Jason Lewis and his friend Steve Smith set out to complete the first human-powered circumnavigation of the world: walking, biking and inline skating the landmasses, and kayaking, swimming, rowing and pedalling a unique pedal-powered boat across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans.
Jason Lewis (above) completed the voyage with friend Steve Smith (Photocredit: Kenny Brown/Expedition 360
As well as promoting carbon-neutral travel, the expedition served as a vehicle to spread the message of environmental stewardship and sustainability to thousands of schoolchildren along the way.
An ecological footprints curriculum saw pupils from five countries measuring seven footprint areas, including food, energy, waste, living space, materials and goods, travel and transport. Steve and Jason conducted the same experiments on board their tiny boat Moksha (meaning liberation or freedom in Sanskrit), allowing compare and contrast analysis.
What follows is an extract from Mr Lewis’ book, The Seed Buried Deep:
Our ecological footprints programme was entering its fourth week. As Steve filmed, I began sorting a week’s worth of our refuse into three categories – biodegradable, non-biodegradable, and reusable – before weighing each in turn with a set of fish scales. Biodegradable waste went over the side. Reusable items, like the food container lids that doubled as barnacle scrapers, remained aboard. Inorganic plastics and metals were also set aside to recycle once we reached Hawaii.
Students would be doing the same assignment, only sorting their waste at home and in the classroom rather than inside a boat.
Part way across the Pacific, the duo stopped off on the Big Island of Hawaii. It gave an opportunity to sort through the recycling they accumulated so far (Photo credit: Kenny Brown/Expedition 360)
Each group, Moksha included, would then email their weekly data to the webmaster for posting online. More than three hundred teams from five countries were taking part, represented by icons in the shape of human footprints. As data accumulated, the size of the footprints grew proportionately, allowing interpretation, comparison, and contrast.[1]
To illustrate the far-reaching effects of human consumption, we’d chosen seven footprint areas: food, water, energy, living space, materials and goods, waste and pollution, and travel and transport. As Steve’s overview explained: ‘Everywhere we go, and in everything we do, we leave an impression, an effect, like footprints on the beach. Each time we eat a meal, take a shower, go to school, play sports, buy a new pair of shoes, everything we do changes our physical world just a tiny little bit.’
Studying geography and biology together at London University, Steve and I shared a common interest in humans, the societies they create, and the natural world that ultimately sustains both. Geography shed light on the interaction between populations and their supporting environments. Biology, in particular its evolutionary arm, looked at the development of the human brain, the emerging science of consciousness, and the ability of Homo sapiens to live within its means.
The story of Rapa Nui in the South Pacific offered a case in point. Famous for its hand-hewn statues, the sixty-six-square-mile island once supported a human population of some 20,000 inhabitants, whose Polynesian ancestors had arrived by outrigger canoe. Within just a few hundred years, only 111 people remained. So what happened?
Unearthing the evidence, archaeologists believe an ecological crash brought about by the islanders themselves was principally to blame. By the time the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen made landfall in 1722, all the native trees had been felled to transport and erect bigger and more impressive moai, the socio-religious monuments used by the chiefs to lend credence to their authority—with disastrous results. Massive soil degradation and erosion followed, causing widespread crop failures. The means to build canoes for fishing was also compromised. As starvation and famine took hold, competition for protein and other vital resources played out as a nightmarish descent into social chaos, civil war and cannibalism. ‘Your grandmother’s flesh sticks in my teeth’ is an insult used by the people of Rapa Nui even today.
What made the story so compelling was the chilling parallel to human colonisation of Earth. Just as pre-20th century Rapa Nui was an island isolated by water, thereby making it impossible for provisions, including food, to be brought in, or inhabitants be taken off to relieve population pressure, so the planet we live on is an island isolated by space. Which begs the obvious question: does Rapa Nui provide a glimpse into the fate of humankind, with multinational corporations playing the parts of paramount chiefs competing for dwindling resources?
In our ecological footprint experiments, Moksha served as a scientific control. The boat was effectively a closed system, a laboratory setting in which Steve and I were the rats. A thousand miles from land there was little chance of resupply, and if our provisions ran out, neither of us could easily jump ship.
The duo resorted to an age-old method to mark how many days they were at sea (Photo credit: Kenny Brown/Expedition 360)
Solar panels and the wind turbine generated electricity, seawater was filtered to produce drinking water and transportation came from our own muscles. We could grow sprouts and catch fish, but unless we managed our resources responsibly, life aboard could get ugly pretty quick.
Who would eat whom first, was the running joke.
The bigger picture wasn’t a joke at all, of course. The near extinction of humans on Rapa Nui became a powerful metaphor in class discussions on sustainability and a habitable planet for future generations. Had the doomed islanders known what was in store by chopping down the last tree, would they have chosen an alternative fate for themselves? Not if present-day attitudes were anything to go by. Despite incontrovertible proof of man-induced climate change, species extinctions, and biodiversity decline, as well as a wealth of information on how to live more simply, people still behaved like the good times would last forever. Joseph Conrad’s damning verdict on the human condition in The Heart of Darkness appeared to be correct: ‘To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.’
Is there hope? For children, saddled with the fate of the world, there has to be. Calling attention to Moksha’s predictably small footprint wasn’t the primary aim of the curriculum. Nor was it to embarrass anyone from richer, more extravagant societies. We merely hoped to inspire in students what we believed to be the most effective tool in preventing a Rapa Nui-style outcome on a global scale: a questioning mind.
[1] We borrowed the programme title from Our Ecological Footprint, a seminal guide for reducing human impact on Earth by authors Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees.
The Seed Buried Deep is the second part of The Expedition trilogy by Jason Lewis, available online and at your local bookshop in paperback and ebook format. More at billyfishbooks.com.
Upon completing the circumnavigation, Jason turned down a six-figure advance from a major publishing house rather than allow a ghostwritten version of his story to be written, one that would have omitted his message of sustainability. After three years of homelessness, Jason contacted Tammie Stevens of BillyFish Books, an independent publisher that champions the works of authors with a message. Jason’s first book, Dark Waters, has to date earned several prestigious literary awards, including the Benjamin Franklin Award in the US foreign rights have been sold to China, Germany and Finland, with more to come.
Jason is still motivating children and adults to care about the Earth speaking at schools, universities and businesses.
