Mountain to Climb

Hakan Bulgurlu

Description

On the 23rd of May 2019, Hakan Bulgurlu became one of the fortunate few to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. To stand on top of the world's highest mountain is a humbling experience, to bear witness to nature at its most awe-inspiring and powerful is even more humbling. Bulgurlu's quest to climb Everest came with a purpose: making the environment the centre of his ambition to highlight the catastrophic effect climate change is having on our planet, to lead by example and to seek out practical solutions. He wanted to use the expedition as a wake-up call to what we are doing to the natural world. In his powerful new book, Bulgurlu tells the fascinating story of this adventure of a lifetime, harrowing and exhilarating in equal measure. He delves into the roots of the environmental crisis we find ourselves in, speaking to climate activists and campaigners, biologists, scientists, filmmakers, academics, economists, entrepreneurs, global leaders and innovators. They help shed light on the issues that we face and the solutions that will help secure a better future for generations to come. In this gripping account of his journey, Bulgurlu describes the challenges he faced in reaching the summit, and the challenges we all face in protecting the planet and the future of humanity.

Sujets

• Climate change

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781913532932
• Langue: English

Extrait

‘The big surprise for me was to finish your book in a very short amount of time. It’s surprising because I’ve never read a book so fast from the first page until the last, not even close to it. Your book is inspiring, pedagogical, and incredibly colourful…’
Fatih Birol, Executive Director, International Energy Agency
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‘In A Mountain to Climb, Hakan Bulgurlu uses his life-changing experience from reaching the world‘s tallest peak to transform business as a true force for good. A must-read for all who aspire to learn from this courageous leader.’
Paul Polman, Co-Founder and Chair, Imagine
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‘Hakan’s book is an inspiring story of how purpose can lead to daring personal and professional decisions. This book is a great inspiration for how to transform our business and our lives, as well.’
Feike Sijbesma, Honorary chairman, Royal DSM and Co-Chair, Global Climate Adaptation Center
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‘With his book and passion, Hakan has the ability to inspire many more to take action to tackle climate change. Thank you for the authentic leadership!’
Jesper Brodin, CEO Ingka Group / IKEA
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‘A nice story of a man looking for himself, contrasted with a planet increasingly lost. Humankind will need to climb its own Mount Everest to avoid ecological disaster. Very well written and engaging.’
Thierry Vanlancker, CEO, AkzoNobel

This edition first published in English in 2022
In partnership with whitefox publishing
Copyright © Hakan Bulgurlu, 2021
The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the author would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future editions.
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-913532-92-5
eBook ISBN: 978-1-913532-93-2
To find out more about the author and book, please visit amountaintoclimb.org
Cover design by Salon Couture Books
Designed and typeset by seagulls.net
Printed and bound in Turkey by PrintCenter.com.tr , Istanbul
To Sasha, Andrea and Oscar; and all the children of the pale blue dot.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
On an Island
Feeling the Heat
Mission Accepted
Dead Seas and Skeleton Coasts
Challenge Aconcagua
Ghost Ships and Dark Fleets
Prep, Practice and Permission
A Tidal Wave of Plastic
Nepal, Tibet and Tension
A Throwaway Problem
Base Camp and Acclimatisation
Food for Thought
The Ascent is On
A Natural Solution
The Death Zone
The Business of Climate Change
On Top of the World
Voting for Change
Down to Earth
Epilogue: Good COP? Bad COP?
Acknowledgements
Further reading
‘Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives … every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.’
– Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
Earthrise by Bill Anders. (Source: NASA)
INTRODUCTION

On Christmas Eve, 1968, Bill Anders was one of three astronauts on board the Apollo 8 spacecraft when he saw something out of the hatch window. The mission was the first manned flight to orbit the moon. The craft was on its fourth orbit, emerging from the dark side of the moon, when Anders saw the blue and white of earth emerging out of the deep black of space. ‘Oh my God!’ Anders exclaimed. ‘Look at that picture over there! Here’s the earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!’ Anders reached for his Hasselblad camera to try and capture the moment. The first picture he took was in black and white. Then one of his fellow astronauts, Jim Lovell, found him a roll of colour film. Anders took the shot that would become known as Earthrise – the first colour photo of our planet taken from space.
More than fifty years on, Earthrise remains one of the most iconic pictures of all time, a shot described by nature photographer Galen Rowell as ‘the most influential environmental picture ever taken’. ‘To see the earth as it truly is,’ the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote in the New York Times , ‘small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.’
But for all the undimmed beauty and power of Anders’s photograph, the self-awareness and understanding of who we are has sadly not gone on to be reflected in our stewardship of this solitary jewel. Over the five decades since that photograph was taken, the damage done to the planet has accelerated to the point that scientists now talk of the Anthropocene, a new era in the planet’s history where, for the first time, human activity is having a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.
The world is heating up at a rate that is unsustainable. The signs of climate change are all around us, and yet human behaviour is barely altered in response. Our planet is under threat like never before. There’s evidence of this everywhere, from the bleaching of coral reefs to the melting of glaciers, and in extreme weather events like mass flooding and devastating forest fires. Our oceans are scarred with plastic waste we can see, and microplastics and fibres we can’t. Biodiversity continues to decline. Efforts like COP26, the UN’s Climate Change Conference, are valuable, but the situation continues to be dire, and we are fast approaching a global tipping point. The clock is ticking.
• • •
One of the challenges in talking about the environment is that it is easy for the eyes to glaze over. The problem can feel so large and overwhelming, it’s difficult to know where to start. The easier option is to change the channel and hope that someone else will sort things out. But as Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians worldwide, puts it, ‘Today there are no excuses for our lack of involvement. If we do not choose to care, then we are not simply indifferent onlookers; we are in fact active aggressors.’ If we want to look our children and grandchildren in the eye, then we all need to step up: as leaders, as business people, as individuals.
As a business leader myself, I’ve been on a journey and a half over the last few years to do what I can to make my company more environmentally responsible. I’m the CEO of Arçelik, one of the largest white goods manufacturers in the world. We have a dozen household brands that include Beko and Grundig, and have a workforce of over 43,000 people. We have sales and marketing offices in more than forty countries and twenty-eight production facilities across nine. In total, Arçelik offers products and services in nearly 150 countries.
Under my leadership, Arçelik has continued its long-standing goal of sustainability. For three years in a row (2019, 2020, 2021), the company was the highest scored home appliances company on the Dow Jones Sustainability index – an index which evaluates the sustainability performance of the world’s largest companies.
In 2020, Arçelik became carbon neutral in its global production. For a company our size, in the industry we’re in, and in the country where our headquarters is based, this is no small achievement. By introducing innovative refrigerators with high energy efficiency levels, the company was able to obtain sufficient carbon credits to offset the direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions generated in our global production facilities. It’s a fantastic achievement for the organisation and a testament to the hard work and creativity of our team. Arçelik is the R&D leader in Turkey – we have over 1,600 researchers across the company, and from solar-panelled fridges to microfibre filters on our washing machines, we are constantly looking for ways to make our products better for the planet. I’m not telling you this to boast, but to show you that whatever industry you work in, change is possible. It’s not always easy, but it can be done in a way that is both sustainable for the planet and also for the company’s balance sheet.
When I took over at Arçelik, I inherited the company’s mission statement: ‘Respecting the World, Respected Worldwide’. This ethos was founded with the aim of making our goods as energy efficient as possible. But as CEO, I wanted to widen this out, so that our sustainability goals would grow into every corner of the business. I knew that achieving this would require leadership on my part: if I could find a way to put myself out there, then others would follow.
At the same time, as the father of three young children, I was being asked questions about the environment I was finding increasingly difficult to answer. My eldest daughter, Andrea, now eight, is a big fan of skiing. But each year we went, she asked me about the changes on the slopes. Why is the weather warmer? Why is it raining on the mountain when it should be snowing? Sasha, two years younger, was similarly passionate about animals and animal welfare: not only was she not eating meat, she was quizzing me about why I was. My youngest, Oscar, was so instinctively in tune with nature, climbing trees to pick oranges and pomegranates, that I didn’t want anything to sour that relationship.
Inspired both at work and at home about the planet, and infused with the personal challenge itself, in 2018 I decided to try and climb Mount Everest to raise awareness about the environment. The particular issue that awareness was focused on was the melti