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Today’s Inspiration

“My earliest journeys to off the beaten path locales took place inside the pages of National Geographic Magazine. Opening the ubiquitous yellow bordered covers, I marveled over “The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World,” studied photos of the Grand Canyon, and learned about other cultures. I still recall its first full-color cover—a 49-star flag honoring the new state of Alaska. Despite seeing no female role models on those pages, I still dreamed of becoming one of its fabled expedition explorers. Last year, I found a box of my youth-era issues in a secondhand shop. Browsing through them, I was dismayed at the shocking insensitivity and outright racism in the writing and photography. In an article about "The Sun Dance ceremony, a sacred Native American ritual still practiced today, a photo caption read, “Hideously Painted Shoshoni Sun Dancers Prance and Toot Their Eagle-Bone Whistles.” My recent experiences with National Geographic (now rebranded as Nat Geo) seem relevant and diverse. What happened between my childhood and senior years? What happened was 130 years of exclusivity and nepotism. In 1888, a group of 33 prominent explorers and scientists, all white and all men, founded the National Geographic Society and its scholarly journal. The publication shared the group’s findings to a readership of two million predominately white, upper middle-class Americans. Members of the founding group, who included John Wesley Powell, Alexander Graham Bell and others who were invited by exclusive invitation delivered academic lectures on their latest expeditions and research. For decades, three generations of a patrilineal family line ran the organization and its magazine. Gilbert H. Grosvenor, the publication’s first editor, held that position from 1899 to 1954, serving 55 years at the helm. Three years after he retired, his son, Melville B Grosvenor, began a 10-year stint as President of the society and editor of the magazine. Said the New York Times of his leadership, “Dr. Grosvenor did not dramatically modify the magazine’s traditional tone of gentlemanly detachment from the ugliness, misery, and strife in the world.” And three years after Melville retired, his son Gilbert M. Grosvenor became the magazine’s editor for a decade before retiring to become President of the National Geographic Society.  Forty years after the society’s founding, it had invited only three women to join. The group excluded African Americans from membership until the 1940s. It wasn’t until April 2018 that the magazine acknowledged its own biased history. Susan Goldberg, the first female editor, wrote, “Until the 1970s National Geographic all but ignored people of color who lived in the United States, rarely acknowledging them beyond laborers or domestic workers. Meanwhile it pictured ‘natives’ elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages—every type of cliché.” The acknowledgement launched an internal examination of the society and its magazine’s practices in membership, hiring, writing, and photography. In 2019 the Disney Corporation acquired National Geographic and began cost-cutting. By 2023 it laid off all the staff writers, turning its content over to less expensive freelancers. It stopped selling monthly issues on newsstands. And it limited National Geographic’s highly regarded documentaries, specials, and television shows to the Disney+ streaming service. Today, the National Geographic Society owns just 27 percent of the company, while Disney owns the rest. I pondered this history sitting in the recent Seattle audience of a Nat Geo Live! event featuring marine biologist Erika Woolsey. As the chief scientist at a nonprofit using virtual reality, we travelled with her to understand her research on coral reef reproduction in the Great Barrier Reef. Today, the society has more than 6,000 National Geographic Explorer scientists, photographers, and adventurers from 140 countries—and half of them are women. I’ve watched presentations as diverse as scientist Albert Yu-Min Lin’s efforts to find the grave of Genghis Khan, ecologist Heather Lynch talk about penguins, and Indigenous photographer Kiliii Yuyan discuss life in the Arctic. The organization funds the work of its Explorers with grants, nearly 50 percent going to women and 60 percent to non-U.S. scientists conducting research around the world. It’s the work of this diverse group that is featured in the speaker series, in the magazine and, as of July 2026, in the new National Geographic Museum of Exploration in Washington, DC. Jill Tiefenthaler, the society’s CEO since 2020, articulated her commitment to diversity in the organization’s latest strategic plan, “Society staff is currently 63 percent women and 31 percent BIPoC. Today, our executive team is 64 percent women and 36 percent BIPoC, including a Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer to ensure we have the organizational expertise to drive our DEI work forward.” “We believe we can only achieve our organizational mission to illuminate and protect the wonder of our world,” continued Tiefenthaler, “when people of every race, identity, experience, and ability have a role in our work.” Maybe it’s time to dust off my dream of becoming a fabled expedition explorer. Ann Randall is a freelance writer, organizational consultant and independent traveler who loves venturing to out-of-the-way locales from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe. Retired from a career as a teacher and union organizer in public education, she now observes international elections, does volunteer work in India and writes regularly for 3rd Act, Northwest Travel & Life, West Sound Home & Garden, Fibre Focus and Dutch the Magazine. ”
—ANN RANDALL

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