Swiss family Schworer

For eight years, this family has been going around the world in a sailboat and on a cycle to spread awareness of global warming

How many push-ups can you do?” asks Dario Schworer, Swiss climatologist and adventurer, egging this reporter to join him. “I can do 2-300,” he says, suiting action to words — one, two... and then stands up. “See, I said 2-300, not 200-300.” It is Schworer’s way of breaking the ice.

Speaking of ice, it was the melting ice on the Swiss Alps that made Schworer realise the need to create awareness of global warming. He gave up his job, and set out along with wife Sabine, a nurse and keen climber, and savings of 2,00 Swiss Franc. Their aim: to circumnavigate the globe using only human and natural energy so as to leave as small a carbon footprint as possible.

 

That was in 2002. In the last eight years, TopToTop Global Climate Expedition, or the Top-To-Top Schworer family as they are better known, has sailed over 70,000 km in a solar-powered, wind-driven sailboat, climbed 400,000 metres, cycled over 18,000 km and met over 47,000 students.

When outside the ambit of the expedition, they use public transport. Flying is limited to emergencies, like when Noe, the Schworer’s son, had to undergo surgery.

The Schworers were in Bangalore for 10 days early this month, at the end of a three-month clean-up operation in the Himalayas. They are in Thailand now, where their boat is being overhauled. From there they sail past Kochi and on to Africa.

The Schworers’s itinerant life may sound adventurous, but it hasn’t been easy. Once, remembers Schworer, they spent 56 days at sea, just waiting for the winds to turn to get them closer to land. Their daughter, Salina, was a year old then and Sabine was pregnant.

“We hope the next generation is able to see Nature as more than a physical entity,” says Schworer, explaining what motivates him to continue. “Look at Bangalore. I was told it used to be much cooler here. Now everyone uses ACs. If only people used more pushbikes, there would be less pollution, cooler weather and no expenditure on AC. Your quality of life improves.”

Interacting with schoolchildren is an important part of the expedition. “We don’t want to be missionaries; we don’t offer solutions. We ask the children for solutions to the planet’s problems. Their brain is not filled up like ours. They have creativity. They join us online in support, or for clean-up programmes in their areas,” says Schworer, who is in his early 40s.

The world is a classroom for the three Schworer children, aged between one and five years. Noe is the youngest ever to be at the Everest base camp. They stay about three months in a country, attending school whenever they are in one place long enough. They’ve recently been in classrooms in Shanghai, Kathmandu and now Bangalore. They are home-schooled on the boat with their lessons arriving “in a box”. “Children are very adaptive — much more than we are — and adapt to a new culture easily,” says Schworer.

Schworer points out how, globally, more and more children are staying indoors, playing videogames. “If you want to save the planet, kids need to experience Nature; not just see rain forests on National Geographic or Discovery.”