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<\/i><\/h2>\nUp today: a guest blog from <\/i>Kate Rawles asking \u2018Can Adventure Change the World?\u2019<\/i><\/h2>\n
There\u2019s a North American writer and environmentalist who said one of those simple but incredibly powerful things. Bill Plotkin wrote that, if you can find the place where something you love doing intersects with something the world actually needs, that sweet-spot will be not only where you are happiest, but also your most effective. These words literally changed my life. I was a university lecturer when I read them, teaching good stuff to super lovely students \u2013 environmental ethics, sustainability, a bit of sea kayaking \u2013 but in a system that had become ever more regimented, bureaucratic, admin-heavy and time-demanding. It was no longer in my sweet-spot. Plotkin inspired me to figure out how to put riding my bike in mountains there instead (preferably hot sunny ones) something I\u2019ve always loved doing, and have done a lot of over the years, despite my marked lack of athletic prowess at school. How could I do more, but in ways that would be both fabulous personal adventures, AND give something back?<\/p>\n
Adventure Plus<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
Over time, that evolved into \u2018Adventure Plus\u2019: using adventurous journeys to help raise awareness and inspire action on our most urgent environmental challenges.<\/i> I\u2019ve been lucky enough to have had a crack at three. The Carbon Cycle<\/i> was a ride in the Rockies from Texas to Alaska, exploring climate change in two of the most oil-intensive, oil-dependent countries on earth. Some years later, with a temporary switch of sustainable travel mode, l was invited to be mission leader for \u2018Gyre to Gaia\u2019, a sailing voyage with Pangaea Exploration. We had an eclectic mix of scientists and artists on board, all investigating ocean plastic pollution and, especially, whether microplastics are being ingested by zooplankton at the very base of the vital ocean food web. (They are.) Most recently, The Life Cycle<\/i> was an 8288 mile, largely solo ride the length of the Andes on a bamboo bike I built myself. En route I explored biodiversity: what it is, why it matters, and why losing it at the current catastrophic rate amounts to a threat every bit as dangerous as climate change, despite that it\u2019s still getting much less attention. I used all the journeys as the basis for slide shows and, in the case of The Carbon and Life Cycles, books. I\u2019m still out there giving talks about that last one.<\/p>\n
So that\u2019s the first part of my answer to the question of how adventure might help change the world. People love having adventures, but they also love hearing about them \u2013 embedding an environmental message and call to action in an adventure story can work well as a communication hook or Trojan Horse, bringing these urgent messages to folk who might not read or listen to a \u2018straight\u2019 environmental lecture. And to communities \u2013 like the outdoor adventure ones \u2013 who have huge though not always fully realised potential for action.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But it\u2019s the rest of my answer that is probably both the most significant, and the hardest to articulate.<\/p>\n The gift of perspective<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n \u2018Adventure\u2019 is of course a relative term (my adventure is Ran Fiennes\u2019 equivalent of a beach holiday) and adventures come in multiple shapes and sizes. But I think there\u2019s always an element of stepping beyond the familiar and the routine; nudging up against comfort-zone boundaries; uncertainty; possibly risk; exploration (internal and external) and novelty. Taken together, these factors offer an infinitely precious opportunity for perspective, the chance to see things \u2013 our lives, our work, our society, our culture \u2013 as if from above (or, if you\u2019re up a mountain, literally from above.) Travelling even somewhat adventurously can be like a massive draft of clarity-drug, where you suddenly see through the routine-induced \u2018this is just normal\u2019 haze to something very different. This new view can be exhilarating, change-inspiring \u2013 and deeply unsettling. The ultimate case of Light and Dark.<\/p>\n Multiple-planet living\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n Dark first. Our \u2018normal\u2019 lives are now putting life on earth, including our own, in serious jeopardy. More precisely, the ways of living and working we\u2019ve developed in aggressively growth-based, extractivist, capitalist, industrialised societies \u2013 like our own \u2013 are profoundly and utterly unsustainable. If everyone on earth were to enjoy the lifestyle of an average Western European, we would need (at least) three planets. Societies with this kind of economic system \u2013 a system that depends on extracting ever more resources and generating ever more waste in the process of creating ever more stuff in order to keep growing \u2013 generate legitimising and supporting worldviews and values that effectively coverup and\/or justify the fundamental insanity of multiple-planet living.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n These include the all-pervasive view that quality of life for humans is primarily materialistic \u2013 it\u2019s about possessions and money. Pretty much anything can be justified in pursuit of them. The same world view tells us that nature is essentially something out there, apart from us, a set of resources we can draw on to provide the material things we crave. Riding a heavily-loaded bike a long way (for example) can cut through all this pretty darn quick. Even on roads you feel much more connected to nature, experiencing it as something you\u2019re actually immersed in and part of; as a community of living beings you belong to rather than simply as a source of stuff. Plus, our stuff is heavy \u2013 literally as well as metaphorically. You fast realise you don\u2019t actually need that much of it not just to be safe (I\u2019m still in awe at what some flimsy bits of canvas and a few poles, aka a tent, can protect a person from) but positively, often exhilaratingly, happy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Quality of life and the new normal<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n Which takes us direct to the Light. Riding a loaded bike a long way, or whatever your version of that is, doesn\u2019t just cut through the dangerous and damaging myth that human happiness depends on quantity of stuff (dangerous because overconsumption in the industrialised world is the biggest single driver of ALL our interconnected environmental crises.) It also generates strong clues about what quality of life for humans could<\/i> involve: a version of quality of life that would be every bit as fulfilling as the materialistic one, if not more, but achievable without requiring multiple planets, destroying our life-support systems or sustaining extraordinary levels of inequality, human poverty and injustice.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Of course, we need some <\/i>possessions and money. But, at the core, the alternative is about valuing experiences rather than things. It\u2019s about connection \u2013 with each other, and with the ecological communities we belong to as much as to our human ones. About trust and openness and in the moment-ness and community. And about gratitude. That sliver of shade on a long hot climb. That swig of warm water-bottle water or, wonder of wonders, a good coffee in an unexpected caf\u00e9. The vista that opens up when you finally reach the top. Bread and sweaty cheese by the roadside when you\u2019re really hungry. The best ever cold beer at the end of the day. In a world that is literally being destroyed by our pursuit of possessions, adventure\u2019s greatest gift is to show us we don\u2019t need that many of them to be happy, and to give us joy to rival that from any shopping spree in a simple glass of water.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s a fascinating overlap here between this insight from the industrialised world\u2019s adventurers, and the wisdom of many indigenous peoples for whom a culture of gratitude is normal and ours the exception (Robin Wall Kimmerer\u2019s brilliant book Braiding Sweetgrass<\/i> explores this, for example.) Yet it\u2019s also a paradox. Out there on the road, this realisation comes easy. But it\u2019s hard to sustain back in (our) \u2018normal\u2019 life when you can have a meal, a hot shower, a decent coffee, a cold beer and a choice of more than two t-shirts any time you like. And when the way we \u2018normally\u2019 live typically cuts us off from nature by default.<\/p>\n The transition to truly sustainable ways of living and working will involve figuring out ways to sustain and live by these on-the-road values; will involve a new normal. I\u2019m convinced by this. And yet. Trust, openness, connection, community, gratitude. They sound right. But also a touch, what, wishy washy? \u2018Unrealistic\u2019 (even though it\u2019s sustaining the current way of life that is actually unrealistic.) It\u2019s partly because that legitimising and supporting worldview I mentioned earlier is bound to make them seem like that. That\u2019s its job. But I think there\u2019s also something else. Yes, we have to live by other values, to recast what we mean by quality human lives. But we also have to tackle power.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Power\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n It\u2019s possible that this is where adventure bursts back in with its most pressing role yet. A relatively small number of unfathomably powerful, eye-wateringly rich corporate institutions prosper wildly from the current status quo. They have heavily vested interests in existing power structures \u2013 structures and systems that are making them way beyond wealthy while destroying the world, mostly without even meaning to (though often knowingly.) To state the obvious: the transition to truly sustainable ways of living and working in the industrialised world involves structural, systemic change. It involves deep shifts in our economic and political systems, as well as in individual hearts and minds.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This transition to real sustainability is immense. System change involves breaking all sorts of boundaries, uncertainty, transgression of comfort-zones, power-struggles, risk. It involves a quest to find levers for change when we may not even know where to look. We don\u2019t really have a choice: the adventure of sustainability is one we\u2019re all on, whether we like it or not. But recasting this hard and necessary transition as an adventure rather than an onerous duty or worse, as about sacrifice and giving things up, summons a \u2018yes, we can do this\u2019 attitude; a positive, perspectivised determination.<\/p>\n And, despite the risks \u2013 those with power don\u2019t typically just agree to give it up \u2013adventures have a certain magic to them. When you step out into that zone of uncertainty, when you don\u2019t really know how its going to work but you take the step anyway, things change positively around you. At the end of the day, what more worthwhile adventure could there possibly be, for the allegedly most intelligent species on the planet, than to figure out how we can all live well alongside, rather than at the expense of, the astonishing diversity of species we share it with? How to celebrate and protect our single, wild and beautiful earth.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Another world is possible. Another world IS possible. Here\u2019s to the sustainability tailwind helping us get there.<\/p>\n The Life Cycle; 8000 Miles in the Andes by Bamboo Bike<\/i> (Icon Books \u201923) is available from all good bookshops in hardback, paperback, Kindle and as an Audible Audio book (read by Kate) The Life Cycle \u2013 Icon Books<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n For more info & talk dates:\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n Web:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 www.outdoorphilosophy.co.uk<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n LI: \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (28) Kate Rawles | LinkedIn<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n FB: \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 www.facebook.com\/kate.rawles.5<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n