Some thoughts from friend of the site Sarah Outen about youth expeditioning in the wake of the recent fatal polar bear attack on a young boy in the Arctic.
I would be really interested to hear your own thoughts on this subject in the comments below as these are important questions:

• Is it wrong to do expeditions that infringe on the environments of endangered animals such as polar bears?
• Is it wrong to take such young people into dangerous situations?
• Would it be wrong to stop such expeditions because of the small risk of occasional disasters?

This week the family of schoolboy Horatio Chapple faced what I imagine was one of the toughest days of their lives: his funeral. He was seventeen years old when he was fatally mauled by a polar bear earlier this month on a remote glacier in the Norwegian Arctic. The attack has been widely publicised and I expect it will continue to attract attention for a while yet. There are two major investigations underway into the events and failings that led to this small party of campers on a youth expedition being attacked by the bear.

Until those findings are released I wouldn’t want to comment on them, other than to say that it was tragic on many levels. It is tragic that the bear was allowed to venture so close and attack before anyone noticed, before it was too late. It is tragic that equipment used to scare and injure the bear failed to function as expected. And it is a tragedy that both Horatio and the bear died because of these events, and that four other young people were also badly hurt.

With all due respect to Horatio’s memory and his family and friends, I believe, however, that there is the potential for an even greater tragedy. Potential for even greater loss.

As I see it, the greatest possible tragedy here is the risk that we might never let our children go exploring and expeditioning to wild places again and that this may herald a reduction in the number of expeditions by, with and for young people to remote wildernesses.

Adventure and exploration are inherently risky and necessarily so – without it, they would be nothing. That risk and the adrenaline and challenge that it whisks up is part of what makes these things so exciting. Overcoming them is part of what makes the achievement so special and the satisfaction so sweet. Importantly, for the most part, most expeditions happen smoothly and without significant injury and death and participants return home having had fabulous and often life changing experiences.

Our young people are already (I think) mollycoddled, spoon fed in a sanitised, prescriptive world which is forever telling them to be this or be that, do this and look like that. Expeditioning and exploration forces them out of their comfort zone, challenges them and beats them down a bit and makes them sustain a puffing effort towards a common and hopefully arduous goal, all the while building confidence, widening eyes and growing perspectives, in an environment where their true character is allowed to shine through without the normal boundaries and confines of modern society and its expectations and, perhaps for the first time in their young lives, the immediacy of social media. For many, it may well be a road to increased awareness of others’ needs, almost definitely a growth in self-respect and undoubtedly a broadening of knowledge and skills. All of these will be invaluable as said youngster bounds into adult life and all the challenges and trials to be found here. There is nothing quite like an expedition for making a shy youngster stand tall, a naughty one show herself and her peers that she does have a good side, or the mediocre kid who never gets noticed for anything really blossom and find their talent. For young people of all ages, sizes, colours and outlooks, an expedition experience can be invaluable.

I have spent many hours in the saddle recently thinking about this and truly believe that if the Svalbard tragedy leads to restrictive legislation or even bigger mountains of paperwork and red tape when it comes to expeditioning by young people then this will be the greatest tragedy of all. I am all for learning from the mistakes and making the findings and recommendations for safety provision in future expeditions as widely known as possible, but please, for goodness sakes -and for Horatio’s sake – let expeditions for young people go on.

Sarah Outen is currently travelling from London to London by pedal and paddle.

Related posts:

1. On Meek-ro Adventures
2. An Open Letter to the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award
3. Andy Kirkpatrick’s lecture series

A mad but marvellous 400 seconds of terrifying BASE jumping lunacy and beautiful surfing beneath the midnight sun…

If you enjoyed this perhaps you’d like to come to the Scottish Night of Adventure in Edinburgh in June? If you know anyone who lives near Edinburgh please do share this link with them: I’ve got to sell a lot of tickets and need some help!

Related posts:

1. Packrafting Iceland Pecha Kucha
2. The world of Whitewater Kayaking expeditions
3. Running Round the World in 400 seconds

It is now a decade since I graduated from university and set out to try to live adventurously. I am fit and healthy, I spend time out in the wild, I have been to many places, and I make my living doing  things I love.

Originally I wrote that last sentence differently. I wrote, “I am lucky: I am fit and healthy…”

But it’s not luck. Not really. It’s all about making choices, and then making them happen.

What I do feel fortunate about is that I have now reached a time when it feels appropriate to start making what I do a bit more useful and helpful to other people.

Here are a few statistics about western society.

1. 60% of adults and 70% of children do insufficient physical activity¹
2. 60% of adults and 30% of children are overweight¹
3. 54% of people would like to take time out for an adventure or to travel³
4. 90% of people do not feel that their current job is their vocation⁴
5. 40% of people have not stood on a mountain or swum in natural water²

This is ridiculous. Ridiculous because it is all so fix-able:

1. Turn off your TV and go for a run
2. Eat less, run more
3. Take time out and go on an adventure
4. Quit your job and do something you love
5. Climb a hill. Jump in a river

If you are fatter than you ought to be then the only person who can change that is you.
If you get out of breath walking up stairs and you’re under 60 then you need to do something about it. Now.
If you want to travel or do something different with your life it is up to you. Nobody can do it but you.

It is time for action. Time is ticking (click here to see the Death Clock). Time for me to start making an effort towards fixing these broken things that I care about very much.

I make my living from speaking and writing about the things that I do. I have a platform to preach from. And the time has come for me to practice what I preach.

So here is my manifesto for 2011:

• In a boring, pragmatic world I appreciate that not everyone can muster the time or the money to go on a massive, whoopeedoo expedition. But everyone, everyone, EVERYONE can manage a microadventure. And to prove how strongly I believe that microadventures are fulfilling, challenging and worthwhile I have decided to not plan any major expeditions for several months. Instead I will do a microadventure every month.
• Each year I speak to thousands of schoolchildren about the thrill of expeditions in wild places. It has troubled me for a few years now that there is no formal follow-up to my visits to capitalise on the enthusiasm generated. This year I will make a concerted effort to set up a system for all the children I speak to to be offered the opportunity to have a wilderness experience of their own. [If anyone can help with this please get in touch]
• My blogging will be more focussed. There will still be some space for travel ephemera, daft comedy, wonderful books, and poems to fire the soul. But mostly I will concentrate on doing what you love, making stuff happen, travel writing, microadventures, and how these are all inter-linked and related to the statistics above.

As always I value the combined knowledge and wisdom of all you out there, so please do let me know what you think, what I can do better and so on.

Wishing you all a challenging and rewarding 2011. Let the revolution begin!

1: The NHS
2: GoOutdoors
3: Survey by EsctheCity

Related posts:

1. Revolution Baby
2. My Manifesto for the Year. A year of Micro Adventure
3. Guest Blog: Revolution Cycle. “Keep it simple, sell your telly”

Before you read this post please listen to the piece of music below, unless you already know it. (Put it on in the background as you do something else for 9 minutes). It’s the second movement of Górecki’s Symphony No. 3. I’ve loved it for many years.

I have listened to this haunting, beautiful piece so many times. But I have only just learned the background to it. And that has made it even more powerful.

Helena Blazusiak was 18 years old when she was imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1944. On the walls of her prison cell she scrawled these words,

“Oh, Mamma, do not cry! Immaculate Queen of Heaven support me always…”

She does not despair, does not cry, does not scream for revenge. She does not think about herself; whether she deserves her fate or not. Instead, she only thinks about her mother: because it is her mother who will experience true despair.
This scrawled sentence was the inspiration for Henryk Górecki to write the second movement of his Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.
And now, if you listen to the piece again, its power is transformed.

Why am I writing this here, on this blog? Because it reminded me to always examine things closely, to dig deeper into your subject, to remain curious, for there are extraordinary stories and great beauty all around us. The more we know, the more we see. The more we see, the more we know.

Related posts:

1. Songs for the Road
2. Winters of my life
3. Wild Swimming as Therapy

I’ve edited down this superb piece on simple living by Pico Eyer. Read the full New York Times article here.

“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.”
The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later.
When I was 29, I began to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense.
“There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.”
I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.

So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.

I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart.

When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never did that for me.

Perhaps happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn’t pursued.
I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.

If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.

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1. Photo Friday – the joy of the Mekong
2. Say No to Stuff, Yes to Trips
3. The World’s Best Boss