canada – Page 2 – To Hither and Yon

National Geographic May 2014

With this post, I will pretty much run out of National Geographic posts from my old blog. I am going to attempt to keep posting entire issues, but I may go back to the pattern I originally set up on the old blog, where I generally posted two articles at a time. If I were to keep posting entire issues, it likely would slow me way down on my reading. The magazines just seem to go faster when I read two and review two, rather than reading the entire issue.

The “pretty much” is because I do have three National Geographic posts left, but two are from the October 1888 issue, which I am still plugging away at slowly. National Geographic didn’t start trying to attract a general audience until around 1905, so those first 17 years of issues will be slow going.

A Five-Step Plan to Feed the World, by Jonathan Foley, photographs by George Steinmetz and Jim Richardson

Over the next 35 years, from 2015 to 2050, the food needs of the world will likely double. This is due not only to population increase, but also to the increase in prosperity of formerly impoverished nations. These developing nations are now demanding more in terms of meat, milk, and eggs, as well as of produce. As a result, scientists need to come up with new ways to feed these people while not wrecking the environment in the process. Foley led what he refers to as “a team of scientists” who have studied this very question and they came up with five steps that may help with this.

These five steps are to freeze agriculture’s footprint, to grow more on farms we’ve got, to use resources more efficiently, to shift diets (to less meat-intensive diets, for example), and to reduce waste.

These goals seem to be pretty obvious to me. Further, while this article gives a few examples of how these goals might be achieved, it then ends with “we already know what we have to do; we just need to figure out how to do it.” I felt sort of underwhelmed by this conclusion. I guess I should count it as a good thing that scientists are thinking about this topic at all.

Digging Utah’s Dinosaurs, by Peter Miller, photographs by Cory Richards

In Digging Utah’s Dinosaurs, we meet the Miller brothers, Ian and Dane, who are paleobotanists. We join the Miller brothers on an expedition at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, where they are searching for signs of the lost continent of Laramidia.

90 million years ago, the area which is now North America was two separate continents, Appalachia to the east and Laramidia to the west. The Western Interior Seaway lay between them. The Miller brothers, along with other scientists, are searching for the species of dinosaur who lived in this area and trying to figure out why the dinosaurs of northern Laramidia were so different from those in southern Laramidia. It is possible that there was a physical barrier of some sort, but they have not yet found any evidence of such a barrier. Instead, the going theory is that the area, much of which is now desert, was a tropical rainforest. This means that the herbivorous animals would not have had to have gone very far in search of food. This also means that any carnivorous animals in the area also would not have had to wander very far. The result would be a less dramatic version of how isolation caused divergence in Australia and Madagascar. The species would have had different pressures causing different traits to be selected for, resulting in very different species.

Finally, I noticed that the writer, Peter Miller, shares a surname with the Miller brothers. Miller is a very common name in the United States (the sixth most common, as of the 2000 census), so it is not impossible that this is a coincidence. However, it is also not impossible that all three Millers are related in some way. I have been unable to determine which of these it is.

The Ship Breakers, by Peter Gwin, photographs by Mike Hettwer

Oceangoing ships have a lifespan of 25 to 30 years. After that, it becomes so expensive to insure them that their only value is for scrap. Ships are not just made of steel. There are other substances involved, such as asbestos and lead. In most developed countries, the safety measures necessary for such work would eat into the profits from recycling the recyclable bits, such as the steel. As a result, “the bulk of the world’s shipbreaking” takes place in countries with lower safety standards, such as Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.

In The Ship Breakers, Gwin takes us to one of the shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, the shipbreaking yards recycle around 90% of each ship and, overall, make a profit of three to four million dollars a year. The yards used to be open to tourists, but a while ago, they closed the yards to visitors.

Gwin and Hettwer show us some of the process of shipbreaking in Bangladesh, in which these elderly ships are taken apart by hand. We also hear from an activist who wants the process of shipbreaking to be done in a cleaner, safer way. At the moment, the shipbreakers risk their lives daily and allow toxic chemicals to leach into the environment. Hopefully, someday the shipbreaking yards will find a cleaner, safer way to do their work without putting people out of their jobs.

The Generous Gulf, by Rob Dunn, photographs by David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes

When the European colonists arrived in North America, they were overwhelmed by the variety of life, and number of fish, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This was for two good reasons. First, their own waters back home had been overfished and second, the Gulf of St. Lawrence had an unusually high number of lifeforms because of its position. The waters of several rivers collect organic matter which becomes food for smaller lifeforms, which then become food for larger ones until you have cod, and herring, and sturgeon, and even whales and walruses. The Europeans seemed to think that the supply of fish and other animals was infinite and immediately set about overfishing the Gulf.

There is a new threat to the Gulf as well. Oil has been found under the Gulf and the oil company executives are making plans to begin drilling. This runs the risk of leaking into the Gulf and causing ecological damage. Hopefully the oil companies that are planning this well will be careful with the ecosystem that they are about to venture into.

Love and Loss on the Seine, by Cathy Newman, photographs by William Albert Allard

Love and Loss on the Seine is a series of vignettes of life on the Seine, the river that flows through the heart of Paris. We meet people who have chosen to live on barges in the river. We see workers setting up for Paris Plages, a summer festival in which the expressway along the right bank of the river is blocked off and turned into a beach with sand and portable palm trees. People discuss the color of the Seine with Newman. We see the history of Les Berges, a sort of River Walk for Paris, where the expressway along the left bank has been closed in favor of parks and restaurants. We visit a homeless shelter on a barge on the river. Newman discusses breaking the law on the Seine (no swimming or wading, no protests, no banners and so forth) with a police officer. We see people fishing on the Seine (a difficult task considering the embankments that have been there since the 1700s). We see Paris at 3:00 in the morning. We visit a mental hospital on a barge on the Seine (there is little to no aggression in the patients in this hospital; no one is sure why).

Overall, Love and Loss on the Seine is very quick, easy reading, and helped me see more of a city that I have only visited for one very pleasant day in 2002.

(originally posted in July and August 2015)

National Geographic June 2014

The Dogs of War, by Michael Paterniti, photographs by Adam Ferguson

The Dogs of War is about the Marine Corps use of dogs to find improvised explosive devices (IEDs). I was less enthusiastic about this article than I might otherwise have been because I don’t like war. I’m one of those people who thinks that the best way to support the troops is to bring them home. And that goes for the dogs, as well.

Paterniti takes us to Afghanistan, where we meet Jose Armenta and his dog, Zenit. Zenit is a German shepherd. And when I say “his” dog, neither Paterniti nor I am using this word in a way that you would expect. I have read articles about how most police dogs are socialized to live with humans and trained only to be aggressive on command. As part of their training, they live with the police officers’ families more or less as a pet would. I expected that to be the way that military dogs are kept as well. It was kind of startling to find that while Jose lives in the barracks, Zenit lives in a kennel.

Though I should put that last sentence in the past tense. We find out what happens, in the end, to Jose and Zenit and it’s a bittersweet ending.

Untouched, by Heather Pringle, photographs by Robert Clark

El Castillo de Huarmey is a tomb built into the side of a large rock formation in northern Peru. The area around El Castillo had been used as a burial ground and had been violated by tomb robbers many times over the centuries. As a result, when Polish archaeologists decided to explore El Castillo, which looked more or less like a step pyramid, no one but the archaeologists expected to find anything.

What the archaeologists found was the undisturbed tomb of one of the rulers of the Wari, a people who ruled this area of northern Peru for around 500 years. One of the chambers contained what looked like a stone throne. There were mummified guards, as well, all of whom were missing their left feet. No one now living knows why their feet were removed.

In one chamber, the bodies of sixty women were found. It appears that three or four of them were royalty and some 54 of the others may have been nobility. These women were found wearing jewelry and fine clothing, then wrapped in cloth that left a roughly egg-shaped form. There were also some other unmummified women found in the chamber, and it is possible that they may have been sacrifices. Other goods, fabrics, vessels, boxes, and so forth, were found in the tomb as well.

And yet, with all of the bodies and materials and the throne, no sign of a king has been found yet. The archaeologists are still searching, but while looking for other information on the Wari, I found a page at Archaeology Magazine’s website called “A Wari Matriarchy?” And it occurred to me that why not? Maybe the archaeologists will never find the “king” because there is no king to find. Perhaps the highest-ranking woman, with the finest jewelry and clothing, was the ruler.

Puffin Therapy, photographs by Danny Green, text by Tom O’Neill

Before we get to the meat of this article, I find the way this article was credited interesting. Generally, it’s the title, then after a few pages of photographs, when the text starts, the writer and photographer are credited in that order, and then the text starts. In Puffin Therapy, the photographer credit is by itself where the writer and photographer credits normally go, and the writer’s credit is stuck at the very end of the text section, following a dash. I wonder why they did it this way? My first instinct is to say that perhaps Green was supposed to have written the text, but he had some kind of prior obligation that kept him from being able to do so and so they enlisted O’Neill at the last minute.

The text is largely about the mating behaviors of puffins. The common image of puffins with their bright orange beaks is their appearance during mating season. The rest of the year their faces and beaks are darker. In fact, one photo that I found when searching for what puffins look like the rest of the year looks more or less like the puffins that we’re used to seeing right after a vacuum cleaner bag blew up in its face — all gray and sooty looking.

It wouldn’t be a National Geographic article without a mention of global climate change. There is some concern that the change in climates may have a deleterious effect on the puffin population. Puffins in some locations have had almost no offspring in some years. Puffins are long-lived and can afford to miss a year or two of breeding, but this trend may be increasing and the puffin may end up being threatened as a result.

The title comes from Iain Morrison, who takes visitors to see the puffins. He says that spending time with puffins makes the visitors happy and refers to it as “puffin therapy.” And looking at Green’s photographs, I can definitely believe it.

How to Farm a Better Fish, by Joel K. Bourne, Jr., photographs by Brian Skerry

It should come as no surprise that an article called How to Farm a Better Fish would be about fish farming. This installment of the Future of Food series focuses on the growth of the fish farming industry and how fish farmers and scientists are attempting both new and older methods in the industry.

As a general rule, fish is one of the most efficient forms of protein there is. Where chicken takes around 1.7 pounds of feed to produce a pound of meat, and the ratios are 2.9 for pigs and 6.8 for cattle, for fish, the ratio is close to one pound of feed per pound of meat. Additionally, more people are eating fish than ever before. As a result, there is more growth in the fish farming industry than in most other areas of agriculture.

We look at a number of farms, including the farm of Bill Martin, who is attempting to develop carbon-neutral onshore fish farming. We also see several offshore farms, including one eight miles offshore which raises cobia. The man who developed this farm, Brian O’Hanlon, has put the farm so far offshore so that the currents will take away the waste. And, indeed, researchers have yet to detect any waste outside of the fish pens. And one researcher, Stephen Cross, is attempting what is called polyculture, where many different edible species live in a sort of symbiotic relationship. In Cross’s case, he is raising sablefish and then down the current from the fish, he is raising mollusks. Down the current from the mollusks are kelp, and further down are sea cucumbers. These three other species filter the water and remove waste from the sablefish. Cross says that the biological filtration system that he is using could be fitted onto any fish farm and, since all of the species he is using for filtration are edible, the filters themselves can be harvested and sold.

The final farm we see is a kelp farm. The owners of the farm, Paul Dobbins and Tollef Olson, grow three species of kelp that can grow up to five inches a day. They then sell the kelp to restaurants, schools and hospitals. Dobbins and Olson have increased their farm has increased to ten times its original size in the past five years and the kelp is cleaning the water in the area as it grows, a win/win for both the farmers and the environment.

I love seafood. I was visiting a friend who was a vegetarian and he tried to convince me to go vegetarian. I admitted that vegetarianism holds some appeal for me, but that I don’t think I could ever give up seafood. And this article made me feel even better about seafood and its future as a source of food for the planet, than I felt before I read it.

Train for the Forgotten, by Joshua Yaffa, photographs by William Daniels

In 1974, the government of the Soviet Union began an ambitious project to showcase what they believed was Soviet superiority over nature. They started work on a rail line connecting Lake Baikal to the Amur River in northern Siberia. Around half a million people worked on the rail ine and on the towns that they had to build to connect it. The original homes for the workers were wooden barracks in the woods, and as time passed, they erected prefabricated buildings to live in.

Then when the Soviet Union collapsed, so did the construction project. Since 1991, the people of this region, known as the Baikal-Amur Mainline (“BAM”) have been isolated and left with no regular health care. In an effort to remedy this situation, the Russian government runs a medical train along the tracks. The train, named for Russian health-care pioneer Matvei Mudrov, has exam rooms and medical personnel and visits each village on average every six months. This may be okay for many of the residents, but for those who are sick or injured, it is not nearly often enough. There are no urgent care facilities and people die of conditions that are treatable in the world outside the BAM.

Yaffa takes us into the world of the BAM, seeing how isolated the people are and how desperate their medical situation can be. He show us the slowly crumbling buildings and infrastructure (where anything besides a dirt road exists; some of the villages don’t even have running water) of the villages along the BAM. The story out of Russia is that the Russian government intends to use the BAM to ship containers, but none of that is seen here. All we see is the slow decay of what started out as an audacious (in both senses of the term) project.

(originally posted July 2015)

National Geographic April 2015

Lincoln, by Adam Goodheart, photographs by Eugene Richards

April 15, 2015 was the sesquicentennial (they use “150th anniversary” in the article, but we have such a nice word for “150th anniversary” that I couldn’t resist) of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In recognition (and, of course, anticipation, since the trek had to be done ahead of time so as to make it to print in time for April) of the occasion, Goodheart traced the train that carried Lincoln’s body as it made the journey from Washington, DC to Springfield, Illinois. There was no continuous rail line between the two, so the body ended up making a two-week journey up through Maryland, then into Pennsylvania, to New York (both the city and the state), then through Ohio and Indiana before arriving in Illinois. The body the went from Northwest Indiana to Chicago and then down to Springfield. Lincoln’s body had stayed in Washington, DC from the 15th through the 21st, so by the time the body arrived in Springfield, it was three weeks old and had deteriorated considerably.

We see, through Goodheart’s words, we see the body as it travels through the night along tracks lined with people and at its stops in Philadelphia, Buffalo, New York City, and then on to Springfield, where his remains ended up being moved 14 times during the years after Lincoln’s death. Then, they proceeded to reconstruct the tomb — the current structure is from the 1930s.

Most of the tracks that carried Lincoln’s funeral train are long gone. There are markers along the way showing where the train passed, and some of the tracks were removed recently enough that you can still see the gravel. I grew up in Chicago, and it is very likely that those tracks still exist, as Chicago is still a major rail hub. Additionally, the freight lines connecting the suburbs to downtown carry commuter trains today. In fact, doing some digging, it looks like if you wanted to travel some of the Lincoln funeral train trail yourself, you could take the Metra Heritage Corridor line from Chicago to Joliet. Metra’s website says that the Lemont and Lockport stations were there when the funeral train went through.

Hubble’s Greatest Hits, by Timothy Ferris

Ferris shares some of the history of the Hubble telescope. Originally, the astronomers wanted the telescope to be farther out, but instead the telescope ended up being put close enough to be reached by space shuttle. And it turned out to be fortunate that it was put so close in. Problems plagued the early days of the telescope and if it had been unreachable, it would have been a waste of billions of dollars. Since it was put in closer orbit, however, astronauts were able to bring replacement parts and fix the telescope, which has been sending amazing pictures of deep space for 25 years as of April 24, 2015.

The photos which accompany the article are actually colorized composites. The one at #9, for example, of the Crab Nebula, is a composite of four images. The most complex photograph, and the one that captured my attention best, is the image at #2, which is created from 32 images of the Carina Nebula. It looks almost like one of the later works of JMW Turner.

How Coal Fuels India’s Insurgency, by Anthony Loyd, photographs by Lynsey Addario

How Coal Fuels India’s Insurgency is about the Naxalites, a Maoist group that is causing problems for the government of India. Loyd jumps right into the violent nature of the conflict by introducing us to a leader who goes by various names, including Prashant, Paramjeet, Gopalji. This man of many names introduces himself to Loyd as “Manas.” Manas had just been part of a confrontation that killed six policemen and injured eight more.

The Naxalites, who take their name from a village in West Bengal where the movement began. However, now all Maoist rebels are known as Naxalites, regardless of their place of origin.

Most of the followers of the Naxalites are the poorest of India’s poor. They are poor farmers, Dalits, and members of an aboriginal group known as the Adivasi. There are a number of college students who have found common cause with the Naxalites, as well. The Naxalites flourish in the undeveloped parts of eastern India, mostly in the states of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. This region, as it happens, is also the center of India’s mineral wealth. Beneath the lands where the Naxalites and their followers live, work, and fight are bauxite, dolomite, iron, limestone and, above all, coal. An area where there used to be farmlands and wildlife is now given over to mines, much of which is done in open “strip” mines. And effectively none of the wealth generated by these mines are being given to the people of the region. This feeds the resentment and leads to further recruits for the Naxalites.

And so, until the government of India finds a way to reach out to and communicate with the residents of this poverty-stricken area, it is unlikely that the question of the Naxalites will ever be resolved.

The Bug That’s Eating the Woods, by Hillary Rosner, photographs by Peter Essick

The Bug That’s Eating the Woods is about the mountain pine beetle, a tiny bug that has killed pine trees in an area stretching from northern British Columbia down into California and as far east as South Dakota. In some areas, such as the area around Wolf Creek Pass in Colorado, nearly all of the trees in the region are killed.

Scientists are trying to figure out why the beetle has had such a devastating effect in recent years and at least part of this devastation is laid at the feet of climate change. The beetle can travel farther during the warmer months because the farther northern reaches are no longer too cold for them. Additionally, we have significantly cut down on forest fires, which has made it easier for the beetle to spread. Some areas are experimenting with controlled burns to isolate the beetle, but it is too soon to see if that will do any good. There is also some hope that climate change may help. The beetle’s actual source of food comes from two fungi that it carries with them, one of which needs cold weather. As cold weather ceases to be quite so cold, perhaps that fungus will become less effective and end the life cycle of the beetle.

I was a small child during the Dutch elm disease outbreak of 1950s through 1970s (specifically the 1970s end), and currently live in an area where oak wilt is always a concern. As a result, I am aware of the maxim of urban forestry that no more than 10% of an area should be one particular species of tree. I cannot help but think that something like that might not be a bad rule to follow when planning what to do with the areas that the beetle has hit, even though it is not technically urban. Perhaps the forestry departments of the various governments could look into broadleaf trees that would fill a similar niche ecologically and economically. Then they could plant 50% pine trees and 25% each two chosen broadleaf species, or a 68%/16%/16% mix, perhaps.

Trajan’s Amazing Column, by Andrew Curry, photographs by Kenneth Garrett

Trajan’s Column is a monument in Rome which chronicles the defeat of the Dacians by the Romans during the rule of Trajan. The column is also where Trajan’s ashes were laid to rest after Trajan’s death in 117 AD. We are certain that at least that second statement is true. Trajan’s Amazing Column lists some of the arguments that historians are using against the idea that the details given on the column are as accurate as has generally been assumed. Some of the details match up with what archaeologists are discovering, but much of it may be made up to conform with the idea of how the war should have gone.

When my son and I were in Rome in 2014, we discovered Trajan’s Column by accident. I’m not sure how we managed to miss it standing there being all columnar and monumental, but we did. It wasn’t until our last day in Rome that we found it. We had been to the Trevi Fountain and stopped in a carryout pizza place. Our purchase of pizza was purely in the interest of science, of course. We had had pizza in Naples and needed another sample so that we could compare the two.

We now had two slices of pizza and no place to eat it. So we walked back in the general direction of our hotel, figuring that if we didn’t see any place to sit down before we got to the hotel, we could eat the pizza in our room. After walking for a while, we found some people sitting on the steps of a church. This looked as good a spot as any to eat, so we sat, too.

That’s when we noticed the huge monument right there. Once we finished our pizza we explored the area, taking lots of pictures of the monument and of the ruins of the forums (fora?) of Trajan and Augustus. I took a panoramic photo of the column. It wasn’t perfect, since I didn’t have my tripod, but it turned out pretty well.

In the article, Curry mentions tour guides explaining the column. The signage, at least when we were there, is excellent, though, so one doesn’t need a tour guide. There is a long sign running alongside the ruins of Trajan’s forum with pictures of the sections and an explanation of what is there (see image). This sign must be new, since I cannot see it in Google Street View in June 2014, but it was there in July and Google Street View shows it in October, as well.

Sign at Trajan's Column — The interpretive sign at Trajan’s Column in July, 2014.

Argentine Identities, story and photographs by Marco Vernaschi

Vernaschi is an Italian native living in Argentina. Vernaschi loves his adopted country and feels that the increasing reliance on soybeans as an agricultural industry is counterproductive. As a result, he and his wife traveled across the country helping small family farmers find new sustainable agricultural projects. He also took pictures of the residents of the areas that he traveled to. He stayed away from the “poverty tourism” aspect of photography, where small rural farmers are shown as impoverished. Instead, he wanted to focus on their culture, including two photographs in which the subjects are wearing ceremonial clothing and one which features a female gaucho. Tags: