Perspective is everything, and for serial adventurer, biologist and conservationist, Sacha Dench, her latest trip – traveling around the UK in an electric-powered paracopter – has given her a unique perspective on both the challenges and opportunities we all face in tackling the climate crisis.
She and her team set off near Glasgow on June 21st and they will finish her circumnavigation of Britain – the first using an electric paramotor – in the next few weeks. The trip is being taken to raise awareness of climate change and to mark the COP26 climate conference, which takes place in Glasgow at the beginning of November.
An integral part of her trip has been meeting local people along the way, all of whom have their own climate solutions. “Meeting those people is what gives me the energy to put that heavy motor on my back,” Sacha says. “All the stories are adding up to a really powerful potential – everyone from individuals who are driving change to heads of companies who I want to speak to, as I want to know if they are genuinely passionate about change.”
She is up most mornings around 4am, planning the logistics of the day, which involves checking weather conditions, getting permissions to take off and land, organising meetings with locals, and ensuring she has enough battery power. She spends probably two hours a day in the air, and while the physical side of the trip was very demanding at the start, she has gotten used to it. “It took me a while to get used to all the controls, and a while to get used to it physically and build the muscles in my core; I can definitely feel my physique is changed in the past few weeks, so I don’t notice the weight of it now,” she says.
Another challenge is monitoring the changing conditions and landscapes. “Depending on the landscape, I can push the battery further,” she says. “Some landscapes have more landing sites than others, so I have to land with 25 per cent of the battery left, as I am not sure if there is going to be easy landing on the other side of a hill. I have to search for thermals so I can get lift from that, so there is a constant monitoring.”
The whole time she is being followed by her support crew in an (electric) van with a live tracker.
“It is busy and quite exhausting, but all the people we are meeting have given me tons of energy, and that’s what makes me happy and hopeful.”
For Sacha, the key to get people to embrace the change needed to really tackle the climate crisis is to focus on solutions rather than the doomsday scenarios some engage in. “What I am trying to do is make the conversation around the solutions rather than the misery or the scary statistics. My personal experience from my last expedition is the only thing that makes people say they will do their bit is when they hear stories of other people doing their bit and make sacrifices.”
That “last expedition” was the Flight of the Swans, where Sacha and her team flew the entire migratory route of the Bewick’s swan from the Russian Arctic through Europe to the English coast, a remarkable three-month, 7,000km journey. “I saw then that people will get excited and take action if they can see their part in a bigger puzzle,” Sacha says. “They got excited about this crazy lady trying to be a human swan, their imagination and ideas opened up, when I talked about the lives of swans, and the only thing that made people take action was telling them what others were doing, such as the researchers across Europe going out on the same day at the same time to count the birds, or to catch them and X-Ray them to seeing how many were shot.”
As for COP26, Sacha is optimistic, but clear on what she hopes will be achieved there. “COP should be seen as a moment when we need to shift into high gear, rather than something you physically have to be at. Please let the outcomes be instructions and ambition rather than targets.”
Until COP, Sacha and her team have hundreds of miles to travel, some more pre-dawn alarms, and more inspiring people to meet. “I’m trying to make the narrative around solutions,” Sacha says. “Everyone I talk to wants to be the hero in this story, and that’s how we will get more groups all working together.”
You can find out more about Sacha’s trip here.