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Dan Bennett, president of the Explorers Club—which counts as its members the first men to both Poles, up Everest and to the moon—agrees that exploration must be “relevant”. Scientific exploration falls into this category. Record-breaking does not. “I am not judging people,” Bennett says carefully, “but merely repeating another person’s first and doing it faster or…on a pogo stick-that is athletics, not exploration.”

Bennett and I are in the lounge of the Explorers Club building, an elegant Jacobean-style mansion on New York’s Upper East Side. A pair of enormous elephant tusks—just one of many impressive artefacts bestowed on the club by its illustrious members—rise up from behind the deep, leather chair Bennett sits on. I ask him: is a scientist who “discovers” from the comforts of his laboratory-but who has never been in the field-an explorer? He answers no, after admitting that the debate is unresolved at the club, “You have to get your hands dirty.” When I posed the question to Winser in London, she, too, agreed an explorer must “be out there”. But neither could articulate exactly why.

Explorers today, particularly non-scientists, often feel the need, like Saunders, to imbue their expeditions with “relevance”-by raising money for a charity or highlighting an issue such as global warming. Saunders’s long-term goal is to start a foundation to help poor children who “don’t even know what the environment is” go on expeditions and learn about the natural world.

Saunders (shown below) is a popular speaker at schools. Soon after we meet, he will give a talk at Ryde School on the Isle of Wight off Britain’s southern coast to mark the opening of a new dormitory wing named in his honour. “The other wings”, he says, abashed but proud, “are named after explorers, too: Scott, Shackleton-and Nansen!”

Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian, was the first person to cross the Arctic in the late 1800s. He was also a scientist (one of the founders of neuron theory) and diplomat (he won the Nobel peace prize in 1922 for humanitarian services as a commissioner of the League of Nations). He is Saunders’s hero. “He did what he did for the amazing adventure of it…And he was a renaissance man! I look up to people who have achieved in more than one field.”

I ask him why. Saunders says slowly, “Deep down, I guess I have this guilty feeling that what I am doing is completely pointless. I want…I need it to have…more meaning. Some purpose.”

One of Saunders’s arctic mentors, Robert Swan, approves of this sentiment. The first person to walk to the North and South Poles, Swan is critical of self-proclaimed explorers who “puff themselves up and pretend they have made history when they haven’t”. He believes that exploration today, given the world’s many ills, should be used to further a cause. (Swan, who is British and was awarded an OBE in 1995, runs a foundation dedicated to preserving the Antarctic wilderness.)

Swan, who I spoke to on the phone when he was in Australia, thinks highly of Saunders, calling the “South” expedition “a definitive polar journey” and approving of Saunders’s charitable goals and his unassuming nature. But Swan himself admits that what drove him to the Poles when he was 29 was a deep and fervent fascination with the Arctic and its history, “The motivation came from…wanting to make one small, irrelevant blip on the map of history.”

Source: INTELLIGENT LIFE MAGAZINE, December 2007