Category: National Geographic

National Geographic March 2013, Part 3

The Drones Come Home, by John Horgan, photographs by Joe McNally

I thought I could knock this out with my last National Geographic post, but when I was writing the post, I realized that I still hadn’t read this article. And now that I’ve read it, I’m still not sure I’ve read it.

Mostly this is about the then up-and-coming field of drones. We talk about the applications that drones can be put to, such as military and law enforcement uses, and the newest varieties of drones that were then being developed.

I really found it to be not terribly gripping reading, so I asked Alex to read it, hoping that he could distill something more exciting from it, but he didn’t see much there, either. So I guess I can say, well, I read it.

National Geographic March 2013, Part 2

Return to River Town, by Peter Hessler, photographs by Anastasia Taylor-Lind

Hessler was a Peace Corps volunteer in Fuling, PRC in the late 1990s. He wrote three books about his experiences in China, the first of which was named River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, whence this article gets its name.

Fuling is, again, as the title of Hessler’s book implies, on the Yangtze River. It is, in fact, near the Three Gorges Dam, one of the largest dams in the world, and the one that produces by far the most electricity.

In Return to River Town, Hessler chronicles some of the changes that have come to Fuling since the publication of his books. He also takes us to the Baiheliang (White Crane Ridge) Underwater Museum, which protects an archaeological site that was submerged when the dam was built.

The Left Bank Ape, by David Quammen, photographs by Christian Ziegler

I’m unclear on the use of “Exclusive” in the subtitle on this article: An Exclusive Look at Bonobos. Maybe I’ve read the covers of too many gossip magazines in my day, but to me this sounds like the bonobos gave some kind of interview to Quammen that they didn’t give to anyone else. Maybe “Exclusive” means “on just bonobos and no other animals”? I guess I’ll probably never know.

I have to admit that I read this article first. Some of my friends idealize bonobo culture, and I really wonder what’s going through their heads when they say that having sex with an aggressor sounds more pleasant to them than fighting with the aggressor. I finally had to speak up and say that I find anger to be a definite turnoff and submitting sexually to someone who’s angry sounds, well, kind of like rape to me.

Over these past few years, as a result, I have a kind of knee-jerk reaction to the very word “bonobos,” so since I’m dedicated to reading absolutely everything, I figured I’d pull the metaphorical “adhesive bandage” off quickly and read this one first.

And Quammen tells us that things are different for bonobos in the wild than the ones in captivity that gave them their reputation. In the wild, bonobos do fight and it’s apparently not expected for the combatants to have sex with each other. It seems that the excessive sex-focus of bonobos is largely an artifact of captivity. In their natural habitat, in fact, the males have relatively high levels of cortisol, a hormone that increases during times of stress.

As to the title The Left-Bank Ape, bonobos are less likely to engage in outright violence than chimpanzees, however, and spend less time eating meat and more time eating plant-based foods than chimpanzees. Scientists attribute this to the lack of gorillas on their side of the Congo River. The lack of competition from gorillas has led to the lifestyle of the bonobo being, while not completely free of stress, less stressful than that of its cousins across the river.

National Geographic March 2013, Part 1

Let’s see if I can get back on this horse here. I try to do NaNoWriMo every year and November is just around the corner. Hopefully I’ll be able to produce at least one blog post a day through the month (though I’ll probably keep going on the every other day pattern for posting). We’ll see what happens once we get there.

In other news, I’m still having trouble reading the issue in one tab while writing in the other, so it looks like I’ll be balancing the issue on my knee for the foreseeable future.

The New Oil Landscape, by Edwin Dobb, photographs by Eugene Richards

It’s interesting that this issue comes along in my reading just as the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline are making headlines, because fracking in North Dakota is what this article is about. Also, the induced earthquakes in Oklahoma have made news recently, though the government of Oklahoma assures us that fracking is not causing the earthquakes. Oklahoma insists that it’s from wastewater wells. I’m dubious about whether that’s for real or not, but I do think that our continued dependence on fossil fuels is a losing proposition in general.

I’ve been pricing rooftop solar and backyard wind turbines. I’d also like to convert my car to electricity some day, but Alex is trying to sell me on biodiesel.

The New Oil Landscape is a long article. I half-expected that it would take up most of the issue because it just kept going and going, taking up pages 28 through 59. I knew that there would be at least one other article because I’d already read the article on bonobos (more on that in a future blog post).

In The New Oil Landscape, we talk a lot about the people affected by fracking, including the workers and a family who were evicted so that an oil company could move their employees into their apartment complex.

Night Gardens, by Cathy Newman, photographs by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel

This is another article that’s pretty much just what it says in the title. Two pages of text on gardens at nighttime are surrounded by photographs of, well, gardens at nighttime. And the White Garden of Sissinghurst in the UK gets a mention. Sissinghurst was the first place we visited when we went on our big UK trip in 2002. The white garden was lovely, but I fell in love with the white wisteria tree hanging over the brick wall. I wish that wisteria weren’t quite so invasive, because I would dearly love to reproduce that.

Instead, I’ve planted two Texas mountain laurels, which are similar in look, although purple, rather than white (the flowers actually smell like grape candy!) but less invasive. Upon doing some research I find that there is such a thing as a white mountain laurel. Maybe something to consider for my next spate of tree-planting.

National Geographic May 2016, Part 3

Living with the Wild, by David Quammen, photographs by various photographers

In this final installment of Quammen’s article about Yellowstone, he talks about the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. He discusses where the term came from, the area it relates to, and how the park itself is impacted by things that happen in the “greater ecosystem” in general. You see, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is not just the park itself, but the surrounding area.

One of the biggest problems is that, well, there are people in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and people have an impact everywhere they go. Most notably, once an animal leaves the park itself, it becomes potential prey for human hunters. And since the park is not fenced off, animals are entering and leaving the park all the time.

Additionally, some of the bison can carry brucellosis, a disease that can be transmitted to cattle and that causes cows to miscarry their calves. No cases of brucellosis being transmitted to cattle from Yellowstone bison have been found yet, but the potential is there, which causes conflicts between ranchers and the park.

The copy of the issue that I have (and likely the same layout that everyone got) suddenly stops in the middle of a sentence on page 137. We go on to some other material for four pages, and then we pick up where we left off on page 142. There is no “(continued on page 142)” or anything.

Quammen has no answers to the questions about what will happen to Yellowstone in the future. One of the people he speaks with, Dave Hallac, former chief of the Yellowstone Center for Resources, says that Yellowstone is facing a “creeping crisis”and doesn’t hold out much hope for the park. Is Hallac right? The scientists involved with Yellowstone are hoping they can forestall the crisis and save the park.

Other Material in this Part of the Issue

Voices: Bill Hoppe (Rancher, Wolf-Release Critic)

Voices: Leo Teton (Member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes Fort Hall Reservation, Idaho)

Dance of the Bison and Elk, a pictorial

Land of the People, another pictorial

Voices: Becky Weed (Rancher, Belgrade, Montana)

National Geographic May 2016, Part 2

Sorry for the gap, but I’ve been stressed out lately and so dealing with that took precedence over blogging. I need to get more prewritten posts racked up before this happens again. Oh, well, this is a learning process, isn’t it?

Now, on to the issue.

Into the Backcountry, by David Quammen, photographs by various photographers

In this part of the issue, we talk about wolves, grizzlies, and elk. Quammen spends a while talking about changes to the environment and the introduction of lake trout to Yellowstone Lake. You’d think that lake trout would thrive in Yellowstone. And you’d be right. The problem is that the lake trout are thriving just a little too much. Grizzly bears eat cutthroat trout. The cutthroat trout eat bugs on the surface of the water and come into the rivers to spawn which make them available for the grizzlies to eat. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work.

The lake trout outcompete the cutthroat trout and are also basically unavailable to bears. The lake trout eat crustaceans from the bottom of the lake and also spawn down there, meaning that their nutrients are locked inside their bodies for too long to support the grizzly.

As a result, for the last five years, Yellowstone has hired a company from Door County Wisconsin which brings boats and nets and slaughters literally tons of lake trout every day. The dead lake trout are then dumped back into the lake so that their nutrients will be available to the ecosystem once again. Quammen doesn’t believe that this will end the reign of the lake trout, but the humans are trying the best they can to restore the balance to the ecosystem.

Other Sections in This Part of the Issue:

Voices: John Craighead, wildlife biologist

The Carnivore Comeback, a pictorial of predators

Tracking the Wildlife Highways, another pictorial, this time of migrations, including a section on the migration of pronghorn.

National Geographic May 2016, Part 1

I’m  a couple of posts behind here because this issue, which focuses on Yellowstone National Park, has an unusual structure. There are pictorials and things punctuating several pretty long articles, rather than larger and smaller articles. So I guess I’ll treat the photo essays and things as if they were articles as well.

America’s Wild Idea, by David Quammen

America’s Wild Idea is the first photo essay, which is accompanied by photos by several photographers. The text isn’t unified but complements the photos that are near it — a blurb about the prismatic springs near a photo of the springs themselves, a statement about interactions (and conflicts) between humans and grizzly bears near a photo of a man who was attacked by a bear, and so forth.

The Paradox of the Park

No writer is credited on this section. We start out talking about, once again, conflicts between grizzlies and humans, and then go into the history of the park. One of the points that the (to the best of my ability to determine) makes is that originally Yellowstone wasn’t supposed to be about establishing a truly wild place. It was more of a place designed to protect prey species from predators. To this end, nearly every carnivore in the park, from grizzly bears on down to otters and skunks, were hunted. Then they discovered that bears could be a draw. The problem with this was that the bears in the park were habituated to humans and would eat out of garbage receptacles.

We kind of end this article on a cliffhanger — “But the grizzlies of Yellowstone were never tame,” and that’s it. I think that perhaps this was intended to be kind of artistic, wrapping around to the conflicts at the beginning of the article, but I was left less than impressed. I think that maybe this was because the article ends in 1929, but begins in 2015. That’s a gap of nearly 100 years. I guess that the attack could prove that the grizzlies weren’t tame, but it could also well indicate that something changed in the interim.

Other Pictorials and Things

Back when I made my posts on Yellowstone, I said that I’d read something where the superintendent of the park, Dan Wenk, said that they need to limit the number of visitors to the park. I found it. It was on the next page after The Paradox of the Park. I still think that limiting cars would go a long way towards the goal that Wenk espouses.

The rest of this part of the issue are more pictorials, It All Starts with Heat, The Fire Within, and For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People.

Next up: More Chicago pictures and then we go onto the next article, Into the Backcountry.

National Geographic April 2013, Part 3

Europe’s Wild Men, photographs by Charles Fréger, text by Rachel Hartigan Shea

Europe’s Wild Men is a collection of Fréger’s photographs of men dressed in traditional costumes evoking spirits, monsters, and animals. The subjects of these photographs are apparently all men, but occasionally women do wear these costumes. Shea’s text explains some of the costumes and the history behind them.

Mahogany’s Last Stand, by Scott Wallace, photographs by Alex Webb

In this article, we look at the business of tree poaching in Peru. The primary target of these poachers is mahogany, but other trees are targeted as well. The government of Peru stopped mahogany logging in 2001 and has been including most mahogany forests in national parks and in reserves for indigenous people, in hopes of preserving them.

Apparently, the poaching of mahogany continued after 2013, because I found a Sierra Club article about mahogany with falsified documents being imported into the United States in 2015.

National Geographic April 2013, Part 2

History’s Backyard, by Adam Goodheart, photographs by Michael Melford

First, I was kind of surprised to find that “backyard” spellchecks. Upon further research (and contemplation) I realized that I’ve generally seen noun as two words, but the adjective as one. So it should spellcheck, but it definitely looks like it should be “Back Yard” in this instance. I keep expecting it to be History’s Backyard Something (barbecue? garden?)

Anyway, the “backyard” in question is the Brandywine River in Delaware. The article goes into some of the historical events that took place along river. As this issue went to press, the government was contemplating including an area including the Brandywine River in the National Park Service. They did eventually do just that. Originally, it was made First State National Monument, then in 2015, it became First State National Historical Park, the first national park in Delaware.

When Push Comes to Shove, by Mel White, photographs by Paul Nicklen

When Push Comes to Shove is about conflict over manatees in Kings Bay, Florida. When this issue was written, over 600 manatees would spend the winter in the bay, and the manatees are a huge draw for tourists and drive quite a bit of the local economy. You see, the nearby town of Crystal River is the only place that allowed people to get into the water with the manatees.

The conflict is that the government, which has an interest in preserving biodiversity (which means preserving the manatees in particular) for future generations, wanted to enforce speed limits on boats in the area to protect the manatees.  Ideally, they would have liked to make Kings Bay off-limits to swimming with the manatees entirely.

I have been unable to determine what, if anything, has changed about this situation in the last three years. I am thinking, though, that a happy medium would be to have licensed manatee tour operators. If visitors who are allowed to swim with the manatees are required to go through a tour operator, then the tour operator would be required to limit swimmers to those that they can supervise (and thus keep from harming the manatees) successfully. Manatee Visitor Supervisor could become a new growth job in the region.

 

National Geographic April 2013, Part 1

I definitely am starting my fifth year of National Geographic issues here. And things should pick up soon. Alex is back in school, so we won’t be going anywhere together on most of my weekdays off. This means that I will return to my hiking-and-listening-to-19th-century-National-Geographic-issues trips. I should be done with 1889 by the end of 2016. I hope.

Bringing Them Back to Life, by Carl Zimmer, photographs by Robb Kendrick

The “them” of the title here is extinct species. Humanity is causing, directly or indirectly, the loss of species, perhaps on a daily, or even hourly, basis (depending on the model you use). Most of these species are likely to be bacteria, invertebrates, or even plants that were never identified in the first place. But the fact remains that there are hundreds of species that we can identify that have gone extinct and it would be nice to stop the resource use (particularly deforestation and rerouting of water) that causes these extinctions.

About a century ago, we lost the passenger pigeon. At one time, there were millions of passenger pigeons in North America, and then westerners moved in and started eating them. Within a couple of hundred years, they were all gone. So, since they once existed in such high numbers and because their loss was relatively recent, this is the example given of how manipulation of rock pigeon genes could create new passenger pigeons, or at least a new bird with the same genetic traits as the passenger pigeon. It would look like a passenger pigeon and likely have some of the same behaviors as the passenger pigeon. Hopefully it would fill the same niche in the ecosystem that the passenger pigeon once filled. At worst, it seems to me that it would be a prettier rock pigeon (and I say this as someone who finds rock pigeons to be a fairly nice-looking bird).

Will this kind of manipulation ever successfully be done? Well, it’s three years later and we haven’t seen the return of the passenger pigeon, so it doesn’t look like it’s been attempted. But perhaps someone someday will attempt it and it will be successful. One of the problems with the plan is that they would have to produce a lot of passenger pigeons in that first generation to succeed, because passenger pigeons naturally formed large flocks.

And even if we do see the return of the passenger pigeon or the Western black rhinoceros, or the Pinata Island tortoise, it will be a long, long time indeed before resources are such that we would have a Jurassic Park-type revival or even the return of animals that coexisted with humans such as, well, the mammoth. Hey, that leads nicely into the next article . . . .

Of Mammoths and Men, by Brook Larmer, photographs by Evgenia Arbugaeva

No, we aren’t talking about the return of the mammoth from extinction. Instead, Of Mammoths and Men is a profile of the residents of northern Siberia who hunt mammoth tusks for a living. As of 2013, a mammoth tusk could earn a hunter at least $60,000.  The hunter that we follow has an exceptionally good year while we follow him, bringing in at least $150,000 worth of mammoth tusks.

National Geographic April 2016, Part 3

Ghost Lands, by Paul Salopek, photographs by John Stanmeyer

We return to Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk series for the first time after a pretty long hiatus. The Out of Eden Walk was originally supposed to take seven years, but it looks like it may take longer. The last time I checked the map showing where he was expected to be, he was a little bit behind schedule. I found the map and he was supposed to be in India in 2015 and then in China at some point in 2016.

So far he’s made it to the border between Turkey and Armenia and in this article he shares with us some of the fraught history between those two countries. During the last days of the Ottoman Empire (which lasted until 1922), over a million Armenians were killed in what Salopek says that “most historians” say is “the modern world’s first true genocide.” The official Turkish version is different, of course; they say that 600,000 were killed and that they were more along the lines of “collateral damage” than an attempt at extermination.

Salopek shows us the remaining damage to both the land and the people as a result of the deaths of these Armenians. The border between the two countries is closed and there is basically no way to get directly from one country to the other except for one airline that flies out of Yerevan. By land, the only way to get from one to the other is to go hours out of the way through Georgia.

93 Days of Spring, by Jim Brandenburg

Brandenburg shares with us his project to take one photograph a day in Minnesota during the spring. Brandenburg didn’t choose Minnesota randomly; it’s his home. The photographs are beautiful, as one would expect from a professional photographer. They also show a love of his home that, hopefully, will inspire other photographers to take pictures of their own homes.

As an aside, taking pictures close to home is a particular interest of mine. Some of the important things from my childhood and youth are no longer there and I never got to take a picture of them. I’m always after Alex to photograph the things and places that are important to him because you never know what may happen in the future and he may want to share these things with his own family someday.