HS 200 – Chasing Shackleton with Tim Jarvis

Tim Jarvis was named Australian Adventurer of the Year. He’s the author of, “CHASING SHACKLETON: Recreating the World’s Greatest Journey of Survival.” Jarvis explains what made Shackleton’s trek so incredible compared to other quests for survival. He also walks us through how he recreated Shackleton’s journey. Surprisingly, Antarctica has some tourist attractions. Jarvis discusses more about this.

His new book is in the process of being made into a movie.

Find out more about Tim Jarvis at www.timjarvis.org.

Tim Jarvis combines a love of adventure with a passion for environmental issues – a passion demonstrated through his work as an environmental scientist, public speaker and explorer of many of the planet’s remotest places.

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Narrator:  Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show with Jason Hartman.  The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives.  Are you prepared?  Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary for you to survive and prosper?  The Holistic Survival Show is your family’s insurance for a better life.  Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats and how to create the ultimate action plan.  Sudden change or worst case scenario, you’ll be ready.  Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times.  Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

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Start of Interview with Tim Jarvis
Jason Hartman:  It’s my pleasure to welcome Tim Jarvis to the show.  He’s an Australian Adventurer – actually I should say Australian Adventurer of the Year and author of Chasing Shackleton: Recreating the World’s Greatest Journey of Survival.  And in his amazing journeys that he has done authentically, just as the original explorers had done it – so you’ll hear about that – there is a lot to learn about leadership.  So, that’s what we will be talking about today with Tim Jarvis.  Tim, welcome.  How are you?

Tim Jarvis:  I’m very good, Jason.

Jason Hartman:  Well, good.  It’s good to have you.  And are you coming to us from Adelaide, Australia today?

Tim Jarvis:  No.  Just to confuse everybody, I’m now in London.

Jason Hartman:  But that’s where you’re based, right?  Adelaide?

Tim Jarvis:  I’m based in Adelaide most of the time.  That’s where I live, yeah, with my family.  And I spend quite a bit of time in London these days to plan expeditions as much as anything.

Jason Hartman:  Right, fantastic.  Well, tell us a little bit about these amazing journeys and Shackleton and how we can all be better leaders.

Tim Jarvis:  I think Shackleton managed to save all of his men from disaster on this particular expedition.  There were 27 men and including Shackleton 28.  His ship, The Endurance, was crushed in pack ice before he ever reached Antarctica.  And the idea was that they sailed down in the ship and then be the first people ever to cross Antarctica going from one side to the other.  And once that happened, the men had to abandon ship into the three small lifeboats, live on the ice for many months.

When the ice broke up, the shifting pack ice, the men got in the boats, paddled them to a nearby island.  There, Shackleton met 22 of the 28 men on 2 of the upturned boats.  And then he did this incredible journey across the southern ocean in essentially a 22 short rowboat across the roughest ocean in the world to reach another remote island and of course South Georgia where he knew there was a wailing station.  He thought if I can reach that, I can raise the alarm and save everyone.

Jason Hartman:  Now, what is that roughest ocean?  Is that Cape Horn?  Which one is it?

Tim Jarvis:  It’s the southern ocean, so it’s the ocean that goes around the bottom of the world, south of both Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn.  In fact, where we were was very near to Cape Horn.  You leave from Elephant Island just off the Antarctic Peninsula and the ocean around there is extremely rough.  It’s the Pacific essentially emptying into the Atlantic, the Southern Atlantic, down around the bottom of South America.  It’s a very, very rough ocean.

The fact that Shackleton managed to do it, he managed to save all of his men, was really down to his leadership, his ability to problem solve, change on the run, set goals, goals that everybody could identify with.  It gave people confidence that they were actually gonna make it, maybe in the face of the facts that suggested otherwise.  His ability to understand all of these men and their individual motivations and get them to all pull together as one by really understanding each of their motivations and get them to all pull together to achieve this single goal, even though their original reasons were all very different.

And a lot of the leadership lessons are so relevant to the issues that we’re faced with today in the modern world, [00:04:44] organization or issues like climate change or the rise of extremism.  All of these issues need to be dealt with collectively and reduce in leadership.

Jason Hartman:  If you want to make any parallels to Shackleton’s journey and the success of his leadership and to something we face in organizations in the world today, feel free to make any of those parallels, that’s very interesting.  So, the year, again, was 1914?

Tim Jarvis:  ’14 is when you set off from the UK to head to Antarctica to do the journey and then the events actually unfolded over a couple of years, culminating in 1916.  We actually wanted to do the expedition before 2014 so that we’d be in a position to really celebrate his achievement on the hundredth anniversary of him leaving.

Jason Hartman:  And so is that planned for this year then?

Tim Jarvis:  Yes, it is.  There are all sorts of plans for the celebrating his achievement.  And it’s wonderfully to really have done the expedition and not be in the position of being down south doing it when we could be back here really celebrating his original achievement.

Jason Hartman:  Right.  So, tell us about the journey.   You do this in the authentic way, just like the original explorers without all of the modern conveniences.  I mean, you bring cameras and devices to record, but as far as creature comforts and GPS navigation and other tools, you don’t have them, right?

Tim Jarvis:  That’s right.  We traveled in a 23 foot keeless rowboat like Shackleton.  The original carpenter on his expedition had taken planks off the other two lifeboats which is what this boat was.  And they built a deck over the boat to stop waves crashing in and sinking them.  And so we did the same thing.  We traveled wearing cotton outer windproof layers and woolens for our formal wears and leather boots.  We navigated using a sextant, in other words taking an angle to the sun and working out your position from that.

And we ate the same animal fat rations and sledging biscuits as they did on the original.  So, basically we did everything exactly the same way as Shackleton.

Tim Jarvis:  I mean, that had to be just incredibly difficult.  Are you a glutton for punishment, Tim?  It’d be hard enough to do it with all the modern gear and the high tech tools and the fabrics now that are windproof and warm and do not collect any moisture.

Jason Hartman:  It was extremely challenging.  I mean, we tried to coat the cotton clothing.  The reason Shcackelton wore that clothing is because he’d anticipated walking across Antarctica which, in fact, even though it’s ice over a mile thick in most places, is very dry.  And so he never anticipated having to get into a small boat and undertake this incredible rescue mission.  And so the clothes were not designed to be waterproof.  He tried his best to coat the clothing with animal fat rendered down from seal blubber.  He wiped this onto the cotton clothing to try and waterproof it and we tried to do the same thing using non-synthetic fat.

And of course the first wave came in on day 1 of the trip and everybody was soaked pretty much from that point onwards.  You just could not get dry.  It was extremely cold.  And we were really always on a path towards hyperthermia.  We were really having to work hard to prevent that from happening.

Jason Hartman:  How many people on the journey?

Tim Jarvis:  Six, just like with him.  And that’s actually a distinct disadvantage because you’re living in the space the size of a queen sized double bed, 6 men, you’re sleeping on rocks in a dark space just below, leaking planks on a rocking wooden boat.  It’s very, very cold, very uncomfortable, and frankly very unsafe.  But I guess the only advantage of having so many man below deck is that you couldn’t fall very far because you were wedged in so tight like sardines.  There wasn’t enough room to fall.

Jason Hartman:  Wow, that’s just incredible.  And how long did this take?

Tim Jarvis:  Well, we were out in the ocean for a couple of weeks trying to get from Elephant Island to South Georgia.  We had narrow misses with icebergs and of course very big seas, 30-40 foot waves and a couple of close shaves with whales which were very exhilarating, humpback whales coming right up alongside, almost brushing the boat.  And then we reach South Georgia island which, for listeners who don’t know, this is 600 foot high cliffs and you have a following sea which is basically trying to throw you onto those cliffs and onto those rocks and you have to basically try and thread the needle and get into the bay that Shackleton did.

One thing’s for sure, you’re going to sure regardless of what you try and do because you can’t turn and sail away with that sea pushing you forward when you’re in a boat with no keel.

Jason Hartman:  It’s just amazing.  What do you think. . .A couple of ships are now caught in the ice down there.  First it was one and then it was a rescue ship and now the rescue ship got caught.  Of course you’ve heard this news story that’s been unfolding the last week and a half or so which is crazy and now the US Coast Guard is down there and I don’t know the latest.

Tim Jarvis:  Yes, that’s right.  The ship that’s stuck is a Russian vessel and the Australian Antarctic Division hired it to take these people south – it’s a combination of scientists and tourists.  And they get stuck in pack ice and then the Chinese tried to rescue them in an icebreaker, albeit not a very powerful one.  And then the Australian government sent Aurora Australis which is a more powerful icebreaker that I’ve traveled on a number of times to exactly that place in fact.  And they too couldn’t get through or almost stuck.  And I think now we have a situation where the US Coast Guard is sending a more powerful icebreaker there to try and help out all the others.

The deal is that if the wind is blowing offshore in Antarctica, which often it is, a lot of the ice that would otherwise be rocked up against the coast of Antarctica is spread out over vast expanses of ocean.  But as the winds blowing on shore, all those icebergs and pack ice that would otherwise be out to sea effectively ends up in a kind of 30-40 mile thick buffer all around the coast of Antarctica and that’s what we’re stuck in.  It’s really luck of the draw as to whether or not you get stuck in that or not.  But I guess because they have tourists on board, they’d be really intent on trying to reach Mawson’s Huts at Commonwealth Bay which is where they’re trying to get to just to show them Antarctica and let people jump off and touch terra firma.  And maybe that pressure to try and do that that’s forced them into the position they’re in when they perhaps should have thought about staying offshore a bit a bit longer.

Jason Hartman:  That’s amazing.  I guess it’s summer there now, right?  I mean, it’s the complete opposite.  So, they’re right in the middle of summer.

Tim Jarvis:  Yeah, right in the middle of summer.  And still in the interior of Antarctica, summer means -40 Fahrenheit, maybe lower, -50, -60.  But in the depths of winter of course you have 24 hour darkness and the temperatures just go far lower than that.  So, summer is a relative term.

Jason Hartman:  Right.  They thought the ice would be a lot less significant, though, I guess, this time of year.  And apparently it’s unexpected cold and ice, right?

Tim Jarvis:  Yeah.  Like I say, it’s a combination of the cold and the fact that the wind is blowing a lot of the pack ice into shore and forming this great barrier.  If it was blowing the other direction, you’d probably find that pack ice regardless of how cold it was which is just break up and you’d be able to get in quite easily relatively.  So, there’s a bit of a lack of better judgment involved in their predicament I think.

Jason Hartman:  Yeah.  Well, tell us more about your journeys and your ship and Shackleton, etcetera.  I didn’t want to divert you too much with that tangent, but I just thought it’s rather amazing what’s going on down there.

Tim Jarvis:  Yes, it is.  And I always use my journeys as an opportunity to talk about leadership lessons and also sustainability issues.  I mean, I’m an environmental scientist by training and I think it’s fair to say that people really listen to what I have to say based on my environmental science background but if you combine that with an interest in the polar regions and you talk about the melting icecaps and melting glaciers and that sort of thing then people tend to listen.

Jason Hartman:  I mean, there’s so much controversy about that.  Why is there so much controversy about this stuff?  I mean, is there more ice or less ice?  What’s happened?

Tim Jarvis:  In fact, the picture is not that difficult.  It’s just that there’s a lot of misinformation.  You’re dealing with very complex systems that are very large as the first thing.  But there is a lot of misinformation.  There are a lot of vested interest in who’s interest it is to confuse people.

Jason Hartman:  On both sides, though.  Because on the Al Gore side of the aisle, a lot of this climate change stuff, it was called global warming but the name was changed to climate change.  It was all global warming – that’s all we used to hear.  Now we hear climate change.  And the people on that side of the aisle claim, hey, this is just an excuse for governments to control us and to raise prices and deny us resources and things like that and then of course on the global warming side we know what they say – they say the caps are melting and we’ve got to do something about it.  What is your take?

Tim Jarvis:  In the case of the Antarctic, because this is a big topic in the case, Antarctica is about twice the size of the lower 48.  It’s a very big piece of real estate.  The average thickness of ice there is over a mile thick.  That’s the average thickness.  So 97% of the world’s water is in the ocean, and of the remaining 3%, 2% is actually locked up in the Antarctic ice cap alone.  But that ice cap is divided into 2.  90% of it is in what you call the eastern Antarctic ice cap.  And that’s the majority of Antarctica.  The rest is in the western Antarctic ice cap which the left hand bit if you’re looking at the map with The US at the top or Europe at the top.

And the western bit is melting quite quickly.  We really are experiencing a lot of warming down there.  We’ve got about 40 bases, all of whom had been there since the mid to late 1950s onwards.  The US, Germans, the Brits, the Argentinians, the Chileans, a whole range, the French, all of them recorded the same thing that we’ve experienced about 4 degrees Fahrenheit of warming in the last 50 to 60 years down there which is completely, unquestionably way beyond anything that the natural environment would produce on its own.  So, on the western part of Antarctica we’ve seen a lot of melting.

The eastern part, which is the majority, as I’ve said, we’re in a situation where there’s more melting happening on the edges of Antarctica, around the coast, where the temperature is now going above 0 quite a lot, 0 Celsius.  And we’re seeing a lot of the glaciers carving ice, in other words ice is pouring into the ocean from those glaciers because the glaciers are moving more quickly because a lot of the time melting is lubricating the bases of the glaciers and they’re just carving off ice faster.  But that’s being offset by more snow in the interior because of higher evaporation rates from the ocean, in other words more heat means that more moisture gets sucked out of the ocean and dumped on Antarctica as snow.

So, the shorter answer, the majority of Antarctica is in a kind of state of uneasy equilibrium.  That’s the east end bit.  The west end bit is melting very fast because of warming temperatures.  So, the answer is both sides of the argument are kind of right.  Eastern part is kind of stable.  Western part, which alone contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by many meters on its own is unfortunately melting quite fast.

Jason Hartman:  So, here’s one of the things I’ve just never understood about this argument.  I frequently have a glass of water and I put ice in the water and when the ice melts, the glass does not overflow.  And we hear Al Gore out there saying that the ocean levels will rise as the ice melts, but even if the ice completely melts, only 3% of it is on land based on what you just said, right?  So, could this ocean rising theory really occur?

Tim Jarvis:  Yes, it could.  What you’re describing is absolutely right.  If anybody has a glass of water with ice cubes in it and the ice cubes melt you might not see any difference in the level of water in the glass because the ice is already displacing the equivalent volume of water so that when it melts it won’t make any difference to the level.  The difference is that in Antarctica, that ice is not in the ocean currently, it’s on the land.

Jason Hartman:  Right, but it’s only 3% of the world’s ice is on land, right?

Tim Jarvis:  No, 2% of the world’s water is in the Antarctic ice cap.

Jason Hartman:  Okay, so if it all melted, if 100% of it melted which would be amazing, then we’d have 2% more water in the ocean, right?

Tim Jarvis:  If the whole lot melted, we’d have about 230 feet of sea level rise just from the Antarctic camp alone because of course you’ve got to appreciate that the ocean, even a shallow ocean like the arctic ocean, average depth is about 6 ½ to 7 thousand feet.  That’s the arctic ocean, that’s a shallow ocean.  Many of the other oceans are far, far deeper.

Jason Hartman:  It doesn’t matter how deep the ocean is, right?  That’s not really what we’re talking about.  We’re talking about the ice that’s on the land coming into the ocean as water – that’s the discussion, right?

Tim Jarvis:  That’s actually right.

Jason Hartman:  So who cares how deep. . .I don’t know, tell me.

Tim Jarvis:  I’m just trying to give an idea that it only takes a small amount of additional water supply to the ocean to actually raise the levels quite significantly.

Jason Hartman:  Okay, because in other words, that represents, in our example, the size of the glass.

Tim Jarvis:  Yeah, that’s it.

Jason Hartman:  A 2%, if that ice came into the ocean, do we have oceanfront land in Phoenix or do we have sea levels rise by an inch?  That 2% of ice would have to come into what covers already 75% of the Earth, is covered in water.  I don’t know.  Can it be that significant?

Tim Jarvis:  Yes, it is.  There are a whole bunch of things going on here that, for start, ocean levels don’t just rise like water in a bath where everything rises an equal amount over the course of the whole planet, because of course you have tides, you have the moon causing those tides, and then you have the positions of the continents.  And so you can end up in a situation where in some places sea level rise is far more significant than others just because of the position of the continents and the time it takes for water to actually reposition itself over the whole of the planet.  So, it’s not an equal rise across the whole thing.  That’s a very sort of key point I’m supposed to grasp.

The second thing is that really we don’t need talk about Al Gore’s. . .In fact, I don’t even know what his figures are.  I have met him and he seems a very decent guy, very well informed, and very passionate.  But I’m really concerned about places like, for example, Asia, where I live.  I live in Australia and by 2050 we will have 4 billion of the 9 billion people that we’re likely to have on the planet living in Asia, and many of those cities are within a meter, so 3 feet, of high tide arc places like Jakarta, places like Beijing and Shanghai, places like Singapore, Sydney.  Huge quantities of the world’s population will live in these coastal zones that will be impacted by much, much smaller amounts of sea level rise than the disaster scenarios we hear about in Al Gore’s predictions.

Jason Hartman:  I mean, Al Gore is saying things like we’ll see a 30 foot increase in ocean levels and sea levels.  So, the coastline, that water will come up 30 feet?  I mean, that’s unbelievable.

Tim Jarvis:  I don’t think that’s correct.  But what I would say, I work for an engineering firm and I’m an environmental scientist and I deal with a lot of industry people and I’m a pragmatist.  I work with people rather than against them.  But things like salt water, you float a lot better in salt water than you do in fresh water and that’s because it’s much more dense.

And in the case of Australia, a lot of the Aquifers, the ground water that supply the drinking water to Australian cities and throughout all Australian cities around the coast because it’s so dry and hot in the interior, we end up in a situation now where already we’re starting to see salt water contaminating a lot of the freshwater that lies below our cities.  Because the sea level is rising subtlety and enough for saltwater to get into our freshwater drinking supplies because it’s heavier, saltwater sinks, and it contaminates the whole of the groundwater supply.  And that just becomes a big social cost.  It’s a big economic and social cost.  It’s not waves slapping up against the main football stadium or the town hall in the center of town.  It’s far more subtle effects that are gonna cause the problems.

And in the case of Asia, a lot of farming land is becoming contaminated by gradual rising of sort and this is causing people the need to move.

Jason Hartman:  Are there any benefits to global warming?  Let’s just try to be really objective for a moment.  For example, land that is not arable now, if the earth gets warmer, will more people be able to grow crops and will that lessen starvation in some areas because it gets a little warmer?

Tim Jarvis:   Look, I would say there are bound to be some benefits.  It’s a case of the places where I think a lot of these changes are going to occur are places where people are not really easily adaptable.  If you want to take, for example, I’ve heard it suggested that warming will actually help the tundra in Russia, for example.  The problem there is of course the soils have developed based on the vegetation that they’ve had over hundreds of thousands of years, and that vegetation’s always been pretty low level vegetation, poor quality vegetation but based on the climate.  And so it takes a long, long time for a decent enough soil to build up to actually take advantage of the warmer temperatures to actually grow a decent crop in a place like that because you just haven’t had the right biology there to enable that to happen.

You get things like disease spread of course with warming.  And of course you get more extreme weather events.  And, in fact, the intergovernmental panel on climate change who are much maligned a lot of the time, probably very unreasonably because they are a very high caliber group of scientific advisors, have suggested that we’re gonna see some of the worst excesses of extreme weather events and things like that in the tropical regions, not necessarily in the polar regions or in the more temperate zones but in the tropical regions and a lot of those places where we have developing countries that are perhaps less capable of handling extreme weather events at either end of the scope.

Jason Hartman:  Interesting.  It just seems so hard to pin down and so difficult to actually quantify any of this stuff.  I mean, to say the climate change, right, the climate has always changed.  The earth has gone through huge shifts throughout history, hasn’t it?  It’s so subjective.  I don’t know.

Tim Jarvis:  It is very difficult to grasp.  And I think the key thing in all of this is that humans are quite adaptable creatures but they can only adapt at a certain pace.  And I think the climate change that we’re starting to see, whether it’s good or bad, and I suggest that most of the effects will probably be unfortunately adverse, society doesn’t have the capacity to change as quickly as it will need to to cope with the change that’s coming.

Certainly in Australia, I’m always very wary of citing the recent space of terrible fires we’ve had and terrible extreme rainfall events we’ve had in different parts of the country, attributing them to climate change.  But certainly, even a developed country like Australia has had some really awful conditions in the last 10 to 15 years that even it struggles to deal with.  We’ve had hundreds of deaths in fires recently in Australia which is really quite something.  We’ve really not had problems on that scale before.  And I would really wonder how a developing country could handle the conditions we’ve had recently.

Jason Hartman:  Yeah, it’s just a really interesting topic.  But all throughout history, Tim, I mean there’s a really interesting article that a lot of motivational speakers use from the 1800s.  And it’s from the Boston Globe and it was the front page headline that says “World to go dark.  Whale blubber scarce.”  And it’s like we keep solving these problems – granted there are externalities.  I know that certainly increased commerce and growing economies, they create external problems.

You can’t be cavalier about this stuff and I completely agree with you there.  We always come up with something.  I mean, species have always gone extinct throughout history.  The dinosaurs aren’t here with us today.  So, I guess the first issue is how much of this is man doing it?  And then the second issue is is it bad?  You brought up some good points about it.  And there are a lot of layers.  You really gotta peel a lot of stuff off this onion here to have a rational discussion about it.  And people on both sides are very passionate.  I guess the problem really boils down to population, right?  Is that the big issue?

Tim Jarvis:  I think it’s a combination.  I think unfortunately the western lifestyle with The US and Canada and Europe and Australia and New Zealand and South Africa and maybe Brazil and a couple of other countries, everybody wants that lifestyle.  And if we all have it, we are really massively over consuming the cystic capacity of the planet to supply what we need.  I mean, the total amount of land that we have appropriated from nature if you like, and I’m including forest land and pasture and land under wheat and that sort of thing through to our cities and through to the coastal zones in which we do most of our fishing, the continental shelves of many of our continents.  We’ve got about 14 billion hectares of land.

Jason Hartman:  What is that measurement?  That 14 billion hectares.

Tim Jarvis:  14 billion hectares is the land that we’ve kind of taken from nature to convert to some sort of human end use whether it’s city, recreational areas, agriculture, whatever.  It’s land that’s no longer native vegetation, forest, and that sort of stuff, and where there are 7 billion of us.  So, we’ve essentially got about 2 – what a global hectare is each – so 2 areas of 10,000 square meters each in which 300 by 300 foot squares each to derive everything we need throughout the whole of our life, our education, our laptop computers, our iPhones, our food, our cars, everything we need.  On average, we have two hectares each from which to get that if you want to look at it in those terms.

As the population increases, the amount of physical land we have to get what we need, to give us everything we need throughout our lives, is obviously going to go down because we are now over 7 billion.  Predictions are we will be at 9 by 2015 and by 2100 we could be at 10 to 10 ½ billion.  But another function of it is how much we consume.  And if we all lived like Bangladesh is, there be enough space on the planet for 30 billion of us.  Now, I’m not suggesting we go and do that, but the problem is that many Bangladeshis want to live like Americans or Western Europeans or Australians.  They want to have a car and a half or a big piece of land, maybe a small boat to go out in and they want to eat meat and they want to eat sugar.  And there’s not enough space or resources for us all to live in that way.  So whereas we’ve always got away with coming up with techno fix in the past, I suspect literally the physical carrying capacity of the planet is beginning to be really seriously compromised now.

Jason Hartman:  Right.  But let’s just talk about that agriculture thing.  And, by the way, I know we’re running a little long, so if you have to go just let me know any time.

Tim Jarvis:  I do have to go in a minute.

Jason Hartman:  Alright.  But on that agriculture thing, certainly you see this amazing stuff and I’ve interviewed people about the concept of urban gardening before on my shows, amazing.  And agricultural land has become so much more efficient with modern technology.  I mean, what used to take an acre to produce, you can do that now in a tiny little space.  It’s unbelievable what they’ve done with modern agricultural technology.  And I suppose that’s only going to get better.  So, the disclaimer has to be, in all fairness, under present technology.  None of us know what will come, what will be discovered in the future.  I mean, did anybody think we would have 3D printing 100 years ago?  That’s going to be an amazing boom.

Tim Jarvis:  I think it all comes down to a case of do we want to try and safeguard the future based on what we currently know, what we currently know to be the wrong thing to do, or do we not.  There is another term that indicates fossil fuels – the stone age didn’t end because we ran out of rocks, we just moved onto a new technology – and so with fossil fuels, we don’t need to use absolutely everything up before we decide that alternatives are perhaps less impactful.  I mean, I think we realize that particulates are not good for our health.  I think we realize that clearing land is not good for us in terms of exploiting potential pharmaceutical gains that might be made from say rainforest environments.

We know that the health of the planet is reliant upon a lot of recycling at the waste that we generate by actual processes.  Trees take in CO2 and give out oxygen.  We rely on a lot of natural environments to filter a lot of the waste material we put into them.  So, certain things we know to be bad that we should be doing something about, regardless of whether or not we feel that climate change is a real phenomenon or not.  There are a lot of win-wins that could be going from not appropriating more land from the natural world than we actually need.

In terms of things like urban farming, I work for a company called [00:33:16].  We design a lot of these. . .We’ve designed a vertical farm for Singapore which is a tower which actually grows things bi-vertically and takes up far less space.  And it’s a great initiative.  One would have to be on an absolutely massive scale for it to really be impactful.  But we do have things to learn from very unlikely places, places like Shanghai.  The Chinese were often criticized for their lack of environmental awareness but like Shanghai they derive 60% of their dairy produce, about 75% of their meet, and about 80% of their vegetables from within the city limits of that city through agriculture.  So, we have a lot to learn from them in certain respects.

So, I think it’s just a case of an understanding that certain activities we’re involved in do not represent the future.  I think mass fossil fuel burning for our principal energy requirements are not the way to go in the form of coal and oil, but it’s a case of just getting a change on a sufficient scale to make a real impact.

Jason Hartman:  Yeah, definitely.  Well, this has been a very interesting discussion.  Your website is TimJarvis.org.  Are there any other websites or resources you’d like to give out, Tim?

Tim Jarvis:  Well, ShackletonEpic.com of course is the Shackleton expedition website.  And that’s a great one to find out a bit more about what we were doing on the Shackleton expedition, some of the change we saw down there and some of the leadership lessons that I think Shackleton stood for.

Jason Hartman:  Fantastic.  Well, Tim Jarvis, thank you so much for joining us today.

Tim Jarvis:  Fantastic, really enjoyed it.

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Transcribed by Ralph

The Holistic Survival Team
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