00:01Another person I truly love has probably done more for geography than any other person here.

00:07Gil Grosvenor, who's the great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, is the chairman of the National Geographic.

00:16He was a former Lifetime Achievement Award here; some of you actually remember him.

00:22He has done more for education in schools than any other person I've ever met.

00:27He's donated over $100,000,000 to teach teachers to get them teaching geography and integrating it in schools.

00:36So I'm very pleased to welcome Gil, and he's going to introduce some kids. Gil Grosvenor, please.

00:47Thank you, Jack.

00:48Thank you, Gil.

00:55Thank you, Jack. It's a great pleasure to be here today with this stimulating group of geographers.

01:05It's a rare and exciting opportunity for me to speak to thousands of people who understand the power and the relevance of geography.

01:14And all this is thanks to Esri, and Jack, I thank you for that.

01:20A challenge for both Esri and National Geographic, indeed, for anyone here...

01:25...is to help the rest of the world understand why geography matters.

01:32We are making headway, but it's a long, hard climb. For National Geographic, 2010 marks an important anniversary.

01:42Twenty-five years ago, we made a commitment to work directly with educators in the United States...

01:49...creating a core group of people who could help us bring geography back into K-2 education within the United States.

02:03When we started this project, I thought it would be easy. It has proven to be very difficult.

02:08As a matter of fact, I think I could move the gravitation force of planet earth easier than the educational force in this country.

02:17California is the birthplace of geography alliances, groups of classroom educators from kindergarten to college...

02:25...led by professional geographers who coordinate efforts to increase and improve geography instructions in their own state.

02:35Starting in 1986 with our first teacher institute at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. ...

02:44...for more than 2,500 practicing classroom educators, this experience has made them first-class geography instructors.

02:56We've done this through intensive summer experiences, and they learn how to transmit information to kids.

03:07In the quarter century since, they in turn have guided hundreds of thousands of teachers at all levels across the country...

03:16...from both formal and informal education to more local but often equally intense geography instruction.

03:25Still, there's much work to be done in geography education.

03:29As you all prove on a daily basis...

03:33...geographic thinking is key to a clear understanding of a topic, a place, or a process.

03:43Only by seeing and understanding the character, the patterns, and relationships around us, can we as individuals...

03:53...and as a society, hope to make intelligent decisions about the complex choices we have to make each day.

04:04Our perilous path toward the future will grow safer only when we grasp the linkages between places...

04:11...tying the processes and the foods that we eat with the climate and food-producing regions...

04:17...connecting transportation systems with energy production and consumption habits...

04:25...and identifying the threads weaving international politics with national economics down to regional land-use decisions.

04:36The cell phone with which kids text their friends carries more than just the time and place to meet.

04:44It reflects the importance of international trade, of science and innovation, and for manufacturing and transportation.

04:55In just China alone, there are 500,000,000 Chinese who subscribe to a mobile phone system.

05:07That's a half a billion people.

05:10This is why geography matters and what our education system needs to do to help students understand that.

05:18This is what the geography alliance movement has been working on for a quarter of a century...

05:23...and why we at National Geographic are excited to work alongside Esri...

05:29...and the many thousands of you who use geography every single day.

05:35Working together, we can push changes in education toward matters of relevance...

05:43...helping students learn math and science and language by engaging critical thinking...

05:50...about the systems of the human and physical worlds, which is the heart and soul of geography.

05:58Working together, the tens of thousands of users of Esri's powerful teaching technologies...

06:06...can help the thousands of teachers reached by National Geographic...

06:11...to engage geographic thinking to understanding and improving our world.

06:19Working together, geomentors and educators can help young people comprehend the many layers of our world...

06:28...see how they tie together, and explore options for a brighter tomorrow.

06:36If you have not had the opportunity to work with a committed teacher and a bunch of bright kids...

06:43...you are missing a life-changing experience.

06:49The GeoMentoring program launched a year ago at this very conference...

06:54...played an important role for our next speakers from the Cave Club in Bigfork High School in Bigfork, Montana.

07:05GIS professionals from national, state, and local levels all had a hand in helping this program succeed.

07:13I'm pleased to introduce to you a team that has helped to reveal and protect a hidden world.

07:21Demonstrating that the power of geography is truly universal, this group went underground...

07:28...studied caves, and brought to light that which lies hidden from most of us.

07:35They have investigated and mapped an unusual three-dimensional world...

07:42...and made recommendations to aboveground managers about how best to protect this magical realm.

07:51With us today are two newly graduated seniors, Tia Bakker and Ernie Cottle. Please help me welcome them to this stage.

08:15Hello, everyone. It is very exciting for us to be here today. I'm Tia Bakker.

08:22And I'm Ernie Cottle.

08:24Now, what a lot of people don't know is that the same problems associated within caves are closely related to those around the world.

08:33Caves contain both renewable and nonrenewable resources that are unknowingly damaged every day.

08:39So we want to preserve and conserve these resources by focusing on a few areas of conservation.

08:46Our first area of conservation includes removing trash and graffiti from vandalized caves.

08:51Originally, our club started as a recreation club.

08:55But as we went in more and more caves, we noticed that there was more and more graffiti within these caves...

09:00...and cleaning up these vandalized caves began us on our path toward conservation.

09:05As we became more and more involved with conservation...

09:08...we started completing different types of monitoring that allowed us to see changes within the caves.

09:14One example of this is our photomonitoring.

09:16Now this allows us to see human-caused change on a feature over a certain period of time.

09:21And you can actually see this on the picture to the right.

09:23Now this shows a stalactite that was broken off at some point during the course of five years.

09:29Now this leads us to our fieldwork.

09:30We do a lot of fieldwork, and it's the best part of our project; we have a great time doing it.

09:35And this includes recording all the resources within a cave.

09:38So let's say we come across a bunch of stalactites.

09:41We're going to record everything from length, condition, and location on every stalactite in that area.

09:48We classify every resource within a cave, whether it be mineralogical or biological...

09:54...in terms of significance, condition, and fragility.

09:58Besides our mineralogical monitoring, we also can tell two different types of biological modeling.

10:04We conduct micro- and macroscopic biological monitoring.

10:08Now, macroscopic monitoring is really anything that we can see with the naked eye...

10:12...and this includes things like barren wood rat sightings and the impact they make within the caves.

10:17It also includes things like harvestman spider clusters, which I'm sure you all know as daddy longlegs.

10:24Now the picture you're looking at is actually only a small snippet from a cluster that is over seven feet long, okay?

10:31So that's taller than this guy right here.

10:34And, I'll be honest; I'm not scared of a lot of things, but when you're in a dark cave...

10:39...and there are thousands upon thousands of spiders just hanging out above your head, it can be a little bit creepy.

10:47Now to move along to something that's not so much creepy or scary or anything like that, the wood rat.

10:54Now, the entire biological ecosystem of a cave is dependent upon the woodrat, and what they bring into the cave...

11:02...whether that be hair or grass or anything like that, because there's no sunlight in the cave for photosynthesis to occur.

11:11Besides our macroscopic monitoring, we also complete microscopic monitoring...

11:16...in which we look at micro-invertebrates underneath the microscope that we packed into the cave with us.

11:20And these micro-invertebrates are only about that big at the most, and so they're really hard for us to see.

11:28But what we do is we have a noncollecting form of examining them so they stay in the caves...

11:32...and not only does this help conserve them but also allows us to learn about their natural environment.

11:39Now we really don't understand a lot about the invertebrates' needs or their natural history...

11:43...so rather than looking at the invertebrates themselves, we actually began looking at the water around them.

11:49Some of the water chemistry readings we took involved taking phosphates, nitrates...

11:54...pH, alkalinity, hardness, and water temperature.

11:58Now, after doing all this work and making the maps of our cave data, it was really exciting for us...

12:03...because we were finally able to visually explain all of our findings to Glacier National Park.

12:09Giving a live GIS demo to Glacier National Park was a wonderful experience, and we'd love to share that experience with you.

12:16Now back home, Ernie here is known as the Clickmaster...

12:20...so he's going to show you guys a live demo that we built in 9.3, but we're trying it out in 10.

12:27So right now, this area just shows a basic map of the United States.

12:31This area up in here with the red dot, that's in northwestern Montana...

12:36...it's where we're from and where we complete most of our research at.

12:40And now we're going to zoom in to that northwestern part of Montana.

12:44This red schoolhouse right here represents Bigfork High School, also known as the base camp of Cave Club.

12:52And we drive about an hour and a half to this red dot here on the eastern side of Glacier National Park.

12:57It's about an hour-and-a-half-long drive with a four-mile hike to all our caves right here...

13:02...and this yellow line around here represents the Glacier Park boundary.

13:10So now we're going to a shaded relief basemap, and this is where we did the majority of our work...

13:14...but right now, we're going to focus on Poia Lake and Kicking Woman Cave.

13:18Now what's cool about Kicking Woman Cave is it actually got its name from previous Cave Club members...

13:23...who lived on a Blackfeet reservation, so it's just a common Blackfeet surname.

13:28Now, as you guys have seen from some of the pictures, caves are not flat-floored, ten-by-ten rooms.

13:32They're really dynamic.

13:34They have different types of floor deposits and floor drops...

13:37...and you can see that coming through in the detail on the cave map here.

13:41So first, Ernie's going to open up the mineral points and polys...

13:44...and a mineral point shows the exact spot where we recorded our mineral feature...

13:48...and a poly is simply a point over a larger expanse.

13:52And now he's going to open up fragility and condition for these mineral features, fragility in yellow and condition in green.

13:58Now, this cave was just recently discovered, so there's only been about 10 people in the cave...

14:03...me and Ernie lucky enough to be some of the few.

14:05And so here you have highly fragile features that are in great condition.

14:10However, on the contrasting side, let's take a look at Poia Lake Cave.

14:16So this cave you have highly fragile features again, in poor condition.

14:21And this is due to the high amounts of visitation. Now this leads us to why we do all this work.

14:28We do this work so we can make management recommendations to Glacier National Park...

14:31...'cause we really want people to experience and enjoy these caves but the park can really do that and still help people...

14:39...help them be protected at the same time.

14:41And none of this, I mean, absolutely none of this, would have been possible without the help and guidance from our teacher...

14:48...our mentor, and our friend, Hans Bodenhamer.

14:52He's really a man who's shared a passion with us.

14:55He's given us once-in-a-lifetime experiences, and he's really changed our lives for the better.

15:03So once again, it would be our pleasure to bring out the man who's made all of this possible, Hans Bodenhamer.

15:19Wow. This is amazing. Amazing.

15:26I have to tell you, as Ernie and Tia's teacher and sponsor of their club, I am very, very proud of them.

15:36They are incredible, absolutely incredible individuals. Yet, as incredible as they are, they are not unique.

15:50I've been a teacher for over sixteen years, and it's been my impression that most teenagers are like Tia and Ernie...

16:00...in that they want to be involved in something meaningful; they want to make a difference.

16:08They actually want to save the world. But they're waiting for someone like you to knock on their door.

16:17As a teacher, I see myself more and more as a catalyst. Six months ago, I knew very very little about GIS.

16:26This wonderful project with kids and caves and GIS would not have happened if our county GIS specialist, Denny Rae...

16:34...hadn't pestered and pestered me about getting my students involved in GIS.

16:40It also wouldn't have happened if another GIS specialist at Eastern Washington State University, Ben Sainsbury...

16:47...hadn't volunteered many, many hours tutoring us in basic GIS and helping us through some of our special challenges.

16:57As a GIS user, you can make a huge difference in the way we educate our youth...

17:04...which will make the world a better place.

17:08One trick might be to find a teacher doing something a little different, thinking outside the box, maybe like me...

17:17...or a group of committed young people, like Tia and Ernie here, in an extracurricular club or activity.

17:25Find them, make a connection, show them how they can use GIS in their project, and the rest will be magic.

17:36Thank you.

17:51Thank you very much, Tia, Ernie, and Hans.

17:56You might wonder how these two youngsters became so poised on a stage such as this.

18:05Well, they just returned from the White House, where President Obama spent about 10 minutes talking with them.

18:14And also, at that time, the administrator of the EPA, Lisa Jackson...

18:19...presented them with the Environmental Youth Award for the year 2010.

18:25As a Washingtonian, I've got to tell you, not many people get them. Thank you. Thank you very much.

18:40Thank you.

18:41Wonderful, you did well, you did well.

18:43Thank you so much.

18:45Thank you.

18:54Imagine what changes we could make together in communities across the country and around the world...

19:00...if all geoprofessionals here and those you know would work with local educators to bring that power to our youth.

19:11That sense of vision and the ability to share it with others is what the National Geographic Society has supported...

19:19...and brought to the world since our founding in 1888.