In 2014, Australian forester Scott Poynton used a cartoon to convince the head of the world’s largest palm oil company to stop destroying tropical forest to produce its product.
This month he’s putting on his lime-green hiking boots and hitting the trail to keep men alive. Starting from Lake Geneva, Scott will climb the Jura peak, La Dole, five times, a distance of around 220 km and an altitude equivalent to scaling Mount Everest.
He also plans to grow a tropical forest between his nose and upper lip as part of Movember, a US$ 710 million1 mens health charity started by two mustache-loving Aussie men over a beer in Melbourne in 2003.
The Movember foundation, which arrived in Switzerland in 2012, is focused on reducing men’s cancer and suicide.
Every year there are around 6,200 new cases of prostate cancer, Switzerland’s most common form of cancer3. In 2014, 1,029 people took their own lives in Switzerland. 73% were men.
On 1 November, the Movember charity placed 191 pairs of shoes on Sydney’s Bondi Beach in memory of the 191 Australian men who took their own lives in October.

Movember co-founder Adam Garone on Bondi beach – Source: Facebook/MovemberAustralia
Looking outside at the falling snow this morning I wondered how deep it would be on the slopes of La Dole, and how Scott might cope. His response: “I’ve got my snow shoes in my back pack.”
Scott lives in Gingins, near Nyon in Switzerland, and works for the The Forest Trust, which he founded in 1999.
Link to Scott’s Movember page.
1 The Movember foundation has raised USD $710 million raised since 2003 (in English)
2 Swiss suicide statistics for 2014 (in French)
3 Swiss prostate cancer numbers (in French)
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