My solo lesson on how to save the planet

Fear is a survival instinct, the inbuilt self-preservation mechanism in all of us. People often ask if I was scared during my record solo voyage around the world. My answer is “yes”. Fear almost certainly kept me alive in the Southern Ocean: it keeps you focused and vigilant.

But when I got back to land I felt a different type of fear as, for the first time, I began to see the world in a different way. I had never questioned whether our planet’s resources were limited, and had certainly not stopped my busy sailing schedule to wonder if the way I lived was sustainable. But when I stepped off my beloved trimaran after setting the record in February 2005, I began to see things differently.

When you sail around the world you take everything you need for three months. From toothpaste to teabags, from clothes to kitchen roll; what you have is all you have, and if you run out you can’t just pop down to the shops to buy more. You are managing your own little world with its finite, life-sustaining supply of resources. And you’re doing it when you are more exhausted than you have been in your life.

Unknowingly, I’d been on a crash course in resource management. This really hit home the first time I had “stopped” since leaving school 12 years before. I had sailed in the Southern Ocean five times, but had never stopped, so I jumped at a chance to go to the Antarctic the winter after the record voyage. Away from radios, TVs, roads, newspapers and civilisation, I marvelled at this magnificent wilderness that I had imagined to be totally untouched.

But I was wrong. Between 1900 and 1950, some 4,500 people worked there in the whaling industry and, even half a century later, their presence is startlingly obvious. The industry was huge and profitable: 175,000 whales were caught because we needed the oil to make candles, soap and nitroglycerine that was used in explosives in the First and Second World Wars.

The whalers left behind churches, cinemas, dentist clinics, workshops and offices. It felt like a ghost town; as if they had one day all simply walked out. It made me realise that what we’d done was to deplete a resource, then move on to the next one. After whale oil, it was oil from the ground. In Antartica I saw that the lessons learnt at sea were equally relevant on land. In the developed world we rely on coal, gas and oil, which are ultimately finite. This time it was an uncomfortable, nagging fear that I felt; a fear that something I did not fully understand lay ahead.

I felt I had two options: to push these thoughts aside and further my sailing career (a sport I love as much as ever), or to confront the fear head on, and learn what we can do about it. This is what I decided to do and I am resolved to see it through.

Few now dispute that more and more people living faster lives and consuming more will have an impact. Energy is at the heart of this — energy for transport, heating, food production. When you read statistics about the quantity of resources we use, they are staggering.

I have spent three years speaking to government, business, local councils, NGOs and the public about our reliance on a finite supply of resources. Trying to understand what this means for our transport, food production and energy security made me realise that this concern is not a conspiracy theory from a group of “run-to-the-hills hippies”. It’s a real issue for us all in the developed world.

Almost without exception, the heads of industry and government figures with whom I have spoken understand these challenges and are desperately looking for solutions. They need us, the public, to make the necessary changes with them.

When the foreword to the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security, written by Lord Oxburgh, a former chairman of Shell, says “there is not much chance of finding any significant quantity of new cheap oil”, and the executive summary to the 2008 World Energy Outlook written by the International Energy Agency (which advises 28 governments), says “it is becoming increasingly apparent that the era of cheap oil is over”, I begin to wonder how our future will look.

As the IEA says, “we can be certain that the energy world will look a lot different in 2030 than it does today”. So I want to find out more about how this will affect us.

To communicate my findings I am setting up a charitable foundation next year to promote understanding of the basic facts and to help people to draw their own conclusions about the challenges before us. The foundation will work with the public, business, government and NGOs to find and communicate ways to live more sustainably.

? We will focus on three main areas: Communicating the facts and making them relevant to people Working as an agent for change within business Setting up projects with specific, measurable objectives.

When faced with a storm at sea I always tried to see through to the other side, and I see this challenge no differently. I firmly believe that we can find the solutions — it will not be the first time that the human race has achieved the impossible through sheer necessity and determination.

Ellen McArthur, an English sailor. She is best known as a solo long-distance yachtswoman.