VERO BEACH — Famed explorer and environmentalist Roz Savage will be in Vero Beach this Wednesday, March 20 to deliver a 7 p.m. lecture at the Emerson Center as part of ORCA’s Planet and Ocean’s speaker series.
The first woman to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean – and the Indian Ocean – and the Pacific Ocean – the Guinness World Record-holder is in high demand as a speaker. Her first visit to Vero Beach will come in the middle of a intercontinental lecture tour with more than a dozen stops in March and April, including six lectures at various locations for the Royal Scottish Geographical Society prior to Vero and stops in San Jose, Newport Beach and at Yale University afterward.
A British native who lives in Sussex, England, Savage was a successful management consultant in London when she had what she calls “an environmental epiphany” and decided she had to do something to better understand and help wake others to the plight of planet earth.
“I’d rowed at Oxford, so that was enough to give me some confidence that I might be able to do [the trans-oceanic rowing missions, and] it was unusual enough to draw people’s attention to the environmental message,” Savage says.
It took her 103 days to cross the Atlantic, by herself without a chase boat, 154 days to get from one side of the Indian Ocean to the other, and 249 days to cross the vast Pacific in three stages.
She says she had nothing but her thoughts to occupy her mind during the 2005 Atlantic crossing but took along books on tape when she rowed the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Physical challenges included “tendinitis in my shoulders and salt water sores on my backside.”
At the Emerson Center she will talk about her “eyewitness account of environmental challenges, particularly in regard to the oceans, and general thoughts on what we need to do for a sustainable future.”
An inspirational introduction to Savage and her work can be found here: http://vimeo.com/39953815
Tickets for the lecture on Wednesday can be purchased at www.TheEmersonCenter.org or by calling 772-778-5249.