LEWIS PUGH
“How do I bring the oceans into people's living rooms? Onto people's newspapers?” asks swimmer Lewis Pugh. “It has to be a David versus Goliath story—a swim where I am about to be grabbed by a polar bear, mauled by a leopard seal, freeze to death, or die of altitude sickness.”
Lewis Pugh once swam one kilometer at the North Pole in water so cold that the cells in his fingers burst. Three years later, he nearly drowned swimming in the thin air of Lake Pumori, which sits at more than 17,000 feet near Mount Everest’s Khumbu Glacier. This past August, the 44-year-old became the first person to complete long-distance swims in each of the Seven Seas that surrounded the ancient world: the Mediterranean, Adriatic, Aegean, Black, Red, Arabian, and North Seas. These long swims in extreme locales, all of which he does in nothing more than a Speedo, have one goal: to call attention to the degradation of our environment, and particularly our oceans, before it’s too late for them to recover.
“Lewis is forcing us to look for solutions,” says EnricSala, director of the Pristine Seas project and a National Geographic explorer-in-residence. “He is not afraid of swimming in freezing waters or near giant oil tankers, because he knows that the health of the ocean depends on our understanding of the problems.”
Pugh, the United Nations Patron for Oceans, swam ten kilometers in six of the seas, and 60 kilometers from the North Sea up the Thames River. Pugh chose the locations of his swims based on their proximity to policymakers and leaders he hoped to reach, and to illustrate both the worst degradation and the most hopeful recovery. He ended the expedition at the Thames Barrier as a reminder of the 50 times the barrier prevented rising sea levels from flooding London this past winter. Thirty years ago, the engineers who designed the barrier anticipated they would need to deploy it just twice a year.
With his seven swims, the South African marine lawyer urged policymakers worldwide to set aside 10 percent of their oceans as marine protected areas—essentially underwater national parks—to combat the damage humans continue to cause by overfishing, littering, and polluting waterways through shipping, dumping raw sewage, and poorly managing coastal development. Currently, only 3 percent of oceans are protected.
The climate of Pugh’s seven swims varied wildly. In the Red Sea, he swam three hours through 129℉ midday heat in 86℉ water. One week later, he swam the 55℉ Thames in the middle of the night in order to comply with the demands of the tides and the harbormaster. In the Black Sea he swam through choppy seas, while the Adriatic was completely flat.
Pugh’s swims had troubling similarities: In all of his seven swims, he did not see a single shark, dolphin, or fish longer than his hand. He found the Black Sea swarming with invasive jellyfish, brought in on the ballasts of ships from America’s East Coast. He swam over coral reefs bleached by the rise in water temperature caused by climate change. He swam over a shallow section of the Aegean Sea and the Red Sea that looked like underwater deserts, devoid of life, and littered with tires, plastic bottles, and cans. Yet, only two kilometers away, he swam over the Aqaba Marine Park. He found red, yellow, green, and blue coral teeming with schools of orange Anthias fish.
“If there was ever any doubt in my mind that marine protected areas work, that confirmed it to me,” says Pugh. “Nature can recover if you give it space. These problems are eminently solvable, but they're going to become very urgent, and potentially unsolvable.”
Determined to do everything he could to get his message across, Pugh and his small team slept four hours a night for the entire month. On an average night, Pugh would give ten interviews in time zones around the globe, update the project’s social media feed, skim through a thousand online comments, respond, personally, to 50, then quickly fly on to the next location.
“Was it worth it? Absolutely,” he says. “At the moment I'm seeing the environment being very, very badly damaged [and] the impact which that is going to have, especially on the poor in the world and on developing nations, is going to be acute. I need to stand up, and start swimming. I will swim until the last day of my life. That's my calling.”
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