Robin Hanbury-Tenison on Survival International

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Robin Hanbury-Tenison on Survival International

28 Oct 2010

Speakers: Robin Hanbury-Tenison OBE

Introduced as our greatest living explorer, co-founder of Survival International and ex-Head of the Countryside Alliance, Hanbury-Tenison begins by saying that he believes exploration, ultimately, has to be about changing the world, about discovering things, and about first-footing. For Hanbury-Teinson, the most exciting moment of his life as an explorer was on an expedition to Borneo, when the footprints he left in an underground cave were the first to have disturbed that surface in five million years. There has to be an element of that, of derring-do, for an expedition to count as exploration.

Survival International grew out of the shared conviction among a group of seasoned travellers that something had to be done to protect the interests of those being explored. Science and exploration can reveal for us how the world works – an important task, and one for which much remains to be done, considering that only 7% of living things on Earth have been identified. Far from there being little left to explore, Hanbury-Tenison believes that we are currently on the cusp of a new era of exploration, one in which scientific research can reveal for us how the world works to a hitherto unknown degree.