Ray Zahab finished his epic run across the Atacama on day 20. As he gets ready to cross the finish, he has a few words of thanks for those who followed and supported his journey.
"First of all, thank you, absolutely from the bottom of both of our hearts and from the whole i2P team, to everyone that followed along with this expedition. Just knowing that you guys are out there following us, and that's students, teachers and everyone, that followed us through Facebook or through the website, that energy helps us to get through these things."
--Ray Zahab 2/13/11 Santiago Chile, being interviewed by i2P Co-Founder, Bob Cox
Climbing has announced the winners of its annual award for the fastest, highest, and hardest vertical pursuits of last year. Below is a quick listing of the Golden Piton awards for 2010, with links to the full write-ups on climbing.com. And if you want even more, there are links to interviews with and about the climbers from our blog.
Breakaway Success: Kyle Dempster Two recent climbs in China, combined with a body of work that includes the west face of Tahu Rutum in Pakistan in 2008
Alpine:Yashusi Okada and Katsutaka Yokoyama Climbing Mt. Logan's 8,500 southeast face and then moving up another 3,000 feet to the peak of Logan, before a 20-mile descent along an avalanche prone ridge
Carl Safina is a critically acclaimed ecologist and marine conservationist whose latest book is The View from Lazy Point. You can check out Bruce Barcott’s review in our January issue. We caught up with the MacArthur "genius" award winner to chat about Lazy Point and what’s so unnatural about the world that we live in.
How long have you been a scientist, and what drew you to ecology and marine conservation? By my nature, I was drawn to science and wanted to "be a scientist" when I was 7 or so. I grew up near seawater on Long Island so naturally gravitated to the docks and bays and boats and birds, doing a lot of fishing and crabbing.
All of college and grad school was science training—which I largely paid for by playing drums. Then I worked a decade studying seabirds, a decade advancing improved fisheries policies, and a decade writing books about how the oceans are changing and what the changes mean for wildlife and for people. But now I feel that my work is more about humanity’s relationship with the rest of the living world and the future.
This book functions as both elegy and advocacy. What's the main message you want people to remember from it? That nature and human dignity require each other. In my travels I slowly came to see this. I’m interested in conserving nature, so it took me a while to see that saving nature from people is also saving it for people. For an extreme example, think of Haiti. Bad government, no freedom, no dignity, and as a result they destroyed their forest and land. And now the resulting poverty is a terrible trap. They have no remaining natural resources from which to draw a future, rebuild, or envision a path out. No dignity, no nature; no nature, no dignity. That dynamic is visible in a lot of places, and it’s at the root of some of the world’s recent strife.
And yet, the world still brims with life. There is so much left, but there is only so much left, and that means the stakes are high. I sense it in the migrations of birds and fishes and whales and others that surround us in the course of a natural year at Lazy Point. Their energy brings me sanity, solace, delight, and hope.
TED recently published this endurance running talk by Born to Run author Christopher McDougall. The 15-minute lecture is packed with loads of cool facts on the history of running, and not all of it is prehistoric or barefoot-inspired. For example, did you know that women weren't allowed to run in marathons before the 80s because organizers worried a woman running more than 26 miles would damage her uterus?
The first fight former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson ever got in was over a pigeon. Yep, some acquaintences taunted him about one of his pet pigeons and his passion for keeping the birds. He fought back when one of them killed the pigeon and, as the onetime "Baddest Man On the Planet" says in our exclusive interview, "I didn't really kill the guy, but I clearly won the fight."
Now Tyson's love for pigeons is on dsiplay in his new show,"Taking On Tyson," about his foray into the world of racing pigeons, which premieres March 6th at 10 p.m. ET on the Animal Planet.
