We share with you a feature by Condé Nast Traveler that focuses on ”Travel-Changers”: 44 People Changing The Way We Travel, whom they label Wandering Renegades Redirecting The Global Compass.
If you’re on a trip and start to ask yourself, I wonder who came up with those e-scooters? Or the idea to put TVs in seatbacks on airplanes? Or who designed that beautiful African American museum in Washington, D.C.?
Those answers are among the 44 game-changers who made the way we see, taste, sail, and circle the world that much more incredible.
Sir David Attenborough
At the time he joined the BBC as a trainee in 1952, Attenborough had only seen one TV show.
He went on, of course, to present many of the most-watched and best-loved natural-history programs ever, seen by countless hundreds of millions (Life on Earth alone had some 500 million viewers worldwide when it aired in 1979).
He insists that he didn’t approach filmmaking with any kind of conservation agenda—he merely wished to share the delight he took in observing interesting people, places, plants and animals.
In the process he has probably done more than anyone else alive today to alert us not only to nature’s wonders but also the threats it faces.
Such is his authority that a few minutes of his Blue Planet II addressing the matter of plastic waste were enough to provoke policy changes at the highest levels of government.
Attenborough just turned 92. The ruffled quiff is thinner these days than it used to be, the instantly recognizable voice a little huskier.
Yet he continues to inspire, to alter the way we look at and think about the world we inhabit.
His great aim, he has often said, is simply to remind people of the interconnectedness of living things. “We are all part of the deal.” —S.K.
See more on him: The Voices of our Planet and The Dawn of the Anthropocene and Signs that you have been to Africa