10 years ago, Roz Savage was living an enviable life by most standards. She worked as a management consultant in London and lived with her husband in a large Edwardian house in a fashionable suburb. Yet she found herself with plagued with a vague sense of dissatisfaction. Some people deal with these feelings by turning to the addictions such as shopping, drugs, or infidelity. Roz, instead, took the dramatic step of leaving one life for another. She became Roz Savage, Ocean-Rower and Eco-Adventurer. She describes it this way:
I did an interesting exercise one day – I sat down and wrote two versions of my obituary. The first was the one I was heading for if I carried on in my present lifestyle, and the other was the one I dreamed of having. They were very different.
So it was time for a change. I didn’t want to get to the end of my life and look back with regret on all the things I hadn’t done. It was time to stop dreaming, and start doing.
She rowed single-handedly across the Atlantic in 2006, and is currently preparing for the third lap of her bid to become the first woman to row solo across the Pacific. Savage is also an environmental campaigner, focusing on climate change, habitat destruction, and plastic pollution. Savage’s message is that we can all make a difference. She puts it this way:
“My journey from San Francisco to Hawaii took 99 days and a million oar strokes. I could have stood under the Golden Gate Bridge and said ‘One stroke isn’t going to get me anywhere’. But if you take a load of tiny actions and you string them together, you really can achieve almost anything. “
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejgVzEPySAs]
Savage’s latest campaign has people take up the challenge to log one or more “green deeds” a day to get points and connect with a world-wide community of aspiring Eco-heroes, as well as earn prizes. To learn more about her ‘Eco Heroes” campaign – a cross between a game, a social media site, and a save-the-world environmental challenge – and to sign up, click here.
To go to Roz’s blog, click here.
To go to The Climate Project, one of the causes that Roz promotes, click here.
Get a handle on reality! No one is really buying the whole eco adventurer thing when actions speak louder than words . Don’t just listen to me, here’s a link to another article with plenty of comments from other people who have figured out what a joke and cover story the “eco adventurer” thing is:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20001613-93.html
Great article! Thanks for the link! And you’re right, there are some nasty comments from people who aren’t doing things in their own life and enjoy compensating for it by saying negative things about people who are. Luckily, there are people like Roz out there to make up for them!
That is a really good article. It’s really inspiring that someone has figured out her values and is sticking to them. I think the whole point of the ‘eco-adventurer thing’ IS that actions speak louder than words, and Roz is actually doing something, unlike the rest of us.
It sure does seem like most of the comments are motivated by a need for people to alleviate their own guilt for not doing anything at all. Why else would they feel the need to tear down the attempts of others to be environmentally aware? Of course Roz isn’t perfect, but there is no way that someone rowing across the ocean makes nearly as much of a impact on the environment as the average North American. So, let he or she who is free from sin throw the first stone.