Toughen Up! It’s Earth Day

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, April 21, 2010)

“What I hate most are motorcars and aeroplanes; they have wrecked the world and robbed it of all its diversity. If I could’ve done my travels by car, what would’ve been the point?”
    -- Sir Wilfred Thesiger, the last great British explorer, in an interview in 2000

As we enter the Northern Hemisphere’s spring, we get the annual rash of events that are supposed to get everyone focused on saving the planet – Live Earth, Earth Hour, Earth Day, the Nyepi-inspired World Silent Day, and others, I am sure, where admonitions to live in moderation will be presented with excess.

And as much as Wilfred Thesiger, who died in 2003 at the age of 93, is a darling of environmentalists for saying that the internal combustion engine was “the single biggest disaster in history,” he probably would not have thought too much of these efforts. Thesiger would have had no interest in productions that involved day-long concerts and the tattooed and dreadlocked that flock to them.

This wasn’t the sort of pageantry he was talking about when he wrote of his “life-long craving for barbaric splendor, for savagery and colour and the throb of drums.”

Thesiger enjoyed his life like he enjoyed his travels: brutal, arduous and desiccated. A description of his participation in part of an expedition that had him traveling Indonesia by boat leaves the reader feeling that the tropics are a bit “too lush for the great Arabist's more astringent tastes,” said a reviewer of a 2006 biography of the explorer.

As travel writer Eric Newby said of him in “A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush,” when their two caravans met in the mountains of Afghanistan in 1956, Thesiger was a Victorian throwback, “a great, long-striding crag of a man … forty-five years old and as hard as nails.”

Thesiger’s travels in the first half and middle of last century documented the disappearing ways of tribal life in Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. Most importantly, he traveled and lived in the same way as the people of the lands he was passing through; his journeys were made on foot, by canoe and on the backs of camels, horses and mules. He is said to have been antagonistic to any technological developments after the steam engine.

And while his fully stocked expeditions through Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Africa for such organization as the Royal Geographical Society and the British Museum probably would never have been mistaken for local traveling traders, Thesiger seems to have been able to associate and empathize with his “native” traveling companions better than most of his contemporaries.

He wrote in the preface to his best known work, “Arabian Sands”: “The everyday hardships and danger, the ever-present hunger and thirst, the weariness of long marches: these provided the challenges of Bedu life against which I sought to match myself, and were the basis of the comradeship which united us.”

Compared to such travelers – compared even to the less dour Newby, whom Thesiger judged a “pansy” for his use of a blow-up air mattress – most of us today that wing about the world don’t even come close to any true experience of the lands where we travel.

What does this have to do with environmental days and save-the-world fun fairs?

Well, everything, or maybe nothing. Thesiger was pure Luddite, rejecting any technology beyond what could afford him “a good rifle, a torch and a compass.”

In 1946, according to an obituary in The Guardian, when the explorer had been starving in Arabia’s Empty Quarter for three days, waiting for his Bedu companions to bring back food, he later wrote: “I would rather be here starving as I was than sitting in a chair, replete with food, listening to the wireless and dependent on cars to take me through Arabia.”

I am not suggesting that we all need to be just as joyful when any adventures we may have in this much safer world suddenly turn life-threatening, but I do think we should be more ready to suffer a bit of inconvenience now and then, and, say, maybe go without AC and a hot water heater in tropical climates.

There is an obdurate spirit embodied by Thesiger that we have lost somewhere amidst the ease of modern living, with its instant gratification and instant disposal for nearly everything, and no matter how many Earth Day concerts are held every year, we will make no progress toward conserving our home planet’s resources and preserving the very lives of our descendants, until we toughen up a bit and reclaim a hardier and earlier vision of what it means to be really alive and human.

Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi