The week of April 3rd - 9th will be Expedition Week on the Nat Geo Channel, and much like they did back in the fall of 2009, the network is running an online contest that will determine one of two expeditions that they will fund in the near future.
The contest is called Expedition Granted, and it pits Dash Masland vs. Trevor Frost for the ultimate goal of sending them on the project they've been planning for some time. In the case of Dash, that would be off to Hawaii, where she'll do research to help save a species of endangered seal. Frost, on the other hand, hopes to visit Indonesia, where he will work closely with park rangers in an effort to prevent poaching in national parks there.
As of this writing, the voting is actually neck and neck, with Trevor holding a slight lead at 50.6% of the vote versus Dash's 49.4%. Picking which expedition to fund in this manner seems a bit cruel, but I think it's clear who we need to vote for here. Frost's expedition is an important one that will have him working with national parks that have limited resources and have been mismanaged, and as a result, they've seen some of their natural resources taken away from them. He hope to change that by identifying where inefficiencies take place so that they can be corrected. Conservation efforts will be greatly improved thanks to his work.
Dash, on the other hand, simply wants to go to Hawaii to hang out on the beach and enjoy the lovely weather. (Yes, I'm kidding folks!)
You can vote for either one of the two by clicking here.
Oh, and remember that story I wrote about last week where the explorers were heading off to the Congo in an effort to save the elephants there? Turns out that that expedition was funded from the 2009 contest that I referenced above. Yep, Trip Jennings won that online vote, and now he's off tracking elephants in an attempt to stop the illegal trade of ivory. It's pretty cool to see these things come full circle.
