Greg Rosenke
National Geographic collection
In May 1980, when Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington State, the impact on a ten-year-old boy living halfway around the world in Victoria, Australia, was negligible. But in January 1981, when an edition of National Geographic featuring the Mount St. Helens eruption materialized in that boy’s mailbox, it was a different story.
The iconic cover photograph—of an apocalyptic ash plume boiling above a suburban rooftop somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, transfixed me, and, during the days that followed its arrival, I devoured every word and image (that issue devoted more than fifty pages to the eruption and its aftermath) over and over again. While I think my parents had been subscribers to the print edition for several years by that point, the January 1981 issue was the first that truly captured my imagination. Even now, forty-five years later, I can still see the images in my mind’s eye.
That story ignited in me a fascination for the natural world and the human explorers, researchers, and journalists trying to understand it, that has never left. As I grew up, National Geographic did this repeatedly, luring me in with gorgeously photographed cover stories chronicling momentous events—the maiden launch of the space shuttle Columbia (October 1981), the discovery of the Titanic, (December 1985)—then subtly continuing the indoctrination of wonder with stories of bird migrations, arctic explorations, rainforest ecosystems, and tomb excavations, details of which have stayed with me to this day. As a gateway drug introducing the intricate inner workings of Earth’s web of life, National Geographic was addictive, and I was hooked.
Thirteen years after reading the Mount St. Helens story, I was a twenty-something backpacker visiting a farmhouse in rural West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana for the first time, and it was a bookshelf holding every copy of National Geographic from the 1980s and ’90s that made it feel immediately like home.
In the 1980s at least, National Geographic’s coverage had an unmistakenly North American perspective. Sure, the cover story might be about the rings of Saturn or elephants on the Serengeti, but issues also covered American natural history, culture, and communities; and even when the stories were about lions or lemurs or lemmings, the scientists and explorers doing the discovering were usually American. Not surprising, given that National Geographic is a US-based publication; but as a soft power projection of American preeminence in science and technology, its impact on international readers was huge. American landscapes seemed bigger, American natural disasters more exciting. American science, it seemed, was everywhere—in space, at the bottom of the sea, burrowing beneath Egyptian deserts. To an impressionable teenager, the coverage seemed far more vivid and compelling than anything Australia was offering at the time, and as a result I probably grew up knowing more weird facts about North American natural history than I knew about those of the continent around me. But actual geography notwithstanding, such was the power of National Geographic’s photography and storytelling that the stories seemed to be everyone’s, no matter what piece of the planet they called home.
If you’ve read Country Roads much, you’ve probably noticed that we’re constantly drawn back to covering the natural history of our region. Partly, I suppose this can be explained by the astonishing biodiversity of Louisiana’s skies and swamps and waterways, and the ways in which the state’s unique ecology is so intimately woven into its history and culture. But it can also be explained by our growing awareness of the ways in which that ecology, for all its fecundity, is threatened by development and industry and climate change—threats that, economic imperatives notwithstanding, it seems willfully self-defeating to ignore.
Yes, you can still take a boat ride to the Chandeleur Islands and be blown away by the birdlife they sustain. But if you happened to take that trip with photographer C.C. Lockwood—who has been visiting the islands for forty years (and himself photographed for National Geographic), you’ll learn that today, both the islands and their bird populations are a fraction of the size they once were. To write about the natural world of Louisiana and the Gulf South is an opportunity to recapture some of the childlike wonder that arrived with each new issue of National Geographic. But since we’re all grownups now, doing so also requires addressing the ways the region’s ecology is threatened, and to acknowledge the people and institutions working to conserve it. For our sake, and for that of our kids and grandkids, I hope we’re capable of recognizing the importance of both.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
