National Geographic BlogWild

The H1N1/swine flu outbreak has prompted officials to close hundreds of schools across the United States and left thousands of kids and teens (both sick and well) stranded at home. The U.S. Department of Education has recommended that schools and parents help students continue learning while they’re home, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called on educational publishers to support the effort.

Friends and colleagues Sarah Caban (editor of the My Wonderful World blog) and Maggie Strassman (intern and University of Wisconsin Madison geography department superstar) have lined up a bevy of fired-up contributors for the first annual Geography Awareness Week Blog-a-Thon. The week, which runs through Saturday, coincides with the National Geographic Channel’s Expedition Week, and highlights the importance of geographic literacy and geography education in the United States.

The National Geographic Channel kicks off Expedition Week 2009 in the U.S. Sunday night with Search for the Amazon Headshrinkers—and an invitation to shrink your own head.

Exciting times here at National Geographic headquarters! Yes, today IS my birthday … but that’s not the reason. In just one week, Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China’s First Emperor opens at our museum. More than 80,000 tickets have already been sold for the exhibition—the largest collection of the life-sized figures ever to tour the United States.

The Royal Canadian Geographical Society awarded National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis its top honor, the Gold Medal, at its 80th anniversary dinner in Ottawa last night. The anthropologist, ethnobotanist, writer, photographer, and lecturer is an eloquent and passionate voice for the world’s indigenous peoples and cultures. He has been described as the "real-life Indiana Jones."

Colleague Anne Haywood (in Austin, Texas) and I (at NatGeo headquarters in Washington, D.C.) got together virtually last week to discuss the ways National Geographic is using new media to inspire people to care about the planet—and to help them understand it. We gave our presentation—or, at least, our avatars did—at the New Media Consortium’s Symposium for the Future in Second Life, an immersive, 3-D virtual world.

Some of the freshest faces at National Geographic are here at headquarters this weekend for a Young Explorers Grant workshop.

Last night, NG Live hosted an event titled “Exploration: The Next Generation” with four up-and-coming Society grantees: Katherine Amato, a biologist studying howler monkeys in Mexico’s tropical forest; Pat Walters, a journalist who’s documented the havoc wreaked by invasive flying Asian carp on U.S. rivers; Trip Jennings, a conservationist who caves and paddles through unexplored regions in Papua New Guinea; and Ross McDermott, a photographer and filmmaker who—with colleague and fellow photographer Andrew Owen—is documenting America’s small-town festivals, from the National Hobo Convention in Britt, Iowa to the Middle of Nowhere celebration in Ainsworth, Nebraska.

By now, you’ve likely seen Monica Szczupider’s photograph of grieving chimpanzees at Cameroon’s Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center. The image—which Monica submitted to Your Shot, and which appeared in the November issue of National Geographic magazine—is resonating with people everywhere. Over the last few days, it’s turned up in newspapers, on television, and on blogs worldwide.

National Geographic President and CEO John Fahey traveled to Hollywood this weekend to accept the Environmental Media Association's Legacy Award on behalf of the Society. Explorers-in-Residence Beverly and Dereck Joubert—whose years of filmmaking, photography, and conservation efforts on behalf of the world's endangered felines inspired the new Big Cats Initiative—joined Fahey for the ceremony.

National Geographic Emerging Explorer, aquatic ecologist, and megafish-finder Zeb Hogan has traveled to lakes and rivers the world over to document and protect the planet’s largest freshwater fish. Tonight, the National Geographic Channel premieres a new episode of Hooked that follows Zeb into the Australian outback in search of one of the most critically endangered—and peculiar-looking—fish on Earth, the giant freshwater sawfish.

Though public attention has focused on oil reserves beneath Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, fossil fuels such as petroleum and coal aren’t the northern state’s only energy resources. Now, two National Geographic Emerging Explorers will receive a grant to see if microscopic life forms from the Alaskan tundra could help turn garbage into fuel in cool climates worldwide.

If you have water on tap in your home, school, or office, and it’s safe to drink, count your blessings: hundreds of millions of people worldwide don’t. As human population and water demands increase, and as climate patterns shift, some aquifers and rivers are running dry. Many people (disproportionately women and children) walk miles a day just to retrieve clean—or not-so-clean—water to drink, to cook with, and to bathe with. Many communities lack any source of clean water or the means to regularly filter, boil, or chemically sterilize it. Contaminated drinking water spreads diseases that kill millions of children and adults each year.

Fresh from dives with National Geographic Fellow Enric Sala and other marine scientists at Cocos Island and Las Gemelas, Explorer-in-Residence Sylvia Earle appears tonight with Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report, where she’ll discuss her new book The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One.

Wildlife filmmakers, conservationists, and National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence Dereck and Beverly Joubert appeared with Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today Show this morning to announce the Big Cats Initiative—a campaign to rally public support and bolster conservation efforts for lions, leopards, and other large feline species in the wild worldwide.

Greetings from Costa Rica, faithful BlogWild followers. For the next three weeks, I’m headed to sea.

National Geographic Fellow Enric Sala, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Sylvia Earle, and a team of leading marine scientists from Central America and across the globe have gathered here. Destination: Cocos Island—Isla del Coco, ringed by some of the most shark-rich waters anywhere—and the submerged and all-but-unexplored summits of Las Gemelas (“The Twin Sisters”) seamounts.

After witnessing an oil spill in San Francisco Bay in 1971, John Francis gave up riding in cars and other motorized vehicles and began walking nearly every place he went. Several years later, he decided to stop talking, initially for just one day. "For the first time," he says, "I began listening." And so his self-imposed silence stretched to 17 years.

I got together with environmentalist, advocate, and National Geographic Emerging Explorer Alexandra Cousteau at headquarters yesterday afternoon to discuss something she thinks about lots and speaks of with passion: Water. Over the last half-year, Alexandra's Expedition: Blue Planet has taken her to India, Botswana, the Middle East, the Mississippi River, and Cambodia chronicling "the interconnectivity of water... what it means to live in a world where water is our most precious resource."

Genographic Project team colleagues were up in New York's Queens borough landmark Astoria Park Monday night for an outdoor world premiere screening of The Human Family Tree. The documentary chronicles the globe-spanning ancestry of seven Astoria residents whose cheeks were swabbed on the same day.

Andrew Howley, who deftly manages National Geographic's homepage, gave me a shout to ask if I knew about KaBOOM! (exclamation point included) and their Play Day 2009 campaign. I didn't, so he filled me in: KaBOOM! is a non-profit devoted to helping communities find resources to build outdoor play spaces for kids, and to encouraging families to get their kids outside--to playgrounds, parks, any place fun and safe—to play. Outdoor play helps address an increasingly rife problem for youth that the author Richard Louv has termed Nature Deficit Disorder.