Leader on the Edge

"I wanted to write a little piece of history," he admits. "But I also wanted to do something with it. There was no point in me standing there with the Union Jack saying, 'Well, I've done it now.' Time had moved on." Along with creating a diverse team of explorers, Swan arranged for 22 adolescents and young adults from 15 countries to come to the Arctic and to stay at the base camp, where they could conduct scientific research and create educational programs about the expedition.

But, proving that even the best-laid plans do indeed go awry, the expedition became a horror story. The temperature rose -- from minus-30 degrees Celsius to minus-5 degrees (from minus-22 degrees Fahrenheit to plus-23 degrees) -- and the ice cap began to melt beneath the explorers' feet. Swan and his team were 700 miles away from land. "It's supposed to melt in August, and this was in April," he says. "Never in recorded Arctic history had the ice cap melted in April. Obviously, that was another sign of environmental change. But at the time, our problem was how to stay alive, because we were beyond rescue of any type."

For 40 hours at a time, the team traveled through constant daylight, often making little headway. Because the ice was so broken up, they could walk for 10 or 15 miles and still have gone north only 100 yards. Even worse, they might go north 10 miles, sleep for a few hours, and then drift back to the point where they had started 40 hours earlier. Some people found themselves up to their waists in near-freezing water, some hallucinated, some sustained serious injuries. Darryll Roberts, the American on the trip, lost the heel of one foot when it simply fell off in his sock.

"What I learned as a leader is that you don't bullshit people under hostile circumstances. You tell them the truth," Swan says. "It was unreal -- the efforts that we made to help each other. People were carrying one another's weight when they could hardly carry themselves. It was a final test of teamwork and leadership, based on all that we'd talked about and practiced. We came through it -- barely -- and the reason was that we'd learned to work as a team."

Once again, despite the enormous difficulties that he had encountered, Swan refused to give up his habits of exploration -- or his efforts to draw attention to environmental problems. Instead, he further expanded those efforts to include young people.

Back in 1987, while receiving an award from the Explorers Club in New York, Swan used his acceptance speech to make a rather controversial point. "I said, 'I've taken your Explorers Club flag to the South Pole, I'm taking it to the North Pole, it's been to the top of Mount Everest -- it's been everywhere,' " Swan recounts. " 'But when did it last visit Harlem? And I notice that there aren't too many black faces in the audience.' There was dead silence. I thought, 'Oh my God, I've really blown it this time.'

"The next morning, the president of the Explorers Club rang me up and said, 'You've embarrassed us, Robert.'

"I said, 'I'm sorry. I'll send your flag back.'

"He said, 'No, no, no. You've embarrassed us into actually taking some action here. We at the Explorers Club will sponsor you to do a series of lectures to young people in Harlem. You're right. It's crazy that our flag has been everywhere on Earth, but it hasn't been to Harlem, just a few miles down the road.' " It was during the lecture series that followed that Swan found Darryll Roberts, whom Swan sees as a role model for both black and white young people. (Swan points out that when Admiral Robert Peary conducted his famous expedition to the North Pole in 1909, his next-in-command was a black man, Matthew Henson.)

The reason for Swan's interest in teens and twentysomethings was, and continues to be, simple: They are tomorrow's decision makers. The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, promulgated in 1991, establishes Antarctica "as a natural reserve, devoted to peace and science." In 2041, the protocol will come up for review. "My job in life is very clear," Swan says. "It's to make sure that in 2041, there are enough people in the nations that have signed the protocol who will stand up and say, 'No bloody way are we going to allow this place to be destroyed.' " Toward that end, Swan -- who was appointed a special envoy to the director general of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1994 -- leads young people on expeditions that focus on research and on raising environmental awareness. "We want to give them skills to go home and to cross the borders created by hate, violence, and bigotry," Swan says. "So we train them in how to speak in public, how to raise money, how to make a TV or radio program, how to use the Internet and email -- and some of them have never even seen a computer!"