A photographer as well as a photo editor, David Arnold traveled to Alaska for a story in October 1977.

Photo editors are the behind-the-scenes heroes of a photographer’s work. The editor sees every single frame and picks up on every mistake and missed opportunity. Then he or she uses everything at hand to correct, coach, and inspire.

David L. Arnold was the best of the best. He was not easy to please, but I trusted his judgment, even when his criticism was tough to hear. When he told me I’d made a memorable photograph, I trusted that too.

One of those memorable photographs was of a honeycreeper, a beautiful bird native to the forests of Hawaii. I’d spent five days on a tiny platform 30 feet off the ground waiting for that bird. I was cold and wet. The tree I sat in swayed alarmingly. The photo I finally made wasn’t good enough, David gently told me. He encouraged me to go back and do better, supporting my obsession to get it right. I repaid his support with a photograph of the bird that ran on the September 1995 cover.

David died a few months ago. He’d retired from the magazine in 1994 after 27 years of inspiring photographers. But his spirit can still be seen and felt. He was a role model for Kathy Moran, who photo edited this month’s story on the Great Barrier Reef. “I learned from David to be honest with photographers at all cost,” she says. “I learned that to edit a story you need to know the subject thoroughly. David always did his homework. He had a Ph.D. in every story he worked on.”

David pushed photographers to think about how best to tell the story. He had an unshakable belief in excellence. These are lessons I have taken to heart. I would not be Editor in Chief of this magazine if I had not worked with him.

Photo: Courtesy Arnold Family

Few things on Earth rival the searing spectacle of a volcano. It’s a force of nature most of us prefer to observe from a very long and safe distance. Not volcanologist Ken Sims. He, along with National Geographic photographer Carsten Peter, could never be satisfied with anything less than standing on the edge of an erupting volcano. In fact, even standing on the edge of an erupting volcano wasn’t enough for Sims. As part of his research, he rappelled down into the maw of Nyiragongo, a volcano in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to gather fresh lava from a molten lake boiling at 1800° Fahrenheit.

Nyiragongo is one of the most active and least understood volcanoes in the world. It’s also a threat to nearly a million residents of Goma, a city in this war-torn part of the world. Both Sims and Peter understood the nature of the geologic beast they were dealing with and were prepared to take risks. Sims wanted a sample of lava to help him predict eruptions. Peter wanted a photograph of Sims at work.

In this month’s issue Peter documents the descent into the fiery heart of Nyiragongo. It was a quest, I’m proud to say, funded in part by a National Geographic Society grant. “It was a dream come true,” Peter says of the experience. “You felt the pulse of the Earth through your body.”

The Nyiragongo expedition’s cooking tent glows in the twilight on the rim of the volcano. Photograph by Carsten Peter

In Jackson’s mind there is no such thing as a good person or a bad person. There are only people he desperately wants to meet. Jackson, I should explain, is my Jack Russell terrier. When he meets someone, his short tail wags at warp speed, sending a vibration through his piebald body right up to his floppy ears. He is exuberant, playful, affectionate—everything a dog lover could wish for. He fits the description of an animal domesticated through years of selective breeding.

In this month’s issue we explore animal domestication, which began more than 15,000 years ago with dogs. As humans bred wolves to be our hunting companions and friends, changes in appearance occurred along with changes in behavior. Traits that might otherwise have been weeded out in the wild survived because they were, well, cute. Jackson, with his piebald coloring and floppy ears, is a classic example. But I think there is more to it than that. When my family went shopping for a dog, Jackson confidently trotted over and made it clear he liked us. We immediately responded by picking him up and hugging him. I have to wonder if there is something in human genes that makes our response to a puppy so immediate and positive. Are we genetically predisposed to connect with dogs? Can a case be made that dog lovers had a better chance of survival with the help of man’s best friend—in a violent and uncertain world—to put food on the table and guard against threats? It makes sense to me, but cat lovers may not buy my theory.

Photography by Rebecca Hale, NGM Staff

Linda Norgrove was taken hostage by the Taliban in September and died during a rescue attempt. Photograph by Nick Horne.

Local intelligence is everything when it comes to traveling in difficult conditions and dangerous places. Fixers, inside sources, and guides are the unsung heroes of every coverage. They point you in the right direction. They watch your back, saying, "Careful, not that close." They tell you, "Go there," or perhaps, "Don't go there."

Covering this month's story on opium, writer Robert Draper and photographer David Guttenfelder depended on many people, including Linda Norgrove—the Scottish aid worker taken hostage by the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan and killed in a failed rescue attempt in October 2010. Norgrove, Draper reports, spent evenings advising them on which of her projects to visit around Jalalabad’s outskirts—communities that had once relied on opium for subsistence—and which areas to avoid. "More than once," he says, "Linda reminded us that certain roads were unsafe to travel. Sometimes, we had to take them anyway. Sometimes, she did too."

Draper and Guttenfelder were seldom out of danger. Kidnapping and being killed were constant threats for them and their sources. In Kabul a former government offi cial allowed himself to be interviewed, knowing that if he was found out, he and his family would be killed. "Covering this part of the world is a crucial undertaking," Draper says. "But I confess I spent the entire month with my heart in my throat."

The world’s population will reach seven billion this year. But you don’t need to visit Delhi, India (population 22 million), or China (home to a fifth of the world’s people) to grasp the consequences. When I return to Jackson County, Oregon, where I was born, the green fields where I used to cut hay, dig onions, and harvest pears are gone. They have been replaced by subdivisions and big-box stores. This is hardly a surprise given that the population of Jackson County has more than tripled in my lifetime. When I see the rapid development going on in my hometown, I can’t help but wonder what the future holds for the rest of the world. This month we begin exploring that future with a series of stories about population that will run throughout the year. Environment editor Robert Kunzig starts by sketching out a natural history of population. The issues associated with population growth seem endless: poverty, food and water supply, world health, climate change, deforestation, fertility rates, and more. Kunzig writes, “There may be some comfort in knowing that people have long been alarmed about population.” Some of the first papers on demography were written in the 17th century. It’s more than 300 years later, and we are still grappling with the outcome of People v. Planet. We look forward to exploring the topic with you.

Setnet fishermen on Bristol Bay trap salmon when the fish swim close to shore with the incoming tide. Photo: Michael Melford

From my vantage point in the single-engine plane above Bristol Bay, I see an epidemic of salmon fever as big as the state of Alaska. Hundreds of boats are in high gear, chasing the millions of ready-to-spawn sockeye returning to the bay, hauling in nets filled with fish. Many boats are so laden with salmon they ride precariously low in the water, dangerously close to swamping. I had heard about this fishery for years, but nothing prepared me for the enormity of it until I saw it for myself. I was also not prepared for its beauty and remoteness—no dams, development, or human footprint, just endless miles of pristine creeks, lakes, and rivers. This was the wild Alaska I had imagined. A tranquil landscape. Nature at its grandest.

Today, nearly 28 years later, photographer Michael Melford and writer Edwin Dobb see the same breathtaking landscape and find the salmon still running. But the Bristol Bay watershed is no longer tranquil. Instead, it’s filled with tension provoked by the discovery of what may be the world’s largest deposit of gold and one of the largest deposits of copper. The lode, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, has spawned ambitions for an immense mining complex with an open pit possibly two miles wide and a cavernous underground mine. It’s a face-off between salmon and gold; the battle between those who support the mine and those who oppose it has reached a critical point. The risk, the values and priorities, the balancing of potential gains and losses all present uneasy and complicated questions. In this month’s issue Melford and Dobb wade into the fight.

Bison once played a similar role on the North American prairie. In 1806 William Clark wrote: “I assended to the high Country and from an eminance I had a view of...a greater number of buffalow than I had ever seen before at one time. I must have seen near 20,000 of those animals feeding on this plain.” When Clark journeyed west with Meriwether Lewis, tens of millions of bison lived on the grasslands, shaping vegetation, dispersing seeds, coexisting with burrowing owls and prairie dogs. By the late 1800s bison had been hunted nearly to extinction.

Fortunately, many other migratory spectacles survive. This month the world of migrations comes to life on the pages of our magazine, on the National Geographic Channel, and at nationalgeographic.com. Our photographers and writers spent two years on the project. They were astonished and inspired by the determination and grace of these animals. I am sure you will be too.

An oily wave breaks on the beach at Gulf Shores, Alabama. Photo: Tyrone Turner

It is 150 years, seven months, and 24 days from the day, August 27, 1859, when Edwin Drake drilled the first successful oil well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, to the blowout of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, 48 miles off the coast of Louisiana, this past spring.

Drake’s well, which struck oil at a depth of 69.5 feet, launched the modern oil industry. We have been dealing with the consequences of our petroleum-fueled lifestyle ever since. There’s been much finger-pointing and debate over who is to blame for the stain of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, but the fault can be said to lie in no small part within ourselves and our appetite for oil. It is an appetite that Drake, with his 20-barrel-a-day well, could not have imagined. The oil from that well, and others of that era, went mostly into kerosene, which was replacing whale oil for lighting. Henry Ford’s company, which would ultimately put car keys in millions of hands, was nearly half a century away. Petroleum-based polymers, plastic bottles and bags, fertilizers, jet planes, the Age of Hydrocarbon Man, as Daniel Yergin calls it in The Prize, his history of oil, had not yet arrived.

The words that follow in this month’s issue, and the photographs—an oil-soaked pelican, a tarry shoreline, the despair on fishermen’s faces—remind us that there is more to the cost of oil than the ticking numbers at the fuel pump.

Wes Skiles took this photo of veteran diver Kenny Broad as they began their descent into the hydrogen sulfide zone of a Bahamas blue hole. 

Photographer Wes Skiles descends through 30 feet of fresh water and encounters a pink, murky haze. The color indicates the presence of hydrogen sulfide gas—produced by decaying organic material in environments where oxygen is scarce—and it’s dangerous. Skiles has little time to traverse this 20-foot-thick, toxic layer. The longer he lingers in this sulfurous hell, the more the risk. His head will begin to throb. He’ll get a tingling sensation in his lips. He’ll feel nauseous from oxygen deprivation. He must reach the saltwater layer below before he collapses. Skiles, writer Andrew Todhunter, and a team led by Kenny Broad, an anthropologist and veteran cave diver, are on a National Geographic–funded expedition to explore the flooded limestone caves of the Bahamas. These blue holes, the subject of this month’s cover story, are an environment like no other. Their dangers are also like no other. Many caves produce violent whirlpools that can rip off a face mask and suddenly suck a diver down hundreds of feet. The risk is worth it. 

To study blue holes is to deepen our understanding of the Earth’s biology, chemistry, and geology. Some of the caves, Todhunter writes, are the scientific equivalent of Tut’s tomb. “It’s true exploration,” Skiles says. Explorers, like Broad’s team of scientists and divers, open doors. They lift the curtain on hidden, sometimes dangerous, worlds. That’s their nature, and our world is richer for it.

Photo: Wes C. Skiles

All that changed in 1935 when Franklin Roosevelt established the Rural Electrification Administration. The REA provided low-interest loans to farmers, who formed their own cooperative groups to bring in lines and manage the power. By the end of the 1940s some 90 percent of farms had electricity. The grid was finally in place. 

The drudgery of life before electrification is a rapidly vanishing memory, as Joel Achenbach makes clear in this month’s story about the grid. Though perhaps you can remember—for a price. The other day I saw a real estate listing for a rural Oregon property near where I grew up. The log A-frame had one bedroom, two baths, and antique furniture that conveyed with purchase. Its big selling point seemed to be a promise of luxury living off the grid. It was priced at more than a million and a half dollars. I wonder what my grandfather would have thought of that?

In 1981, nearly a year after the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State, I flew over a monochromatic landscape littered with the shattered trunks of old-growth firs. Before the deadly event that killed 57 people, this had been one of the most beautiful mountains in the Cascades. Afterward, it was a gaping hole breathing plumes of steam. 

A colleague from the Seattle Times and I were looking for Ralph Killian, a man on a mission. We spotted him, digging in a tangle of trees (above). He had the weathered look of someone who had spent most of his 61 years working the timberland of the Pacific Northwest. Over the past year Ralph had been searching for the remains of his son, John, and daughter-in-law, Christy, who had been camping in the area at the time of the eruption. 

“A lot of people would just try to forget about it,” he said when we landed to interview him. “We go on living. Have to. But we can’t just forget that easy. I’ve got to know what happened.” Ralph had accepted the deaths of his loved ones long ago. But he still wanted to fill in the details of that day. In a bittersweet ending, he did recover his daughter-in-law’s remains though not those of his son. 

Science helps us understand many things: We can track a hurricane and measure a tsunami’s wall of water. But some things are beyond the dissecting lens of science. An aching heart, for one.

As a chemical compound,  nothing could be simpler than water: two atoms of hydrogen joined to one of oxygen. From a human point of view, simplicity fades. Though water covers our world, more than 97 percent is salty. Two percent is fresh water locked in snow and ice, leaving less than one percent for us. This “precarious molecular edge on which we survive,” as Barbara Kingsolver says in this month’s special issue, will only grow more precarious. By 2025, 1.8 billion people will live where water is scarce.

In the pages to come, we bring to life the drama behind that statistic. And this is only the start of a larger commitment, at the magazine and throughout the National Geographic Society, to explore the world of water. To that end, the Society recently named Sandra Postel its first National Geographic Freshwater Fellow. As a researcher, lecturer, and writer, Sandra has worked in the field of sound water management for 25 years. The initiative she heads will not only educate; it will “reshape how people and communities think about, use, and manage fresh water. It will provide the tools to enable individuals, corporations, and communities to become part of the solution,” Sandra says. 

A lone male gray wolf patrols Wyoming’s Blacktail Pond area of Yellowstone National Park. Photograph by Robert Weselmann

I saw the damage on a crisp autumn morning when I checked the pasture where I was raising a dozen ewes for my Future Farmers of America project. Several lambs were down. Six were dazed and wounded, their faces chewed. I tried to save them, but two died in my arms. The others died the next day. I was sad, angry, and wanted answers. An animal control officer investigated and concluded that they had been attacked by dogs. I received compensation, but to a 16-year-old, it seemed woefully inadequate.

Four years ago an automobile accident robbed Amanda Kitts of her arm and the ability to do things most of us take for granted, like making a sandwich. “I felt lost,” the teacher from Knoxville, Tennessee, tells writer Josh Fischman in this month’s cover story on bionics.

Bobby Model passed away this week.  I am incredibly sad and will miss him terribly. I kept hoping he'd recover and be back, with a shy smile, talking about photography and his next adventure. He made the lives of everyone he touched richer. 

He was a valued colleague and friend to all of us at National Geographic and will be deeply missed.  Our thoughts are with his family.

Lying on a soft, damp forest floor, looking up and oblivious of time, I’m in one of the most magical places on Earth, Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park in northern California. I can hear the panic in my mother’s voice as she searches for me—her ten-year-old who has a habit of disappearing in the woods. I should shout out to put her at ease, but not just yet. I want a few more minutes of solitude with the tallest trees I’ve ever seen. 

It may seem like madness for a photographer to repeatedly risk his life in one of the most dangerous places on Earth, but that is exactly what Pascal Maitre did on five visits to Somalia. (He photographed the street scene above in Mogadishu.) Without a stable government since 1991, the country is arguably the scene of Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis. It’s one of the deadliest places a journalist can be. Pascal began photographing there in 2002 and established the relationships that made this month’s “Shattered Somalia” story possible. In 2008 he returned with writer Robert Draper.

Sockeye salmon shoot up the rapids and flip in midair. I see their mirror-bright sides catch and scatter the sun. Propelled by instinct, they return to their birthplace to spawn. Commercial fishermen caught 90 percent of these fish’s mates even before the salmon began their odyssey up British Columbia’s Fraser River. The ones left have beaten the odds so far. But their journey isn’t over, as I found out many years ago on an early assignment for the Geographic. I watch as 13-year-old Gordon Alec (above), of the Lillooet tribe, dips his net in the rapids and pirouettes to his left with a captured fish. The ritual of netting salmon is Gordon’s ancestral legacy. Drying racks line the Fraser’s banks. Young and old camp out under the summer sky and celebrate the catch. But regret is expressed too, as elders recount how diminished the run has become in their lifetime.

I got busted at the milk shake stand at my first state fair. My father had dropped me off along with my prize hog at the Salem fairgrounds for the Oregon State Fair’s livestock competition. He paid for a week’s food and lodging in the 4-H dorm and went to visit his parents for the day. When he returned, we went to the Dairy Bar. It came time to pay for my milk shake. I was broke. My father asked what I’d done with all the money he gave me. I confessed I’d spent it all in two hours on the bumper cars.

“There is no feast which does not come to an end,” a Chinese proverb warns, and this month’s story on Canadian oil sands is a cautionary tale about the consequences of large appetites. With the decline of conventional oil reserves and the rising price of oil extraction, sources like oil sands—layers of tarlike bitumen mixed with clay, sand, and water—are increasingly attractive as a way to satisfy the world’s craving for hydrocarbons. The catch: Extracting them is messy and costly to the environment.

All the more reason to be mindful of the choices we make. Nearly 20 years ago my wife, Elizabeth, and I chose to live in the country, which makes us highly dependent on a car. We could move to the city and use mass transit, but we want to raise our family in the country. In compensation for our choices, Elizabeth drives a small, high-mileage car, while I commute to Washington once a week, park, take the subway, walk, and stay with a relative.

Much in life revolves around balance. Public policy strives to balance individual needs and freedoms with community welfare. Canadian oil sands, says author Robert Kunzig, are about balancing the needs of today and tomorrow.

In my own personal quest for balance, it occurs to me that I could compensate for my rural lifestyle by purchasing carbon offsets, but, really, the best strategy is to live an environmentally responsible life to begin with.

Photo: Peter Essick

Now, here’s the best. Witnesses fled except one man, who stopped, called an ambulance, and made sure Bobby got to the best hospital. “He saved his life,” his mother, Anne Young, said. Bobby Model, veteran  of many mountaineering expeditions, embarked on the longest expedition of his life. After a month, still in a coma, he was flown to New York City for surgery, then to Denver’s Craig Hospital for rehabilitation.  His family is his center of gravity, of course; his sister says it’s a gift to be there for the person you love. But Bobby’s big heart touched many, and many reached out in return. Schoolchildren in his hometown of Cody, Wyoming, sent cards. A blog for climbers posted a thousand messages. Friends flew in to visit, surrounding him with love.

“Sometimes I have to kick myself when I take my life for granted,” Bobby once wrote. “I’ve been fortunate to witness so many amazing human moments.” Now, Bobby’s drive propels him from one amazing moment to the next. “You see it in his eyes,” his mother said. “He is figuring it out.” He gets around in a wheelchair, talks, and laughs. He snaps with a point-and-shoot in his right hand, and, because his left hand lacks strength, the staff at Craig will rig a bigger, heavier camera on his wheelchair. The expedition continues. There is far to go. “But he is so much with us now,” Anne Young added. “He shows a sense of humor and sweetness that is pure Bobby.”

Recently, he wrote his friends:

OK, everybody you can stop crying for me now. Thanks, though.

Love, Bobby

Photo: Rich Clarkson

The day before Thanksgiving in 2005, Kathy Sartore, married to photographer Joel Sartore, learned she had breast cancer. “Cancer is a thief. It steals time,” Joel says. “But cancer can also be a blessing, an amazing experience that forces us to set things right. My work had made me a stranger to my three kids. With Kathy sick, I knew it was time to stay put for a while.” So Joel stayed close to home. He started photographing endangered species in his hometown zoo in Lincoln, Nebraska. Then he took his portable studio down the road to the Omaha Zoo. “My fascination with endangered species started when, as a child, I saw a picture of Martha, the last passenger pigeon,” Joel explains. “She died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Audubon described flocks flying at 60 miles an hour, darkening the skies for days at a time. And there she was, the last bird. I’ve never forgotten that.”

Kathy has beaten cancer, but Joel’s mission continues. So far, he’s documented more than 1,200 imperiled species. Among his photographs in this month’s story “Last One,” you’ll see a pygmy rabbit named Bryn. She died not long after the picture was made. Now the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit population is no more. Joel hopes his work will help prevent this from happening to other animals.

Since that monumental day in 2005, Joel has learned how to combine his passion for his family with his passion for photography. “Kathy’s cancer made me realize how little time any of us really has,” he says. Time, our most precious currency, is the most valuable thing we humans can spend.

Photo: Cole Sartore

I once met a hunter in British Columbia who could read a trapline as if it were a novel. Where others saw merely trees, scrub, and earth, he could interpret the wanderings of foxes, deer, and lynx. He was a man who did more than look. He could see.

Alfred Russel Wallace, the almost Darwin, was such a man. Without benefit of formal education, Wallace, a young English field biologist and collector of exotic species, described a theory of evolution that paralleled one Darwin had developed but hadn’t yet published. What lifted Wallace from the realm of the ordinary, points out David Quammen in this month’s story, was his extraordinary capacity to observe, a skill honed in his early days as a land surveyor, during long walks across the Welsh moors. It helped that Wallace, on his monumental expedition to the Malay Archipelago, collected specimens in multiples. One might construct a sentence from one golden birdwing butterfly. Given 50 golden birdwings, Wallace could construct a story. Another naturalist might not note ever-so-slight variations in size, color, and pattern. Wallace did. He not only saw, he meticulously recorded his findings, then connected the dots. Of such stuff is great science made.

“Learn to see,” said the eminent 19th-century physician William Osler. Before the advent of sophisticated medical imaging like MRIs, Osler could diagnose a complicated disease simply by noting subtle signs visible to the eye. To be able to see, not merely look, is the foundation of discovery.

Photo: Robert Clark; photographed at Sophia M. Sachs
Butterfly House, Missouri Botanical Garden

The desert air at night is cold and clear. I’ve never seen a sky so bright. The stars and planets seem to pulsate. I’m hundreds of miles from a city, deep in the Namib, one of the oldest deserts in the world. The Bushmen, southern Africa’s oldest inhabitants, call this home.

Legend says that one dark night, a young Bushman girl, wanting to see better, threw fire embers in the sky. The embers became the stars and planets. Thrilled with the transformation and wanting to make it even better, she tossed different burning roots into the air and added color to the sky. This, say the Bushmen, is how the Milky Way was created.

I have my own story about the sky, one that precedes my experience in the Namib by more than three decades. I’m ten years old, perhaps even the same age as the mythical Bushman girl, and am sound asleep. My father lifts me from bed and carries me to a couch in front of our flickering black-and-white television. It’s three in the morning on February 20, 1962, and John Glenn is boarding the Mercury spacecraft. Soon an explosion of light and smoke erupts, and the rocket, burning like a hot ember, lifts him into the sky. “Godspeed, John Glenn,” radios fellow astronaut Scott Carpenter. The world waits and watches. Five hours and three orbits later, anxiety turns to elation when Glenn splashes down safely.

It’s a scene I will never forget, but the mission that stirred my imagination more than any other was Apollo 8 in December 1968, with its haunting photographs of Earth, made by the crew as they rounded the moon, the first humans ever to see its far side. There is our planet, beautiful, fragile, a mottled blue-and-white orb, floating in the blackness of space. The mission’s defining moment came on Christmas Eve, when in a live telecast from lunar orbit, the astronauts read the majestic words of Genesis to an enthralled audience on Earth.

This special edition of National Geographic celebrates the 40th anniversary of that mission. We also salute all the heroes who have ventured into space, and those on the ground who make such incredible journeys possible. May the dreams and aspirations of humanity always be as infinite as space itself.

The night sky in the small, rural Virginia community I call home is a big deal, but I didn’t realize how big until our local schools considered installing stadium lighting for nighttime sports. The controversy that erupted surprised me. I thought there’d be arguments about the cost of installing and maintaining lights—and there were. I just never expected the most intense debate to revolve around the potential light pollution of our famously dark skies. When the Rappahannock County Board of Supervisors heard public comments on the issue, eight residents spoke in favor of the lights. Nine spoke against. Readers of the local newspaper also weighed in. “Our children will have the opportunity to play more sporting events,” wrote one supporter of the proposition. The lights   “will fundamentally and unalterably change the quality of life,” countered an opponent.

Light pollution is a rather new, unintended consequence of technology in the arc of human history, reports Verlyn Klinkenborg in our cover story. The beauty of an ink black night aside, darkness turns out to be as essential to our biological well-being as light. The cyclic rhythm of waking and sleep parallels the cycle of light and dark on Earth. Tampering with it may turn out to have biological repercussions.

Back to the light storm in my own backyard: After an anonymous donor offered financial help, the measure passed, four to one. It was “best for the kids,” the superintendent of schools said, but the jury may still be out on that one.

Photograph by Jim Richardson

My life has been bracketed by trails. I grew up near the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail, which meanders from the Pacific Northwest rain forest to the California desert valley and passes through the Sky Lakes Wilderness in southern Oregon. It’s where I first tasted the magic of two loves, a backpack and a camera. I can remember rolling out of a tent to photograph a small lake as fingers of light poked through a scrim of mist and the rising sun burnished the landscape with the intense gold of late summer.

Thirty-six years later, on the other side of the continent, I can sit on my front porch, look west to the Blue Ridge Mountains, and see that other marquee route—the Appalachian Trail. I remember the first time I hiked the Appalachian. Being a Westerner, I imagined I knew what real mountains were; I figured I was in for a cakewalk. I was wrong. The Appalachian Trail upended my arrogance. I realized that a challenging hike and incredible beauty were not exclusive to the Pacific Crest.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of a national system that incorporates 1,077 trails, totaling more than 66,000 miles in all 50 states. We feature one of them—Arkansas’s Ozark Highlands Trail—in this issue. “Build a trail and they will come,” says Pam Gluck, executive director of American Trails, a nonprofit that works to protect trails across the country. Trails, she points out, promote exercise and can help ease traffic congestion and decrease pollution. Most of all, trails put us in touch with nature—and ultimately ourselves.

Photograph by Peter Essick

Elephants stir strong emotions. I remember standing in the roof hatch of a Land Rover to photograph a bull elephant in Tanzania. The animal turned, headed toward me, and laid his tusks on the hood. I slid down and froze as his trunk slipped through the hatch and paused, inches from my face. Gently, the tip tapped my left shoulder and snuffled my neck. His warm breath filled the Rover. Then he retracted his trunk and ambled off. The contact took my breath away.

A bull elephant browses trees in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater. He later investigated the Editor’s Land Rover.

Years later, I had an encounter that left me with a different emotion. I was in a helicopter chasing a large bull in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. As the pilot brought us in behind the frantic elephant, a ranger, Douw Grobler, leaned out and fired a bullet into the animal’s head. He collapsed, driving his tusks deep into the dust. “A perfect brain shot,” Grobler said, adding that he did it “only to protect the park’s biodiversity. I wish there were a better way.” Sadly, sometimes there are too many elephants, even in the vastness of Kruger. The ranger was simply doing his job as part of a culling operation. 

A passionate advocate of African elephants is zoologist Iain Douglas-Hamilton. For more than a year, he worked with photographer Michael Nichols and writer David Quammen to bring you this issue’s coverage of the elephants of Samburu National Reserve area in Kenya. It’s a heartening story, but elsewhere the situation is more complicated. After 13 years, South Africa has lifted its moratorium on culling. This month we also examine that decision and the debate it provokes.

Photograph by Chris Johns, National Geographic Image Collection

The hand singed by the blowtorch looks human. Close inspection reveals that it belongs to a drill, a baboonlike primate, for sale in the bush-meat market in Malabo, the Bioko Island capital of Equatorial Guinea. Scorching flesh brings a higher price for monkey meat, a delicacy in this part of the world. Photographer Joel Sartore captured this alarming scene, hoping to provoke change. He was part of an International League of Conservation Photographers project called a RAVE (Rapid Assessment Visual Expedition) to document wildlife on Bioko. 

Bioko’s bush-meat trade threatens animals like this young drill.

There, primates are hunted and sold through a growing trade fueled by money earned in nearby oil fields. The commitment to make a difference motivated three other National Geographic photographers—Tim Laman, Ian Nichols, and Christian Ziegler—to accompany Joel. National Geographic and Conservation International sponsored the expedition. Along with writer Virginia Morell, Joel, Tim, Ian, and Christian have produced a startling story for this issue. We hope their work will raise awareness of the need for conservation on the island, to help ensure Bioko remains what one biologist calls a “monkey paradise.”

Photograph by Joel Sartore                                                                              

“The only thing that stopped the Tillamook fire was the Pacific Ocean,” my grandfather said. He wasn’t far off the mark. That 1933 forest fire, one of Oregon’s biggest, was never contained. The firestorm uprooted huge Douglas firs. Cinders rained on ships 500 miles out at sea. The fire scorched 240,000 acres before rain extinguished it. Some 3,000 men fought the blaze. My grandfather was one of them.

I grew up in the forest fire country of southern Oregon. My father and I would drive to the Medford Air Tanker Base
to watch B-17s lumber down the runway loaded with a slurry of fire retardant to smother flames. We’d hear about mechanics picking pinecones out of engine cowlings because the bombers flew so low they’d slice the tops off trees.

This knowledge was useful when photographing a fire in Oregon in 1979 for my first Geographic assignment. When bombers flew overhead, my instinct was to run for cover, until I remembered the knocked-off treetops and headed for a clearing. It was better to be pelted by slurry than crushed by a tree.

In October 1899 this magazine published “The Relation of Forests and Forest Fires,” by Gifford Pinchot, first director
of the U.S. Forest Service. Pinchot’s “snuff them” approach to wildfires has since evolved. As photographer Mark Thiessen and writer Neil Shea report, we now know that fire is an ecological necessity. If our understanding has changed, one thing has not: Forest fires still fill us with awe.

Photograph by Mark Theissen, NG Staff Photographer

In the photograph, a snow leopard emerges from the shadows of the rugged Himalaya. Its thick, soft coat is lovely, but even more enchanting is its tail. It is nearly the length of its body. This is my first opportunity to really study a snow leopard; I can see the rosette spots, penetrating yellow eyes, and broad, delicate paws. I’ve photographed leopards throughout Africa, but never one to match this creature’s beauty.

In a darkened room, Steve Winter shows his next photograph—another snow leopard, this one with a dusting of snow on its back.

The snow leopard’s long tail helps stabilize the cat on rough terrain.

I read George Schaller’s Stones of Silence 20 years ago and ever since have wanted to make a photograph like this. Schaller’s book transported me to the Himalaya; I dreamed of seeing snow leopards at those heights. The dream remains unfulfilled, but for now Steve is there for all of us. His commitment to this beautiful animal has produced the finest images of snow leopards I’ve seen. But reality casts a shadow on these pictures. As few as 3,500 snow leopards may survive. If I want to photograph them, I should move quickly. Schaller’s words still hold the same urgency they had nearly three decades ago: “The snow leopard,” he wrote, “might well serve as symbol of man’s commitment to the future of the mountain world.”

Photograph by Steve Winter

View Steve Winters stunning photography from the June 2008 "Snow Leopards" story.

I’m in a Beijing hutong—a narrow alley in the old city—playing Ping-Pong with a monk. It is 1985, and I’m on a photographic assignment for this magazine. Though many Chinese are afraid to be seen with a foreigner, the monk doesn’t care and invites other monks to join us. It is the best experience I’ve had in three months. That night I take a small, dilapidated taxi to the Beijing Hotel, one of the few places where foreigners can stay. It’s 8:30; the streets are dark and deserted. The few cars on the road aren’t using their headlights, I’m told, because the drivers don’t want to burn out the bulbs.

Cars now fill Beijing highways both day and night.

Twenty-two years later I’m in front of the Beijing Hotel at 8:30 at night. The driver of a sleek new Audi taxi pulls up with headlights blazing; he doesn’t seem concerned about burning out a bulb. The city pulses with life. It’s washed in light and jammed with traffic. An attractive Chinese woman approaches a number of men, then comes to me, asking if I need a massage. I don’t need a massage; I need a map—something to help me understand the cataclysmic changes of the past few decades.

China can overwhelm. The shock waves of its growth reverberate in every corner of the globe. That’s what this issue is—a map to help readers navigate the terrain of exuberance and anxiety that is China today.

Photograph by iStockphoto