Leader on the Edge

Crevasse by crevasse, Swan and his teammates forged ahead, basing their decisions about where to cross in part on the color of the snow -- and in part, says Swan, on "instinct, practice, and luck." Crevasses did not pose the only obstacle. Other dangers included the threat of faulty or damaged equipment and the possibility of injury, dehydration, or starvation. Swan and his teammates dragged their supplies on sleds that weighed 353 pounds at the beginning of their trek. (The men would lose 50 pounds each before it was over.) Even so, they carried only enough food for 70 days -- which meant that arriving at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station on time was critical.

"You don't have to be Einstein to figure out that going almost 900 miles in 70 days means maintaining an average of almost 13 miles a day," Swan says. "If you do half a mile less every day, then you've done 35 miles less by the end of the journey, and making up those 35 miles could take you three days. What happens if you run out of food with three days left? You're dead. The bottom line in my business is that if you make a mistake in anything, you die."

Swan and his teammates didn't die. In fact, they arrived at the South Pole five days ahead of schedule. Instead of retreating to his native England to rest on his laurels, Swan realized at the completion of this trip that he had a new purpose -- and that he faced a new set of challenges. "What happened to us on that journey changed our lives completely," Swan says. "My eyes changed color. They used to be dark blue, and now they're light blue, and looking at bright lights is quite difficult for me. Our faces just blistered out, and our skin continued to peel right off our faces for months.

"We had not read about that sort of thing happening in the history books," he continues. "Then, when we got home, we were told that we had spent 70 days walking under this thing called a hole in the ozone layer. I'd never heard of it. But when you've experienced it firsthand -- when you've had your face torched off -- you take the information more seriously than you otherwise might."

Swan became deeply interested in, and deeply committed to, environmental issues -- an interest and a commitment that were motivated not just by the destruction of the ozone layer but also by the waste and pollution that he had encountered on his journey. "It's so cold and dry in the Antarctic that nothing rots or disappears," Swan says. "It's frozen history."

That meant that 74 years after Robert Falcon Scott and his men had died, the hut that had served as their base camp at McMurdo stood exactly as they had left it -- complete with baking powder and bottles of vinegar set on tables, and socks left out to dry. Outside the hut, a dead husky lay in the snow. "The more we became involved in the Antarctic, the more we saw that there was a bigger picture," Swan says. "The dead dog was a sign of how anything that we left there today would still be there 75 years from now. We began to feel that maybe we could use our story to help preserve this extraordinary place that we were visiting." Dead animals and the supplies of past explorers were not all that Swan and his teammates found on their trek: "Rich, powerful nations have left thousands of tons of rubbish from their scientific stations," he says.

Instead of feeling disillusioned by what he saw, Swan found that his passion for polar exploration was undiminished. But his earlier, more ego-driven interest in setting records was now supplanted by a new goal that was, in its own way, just as lofty and far more urgent: He wanted to save the world. And he was going to start by saving Antarctica. "We need to leave just one place on Earth alone," he says.

Swan decided to distinguish his environmental activism by offering something that he wasn't seeing much of: optimism. "No one is inspired by the negative," he says. The problem is not lack of awareness, he argues -- it's lack of inspiration. "Most people are not stupid," Swan says. "They know that there are huge changes going on in our world. On TV, they can see temperature problems, floods, climate records broken every five minutes. But it's such a big issue, and so terrifying, that most people can't register what's going on. It's too much. There's a process, a journey to be made along a certain path, but at the moment, they're confused or discouraged or switched off. My job is to inspire them -- to get them to believe that the journey is possible, by showing them small, achievable steps."

Swan's second major expedition, in 1989, was to the North Pole -- making him the first person to walk to both poles. But receiving personal acclaim wasn't his primary focus. Underlying the trip were two other goals: working to preserve the polar regions, and doing so through a global effort. Driven by the latter goal, Swan gathered a team consisting of eight people from seven nations. The team included a German, a Japanese, a Russian, an Australian, a fellow Brit, an African-American, and an Inuit.