Kate Rawles is a philosophising activist adventurer with a special love for cycling and sea kayaking for exploring the environment and biodiversity, and she says she is relieved that she can not be fit into any one classifiable box. And that the main reason she left academia, to become more of an environmental activist, was exactly that unwillingness to be put into any one box.
In 2006 she cycled through the whole Rocky Mountains, from Texas to Alaska, to see what climate change meant in the belly of the oil-beast under George W. Bush.
She likes combining adventure and environmental activism to reach more people with her message. And in 2017 she quit her job to ride the whole length of South America, along the spine of the Andes mountains.
She cycled 8300 miles, or 13.340 kilometres on a bamboo bike that she herself had built. His name is woody!
She tells us the story of the local resistance in Colombia against Anglogold Ashanti, who have a terrible human rights record, and how this gold corporation was going to devastate the environment in an agricultural area in Colombia where they wanted to open a gold mine, called La Colossa.
Kate Rawles says, that If we are going to tackle climate change or the loss of biodiversity, we need big systemic changes of how the economy operates, how corporations are allowed to operate, and the whole consumerism paradigm.
We also need to rethinking our relationship to nature, and the separation we perceive between us and the natural world, perceiving us as superior to nature.
Another thing we need to rethink, is who we are in terms of what makes us happy, and what actually gives us self esteem and respect, and what counts as progress. In our current model consumerism plays a big role. We are all indoctrinated to think that stuff and money gives us worth and happiness, but it turns out that this consumerism actually makes us unhappy.
We then speak about the hedonic treadmill, and Kate thinks, that happiness is partly jumping off it - then I can just be who I am. More important are connections to our near community, but also to the more than human community - that separation that we feel is part of our pain.
We also talk about Lifeforce deficit that can come with modern lifestyle.
We will need this spirit of the adventurer to embrace the challenges ahead, in this human dominating era, the anthropocene era. Kate says.
There are lots of uncertainties in what lies ahead, and to achieve sustanability we need the spirit of adventure, which evokes a much more positive mindset.
Adventure has a certain magic about it. Kate says. You have to take that step into the unknown, and then things start happening. There is power in embracing the challenge.
Extinction rebellion and the young people are speaking up, they want a future, and they are starting to claim it - claim the needed system change, and that is hopeful. Things are however never as simple as they seem, f.ex. all our electric cars use lithium in the car batteries, and that then needs to be dug out of the ground.
Next, Kate would like to look at rewilding projects. Rewilding as a conservation strategy, but also as interesting philosophically, as it is about us relinquishing control.
We also talk about the carbon footprint we leave when we fly as compared to sailing.
Kate herself is on a flight ration, she only flies once every 3 years.
We also touch upon Bill Plotkins book Soulcraft, where he writes about meaning lying where our passion meets the hunger or need of the world.
And ofcourse, we speak about true toughness, what it is, and what it isn’t.
Kate Rawles website:
https://www.outdoorphilosophy.co.uk
My website:
www.duritaholm.com