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At this year's annual Jazz Fest in New Orleans, representatives from the four main industries of Louisiana's cultural economy--music, food, art, and film--gathered for a roundtable discussion on how their unique cultural heritage holds the key to economic recovery and growth in the region. With Lt. Governor Mitch Landrieu as the host, local luminaries such as Grammy-winning musician Terrance Simien, chef John Besh, folklorist and radio host Nick Spitzer, and artist James Michalopoulos shared their perspectives on how to keep local cultural traditions alive while building sustainable livelihoods.  

A couple of themes emerged, such as the necessity of collaboration among the various industries, which is critical to the success of the whole cultural economy. Richard McCarthy, who runs the Crescent City Farmers Market, spoke of his partnership with chef John Besh to build relationships between local farmers and the city's renowned restaurants. The role of local government in both creating the space for cultural activity and providing economic incentives for cultural development was another important theme, with the most notable example being the tax incentives which have fueled Louisiana's burgeoning film industry.  

I left the roundtable inspired by the creative synergy I witnessed among the panelists. As the region rebuilds from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, it seems that New Orleans will be, as Nick Spitzer noted, "even greater than it was before." This is a destination to keep an eye on. 

Video: Susanne Hackett

The New Acropolis Museum, a project that the New York Times called "one of the highest-profile cultural projects undertaken in Europe in this decade," is celebrating its opening day on Saturday after years of planning and labor--33 years in all, eight since the design was chosen. The stunning modern building, designed by New York architect Bernard Tschumi, allows visitors to view the Parthenon from balconies and see archaeological remains through glass floors. It boasts 226,000 square feet of glass, 150,000 square feet of display space spanning five floors, and 4,000 artifacts. However, perhaps the most important statement made in this museum's opening is not what it has, but what it is missing: The Elgin Marbles.

For all of the beauty and history encompassed in the existing displays, they are incomplete. According to the AP,   

The Parthenon was built between 447-432 B.C., at the height of ancient Athens' glory, in honor of the city's patron goddess, Athena.

Despite its conversion into a Christian church, and Turkish occupation from the 15th century, it survived virtually intact until a massive explosion caused by a Venetian cannon shot in 1687.

About half the surviving sculptures were removed by Scottish diplomat Lord Elgin in the early 1800s, while Greece was still an unwilling part of the Ottoman Empire.

Most belong to a frieze depicting a religious procession that ran round the top of the temple.

Guarded by giant seven-headed serpent gods high on an obscure mountain, in backcountry disputed by Thailand and Cambodia, is an ancient sacred site that's not on the regular tourist map.

 

Surrounded by landmines and bunkers from the Khmer Rouge era, and still caught up in today's border disputes, Preah Vihear, or "Holy Monastery," is a mysterious place few westerners have been able to visit.

 

Jon Ortner, photographer and author of the book "Angkor, Celestial Temples of the Khmer Empire," shares his first encounters and impressions of the thousand-year-old sanctuary in this essay of words and photos composed especially for NatGeo News Watch.

Are you a fan of polar bears? (Who isn't?!) Well there's some good news from our friends over at the NatGeo News Watch blog:

Russia will create a new 3.7 million-acre (1.5 million-hectare) park in the Arctic, a central area for the Barents and Kara Sea polar bear populations, WWF said today.

Announcing the park, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he hoped it would be a major attraction for tourism, and announced that he personally plans to vacation there, WWF said.

The new Russian Arctic park is located on the northern part of Novaya Zemlya, a long island that arcs out into the Arctic Ocean between the Barents and Kara Seas, WWF said. It also includes some adjacent marine areas.

Check out the entire post for more info on the park.

Photo: NGS photo of polar bear in the Russian Arctic by Gordon Wiltsie

Molly Feltner is traveling through Africa, and got the chance to experience a model sustainable hotel in Rwanda.

In my travels to various destinations in the developing world, I've often been disappointed by how some upscale resorts and hotels go out of their way to separate their businesses and guests from the local population. So I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge, located in a farming community right outside Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda.

Set on the slopes of the volcano Sabyinyo, this luxury lodge caters to well-heeled tourists coming to track the park's mountain gorillas and it supports some of the neediest members of the surrounding community. It's managed by Governors' Camp, which operates several high-end lodges and safari camps in East Africa, but is owned by SACOLA, an association of about 18,000 local Rwandans that is sponsored by the International Gorilla Conservation Programme, African Wildlife Foundation, and USAID.

When guests stay at the lodge, $50 per person per night goes to SACOLA. Since the lodge opened in 2007, SACOLA has earned enough to build more than 1,200 houses for survivors of the Rwandan genocide and other needy families, and fund sustainable agriculture projects as well. Sabyinyo also employs locals--90 percent of the staff members are Rwandan--and most of the food and all of the flowers used on the property are grown by community members.

To compile his new book, My Favorite Place on Earth, Jerry Camarillo Dunn Jr., interviewed dozens of famous people -- from Natalie Portman to the Dalai Lama -- about the places they loved most. He'll be guest blogging about his experiences here for the next few weeks. Click here for recent posts.

Back in 1906, a railroad hoping to attract passengers coined the slogan "See America First."

But which America?

A fantastic musician and great gentleman from My Favorite Place on Earth has some ideas. For his spot, musician Jack White of the White Stripes and the Raconteurs chose Clarksdale, Mississippi, a town that stands among plowed fields at the legendary crossroads where Highway 49 meets Highway 61. It has been home to blues singers Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, and Jack White's hero, Son House.

"I didn't expect to feel the way I do about Clarksdale," Jack told me. "I thought maybe I'd find that it's all Wal-Marts and commercialized chain stores, like a lot of the western world now. When you're driving around the country, you think it would be nice to pull off the road and eat at a mom-and-pop diner or café, but you can't do that anymore. They're gone, and it's really sad. Now it's 'Take your pick of what corporation you want to have lunch at.' So I was worried that my idea of Mississippi wasn't going to be there anymore. But that wasn't the case. Clarksdale was the Mississippi I had in my head.

Molly Feltner is traveling through Africa, and shares how one group found a sustainable solution to help the impoverished residents who live alongside Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park.

In Rwanda, conservationists have discovered that you can't protect species like mountain gorillas without also looking after the people who live around their habitat. And in the area around the gorillas' home, Volcanoes National Park, where there are nearly 600 people per square kilometer, the potential for human-wildlife conflict is particularly great. I learned about challenges and some of the possible solutions from former Volcanoes National Park Tourism Warden, Edwin Sabuhoro, whom I met while traveling in Rwanda. As it turns out, cultural tourism is a big part of the answer.

In 2004, Sabuhoro rescued a baby mountain gorilla from poachers who had killed several adult gorillas and where attempting to sell the baby on the black market. The baby survived but the two young poachers received life sentences in prison for their crime. After their conviction, Sabuhoro visited with the poachers' parents to find out why they did it. One of the boy's father said "If you were starving and couldn't feed your family, wouldn't you do something desperate to survive?"

Sabuhoro did further investigation into the lives of the nearly 500,000 poverty-stricken people who live around the park and found that the residents suffered as a result of their proximity to it--animals like Cape buffalo and elephants ate their crops and trampled their dwellings, and access to fresh water, firewood, and other resources was limited because it was illegal to harvest them from the park. The locals resented the park, and saw little reason to conserve it, so wildlife poaching and illegal harvesting of trees and other plants was rife.

Michael Meyer, author of The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed and a panelist on Traveler's annual Destinations Rated issue, shares an intimate glimpse of life in his hutong neighborhood.

Last year, billboards across the city promised: "New Beijing, New Olympics." To an American, the result looks uncomfortably familiar. Ancient courtyard homes and narrow lanes have been replaced by shopping malls, parking lots, nearly 200 McDonald's, and over one hundred Starbucks. I live in one of the capital's last remaining traditional neighborhoods, located just south of Tiananmen Square. Visitors to Beijing should see it now; the hutong - narrow lanes - are slated for destruction at summer's end.

Hutong are to Beijing what canals are to Venice. In 1949, a survey recorded more than seven thousand hutong. Shaded by rows of leaning locust trees, many were too narrow for vehicles to enter. The network of backstreets connected neighborhoods of walled courtyards and also formed an elongated public marketplace, where itinerant peddlers and performers worked door-to-door. In a period of the late 1990s, an average of six hundred lanes were destroyed each year. Now, less than thirteen hundred hutong remain, and the government admits to evicting over five hundred thousand residents from the city center, a figure that continues to rise.

Settled over eight centuries ago, my hutong neighborhood, Dazhalan (Big Fence), is Beijing's most venerable community. The name dates to the fifteenth century, when wicker gates on either end of the area's hutong were clasped shut at night to deter thieves from preying upon the shops that formed the capital's most prosperous commercial district. After a succession of seventeenth-century imperial edicts banned hotels, restaurants, teahouses, and theaters from inside the imperial confines, businesses migrated through Qianmen (Front Gate) to the other side of the city wall. Dazhalan became the capital's entertainment, artisan, and antiques district. Beijing specialties such as roast duck, acrobatics, and opera flourished here. Some lanes filled with silversmiths, silk embroiderers, and calligraphers; others with stages, brothels, and opium dens.

To compile his new book, My Favorite Place on Earth, Jerry Camarillo Dunn Jr., interviewed dozens of famous people -- from Natalie Portman to the Dalai Lama -- about the places they loved most. He'll be guest blogging about his experiences here for the next few weeks. Click here for recent posts.

"Cultural, authentic, and sustainable"- the triple aspirations of the Intelligent Travel blog - are watchwords for some of the accomplished people you'll read about in My Favorite Place on Earth.  

I think of Jean-Michel Cousteau, whose favorite spot wasn't undersea but a lost corner of Peru, where 25 years ago he met a remarkable man. "Chief Kukus [of the Achuar, a group of the Jivaro] had nearly as much impact on me as my own father," Mr. Cousteau told me. "He taught me his values...His village stood on a river in the deep forest...There were a lot of birds in the trees, and monkeys all over the place. The people hunted with blowguns and poison darts, but in a sustainable way. They only killed what they needed, what nature could provide.

"Chief Kukus showed me some trees he had planted that were about ten feet tall. He told me: 'I'll never see them grow big enough, and my children won't either - even my grandchildren, probably not. But my great-grandchildren, they'll be able to use those trees that I have planted.' He pointed to one in particular and said, 'That's going to make a good canoe.'

"For me, the chief expressed the unwritten constitution of the future. In our modern culture we deal only with the present - now now now. We say we care about our children and grandchildren, yet we do nothing about it. But the Jivaro people had the right concept. They knew how to live in harmony with nature in a sustainable way."

Like Jean-Michel Cousteau, the world stands to learn much from traditional people who have managed to survive in one place for a long time. I think of the Earth as "one place" - and I hope we take the long view.

Photo: via the Ocean Futures Society

The National Trust for Historic Preservation released its 2009 list of the most endangered historic sites in the America yesterday, and it's a delicate mix of architectural and historical treasures. Some sites have been damaged by hurricanes, others are threatened by developers who seek to tear them down. But all of them have a role in the American experience, from a building which first served as a schoolhouse for freed slaves, to the hangar for the Enola Gay, to Lana'i City, the Dole company town in Hawaii with it's fruit-hued plantation homes. Check out National Geographic News for a slideshow of the sites and read through the complete list, as released by the Trust, after the jump.

Have you visited these sites? Do you think they should be perserved? Let us know in the comments.

As we've said before, the National Mall here in D.C. has been in disrepair for some time. Despite hosting some 25 million visitors a year, the national park has only 100 toilets and three places to buy water. The Reflecting Pool is old and grimy, and the Mall's grass just hasn't been the same since millions of people visited D.C. for the Inauguration in January.
 
But finally, after much deliberation, the Department of the Interior announced yesterday that Washington, D.C. will get over $70 million to restore these "eyesores." The Washington Post reports $30 million will go to the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool and $7.3 will go to the District of Columbia War Memorial, which has seen very little upkeep in decades.

But the aid doesn't stop at District lines. Twelve million will go to the C&O Canal, which has over 180 miles of hiking and bike trails, $3 million will go to Arlington Cemetery's historic Custis-Lee mansion, and nearly $10 million will go to Skyline Drive, one of the country's most popular fall foliage drives.

The funding is part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which awarded $750 million to the country's national parks. The money will fund some 750 projects around the U.S.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that work on the National Mall will begin immediately, and hopes to have the projects complete by September 2010. He told the Post:

"With respect to the National Mall . . . this is but the beginning," he said. "This is a down payment on the challenges that we face on the Mall. . . . This is not Washington, D.C.'s Mall, this is the Mall that belongs to the people of the United States of America. . . . This is part of the best of what is America."

Photo: StacyN - MichiganMoments via the Intelligent Travel Flickr pool

Hunter Braithwaite finds more that great surf along the Costa Rican coastline.

Costa Rican roads are a cruel joke played on Americans, I thought, teary-eyed, as I clutched my forehead, which had just bounced off the windshield of our rented SUV. Why did this happen? What did we swerve to miss? Oh, the usual - a parade of stray dogs, barefoot children on dirt bikes, a rooster lazily strutting like a Caribbean dictator. I suppose parade implies motion, and dead pigs don't move, but the parade also featured a dead pig. Considering the pain, it's not remarkable that this is my chief memory from a week in Costa Rica.

A few days prior, I met a group of high school friends in Nosara for one last week of surfing before the anchors of career confined each to our own harbor of adulthood. The days that followed consisted of little more than fish tacos and sunburns. After almost a week of this, I convinced the group that there is a beautiful and varied country beyond Playa Guiones, and it would be regrettable to spend the rest of the vacation surfing. (Full disclosure: I hate surfing, it's boring and too hard.) So we did.  

Around noon we bought some sandwiches and rented a Toyota Prado for the day ($96 and a valid passport). With little more than a rough approximation of where we wanted to go (south) we took the 116 to Samara. Samara is the type of place where the locals only talk to you if attempting to sell you pot. They'll saunter up, chat about the waves or about Obama, and just when you think you've made a new friend, whisper into your ear: "You want the weed?" Here we ate empanadas and smoothies at a rancid-smelling soda shop. Despite the maddening heat, it was one of the best meals of the trip. In Costa Rican tourist towns, there is a negative correlation between cleanliness and food quality.    

The road south from Samara turns quickly from bad to worse. Drivers are required to ford several rivers. Luckily, this was the peak of the dry season, so a river is nothing more than a bone-dry ditch. If we had come three months later, the Prado would never have made it. It barely did as is. In front of an audience of old Costa Rican women and cows, we spent 10 minutes trying to get out of a sandpit. You could hear it rustling from the palm trees, "muy estúpido."  

Camaronal is a black beach. As we drove up to it, the sun was setting and the wind was kicking up a lot of sand. It looked like smoke as it hung in the air. Very intense. Down by the water a single person stood watching baby turtles walking into the sea.

For some it's the last place on earth, the seventh check mark on their continent list. But the growing influx of tourists to Antarctica has U.S. leaders thinking about the consequences, and on Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke at the Arctic Council and the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting about the need to limit visitors to the region.

"The changes underway in the Arctic will have long-term impacts on our economic future, our energy future, and indeed, again, the future of our planet," she said. "So it is crucial that we work together." In her statement, she proposed new international standards that would limit the number of tourist vessel landings and cited the need to have cooperation in restricting potentially hazardous discharges from ships. She also focused on setting safety standards for tour operations; citing some of the recent cruise ship accidents, she made a recommendation for new requirements for lifeboats on tourist ships "to make sure they can keep passengers alive until rescue comes."

The International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators has reported that over 46,000 tourists visited Antarctica in the 2007-2008 tour season -- which is about four times the number of visitors as during the 2000-2001 season. What do you think? What standards would you like to see in place to protect the Arctic?

Read More: In the April National Geographic magazine, Bruce Barcott wrote a feature article about Svalbard, Norway's pristine Arctic archipelago, with photos by Paul Nicklen.

[CNN, DotEarth]
Photo: Dave Walsh via the Intelligent Travel Flickr pool

The earthquake that hit L'Aquila, Italy has inflicted devastating damage to multiple sites of the city's artistic history. L'Aquila, the medieval capital of the Abruzzo region just northeast of Rome, was at the epicenter of the 6.3 magnitude earthquake early Monday morning. The death toll has reached over 90, and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has estimated 1,500 have been injured.

The full extent of the earthquake's damage has yet to be assessed, but Giuseppe Proietti, Secretary General of the Italian Culture Ministry commented to the news agency ANSA that the quake's toll has been "huge." Much of the city's treasured Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance architecture is now gone.

The city's largest Romanesque church, the Santa Maria di Collemaggio, cracked at the transept and part of the nave has collapsed. The 13th-century basilica was the coronation site of Pope Celestine V in 1294. Other collapsed structures are the cupola of the 17th-century Anime Sante church and the bell tower of San Bernardino da Siena. In addition, it has been reported that the Porta Napoli, built in 1548 to honor Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, is gone.

Concern has turned to the National Museum of Abruzzo. A reported collapse on the third floor of this 16th-century castle has prevented anyone from entering the building to evaluate damage to the museum's civic and religious works, which date back to the 17th and 18th centuries.

In addition to the deaths, tens of thousands have been left homeless. The National Italian American Foundation has set up a special Abruzzo relief fund to aid the victims of the earthquake. Although the Italian Red Cross has not yet asked for international assistance, the US International Response Fund will be taking donations.

--Giovanna Palatucci

It may not have appeared on many of our calendars, but yesterday was Africa Environment Day. To recognize the event, the South African Embassy hosted representatives from several African nations yesterday afternoon to discuss some of the initiatives their countries are working on to support sustainable environmental and economic development. After attending the session, I was impressed with the range of ideas and projects being put forward.

For example, right now Gabon is still glowing from the international attention it received while it played host to the season of CBS's hugely-popular Survivor: Earth's Last Eden series. Over 18 million people saw that the country was safe and politically stable, said Mireille Obame Nguema Moore, who was speaking on behalf of the ambassador. She said the country is now working on several projects, and aiming to become a "leader and innovator in conservation and sustainable tourism."

One major Gabon initiative was the creation of 13 national parks, achieved with the help of National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Michael Fay of the Megatransect project. The Gabon government continues to promote sustainable tourism through programs like Operation Loango, which helps train eco-guides in Loango National Park, who then act as ambassadors to the local community to promote the value of the park. They've also been working with PPG-Congo to establish a gorilla release program in the country, and have released 50 rehabilitated or orphaned gorillas into the wild. Increasingly interested in attracting the adventure tourist, Gabon is creating infrastructure to support travelers, and plans a "rainforest airport" which would be the world's first sustainable airport.

In this month's issue of National Geographic magazine, writer Edward Hoagland and photographer Michael Yamashita document the dichotomy that exists at China's Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve, a World Heritage site that gets over 18,000 visitors daily. The deep emerald-colored pools are considered magical by the Chinese: "Nowhere else under the sky," they say, "can match Jiuzhaigou." The images Yamashita took are the antithesis of images of China's urban sprawl we're most commonly accustomed to seeing. But the forests are also threatened - already, their panda population has been decimated, and though there's a growing call for more conservation efforts, items from illegally-harvested herbs to snow leopard pelts are still sold to tourists. Check out the full story here, and visit the photo gallery of images here.

Photo: Michael Yamashita 

What is perhaps the world's most famous ice festival has become another of the world's Disney theme parks, with a Disney licensing company taking over operations from the local Communist government. It is the first time a private company has run the ice festival.

Snow White has replaced snow dragons. Children wander through the frozen hallways of Aladdin's Castle instead of a Qing dynasty palace. "It's a Small World" plays in one corner of the park. (What better theme music for globalization?)

The diverse New Zealand landscape is among the most beautiful in the world: pristine beaches, rolling green fields, awesome mountains. But residents in Tekapo aren't so much concerned with what surrounds them on the ground, they're much more interested in preserving what shines down from above.

The small South Island town of about 800 people is on a mission to receive UNESCO's approval to become the first starlight reserve, an idea first generated four years ago. Locals have been darkening their Canterbury town since 1965, and have since restricted lighting use within a 19-mile radius of the town. Today residents use low-energy sodium streetlamps and household lamps that face down. Even the local skating rink installed special lighting that prevents ultraviolet rays from reflecting into the night sky, according to the Associated Press. The AP also reports that more than two-thirds of people in the U.S. and about one-fifth of the world's population cannot see the Milky Way from their homes, a statistic that the folks of Tekapo hope to change.

For more places to see the night sky, check out other Dark Sky Destinations.

Photo: Neil Gardner

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the BBC has put together a fascinating package that explores the role that the atrocious death camps still play in contemporary European culture. Many of the camps were built over 70 years ago, and were not meant to be long-term installations. But now, millions of visitors travel to camps like Auschwitz each year to bear witness to the memory of the atrocities.

Time and heavy traffic has led to the gradual deterioration of these sites, and many of the museums on site are facing a financial shortfall that has preservationists worried about how to ensure that future generations will not forget. In some cases, many of the artifacts are slowly starting to deteriorate, such as the shocking room filled with two tons of victims' hair that can currently be seen at Auschwitz. At the time, the Nazis had sent the hair to textile factories; today scientists acknowledge that it is only a matter of time until it all turns to dust. (You can see a slideshow of many of the deteriorating parts of the camp here).