Dick Sblog

Back from Borneo after a very successful expedition, I was faced with a virtual mountain of email. Tucked away in my inbox was a message from my old friend Robin Hanbury-Tenison. Robin led the 1977-78 Royal Geographical Society Expedition to the Gunung Mulu National Park in Sarawak, on the island of Borneo. Although I wasn’t on that trip, the discoveries made by a small group of my friends sparked a 30 year love affair on my part – returning again and again to explore the network of caves within Mulu’s hollow-mountains.

For those who don’t know, Mulu now contains the largest natural underground chamber in the world , Sarawak Chamber,  (which is big enough to accommodate 42 jumbo-jets without overlapping their wings) and also the 6th largest Chamber; it has the largest single cave passage in the world, Deer Cave, and the longest cave in S.E.Asia, Clearwater. The Clearwater System, which has been the focus of much of our work in recent years, is now 177.6km in length, which makes it the 8th longest cave in the world. You can find out more on the Mulu Caves Project website.

That original expedition fielded a huge, multi-disciplinary team of scientists who, for 15months, studied Mulu’s beautiful rainforests. The expedition was a stunning success.

In another email, I found that my co-Director had won a contract for me to write a business plan for an educational initiative in the south west. This project aims to bring together small groups of highly-skilled graduates from around the world to work in multi-disciplinary teams undertaking commercial projects. The benefits to the students will be to gain production experience in a high-pressure commercial environment, to learn from each other and to spin out novel ideas to meet the needs of their clients and to generate new innovations. The benefit to their clients will be to have access to that concentration of expertise and creativity, an innovation-tank to solve their challenges.

It’s that last point that’s important. By bringing together people from different disciplines and varied backgrounds, you have the opportunity to apply different perspectives, different ideas and novel thinking; team members spark ideas off each other and innovation is the outcome.

With the challenges facing society – economic meltdown, climate change, mass population migrations, water conflict, peak oil, food shortages (need I go on) we need more opportunities for multi-disciplinary approaches, more chances to bring together creative thinkers, more hope that we can overcome some of the challenges facing us or, more particularly, facing our children.

Anyway, back to Robin’s email… it was a request for me to support the Beagle Campaign. I did so with great enthusiasm and I suggest that you do, too.