Whither National Geographic

The USA's National Geographic Society (Wikipedia entry here) has been abound since 1888, and its well-known magazine for almost that long.

I can remember as a child looking at my grandparents' copies.  My parents didn't get around to subscribing until I was perhaps college age.  By then, I found myself almost never reading through an entire article.  The one thing I always did enjoy in those days was their maps: I still have a number of them in my map collection, a few dating back to around 1920.

In the first 50 or so years of its existence the Society sponsored discovery expeditions along with commissioning reports about places known, but unlikely to be visited by most readers.  In the 1920s and 1930s such places would include Brittany and other parts of France.  To get there, a reader would have to take a long train ride to an East Coast port (if he didn't live near one) and then sail across the Atlantic on a steamship -- all this before getting to the target area (and having to retrace his steps getting home).  Most folks back then did not have the time and money for such travel, so the Geographic served as a handy proxy.

One of the few useful concepts I can recall from my sociology training was that organizations would usually try their damndest to continue existing after their original reason for existence had vanished.  So it seems to be for the Society.  By around 1960 there were no longer significant unexplored places on earth and comparatively fast, inexpensive jet air travel made overseas tourism practical for a much larger portion of the American population.  Ever since, the Society has pushed into new fields and seems to have thrived.

Alas, for me what the Society does and what its now-many publications show are not unique to it.  There are other sources of information covering the same topics.  Even worse, in my opinion, the Society has allowed itself to drift into supporting political positions that are corruptive of best scientific practice.  An example is "Climate Change," where research practices have tended to fall short of scientific method as exemplified by Karl Popper and Richard Feynman.