Connecting the Dots of our Environment While Rowing the High Seas

Rosalind (Roz) Savage of United Kingdom

“My mission is to spread ripples of awareness and behavioral change among us to reduce ocean pollution, habitat destruction, and global warming.”

In this seminar Roz Savage will discuss her efforts to identify and reinforce positive actions we can all take to make a difference, while connecting science with her ongoing first-hand observations on the open waters of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Rosalind (Roz) Savage, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, United Nations Climate Hero, and an Athlete Ambassador for 350.org, is a British ocean rower and environmental campaigner, who in 2010 became the first woman to row solo across the Pacific Ocean in efforts to gain further awareness of global warming and ocean plastic pollution. Coupled with her solo row across the Atlantic in 2005-6, she has now rowed over 11,000 miles, taken 3.5 million oarstrokes, and spent cumulatively nearly a year of her life at sea in a 23-foot rowboat. Roz Savage has been listed amongst the Top 20 Great British Adventurers by the Daily Telegraph, and the Top 10 Adventure Twitters by Outside Magazine. Her book, “Rowing the Atlantic: Lessons Learned on the Open Ocean,” is published by Simon & Schuster.

Roz took up competitive rowing at University College, Oxford, and went on to gain two half-blues in representing Oxford against Cambridge, and to win blades with the University Women's 1st VIII in 1988 and 1989. By 2001, at age 34, she was a management consultant and investment banker whereby she took on a new life of discovery. In 2003 she became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and took part in an Anglo-American expedition that discovered Inca ruins in the Andean cloudforests near Machu Picchu. She then spent an additional three months in Peru, travelling solo and researching her first book "Three Peaks in Peru." Roz ran in the London and New York marathons, finishing in the top 2% of women in each, and has run a personal best of 3 hours 19 minutes. Roz' story was filmed as "A Little Silver Boat in a Big Silver Sea" as part of the ITV1 documentary television series "Is It Worth It?," first broadcast in March 2007 in the UK.