SIR ROBIN KNOX-JOHNSTON
How green issues have changed in 60 years
Ilove the way young people now seem to think they have discovered green issues. Some of us have been on about it ever since the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring back in the early 1960s. It was the first book that really pointed out the threats to the environment that were coming. I read it while I was living in India. And it made me sit up and think: ‘Wow, this is something we need to take seriously.’ For those of us concerned at the time, we hoped that the book would create an international campaign. It didn’t. But here we are 60 years on and things have changed. People are taking this much more seriously. David Attenborough’s been very influential, he’s got a voice of quiet authority on the subject and people trust him.
I remember sailing to New York and the floating rubbish en route was atrocious. I thought, ‘For goodness sake this has to stop, we can’t keep pouring this rubbish into the sea.’
Thankfully, international law has been very effective at preventing shipping from throwing stuff into the oceans. When I was in the Merchant Navy 50 years ago, plastic wasn’t so prevalent, but rubbish was being thrown off ships – it tended to be wood or wire that went straight to the bottom. The wood did not sink, of course, but at least it decayed and the quantities were small.
Now, apart from the occasional spills due to things breaking, on the whole shipping is no longer the culprit. The culprit is the people who just discard their rubbish on land, and the wind picks it up and it ends up in the sea. In certain areas it’s particularly bad, and you think, ‘We’ve got to get tidier and clean our act up.’
Plastic is the problem. It just floats around out there. Take one simple example, the turtle. It eats jellyfish. Well plastic floating in the sea looks like jellyfish so the turtle eats it, clogs up its insides and dies. That’s unforgivable, we can’t treat the turtle like that.
The list of endangered species is quite sobering. I saw a blue whale after passing
New Zealand. I was down below fiddling with the batteries and I suddenly heard a noise like a train letting off steam. It was a wonderful sight, the only time I’ve seen a blue whale in the wild. But of course, it weighed 10 times Suhali, so I tiptoed past it. I didn’t want it to get too friendly.
There’s a lot of experimentation going on in shipping to make emissions cleaner, which is excellent because sulphur is the problem. We’ve still got a long way to go but it’s like one of those big heavy wheels, once it starts rolling – it keeps going.
Looking at recreational sailing, when we can get electric engines that can store sufficient power, I will not hesitate to switch. The problem we’ve got at the moment is if a boat loses a mast in the middle of an ocean, and it’s got a full diesel tank it can probably motor somewhere. If it’s got an electric engine, how are you going to charge the batteries? A generator? What powers that – diesel. We’re not there yet. I really believe that within 10 years we’ll have a solution.
Similarly, there’s work going on to figure out how to get rid of the fibreglass boats once they stop being safe to use. Perhaps we could go back to more traditional boat building but that means finding decent timber from sustainable forests.
I had the great advantage when I built Suhali in that I was a master mariner by then. I’d passed exams in ship construction for my master’s ticket, so I had a good idea of what a boat required to make it strong.
As a responsible business, the Clipper Race is committed to recycling, reusing, and reducing our consumption of singleuse plastics, and using environmentally friendly cleaning products.
In fact we have been dropping weather buoys from our Clipper Race fleet in the less frequented areas of the world in order to assist in the general knowledge of the weather across our oceans.
There is a general recognition now that global warming, and its effect on increasing ocean temperatures, is leading to stronger winds and, in the case of the Caribbean, more hurricanes. That is an important issue for all those who go on oceanic cruises.
It was wonderful to see a blue whale in the wild, but it weighed 10 times Suhali, so I tiptoed past