A new breed of adventurer is out to raise environmental awareness, as well as having an exciting time. And, reports PETER HUCK, some big corporate names are happy to back their eco-crusades
When Roz Savage dips her oars into the Pacific Ocean on May 24 and steers her 7m rowboat west from Honolulu on the second leg of her bid to be the first woman to row solo across the world's largest ocean, she will be hoping for more, much more, than laudatory press coverage and a place in the annals of derring-do.
The 41-year-old is a member of a fast-growing breed - the eco-adventurer: explorers with an environmental purpose.
Savage, who rowed solo across the Atlantic in 2006 and has already done the San Francisco to Hawaii leg of her Pacific voyage, wants to build a "global community who will all pull together to take action on climate change".
Her plan is to exert grassroots pressure on world leaders at December's global warming talks in Copenhagen.
"Each of my ocean rows takes about one million oar strokes. One stroke doesn't get me very far. But a million gets me across [4000km] of ocean. Lots of tiny actions do add up to something important."
Savage hopes people who follow her online reports about the second leg of her voyage, which she named "Pull Together", will reduce their carbon footprint.
"We're clearly not on a sustainable path. I want people to make conscious decisions as consumers."
It is an extraordinary quest, but Savage is not alone. Other adventurers are publicising green causes - and increasingly enlisting corporate support to do so.
On a voyage from South Africa to New Zealand, another intrepid eco-adventurer, 42-year-old Mike Horn, is sailing his 35m aluminium ketch Pangaea through the Roaring Forties with five colleagues.
After he makes landfall in Dunedin, where he was expected to arrive today, eight Young Explorers - selected from hundreds of teenagers who applied via Horn's website - will sail for Fiordland on the Pangaea, to check out a rodent-trapping project on Coal Island and a dolphin research study, and to hike the Dusky Track. Intended to highlight threats to biodiversity, this is the second of 12 ventures on a four-year eco-quest to inspire people to clean up the planet that began in Antarctica last year.
And David de Rothschild, 30, hopes to set sail from San Francisco in July or August for Australia with five others on an 18.3m catamaran, the Plastiki, built from 12,500 2-litre plastic bottles filled with dry ice.
This radical craft, designed by America's Cup veteran Andy Dovell with assistance from Auckland firms High Modulus and North Sails, will also chart an environmental path, this time highlighting pollution.
The vessel will visit the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vast gyre of floating plastic debris between Hawaii and the American mainland - as part of a bid to promote a cradle-to-cradle sustainable business model in which waste such as plastic is reused as a resource rather than dumped.
Elsewhere around the globe, other eco-adventurers are also highlighting environmental issues. They include polar explorer Robert Swan's 2041 Project, dedicated to preserving Antarctica, and German scientist Dominique Goerlitz's fourth bid to cross the Atlantic and back in a papyrus vessel, the Abora IV, and prove New World plants made it to ancient Egypt (Thor Heyerdahl, whose 1947 Kon-Tiki Pacific expedition inspired de Rothschild, sailed one way across the Atlantic in his Ra II reed boat in 1970).
In the past explorers won fame partly by besting nature in feats of endurance. Now they seek to preserve nature.
"We've gone beyond the quest to be first, at least on land," explains Lorie Karnath, president of the New York Explorers Club, who led an expedition to help save the endangered white stork last year, sponsoring a dual-use sanctuary - storks and farm cattle - on the River Elbe with a German wildlife group.
"Now one of our greatest needs is to protect the planet. I would say that almost every expedition we have, where we plant a club flag, has a very significant element of preservation attached to it."
And while each expedition is full of the derring-do expected from adventurers willing to put their lives on the line, they tend to emphasise the upside. It's not all doom and gloom at the end of the world. Environmental challenge can also mean economic opportunity and sponsorship from corporations who are beginning to realise that further damaging a fragile planet is ultimately not good for the bottom line.
"Corporations face many of the same things as explorers," says Karnath. "They have to be conscious of their carbon footprint." The confluence of eco-adventurism and corporate sponsorship is driven by a growing awareness of shared interest.
"It's about how you go forward," says Steve Hoffman, director of worldwide marketing for HP, the world's largest IT company and one of Plastiki's sponsors. "You don't make short-term tradeoffs, but tradeoffs you can build on far into the future, such as reducing the amount of materials and energy we need."
It is a synergy where exploration, environmentalism and corporate interests all collide.
Corporate sponsorship is nothing new. "It's been a trend since Shackleton," laughs Jeff Blumenfeld, publisher of Expedition News, an online monthly review of expeditions, and author of You Want to Go Where?: How to Get Someone to Pay for the Trip of Your Dreams, due out next month. Traditionally sponsors have lavished equipment on explorers who can test gear and deliver what Blumenfeld calls the "halo effect".
"If your sleeping bag works on the top of Everest, or if some guy's tent works at the North Pole, where are you going that's as tough as that?"
But today's adventurers are offering wider benefits to their corporate backers.
Ten years ago the New York Times reported that "thanks to a surge in corporate sponsorship of expeditions, there are probably more professional explorers today than at any time in history". Many were intent on realising "arcane grails", such as being "the first male-female team to cross Antarctica".
Given the odds, eco-adventurers have to go the extra mile to find backing. "You have to create a news hook," explains Blumenfeld, "to counter the 'so what?' factor. 'You plan to study garbage in the Pacific? So what? The Pacific is full of garbage. You're going to study garbage in a boat made from plastic bottles? Now that gets interesting' ... If your expedition can demonstrate the ability to generate media awareness you have a better chance of getting sponsorship."
The trick is to grab attention at the outset with a novel idea - a recyclable boat, say, or a solo rower - and never let go as you voice green concerns and road test solutions. "There's a shift," says de Rothschild. "We're not just exploring our human feats. We're exploring our understanding of the systems we're travelling through."
It is also good to bring your sponsor to the party. Thus, the Pangaea, while prepared to spread sails when there's plenty of sea room, uses twin 500hp diesels from primary sponsor Mercedes-Benz when motoring around 'bergs in Antarctica. "They have lower carbon emissions," says Martin Horn, Mike's brother, speaking from expedition HQ in Switzerland.
Nonetheless, the engines still pump out greenhouse gases. Next year Daimler plans to fit the Pangaea with fuel cells.
After the Pangaea leaves New Zealand it will sail to the Solomons, via Sydney, on a new quest: creating a water sanitation project in small villages using equipment from Swiss plumbing company Geberit AG, another sponsor. Once again, an eco-adventurer can showcase a corporate backer at the forefront of worldwide efforts to tackle environmental issues, in this case the shortage of water in poor nations.
Do sponsors want to bathe themselves in a green glow? "Sure," says Horn. "Daimler, for example, thinks it's great if the public thinks they are doing something for the environment. Second-tier sponsors like Geberit and Panerai [a watch company] want a connection to young people."
Still, finding money for even the worthiest causes isn't easy, especially since the global economy nosedived. The process can take years. "All of us are running in the same lanes," says Horn. "We're looking for the same guys."
Savage, a management consultant in an IT company in a past life, had burned through money from a Silicon Valley company and was using a book advance to fund her shoestring expedition, with private donations.
On a previous Atlantic crossing she says her support team was "my mother"; this time she has a programme director and is funded by donations and a book advance. Her main sponsor is Brocade, a California data-networking company. "It's all a bit seat-of-the-pants at the moment," says Savage. "I'm definitely open to offers."
"The recession has put a damper on raising money," says Will Steger, a veteran polar explorer - his feats include the first unmechanised Antarctic crossing in 1990 with five others - who talks to school children about climate change. "Funding is extremely difficult."
Nonetheless, Steger says he is very careful about whose money he accepts; taking the corporate shilling can provoke accusations of greenwash, where corporations - oil companies are the usual suspects - profess to be green while pumping out greenhouse gases.
In 1985 Shell provided fuel for Swan's Footsteps of Scott expedition (Shell also helped the original Scott expedition some 75 years earlier). Today, as greens excoriate the oil business, this is a trickier option.
"If I wanted to go to an oil company I'm sure I could sell myself out and my money worries might be over," says Steger. "Believe me it's very tempting." But, ultimately, he fears such a Faustian deal would tarnish his credibility.
Greenwash is still prevalent. After years funding climate-change deniers, ExxonMobil now portrays itself as part of the solution through small investments in renewable energy. But de Rothschild, a scion of the banking dynasty, hopes self-aware corporate players will recognise that confronting climate change and other environmental is good for business.
"I'm definitely not into greenwashing," he says. "But I think the time of sitting on the fence and pointing the finger at big business is over. To create systemic change within society we need to get some harmony between consumers, business and government."
Put bluntly, this means jettisoning an economic model that "has left our planet in a failed position" - the unrestrained pilfering of finite resources in a mad scramble for profits linked to exponential growth - and inventing a sustainable one.
"That problem is now evident in the collapse of our economic system and the collapse of our environmental system," says de Rothschild, whose other projects include an organic farm at Akaroa, near Christchurch. "We're seeing this mass dichotomy, where we've basically created two subsets: ecology and economy." He believes man has externalised himself from nature and is now reaping the whirlwind.
"We've made the fatal mistake of removing ourselves from the web of life."
The lesson is simple: humans divorce themselves from nature at their peril. He sees the Plastiki as a sort of floating laboratory that tests cradle-to-cradle ideas with a view towards wider application.
"We can apply our knowledge of polymers back into HP, back into the philosophies of reducing waste in the supply chain and removing noxious substances." The major scientific concern about the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, aka the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is that polymers break down into minuscule particles, laced with poisons such as DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls and enter the food chain when they are consumed by marine creatures, a scenario outlined in Alan Weisman's chilling book The World Without Us, now the inspiration for a United States television show.
Once, the idea of an environmental campaign influencing corporate behaviour in this way might have provoked derision in boardrooms.
But the times are changing. HP's Hoffman runs down a list of IT practices that he suggests reflect a fusion of business sustainability and bottom-line smarts.
They range from cradle-to-cradle "up-cycling" of inkjet cartridges and 100 per cent recyclable packaging (the cradle-to-cradle concept, espoused by American green architect William McDonough, involves reusing non-biodegradable waste products) to devices that allow teleconferencing, thus cutting carbon-heavy travel, and PCs that cut metal components by 55 per cent and plastic parts by 37 per cent.
Kiehl's, a New York cosmetics company owned by L'Oreal, also espouses this ethos and will supply Plastiki's crew with sunblock and skin cream. "For us David de Rothschild is an amazing eco-adventurer who has an unprecedented idea to raise awareness about environmental initiatives," says Sara Denny Roth, assistant vice-president for global PR. "It was a no-brainer to support his mission." Kiehl's will also provide financial support.
Besides road-testing new products designed to handle harsh environments (in 2002 Kiehl's helped a Greenland expedition that tested a face moisturiser), Roth says her company shares the expedition's ethos of minimum environmental impact and maximum reuse.
Last year Kiehl's produced the first 100 per cent biodegradable body cleanser to be certified as cradle-to-cradle, in a business venture with actor Brad Pitt.
"It's not a trend," Roth says. "It's a sea change in corporate responsibility."
The word "responsibility" doesn't always sit well with public perceptions of the dog-eat-dog corporate world. But reality has a way of intruding if the bottom line is to survive.
In a world facing climate change, with huge demands being made on finite resources, the eco-messages espoused by de Rothschild and his peers are morphing into corporate supply chains. "We're doing everything we can to drive it," says Hoffman. "Our operating system is very leveraged. We work with a lot of partners."
Some 50 million PCs and 60 million printers flow through HP's vast global network each year. Two years ago it was the first company to issue a greenhouse gases audit.
As public anger grows at corporate profligacy in areas such as banking and the car industry, HP stresses that it equates sustainability with fiscal efficiency. "We're making it very loud and clear to partners who work with us, that we put a priority on it," says Hoffman. In other words, as corporate players assess their carbon footprints, their partners may have to step up and adopt their own sustainability model, or be out of the game.
Part of de Rothschild's game plan is to reach the people at the top of the corporate pyramid. He mentions a website, whorunstheplanet.com, to suggest this isn't a very big number.
Can green ideas trickle down?
"Take Wal-Mart," he says of the retail colossus. "Lee Scott [the former chief executive] could create a sustainable fishery by saying, 'We wouldn't buy fish unless they're from a sustainable fishery' with one stroke of a pen. Overnight. That's the power of business to transform and create change."
De Rothschild says he is interested in the area between business and government and wants to transcend the "isolationist view that businesses can't work together".
De Rothschild, who is also espousing his views on the new US TV programme Eco-Trip - billed as "the hottest thing since global warming" - recently spoke about sustainability to HP's 300,000 employees worldwide via a global webcast from Houston, a quid pro quo for the company's sponsorship. That support includes portable technology that will allow the Plastiki to communicate its progress, including work with scientists about environmental issues en route.
After the Plastiki arrives in Sydney it will be scrapped and recycled in accordance with cradle-to-cradle principles.
When we spoke, de Rothschild was grappling with the myriad issues involved in creating a bespoke vessel from plastic bottles. "No one's ever done this before," he says. Marcus Eriksen's Junk Raft, also built from plastic bottles, sailed past the Great Pacific Garbage Patch last year, but building a catamaran is a more taxing challenge.
De Rothschild believes waste is a "design flaw". The idea is for the Plastiki to showcase smart design and provide sustainable models.
Ironically, the recession provides a chance for business - already buffeted by consumer environmental concerns and demands for accountability - to work on sustainability. The old stand-off of greens versus corporations is giving way to efforts to find common ground, even as eco-adventurers build virtual communities, a key component in modern eco-exploration.
When Robert Swan and two colleagues left Cape Evans for the South Pole in 1985, retracing Robert Scott's doomed journey, in that pre-internet era they skied into a void, sans radios, hauling gear on sledges.
Today, Swan, like his peers, uses the internet to communicate concerns for Antarctica's future via his 2041 website.
De Rothschild will post videos and photographs on his website for Adventure Ecology, an environmental organisation he founded in 2005. A 2006 polar trek from Russia to Canada drew almost two million hits to the site.
Steger notes that for his green message to have an impact "you have to create a following, create excitement, so they tune in again and find out what's going on".
When I spoke to Martin Horn, the Pangaea expedition was busy redeveloping its website to make it more user-friendly for the target youth audience - the same one coveted by many businesses.
"When I spoke about streaming and webcams a few years ago people thought I was crazy," says Horn, an ocean-racing veteran. "Today the net rules the world."
Shortly before Savage sets off from Hawaii she will announce an environmental challenge to her followers, asking them to walk more and drive less, matching her 10,000 oarstrokes each day with 10,000 steps.
She will unveil new technology on her website that will allow followers to record the number of steps they take each day as a substitute for driving. The idea is to use the total as grassroots ammunition with which to persuade world leaders at Copenhagen to take aggressive, immediate action on climate change.
The new technology would seem a natural pull for some IT sponsor. "We are in conversations with some technology companies with a large online presence," agrees Savage, who uses her satellite phone to broadcast video, photos and data spread around the globe via YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other sites. "We're hoping that might bear fruit."
In a world of growing environmental concerns, in which eco-adventurers are rock stars who walk the walk, Savage thinks the sponsorship world may also change. "In the past it's been big sports stars who got big sponsorship deals. As the focus shifts to green and more ethical concerns, then maybe a new kind of brand ambassador will emerge."
Eco-venturers
ROZ SAVAGE
The quest: Row across the Pacific from San Francisco to Cairns, via Hawaii and Tuvalu, in support of action on climate change.
Main sponsor: Brocade (US, data networking).
Website: rozsavage.com
MIKE HORN / PANGAEA
The quest: Four-year, 100,000km sea and land voyage including the North and South poles. Groups of young people will join the voyage for environmental and community projects.
Main sponsors: Mercedes-Benz, Geberit (Switzerland, plumbing supplies), Panerai (Italy, watches).
Website: mikehorn.com
DAVID DE ROTHSCHILD / PLASTIKI
The quest: Sail from San Francisco to Sydney in boat made of plastic bottles and recycled waste, to focus attention on waste dumped into the sea.
Main sponsors: IWC (Switzerland, watches), HP (US, computers, printers), Kiehl's (US, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals).
Website: adventureecology.com/theplastiki
