Jason has seen more of the world, and been on the sharp end longer, than most men could even dream. He pitched himself and his team against the maelstrom of mother nature for 13 years to achieve the first human powered circumnavigation of the globe.   From the Himalayas, the remotest deserts and across vast oceans, with only the strength of muscle, mind and will. His unique perspective on our world, his deep insights into who we are as a collective (to be read in his up coming book early 2011), make Jason a perfect candidate to ask questions about the concept of travel and adventure and what it means to one particular man.

1. Do you believe your experiences have had a positive effect on you?

Undoubtedly. Growing up in the UK, I always felt I was out of synch with something, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. After leaving school, I tried the army. It didn't suit. Whilst dabbling in other jobs, including music, I became increasingly aware of how a career in a free market economy is always going to be tied in some form or another to profit. Not that money itself is bad. We all need at least some of it to cover the bases. And I'm deeply grateful for such a privileged start to life compared to youngsters denied the same level of opportunities growing up in less well off countries. But I couldn't see any consideration for the long-term implications, particularly environmental ones, of a value system centred on unrestricted profit making. I knew there had to be more to life than this. And I've always been interested in some of the bigger questions I believe all of us living in the world today have to ask at some point:

- What gives a life a sense of meaning and purpose?

- What should the long term "point" of a career be, other than financial?

- What constitutes a sustainable lifestyle that doesn't adversely affect others elsewhere in the world, or contribute to further deterioration of the global ecosystem?

- How can I be an asset, as opposed to a burden, as a citizen of the world?

I knew these questions couldn't easily be answered in the clamour of society. Travel offered a solution, because only when you're out of your comfort zone, and all that is familiar, especially friends and family reinforcing the ideas, beliefs, and opinions you've grown up with, can you step back from who you think you are and gain some perspective.

I found wilderness environments particularly rewarding for this. Out at sea, or surrounded by desert, the clutter of civilization falls away. You are free to turn your attention inwards, and strip away the years of conditioning, probing what lies underneath. You can put yourself under the microscope, picking out which aspects of your personality you do and don’t like, and make adjustments upon returning to civilization. Hopefully, you’ll become more of a grounded person, with a better sense of your strengths and weaknesses. And maybe you’ll even have something positive to offer back in society as opposed to just trundling along mindlessly with the rest of the herd, never having questioned anything. After travelling for 13 years around the planet by human power, I feel I've answered many of those big questions, and come back more of a “whole” person, with something (hopefully) to contribute to the collective.

 

2. Have your experiences changed the way you view other cultures. Humanity in general?

Meeting people from other cultures, in particular working with groups of youngsters in 38 countries, has led me to one overriding conclusion. That underneath the surface differences of language, colour of skin, religion, customs, et cetera, all of us are essentially the same as a species.
Different geographical regions of the world colonized by our earlier ancestors clearly caused different populations to evolve separately from each other, yielding both physiological and cultural variations in response to environmental pressures. Hence the rich diversity of cultures we see around the world today. On the downside, however, these differences are frequently used to exploit people for personal gain. This inherent tribalism, people competing for finite resources, is, I believe, at the root of many of today’s problems in the world.

A few hundred years ago, the dynamic would have been somewhat different. With the world population a fraction of what it is today, there was more than enough to go around. Tribes could fight each other over assets until they were blue in the face; it didn't affect others living elsewhere. But since the industrial revolution, and now with the compounding factors of globalization, technology (leading, amongst other things, to accelerated exploitation of resources), and the exponential rise in human population, all of us have become intrinsically linked, affected in small or large way by the actions of others.
With this backdrop, I would argue that clinging rigidly to cultural differences could be our downfall as a species. Continuing to allow ourselves to be tricked by our genes into competing over nature’s assets based on tribal differences will, I believe, lead to catastrophic environmental collapse at a planetary level. Human induced climate change may be an early sign of this. Only by transcending these differences and working together can we solve the very significant problems currently faced by humanity.
That is why travel is so important. Before leaving the UK in 1994, I thought I was pretty open-minded. Not until after I'd travelled for a while did I realized how biased I was, presuming that my core beliefs, principles, and attitudes, standards which I’d always assumed to be solid and real, were anything more than imaginary attributes relative to my geographic origins.
Travel is a great antidote to many forms of bigotry. For by expanding awareness, it allows you to transcend divisiveness.

3. Would you encourage others to embark on a similar journey/s to your own?

Even if you're not predisposed to a nomadic way of life, as some people are, I believe all of us have a duty to travel for at least six months to a year. In a world where governments use the ignorance of their voting populace to implement often questionable foreign policies, people need to become better informed if they desire to be part of a solution for a sustainable planet, not remain part of the problem.
Travel is one way.

You can learn all you need at school to earn a living. You can watch television and get a vague idea of what other places around the world look like, and how the people are. But relying on the media to form opinions about the rest of the world and how to interact with it is, in my opinion, wholly irresponsible. The only way to be a useful citizen of the world is to get out there and see a bit it for oneself. And I'm not talking about hopping on a plane and spending a couple of weeks boozing it up on a beach where you never get to meet real locals. To learn anything useful, you need to keep close to the earth and it's people. As Robert Louis Stevenson once said, "come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints."

Human power is ideal for this. For the slower you move, the more you absorb.
As to whether I would encourage anyone to spend 13 years travelling... Well, there will always be some of us who commit to something without any real idea of how long it will take, or, afflicted by the gypsy curse, find themselves getting antsy staying anywhere for too long. And contrary to what the Establishment might think, I genuinely believe those nomads amongst us have a positive role to play in a sedentary society (see below). But, as a caution, there's a price to be paid for being away from "home" for too long. Since finishing my circumnavigation in 2007, I've found it hard to fit back in to UK society. In fact, aside from having family there, and holding a British passport, I don't see it as being home any more than elsewhere in the world.
Yes, I’ve managed to answer some of my big questions from travelling for so long. And I’d like to think my awareness has expanded to be more global, and I tread a little lighter on the Earth as a result. But I’ve been away from England for too long now to buy into much of the superficial stuff people get excited by (X-Factor, Top Gear, Britain’s Got Talent), or for them to relate to what interests me most. So, in this sense, travel can be a double-edged sword.

 

4. Do you believe if more people would experience extensive travel it would have a positive net effect on a community overall ?

A group of people has lived all their life in a cave. They see shadows projected by their fire onto the wall in front of them, reflections they believe to be reality. Eventually, one of them ventures out into the light of day and realizes the shadows in the cave were only illusions. Reality is something other. Illuminated, the lone traveller returns to the cave to share the insight. (Plato's Allegory of the Cave.)

When I tell people in the West how hospitable Muslim people were in countries like Sudan and Syria, they find it hard to reconcile with the "reality" they’ve been led to believe by the media. But with some people, I can see the wheels begin to turn, that all they’ve ever read and heard about the rest of the world might not be entirely as they thought. This is where travel comes in. Maybe a few of these people might be inspired to venture out of the cave themselves? Then return to their local community to share the truth.

5. Do you see a future for adventure and exploration within humanity?

The appetite for adventure and exploration is undoubtedly in our genes. The success of the species is largely thanks to this predisposition to travel. But whereas travel historically was a means to seek out new environments offering valuable resources, nowadays I think it serves a different purpose.

We are living in an age when we either rally as one species and work as a whole, harnessing our large brains to focus on the big picture, sustainable human life on Earth, or allow ourselves to be divided and conquered by Mother Nature, as already demonstrated in miniature on several south Pacific islands. Earth is an island stranded in space much like an island or a boat surrounded by ocean. When you have finite resources, as on a sea voyage or an island, you quickly understand how managing your resources intelligently is essential for everyone to survive and coexist peacefully. Surface anomalies such as nationality, faith, customs, and ideals don’t mean a damn out on the ocean. You either work together as a team towards a common goal, or risk a desperate survival of the fittest scenario where the most brutish behaviour wins out, and likely everyone loses.
In the 16th century, Easter Island supported a population of some 20,000 people. By 1872 only 111 remained, the last survivors of environmental collapse, famine, and civil strife between warring tribal factions. Can we avoid the same fate at a planetary level? Perhaps. By expanding our village awareness to a global level, and living according to a bioethical creed that transcends our innate myopia and puts the health of the planet first, I believe we can. One way to jump-start this process of consciousness-raising is to travel.

Jason Lewis - February 2010. (Copyright preserved).