We met up with Mike Horn in Battery Park City near the World Trade Center site, in an area surrounded with high-rise buildings facing the Hudson River. Moored in the small North Cove yacht harbor that sits right in the middle of all that is the Pangaea. The businessmen that gather on the benches around the marina probably have no idea that the compact yacht sitting there had spent over four years conquering the seven continents during the course of an important project he’s working on.
Horn, in a T-shirt, shorts, and sunburned face, looks somewhat out of place in this bustling urban environment.
“I’ve never been a city person. You can always tell when you’re close to a city by the smell,” says Horn. “The cities are full of ghosts and pollution, it all reeks of humanity,” he laughs. It would seem that Horn, who has spent his days surrounded by untouched nature, from glaciers, to jungles, to deserts, is somewhat uncomfortable in this urban environment.
This is perhaps in part what inspired Horn to begin the Pangaea Young Explorers Project (YEP), to take the youth of today, who have grown up surrounded by technology and information. No matter how much knowledge and information they have, they have a dearth of life experience. With so many parents out of the house working from early morning to late at night, there aren’t as many chances for children to learn and experience things by through doing some real work alongside their parents. Horn lamented that there isn’t enough being done for the spiritual growth and development of today’s youth just by taking them through a school curriculum.
“People in the past have always been far more connected to the earth and to nature, but now kids think see earthquakes, tsunamis, and other disasters, and they see nature as a danger, as their enemy,” explained Horn. “It isn’t nature that’s changed. It's just us that have changed.” That’s why I’m teaching them that they can live in harmony with nature, rather than fearing and shunning it.
The project teaches participants basic adventuring skills, from planning a voyage and raising a mast to methods for mountain climbing.
“How many fathers can teach that to their children these days? I mean there are plenty of fathers who will teach their kids to buy this or that car if they get rich,” Horn jokes.
Horn has now become something of a second father to thousands of young people all over the world. But his goals for the Young Explorers Project are more than just to allow young people to experience nature.
“When you get kids of different backgrounds together, once they start to understand each other’s cultures and see through to the one goal they all have, protecting the earth, they can all really come together to overcome obstacles. Couldn’t this be considered part of the process of uniting the world in peace? People have changed a lot over the last ten years. When it should be good enough to hope to have peace and happiness, without thinking too much about other things like money and status, we’ve got too many things on our wish lists. Now more than ever, it’s important to get back to basics.
Horn’s motto, both in adventuring and in life, is “simplify everything.” He explained that whatever it is, when things get big and complicated, you become unable to solve problems that come up. As if to prove his point, he continues to run his voyages with a small, sharp crew of only four. With the success of the Pangaea project being far greater than anticipated, he is beginning to consider establishing local camps in various locations around the world. He plans to continue the Pangaea project even after 2012.