Old Faithful photo: Mark Kobayashi-Hillary

OK TreeHugger readers, confession time. How many of you bring your cellphone with you when you go hiking, or whatever you do when you want to get out into nature? I confess that I do it—if only because it was already in my bag and I don’t want to leave it behind to get stolen—but I don’t actually use it when I’m out in the woods, even if there is a signal. For me it’s part of getting away from pretty much anything that needs a battery and into the woods. But everyone is different and some people have to check the Crackberry no matter where they are... The essential question is: Is the telecommunications grid compatible with the wilderness experience?

That is the question being considered in Yellowstone National Park. The LA Times has got a complete rundown of the arguments for and against, but this is the gist of it:

Northern Forest Canoe Trail, Image credit: Flickr, American Rivers, Blue Trails Set, photo by Jamie Mierau

At American Rivers, we not only want to protect and restore our nation’s rivers, we want to bring Americans back to their rivers. As more people learn to appreciate how great rivers are through paddling, fishing, swimming, hiking, biking, and camping, more people will want to protect them.

But some communities need help making these types of recreational activities accessible. A great way to do this is by establishing a blue trail, the water equivalent of a hiking trail. I recently posted about a new blue trail, on the Congaree River in South Carolina that we helped make possible by working with local partners. And now, thanks to a new guide, anyone can take on these types of projects.

These three young men having been walking across Britain without any money, camping out and relying on the kindness of strangers to survive. Calling themselves "singing adventurers", they have taken three major trips in the past three years, sleeping wherever they can and foraging for food. They sing three-part folk songs, ancient and modern, wherever they are welcomed. They "busk in heaving towns, chant in crumbling chapels, and get feet tapping in many a-pub across the land."

Why? and what have they learned? It started out as long hike, to see if it would be possible to leave home without any money or mobile phones and make it across the country by foot. Now it has developed into a kind of environmental mission. They have learned about survivalism and herbalism and finding edible plants. They have learned all of the basic life skills of living with nature that people have forgotten. And they have experienced wonderful responses from people along the way; some have taken them in, fed them meals and enjoyed their music.

If you’re a high school student with an idea to make your community a more sustainable place to live then there’s a new contest that just may be a great way to get the seed money you need to get your project off the ground. Put together by The Weather Channel and the National Environmental Education Foundation as a part of Classroom Earth, they’re looking for smart, innovative, and workable solutions to pressing environmental issues.

And get this; they’ll even pay you a cash stipend for being a local environmental intern to go along with the seed money you'll receive to help make it happen!

photo: José Antonio Gil Martínez

TreeHugger has covered the plight of the bluefin tuna on a number of occasions, and in short humans are eating them into extinction: The spawning population of the western Atlantic bluefin has declined 80% in the past 40 years.

In an effort to do something about this sorry state of affairs, at this week’s biannual meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, held in Marrakech, Morocco, conservation groups Oceana, Greenpeace and the Blue Ocean Institute are urging the United States to pursue a complete moratorium on bluefin tuna fishing in the entire Atlantic basin.

In a letter to the Secretaries of Commerce, Interior and State, the groups made the following recommendations:

Photo courtesy of Terry Mass

The critically endangered leatherback sea turtles are leaving California's relatively safe coast for their annual Pacific migration to nesting beaches—and they could find a veritable death trap of 5 million new longline hooks waiting for them when they return. This is the plight detailed in a new report, ominously titled "Death by a Thousand Hooks," which was released last week. The surplus in new hooks would come from a "Deadly Trio"—three new proposed swordfish fisheries slated for approval in the Pacific ocean. This could spell disaster for the migrating sea turtle population that migrates between Hawaii and California every year.

Photo courtesy of Daniel Belanger

There aren't too many good ol' artist/adventurer types around these days—ever notice that? Plenty of artist/graphic designer and artist/web consultants, but our generation could use a good solid artsy adventurer. You know, like Byron or Hemmingway or John Muir (okay, so he was more of an essayist/adventurer, but cut me some slack here). Perhaps with a little luck, we could find one in the intrepid photographer Daniel Belanger.

Yacht Racing, Vendee Globe Competition, Vendee Globe website

By George Grattan (with support from colleagues across the pond in Earthwatch’s UK office).

I’m going to risk bad taste and begin this blog—about record-breaking yachtsmen Brian Thompson’s bid to win the Vendée Globe round-the-world solo ocean race and promote research at the same time—by invoking Melville’s Ishmael.