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By Simmons Buntin, February 5, 2010 6:53 pm

Award-winning travel entrepreneurs share practices to preserve authenticity of place and local character

Geotourism at Loreto Bay, Baja California Sur, Mexico. Photo by Simmons Buntin.

WASHINGTON (Feb. 4, 2010)—The Second Annual Geotourism Change Summit at  National Geographic headquarters showcased travel leaders from around the globe presenting success stories from both major cities to countrysides, all with the mutual purpose of preserving the character of the world’s special places and furthering sustainable travel.

The  200 attendees on Feb. 2 heard inspiring presentations by the winners of the 2009 Geotourism Challenge, sponsored by National Geographic and Ashoka’s Changemakers, as well as speakers discussing advances in geotourism and other new trends in sustainable travel.

Geotourism is defined as tourism that sustains or enhances the geographical character of a place — its environment, culture, aesthetics, heritage and the well-being of its residents.

“The forces of globalization are making places look just like the next one.  The Summit   honored those who have not bowed to mass tourism — in fact, they are offering the most authentic experiences possible,”  said Jonathan Tourtellot, director of National Geographic’s Center for Sustainable Destinations.

Award-winners ranged from river.India.com, the world’s first outfitter on the challenging Siang River, that has trained locals to be river guides, to Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto, which took an abandoned brick factory and has turned it into a vital part of the city, with farmer’s markets, summer camps and an ice skating rink.

Tourtellot noted that despite terrorist threats, a shaky world economy and the increasing inconvenience of air travel, people are still traveling, and the number will likely top 1 billion international trips within very few years.

Other news from the Geotourism Summit:

• Economist James Gilmore, coauthor of the books Authenticity: What Customers Really Want and The Experience Economy, provided the keynote address.  He said that the world is moving out of the “service economy” into what he calls an “experience economy” – a desire by consumers for authenticity and memorability. His message to travel entrepreneurs at the Summit: consumers now desire a combination of the “four E’s”:  entertainment, education, esthetic and escapism.

• National Geographic unveiled its Geotourism Impact Map Concept, to be integrated into the Center for Sustainable Destinations website, and a testament to the proliferation of geotourism around the world. It will become a huge aggregate for geotourism practices and existing maps, available to both businesses and travelers.  It will also identify regions where geotourism activities are unknown and need help.

• Details of the 2010 Geotourism Challenge were announced. The theme will be  “Places on the Edge: Saving Coastal Destinations.” Tourtellot noted the world’s coast lines, more than any other geographical feature, are under pressure from tourism.

• Vanessa Healey, vice president, global brand marketing, InterContinental Hotel Group, was a member of the panel devoted to destination stewardship strategies. She shared how the hotel group has fully embraced geotourism, including training their 60,000 employees in how to help visitors “go local.” Information cards on local activities and history are often left at night on guests’ pillows.  Other comments from panelists:  “We must move from Joe Tourist to Joe Citizen;  “follow the locals’ lead”;  “travel is a life value.”

• Geotourism Challenge-winner Alex Khajan, CEO of Nature Air in Costa Rica, conveyed the passion of Summit attendees to preserve the world’s special places.  “We are rebels by nature and want to be catalysts for change,” he said to the group when accepting his award.

The Geotourism Challenge is a global competition of tourism-related projects that promote natural and cultural heritage while improving the well-being of the local people. The 10 finalists honored at the Summit are the best of 610 entries from 81 countries,

“The Geotourism Change Summit offers an opportunity to showcase the true nature of tourism. These 10 innovators demonstrate not only that tourism needs a major rethinking, but also that these pioneers have already done it and are now leading initiatives to help alleviate poverty, conserve natural and cultural assets, and provide enriching experiences for visitors. If we want to know what the future of travel looks like, this is it,” said Charlie Brown, executive director of Ashoka’s Changemakers.

The three Geotourism Challenge winners — Nature Air (Costa Rica), PEPY (Cambodia), and Wikiloc Community Maps (Spain) — were selected by online voting. Each received a $5,000 award at the Summit.  The winners:

• Nature Air, the 100 percent carbon-neutral airline in Costa Rica, offsets 100 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions to encourage reforestation of tropical forests in Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula.
• PEPY (“Protect the Earth, Protect Yourself”) is Cambodia’s Educational Volunteer Tourism Program, providing adventure bike tours and on-site volunteer projects, like building rainwater collection units.
• Wikiloc Community Maps in Girona, Spain, created by a software engineer with a passion for travel, is built on maps, photos and video submitted to offer honest impressions about destinations.

The seven Geotourism Challenge runners-up:

• Ger to Ger Foundation, Mongolia, links visitors with genuine nomadic families.
• Evergreen Brick Works of Toronto, Canada, is an adaptive re-use of the heritage structures at the Don Valley Brick Works.
• Virgin Islands Youth Heritage Exchange Farm Excursions, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, focuses on food as the basis of youth identity and education.
• Context Travel, based in Philadelphia, offers walking seminars in major European cities, encouraging sustainable ways to visit urban destinations.
• RiverIndia.com’s Bamboo Eco-Lodge River Trips, Arunachal Pradesh, India, help protect India’s Siang River through locally guided expeditions.
• Trout Point Lodge, Nova Scotia, a Five Green Key-designated nature retreat in Canada, has revitalized backwoods and Acadian French cultural tourism.
• Reality Tour Viagens e Turismo Ltda’s Route of Freedom, Rua Bom Jesus, Brazil, commemorates the African Diaspora in Brazil.

For more details about the innovative work of all 10 finalists, go to www.changemakers.net/geotourismchallenge.

The Multilateral Investment Fund (FOMIN) joined forces with the National Geographic Society and Ashoka through the Changemakers Geotourism Challenge 2009 “Power of Place” competition. The goal was to capture regional creativity and demand as well as provide co-financing opportunities for small geotourism initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean that benefit local communities by improving the competitiveness, social use and sustainability of the tourism sector. The FOMIN received 319 proposals from 24 countries, selecting seven projects for co-financing.

About Ashoka’s Changemakers

Changemakers is an initiative of Ashoka, an organization with over three decades of finding, funding and expanding the work of social entrepreneurs across the globe. It is a global online community of action that connects people to share ideas, inspire and mentor each other, and find and support the best ideas in social innovation. The Changemakers online community builds on this history and expands the Ashoka vision by creating an “Everyone a Changemaker” world through networking, relationship-building and the sourcing of funding opportunities. Through its collaborative competitions and open-source process, Changemakers has created one of the world’s most robust laboratories for launching, refining and scaling ideas for solving the world’s most pressing social problems.

About National Geographic

The National Geographic Society is one of the world’s largest nonprofit scientific and educational organizations. Founded in 1888 to “increase and diffuse geographic knowledge,” the Society works to inspire people to care about the planet. It reaches more than 375 million people worldwide each month through its official journal, National Geographic, and other magazines; National Geographic Channel; television documentaries; music; radio; films; books; DVDs; maps; exhibitions; live events; school publishing programs; interactive media; and merchandise. National Geographic has funded more than 9,200 scientific research, conservation and exploration projects and supports an education program promoting geographic literacy. For more information, visit nationalgeographic.com. To learn more about the mission and work of the Center for Sustainable Destinations, visit www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/sustainable/.

About the Multilateral Investment Fund

The Multilateral Investment Fund (FOMIN) is an autonomous fund composed of 38 member countries that is administered by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the main source of multilateral financing for development in Latin America and the Caribbean. Since 1993, the FOMIN has been providing grants, loans and equity investments for innovative projects that promote economic growth and poverty reduction through private sector development, focusing primarily on micro, small and medium enterprises. It is the largest private sector-focused development donor in the region, with an extensive network of over 650 local executing agency partners. Created in 2004, the FOMIN’s sustainable tourism cluster is a group of 27 projects in 19 countries aiming to increase the competitiveness of locally owned micro, small and medium enterprises by mainstreaming sustainability in the tourism sector.

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By Simmons Buntin, February 5, 2010 12:24 am

“A Short History of Falling” by Pamela Uschuk, appearing in the current issue (No. 24) of Terrain.org, has been named a “Best of the Web” award recipient by Dzanc Books and will be included in its Best of the Web 2010 anthology.

The selection completes the hat trick for Terrain.org, as we placed fiction in the 2008 edition (“The Split” by Kim Whitehead) and nonfiction in the 2009 edition (“Catching Hell: The Joe Holt Integration Story” by Heather Killelea McEntarfer).

Read and listen to the poem — and two others by Pamela Uschuk — at http://www.terrain.org/poetry/24/uschuk.htm.

We are delighted to once again place a contribution in the Dzanc Books Best of the Web anthology series!

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By Simmons Buntin, February 2, 2010 8:54 pm

Telling it Real: The Best of Pilgrimage Magazine 2003-2008
Edited by Peter Anderson
Pilgrimage Press, 2009

In the world of environmental literature, there are only a handful of steadfast publications — those you know you can turn to for excellent literary work in poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, as well as enticing artwork. They work in part because of the strength of the editing team, in part because of the array of contributors, and in part because they speak to place. Pilgrimage Magazine, a small journal located in Colorado, is one such journal.

“I believe in the power of stories,” says former Pilgrimage editor Peter Anderson, “stories from the world’s great wisdom traditions; stories that help us to know home and place; stories that speak to the social justice issues of our time; stories that invite reflection; stories that can open, heal, and empower us; the kinds of stories that once led poet Robert Bly to describe Pilgrimage as ‘one of the finest journals in America.’”

Anderson’s last move before stepping back from his editing role at Pilgrimage was to assemble Telling it Real: The Best of Pilgrimage Magazine 2003-2008, and as you might imagine the collection sings. (Disclaimer: Terrain.org editor Simmons B. Buntin has an essay in the collection, “Ben’s Bells,” so he’s biased — but if you spend any time at all with this collection, you’ll acknowledge his bias is right on.)

Telling it Real is introduced by Peter Anderson and then divided into four sections: Story, Place, Spirit, and Witness. At first, you might think: Well, where are all the leading environmental writers? There’s no Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, or Alison Hawthorne Deming, for example. The writers mostly represent the American Southwest, and they represent it beautifully. They are, perhaps, lesser-known, and yet their work — like the anthology itself — is strong and image-filled and built on a passion for and sturdy relationship with the natural world. They include Kim Stafford, Rick Kempa, Pamela Uschuk, William Pitt Root, Reyes Garcia, Maria Melendez, William Stimson, and others.

Telling it Real can be difficult to locate — it’s not on Amazon.com, for example. But you can get it right here:

http://www.pilgrimagepress.org/telling-it-real.html

And we recommend you do.

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By Simmons Buntin, February 1, 2010 8:43 pm

Join Terrain.org editorial board member Alison Hawthorne Deming and other authors at the Friends of the Patagonia Library Writers’ Round-up 2010: Saturday, February 13, 2010 from 10.00 a.m. – 3.30 p.m. at Cady Hall in Patagonia, Arizona.

Scheduled writers include Mark Bahti, Betty Barr, Byrd Baylor, Elizabeth Bernays, Joel Bernstein, J.P.S. Brown, Stephen Cox, Philip Caputo, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Elizabeth Gunn, Lynn Hassler, Juanita Havill, Mike Hayes, Fenton Johnson, Ken Lamberton, Susan Lowell, Gregory McNamee, Tom Miller, Gary Paul Nabhan, Margaret Regan, Richard Shelton, Stephen Strom, and Janet Winans.

For more information, visit http://www.patagoniapubliclibrary.org/?p=874.

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By Simmons Buntin, January 27, 2010 5:10 am

Final Week of Solo Exhibit: Heritage Homecoming, by Erik Hoffner
Vermont Center for Photography, January 8-31, 2010
49 Flat Street, Brattleboro, VT
www.vcphoto.org

Terrain.org editorial board member Erik Hoffner will exhibit images from a 2008 photo assignment in Poland for Heifer Project International’s magazine World Ark. This solo show features dozens of gorgeous enlargements captured with black & white film and also some color digital images. See the online gallery for a sampling.

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By Simmons Buntin, January 21, 2010 5:05 pm

President Barack Obama’s first year in office has been a good news/bad news story for the environment, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. On endangered species, he revoked some damaging Bush-era policies but also stripped protection from gray wolves in the Northern Rockies and Great Lakes. On climate, he followed the Supreme Court’s lead and declared carbon dioxide a threat to human health and welfare, but provided virtually no leadership in congressional and Copenhagen negotiations to develop a real solution to global warming. In our oceans, he took initial steps to address ocean acidification, but also increased the number of endangered sea turtles that can be caught and killed by industrial longline fisheries.

Overall, the Center for Biological Diversity gives the president’s environmental record so far a “C.” Take a look at Obama’s first-year report card and share it with other people who care about wildlife. You can also read the Center’s press release for more details.

Obama’s record, while much better than Bush’s, is disappointing so far. He has not lived up to his campaign promises by a long shot. Luckily, there’s still time to get him back on track: We have to show him America cares.

So the Center will be keeping up the pressure with scientific studies, legal action, grassroots organizing, and media work — and I’m counting on your help this year to get the word out to your networks, make calls to decision-makers, and send emails on breaking endangered-species issues.

Here’s to a better year in 2010 and great improvements in how Obama protects endangered species, wild places, and our degrading climate.

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By Simmons Buntin, January 20, 2010 5:26 pm

After visiting Carslbad Caverns with my daughters this spring, I have a new affinity and respect for bats and their migrations. (In truth, I’ve always been a fan of bats, but more so even now.) So this recent update from the Journal of Mammalogy strikes a chord:

Bat flying at night. Photo courtesy North Carolina Wildlife Federation.

Bat fatalities at wind energy turbines offer new insight into bat migration

New data suggest that bats, like birds, may follow specifically defined routes when migrating rather than simply migrating in a dispersed way across a broad area. Wind energy turbines located in these routes may cause fatalities of migrating bats. As new sources of energy such as wind farms are being built in greater numbers, their impact on other aspects of the environment must be considered. While we reduce carbon emissions and develop renewable energy resources, we must be careful not to endanger migrating species such as bats.

The migratory behavior of bats, a topic that has received little attention in the past, is the subject of new study in the December 2009 issue of The Journal of Mammalogy. Wind turbines have been the cause of many bat fatalities, but these installations also offer a new opportunity to examine bat migration habits. This is because the majority of bat fatalities caused by wind turbines around the world have involved migratory bats during fall migration.

Over a period of seven years, scientists used acoustic monitoring and carcass searches at nine wind energy facilities across southern Alberta, Canada, to determine if bat activity and fatality were concentrated in certain areas or evenly distributed across the landscape. Their findings indicate that as bats migrated, they concentrated along selected routes at night and sought daytime roosting sites. Migratory tree-roosting bats, including hoary bats, eastern red bats, and silver-haired bats, are the North American species most affected by wind farms.

As locations and types of turbines are planned for new wind energy facilities, the information gained from studying the migratory habits of bats can be put to use, making the facilities even more environmentally friendly. For instance, the researchers found that greater tower height increased the probability of bat fatality, but that differences among sites in migratory bat activity also were related to the number of bat fatalities. By identifying migratory routes and the specific landscape features that bats follow, bat fatalities could be minimized by building wind facilities in areas with low migratory activity.

The full text of this article, “Geographic Variation in Activity and Fatality of Migratory Bats at Wind Energy Facilities,” The Journal of Mammalogy, Vol. 90, No. 6, December 2009, is available at http://www2.allenpress.com/pdf/mamm-90-06-1341-1349.pdf.

###

About the Journal of Mammalogy

The Journal of Mammalogy, the flagship publication of the American Society of Mammalogists, is produced six times per year. A highly respected scientific journal, it details the latest research in the science of mammalogy and was recently named one of the top 100 most influential journals of biology and medicine in the last century by the Special Libraries Association. For more information, visit http://www.mammalogy.org/.

Media Contact:
Robin Barker
Allen Press, Inc.
800/627-0326 ext. 410
rbarker@allenpress.com

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By Simmons Buntin, January 18, 2010 6:48 pm

Animal Logic, by Richard Barnes

Animal Logic
by Richard Barnes
with contributions by Susan Yelavich, Jonathan Rosen, and Mark Strand
Princeton Architectural Press, 2009

A buffalo stands horns to head with a man who is calmly vacuuming the snow-covered plains beneath its feet. A herd of plastic-wrapped zebras surrounds a giraffe, while a man on scaffolding above them paints a lovely trompe l’oeil sky. Photographer Richard Barnes has spent more than ten years documenting the way we assemble, contain, and catalog the natural world. His behind-the-scenes photographs are haunting reminders that there is nothing natural about a natural history museum.

Animal Logic, Barnes’s first monograph, collects four related species of his photographic work that touch on themes relevant to science, history, archaeology, and architecture. Through his lens sights and objects normally hidden from public view — half-installed dioramas, partially wrapped specimens, anatomical models, exploded skulls, and taxidermied animals in shipping crates — take on a strange beauty. Barnes peels back layers of artifice to reveal the tangle of artistry, craftsmanship, and curatorial decisions inside every lifelike diorama and meticulously arranged glass case. Animal Logic investigates both the human desire to construct artificial worlds for “the wild” and the haunting and poignant worlds the real wild constructs. Barnes’s camera freezes migrating starlings to reveal the visual poetry hidden inside their dense formations. His extraordinary photographs of birds’ nests constructed from detritus — string, plastic, milkweed, tinsel, hair, dental floss, pine needles — sculpturally embody our often complicated relationship with nature.

Animal Logic presents more than 120 of Barnes’s photographs and features texts by Jonathan Rosen of the New York Times, former poet laureate Mark Strand, and curator Susan Yelavich that explore the themes that emerge from Barnes’s unique body of work.

~~~

Animal Logic will be fully reviewed in the forthcoming issue of Terrain.org, “Virtually There,” publishing in mid-March.

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By Simmons Buntin, January 11, 2010 6:18 pm

Not long after Deborah Fries submitted to Terrain.org, and we included her work — such as the poem below from Issue No. 7 — we knew a lasting relationship was developing.  Several years later, we reviewed her excellent first book of poetry, Various Modes of Departure, and then invited her to join our editorial board and write a regular column, Plein Air.

In reviewing the wonderful poetry from that issue, it seemed remiss not to first highlight one of our favorites:

Alone on Más a Tierra

Immediately our Pinnace return’d from the shore, and brought an
abundance of Craw-fifh, with a Man cloth’d in Goat-Skins, who
Look’d wilder than the firft Owners of them.  He had been on the Ifland
Four Years and four Months, being left there by Capt. Stradling
In the Cinque-Ports; his name was Alexander Selkirk.
                                                                  — Woodes Rogers

Imagine the turquoise horizon.  Days you saw a lozenge of grey, thought it a sail,
knew better.  No one would come.  Alone on Más a Tierra, you were everything
to yourself:  grocer, governor, butcher, tailor, surgeon, shepherd, pastor, lover. 

Imagine the loss of language.  Years without speaking, not even calling the cats
to supper:  Ben Feet, Ol’ Soot, Cap’n Cook, No Whiskers, Johnny Boy, Ratso. 
The motley kittens with no names sleeping against your face.  And in dreams,
old friends speaking without words.

Consider the beach after the storms.  Bits of ships that never reached you. Mounds
of shellfish and kelp. The blue French bottle you thought a jewel. The groves
of broken palms and a good white goat floating in the tidal pool.  No one to clean up
but you and God. 

Consider the animal you became.  Faster than the others.  A quick and clever
carnivore without salt or bread, sugar or silver.  A man who took a goat,
and then another.  A man who whimpered in his sleep, dreaming
of the chase:  the green forest, the flashes of brown and white and grey.

Remember the nights you went out of yourself and looked down
at the island, ringed with phosphorescent spawn.  And back again
in your dark shack,  tried to recall music and the smells of tobacco and soap
to forget what would happen when the Spaniards found you.

Remember the cabbage and pimento trees, the yellow snails and parrots;
the hot, white sun. All this beauty is mine, you thought.  A Scottish mind
abandoned off the coast of Chile.  You colonized the cats, governed the goats,
made linen shirts, grew rich and brown.   The gentleman.

Imagine the day Woodes Rogers arrived.  England had come for you.  And without
words or fine clothes you needed England to understand how you had made
Más a Tierra home.  Tour guide to your house of skins, the hoards of cats,
your worn Bible, the gracious uses of a common nail.

Imagine the stories they would tell.  Peculiarities of your ordeal: the man
who had forgotten ale, waltzed with tabbies,  run down prey.  A character,
and bigger still.  Even as guest, sharing Christmas goose and sherry, they would see
you as the story man:  voracious, unclothed, indifferent to a well-set table.

~~~

View more of Deborah Fries’ poetry at http://www.terrain.org/poetry/7/fries.htm and http://www.terrain.org/poetry/15/fries.htm, and look for new poems in our next issue, No. 25.

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By Simmons Buntin, January 6, 2010 6:03 am

Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments is pleased to welcome four new Editorial Board members:

• Alison Hawthorne Deming
• Erik Hoffner
• William Keener
• Kathryn Miles

They join the following dynamic mix of existing Editorial Board members:

• Scott Calhoun
• Miriam Marty Clark
• Rick Cole
• Carolyn Dooling
• Deborah Fries
• Jessie Lendennie
• Rich Michal
• David Rothenberg
• Lauret Savoy
• David Wann
• Todd Ziebarth

Additionally, Terrain.org’s editors are:

• Simmons B. Buntin, Editor and Publisher
• Stephanie Eve Boone, Reviews Editor
• Patrick Burns, Fiction Editor
• Catherine Cunningham, Editor
• Joshua Foster, Nonfiction Editor

New Board Member Bios