October 20, 1975 - Thor Heyerdahl, Norwegian explorer and anthropologist who sailed across the Pacific on the balsa wood raft Kon-Tiki, speaking at Concordia College.
October 9, 1975 - Heyerdahl speaks as part of a fundraiser for Concordia College in Moorhead. He says the main trouble is what we?re doing to the world ocean, destroying the possibility of living on this planet. We have maintained the vision of the ocean that existed at the time of Columbus; the ocean is not bottomless, not endless. It is much smaller when you climb on a few logs like he did in Kon-Tiki and step off 4000 miles later. If you move the buildings from Manhattan and set them on the bottom of the North Sea all the big buildings will come high above the surface. We see the big rivers draining into the ocean and still it doesn?t raise an inch. We forget about evaporation, what evaporates is the clean water, what remains is all the pollution that modern man has started to send in the last two decades or so. There's not a river in the world with any clean drinkable water going into the ocean anymore. It?s all polluted by chemicals in ever greater concentration; just a matter of time before we kill the plankton which is not only the food for the fish but is the main producer of oxygen that we need.