Howard Fairbank is a global explorer and adventure extraordinaire: Few on this planet have explored its vast surfaces, its diverse societies, and themselves, like he has done. Even fewer have done this in a way, that in the search of truth and purpose, have radically transformed their whole belief and value system, in the process.
In an increasingly bewildering world, more and more people are struggling for purpose and meaning, as the origins of their beliefs and values are being radically challenged, by an, off course humanity.
In his uniquely inspiring way, Howard shares his life’s story of adventures seeking purpose and meaning against the flow of this unfolding global spiritual crisis.
His last six-year adventure, as a global Climate Change activist, was his most existentially challenging adventure yet, and is central to the inspiration for his talk………
Yet as his entertaining adventure stories will show, this wasn’t about Climate Change, nor saving the planet: This was about finding meaning and purpose through exploring the real truths behind Climate Change: Finding that ‘society’ is ‘Off Purpose’ and that humanity has lost its fundamental collective spiritual purpose.
In intimately connecting this unfolding spiritual crisis to the audience’s lives, his talk explores the issues of our individual purpose and how all our life stories do point to some purpose. And that we are the authors of that purpose, whether consciously or not. Then getting the audience to reflect on their stories, and their linkage to society’s spiritual predicament.
The talk will show why that the spiritual crisis will intensify, and how the struggle for purpose and meaning will become more and more acute. And finally, Howard will throw down an inspiring challenge for the audience: To become courageous ‘adventurers to their truths’ and embrace the great adventuring opportunity, this seemingly bewildering epoch, is offering.
And in the process become purpose driven, meaningful authors of the future chapters of their own life stories, play a leadership role in their families and communities of influence.
PS: This talk is not religious yet will engage the most hardened atheist to question their take on the existence of human spirituality, while encourage strongly spiritual people to reflect on their beliefs in the context of our unravelling ‘Ecological Crisis’.
Howard Fairbank: A Snapshot!
From his social roots as an anglo saxon, Anglican child of capitalist apartheid South Africa, at age 39 Howard had risen the corporate ladder to be the youngest ever director of the largest oil company in Sub Sahara Africa. With 2500 people working for him, he was a powerful human.
But there was something wrong?: His soul drove him to throw it all away.
Yet, he knew we all need to have ‘enough’, and he didn’t. Turning entrepreneur in Australia, he embarked on his next adventure: A traitor’s journey to use ‘The System’ to free himself from it. By the age of 46 he had ‘just enough’ and, selling all his material possessions, he bought a yacht, bicycle, sea kayak, and trekking shoes, and set out on a radical adventure to seek a different power: Power in submission as a pupil of Nature.
As a highly skilled multi-disciplinary, solo adventurer, he embarked on a radical ten-year journey that saw him confront Nature alone in almost every, last great wilderness on this Planet.
With Nature’s transformation of his beliefs and values, in 2016 his soul pushed him on to launch One Point Zero, a multi-threaded Climate Change, activist adventure, to essentially explore the big truths underlying Climate Change, while exploring ‘one planet living’ himself, and trying to recruit others on a radical global cause.
Travelling more than 1.5 times around the world and spending more than five months in total on container ships, he explored society with a purpose like few have done.
Meeting with thousands of people from all walks of life, from billionaires, to scientists, to economists, to politicians, to schoolteachers, to innocent, yet concerned, young people, to passionate Climate Change protesters, to UN Climate Change authorities, to everyday ‘moms and pops’, and finally, a deep and intimate exploration into the global Climate Change, NGO sector.
In 2021, Howard finally arrived at his truths on the situation, and this feedback, from the founder and CEO of a world leading, globally significant, Climate Change organisation, who he mentored, confirms his unique offering to audiences:
”Your broad and intriguing experience you brought into the conversation – living in South Africa, operating at the heart of the capitalist system, leading cultural transformations, renouncing the material route and exploring, keeping exploring with enormous curiosity. You are somebody who has thought about the problem for long, deep, and is not blinded/corrupted by their own interests. There are VERY few people like you.”