The subtropical island of Bermuda does not see many
icebreakers, but on a warm May day, Dave Ford is standing
on one, welcoming his uneasy guests aboard. Technically, the
RCGS Resolute, 400 feet long and eight decks high, is an ice-
strengthened expedition ship, one class below an icebreaker.
But the choice still seems inspired, because as the factions of
environmentalists and plastics executives arrive, the chill on
the ship is palpable, and the only way Ford’s vision of some
sort of Paris Accord for plastics is going to happen is if a
whole lot of icebreaking goes down.
Ford’s company, SoulBuffalo, takes corporate executives
on epic excursions (Antarctica, Kamchatka, Zimbabwe),
smacks a little kumbaya into them, then sends them home
fired up about corporate responsibility. As we stand on the
deck of the Resolute and watch the tender deliver more of the
150 passengers joining this four-day mission, he tells me that
he started his career as a hard-charging ad man in the tech
world, “but it wasn’t filling me up inside.” In 2008, at 28, he
quit and bought a one-way ticket to Argentina. For the next
two years, he knocked around the planet’s remote corners,
then found himself in Antarctica and felt his spirit mingling
with the vastness. “That trip opened me up,” he says. “I knew
immediately that I wanted to help others access the break-
throughs that can happen with intense travel experiences.”
SoulBuffalo’s previous expeditions have all been for small
groups from single companies, but as the scope of the plas-
tics crisis has unfolded (spoiler alert: it’s worse than you can
possibly imagine), Ford began to wonder if a big, boundary-
crossing, experiential intervention could turn the tide. “I’ve
always believed that travel can capture magic in a bottle,” he
says. “You know how when you travel with people, your re-
lationship can advance years in a matter of days? That’s what
needs to happen out here.”
Ford is tall and scruffy. At 41, he still dresses in the just-
slept-in jeans and T-shirts that make it easy to picture him
in his young, globe-trotting days. That informality helps take
the starch out of the suits, which is one of his goals for this
Ocean Plastics Leadership Summit: Put all the stakeholdersPHOTOGRAPHS BY
THOMAS PRIOR09/10.19 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 75