On Growth

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63. Thor Heyerdahl

Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl was born in Larvik, Norway, in 1914. He studied zoology and geography at the University of Oslo. In 1937-38 he led his first expedition to Polynesia.
In 1947, on a raft named Kon-Tiki, in honor of a legendary pre-Inca sun king, he left Callao in Peru; and in 101 days Heyerdahl and his team crossed 4,300 miles of ocean, landing on the Raroia atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago. Thus, he proved that scientists had greatly underestimated the seaworthiness of the balsa raft.
After numerous other expeditions, Heyerdahl undertook his Ra expeditions (1969-70). He finally crossed the Atlantic in his Ra II - 3,270 miles in 57 days in a papyrus boat.
Thor Heyerdahl also takes an active part in meetings of the Club of Rome.

What was your foremost conclusion from your two Ra voyages?¹

I expect you would want me to say that I proved my point that ancient people could cross the Atlantic in a primitive type of boat. But for me personally I found it more important to realize suddenly how small the ocean is, how very limited the distance is from one continent to the other and how polluted its water has become. On the trip that took only fifty-seven days, forty-three out of those fifty-seven days we observed oil clots floating about. Every day we actually saw plastic containers, nylon bags, empty cans or bottles or some other refuse from man, all the way from Africa to America.

One hundred years ago Her Majesty's Challenger set sail from Portsmouth, England, on the world's first scientific voyage devoted to the exploration of the seas. That was a hundred years ago. Do we have enough facts, do we have knowledge about the sea, to explain the decline of the plankton, or to calculate how much time we have left to save the ocean?

1 See Thor Heyerdahl, The Ra Expeditions, New American Library (New York, 1971).

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I think the situation is very serious, for the very fact that the visible pollution that has started must obviously be following some sort of potential curve. Only twenty years ago the world oceans were perfectly clear. We could still drag our plankton net behind our vessels and inside one would find only marine life. If we do it today, we cannot avoid collecting human pollution. I think that although science has advanced tremendously those hundred years, we have not been able to rid ourselves of the medieval concept of the ocean as being something endless. We think that if we pipe our sewers far enough off the beaches, the refuse will sort of fall off the edge of the world. We think that the blue ocean runs into the blue space and whatever we dump into the ocean will disappear. We think that the ocean is endless because it has no beginning and no end. But neither has a tennis ball. Today oceanographers are striving very hard to let the public as well as our decision makers realize that if we manage to pollute the ocean, to destroy life in the ocean, it means suicide. It would be the worst that could happen to man. The ocean was the source of all life on earth and is still its indispensable foundation, serving in addition as the global filtering system. Yet even with present-day knowledge we do not value it as such. We merely use it as our common sink, forgetting that it is landlocked in all directions with no outlet whatsoever, except for clean water evaporation.

The Americans already put atomic waste in huge containers on the bottom of the ocean. Ralph Lapp,² the atomic scientist, has already suggested building atomic reactors in the sea. What on earth could this do eventually to the sea?

I think this is the policy of the ostrich. If we find something to be so dangerous and so terrible that we cannot dispose of it ashore, we dump it into the sea, because then we don't see it and we feel it is not there. Of course if some material is that dangerous, we should keep it in some place where we can control it. Once it's at the bottom of the ocean, containers can crack open, something may happen and we have no more control over where it spreads.

- Pollute the entire bottom of the ocean and kill all marine life. You live on the Mediterranean. From where you live you can see the water and the Alps.

The situation in the Mediterranean is extremely dangerous. For the

2 See conversation no. 37.

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first time last year there were days when I had to tell my children not to go to the beach because the water was so terribly polluted. We could not swim. Only four years ago the water was always crystal clear. Of course the Mediterranean is a closed or almost closed ocean. We know that every year an estimated two hundred to three hundred thousand tons of oil are dumped intentionally into this great ‘lake.’ This floating oil slick is working against the cliffs of the Mediterranean, killing in some areas all littoral life, which happens to be of the greatest importance for the ocean as a whole, because most marine life will pass some stage of its life cycle either as eggs or larvae on the cliffs. If we manage to destroy life among the coastal rocks through toxic matter, this will have a deadening effect on life far away from the land.

On November 13, 1972, ninety-one nations concluded a global convention in London to control dumping in the oceans. How effective do you think that convention will be?

I think that the main thing is that we start to police these matters. This will be a great problem, because a great many people still think that all this is not so dangerous and they keep on dumping. I think it is also a matter of education. It's a matter of making people understand that the ocean is much smaller than we thought it to be.

In the North Sea, where so much of this dumping is going on, if people would only realize that if one builds a metropolis like New York City on the bottom of that sea, most of the houses would stick well above the surface of the water. That is how shallow it really is. It must be quite obvious that when we dump toxic matter into this shallow sea, it is going to have a disastrous effect on marine life, which again means that it is going to have an aftereffect on all humanity in the long run.

What are your expectations, for instance, of the New Institute for Marine Environment as part of the Natural Environment Research Council for Britain, which in 1975 is supposed to be in full operation with about a hundred and thirty scientists working in it?

Yes, that is an encouraging development. I am quite sure that the main thing is really to open up the eyes not only of the scientists, but also of the public at large. I think that there is still time, but time is very short. I should like to stress that while people are very much concerned about the pollution of the atmosphere above the big cities and the pollu-

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tion of lakes and rivers, these are problems of minor importance. This pollution will be cleared by the wind and the current, but it will all end up in the ocean. The ocean is the only place where all this is accumulating and the only place where we must make sure to stop it from entering as fast as we can because it is much harder to get it out than to prevent it from coming in.

With your obvious love for the sea, do you feel the Club of Rome can be helpful in fighting for the survival of that sea?

Yes, I definitely think so. One of the main functions of the Club of Rome is to call attention to problems and to stimulate research bearing upon the future living conditions of civilized man upon this planet. This, for instance, was its sole intention in sponsoring the research behind Limits to Growth. Let me say that I feel the Club of Rome's work could be compared to an icebreaker. It is really not a question of how beautifully it moves through the ice but the fact that it is breaking the ice and making it possible for other more streamlined passenger steamers to follow. Scientifically, a lot of improvements could probably be made to a pioneering work like Limits to Growth, but the basic discovery that we are on a wrong track, on a collision course, and that it's a matter of time, no matter what adjustments we make to these curves - that is the most important result of the study. I don't think that the Club of Rome as such will solve these problems, but I do think that the members of the club, with their contacts with different scientific institutions, with different governmental bodies and so on, will certainly be able to stimulate deeper interest in the problem.

I should mention that at the 1972 annual meeting at Jouy-en-Josas near Paris, some of the scientists present took up some of these problems after the speech I delivered on the vulnerability of the ocean. They are now going to interest certain oceanographic institutions in research programs. We need to learn what is really happening, because today we don't know. We don't know what will happen if we kill the botanical plankton. There are some scientists who say it means that fifty percent of our oxygen will disappear. Some estimate seventy percent. Some even say it will take a million years for the oxygen we still have to evaporate. It means that opinion among the so-called experts is completely colliding. It is high time that we really know what will happen before we can start saying, ‘Don't worry, the ocean is endless and we can just keep on dumping.’

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Will these problems be studied with the use of computers?

I think that computers will be very useful in research of this kind.

Actually, isn't it shocking how little we know of the effects of what we are doing to the earth, how opinions differ? And do you think we will be able to correct some of our errors in time?

I think that long before we reach population numbers like seven billion or ten or twenty billion, we will run into problems that will stop a population increase. It is very likely that the pollution of the ocean is going to be one of them, because when we make calculations today on the food supply of the world - let us say for ten years from now - we figure out that while today you can catch eighty million tons of fish with the evolution of technical equipment, ten years hence, we could catch twice as much. This is on the assumption that there is an endless number of fish to be caught. Those who are involved in studies of the ocean realize that instead of increasing or keeping at a steady level, marine life is decreasing very quickly. Not only because of the strong evolution in fishing gear and techniques, but also, as I mentioned, due to the problem of pollution, particularly in the shallow coastal areas where ninety percent of all marine life is concentrated. If we are able to destroy the ocean, I don't think it's of any interest whether this or that person would be correct in assuming that some day there will be twenty or a hundred billion people, because we would never get to that point.