Fiennes wants the Royal Geographical Society
to organise the sort of voyages undertaken by
Livingstone, inset, rather than study the
environment
Posted on 04/25/2009 7:36:19 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
EL DORADO may never be found. Some of Britain’s leading explorers, including Sir Ranulph Fiennes, have joined forces to accuse the Royal Geographical Society, the launch-pad for epic voyages of discovery since Queen Victoria’s day, of losing its sense of adventure.
They claim the society has been hijacked by politically correct academics who have abandoned great expeditions in favour of studying the environment and rising sea levels.
Fiennes wants the Royal Geographical Society
to organise the sort of voyages undertaken by
Livingstone, inset, rather than study the
environment
The society’s leadership argues that the explorers are living in their own “lost world” and fail to realise that the advent of Google Earth and satellite mapping techniques make it more important to analyse climate change than to find the source of the Orinoco.
Fiennes, the first man to cross Antarctica on foot, is among the RGS’s “rebel” members who are forcing the society to hold a special general meeting next month to thrash out its future.
He is backed by Colonel John Blashford-Snell, who has studied the Amazon, Sir Chris Bonington, the mountaineer, and Pen Hadow, the polar explorer.
Their resolution calls on the society to return to the “clear spirit” of its royal charter of incorporation and mount its own expeditions. The RGS’s 10,500 fellows will be asked to vote in support of research teams of explorers, botanists, zoologists and geologists venturing out together to study remote regions.
Blashford-Snell, who is leading his own expedition this year to find traces of a prehistoric civilisation in eastern Boliv-ia, said: “The RGS is a show-piece for Britain and it is a pity to let it hibernate. There is a resistance to do anything more than solid academic work.
“You can’t fight to save
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Behold! Another great institution is taken over and succumbed by pointy-headed intellectuals.
Time hasn't been all that kind to him. Evidently he wants the society to bankroll his own expeditions.
What's with renaming New Zealand?
yitbos
If so, the man is an idiot. People should be judged as individuals.
The whole ancestry thing is fatally flawed by the fact that some unknown but significant percentage of the time the legal father is not the biological father.
They've quit exploring Brazil and it's not because of satellite photos.
yitbos
Right. How silly of me to think that you should do geographical science by actually visiting the area.
LOL! Then he should like me a lot! We have Fiennes in our family tree. :o)
I’m all in favor of expeditions, there’s still a lot to be discovered in our world.
But judging people primarily on their ancestors is just stupid.
Three presidents who would be disqualified on this basis are Lincoln, Reagan and Truman. Their ancestors were all nobodies.
> What’s with renaming New Zealand?
(Grin!) That comes up from time-to-time. New Zealand already has a Maori name that is in reasonably common use: “Aotearoa” — very poetic, means ‘Land of the Long White Cloud”. I kind of like it.
North Island and South Island also have Maori names: “Te Ika a Maui” for the North Island and “Te Wai Pounamu” for the South. Both are poetic and roll off the tongue: “The Fish of Maui” and “The Place of Jade”, for North and South Island respectively.
All that the NZ Geographic people want to do is to formalize these names, and they have never been formalized: neither the English version nor the Maori version.
Maori is a beautiful language, very logical, quite easy to learn. In many ways, it is a New Zealand national treasure — I know that sounds sorta New Age and touchy-feely, but it really is like that. Their warrior culture is deeply rich and interesting, their cannibal history is fascinating, and their spiritual world is intriguing. And there are many, many Maori who can recite their family trees back to when they first arrived in New Zealand, and even before that.
So in this case the Maori get a pass on this. I don’t mind if they formalize both sets of names for the islands: they will be used interchangeably, the same way we use the names for mountains interchangeably (eg Mt Cook / Aoraki).
We’re used to that.
The leftist is a collectivist. Everything he does is calculated to drive the independence out of us, to normalize us, to homogenize us, to control us. This is an instinct of the leftist which is the inevitable result of their quarrel with God. They insist on playing God and so they must order the universe. Put another way, we are chickens in their Skinner box.
The cowboy rides across the landscape and enters town without a biography and without dependency on any government. In fact, he carries government in his holster. He does good while in town, serves justice unencumbered by regulation or authority, leaves town while still anonymous and magnificently independent. All this, of course, is anathema to the collectivist.
It seems to me that the the Royal Geographical Society ought to consider Hollywood's solution to the dilemma presented to them by the cowboy. First they exploit the image of the cowboy to make money, to extend their reach. But they turn the cowboy's independence not against the collective but against the conservative. Gary Cooper in, High Noon, was betrayed not by a collectivized city but by a series of conservative institutions, strikingly in one scene, the church. Said to be a camouflaged attack on McCarthy, High Noon is still a damn good western more than 60 years later.
So the Royal Geographical Society certainly ought to serve up its heroes to the public but it should just make sure they've told the story in the right way so that everybody takes away the politically correct message.
yitbos
Sounds like my tagline.
yitbos
Well, chappie! All this derring-do stuff. It simply isn't safe, now, don't you see. There are laws, chappie. One simply can't hop on the old velocipede and shove off. There are requirements to consider. Helmets, and all that.
Yes, yes. Exploration! Going there! Ah, such a bother. Can't we get video of that? Eh?
> Well, there’s already a Maui. It’s in Hawaii.
(grin!) Interestingly, the Maori claim to have originated in a place called “Hawaiki”
Interesting, thanks for posting that. Reminds me of Hawaiian, too.
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