Footnotes

A major new exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society’s Kensington headquarters seeks to shed light on those who made vital contributions to the expeditions of the past, but whose names have been overshadowed by the glorification of lead explorers. The AHRC-funded “Hidden Histories of Exploration,” curated by Felix Driver and Lowri Jones of Royal Holloway, University of London, uses the extensive archives of the RGS (with IBG) to bring advisers, guides, porters, Sherpas and artists back into our accounts of famous historical explorations. If the names Mohammed Jen Jamain, Nain Singh and Juan Tepano mean nothing to you, this exhibition will help to explain why this is a grave oversight, but also how such an oversight is produced by our cultural reception of (white, male) hero explorers - an example of Adichie's single story problem. The effort to move these other, crucial participants in expeditions from the footnotes of the historical record to centre stage is ambitious and important. The exhibition is running until 10 December 2009, and an online version is available for those who can’t make the expedition to Kensington.

Image: Tenzing Norgay (Nepal), Edmund Hillary (NZ), Everest 1953. After their successful ascent, debate raged in the press as to who had first stood on the summit, and which country could therefore make the “first ascent” claim. In this case notes about feet threatened to assign one man to the historical footnotes, an outcome that Hillary resisted by claiming that they had completed the challenge as a team.

Homing

This expedition into the blogosphere sets out just as two very interesting, very different, but very much interrelated expeditions return to the UK. Dan Box, a Shropshire-based journalist, received funding from the Royal Geographical Society to spend time with the people of the Carteret Islands, Papua New Guinea. He describes the islanders as “the world’s first climate change refugees” as the island community faces a phased relocation in the coming years due to rising sea levels. Dan has been there as the first main phase of the relocations occur. (Dan’s blog here).

There are questions to be asked about that “world’s first” claim, though. We like the term “first” when we talk about travel, expeditioning or competitive adventure challenges. It gives the impression of striking out into the uknown, of pushing the limits of human endurance and ingenuity. It brings in the funding. But here it’s a contentious, perhaps even dangerous claim (to Dan’s credit, he discusses his own confusion about the issue here). People displaced by dramatic changes in climate, and unprecedented weather events caused by those changes, are unfortunately numerous. It is only the problem of quantifying the specific contribution of the changing climate, in complex situations involving issues with resources, political and social challenges etc., that prevents their precise labelling as “climate refugees.” The Cultures of Climate Change group at CRASSH, Cambridge University hosted a talk on these matters by Norman Myers (Oxford) in April 2008 (more details here). We hope Dan might be able to tell us more if he visits us in Cambridge later in the year.

And then there’s the Catlin Artic Survey (blog archive and fascinating photos by Martin Hartley here), now back on terra firma after just over 73 days on the shifting ice of the Arctic Ocean. The results of their ice thickness survey are currently being analysed. With any luck the final report will help us to understand the impact of climate change on the melting patterns of the ice cap – providing another piece of the jigsaw puzzle in understanding the predicament in which the people of the Carteret Islands find themselves.