北二高大走山！
無雨無地震 為何會山崩？道路橋樑隧道 哪裡有潛在危險？
張貼者： 公視有話好說-新聞論壇 於 星期一, 四月 26, 2010
來賓：
中興工程顧問公司總經理 周南山
經濟部中央地質調查所所長 林朝宗
台北縣土木技師公會理事長 洪啟德
台大地質系教授 陳宏宇
SNG連線：公視記者 林曉慧 (19:05-19:10)
國道三號南下3.1公里處靠近基隆路段，昨天下午發生嚴重土石崩塌，南北雙向路段被覆蓋，目前積極搶救中，無雨無地震，為何會出現大面積的地層滑動？問題到底出在哪裡？
記者連線：
1.現場搜救進度
目視三個足球場大的土石坍方，目前高公局、國軍等搜救的方式，是盡量把土方高度降低，避免因為挖掘土石而讓地質再次鬆動崩落。
2.家屬情形疑似受困人數車數？
先前傳出兩輛車遭到掩埋，今天又傳出有賓士車主沒有到班，懷疑可能也壓在土礫堆中。
3.為何走山官方說法？
關於外界揣測錨釘生銹老化，高公局目前回應每天都有做目視及監測，表示一切正常。
關鍵一瞬間！
國道三號高速公路南下3.1公里處二十五下午發生大崩塌，差點被土石滅頂的車主拍下這一刻。畫面上所有人都驚慌失措這台藍色轎車跟山崩只差一步。目睹這一幕的藝人陳美鳳，簡直不敢相信。
北二高的走山，估計崩落20萬立方公尺的土石，高工局北工處表示，目前動員投入搶救人力達到930人，交通部長毛治國表示，國道還有20幾處屬於順向坡，目前以目視檢測無虞，有疑慮的再做重點式監測。
何以解讀“走山”？
無雨無地震，高速公路旁的山坡到底為什麼會突然崩塌，上午中央地質調查所到現場確認，當地的確屬於順向坡，因為蓋高速公路必須挖空底下的結構，雖然過去做過補強的工作，但可能因為地質不斷風化、或者補強的地錨老化，整片山坡才會滑下來。
何謂順向坡？順向坡下就一定會有危險？國道3號都是沿著山線走，有多少順向坡？大自然是變動的，必須常常監測。監控設備是什麼？(中寮、九份二山)
國道山崩，禍首是岩錨不足或老化？整片山的崩移，只是幾個岩錨的關係？
工程如何克服潛在危險？
多雨多颱風，坡度又陡，加上坡地開發很普遍，工程開發要如何因應這些可能的潛在危險，或作好維護工作？講求工程品質和安全，工程計畫每一環都不可掉以輕心。
還有哪些危險地區？1997年，位在台北縣汐止的林肯大郡，因為受到溫妮颱風大雨的侵襲，山坡地邊坡滑動，毀損了六棟房舍、數十人傷亡，事後調查這也是一起順向坡走山所造成的意外，但台灣地小人稠，蓋在山坡上的房子比比皆是，雖然建商都強調有做擋土牆，但民眾又怎麼會知道買到的房子會不會也是蓋在順向坡的山坡上。走山事前會有跡象嗎？能監測嗎？
還有哪些潛在危險地段？
貓纜、雪隧、國道六號、國道三號、到處都有危險？山坡地除了要擔心順向坡可能造成走山，另外，像貓纜在 2008年時接連受到兩個颱風的大雨沖刷，造成了T-16塔柱淘空、附近邊坡崩塌，連帶影響了山下社區居民的安危，根據台北市政府的調查，確認在颱風大雨之外，貓纜從規劃到施工、驗收，都有行政疏失，為此，台北市長郝龍斌還向市民公開道歉。
而台灣工程界最引以為傲的雪山隧道，由於位在斷層上且附近有水源通過，結果通車後北上車道26公里處就發生過兩次漏水事件，2007年甚至嚴重到封閉隧道修復。走山土石流，想都想不到？環評、公共工程標準是否過低？
山崩、豪雨、過度開發，再加上氣候變遷，讓台灣地表遭受嚴重破壞，災情也一次比一次嚴重，如果相關單位的監測系統不夠完善，只會讓民眾無論是在行的安全、住的安心上，都充滿了擔心。
Saturday, May 01, 2010
陳之華新作-《每個孩子都是第一名》最動人的芬蘭教育書
藉由自身的觀察與感受，作者在書中不斷比照、對應台灣和芬蘭在教育方面的差異，對於台灣社會爭執不休的教改的內涵、資優班制的存續、學校排名、補習風氣、孩子的價值觀等議題，有深刻且多面向的討論。
Roz Savage: Why I'm rowing across the Pacific
http://www.ted.com Five years ago, Roz Savage quit her high-powered London job to become an ocean rower. She's crossed the Atlantic solo, and just started the third leg of a Pacific solo row, the first for a woman. Why does she do it? Hear her reasons, both deeply personal and urgently activist.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate. Watch a highlight reel of the Top 10 TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10
Hi, my name is Roz Savage and I row across oceans. Four years ago, I rowed solo across the Atlantic, and since then, I've done two out of three stages across the Pacific, from San Fransisco to Hawaii and from Hawaii to Kiribati. And tomorrow, I'll be leaving this boat to fly back to Kiribati to continue with the third and final stage of my row across the pacific. Cumulatively, I will have rowed over 8,000 miles, taken over 3 million oar strokes and spent more than 312 days alone on the ocean, on a 23 ft. rowboat. This has given me a very special relationship with the ocean. We have a bit of a love/hate thing going on. I feel a bit about it like I did about a very strict maths teacher that I once had at school. I didn't always like her, but I did respect her. And she taught me a heck of a lot. So today I'd like to share with you some of my ocean adventures and tell you a little bit about what they've taught me, and how I think we can maybe take some of those lessons and apply them to this environmental challenge that we face right now.
Now, some of you might be thinking, "Hold on a minute. She doesn't look very much like an ocean rower. Isn't she meant to be about this tall and about this wide, and maybe look a bit more like these guys?" You'll notice, they've all got something that I don't. Well, I don't know what you're thinking, but I'm talking about the beards. And no matter how long I spend on the ocean, I haven't yet managed to muster a decent beard. And I hope that it remains that way.
For a long time, I didn't believe that I could have a big adventure. The story that I told myself was that adventurers looked like this. I didn't look the part. I thought there were them and there were us, and I was not one of them. So for 11 years, I conformed. I did what people from my kind of background were supposed to do. I was working in an office in London as a management consultant. And I think I knew from day one that it wasn't the right job for me. But that kind of conditioning just kept me there for so many years, until I reached my mid-thirties and I thought, "You know, I'm not getting any younger. I feel like I've got a purpose in this life, and I don't know what it is, but I'm pretty certain that management consultancy is not it.
So, fast forward a few years. I'd gone through some changes. To try and answer that question of what am I supposed to be doing with my life?, I sat down one day and wrote two versions of my own obituary, the one that I wanted, a life of adventure, and the one that I was actually heading for which was a nice, normal, pleasant life, but it wasn't where I wanted to be by the end of my life. I wanted to live a life that I could be proud of. And I remember looking at these two versions of my obituary and thinking, "Oh boy, I'm on totally the wrong track here. If I carry on living as I am now, I'm just not going to end up where I want to be in five years, or 10 years, or at the end of my life. I made a few changes, let loose a few trappings of my old life, and through a bit of a leap of logic, decided to row across the Atlantic Ocean.
(Laughter)
The Atlantic rowing race runs from the Canaries to Antigua. It's about 3,000 miles. And it turned out to be the hardest thing I had ever done. Sure, I had wanted to get outside of my comfort zone, but what I'd sort of failed to notice was that getting out of your comfort zone is, by definition, extremely uncomfortable. And my timing was not great either. 2005, when I did the Atlantic, was the year of Hurricane Katrina. There were more tropical storms in the North Atlantic than ever before, since records began. And pretty early on those storms started making their presence known.
All four of my oars broke before I reached halfway across. Oars are not supposed to look like this. But what can you do? You're in the middle of the ocean. Oars are your only means of propulsion. So I just had to look around the boat and figure out what I was going to use to fix up these oars so that I could carry on. So I found a boat hook and my trusty duct tape and splintered the boat hook to the oars to reinforce it. Then, when that gave out, I sawed the wheel axles off my spare rowing seat and used those. And when those gave out, I cannibalized one of the broken oars. I'd never been very good at fixing stuff when I was living my old life, But it's amazing how resourceful you can become when you're in the middle of the ocean and there's only one way to get to the other side.
And the oars kind of became a symbol of just in how many ways I went beyond what I thought were my limits. I suffered from tendinitis on my shoulders and saltwater sores on my bottom. I really struggled psychologically, totally overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge, realizing that, if I carried on moving at two miles an hour 3,000 miles was going to take me a very, very long time. There were so many times when I thought I'd hit that limit, but had not choice but to just carry on and try and figure out how I was going to get to the other side without driving myself crazy.
And eventually after 103 days at sea, I arrived in Antigua. I don't think I've ever felt so happy in my entire life. It was a bit like finishing a marathon and getting out of solitary confinement and winning an Oscar all rolled into one. I was euphoric. And to see all the people coming out to greet me and standing along the clifftops and clapping and cheering, I just felt like a movie star. It was absolutely wonderful. And I really learned then that, the bigger the challenge the bigger the sense of achievement when you get to the end of it.
So this might by a good moment to take a quick time out to answer a few FAQs about ocean rowing that might be going through your mind. Number one that I get asked: What do you eat? A few freeze-dried meals, but mostly I try and eat much more unprocessed foods. So I grow my own beansprouts. I eat fruits and nut bars, a lot of nuts, and generally arrive about 30 lbs. lighter at the other end. Question number two: How do you sleep? With my eyes shut. Haha. I suppose what you mean is: What happens to the boat while I'm sleeping? Well, I plan my route so that I'm drifting with the winds and the currents while I'm sleeping. On a good night, I think my best ever was 11 miles in the right direction. Worst ever, 13 miles in the wrong direction. That's a bad day at the office. What do I wear? Mostly, a baseball cap, rowing gloves and a smile, or a frown, depending on whether I went backwards overnight. And lots of sun lotion. Do I have a chase boat? No I don't. I am totally self-supporting out there. I don't see anybody for the whole time that I'm at sea, generally. And finally: Am I crazy? Well, I leave that one up to you to judge.
So, how do you top rowing across the Atlantic? Well, naturally you decide to row across the Pacific. Well, I'd thought the Atlantic was big, but the Pacific is really, really big. I think we tend to do it a little bit of a disservice in our usual maps. I don't know for sure that the Brits invented this particular view of the world, but I suspect we might have done because there we are, right in the middle. And we've cut the Pacific in half and flung it to the far corners of the world, whereas, if you look in Google Earth, this is how the Pacific looks. It pretty much covers half the planet. You can just see a little bit of North America up here and a sliver of Australia down there. It is really big. 65 million square miles. And to row in a straight line across it, would be about 8,000 miles. Unfortunately, ocean rowboats very rarely go in a straight line. By the time I get to Australia, if I get to Australia, I will have rowed probably 9 or 10,000 miles in all.
So, because nobody in their straight mind would row straight past Hawaii without dropping in, I decided to cut this very big undertaking into three segments. The first attempt didn't go so well. In 2007, I did a rather involuntary capsize drill three times in 24 hours. A bit like being in a washing machine. Boat got a bit dinged up, so did I. I blogged about it. Unfortunately, somebody with a bit of a hero complex decided this damsel was in distress and needed saving. The first I knew about this was when the Coast Guard plane turned up over head. I tried to tell them to go away. We had a bt of a battle of wills. I lost and got airlifted. Awful, really awful. It was one of the worst feelings of my life. As I was lifted up on that winch line into the helicopter and looked down at my trusty little boat rolling around in the 20 ft. waves and wondering if I would ever see her again. So I had to launch a very expensive salvage operation and then wait another nine months before I could get back out onto the ocean again.
But what do you do? Fall down nine times, get up 10. So, the following year, I set out and, fortunately, this time made it safely across to Hawaii. But it was not without misadventure. My water maker broke, only the most important piece of kit that I have on the boat. Powered by my solar panels, it sucks in saltwater and turns it into freshwater. But it doesn't react very well to being immersed in ocean, which is what happened to it. Fortunately, help was at hand.
There was another unusual boat out there at the same time, doing as I was doing, bringing awareness to the North Pacific garbage patch, that area in the North Pacific about twice the size of Texas, with an estimated 3.5 milion tons of trash in it, circulating at the center of that North Pacific Gyre. So, to make the point, these guys had actually built their boat out of plastic trash, 15,000 empty water bottles lashed together into two pontoons. They were going very slowly. Partly, they'd had a bit of a delay. They'd had to pull in at Catalina Island shortly after they left Long Beach because the lids of all the water bottles were coming undone, and they were starting to sink. So they'd had to pull in and do all the lids up.
But, as I was approaching the end of my water reserves, luckily, our courses were converging. They were running out of food; I was running out of water. So we liaised by satellite phone and arranged to meet up. And it took about a week for us to actually gradually converge. I was doing a pathetically slow speed of about 1.3 knots, and they were doing only marginally less pathetically speed of about 1.4. It was like two snails in a mating dance. But, eventually, we did manage to meet up and Joel hopped overboard, caught us a beautiful, big mahi mahi, which was the best food I had in, ooh, at least three months.
Fortunately, the one that he caught that day was better than this one they caught a few weeks earlier. When they opened this one up, they found it's stomach was full of plastic. And this is really bad news because plastic is not an inert substance. It leaches out chemicals into the flesh of the poor critter that ate it, and then we come along and eat that poor critter, and we get some of the toxins accumulating in our bodies as well. So there are very real implications for human health.
I eventually made it to Hawaii still alive. And, the following year, set out on the second stage of the Pacific, from Hawaii down to Tarawa. And you'll notice something about Tarawa; it is very low-lying. It's that little green sliver on the horizon, which makes them very nervous about rising oceans. This is big trouble for these guys. They've got no points of land more than about six feet above sea level. And also as an increase in extreme weather events do to climate change, they're expecting more waves to come in over the fringing reef, which will contaminate their fresh water supply. I had a meeting with the president there, who told me about his exit strategy for his country. He expects that within the next 50 years, the hundred-thousand people that live there will have to relocate to New Zealand or Australia. And that made me think about how would I feel if Britain was going to disappear under the waves. If the places where I'd been born and gone to school and got married, if all those places were just going to disappear forever, how, literally, ungrounded that would make me feel.
In very shortly, I'll be setting out to try and get to Australia. And if I'm successful, I'll be the first woman ever to row solo all the way across the Pacific. And I try and use this to bring awareness to these environmental issues, to bring a human face to the ocean. If the Atlantic was about my inner journey, discovering my own capabilities, maybe the Pacific has been about my outer journey, figuring out how I can use my interesting career choice to be of service to the world, and to take some of those things that I've learned out there and apply them to the situation that human kind now finds itself in.
I think there are probably three key points here. The first one is about the stories we tell ourselves. For so long, I told myself that I couldn't have an adventure because I wasn't six foot tall and athletic and bearded. And then, that story changed. I found out that people had rowed across oceans. I even met one of them and she was just about my size. So even though I didn't grow any taller, I didn't sprout a beard, something had changed, my interior dialogue had changed. At the moment, the story that we collectively tell ourselves is that we need all this stuff, that we need oil. But about if we just change that story? We do have alternatives, and we have the power of free will to choose those alternatives, those sustainable ones to create a greener future.
The second point is about the accumulation of tiny actions. We might think that anything that we do as an individual is just a drop in the ocean, that it can't really make a difference. But it does. Generally, we haven't got ourselves into this mess through big disasters. Yes, there have been the Exxon Valdezs and the Chernobyls, but mostly it's been an accumulation of bad decisions by billions of individuals day after day and year after year. And, by the same token, we can turn that tide. We can start making better, wiser, more sustainable decisions. And when we do that, we're not just one person. Anything that we do spreads ripples. Other people will see, if you're in the supermarket line and you pull out your reusable grocery bag. Maybe if we all start doing this, we can make it socially unacceptable to say yes to plastic in the check-out line. That's just one example. This is a world-wide community.
The other point: It's about taking responsibility. For so much of my life, I wanted something to make me happy. I thought if I had the right house, the right car, or the right man in my life, then I could be happy, but when I wrote that obituary exercise, I actually grew up a little bit in that moment and realized that I needed to create my own future. I couldn't just wait passively for happiness to come and find me. And I suppose I'm a selfish environmentalist. I plan on being around for a long time, and when I'm 90 years-old, I want to be happy and healthy. And it's very difficult to be happy on a planet that's wracked with famine and drought. It's very difficult to be healthy on a planet where we've poisoned the earth and the sea and the air.
So, shortly, I'm going to be launching a new initiative called Eco-Heroes. And the idea here is that all our Eco-Heroes will log at least one green deed every day. It's meant to be a bit of a game. We're going to make an iPhone app out of it. We just want to try and create that awareness because, sure, changing a light bulb isn't going to change the world, but that attitude, that awareness that leads you to change the light bulb or take your reusable coffee mug, that is what could change the world.
I really believe that we stand at a very important point in history. We have a choice. We've been blessed, or cursed, with free will. We can choose a greener future. And we can get there if we all pull together, take it one stroke at a time.
Thank you.
(Applause)
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate. Watch a highlight reel of the Top 10 TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10
Hi, my name is Roz Savage and I row across oceans. Four years ago, I rowed solo across the Atlantic, and since then, I've done two out of three stages across the Pacific, from San Fransisco to Hawaii and from Hawaii to Kiribati. And tomorrow, I'll be leaving this boat to fly back to Kiribati to continue with the third and final stage of my row across the pacific. Cumulatively, I will have rowed over 8,000 miles, taken over 3 million oar strokes and spent more than 312 days alone on the ocean, on a 23 ft. rowboat. This has given me a very special relationship with the ocean. We have a bit of a love/hate thing going on. I feel a bit about it like I did about a very strict maths teacher that I once had at school. I didn't always like her, but I did respect her. And she taught me a heck of a lot. So today I'd like to share with you some of my ocean adventures and tell you a little bit about what they've taught me, and how I think we can maybe take some of those lessons and apply them to this environmental challenge that we face right now.
Now, some of you might be thinking, "Hold on a minute. She doesn't look very much like an ocean rower. Isn't she meant to be about this tall and about this wide, and maybe look a bit more like these guys?" You'll notice, they've all got something that I don't. Well, I don't know what you're thinking, but I'm talking about the beards. And no matter how long I spend on the ocean, I haven't yet managed to muster a decent beard. And I hope that it remains that way.
For a long time, I didn't believe that I could have a big adventure. The story that I told myself was that adventurers looked like this. I didn't look the part. I thought there were them and there were us, and I was not one of them. So for 11 years, I conformed. I did what people from my kind of background were supposed to do. I was working in an office in London as a management consultant. And I think I knew from day one that it wasn't the right job for me. But that kind of conditioning just kept me there for so many years, until I reached my mid-thirties and I thought, "You know, I'm not getting any younger. I feel like I've got a purpose in this life, and I don't know what it is, but I'm pretty certain that management consultancy is not it.
So, fast forward a few years. I'd gone through some changes. To try and answer that question of what am I supposed to be doing with my life?, I sat down one day and wrote two versions of my own obituary, the one that I wanted, a life of adventure, and the one that I was actually heading for which was a nice, normal, pleasant life, but it wasn't where I wanted to be by the end of my life. I wanted to live a life that I could be proud of. And I remember looking at these two versions of my obituary and thinking, "Oh boy, I'm on totally the wrong track here. If I carry on living as I am now, I'm just not going to end up where I want to be in five years, or 10 years, or at the end of my life. I made a few changes, let loose a few trappings of my old life, and through a bit of a leap of logic, decided to row across the Atlantic Ocean.
(Laughter)
The Atlantic rowing race runs from the Canaries to Antigua. It's about 3,000 miles. And it turned out to be the hardest thing I had ever done. Sure, I had wanted to get outside of my comfort zone, but what I'd sort of failed to notice was that getting out of your comfort zone is, by definition, extremely uncomfortable. And my timing was not great either. 2005, when I did the Atlantic, was the year of Hurricane Katrina. There were more tropical storms in the North Atlantic than ever before, since records began. And pretty early on those storms started making their presence known.
All four of my oars broke before I reached halfway across. Oars are not supposed to look like this. But what can you do? You're in the middle of the ocean. Oars are your only means of propulsion. So I just had to look around the boat and figure out what I was going to use to fix up these oars so that I could carry on. So I found a boat hook and my trusty duct tape and splintered the boat hook to the oars to reinforce it. Then, when that gave out, I sawed the wheel axles off my spare rowing seat and used those. And when those gave out, I cannibalized one of the broken oars. I'd never been very good at fixing stuff when I was living my old life, But it's amazing how resourceful you can become when you're in the middle of the ocean and there's only one way to get to the other side.
And the oars kind of became a symbol of just in how many ways I went beyond what I thought were my limits. I suffered from tendinitis on my shoulders and saltwater sores on my bottom. I really struggled psychologically, totally overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge, realizing that, if I carried on moving at two miles an hour 3,000 miles was going to take me a very, very long time. There were so many times when I thought I'd hit that limit, but had not choice but to just carry on and try and figure out how I was going to get to the other side without driving myself crazy.
And eventually after 103 days at sea, I arrived in Antigua. I don't think I've ever felt so happy in my entire life. It was a bit like finishing a marathon and getting out of solitary confinement and winning an Oscar all rolled into one. I was euphoric. And to see all the people coming out to greet me and standing along the clifftops and clapping and cheering, I just felt like a movie star. It was absolutely wonderful. And I really learned then that, the bigger the challenge the bigger the sense of achievement when you get to the end of it.
So this might by a good moment to take a quick time out to answer a few FAQs about ocean rowing that might be going through your mind. Number one that I get asked: What do you eat? A few freeze-dried meals, but mostly I try and eat much more unprocessed foods. So I grow my own beansprouts. I eat fruits and nut bars, a lot of nuts, and generally arrive about 30 lbs. lighter at the other end. Question number two: How do you sleep? With my eyes shut. Haha. I suppose what you mean is: What happens to the boat while I'm sleeping? Well, I plan my route so that I'm drifting with the winds and the currents while I'm sleeping. On a good night, I think my best ever was 11 miles in the right direction. Worst ever, 13 miles in the wrong direction. That's a bad day at the office. What do I wear? Mostly, a baseball cap, rowing gloves and a smile, or a frown, depending on whether I went backwards overnight. And lots of sun lotion. Do I have a chase boat? No I don't. I am totally self-supporting out there. I don't see anybody for the whole time that I'm at sea, generally. And finally: Am I crazy? Well, I leave that one up to you to judge.
So, how do you top rowing across the Atlantic? Well, naturally you decide to row across the Pacific. Well, I'd thought the Atlantic was big, but the Pacific is really, really big. I think we tend to do it a little bit of a disservice in our usual maps. I don't know for sure that the Brits invented this particular view of the world, but I suspect we might have done because there we are, right in the middle. And we've cut the Pacific in half and flung it to the far corners of the world, whereas, if you look in Google Earth, this is how the Pacific looks. It pretty much covers half the planet. You can just see a little bit of North America up here and a sliver of Australia down there. It is really big. 65 million square miles. And to row in a straight line across it, would be about 8,000 miles. Unfortunately, ocean rowboats very rarely go in a straight line. By the time I get to Australia, if I get to Australia, I will have rowed probably 9 or 10,000 miles in all.
So, because nobody in their straight mind would row straight past Hawaii without dropping in, I decided to cut this very big undertaking into three segments. The first attempt didn't go so well. In 2007, I did a rather involuntary capsize drill three times in 24 hours. A bit like being in a washing machine. Boat got a bit dinged up, so did I. I blogged about it. Unfortunately, somebody with a bit of a hero complex decided this damsel was in distress and needed saving. The first I knew about this was when the Coast Guard plane turned up over head. I tried to tell them to go away. We had a bt of a battle of wills. I lost and got airlifted. Awful, really awful. It was one of the worst feelings of my life. As I was lifted up on that winch line into the helicopter and looked down at my trusty little boat rolling around in the 20 ft. waves and wondering if I would ever see her again. So I had to launch a very expensive salvage operation and then wait another nine months before I could get back out onto the ocean again.
But what do you do? Fall down nine times, get up 10. So, the following year, I set out and, fortunately, this time made it safely across to Hawaii. But it was not without misadventure. My water maker broke, only the most important piece of kit that I have on the boat. Powered by my solar panels, it sucks in saltwater and turns it into freshwater. But it doesn't react very well to being immersed in ocean, which is what happened to it. Fortunately, help was at hand.
There was another unusual boat out there at the same time, doing as I was doing, bringing awareness to the North Pacific garbage patch, that area in the North Pacific about twice the size of Texas, with an estimated 3.5 milion tons of trash in it, circulating at the center of that North Pacific Gyre. So, to make the point, these guys had actually built their boat out of plastic trash, 15,000 empty water bottles lashed together into two pontoons. They were going very slowly. Partly, they'd had a bit of a delay. They'd had to pull in at Catalina Island shortly after they left Long Beach because the lids of all the water bottles were coming undone, and they were starting to sink. So they'd had to pull in and do all the lids up.
But, as I was approaching the end of my water reserves, luckily, our courses were converging. They were running out of food; I was running out of water. So we liaised by satellite phone and arranged to meet up. And it took about a week for us to actually gradually converge. I was doing a pathetically slow speed of about 1.3 knots, and they were doing only marginally less pathetically speed of about 1.4. It was like two snails in a mating dance. But, eventually, we did manage to meet up and Joel hopped overboard, caught us a beautiful, big mahi mahi, which was the best food I had in, ooh, at least three months.
Fortunately, the one that he caught that day was better than this one they caught a few weeks earlier. When they opened this one up, they found it's stomach was full of plastic. And this is really bad news because plastic is not an inert substance. It leaches out chemicals into the flesh of the poor critter that ate it, and then we come along and eat that poor critter, and we get some of the toxins accumulating in our bodies as well. So there are very real implications for human health.
I eventually made it to Hawaii still alive. And, the following year, set out on the second stage of the Pacific, from Hawaii down to Tarawa. And you'll notice something about Tarawa; it is very low-lying. It's that little green sliver on the horizon, which makes them very nervous about rising oceans. This is big trouble for these guys. They've got no points of land more than about six feet above sea level. And also as an increase in extreme weather events do to climate change, they're expecting more waves to come in over the fringing reef, which will contaminate their fresh water supply. I had a meeting with the president there, who told me about his exit strategy for his country. He expects that within the next 50 years, the hundred-thousand people that live there will have to relocate to New Zealand or Australia. And that made me think about how would I feel if Britain was going to disappear under the waves. If the places where I'd been born and gone to school and got married, if all those places were just going to disappear forever, how, literally, ungrounded that would make me feel.
In very shortly, I'll be setting out to try and get to Australia. And if I'm successful, I'll be the first woman ever to row solo all the way across the Pacific. And I try and use this to bring awareness to these environmental issues, to bring a human face to the ocean. If the Atlantic was about my inner journey, discovering my own capabilities, maybe the Pacific has been about my outer journey, figuring out how I can use my interesting career choice to be of service to the world, and to take some of those things that I've learned out there and apply them to the situation that human kind now finds itself in.
I think there are probably three key points here. The first one is about the stories we tell ourselves. For so long, I told myself that I couldn't have an adventure because I wasn't six foot tall and athletic and bearded. And then, that story changed. I found out that people had rowed across oceans. I even met one of them and she was just about my size. So even though I didn't grow any taller, I didn't sprout a beard, something had changed, my interior dialogue had changed. At the moment, the story that we collectively tell ourselves is that we need all this stuff, that we need oil. But about if we just change that story? We do have alternatives, and we have the power of free will to choose those alternatives, those sustainable ones to create a greener future.
The second point is about the accumulation of tiny actions. We might think that anything that we do as an individual is just a drop in the ocean, that it can't really make a difference. But it does. Generally, we haven't got ourselves into this mess through big disasters. Yes, there have been the Exxon Valdezs and the Chernobyls, but mostly it's been an accumulation of bad decisions by billions of individuals day after day and year after year. And, by the same token, we can turn that tide. We can start making better, wiser, more sustainable decisions. And when we do that, we're not just one person. Anything that we do spreads ripples. Other people will see, if you're in the supermarket line and you pull out your reusable grocery bag. Maybe if we all start doing this, we can make it socially unacceptable to say yes to plastic in the check-out line. That's just one example. This is a world-wide community.
The other point: It's about taking responsibility. For so much of my life, I wanted something to make me happy. I thought if I had the right house, the right car, or the right man in my life, then I could be happy, but when I wrote that obituary exercise, I actually grew up a little bit in that moment and realized that I needed to create my own future. I couldn't just wait passively for happiness to come and find me. And I suppose I'm a selfish environmentalist. I plan on being around for a long time, and when I'm 90 years-old, I want to be happy and healthy. And it's very difficult to be happy on a planet that's wracked with famine and drought. It's very difficult to be healthy on a planet where we've poisoned the earth and the sea and the air.
So, shortly, I'm going to be launching a new initiative called Eco-Heroes. And the idea here is that all our Eco-Heroes will log at least one green deed every day. It's meant to be a bit of a game. We're going to make an iPhone app out of it. We just want to try and create that awareness because, sure, changing a light bulb isn't going to change the world, but that attitude, that awareness that leads you to change the light bulb or take your reusable coffee mug, that is what could change the world.
I really believe that we stand at a very important point in history. We have a choice. We've been blessed, or cursed, with free will. We can choose a greener future. And we can get there if we all pull together, take it one stroke at a time.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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