credo. But it seemed woefully inadequate in the face of such an onslaught of depressing news. I felt like a latter-day King Canute, trying to hold back an incoming tide but being submerged by a tsunami instead.

  The only glimmer of hope I could find was in Brian Skerry’s assertion, backed up by his photographs of marine reserves in New Zealand, that when the ocean is left alone for a while it has amazing powers of recovery. In as little as 20 years, life returns and equilibrium is restored. Nature is incredibly resilient, but it needs to be given a chance. The creation of more marine reserves—and the larger, the better, to allow the fabric of the underwater ecosystem to mend—is absolutely key to the future survival of the seas. If we want oceans once again teeming with life, as they did not so very long ago, we can start by leaving them alone for a while and giving them a chance to heal.

  As I reflected on my time at TED Mission Blue and my realization from Copenhagen, that we each have the responsibility to act as a leader, I made some new resolutions and shared them on my blog in the hope of spreading a few ripples of change—for the sake of the oceans.

  1. Reduce even further my use of plastic. Recycling isn’t good enough, and comes with its own environmental impacts. We need to stop it at source.

  2. Eat less protein, and/or get more of it from organic vegetable sources. Avoid farmed salmon (salmon are carnivorous, so it takes many pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of farmed salmon), shrimp (horrendous by-catch), and don’t even think about eating bluefin tuna.

  3. Support organizations campaigning for more marine protected areas.

  I rounded off the blog with one of my mantras: “If we all pull together, we can make a world of difference.” And I just hoped that we could make enough of a difference, and soon enough, to save the
oceans.

  I WENT STRAIGHT FROM TED MISSION BLUE to Kiribati—or at least, straight there via a two-hour boat ride, then flights from Galapagos to Quito, to Houston, to Los Angeles, to Fiji, and finally Kiribati. The journey took about two days, but it was still a lot faster than rowing there.

  As we flew across the Pacific, the man sitting next to me on the plane leaned across to look out of the window.

  “That’s a whole lot of ocean down there,” he commented.

  I smiled wryly and replied, “Yes, it is.”

  I looked at the glittering expanse beneath us and thought of the times when I had been on my boat, looking up at an aeroplane’s contrail and wondering if anybody on the plane noticed the tiny vessel below them, a microscopic dot in the vastness of the ocean. To put it in perspective, if the Pacific Ocean were three statute miles across, my boat would be less than one-tenth of an inch, about the size of a pinhead.

  My trusty Director of Boats, Ian Tuller, had refused to come back to Kiribati. When he left the island the year before, he had brought home an unwanted souvenir—a parasitic infection. He had not been the only member of my team to suffer: Conrad and Nicole had contracted stomach bugs, and Hunter a nasty bout of conjunctivitis, but Ian’s problem was much more persistent. Seven months later it still hadn’t cleared up.

  “That just doesn’t work for me,” Ian had said.

  I was disappointed, but I completely understood. To ask one’s friends to travel halfway around the world to help launch a rowboat is a tall enough order, but asking them to risk serious long-term health consequences is just too much.

  LUCKILY, MY FRIEND LIZ FISCHER had volunteered of her own free will. A Virginian living in Hawai’i, she had traveled extensively in the Pacific and knew more or less what she was getting herself into. Forsaking the Hotel Otintaai, we stayed at the Betio Apartments. Our twin-bed room, one of a row of similar rooms opening onto an outdoor walkway, was basic, but clean enough.