National Geographic BlogWild

National Geographic's Expeditions Council has come out in force for the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festivals, conducting workshops to help filmmakers and authors pitch ideas to National Geographic Television, National Geographic Books, and our magazines.

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.

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.

National Geographic Emerging Explorer T.H. Culhane and his wife Sybille are passionate about energy and garbage. In fact, they are so committed to investigating new ways of approaching energy problems that they moved into a slum in Cairo, and are teaching the people there how to make solar water heaters from recycled materials and biogas from trash.

The 2009 Fellows from Pop!Tech–led by National Geographic Fellow Andrew Zolli–have been announced, and this year the group includes the amazing Eben Bayer of Ecovative Design. Eben and fellow RPI graduate Gavin McIntyre were fascinated by mushrooms growing on wood chips and observed how the fungi strongly bonded the wood chips together. This observation led them into a business developing green materials using this sticky organism. Their packaging is an amazing 100% compostable and biodegradable because it's made from seed husks and mushroom roots!

From afar, the primeval mountainsides of the Monteverde Cloud Forest of Costa Rica appear both majestic and mysterious. Venture within with National Geographic Young Explorers Greg Goldsmith and Drew Fulton and you will discover that this mist-enshrouded tropical evergreen forest is teeming with life. This astounding biodiversity owes much of its existence to the extra water bestowed by clouds, which condenses onto leaves and drips to the forest floor. This extra moisture supports the world's most diverse collection of orchid species and a thriving array of amphibians, reptiles, and birds.

National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Mike Fay's Redwood Transect is featured on the cover of this month's magazine. The buzz here is all about the redwoods, Mike's amazing walk and the huge, cool, special foldout image of a redwood tree in the middle of the magazine.

National Geographic Emerging Explorer Alexandra Cousteau visits the Earth Conservation Corps, a service organization that teaches at-risk teenagers and young adults from the poorest, most violent neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. to clean up the Anacostia River̶and their lives.

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.

Days of camping without power and Internet access interrupted the story of my trans-Icelandic journey with Nat Geo Student Expeditions. Now I'm back on the grid, and the saga continues...

We get our first real taste of ice on Iceland's southern coast at Solheimajökull. (The last part of the name is pronounced yokel, as in "local yokel," and means "glacier" in Icelandic.)

Late-night twilight greetings from Iceland! I'm here with Nat Geo Student Expeditions and a group of (I asked what adjective to use to describe them, and they chose) extraordinary teens. We've come to photograph this island, to study the wild geology that put it here just south of the Arctic Circle. We're documenting the effects of climate change—the melting away of glaciers that have covered Iceland for millennia and that gave it its very name.

Thomas Culhane, Katey Walter, and Jon Waterman share their insights on co-existing with the planet at the 2009 National Geographic Explorers Symposium.

More memorable moments from the 2009 Explorers Symposium, with linguists David Harrison and Greg Anderson, marine ecologist Enric Sala, naturalist Mike Fay, and geographer and author Jared Diamond.

In a week that began with World Ocean Day, some of the planet's most renowned oceanographers and marine conservationists kicked off the annual Explorers Symposium at National Geographic headquarters. The event celebrates the Society's 2009 Emerging Explorers, and gathers pioneers in a host of fields—anthropologists, archaeologists, conservationists, photographers, educators, oceanographers, epidemiologists, paleontologists, geneticists, geographers, linguists, urban planners, and more—from across the globe.

What's it like to be a million oar strokes from your destination, tossed alone in a tiny boat? Ask Roz Savage, the one-time management consultant turned full-time rower, environmental advocate, and inspirational speaker. Roz departs Hawaii today bound for Tuvalu on the second leg of her trans-Pacific journey.

She's already knocked off the Atlantic, a 103-day, 2,935-mile (4,723-kilometer) ordeal in 2005. Storms broke all of her oars and claimed her stove, stereo, and cockpit navigation instruments. Her satellite phone failed with nearly four weeks left on the journey. Undaunted, Roz rowed on.