The hot potato

So what’s the point of this grand adventure, re-tracing the famous voyage of Charles Darwin? Perhaps it’s simply to satisfy a Dutch thirst for TV travel shows? Or an eccentric producer’s fancy for sailing on board a 26-sail clipper as a kind of elaborate way of bobbing up and down memory creek.

No. I am told this voyage is a grand and ambitious effort to help us all peer beyond today’s horizon and delve into some of the most important questions facing all living things today.
Such sentiments would, I am sure, have been shared by Charles Darwin as he set out from Plymouth on December 27th, 1831. His ambition was to try to demystify the processes of geology and to discover the mechanics behind the “transmutation of species”.

Darwin’s thirst for answers was born out of intense frustration. He was a young man who was well and truly hacked off by his educational experiences at Shrewsbury, Edinburgh and Cambridge. Apart from the occasional ray of sunlight (such as meeting Professor Henslow who set him up on the Beagle voyage), learning anything useful at school and university was, according to Darwin’s autobiography, almost impossible and most often a complete “waste of time”.

Darwin’s wanted to know how the world was made, how old it was, and what processes gave rise to its abundance of various life-forms. He approached the problem without preconceptions – there was no “theory of everything” that he was trying to prove or disprove. All his ideas about Natural Selection came several years after the trip aboard the Beagle and then they precipitated only after rigorous examination and interpretation of hard evidence that Darwin collected during his travels.

Something like the same process is underway today on board the Stad Amsterdam. Scientists, environmentalists and other experts will, like Darwin, be focused on gathering evidence about the world and its species. But with one big difference. Today, it is not where life came from, - the origin of species – that is the issue. Rather, it is where they are going? What are the future prospects for life on Earth?

Some scientists today talk of a “sixth mass extinction” caused, they argue, by a world inhabited by approaching 7 billion humans. Climatologist James Lovelock, originator of Gaia theory, warns in his latest book The Vanishing face of Gaia that it is now probably too late to avoid catastrophic global heating. Within 100 years, he says, global temperatures are likely to have catapulted up by c. 6 degrees to a new hot-state, with sea levels rising by as much as 25 metres.

Flooding and famine will be the immediate causes of ecological destruction as the earth / life system (Gaia) adjusts to a new equilibrium. Ice-free poles, acidic oceans, vast new deserts and a global mass extinction of species are, he warns, now the most likely scenario – whatever we do or do not do. The simple truth is that 7 billion humans, with all their billions of livestock and pets, eject far too much carbon dioxide and methane for the planet to cope in its current state.

Are the seas really rising twice as fast as was predicted by scientists over the last 10 years, as Lovelock claims? Is climate change unstoppable even if we cut carbon emissions, as politicians propose, by 60% by 2050? Are ecological initiatives in so-called “renewable energy” (e.g. wind farms, biofuels) just empty gestures made by popularity-conscious Western governments that simply suit companies eager to profit from the latest centralized subsidy-binge?

The questions are is Lovelock right? And if so, what’s to be done? Is global catastrophe inevitable and, if so, what then is the best way of trying to manage a crisis, the scale of which is beyond precedent in human history?

This is the rather hot potato that our voyage in the wake of Darwin seeks to address.