As a motivational speaker, adventurer and author Braam believes the Earth Challenge will be the greatest challenge ever undertaken. It is a global expedition intended to save the planet from human annihilation by creating a critical mass of a billion children around the world who hold adults accountable for the wholesale destruction of our natural resources. The official start of the six month expedition is scheduled for the end of 2012 and will be filmed as a 24 part documentary series for international broadcast.
The core team will be made up of a select group of individuals who have achieved ‘world-first’s’ or other unique and remarkable accomplishments. An Earth Flag has been designed with a motto: “One Earth; One Home; One Responsibility.” The team will embark on a global adventure, beginning at our beginning: the Cradle of Humankind at the Sterkfontein caves where our first early ancestor, Mrs Ples (who, it now turns out, was a Mr Ples!), first ventured forth to explore and populate our planet. The team of adventurers will trace the migration of our species. From South Africa, heading north through Botswana, the Great Rift valley, through the Fertile Crescent, splitting left into Europe, right into Asia and down via India and Tailand across the land-bridge coastal super-highway into Australia. Also, via Russia and the Bering Sea, into North America.
At the start, 30, 000 children will see us off, waving Earth flags and sending 30, 000 messages to their parents via email. The message will be expressed individually by each writer but will follow a common theme:
The expedition will show how all human suffering stems from a common origin: our refusal to live in harmony with our natural environment i.e. unsustainable resource use and overpopulation. We will show how our species has transgressed the basic law of nature where ‘all species give to one or more other species, thereby ensuring their own survival’. Most importantly, the expedition will show positive solutions to the sad predicament we now find ourselves in.
The adventurers will do some crazy things, like running 200kms with Bushmen in the Kalahari to show how people can live sustainably, even in harsh environments. Trying to climb the glacier on top of Mount Kilimanjaro to show how her white mantle effects the human and animal populations in the valleys below. Paddling a 1000kms from the ecologicaly denuded Easter Island to a pristine Polynesian island to illustrate how over-exploitation of a finite resource drove the Easter Islanders to extinction: a microcosmic example of what we are doing to the earth.
The expeditions 24 episodes are near completion and the business plan is also nearing finality. I will keep you posted on developments as well as ways to get involved!
“We, as adults, have committed the single greatest crime against humanity by almost exhausting the resources of a finite earth, we have seriously compromised our childrens future. The earth challenge aims to put this right“
