Category Archives: Exploration

Sylvia Earle and the lives of women

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I saw Sylvia Earle speak a few years back at a day long science and exploration gathering of Wings Worldquest and their gala awardees. The gala was the next day, so it was a room full of people talking about what these women had done.

These women were astonishing, all of them, and almost none I had heard of, even though I hang out in explorer-y circles and read all manners of relevant publications. I’ll come back to that.

The gathering took place in The Explorer’s Club in NYC and even though it was open to the public, in a room of a hundred or so people, there were perhaps six men, most partners or children of the women there.

The current president of the club introduced the day by saying, “Women have always been part of exploring our planet! You stayed home and kept our houses and raised our children while we trekked off to the ends of the earth. We could never have done it without you.”  The room was silent. He was serious. Soon enough we got past that, as we do, because what else is there to do? And later, Sylvia Earle stood up and asked a series of questions:

“What,” she asked, “can women not do today? What can we not do that we once could do? What have we never been able to do? What don’t we even consider?”

She left us with that, but I wrote these questions down, (as well as the opening speech, almost word for word, which got even worse than my quote above). They are interesting questions. Lately, it feels like we can do less and less. We are portrayed as less and less — Look at Katharine Hepburn movies such as Deskset. She had SPINE. Women don’t do that in movies anymore.  Look at Mae West. It’s not the same.

I’ve been thinking about Sylvia Earle’s questions, without remembering she had asked them, in a different context, of late, about writing, and what we write, especially when it comes to travel or nature or psychogeography. How we may be limited, if, and what I want to say about it, do about it.  Sylvia’s questions were good, in a room with some of the most impressive women I’ve ever met, we didn’t have a lot of answers that made us feel better.

Travelers and truth

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“There was another problem: the explorers who had come before and discovered facts had at the same time laid down distinctions between what was significant and what was not, distinctions which had, over time, harded into almost immutable truths.”

This seems to be from Alain de Botton’s miserable book, The Art of Travel. In which he appears to be not only really depressed, but rather misanthropic. He seems to not care much for the places or the people he travels toward, in fact, he’d be happier, I think, as de Maistre, traveling only in his room.

de Botton is riddled with guilt, whether he chooses to do something or to not do something. He doesn’t seem to enjoy any of his travels, and yet, there he goes, sulking miserable from place to place, writing about other people who do, in fact, seem to like travel. So while he may be writing of other’s arts of travel, perhaps he needs to embrace the art of staying home?

But my point is not, in fact, de Botton’s misery but that interesting quote, especially as I am currently read Travels into Print, about the House of John Murray and the travel books he printed in the 18th and 19th centuries. I haven’t finished it yet, but I had been struck by the above quote, which I had come across in one of my seafaring journals (notes of people I meet and books/articles I read while at sea), and it particularly struck me as I read Keighren et al’s book.

I read, and own, so many books and articles by explorers that one day soon I shall have to get down to those shelves and see who the publishers are, and what years. That would make a nice wall chart, for the chalkboard, though sadly not related to the adelphi project, so perhaps not what goes on the wall.