Birth of the Blue Zones: How Dan Buettner created a movement
by Mark McDermott Dan Buettner is a National Geographic Explorer, a vocation for which both wonder and wander are inherent. But he came of age at a time when the geographic wonders of the world had been thoroughly documented. So early in his career, Buettner wandered in ways nobody had before, making his mark as an explorer through extraordinary exploits. He broke three world records by bicycling across five continents. He cycled 15,536 miles from arctic Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina; 12,888 miles following the 45th parallel around the world; and 11,885 from the top to the bottom of Africa. He also began to understand that what he was doing was not sustainable, personally or professionally. Buettner had become “a walking science experiment,” as he later described it, contracting malaria, giardia, dysentery, intestinal worms, and most of the other types of gastrointestinal infection known to humankind. By the end of the ‘90s, he’d cycled 120,000 miles, and it occurred to him that statistically, he should already be dead, by disease or accident. “Maybe it’s my grandmother praying for me that got me through,” he told an interviewer at the time. Something an editor at National…
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