EDITOR’S NOTE: Call to Earth is a CNN editorial series committed to reporting on the environmental challenges facing our planet, together with the solutions. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative has partnered with CNN to drive awareness and education around key sustainability issues and to inspire positive action.The water was calm that morning in the Okavango Delta, in Botswana. Belgian diver Alain Brandeleer remembers the visibility was good and that he felt no particular unease. He had spent much of his life seeking ever more extreme experiences in the water, swimming with sharks in different parts of the world — even with great whites, without a cage. Over time, the constant exposure to risk had stopped giving him an adrenaline rush. And when that happens, he said, a question appears that’s hard to ignore: what comes next?That day, September 6, 2012, the answer was brutal. The water turned cloudy and thick. Visibility disappeared in a matter of seconds. He felt something brush against his legs, but didn’t fully register what it was at first. Then he understood. The body of a crocodile was wrapped around him, and it was biting his right arm.AdvertisementAdvertisementOne of his companions managed to hold him by the oxygen tank for more than a minute. Brandeleer would later say that saved his life.“If he had let go for a second, I was dead,” he said.After the attack came the wait. Hours passed before medics could attend to him, get him onto a helicopter and transfer him to a hospital in Johannesburg. During that time he didn’t even know for certain whether he still had his arm.“I could feel the arm, but I didn’t know if it was there or not,” he recalled. The wetsuit was holding it in place.When the doctors assessed Brandeleer they decided the arm had to be amputated.AdvertisementAdvertisementIt was a devastating blow. Brandeleer was born with an atrophy of his left hand. From a young age he had learned to live with that physical difference and to resist it defining him. The arm that had just been destroyed was his only fully functional one.Over the …
