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A happy irony of the computer age is that it has spawned a Renaissance in old-fashioned letter writing. Nowadays, electronic pen pals shoot missives across the world, but the essence is as old as stone tablets—ideas and thoughts, feelings and passions and questions. This week’s e-mail to “Glad You Asked” produced the following queries:

Do wildlife photographers ever help out animals in trouble?

Have you ever opened a copy of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC or watched one of our television programs only to find a disturbing image of an animal in distress? Perhaps it’s a cuddly creature in the jaws of a predator or a hapless elephant seal pup swallowed by a mud hole. You may wonder “Wasn’t there something the photographer could have done to save this poor creature?”

Aside from the inherent danger involved, there is an ethic among those who document the natural world against interfering with the natural order of things. And many times local laws prevent it as well. But sometimes photographers do intercede. In the case of the seal pup mentioned above, photographer Frans Lanting made valiant attempts to pull it to safety, only to watch it return time and again to the source of its misery.

Recently, in the National Geographic television program “Wildlife Warriors,” an elephant was shown with its leg entwined in a poacher’s wire snare. After shooting that scene, wildlife filmmakers Dereck and Beverly Joubert abandoned their cameras for several days and made arrangements for authorities in Botswana to help the animal.


Where are the ends of the earth?

Hmm, good question! Since the earth is a sphere, it doesn’t really have any “ends.” Oh, you say earth’s poles constitute ends, but just which poles? Geographic? Magnetic? And what is it about those places that makes them “ends”?

So, let’s also presume we’re talking about “land” as opposed to water. The North Pole sits on frozen sea water up at ninety degrees north. Its southern counterpart is also a bastion of ice and snow, but piled up on a continental landmass. But let’s look south for that spot of accessible dirt that is farthest away from any other landmass.

Our search would take us to the storm-wracked South Atlantic Ocean to a small nubbin in the middle of the triangle formed by the southern reaches of South America, Africa, and the coast of Antarctica. Here, on the morning of the first day of 1739, French explorer Jean-Baptiste-Charles de Lozier Bouvet and his crew chanced to glimpse “a grim, glaciated double peak looming out of the sea.” They mistook it for the northern tip of a fabled southern continent they had been seeking—Terra Australis Incognita. Bouvet never knew he had been the first to spot earth’s loneliest island, known today as Bouvet. I’d say it’s just about at the end of the earth.


Your magazine covers the whole world and is read worldwide. Why don’t you call it “International Geographic?”

And in the future - Intergalactic Geographic! Yes, over the years readers have suggested that the name International Geographic would more accurately describe the magazine’s coverage and readership. But “National” has been part of our name for 108 years. It is so strongly identified with our work that we would be extremely reluctant to make any change.

It might interest you to know that a list of the Society’s 217 members was published in 1889, in the second issue of the magazine. Only 31 members lived outside the District of Columbia at that time; only two lived outside the United States. Certainly using the name “International” at that time would have been a bit premature.