| Lewis Gordon Pugh | |
|---|---|
Lewis Gordon Pugh |
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| Born | 5 December 1969 Plymouth, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | University of Cambridge, University of Cape Town |
| Occupation | Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer |
| Parents | Surgeon Rear Admiral P.D. Gordon Pugh and Margery Pugh |
| Website | |
| lewispugh.com | |
Lewis Gordon Pugh, OIG (born 5 December 1969) is a British environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer.
Pugh was the first person to complete a long-distance swim in every ocean.[1] He frequently swims in vulnerable ecosystems to draw attention to their plight and is best known for undertaking the first swim across the North Pole in 2007 to highlight the melting of the Arctic sea ice and for swimming across a glacial lake under the summit of Mount Everest in 2010 to draw attention to the melting glaciers in the Himalayas, and the impact the reduced water supply will have on world peace.
In 2010 he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum for his "potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world through inspiring leadership."[2]
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Pugh was born in Plymouth, England. His father, Surgeon Rear Admiral P.D. Gordon Pugh, OBE, FRCS was a surgeon in the Royal Navy and a prolific collector of ceramics of the Victorian era. His mother, Margery Pugh was a Senior Nursing Sister in Queen Alexandra's Royal Naval Nursing Service. Pugh is a descendant of William Carey the famous missionary. His father's cousin, Carey Heydenrych, participated in the "Great Escape" from the German POW camp Stalag Luft III during the Second World War.[3] In 2009 Pugh married Antoinette Malherbe, whom he met at school.
Pugh grew up on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon. When he was 10 years old his family emigrated to South Africa and he was educated at St Andrew's College in Grahamstown and later at Camps Bay High School in Cape Town. He read politics and law at the University of Cape Town and graduated with distinction and at the top of his Masters class. In his mid-twenties he returned to England where he read International Law at Jesus College, Cambridge and then worked as a maritime lawyer in the City of London for a number of years. During this time he concurrently served as a Reservist in the elite British Special Air Service.[4]
During his youth Pugh visited many National Parks in South Africa. He attributes this to his father's desire to teach him to love and respect nature after what he had witnessed whilst serving in the Royal Navy.[5] His father was present at the first British atomic bomb test in 1952 and a number of subsequent tests.
In 2003 Pugh left his maritime law practice to campaign for the protection of the environment. He often addresses Heads of State and business leaders on the need to tackle climate change head on and the importance of a low carbon society.
In 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Pugh took the evidence of witnesses from across Africa on the effects of climate change at the Pan-African Climate and Poverty Hearings. The evidence was presented to the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference.[6]
Pugh is an accomplished public speaker. He has twice spoken at the influential TED Conference and is described on their website as a “master story-teller”.[7] The Financial Times reported that his speech:
“... was the perfect TED talk: a little bit of action, some thinking outside the box, humbling words on the need to respect nature, a happy ending. A Hollywood scriptwriter could not have structured it better.”[8]
And his speech on environmental leadership at the 2008 Business Innovation Forum Conference in the USA was voted as one of the "7 Most Inspiring Videos on the Web" by Mashable, the social media guide.[9]
In 2008 Pugh founded the Polar Defense Project to campaign for greater protection for the Arctic and a resolution of the maritime boundary disputes. In 2009 it won the Best Project for the Environment at the inaugural Beyond Sports Awards.[10]
Pugh sits on the Council of Ambassadors for the World Wide Fund for Nature in the UK with Sir David Attenborough and Jonathon Porritt.[11] He also works closely with Dr Ian Player and the Wilderness Leadership School to promote and protect the last wilderness areas on the earth.
Pugh has been outspoken on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In a feature in Business Day he said:
"They [BP top executives] should be criminally prosecuted. They should go to jail. What I can't understand is why people haven't responded more vigorously, by boycotting BP."[12]
Pugh has undertaken a series of expeditions to raise awareness about the effects of climate change.
In 2006, he became the first person to swim the entire length of the River Thames, to raise awareness about the severe drought in England and the dangers of global warming. The 325 km (202 mi) swim took him 21 days to complete. The river had stopped flowing due to the drought, forcing Pugh to run the first 42 km (26 mi) of the river. While swimming through London, Pugh exited the water and made a visit to Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street to call on the United Kingdom to move towards a low carbon economy. Shortly afterwards the Prime Minister introduced the Climate Change Bill to Parliament.
In February 2007 Pugh became the first person to swim across the width of the Maldives. He undertook the swim to raise awareness about the effect of climate change on low lying islands in the world. The 140 km (87 mi) swim took 10 days to complete.
In July 2007 Pugh undertook the first long-distance swim at the Geographic North Pole. The 1 km (0.62 mi) swim, across an open patch of sea, in −1.7 °C water, took 18 minutes and 50 seconds to complete. Jørgen Amundsen, the great-grandnephew of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, paced Pugh by skiing alongside him during the swim[13].
The swim coincided with the lowest coverage of Arctic sea ice ever recorded. Pugh disagrees with recent modeling, which predicts that the Arctic will be ice free in the summer by 2080. After his swim he said:
"From what I have seen, I think the Arctic will be largely free of summer sea ice within a decade."
In September 2008, Pugh, accompanied by a team aboard a ship where he slept, attempted to kayak the 1200 km from Svalbard, across the Arctic Ocean, towards the North Pole, but team abandoned the effort 135 km from the start.[14] The aim was to further highlight the melting sea ice. The expedition coincided with some scientists predicting that the North Pole could be free of sea-ice in the summer of 2008, for the first time in thousands of years.[15] Pugh stated that despite several attempts, they were unable to find a gap in the ice. In 2002, Thomas and Tina Sjogren had skied and swam their way to the North Pole without any external support.[16] In his autobiography Pugh wrote:
"Ironically, global warming played no small part in undermining the entire expedition. We believed that the greater melting of summer ice would open up large areas of sea and allow us to paddle north at good speed. What we did not fully appreciate was that to the north of us there was a widespread melting of sea ice off the coast of Alaska and the New Siberian Islands and the ice was being pushed south towards us ... The evidence of climate change was stark. Fourteen months before I'd sailed north and I'd seen a preponderance of multi-year ice about three metres thick north of Spitsbergen, but this time most of the ice was just a metre thick."[17]
In May 2010 Pugh swam in Lake Pumori, a glacial lake on Mt Everest, to highlight the melting of the glaciers in the Himalayas and the impact the reduced water supply will have on world peace.[18] The 1 km (0.62 mi) swim, at an altitude of 5,300 metres, in 2 °C water,[19] took 22 minutes and 51 seconds to complete and was done as part of the Clinton Global Initiative.
Pugh has appeared on numerous TV shows including Good Morning America, Jay Leno,[20] Richard & Judy, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart[21] and BBC Breakfast. He has also been featured by Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Vital Signs on CNN,[22] ADN on France 2, Carte Blanche and Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.[23]
In 2009 Pugh starred in Robson Green's Wild Swimming Adventure where he trained the English actor / singer to swim across the icy waters of Llyn Llydaw, a lake on Mount Snowdon in Wales. Afterwards Robson Green said:
"… Lewis prepared me psychologically for something that was way outside my comfort zone. His introduction to the notion of committing to an objective, becoming unstoppable and reaching that objective was life changing. There was no swim I couldn't do after meeting Lewis because anything is possible if you COMMIT!!"[24]
In 2010 Pugh's autobiography "Achieving the Impossible : A Fearless Leader, A Fragile Earth" was published by Simon & Schuster. It quickly became a Number One bestseller.[25]
Over a period of 24 years Pugh has pioneered more swims around famous landmarks than any other swimmer in history. In an interview with Forbes he stated:
"Between Lynne Cox, Martin Strel and myself, we've hit all of the world's major landmarks. There's really nothing left."[26]
Pugh had his first real swimming lesson in 1986, at the age of 17. One month later he swam from Robben Island (where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned) to Cape Town. In 1992 on August 6, he swam across the English Channel. In 2002 he broke the record for the fastest time for swimming around Robben Island.
He was the first person to swim around Cape Agulhas (the southernmost point in Africa), the Cape of Good Hope, and the Cape Peninsula (a 100 km (62 mi) swim from Cape Town to Muizenberg). Pugh was also the first person to swim across an African Great Lake, namely Lake Malawi.
After 2003 Pugh focused on pioneering swims in the coldest and most hostile waters of the world. All of them were undertaken in accordance with Channel Swimming Association rules, in just a pair of Speedo swimming trunks, cap and goggles. He became the first person to swim around the infamous North Cape, the northern-most point in Europe. The following year he became the first person to swim down the entire length of Sognefjord in Norway, a 204 km (127 mi) swim which took him 21 days to complete.
In 2005 he broke the world record for the farthest-north long-distance swim by undertaking a 1 km (0.62 mi) swim at 80° North around Verlegenhuken, the northern-most cape in Spitsbergen. He followed that five months later by breaking Lynne Cox's world record for the farthest-south long-distance swim by undertaking a 1 km (0.62 mi) swim at 65° South at Petermann Island off the Antarctic Peninsula.
In 2006 Pugh challenged Russia's top cold water swimmers to a 500 metre race at the World Winter Swimming Championships in Finland. He easily won the gold medal, beating Russian Champion Alexander Brylin by over 100 metres and the bronze medalist Nefatov Vladimir by 125 metres.
On both his Arctic and Antarctic expeditions Professor Tim Noakes, a sports scientist from the University of Cape Town, recorded Pugh's ability to raise his core body temperature by nearly 2 °C in anticipation of entering the freezing water.[27][28] He coined the phrase "anticipatory thermo-genesis" (the creation of heat before an event).[29][30] This phenomenon had not been noted in any other human. Pugh believes it is a Pavlovian Response to years of cold water swimming.
In 2006 Pugh achieved the "Holy Grail" of swimming by becoming the first person to complete a long-distance swim in all 5 oceans of the world. To date he is the only person to have achieved this feat. His five swims were :