Royal Geographical rumpus resolved
19th May 2009
Members of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) have voted against a resolution to reinstate Society-backed expeditions.
At a Special General Meeting at the Society’s headquarters in London, more than 4,000 fellows voted on the resolution; 2,590 (61.7%) voted against mounting expeditions, while 1,607 (38.3%) voted for them.
The meeting was called by a group of fellows including Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Pen Hadow, Chris Bonington and Robin Hanbury-Tenison. They felt the RGS was betraying its original charter by not mounting expeditions of its own.
The last Society-backed expedition was in 1998. Since then it has focused on working with a range of scientific and research projects.
Several fellows had accused the RGS board of ‘losing its way’.
After the vote, RGS President Professor Sir Gordon Conway said: “This vote of confidence in the Society’s policy and leadership means that we will continue to support research and scientific expeditions with a wide range of grants as one of the many ways of delivering our Charter objective of advancing geographical science in a way fit for the 21st century.”
However, one famous RGS member is mounting an expedition of his own. Colonel John Blashford-Snell is leading a party to Lake Roja Aguado in Bolivia where it’s said that a meteorite strike 900 years ago wiped out the Moxos tribespeople.
Colonel Blashford-Snell believes there are people still living in the region and hopes to potentially open it up to the wider world.
“It is hoped that we can come up with some sort of plan for how they can capitalise on their remoteness and get some people in. It is not a question of neocolonialism. We help the people, they help us, and the results help everybody,” he told The Times newspaper.
The 45-day expedition sets off in July.