National Geographic Explorers Festival – Exploration in Progress

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National Geographic Explorers Festival – Exploration in Progress

Once a year National Geographic Explorers come together for the annual National Geographic Explorers Festival in Washington DC. This year, over 140 explorers came gathered to collaborate and share their work. As ever, this year was truly inspirational.

For the first time ever you can watch the presentations online. The full schedule of all the speakers can be found here.

The “Exploration in Progress” session is a quick-fire update from over 30 explorers. Each explorer is given just 3 minutes to share their current work.

Here’s my short update.

Watch Friday:

Watch Saturday:

National Geographic: One Man’s Plan to Transform a Major City Into a National Park

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National Geographic: One Man’s Plan to Transform a Major City Into a National Park

“What is a park? For most of us, a park is a place apart – a reserve of nature in a world increasingly dominated by human activities and arranged to fulfill human needs and desires. But a park is also for people –  a place of refuge for the human soul, which tends to wither when long separated from green and growing things.

John Muir, the great naturalist, captured this dual purpose at the dawn of the national parks movement. “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity,” Muir wrote in 1901. Our concept of parks, especially in North America, Europe, and Australia, has remained largely unchanged since.

Daniel Raven-Ellison, a self-described “guerrilla geographer” and National Geographic explorer, would like to change it.”

Continue reading this article by Emma Marris on National Geographic.

Photo: Luke Massey

London’s Peaks: Wandsworth

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London’s Peaks: Wandsworth

A few weeks ago I went for a hike to Wandsworth’s highest point with Rick Pearson from London’s Peaks, a new podcast.

“The premise of the podcast is simple: each episode, one notable resident of one of the twelve inner-city boroughs will lead us on a walk to the highest point within that borough. Along the way, we’ll talk fondest memories, hopes for the future and, crucially, what that area of London means to them.”

You can listen to all the podcasts here.

London Essays: LONDON’S EMPTY CHILDHOODS

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London Essays: LONDON’S EMPTY CHILDHOODS

From an early age I had the freedom to go exploring. Along with my brothers and friends, I would play well-organised games of ‘hide and seek’, ‘forty-forty’ or ‘capture the flag’ over large areas of woodland. I was good at it, too. While some of my friends would hide behind a log wearing bright clothing, I would camouflage myself with soil and old branches and position myself in the one place hardly anyone looks, on a branch high up in the trees. I would imagine myself as a lynx, a shadow in the woodland’s canopy, quietly watching as people passed below without noticing me. In the heat and excitement of the games, I used these quiet moments to tune into the wild around me. I might watch a woodlouse navigate an archipelago of moss, a woodpecker feeding its young, a family of deer observing my friends trying to find me.

We should not see childhood just as a period of time; we should see it as a place

At the age of 10, we made the most incredible camps. Once, taking advantage of a fallen tree…

Continue reading on the Centre for London’s London Essays website.

Using technology to make #wildcities

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Using technology to make #wildcities

First posted on NationalGeographic.com/Cisco

Back in June, I started my walk across all of the UK’s national parks and cities in St David’s, Britain’s smallest city. Since then, I’ve spent 338 hours taking 2,443,845 steps and walking 1,686km. To put that into perspective, equivalent to walking the length of the country and then some.

During all that time, I wore an an Emotiv EEG headset which collected data over 5 million times during the expedition: taking a 3D snapshot of activity inside my brain, transferring the reading from my headset to my smartphone, using an algorithm to work out my emotions and then sharing the data through the cloud for geotagging, analysis, visualisation and storage. I’m now working with neuroscientists and a range of experts to crunch and analyse the data. I hope to have some findings to share later this year.

What has become clear to me is the enormous power of this kind of technology to improve our lives. I really felt that wearing the headset influenced my behaviour. Much like how other wearable devices (such as activity trackers) influence how far I walk and how many steps I take, the brainware put me more in touch with my feelings. On a very personal and practical level, I feel that is has not only helped me to avoid stress but also actively search for interest in everyday places.

The opportunity is for technologies like these to become more affordable, used by far more people and connected through the internet of everything. We already know that data is being used to in many areas to improve health and social care, save energy and preserve the environment and help commuters travel with increased efficiency.Data revealing how thousands or millions of people feel about specific or different kinds of places could directly influence how they are designed. I hope that big data from a crowd of brains will add to the growing evidence for why we should make cities greener, wilder, less polluted and more healthy.

Influenced by wearing the headset, I had many thoughts and ideas about how we could make cities better. My lasting impression is that the UK is a wonderful country, but it’s also bursting with potential and opportunities to make it even more so. Here are just a few ideas of things I think would make the UK better.

Be more inviting
We should strive to make our cities more inviting and accessible to all by growing habitat for wildlife, having benches outside our houses, prioritising streets for children and animals instead of cars, hanging swings on street corners and offsetting every negative “no” sign with a positive “do” sign.

Be more interesting
We could increase visual interest in our cityscapes by erecting sculptures on roundabouts, curating exhibitions on household window sills, designing streets to boost bird populations and amplify their songs, chalking poetry onto paths and encouraging or making in mandatory for retail parks to have as much green as possible and make climbing or art walls on the side of their buildings.

Be more invested
We should be more invested in places by not just protecting nature and heritage but actually creating it, allowing culture and life to thrive wherever possible. We should walk more, engage with each other more and invest in making places more inviting and more interesting.

Be more connected
We should be better connected by ensuring everyone can always get a decent data connection, (unless they are deep inside a cave), using sensors and displays to reveal and visualise current levels of air pollution, monitoring flood risks at a hyper-local level and live screen nearby wildlife in city centres.

Many of the above ideas are personal, local and low tech. Increased connectivity will help us share, engage and evaluate these actions and many more to work towards, more liveable, healthier and wilder cities.

The next part of my journey is to use all of my Wild Cities expedition experiences, ideas and findings to further my work to make London a successful National Park City. To find out when the final Wild Cities results are published and how the London National Park City campaign is going you can follow me on Twitter at @DanRavenEllison.

 

BBC Wildlife Magazine: Concrete Conservation

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BBC Wildlife Magazine: Concrete Conservation

Urban areas cover approximately three per cent of the world as a whole, and seven per cent of the UK. They are a distinct habitat that, in the case of large cities, can stretch across entire landscapes. As you’d expect, our largest, most diverse, most complex and influential of these habitats is to be found in London. Covering around 1,600km it’s larger in area than the Peak District, and it’s not just home to 8.6 million Homo sapiens.

It doesn’t matter how often I see a red fox, my heart skips a beat every time. I see them all the time where I live in Hanwell…

The this article in BBC Wildlife Magazine.

Time Out: An urban wanderer walked all the way across London. Here’s what he discovered

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Time Out: An urban wanderer walked all the way across London. Here’s what he discovered

I’ve just finished walking across all of the UK’s 15 national parks and 69 cities: the equivalent of the length of Britain and then some. Without a doubt, the best part of my journey was my 18-hour, 56km leg across London: from Hinchley Wood in the south-west, through the centre of the city and all the way to Grange Hill in the north-east. The UK has many brilliant cities, but none compare to London’s diversity, omnipotence and sheer scale.

Continue reading on TimeOut.com.

BBC News: Mood swings. The man mapping Britain’s emotions

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BBC News: Mood swings. The man mapping Britain’s emotions

“National Geographic explorer Daniel Raven-Ellison has just completed a 2.5 million step walk across Britain’s cities and parks and electronically measured his changing mood with each step.

Wearing an EEG monitor strapped to his head he collected millions of snapshots of the activity in his brain as he crossed 69 cities over seven months in the UK from June last year.

The monitor measures the electrical activity of the brain from sensors located across key areas of the scalp.

Its software provided metrics on how stressed, relaxed, excited, focused, interested and engaged he was during his walks.”

Continue reading David Sillito’s report on the BBC News website.

BBC Open Country: London, A National Park City?

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BBC Open Country: London, A National Park City?

“There’s a campaign gaining ground to make London a National Park City. But what exactly does that mean? David Lindo meets the campaign founder Dan Raven-Ellison to find out and goes on a journey across London to see for himself why anyone would think the UK’s biggest city could qualify for such a title. Along the way he finds a ghost of a river, an enthusiastic ornithologist, and some paddlers who call Regents Canal their breathing space.”

Listen to this episode of Open Country on BBC Radio 4.