A few more tour dates have been added for next year, which I have listed in the column to the right. As well as these public dates, I’ve also been asked to speak at quite a few schools, colleges and university societies. I’m pursuing a policy of saying yes to all of these invitations – after all, I was given a slab of money to make the Journey of a Lifetime, the least I can do is share the experience – which means I’m going to be nice and busy in 2010.

I gave the Monday Night Lecture at the Royal Geographical Society about the Carterets journey this week (would have blogged earlier, but have been laid up with flu). It was a real privilege, it was good fun and a great way to end the year on a project that, to my suprise, has come to dominate the year.

A whole bunch of friends and family came down to watch, as well as the entire class six of Clearwell Primary School – one of the schools that I visited before and after I went to the islands, and who followed the journey live on this blog. The Society president, Michael Palin, hosted the night and seemed pretty happy with how it went. He also got me very drunk on port at the dinner afterwards. Despite all this dutch courage, however, I never had the guts to ask him to show me his silly walk…

I’ve been asked to go on tour by the Royal Geographical Society, talking about the Carterets trip as part of their regional lecture series next year. I’ll post more details when I get them but, until then, these are the dates I have so far:

February 25, 2010. Stamford Arts Centre, Lincolnshire.

March 30, 2010. Theatr Brycheiniog, Brecon.

May 6, 2010. The Turner Sims Concert Hall, Southampton.

A version of the Journey of a Lifetime doco has been broadcast on the BBC World Service. I missed it (though with any luck some of the those I met in Papua New Guinea did not), but you can catch it here.

I’ve gone through the recordings I made while living on the Carterets islands and picked out a few to listen to here. They say the pictures are better on radio, and I agree:

In church, on Sunday morning

Walking through the food gardens with John Sailik and Ruth Marcella

A school assembly

Talking to Selina Bill

A procession to celebrate the Virgin Mary

Walking into the sea

Note; the links above take you to the excellent archive.org. I haven’t been able to work out how to get them to open in a separate window, so any suggestions would be gratefully received.

This is it, the big time. I’ve been interviewed by BBC Radio Shropshire about the Carterets and the broadcast is going out tonight. All of you within the county borders and in search of a little entertainment this evening, expect it anytime before six pm tonight.

Seriously, it’s a privilege to be able to talk about the Carterets to any and every audience. The first of the two talks I’m giving to the Royal Geographical Society went well this week – or at least they haven’t said I can’t come back to give the second one. I was also asked to speak at the Shropshire Wildlife Trust AGM last night.

Also, great news, a version of the Journey of a Lifetime doco for BBC Radio 4 has been edited down for broadcast on the World Service. Not only an honour but a chance for those people out in Papua New Guinea to hear it. No broadcast date as yet, but watch this space…

I’m pulling together a talk I’m due to give to the Royal Geographical Society about the Carterets journey. I’m speaking twice, firstly to the Society’s City branch on October 6 and secondly at the RGS itself, on December 14.
It’s proven to be a good opportunity to finally tie together some of the loose ideas I’ve been thinking about since before I left for the islands in April. At the time, I remember thinking there was something there, but couldn’t quite form it as a finished idea in my mind.
My basic thinking goes link this (I hope to come back with more scientific data to back all this up):

This year is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. He was born in Shrewsbury, where I live. I even went to the birthday party held for him in town, where lots of people got dressed up in old-fashioned clothes and ate cake.

It is also the 300th anniversary of the first use of coke (a form of coal) to smelt iron. The site of this discovery, now called Ironbridge is described as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. I grew up in Ironbridge.

Ironbridge and Shrewsbury are just 12 miles apart. I cycle or drive that road constantly. Before I left for the Carterets, I couldn’t shake the feeling there was something that linked Darwin, Ironbridge and the islands, but I couldn’t work out what it was.

Now, I think it is this:

• The work that Darwin himself said he was happiest with was his theory of the formation of coral atolls, what he called these ‘curious rings of land’. Essentially, Darwin was the first to suggest that coral atolls naturally formed, rose and eventually subsided beneath the sea.
• On the Carterets, the people are being forced to migrate as their home apparently sinks beneath the sea.
• That migration is a very Darwinian process. Right now, British butterfly populations are migrating north as their climate warms up. In fact 80% of British fauna are believed to be moving slowly north.
• In a sense these migrations are a process of natural selection; those individuals best suited to migration will survive the move.
• But is that to say what is happening to the Carterets is a natural process? If it were only natural, Darwinian subsidence causing the atoll to sink we could say yes it is. But is it?
• The rate of Darwinian subsidence is too slow to account for the dramatic changes seen on the islands.
• So is it something else?
• The use of coal to smelt iron, and the Industrial Revolution it provoked, led directly to CO2-based pollution we see today and which is causing climate change.
• Climate change is causing the sea levels to rise globally.
• Is this enough to account for the destruction wrought to the Carterets? Possibly.
• Climate change is also increasing the incidence and fury of high-tides and storm surges in the region, which literally tear away the sand from which the islands are made.
• Is this enough to account for the destruction wrought to the Carterets? Possibly.
• Would the natural subsidence of the Carterets be made worse by rising sea levels and worse storm surges? Yes.
• If this is the case, then climate change has not so much changed the natural selection game, but has massively upped the stakes.

Is Dan vain enough to put the reviews for his radio programme up on this blog?

Yes he is…

The Independent, Observer, Daily Telegraph, Times and Yorkshire Post all made the Journey of a Lifetime programme their Radio Choice (at least half the credit for this has to go to Simon Elmes, the programme’s BBC producer), and these papers also had this to say:

Daily Telegraph
Dan Box, winner of this year’s Journey of a Lifetime award, made jointly by the Royal Geographical Society and the BBC, chose to make his journey to the Carteret Islands, on the far west of Papua New Guinea. You can hear the waves as he begins his frank and engaging report. But this no idyllic beach. It’s the last staging post to a coral atoll, sinking below those very waves, its people relocating en masse to higher ground on another island. He wants to be of help, not just an observer. And it’s going to be hard.

The Times
The latest winner of the BBC/Royal Geographical Society’s annual competition that enables young journalists to travel far and wide to report on their dream assignment is Dan Box. He went to the remote and low-lying Carteret Islands of Papua New Guinea, whose population is being evacuated to a nearby, higher island because their tropical atoll is, as one of the inhabitants puts it, being “taken back by the sea”. It is one of the first instances of human displacement as a result of global warming. Box’s audio dispatches begin with his admitting to having packed unwisely for the trip – the overcoat, sleeping bag and heavy jumper have to go, for a start – and continue with his reports on a people who, having lost their home and most of their possessions, now have to hack out a new place with their bare hands.

Observer
“It’s our home and we don’t want to leave it but we are leaving it because the sea doesn’t want us to live there.” Residents of Papua New Guinea’s low-lying Carteret Islands, forced to evacuate because of rising sea levels, talk with a surprising lack of bitterness to Dan Box, the latest winner in the BBC and Royal Geographical Society’s annual competition for a “dream journey” project. Box is not the most penetrating interviewer, but is a sympathetic and respectful presence. SB

Yorkshire Post
Young journalist Dan Box decided to explore global warming by travelling to the remote and low-lying Carteret Islands, in Papua New Guinea, whose population is being evacuated to a nearby, higher island. Dan risked life and limb to travel through stormy seas to witness the first men and women to leave their home, after the Carterets were inundated in a huge storm. Most of the fertile land was rendered unusable and evacuation became inevitable.

Make up your own mind here.

This is Nel, my wife.
If you look closely around her neck, you can just see the two strings of shell money sent out to me by the Carteret Islanders for our wedding. The shell money was a completely unexpected gift, from the people of Group 4 on Han island, where I lived for a couple of weeks (the islands have a very democratic social system, with the people divided up into groups, each with a set of responsible elders). Having left PNG and arrived home, I got a phone call from one of the islanders out of the blue saying they had made the shell money and needed to get it to me in time for the wedding – they wanted me to be able to pay bride-price on the big day.

The islanders couldn’t afford to post it to me, so I arranged for a couple of aid workers I know in Buka to pick it up and send it on.
When it arrived, it was beautiful. Two long strings of tiny white and black shells, each string a couple of metres long. Ruth, my friend from the islands and who had been given the task of travelling to the mainland to get the shell money to me, later told me that each of the thousands of shells was harvested by hand from the coral reef that encircles the islands. The shells can only be harvested at low tide, and are then brought back to the islands where each has a hole cut in it. They are then each polished with a special stone and then strung onto the cord. Ruth says it took five women months to do all the work.
The islanders wanted us to use the shell money in the wedding ceremony itself, and were very specific as to how it should be used. Fortunately, I was able to work out a way to accommodate this with our registrar, who was really surprisingly cool about the whole thing. Maybe she gets strange requests from the South Pacific all the time. After the exchange of rings, I took the shell money and hung it around Nel’s neck, and clasped it between her hands, before we kissed. According to Ruth, doing so also sends out a message to all the other men that this girl is now mine and off-limits to anyone else who may be interested. Or, in pidgin, Nel has become Mary blong me.

East, Dan, east. The Carteret Islands are in the east of Papua New Guinea. Not, as you said three times in the course of the programme, the west. Idiot boy.

That apart, I really enjoyed listening to the programme (which can be downloaded here), maybe more than anyone else who did. I could remember every moment; the heat, the music, the taste of the fish eyes…

Simon Elmes at the BBC did a great job stitching it all together and I’m really proud to have worked with him on it. The programme has also been made the Radio 4 ‘podcast of the week’. My Aunty Sue says they should give me a badge.

Latest news: This just in from the Carteret Islands…

Coincidentally, my friend Ruth Marcella from the islands called me this morning from Buka, where she is working on a Bible-translation project. She had no idea about the broadcast, nor opportunity to hear it. But she did bring me up to date with the latest news:

The initial evacuation (of five men, who were the fathers of five families) to the mainland has hit understandable troubles: Of the five who formed the first wave of migrants leaving the islands to build new homes on the mainland, three have returned to the islands. Apparently, they were finding it too hard living in a new place and being apart from their families. Three men have been chosen to replace them and are expected to make the journey soon. The gardens that have been planted by the original five men, however, have begun to bear fruit and veg and with this food available, the remaining two men can send for their families to join them.
 
Better news is that the Bougainville government seems to have secured an agreement with the tribal owners of a large area of the mainland, on which the government plans to establish a resettlement area for the entire atolls’ population. This is very hopeful, although progress is very slow and there is a chance the agreement may yet fall through.
 
A number of the islanders will be travelling to Copenhagen for the climate change talks in December. Good. I do not know who is organising this, though imagine it is an Aussie NGO. Ursuala Rakova will be one of the group and I hope to have a chance to catch up with her, though am not as yet sure how (any ideas gratefully received).