‘What is (and is not) exploration?’ discusses what it means to explore and be an explorer by considering explorations and discoveries through history by Leif Eiriksson, Christopher Columbus, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Alexander von Humboldt, Henry Morton Stanley, Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, and James Cook. Exploration is often fundamentally about mediation, intercession, cultural negotiation, and sometimes, even, symbiosis. Exploration also encouraged some form of occupation, conquest, or control. Explorers were the primary agents of contact not just between cultures and peoples, but between whole ecosystems and environments. To that joint anthropological and ecological extent, exploration ultimately means change: it is a particularly adventurous form of original travel involving discovery, cultural contact, and change.
