The Life Cycle E-Book

Kate Rawles

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 677

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

'A gripping read for anyone who cares about what we're doing to the planet and how we can change it' DAVID SHUKMAN, FORMER BBC NEWS SCIENCE EDITOR 'Searing observations focused on our need to protect biodiversity - A tour de force' SIR TIM SMIT OBE, CO-FOUNDER OF THE EDEN PROJECT 'An informative, uplifting and truly important book' JONATHON PORRITT, AUTHOR AND CAMPAIGNER One woman's journey through South America - and the devastating story of our planet's disappearing biodiversity Pedalling hard for thirteen months, eco adventurer Kate Rawles cycled the length of the Andes on an eccentric bicycle she built herself. The Life Cycle charts her mission to find out why biodiversity is so important, what's happening to it, and what can be done to protect it. From the Pacific Ocean to rainforests and salt flats, Kate learns that armadillos can cross rivers by holding their breath, that Colombia has more species of birds than North America and Europe combined, and that in threatening ecosystems, we're tearing down our own life support system. En route, she witnesses the devastation of goldmining and oil drilling but finds hope in the incredible people working to regenerate habitats and communities. As she reaches the 'end of the world', she realises that to tackle biodiversity loss we all have a role to play.

Leseprobe

Praise for The Life Cycle

‘Kate Rawles is quite simply the best travelling companion you could dream up. Her conversational style, ear for an anecdote and searing observations focused on our need to protect biodiversity is a tour de force … I finished the book with a sense of regret that the adventure was over, inspired by the awesome and deeply melancholy at the hells she visited along the way. Welcome to the complexity of the real world.’

SIR TIM SMIT OBE, co-founder of the Eden Project

‘Profound and funny, philosophical and gritty, this book shares both the pain of an incredibly brave woman traveller and the enchantment as she meets the pioneers of lifestyles that seek to restore biodiversity rather than exploit it. A gripping read for anyone who cares about what we’re doing to the planet and how we can change it.’

DAVID SHUKMAN, former BBC News science editor and visiting professor in practice at the LSE’s Grantham Research Institute.

‘Rawles built a bamboo bike for one, but with this book she takes each reader on her heart-wrenching and heart-warming ride through South America and into the pounding soul of the vibrant biodiversity we have ignored for way too long.’

CHRISTIANA FIGUERES, co-host of the Outrage and Optimism podcast and former head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

‘The Life Cycle’s pace is brisk, the vistas magnificent, the many characters encountered along the way compellingly and entertainingly brought to life. Even the all-important diversions … leave one feeling stronger, more resolute than ever to support the causes and organisations she champions. This is such an informative, uplifting and truly important book, making all the right connections across many different areas of concern.’

JONATHON PORRITT, author and campaigner

‘Kate’s epic 8,000-mile journey on a bamboo bicycle was a fabulous adventure, but she also harnesses the power of adventure to inspire environmental action by bringing to life the tragedy of biodiversity loss that requires profound systemic change to tackle.’

ALASTAIR HUMPHREYS, author, adventurer and host of the Living Adventurously podcast

‘This fabulous book will make you want to live more fully, buy less junk and appreciate our world more. It will also make you want to rewire the whole economy and scream about the mess we are making. And it will make you want to jump on your bike.’

MIKE BERNERS-LEE, author of There is No Planet B

‘Riveting, poignant and laugh-out-loud funny. From the “heart of the world” in Colombia to the devastating lead mines in Peru and from the coloured lakes of Bolivia to the final breathless dash for Ushuaia, The Life Cycle is un-put-downable. Its imagery will stay with you long after the last page is turned. From her own extraordinary endurance – and the stories of those she met along the way – Rawles has conjured up a kaleidoscopic “cosmovision” for our times: a passionate call to fight for the soul of the natural world – and, in doing so, to rescue our own.’

TIM JACKSON, author of Post Growth: Life After Capitalism

‘The Life Cycle will change your life. Or it should. Here is one of those rare flowers of a story whose message is as powerful, and urgent, as the beautiful writing used to tell it. It will move you, as it did me. Open it, but don’t just read it. Savour it.’

Carlos ZORRILLA, environmental activist, writer and photographer

‘Kate Rawles is an extraordinary woman – keen adventuress, intrepid cyclist, curious thinker, passionate environmentalist and a fabulous storyteller. Riding with her along high Andean roads but also through terrifying traffic, we get fascinating insights into people, environmental projects and the threat to biodiversity and our beautiful planet. I loved this book.’

ANDREA WULF, author of The Invention of Nature

‘An epic tale, passionately and powerfully told, which is less a simple travelogue and more a call to arms for urgent action to save our planet’s precious biodiversity … Rawles is an authentic, compelling narrator who acts as a living epitome of the eco-values she espouses … A deeply thought-provoking and essential read.’

REBECCA LOWE, author of The Slow Road to Tehran

‘A beautifully written story of eco-adventure and eco-pilgrimage … It is as much an inspiring travelogue as it is a plea to care for the diversity of life on our precious planet … an enchanting narrative told passionately by an eco-warrior. Reading this book is an immensely engaging and entertaining as well as heartbreaking experience. Read this book, you might become an eco-activist!’

SATISH KUMAR, editor emeritus Resurgence and Ecologist and founder of Schumacher College

‘In this remarkable journey, Kate Rawles brings the biodiversity crisis to vivid life. And she does it in a way that is at once thrillingly gripping, intimately heartbreaking, touchingly funny and full of fierce hope. This is a book about perseverance and determination … Few books have illuminated so clearly and honestly what is at stake. A magnificent, inspiring and unforgettable ride.’

JULIAN HOFFMAN, author of Irreplaceable

‘I was captivated by Kate’s unique ability to take such complex and paramount matters and craft them into a thrilling, meaningful and accessible story … The Life Cycle will be taking pride of place on my bookshelf’.

JENNY GRAHAM, world record-breaking endurance cyclist, presenter and author

‘A call to arms to protect what’s left of our precious natural world. Kate’s explorations open up new perspectives, helping us understand how our daily choices impact on people and species that may be far away, but with whom we are intimately linked and co-dependent.’

HELEN BROWNING OBE, organic farmer, author and CEO of the Soil Association

To environmental and community activists everywhere – and especially in South America

First published 2023

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

www.iconbooks.com

Copyright © Kate Rawles, 2023

The right of Kate Rawles to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-178578-787-4 (hardback)

ISBN 978-178578-788-1 (ebook)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Typesetting by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India.

Printed in the UK.

CONTENTS

About the Author

Introduction: The Fish Story and Other Cameos

PART 1Colombia

1.North is not the Direction of Cape Horn

2.Monkeys, Turtles and Fish

3.Into the Mountains and Meeting the Sloth Lady

4.The River Has Got Us

5.All That Glitters …

6.Bamboo is Brilliant

PART 2Ecuador and Peru

7.Into Ecuador

8.Rainforest

9.Volcanos of the Mind

10.Cats, Mice and the Ministry of Sardines

11.Darkest, Flat Peru

12.Friends in High Places

13.Think Like a Mountain

14.Heavy Metals

15.Guano, Doughnuts and Condors

16.Old Forests, New Roads

17.Buen Vivir

PART 3Bolivia, Chile and Argentina

18.Edgelands

19.The Critical Perspective of Rebellious Spirits

20.Birds and Bees

21.The Atacama Desert

22.Happy New Year

23.Patagonia Park

24.Penguins at the End of the World

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Notes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kate Rawles is a writer, cyclist and former university lecturer in environmental philosophy who uses adventurous journeys to raise awareness about environmental challenges. She writes for a range of publications, is a mountain and sea-kayak leader and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. She lives in Cumbria.

INTRODUCTION

The Fish Story and Other Cameos

I am young, perhaps ten. A small scrap of a kid, mess of pale blonde hair, walking alone along Aberdeen beach in Scotland. Where my parents are or why I am alone is not clear. The beach is clear, though – that long, long stretch of dark wet sand, a thick grey/dun wedge between the road and the receding tide. In a line along the length of the beach are occasional structures that look like goal posts; a wooden frame with a net across the back, designed to catch fish as the tide goes out. Between them drives a man with a tractor and trailer. He plucks thrashing fish from a net and throws them onto the trailer. Then he drives across the sand to the next one to do the same.

I’ve walked up to one of the nets he’s already been to and can see that he’s left some of the fish behind. They are still alive. I lift one – cold, wet, grey, pulsing – and carry it carefully back to the sea where it swims fast and downwards, disappearing in a cloud of sand and saltwater. Then I walk back for the next. I’m completely absorbed in this task of fish rescue.

Suddenly the man and the tractor are right alongside me. There is a smell of diesel and hot machinery. The man is angry. Very angry. These fish are the most valuable, he shouts, and he was leaving them until last so they were as fresh as possible when they reached the fish market. I’ve been liberating his best catch.

The memory fades with me standing there, small and scared next to the big man and the big tractor and the trailer-load of writhing animals. What did I think I was doing? I hadn’t given it much thought. I remember how obvious it seemed – in the way things appear clear-cut when you are ten – that I should take the fish back to the sea. And I remember how right it felt as each one disappeared into the shallow waves; the knowledge that I had saved at least a few of these creatures from a slow, suffocating death gratifying in a way that left a mark.

I’ve often wondered since then. Do most people feel as I do about other living things? Or like the man, who, after all, was only doing his job?

December 2016. I am standing with a heavily loaded bicycle on a cold Calais dockside, beside a massive blue hull. The ship is so huge I can’t take her in all at once. Towards the bow, a towering slice of off-white, multi-storey accommodation block with windows and railings stretches skywards, an external stairway zigzagging its way up each level. At the stern, the words ‘CMA CGM Fort St Pierre, Marseille’ are painted in white on the half-moon-shaped rear; thick, rust-coloured stains running in frozen motion down through the words from the railings above. The ship is in turn dwarfed by a gigantic gantry, the crane arm temporarily suspended above us.

A man in black and white checked trousers and an immaculately white T-shirt has come down a precarious-looking stepladder to find me. He introduces himself as Christian, from the Philippines, the passenger steward. He’s joined by a man in navy overalls and a hi-vis vest. I start to take the panniers off the bike, but they stop me with hand gestures and wave me to stand aside. Christian holds the bike while the other man attaches a thick, grubby loop of grey webbing to the frame, front and rear. I watch in astonishment as the bike – complete with handlebar bag, map case, two front panniers, two bulging back panniers and several bungeed-on dry bags – is hauled up parallel to the side of the ship, dangling unceremoniously at a mildly alarming angle. I wait for the panniers to tumble off. They don’t. Instead, there’s a shout.

‘Take it in!’

An arm appears and my bike disappears over a railing and into the belly of the boat.

I made the bike, Woody, myself, from bamboo. Or at any rate, the frame is bamboo.* I learned how to build it at a workshop in London, run by the Bamboo Bicycle Club. Most of the bamboo they use comes from China – I wanted to find a more local source. We did: a thick cluster of tall gold and green plants growing behind one of the massive domes at the Eden Project in Cornwall.

It took about five days to build the bike, a fascinating, occasionally alarming process, starting, quite literally, with a pile of bamboo canes. The first cuts were hair-raising; the unnerving sound of metal on cellulose seared in my memory, alongside the pungent odour of vegetable-based glue. Much cutting, scraping and sandpapering was involved, and a lot of learning how to use equipment I’d not encountered previously – jigs, vertical cutting machines, high-powered sanders. There was a lot of dust and disorganisation. By the end of it, though, I was riding around the club’s car park on the UK’s first ‘home-grown’ bicycle. Somewhat eccentric in appearance, admittedly, but apparently functional.

I’m not sure where I got the idea that I might be able to build my own bike, never having done so before. I had basic if rusty bike mechanic skills and remember thinking I’d be better able to maintain it on the road if I’d constructed it in the first place. Using bamboo would surely involve some interesting learning curves. Most of all, though, there was an irresistible fit with what the journey ahead – The Life Cycle – was about. I wanted to celebrate and explore the importance of biodiversity, by riding across one of the most biodiverse continents on the planet, causing as little environmental harm as possible in the process. Woody’s joints look like fibreglass but were made from tightly wrapped strips of hemp soaked in vegetable resin, without the chemical pollutants of fibreglass or epoxy. And, while all bikes are pretty good on the carbon footprint front, a bamboo frame has an even lower footprint than steel or aluminium.1 What could be more in keeping than a biodiversity bike ride on a bike that used to be a plant? It made me grin.

As for Fort St Pierre, she is a cargo ship, and I’m about to cross the Atlantic on her. In comparison with flying, this reduces my carbon footprint much more than the bamboo bike does.* I’m heading for Colombia. My plan is to cycle the length of South America, from Colombia to Cape Horn (or as close as you can get to it by bike). I’ll be riding most of it solo, following the spine of the Andes, the longest mountain chain in the world. The journey will take me through an astonishing variety of landscapes and ecosystems; from Caribbean coastline to high-altitude Andean páramo; from cloud and rainforests to the Bolivian salt flats, the Atacama Desert and the classic, spiky, white mountain peaks of the Peruvian Cordillera Blanca. And finally, of course, to the Patagonian Steppe, known for its brutal, relentless, cyclist-soul-destroying winds.

I grew up wanting to be ‘an adventurer’. But I was a weedy, unathletic kid and my image of an adventurer was overly shaped by reading too many books by Wilfred Thesiger walking across deserts on a handful of rice. And by seeing those photographs of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay heavily kitted up, brandishing flags and ice axes, about to ‘conquer’ Everest – the ultimately daunting ice-clad death-zone mountain in the backdrop. In other words, utterly out of reach. There was something else that troubled me, too; something I struggled to articulate about the relationship between adventurers and the chunks of nature they were conquering. Was it possible to adventure in a different way?

It was the bicycle that cracked it for me. A bike is a magician, transforming a journey that would be utterly mundane in a car or on a bus into a mini adventure. On a bike you are really in the landscape you are travelling through. You are not conquering nature so much as being absorbed by it. It’s fabulously low-impact – I once read that a cyclist on a flat road with no wind (if such a thing exists) can do ten miles per peanut, and that bicycles are the most efficient way of moving humans around ever invented. And people treat you differently when you turn up on a bike. You are perceived as vulnerable, a touch eccentric, perhaps, but probably harmless. Uniquely free. With a bike – any bike – the world opens out. An unfit person, as I was as a teenager, can cycle ten, twenty, even thirty miles with minimal training and not too much pain. Over the years, I’ve gone further and further from a very unathletic starting point. If I can do such trips, so could pretty much anyone if they wanted to.*

The idea behind The Life Cycle is one I’ve started to call ‘Adventure Plus’: using adventurous journeys to raise awareness and inspire action on some of our most urgent environmental challenges. Or trying to. My previous attempts were The Carbon Cycle ride from Texas to Alaska, exploring climate change, and a voyage on Pangaea Exploration’s sailing yacht, Sea Dragon, investigating ocean plastic pollution. For The Life Cycle, my focus is biodiversity loss, and it’s been inspired in part by a startling article I read while searching out material for an environmental degree I taught when I used to be a lecturer in environmental ethics.

The article was based on work lead by the Swedish scientist and sustainability expert Johan Rockström, and his team at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. The starting point for the article was the often-made observation that we’ve enjoyed a uniquely stable era in the history of our planet for the past 12,000 years or so. It has been this stability – in relation to climate and sea level, predictable seasons, a thick cloak of forest across the globe reliably performing various ecological functions – that has allowed humanity and the phenomena we call ‘civilisation’ to flourish. Rockström and his team argued that we owed this stable era, the Holocene, to a series of interlocking, self-regulating natural systems such as the climate, carbon cycles, water cycles and so on. Where ‘the safe operating space for humanity’ might lie in relation to these systems was the subject of their research. How far can we push, for example, climate change or chemical pollution or overuse of global fresh water supplies before we get into the danger zone in relation to human life and well-being?* Where are the tipping points that will likely take us over the edge into dangerous – and irreversible – change?

When I first saw Rockström’s work presented visually, I was dumbfounded. The basic model was a circle overlaid on a globe. The circle was divided into ten segments, each representing a major environmental issue. At the centre of the circle, crossing each segment, was a smaller green circle. The green area represented the ‘safe operating space’ – where things are still OK, at least from a human perspective. Red was used in relation to each segment/issue to indicate where we’d transgressed. And the segment that was further out into the red zone than any others, further even than climate change, was biodiversity loss (see plate section).

I couldn’t shake the image of that brutal chunk of red bursting out of the safe zone from my head. Could biodiversity loss really present an even greater threat than climate change? And what must that mean, in terms of actual, living animals and plants?

We are currently losing species of both at such a rate it has been called the ‘sixth great extinction’ caused, for the first time in earth’s history, by a single species – us. As someone who would undoubtedly be diagnosed with biophilia,* it felt right on a personal level to make this the focus of my journey. I have always been an animal kid, the toddler drawn like a magnet to animals of any size, tame or wild, friendly or fierce; the exasperating child who kept snails in jars and constantly pleaded to have a dog and tried to rescue fish. I’ve become increasingly enamoured of plants too. But if the analysis that Rockström offers is accurate, then this issue of ‘biodiversity loss’* is one that everyone should care about – because of the implications it has for the stability of earth’s life support systems. Our life support systems.* Yet this cataclysmic draining away of life has had relatively little press, eclipsed by climate change (immensely important though that is).

And so, as I pedal south on the longest bike ride I’ve ever attempted, I will be looking for answers to some of the questions that Rockström’s diagram raises. I’ll be visiting a wide variety of conservation-related projects and people, from grassroots, community-based forest regeneration to a school whose entire curriculum is based on turtles; from local advocates of sustainable fishing to a former radical priest, now a member of the Peruvian Senate. I’ll be cycling through some of the most biodiverse landscapes on earth, and some of the most ecologically degraded. And I’ll be exploring, not just mountains – much as I love mountains – but biodiversity. What is it? What’s happening to it? Why does it matter? Does its loss really present us with as great a threat than climate change? And if so, what can be done to protect it?

Climbing the steeply angled stepladder that leads up beyond Fort St Pierre’s hull, I realise I have no idea what my time on board will be like. I am reassured by the friendliness of the crew – or at least the Filipino crew. There are big, smiley hellos and lots of ‘welcome ma’ams’. The officers are all French and, when I see them, are much more reserved.

My accommodation is generous. An en-suite cabin, with a comfortable bed, a small desk and a view out across the vast deck. This becomes a view of orange metal as the ship is loaded and the stacks of containers mount up to my level. There are just two other passengers on board – Alicia and Olivia from Austria. We bond over our first meal together, which, like all our meals, must be eaten in the vicinity of the officers’ table, though we are separated from them by a screen (and from the rest of the crew altogether – they eat in a different location we never find). I arrive exhausted from the inevitable pre-big-trip preparations, and spend a lot of the voyage sleeping, catching up with the many jobs you can do even without Wi-Fi, and while sitting on deck watching flying fish. As we steam west, each day is warmer, and Alicia, Olivia and I become fast friends, allies in exploring the ship and in the aim of securing permission to descend to the cargo decks and sway down the long, narrow walkway to the bow for sunset wave-watching. The crew are about 30 in total, living on board for months at a time. On Sundays we are invited for a lunchtime glass of champagne with the senior officers. On Friday nights, it is karaoke with our Filipino shipmates. Apart from the cargo deck, we have the freedom of the vessel, including the bridge, provided we do not speak to the captain during manoeuvres.

The journey up to that magical point of departure had been turbulent. To turn The Life Cycle from an idea into reality, I had to take a large chunk of time off work. This didn’t seem unreasonable. It had been ten years since I had done something similar and, upon returning, I could feed my adventures and what I’d learned into my teaching, like a minor Indiana Jones.

My head of department hadn’t quite seen it that way. Instead of offering me unpaid leave, she suggested I resign.

‘Kate,’ she’d said, visibly supressing a smile, ‘if we can manage without you for a year, how can I justify your salary?’

‘Kate,’ a friend echoed later, his face cracking into a grin as I recounted this tragedy, ‘the system just spat you out. And maybe that’s a good thing.’

Chris, my ever-supportive partner, was prosaic. Over a particular Scottish liquid especially crafted for moments of crisis and inspiration, he pointed out that I didn’t earn much anyway and that he could cover my share of the bills while I was away – and lend me what I needed for the journey until the bestseller came out.

Having always been keen on independence, this offer felt problematic as well as fabulously generous. The clincher came by cliché: a book that changed my life. It was written by Bill Plotkin, a North American writer and environmental activist, and, as I read it in my van on wet days on a camping/cycling holiday, a cluster of words leapt out from the page:

If you can find the intersection between something you are passionate about, and something the world actually needs, that sweet spot will be where you are happiest AND most effective.

I wanted to be back on the road, back in the mountains, back on my bike. And I wanted to be a sort of investigative activist, not an academic. The chance to do this, to live my best life while making some kind of contribution, was surely more precious than my financial so-called independence. Plotkin’s words completed the justification jigsaw. I resigned.

On the deck of Fort St Pierre. It is night. We’ve just left Calais. There is a line of ships on the near horizon, sparkling like long jewels between the dark sea and the dark sky. It is beautiful, just beautiful. I feel a huge uprush of sheer excitement. Underway! Heading for Colombia! I have over a year ahead of me. I’ve been set free to do what I most want to do. Woody and I are steaming into the sweet spot.

* Bamboo is, of course, a grass: but ‘Grassy’ didn’t cut it as a name.

* According to Mike Berners-Lee, while a second-class return transatlantic flight would account for approximately 2 tonnes of CO2e, travelling by cargo ship reduces it to around 50kg.

* Well, anyone who enjoys the privilege of having been born into a relatively ‘rich’ society, which grants passports and travel freedom to its citizens.

* These have already been pushed far enough for geologists to argue that the Holocene is sliding into a new era, shaped and dominated by the influence of humans to such an extent it should be called the Anthropocene. This is not a compliment.

* Love of living things, the term coined and explored by the biologist Edward O. Wilson.

* The bland and boring nature of this phrase is dangerously misleading.

* I don’t think this is the only reason to care about biodiversity loss by any means – but it’s a powerful one.

PART 1

Colombia

1. NORTH IS NOT THE DIRECTION OF CAPE HORN

COLOMBIA

Happy Planet Index score: 60.2

Rank: 3rd out of 152*

It’s typical. You set out with a linear idea of what your journey should be and soon discover the world has other plans.

STEFFEN KIRCHHOFF, SHAMANIC MUSICIAN

Cycling out of the coastal city of Cartagena was probably one of the most dangerous things I’ve ever done – right there on the border between brave and stupid.

Before I got going, swaying out of my quiet, temporary haven of a street on the overloaded, unstable-feeling bike, I’d mostly been worried about taxis.

The taxis, flocking the city in yellow, hooting multitudes, turned out to be just fine. The buses, though, were demonic. They were all in some rival warfare with each other, and they blasted past, multicoloured and blaring, cutting up anyone on their inside, focused on outmanoeuvring other buses rather than on the road. I inched out into traffic, stopped at the slightest doubt and pushed the bike across every busy junction. It was still hair-raising. And you can’t focus solely on the buses because the road is prolific with potholes, motorcycles in all lanes and all directions and constantly switching, people pushing carts, and sudden piles of gravel. Out on the coast road, things calmed down slightly, but only slightly. A huge, hot wind was blowing – against me, of course – initially with added sand and grit.

Having changed course to avoid a road that led to a tunnel clearly signed ‘No Cyclists’, I came to a halt at a complicated flyover and asked a man in old jeans and a blue T-shirt, walking in my direction along the gutter, which of the confusing array of roads on offer was the one to Barranquilla. He pointed and then said:

‘Pero es muy peligroso. ¡Peligroso!’ ‘But it’s very dangerous. Dangerous!’

I think I had figured that out by then, but I thanked him anyway.

‘Amen,’ he said, seriously, and shook my hand.

Colombia. Such an evocative word. A country laden with stereotypic associations. Violence, drugs, guerrilla warfare. Pablo Escobar. Football. I had cycled across it on a journey from Venezuela to Ecuador in 1992, when the complex civil war between the Colombian government, crime syndicates, right-wing paramilitary groups and left- leaning guerrilla movements was ongoing. I had returned with very different stories. Me and the friend I was cycling with were both underinformed and full of an idealistic, half-naïve, half-youthful, untainted optimism. To us, the terrible, life-decimating conflict was largely invisible. What we mainly encountered was huge friendliness and astonishingly beautiful landscapes. Enormous mountains that were green all the way to their summits. Music, everywhere: salsa and merengue rhythms ricocheting through villages and towns, exploding from houses and cafés and bars. Fabulous fruit.

What would I find now, 25 years later and less than a year after the official declaration of peace? A country still dancing that strange and dangerous dance between violence that’s long been, as the writer Tom Feiling puts it in Short Walks from Bogotá, part of the fabric; and overwhelming warmth, humanity, humour and hospitality? A country recalibrating itself after almost topping the charts of countries with the highest numbers of internally displaced people (IDP) – over 5 million – and where extreme wealth coexists with the more than 25 per cent who live below the poverty line. A country whose politics, landscapes, conflicts and peoples have been made vivid through literature; homeland of Gabriel García Márquez and a host of modern writers. A country still overflowing with music. A vibrant cycling culture, thanks not least to brilliant Grand Tour riders like Nairo Quintana and Egan Bernal. A country bursting with life, hosting a dazzling variety of species and habitats: the country with the second-highest biodiversity in the world, second only to Brazil.

I was delighted to be back.

If your starting point is Cartagena and you are heading for Cape Horn, Santa Marta is not on the way. Santa Marta lies about 150 miles up the coast to the north-east. But, with invites to visit a cluster of environmental projects in that direction, it seemed like a small and worthy detour. One invitation – to meet a woman called Manuela Perez – had especially caught my imagination. Manuela worked with local farmers on forest regeneration and rural sustainability in the mountainous Sierra Nevada area. Visiting her offered the prospect of diving straight into some big questions about how biodiversity conservation can be achieved in a way that also enhances our quality of life: a great way to start the journey. Which is why Woody and I were launching ourselves into the Cartagena traffic and heading north instead of south.

Ferocious winds dominated the rest of that day. They were relentless. We slogged along in the blistering heat, the slowness not only wind-related. Maintaining cycling fitness on a cargo ship is not straightforward.* As for Woody, he was almost completely untested. Aside from his eccentric appearance, there was a question mark over whether he would hold together when faced with the open road.

The road ran alongside the sea. The sea looked unfriendly, a dark khaki colour, littered with off-white waves. After a while we left the coast for what was, to me, a strange new landscape. I’d never seen mangroves and cacti in the same place before. Road signs promised anteaters, snakes and geckos. In between roadworks and stretches of low, tangled woodland, hotel developments were sprouting up alongside the occasional golf course. Sometimes there were cattle and white cattle egrets and once a cluster of black vultures, hopping around a roadkill. Not me, at least not yet.

Finally, after the hardest 38 flat miles I’d ever ridden, I turned off for Galerazamba, where I knew there was a hostel. I felt both intensely alive and alarmingly tired. Let’s not even think about the mountains at this point. You don’t have to climb the Andes today. The small town at the junction – a cluster of roughly built houses – unexpectedly unnerved me. There was visible poverty, a lot of people milling about and a sudden outbreak of shouts directed at me, most of which I didn’t understand. I felt elsewhere, a bit out of my depth and a little ashamed of the feeling; the elegant and easy-going Cartagena tourist quarter already far away. After the town, the road ran along sandy, wooded strips of land with rivers full of people swimming and washing motorbikes. Then no one.

I was at crawling pace by the time I saw a sign saying ‘Hostel’. The sign pointed in two different directions. One led to a corner of a building with no door. The other to a huge iron gate, behind which were two loudly barking, lightly slavering Dobermans. No bell. No sign of humans. A woman walking by confirmed this was the hostel. The only hostel. She took out a mobile and rang someone. Then explained, patiently, in basic Spanish, that the chico running the place was having dinner and would be back soon. I should wait. I waited. Eventually the chico turned up, jeans, black jacket, black hair and a big smile, went through the huge gates and caught the dogs, depositing them where we could still hear their outraged cries at confinement. Inside the gates, a big open space, various buildings, a few short trees in the dwindling light. I was led to a large room full of bunk beds. Electricity? No. Drinking water? No. Two other travellers arrived, and we walked along sandy tracks, hopping with small frogs, through the darkness to a small store, candlelight flickering across faces, fruit and shelves of tins.

Later, sitting in a saggy chair, eating bread, cheese and apples and slowly coming to, I found myself grinning. It was good to be here.

Day two turned out to be an intensive refresher course on bicycle travel for a rusty, unfit gringa. Having survived it, I wrote the following in my journal:

Lesson One: No matter the distance, you will always arrive late.

At times so strong I have to get off and cling to the bike to stay upright, the headwinds slow me down more than a little. It takes me all day to ride relatively few miles and I have the unnerving sense that I am encountering a law of (my) cycling that will likely apply across the entire trip. End result: loss of daylight. And so:

Lesson Two: Cycling in the Dark. As a general rule, avoid it.

Cycling in the dark is a wonderful thing in many circumstances, but not as an introduction to the city of Barranquilla.

I assume that finding somewhere to stay in populous Barranquilla will be a breeze after Galerazamba. But I end up slogging uphill on a never-ending main street in fast-fading light with horrible traffic – then weaving about looking for cheap hotels that appear on the maps.me app but not on the ground. After the third one fails to materialise and it is pitch-dark but still traffic-crazy, I bump into a ‘Park Inn’ complete with liveried doorman. Deciding my life is at stake, I tentatively enquire about the price of a room. Expensive. Though not the multiple $100s expensive I am expecting. I put frugality on hold, pull out the emergency credit card and am abruptly transported into off-the-road, air-conditioned, double-bed luxury, Woody leaning against the mini-bar.

The hotel was posh in a very Latin way: on my way down from my twelfth-floor room (the lift wasn’t working), I found several floors still under construction. Steel poked out of concrete and glassless window-holes gave out to dizzying squares of cityscape below.

The next day, I’d come up with a super-smart plan to outwit the traffic by taking a minor road out of town close to the sea. I found myself cycling with a razor-wired industrial site on one side and acres of grim-looking favelas separated from the road by a thick sludge of water on the other.

A woman on a scooter overtook and flagged me down.

‘¿Adónde vas?’ Where are you going?

‘Santa Marta.’

The route from Barranquilla towards Santa Marta involves crossing a road bridge, some distance ahead. She shook her head in horror.

‘¡Muchos rateros!’

The literal translation is ‘many pickpockets’ but her throat-slashing sign language suggested something rather more unpleasant. In the decision to escape the traffic it hadn’t occurred to me that I might be venturing into perils of another type, the stereotype of dangerous Colombia long displaced in my head by that of friendly, helpful and beautiful Colombia.

My scooter guardian insisted on escorting me through the industrial site on the ‘quiet coast road’ all the way to the bridge, stopping at checkpoints to inform the officers there of the stupid gringa on a bicycle with panniers full of presumably valuable stuff. Finally, we reached the bridge junction where she pulled up at a parked police van and explained the situation. The policeman grinned, shook his head and then my hand and waved me onto the bridge the wrong way up a slip road and into a gap in the traffic. Taking a cue from a motorcyclist, I heaved Woody up a steep curb onto the pavement through a miniscule pause in the blistering truck conveys and caught my breath in the now truly sweltering heat. The pavement was bumpy and potholed but at least it was out of reach of the HGVs.

Not far on the other side, in an area lined with shacks, small houses and stalls, I met a touring cyclist! First of the trip. I was to meet many more but, at that point, Tom-from-Australia seemed downright astonishing. He had just turned south from Santa Marta, having cycled there from Ushuaia in Patagonia – pretty much as close as you can get to Cape Horn on a bike, and hence, my destination. We chatted at the hot, noisy roadside. Barranquilla had left me resolved to avoid cities altogether as my best chance of survival, fast followed by the realisation that this was not a feasible option. Talking with Tom, I was unnerved to notice myself feeling something close to incredulity that a cyclist had journeyed the entire length of South America and survived. I told him about my encounter with the ‘quiet road’ and he grinned.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I always take the traffic over people with guns. In cities, you should stay on the busiest roads you can find.’*

For the rest of the day, the surrounding lands stayed flat. There were intermittent stretches of sand and the occasional cactus, merging into mangroves and river-fed swamps. Pelicans. And beautiful brown and cream hawks, scavengers, presumably, as I often saw them on the road. Occasional explosions of raucous, emerald-green parakeets, their harsh cries ricocheting through the ferocious sidewind.

The sidewind veered to a headwind. Then, quite suddenly, it was getting dark. Having cycled through Barranquilla with no front light, I now had a strong urge to have one. I stopped near a toll station and, something missing from the front-light attachment, taped it onto the handlebar. Then it was off into Colombian small-town chaos: traffic, pedestrians, motorbikes and scooters, cyclists, tuk-tuks, the occasional horse and cart, all moving erratically at different speeds and changing course without warning. I was super-focused on staying upright, not hitting anything, not being hit; on staying alive, essentially. I couldn’t move very fast because of the people wandering in the hard shoulder, making me feel suddenly visible and a bit vulnerable to the wolf whistles – something I had hoped my advancing years would inoculate me against.

Just as I was thinking, OK, this really is not so smart, a sign appeared by a petrol station. ‘Popeye’s: Hotel Restaurant Playa’ A hotel! I pulled over. It was not clear where the hotel actually was, so I asked a pump assistant, a young woman who dealt with my terrible Spanish by miming, ‘Do you want to sleep?’ and laughing a lot. She called someone on a walkie-talkie. Several policemen appeared and then some truck drivers, and eventually, I figured out that I was to leave Woody with them while I went to check in. I was given a key and relieved of about £7, for which I was suddenly safe and off the dark, noisy, traffic-ridden road. Someone insisted on carrying the bike fully loaded down some steps to Room 42, which was small and super-hot. I didn’t care. I felt only relief. After I’d eaten, I lay under a sheet directly below the fan and slept for a good ten hours.

Somewhere in those first few crazy days on the road, I had picked up an email from Manuela Perez. Not only did her work sound fascinating and relevant but she was fluent in English, a significant bonus. As part of my pre-trip preparation, I had diligently attended language classes, to virtually no effect. My Spanish was nowhere near adequate to understand discussions about biodiversity conservation. (Now I was immersed in Spanish-speaking countries, it was bound to get better, right?) Meanwhile, I arranged to meet Manuela in a town called Palomino, an easy bus-ride from the town of Santa Marta, where I had somehow arrived in one piece.

Positioned on the Caribbean coast, Santa Marta is probably where the Europeans first ‘discovered’ what we call South America. Founded in 1525, it is one of the oldest-surviving Spanish towns on the continent. Símon Bolívar retired there having liberated Gran Colombia – now Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Venezuela, parts of northern Peru and north-west Brazil – from the Spanish in the early 19th century.

The hostel I’d been recommended, Casa del Ritmo, was a tonic: a wonderful place, run by musicians, full of music, colour and friendliness. On top of that, it was – perhaps uniquely for Colombia – vegetarian.* A hand-painted sign on the kitchen wall read: ‘Animal Friendly Area. Don’t cook them.’

Next day, I sought out the bus. The route took me east along the coastal road, though I saw little of it thanks to the local custom of travelling with curtains drawn across all windows.

I liked Manuela from the start. A friend of a friend, her work with local farmers on forest regeneration was done under the auspices of an international organisation called Environomica, for which Manuela was the Colombian lead. She was slim, with dark hair and warm smile, a beguiling mix of elegance and sheer toughness, as I soon found out as we set off for one of the farms she worked with.

It took us all day to get there, initially on moto-taxis. We stopped for lunch in the neat, colourful, hamlet of Marney, one of the first towns on the well-known trek to Ciudad Perdida, ‘The Lost City’.

After the meal, we would be heading further inland for the farm, a small, family affair, high in the mountains. It promised to be a dramatic journey. In the space of only 26 miles, Manuela told me, scooping omelette from her plate, the ecosystems change from ocean, to coast, to desert, to tropical dry forest, to tropical humid forest, to páramo – grass and shrub ecosystems above the treeline but below the snowline – to the snow-capped Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the highest coastal mountain in the world, with twin peaks rising to nearly 19,000 feet above sea level. Such diversity of habitat across such a small distance is very unusual, possibly unique.

‘There’s extraordinary diversity in the plants and animals here because of it,’ Manuela said, as we finished eating and settled the small bill. ‘And intensity. You’ll feel it.’

We’d been expecting to travel onwards with the moto-taxis, but they hadn’t returned. The drivers had been called to a meeting, apparently with the paramilitary, who, I learned later, controlled the area in the absence of any kind of government presence. They were said to extort a cut from all tourist-related revenues and to keep a tight rein on, for example, moto-taxi safety, and anything else that could compromise such useful income streams. As a result, the tourists here were among the safest in the world (not a little ironically given the violent, gun-running, drug-running reputation the paramilitary had earned during the civil war), though most never knew why.

We left our luggage at the café – ‘they’ll bring it later,’ Manuela said – and walked. The trail took us up through the rainforest, into the Sierra Nevada. Vivid lime-coloured lizards scuttled across the hot sand-coloured path towards the densely forested, angular, green mountains. As we walked, a machete swinging from Manuela’s waist, we talked about Environomica. Part of the organisation’s work involved job re-creation for cattle farmers.

‘Cattle farming here takes huge amounts of land,’ Manuela said, ‘about ten acres per animal. Every acre cleared of trees.’

If the farmers could make a better living by growing organic cacao or adding value to other products by producing them organically, without the need to fell trees, that was a win–win for the forest ecosystem and the farmers.

Those two interconnected aims – conservation of forest ecosystems and sustainable rural development – wound through everything Environomica did. As we climbed slowly through the lush complexity of foliage, Manuela set out layer after layer of their work. Tree planting, community development, education, research, local engagement … She fizzed with ideas and energy, undiminished by the ever-present heat.

One of the biggest challenges was explaining – to farmers, to businesses, to potential funders, to anyone – why biodiversity matters.

‘People think it’s a luxury, something that may be nice to have, but not essential,’ Manuela said. ‘Couldn’t be further from the truth.’

‘Do you think biodiversity loss is as great a threat as climate change?’ I asked, thinking of Rockström.

There was no hesitation. ‘Yes, definitely,’ she said.

‘Why?’ I asked, and not just because I was short of breath. I really wanted to know what she thought.

‘Well, in a nutshell, biodiversity is our life support system,’ she said. ‘It’s fundamental to our well-being and indeed, survival, in all sorts of ways. We literally cannot live without it.’

‘Literally?’ I asked.

‘Literally,’ she said.

One way Manuela liked to illustrate this involved sunshine.

‘We hear “solar power” and tend to think of panels on rooves,’ she said. ‘But we are solar-powered.’

The sun, Manuela reminded me, is where we get our food energy from. But we can’t access it directly. The only living things that can are plants and other organisms with green chlorophyll – algae, some of the seaweeds – who capture that energy and turn it into carbohydrates, via photosynthesis.

‘It’s an astonishingly important chemical process when you think about it.’

Manuela paused, gesturing towards the lush plant life that bordered the track.

‘It’s going on all around us, right now.’

We both stared at some mundane-looking grass, suddenly imbued with new significance.

‘Everything else alive on earth,’ she continued, ‘bar a few extremophiles who have figured out how to get energy from sulphur in deep ocean vents,* either eat plants – including grass – or things that eat plants. And plants depend on the huge diversity of often tiny organisms that make it possible for them to grow and reproduce. So yes, we literally couldn’t live without plants, or without the myriad lives that make plants’ lives possible. And that’s just one example.’

Manuela’s favoured approach to unpacking this was to talk about how different species of plants and animals all play different roles within ecosystems. Ecosystems depend on this diversity to function and flourish, and this is vital in turn because of the so-called ecosystem services that functioning ecosystems deliver.

‘Ecosystem services include breaking down waste and recycling nutrients to create fertile soil. And pollination. Then there’s fresh air and clean water,’ Manuela said. ‘Also, flood management. Carbon and oxygen cycles. Far from luxuries.’

‘The language of “ecosystem services” is useful, then?’ I asked.

‘I hate it,’ she said. ‘It makes it sound as if the rest of nature is there for us, that nature matters only in relation to what we get from it. But the point is that ecosystem services make life possible – all life, not just our own – and yes, I think the phrase is useful in communicating that.’

An hour or so later, the light fading from the distant mountains, we stepped off the narrow, rutted path to let a train of mules plod slowly past us. They carried bulky loads – luggage and provisions for tourists hiking into The Lost City, a popular four- or five-day trek.

Later we would see the mules on the return journey, sacks now stuffed with rubbish, including hundreds of empty bottles and cans. Most seemed to be Coca-Cola bottles, the distinctive red labels visible through the worn hessian.

Finally, the light gone, we pitched up a steep track and into a small crowd. Manuela, incredibly, did the majority of her Environomica work alone, and I had envisaged that it would be just the two of us at the farm. Instead, we walked into semi-organised industriousness in a small, dimly lit courtyard. There were various Colombians, some of whom turned out to be the farm owners, Wilmer and Sandra, and their visiting relatives. A small huddle of European volunteers were chopping vegetables by candlelight in a corner, closely watched by a dog and two puppies, a cat and some chickens, all criss-crossed by heavily laden washing lines above them. A large water trough seemed to be the main source of drinking and cooking water. I sat in a shadowy corner, disoriented by the hot walk, the sudden busyness and the flickering lights, and slowly figured out how life functioned in the place I’d just parachuted into.

The next morning, emerging banana-shaped from a night in a hammock into the briefly chilly air, I found to my delight that Manuela’s plan for the day involved riding mules. Mine, Lola, was a dark dun, and bold. Looking out over her long ears to the incredible lush complexity of ferns and trees and foliage towards the angular mountains as we rode further inland, I was shot through with happiness. Some of the slopes were visibly scarred and bare of trees from the cattle grazing. But where the hillsides were still forested, I could feel the sheer presence of diverse life as a sort of vital yet peaceful intensity. And hear it, humming and calling and crying and buzzing into the hot blue sky.

Biodiversity isn’t typically understood in terms of the feelings it evokes, though perhaps it should be.

It’s common to think of biodiversity mainly at the species level, the undeniably astounding variety of plants and animals that inhabit the earth. Within that, there’s often an association of biodiversity with ‘charismatic megafauna’ or big, sexy animals, such as polar bears and tigers.

But biodiversity is the variety of all life, and at multiple levels – from genes to species to ecosystems. It is diversity within a species, the myriad genetic variations present in, say, a single species of starfish. It is the dizzying range of ecosystems on our planet, from deep ocean to high mountain and everything in between. And it is also the diversity and abundance of species themselves, from sandflies to blue whales, from starlings to oak trees, from centipedes to silverweed. It is life in our oceans and rivers as well as on land. And it is the small stuff – the critical minifauna – as well as the big, eye-catching stuff; the many millions of small-to-minute organisms doing their all-important ecosystem work.

Biologist Edward O. Wilson sums it up perfectly. Biodiversity, he says, is:

All the variation you find in living creatures around the world: from ecosystems to species to the genes that describe the traits of species – nested levels of biodiversity within the biosphere, that thin and fabulous layer of our planet and its atmosphere that supports all life.1

Manuela and I stopped at a bend in the trail and tethered the mules to a small tree. Its larger, older neighbour – the trunk too wide to loop the reins around – was hung with beards of lichen. A confusion of lime-green ferns sprouted from the rough, grey branch-junctions. At its foot, a fallen, long-dead branch hosted dark orange fungus, the size of small plates, among the myriad of different shapes and colours in the foliage all around us. There must be hundreds of species just here on this trackside, I thought, before we even start contemplating the multitudes living in the soil underneath. About a billion microorganisms in a teaspoon of good soil, I’d read; ‘more bacteria than there are people on earth’ in a tablespoon.2 The thought was dizzying, multitudes in motion beneath our feet, unseen but absolutely vital. Microorganisms are crucial to soil fertility: no microorganisms, no plants.

‘Did you know that soil is one of the largest reservoirs of biodiversity on earth?’ Manuela asked. ‘About 90 per cent of terrestrial organisms spend at least part of their life cycle there. We don’t live in it, but we wouldn’t last long without it.’

Manuela paused. ‘I guess we often think of soil as pretty samey,’ she continued. ‘But soil habitats are actually very varied. So the variety of species they host are extraordinarily varied, too.’

Our planet has a fantastic variety of species in general. So far, about 1.7 million species of plants, animals and fungi have been identified, and just over 1 million species of insects. The estimates of how many species there are in total range from 8 million, to around 100 million.

‘This way,’ Manuela called, bringing me back to the here and now.

I followed as she scrambled up the bank to a grassy plateau where we climbed into a small structure, half-full of young trees. Manuela sat beside one and touched a large, bright green, classically leaf-shaped leaf.

‘They are called mastre, Pterygota colombiana. One of the native species that would be growing here were it not for the cattle,’ she said. ‘We sell them to the tourists trekking into the Lost City. They take a young tree and plant it in a strategically situated, pre-dug hole, helping forest regeneration. Plus, the income from the trees goes into the local community and supports farmers diversifying away from cattle. And the people trekking learn something about the role and value of forests. Forests provide so much we need – from water, to soil stability, to habitat for thousands of species, to taking carbon out of the atmosphere – but so many of us don’t know much about this.’

The Lost City trail tree-planting was only part of Environomica’s ambitious forest regeneration plan. They aimed to plant 10,000 trees a year in the Sierra Nevada region, and to join up numerous forest fragments to create a far-reaching conservation corridor.

Manuela eased back out from among the trees and stood up. ‘And the trekkers get to give something back,’ she added. ‘Buying and planting a young tree helps them leave a positive footprint rather than just stomping in and out of a sacred area, leaving their rubbish behind …’

‘Sacred?’ I asked.

‘Sacred to the Kogi people,’ she said.

The Kogi, whom we encountered occasionally on the trail, walking barefoot in long, white garments, have lived in this area for centuries. They are descendants of the Tairona, the civilisation known for their brilliant engineering; the dramatic buildings and extended pathways they constructed in the jungle, their irrigation systems and the spectacular jewellery and ornaments they crafted from gold.

The Tairona culture extended across the Sierra Nevada region, with a complex trading system between societies from the coast to the mountains. When the conquistadors blasted onto the scene in the 15th century, this system, which had been functioning for five centuries, was violently disrupted.

Initially, the Tairona and the Spanish coexisted. But the cultures were deeply incompatible.

‘What the Spanish saw, when they looked at the Tairona,’ the British historian, writer and broadcaster Alan Ereira tells us, ‘was a society of devil-worshippers in a state of untamed nature. And what the Tairona saw when they looked at the Spanish were savage barbarians with outlandish weapons of extraordinary power.’3

In 1525, a battle centred on Santa Marta was followed by an extended massacre. The Spanish moved along the coast, setting dogs on people, sacking and burning towns, capturing, killing and looting, stealing gold that was sacred to the Tairona. Those who escaped fled through the jungle and headed upwards.

Many starved, and many more were decimated by European diseases, as they were across South America. In the Sierra Nevada region, the survivors hung on in the mountains. With the areas below them now inaccessible, they couldn’t recreate a way of life based on trading. The descendants of the Tairona gradually established a new social order built on simplicity, self-sufficiency and equality. They maintained their core values, including a deep respect for the earth; and they stayed high, surviving the ongoing brutalities of the Spanish invasion by being out of reach.

The Kogi have lived there ever since, doing their best to stay isolated, resist colonisation and the modern world and keep their culture intact. Their greeting to strangers is, ‘When are you leaving?’ Should you need to know anything about how to farm and live well in mountainous terrain, these are the folk to ask. They have now farmed there successfully for more than 1,000 years. Out of touch with everything we in the West think of as ‘progress’, what would ‘living a good life’ mean to them?

It would probably include protecting diversity at the ecosystem level, the diversity the Sierra Nevada is most famed for – that dazzling transition from coast to tropical forest to ice-capped mountains. The Kogi believe that the variety of the Sierra Nevada ecosystems is so comprehensive, in fact, that the region acts as a mirror to the world; that what is happening there, ecologically, reflects what is happening globally.

Despite deliberately eschewing technology and many forms of communication we take for granted in the West, their knowledge of local and global ecosystems, the way they are currently changing and why this matters, largely parallels the same conclusions reached by Western ecological science. Two converging streams of wisdom from utterly different sources. In the Kogi’s case, it is a stream that has continued, unbroken, since before the arrival of the Spanish. Almost everywhere else, the European invaders of America ‘destroyed the worlds they found’.4

Back at the farm, Manuela and I inspected ourselves and each other for ticks and settled in for the evening. Casa del Ritmo had been reasonably basic, but this small farm was much more so. Cold-water bucket showers, no electricity, no telephone and definitely no Wi-Fi. The few days I spent there provided a glimpse into a particular kind of conservation in action, and how people lived in these remote mountain regions. Despite its brevity, it was to prove a deeply affecting visit, a short pause in my new road life that left me feeling alive and appreciative of what each day brought – landscapes, people, conversations, food, water.

For me, a recent arrival from a life of comparative wealth, the absence of Wi-Fi and phone signal and, well, things, felt like a sort of holiday, a release, a kind of liberation. How it would be as a normal state of affairs was another question. I tried to envisage Wilmer and Sandra’s life, the small farm and everything in it, positioned on a quality-of-life spectrum, a tightrope of possessions. Not enough stuff vs too much stuff. Quality of life is undermined, even made impossible, at both ends. When does real poverty begin at one end, and when do our things become a life-eroding trap at the other end? How much ‘stuff’ do we need to be happy? Given that every item has carbon and other environmental footprints, and that these footprints bear down on the natural world, the possibility of being happy with less clearly has implications beyond the personal ones.