National Geographic – Page 8 – To Hither and Yon

National Geographic December 2013, Part 1

To Walk the World, by Paul Salopek, photographs by John Stanmeyer

And finally I reach the beginning of the Out of Eden Walk series. From now on, all posts on this topic will be in chronological order.

In this introductory article, Salopek explains his motivation for attempting this walk. He tells us how he wants to understand how small groups of a couple of hundred humans who originally left Africa, came to dominate the globe in such a relatively short space of time. He says that he wants to take this at the pace of a human’s walking speed so that he can learn everything he can, and also to document “current events as a form of pilgrimage.” He will be following humanity as it spread out from Herto Bouri, Ethiopia, where the earliest human relics have been found, and eventually end up in Tierra del Fuego, Chile.

In this article, Salopek starts out at Herto Bouri, then goes northeast to Djibouti. I feel the need to warn for one graphic image. On page 46 of this issue, there is a picture of a dead body on a lava field. The body is in what looks to me to be an advanced state of decomposition and one can see some of the bones.

There is a map of Salopek’s expected path, and it looks to me, two years later, that he’s behind schedule. There are years given, but no indication whether they are the beginning, middle, or end of the year. The point for 2014 is in Tajikhstan and the point for 2015 is in India. As of October 27, 2015, Salopek was in Georgia, which means he hasn’t even made it to that 2014 marker yet. So I guess we’re looking at this project going on until 2018 at least, rather than ending in 2017.

Ghost Cats, by Douglas Chadwick, photographs by Steve Winter

Ghost Cats is about the status of the American cougar in the United States. The cougar is an apex predator, which means that a lot of humans are afraid of them. As a result, they have been driven out of a lot of inhabited places, which has thrown the ecological balance out of whack. But cougars are making a comeback. Scientists are tracking them with collars and cameras and observing their behavior, and the behavior of cougars is nothing like the scientists expected. They expected the cougars to be largely solitary, but they seem to share space and prey fairly easily.

One of the reasons why humans don’t like cougars is the fear that they will kill livestock, pets, and be competition for prey with human hunters. But it looks as though once a male gets established, a lot of the mayhem that humans have come to expect from cougars. One male being in charge of an area seems to reduce the number of other males that come into the area looking for food.

The photographs that accompany this article were largely taken with automatic cameras. And the camera must be very fast indeed, because the photos are so clear and crisp that they look almost like photographs of taxidermied animals, rather than living ones. I looked carefully for any indication that taxidermy was involved, but all of the pictures seem to indicate that they were of living animals.

National Geographic August 2015, Part 2

Last Rites for the Jade Sea? by Neil Shea, photographs by Randy Olson

Last Rites for the Jade Sea? is about Lake Turkana, which sits on the border between Kenya and Ethiopia, and the Daasanach people, who depend on the lake for their livelihoods. Lake Turkana sits not terribly far from the Great Rift Valley, where humanity began, and the ancestors of modern humans lived on its shorelines.

And, as with so many smaller bodies of water, Lake Turkana is threatened. The lake has been shrinking for 7,000 years. The trend has increased in recent years, and may be threatened further by a proposed dam and planned sugar plantations on the Omo River. The Omo River is the main river that feeds Lake Turkana. Sugarcane uses a lot of water and the dam will certainly not help the flow of water to the lake.

The Daasanach are underrepresented in Kenya’s government and so it is likely that their concerns, and their very homes, may never be taken into account as the governments of Ethiopia and Kenya make plans for the Omo River and the region around the lake.

Still Life, by Bryan Christy, photographs by Robert Clark

Christy takes us to the World Taxidermy Championships in St. Charles, Missouri, and then further into the history of taxidermy. My interest in taxidermy is superficial at best. I have many fond memories of the taxidermied animals at the Field Museum of Natural History (likely to come to a Northern Illinois Destination post near you sometime in November). The Field Museum has the skins of the lions that were the subject of the movie “The Ghost and the Darkness.” One lion is kind of standing up and the other is lying on some rocks. If you’ve been through that room, you have probably seen them. They now have a big sign and everything, though I don’t think they had that sign when I was younger.The lions are smaller than they were in life because they were used as rugs for 25 years in the home of the man who killed them (and who was played by Val Kilmer in the movie), and they were in the kind of shape that you’d expect a 25-year-old fur rug to be. As a result, the taxidermists had to trim them down to make it work.

Then there’s Jenny Lawson. Her blog, The Bloggess, is about Lawson’s life and mental illness and the weird and wonderful things that happen in her life. Lawson also collects taxidermied animals. Her rules for her collection are that the taxidermy has to be older than she is, or that the animal has to have died of natural causes. And despite this, she has amassed a really amazing collection of taxidermy animals.

So, overall, this was a pretty interesting read. Though sharing my home with the skin of dead animals which has been wrapped around a plastic form so that it looks like the animal might have looked in life isn’t really a goal of mine.

Laos Finds New Life After the Bombs, by T.D. Allman, photographs by Stephen Wilkes

I’m going to level with you. I’m a pacifist. I don’t know if I’m gung-ho enough to join the Quakers or Mennonites (there’s a part of me that goes, “well, maybe, I guess . . ” about the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War II*), but in general, I’m anti-war.

And I cut my teeth on this anti-war stance at a surprisingly young age. I can’t remember a time when I thought that the Vietnam War was a good idea. Now as a sort of side comment, by the time I was born, the war was about halfway done. I also became aware of the wider world outside as it became more clear that the Vietnam War had been a colossal waste of time, money, and, most importantly, of lives.

One of the worst-hit victims of the Vietnam War was Laos. As the tagline for the article says, “the U.S. dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on Laos . . . . That’s equal to a planeload every 8 minutes for 9 years.” I was on the low end of the single digits for most of that time (and wasn’t even there for some of it), but that statistic makes me feel kind of ill.

In 2015, it has been over 40 years since the bombs stopped falling and the Laotians are still feeling the effects of the war. Their ground is still full of holes from where the bombs landed and they still find live bombs. In the nine years from 1999 through 2008, 1,350 people were injured and 834 were killed when old bombs exploded. Taking those numbers as an average (rather than, as I suspect, a low end), that’s about 3,800 deaths from when the bombing ended to today, and that’s 3,800 too many.

Allman’s words and Wilkes’s photographs do a wonderful job of not only showing the damage done but also showing how Laos has grown, and will continue to grow, over the intervening years.

*There are probably other wars in other countries that I would say the same about, but as I’m not very interested in war, finding those wars is not a priority for me.

National Geographic August 2015, Part 1

I don’t normally comment on the material that comes before the actual articles, but I will make an exception in this case. A few months back, I commented to one of my pharmacists that, if I ever get lice — which is doubtful, but you never know — there is a class of medications that I cannot take because of my hay fever. She had never heard of such a thing and my attempts to find the medication right then came to nothing.

This issue has the answer. The class of medications is ones that are based in pyrethrum. The little article-let thing is on the resurgence of pyrethrum production in Rwanda. Pyrethrum comes from certain species of chrysanthemum, so there is a possible cross-reaction in people with hay fever. The chrysanthemums in the photo, by the way, are single flowers, and not double, like the ones we generally see in the United States.

Generally, pyrethrin, and not pyrethrum, is sold for lice treatment in the United States. RID is one of these medications.

So there you have it. The only medical reason that I know of why I would need to disclose my hay fever when medical personnel ask me if I have any allergies to any medications.

Will the Pope Change the Vatican? Or Will the Vatican Change the Pope? by Robert Draper, photographs by Dave Yoder

During Alex and my 2014 trip to Italy, we went to the Vatican City. We spent three or four hours at the Vatican Museums and then walked around the city walls, the long way, to St. Peter’s Square. As we now (as I write this) live in the first time since the 15th century when there were two living Popes simultaneously, I realized that gave me double the usual chance to see a Pope when we were there and, despite being a dyed-in-the wool Protestant, I kind of hoped that we’d see one, and my preference was for Francis. Alas, we didn’t see even one Pope (though we saw two Swiss Guards who looked to be on-duty, which may indicate that a Pope was nearby).

Fortunately, Yoder didn’t have to look around, hoping to see a Pope. In fact, he was hired by National Geographic to follow the Pope for a six-month period (described in this issue as “off and on”) to take pictures of Pope Francis. Yoder took 67,000 pictures, some of which are reproduced here. Some of the others are in the book Pope Francis and the New Vatican, which came out in September of 2015.

The text of the article goes into some of Francis’s background, including his appearance at a convention of Roman Catholics and Evangelical Christians at which he asked the Evangelicals to pray for him, and for which the ultraconservative Catholic Argentinian newspaper Cabildo labeled him apostate.

Draper’s text also focuses on the changes that Pope Francis has made, from his more humble lifestyle to the attempts of his staff to keep up with his, to them, unpredictable personality. We also see some of the changes that the Papacy has made in Francis. He has accepted that he is now a public figure and has gotten over some of his camera-shyness. One of the changes that resonated with me, was that when he was just plain Jorge Mario Bergoglio, he liked to walk around in Buenos Aires, but he is no longer allowed to wander around Rome in the way he would like to do. The Pope would like to retire someday and return to his home in Buenos Aires. Whether he will be able to do so remains to be seen.

As to the shocking statements and some of the changes he has made, a Buenos Aires-based priest who has known Francis for decades says, “I believe we haven’t yet seen the real change. And I also believe we haven’t seen the real resistance yet either.”

St. Peter's dome from outside the Vatican City — The dome of St. Peter’s Basilica from outside the Vatican City walls

I Finally Found It

Inspired by an article from the Cairo Post on the solar alignment of the temple from Abu Simbel yesterday morning (which happened when it was Wednesday night here in Texas), I went back and found the issue of National Geographic that started it all for me. For almost as long as I can remember, until we had to toss the issue when it got damaged in a flood in our basement, I would go back and reread and/or look at the pictures (from when I was too young to read) of the May 1966 National Geographic.

I was tempted to dig up that information and actually start my reading project with that issue, but I opted instead to start from where I was when I began my reading project, which was January 2015, and then work my way both forwards and backwards. At the rate I’m going, I may never get to that issue, since it was forty-nine and a half years ago, but I’ll do my best.

National Geographic January 2014, Part 3

Putin’s Party, by Brett Forrest, photographs by Thomas Dworzak

Putin’s Party is about the then-upcoming 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. As we now know, things did not exactly go without a hitch in February 2014, with unfinished hotels and cramped conditions for the athletes, but this article is not about those things. You see, Sochi was a controversial choice for other reasons, namely the near eradication of the Circassian people.

The final battle of the war between the Circassians and the Russians (the Circassians lost) was in an area called Krasnaya Polyana, which is, coincidentally, where the skiing events of the 2014 Winter Olympics were held. The Circassians were sent to Siberia or to the Ottoman Empire.

Putin’s Party also profiles Pyotr Fedin, who biult a ski resort and got bought out by Gazprom, the corporation which previously had been the Soviet Ministry of Gas Industry. Gazprom is publicly traded on the Moscow, London, Frankfurt and OTC stock exchanges. As I write this, the price is $4.61 per share.

Things in Sochi and the surrounding area were getting tense in late 2013 when this article was written, both through threats from Muslims who live in nearby areas such as Chechnya and through Russia’s own, the article uses the words “suspicion of foreigners and their motives,” so let’s go with that.

In response to this, well, I guess, “suspicion,” is as good a word as any, the government has reactivated the Cossacks, who are both an ethnic group and a sort of military force. The Cossacks allied with the Tsars against the Bolsheviks. As a result, they were repressed during the Soviet era. They are no longer repressed and have been patrolling the streets of the cities and villages of the region.

Impossible Rock, by Mark Synott, photographs by Jimmy Chin

Impossible Rock takes us to a peninsula of Oman, where there are some of the most difficult rock-climbing rocks in the world, apparently. Our tour guides are Synott, a rock climber, and two of his rock-climbing compatriots, who prefer to climb without ropes.

The article is well written and the photographs are breathtaking, but this is about as close to free solo climbing as I think I’m going to get. This may be about as close to rock climbing as I really would like to get, come to that. I much prefer the kinds of adventures you can have exploring cityscapes and things of that nature. Maybe, someday, when I have exhausted all of the places that I can get to with a car or a boat or a train or whatever, and I’m down to places that can only be accessed by rock climbing, I’ll consider taking up rock climbing. I feel the same way about parachuting, by the way. It holds no interest for me unless it involves crossing more places off my travel “to-do” lists.

National Geographic January 2014, Part 2

Far from Home, by Cynthia Gorney, photographs by Jonas Bendiksen

Far from Home is a profile of the situation and economics of “guest workers” in foreign countries. This article refers to them primarily as “remittance workers,” because of the fact that the workers are sending as much money home to their families as they can afford to do. In economics, the term for sending money in this way is “remittances,” thus “remittance workers.”

There are millions of remittance workers in the world, both documented and undocumented, in scores of countries all over the world. The United States is temporary home to one of the largest populations of remittance workers in the world and, indeed, the existence of undocumented remittance workers in the United States is currently a heavily debated issue.

For the purposes of this article, however, Gorney focuses on one particular subset of one particular remittance worker population in a different country. This is the situation of Filipino guest workers in Dubai.

And the example Gorney uses to show this world to us is the Cruz family (which is a pseudonym to protect them). The Cruzes met in Dubai, though the husband, Luis, had a wife at home in the Philippines. After he and Teresa fell in love, however, Luis got an annulment from his wife at home and married Teresa. As they are a two-income family, they can live independently of some of the group homes that remittance workers occupy in Dubai. They also have room for two of their children. The problem is that they have four children. Since there is no room for them in the home, the Cruzes sent their eldest two children home to the Philippines, where they live with their maternal aunt.

Once Upon a Dragon, by Jennifer S. Holland, photographs by Stefano Unterthiner

Okay. Komodo dragons. They’re dragons. From Komodo.

This article is actually a very interesting read, but there’s not a whole lot to say about it. We talk about the legends that say that humans and dragons are sort of cousins — the first komodo dragon was the twin sister of an Indonesian prince. They’re a protected species, as are their prey, which means that people of the islands where the Komodo dragons live cannot offer deer meat as offerings to the dragons anymore. And, as we do in a lot of National Geographic articles, we follow scientists who are studying the dragons.

National Geographic January 2014, Part 1

Kayapo Courage, by Chip Brown, photographs by Martin Schoeller

The Kayapo are a relatively large indigenous group of Brazil. They still lead a hunting-and-gathering lifestyle based on traditional (if not stereotypical) gender lines. The men hunt and fish, the women gather produce and take care of the home and children.

The Kayapo are also one of the populations that are trying to balance the benefits of the outside world with their own traditional way of life. The village that Brown visits has solar panels, satellite dishes and, in some buildings, generators and flush toilets.

The Kaypo are also active in the outside world. Their numbers were reduced in the early 1900s by outsiders encroaching upon their territory, bringing diseases such as measles and smallpox. The survivors have used their immunity to Western diseases to go out into the greater population of Brazil and advocating not just for the Kayapo, but for the indigenous peoples of Brazil as a whole. It is due, in part, to the advocacy of the Kayapo that indigenous peoples’ rights were written into the Brazilian constitution in 1988. The Kayapo were also instrumental in halting the building of a series of dams that would have flooded parts of the territory occupied by indigenous peoples. A version of one of those dams, named Belo Monte, is under construction at the moment. The projected opening date for the Belo Monte dam is 2019. It remains to be seen whether the other dams will be built or not.

And if you are old enough to remember 1989, there is a good chance that you have seen at least a picture of a Kayapo. In 1987, the chief of the Kayapo, Raoni Metuktire, approached the musician Sting about the plight of the indigenous peoples of South America, and together, Sting and Chief Raoni founded the Rainforest Foundation and made an international tour in 1989 to raise worldwide awareness of indigenous peoples. So, if you remember that tour, that native Brazilian in those photos with Sting? Was Chief Raoni.

The Things They Brought Back, by Jeremy Berlin， photographs by Rosamond Purcell

The Things They Brought Back is a brief overview of the things in the back rooms of museums. We see the back rooms at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

They don’t just store these things in the back rooms; they continue to study them. One scientist, Helen James of the Smithsonian, has identified nearly 40 extinct species of bird from samples brought back from Hawaii.

I haven’t seen the back rooms of either of these museums, but for a time during my adolescence, my parents were members of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago (let’s see if I remember to put the link to my overview of the museum there once the Field Museum becomes a Northern Illinois Destination topic), and during members’ nights, members of the museum are able to visit the back rooms and see the work being done there. I enjoyed members’ nights so much that, on two different occasions, I brought friends with me. I am budgeting a trip back to Chicago for 2016. If I could guarantee being able to take Alex back to Chicago during the weekend of members’ night, I would actually contemplate joining just for 2016 so that I can take him to the behind-the-scenes events at the Museum

National Geographic, July 2015, Part 3

Pluto at Last, by Nadia Drake, photographs by Dana Berry

Astronomers have known that there must have been something beyond Pluto since the 1840s, when they decided that the orbits of Uranus and Neptune were being affected by a large body beyond them. It took another 90 years for them to actually find Pluto, which turned out to be a lot smaller than they had expected it to be. At first, they assumed it had to be about the size of the Earth, but farther out than it looked, but over time, they realized that Pluto was just really, really tiny. It turns out that the irregular orbit of Uranus and Neptune is because the scientists miscalculated the mass of Uranus. Once that was corrected, the orbits of Uranus and Neptune make sense.

Not too long after this issue was published, New Horizons flew past Pluto, taking the first-ever photographs of the dwarf planet’s surface. It took so long for New Horizons to reach Pluto that Pluto was still a full planet when it left Earth in January 2006. Pluto was demoted to “dwarf planet” status in August of 2006.

As an aside, I do love Eris’s name. Eris is the dwarf planet that is twice as massive as Pluto that was discovered in 2005. Since Eris is larger than Pluto, if Pluto was still considered a planet, they should have considered Eris to be one, as well, but then they discovered other dwarf planets around the same size as, or larger than, Pluto. If this kept up, they would have to keep adding new planets as things in the range of Pluto’s size continued to be discovered. In the end, as we all know, Pluto was demoted to the newly created category of “dwarf planet.” Since this new planet sowed strife and discord among the scientific community (and also among the population in general), Eris seems to me to be the perfect name.

Of course, as I’m writing this, New Horizons’s flyby of Pluto is done. New Horizons just sent back new photographs of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon and soon the spacecraft will be heading into the Kuiper Belt, which is full of dwarf planets and other objects. They estimate that, unless it has some kind of mechanical failure, New Horizons will continue on its current path for another 20 years. You can see where New Horizons is now at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory website.

Mountain Men, by Jeremy Berlin, photographs by David Burnett

Mountain Men is an overview of the American Mountain Men association, who are a group of people (largely, but not exclusively, men) who reeenact the lifestyle of the fur trappers of the old west. And they do actually trap animals and tan their hides. The website, but not the printed issue, has a photograph of a freshly skinned beaver hide that one of the members is going to tan. This isn’t my sort of thing, but if we were all the same, how boring would that be?

National Geographic July 2015, Part 2

How Orcas Work Together to Whip Up a Meal, by Virginia Morrell, photographs by Paul Nicklen

That’s an uncomfortably wordy title, but I guess it’s descriptive. How Orcas Work Together to Whip Up a Meal is the final installment of the three-part Understanding Dolphins series, because orcas are dolphins — the largest of the dolphins, in fact.

The meaning of the title is that orcas do what is called “carousel feeding.” They surround schools of herring and swim in ever-tighter circles around the herring. Then, once they have the herring trapped, they smack them with their tails. This stuns or kills the herring, making them easy to eat. They use other tactics, of course, but carousel feeding is one of the most fascinating.

While researching the story, Morrell saw whales hunting with the orcas. This was surprising because whales are also prey of orcas (the name “killer whale” is actually a mistranslation of the Spanish name, asesina de ballinas, or “whale killer.” Yet the whales were out there with the orcas, unmolested. The orca specialist that Morrell was talking to, Tiu Similä, decided later that the whales were freeloaders. However, there were enough fish for all, so the orcas allowed them to hang around.

In the Footsteps of Gandhi, by Tom O’Neill, photographs by Rena Effendi

In the Footsteps of Gandhi is about Gandhi’s literal footsteps. As part of India’s path to independence from the United Kingdom, Gandhi and thousands of other Indians walked from to the coast of the Arabian Sea. The British forbade the people of India to harvest their own salt from the sea, instead requiring them to buy the mineral from the British. In protest, Gandhi walked to the sea, intending to harvest salt from the salt flats, but the British had ground the salt into the beach. Gandhi was able to find one crystal of salt on the beach and picked it up, breaking the law. Gandhi and tens of thousands of his followers were arrested.

O’Neill decided to walk the same path, from Ahmedabad to the Arabian Sea. Through this article, we see the places he visits and talk to the people he meets, looking for traces of Gandhi.

National Geographic July 2015, Part 1

Seeking the Source of Ebola, by David Quammen, photographs by Pete Muller

Despite the title, the scientists that study ebola aren’t really looking for the source of ebola so much as they are looking for a reservoir species, where the disease hides in between outbreaks. They are as certain as it is possible to be (which means that really persuasive evidence could change their minds) that ebola is not always present in the human population. This means that it must hide in another species.

For most of this article, Quammen focuses on bats. This seems to be a pretty good candidate, since Patient Zero in the most recent outbreak, two-year-old Emile Ouamouno of Guinea, likely caught the illness from a bat. Ouamouno was seen playing in a tree that had a colony of bats days before he became symptomatic. Children also try to catch the bats and then they roast them on a stick and eat them, and that may be what happened to Ouamouno.

And then there’s more about bats as a disease vector for other viruses, including Nipah virus, Hendra virus, and Marburg virus. However, when it all comes down to it, there is no definite evidence that bats are the reservoir species. The reservoir species may be something else, such as an insect or bird.

Food Truck Revolution, by David Brindey, photographs by Gerd Ludwig

A few years ago, they legalized food trucks in San Antonio. A food truck is just like it sounds, a truck that serves food. Generally, the food is cooked on the truck, but there are also trucks that serve premade food such as sandwiches and beverages. And I realized then that there isn’t a lot of street food in San Antonio. This is odd, since street food was a big part of San Antonio history. If you are in the United States, it is likely that you have eaten chili at some point in your life. Chili began as a San Antonio street food. For over a century, from the 1800s until World War II, the “chili queens” would serve chili from tables in the public parks and squares (most notably Alamo Plaza).

Yet that culture died out at some point, perhaps when the focus of business shifted from downtown to the area around North Loop 410. And even today, if you look where the food trucks are, you will see more out by Interstate 10, Loop 1604, and Loop 410 than you will find downtown.

Food Truck Revolution focuses on the origin of the current crop of food trucks — the Kogi BBQ truck of Los Angeles. In 2008 Korean-born Roy Choi opened a food truck serving Korean-flavored Mexican food. From there, Brindey shows us some of the other food trucks of the Los Angeles area.

Despite the proliferation of food trucks in San Antonio, I have really only ever eaten street food while on vacation. Maybe I will have to track down a food truck or two here in San Antonio someday and see what they have to offer.