Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2022 i National Geographic Magazine

At more than 6,500 tons, a grove of quaking aspens growing on 106 acres in Utah is, by weight, Earth’s largest known land organism. What look like 47,000 separate trees are in fact genetically identical stems rising from one root system. Deer and cattle eating new aspen shoots threaten to kill this peculiar being—a tree that for millennia has been its own forest.…

Conservation works. In the past century or so, efforts to save American species like the peregrine falcon, the American bison, and the Pacific gray whale have succeeded. But last year, the federal government proposed taking 23 species of plants and animals off the endangered species list—not because they’ve recovered, but because they’re now extinct. We have to do better. My friend Karl Wenner shows up to meet me wearing scrubs with a canvas jacket thrown on top. He’s a retired surgeon, but he still spends a few hours a month teaching. He also co-owns Lakeside Farms in the Klamath Basin, a dry part of southern Oregon that has lost nearly all its wetlands. Without marshes, water runs into Upper Klamath Lake unfiltered and carrying phosphorus-rich volcanic soil, causing algal blooms…

Protecting Nature Close to Home Land in just about every part of the country falls into at least one of the categories needing conservation—so every community can make change to its environment that matter. Some of the most successful projects so far have included diverse voices in decision-making and an emphasis on safeguarding cultural heritage alongside nature. Several of today’s most innovative, community-led conservation efforts are highlighted below. THE NATURE EQUITY GAP Millions face barriers to experiencing nature and all its benefits, especially in low-income areas and communities of color. Addressing environmental injustices is a critical part of conservation. 3X Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans are three times as likely as white Americans to live far from natural areas. 70% The majority of low-income Americans in the contiguous United States live…

BACK HOME IN THE Klamath Basin, I think about water—how it is both beautiful and essential to life. Much of our area is in what the National Weather Service terms an “extreme drought.” The Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge is normally a stopover for half of the Pacific flyway’s migrating waterfowl. It relies on water managed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and gets whatever’s left after farmers take their share. These days, there’s nothing left. The refuge turns to dust. Irrigation also draws down water from Upper Klamath Lake, which can limit access to areas where suckers spawn. One solution would be to use less water for farming. That’s anathema to many farmers, but it may be necessary to support bird migration, save the suckers, and send enough clear,…

TRAVELING TO THE SACRED LANDS of Badger-Two Medicine, Montana, is a journey of two parts. The first starts on a solitary road that runs to a horizon split into green and blue, cutting across broad plains and big sky. On the left is Heart Butte mountain, where fire-charred vegetation rests on land that once hoisted emerald pines toward the heavens. Farther along, the road cuts between the Twin Lakes and becomes only tire tracks in the dirt. It’s not long before you leave the car and mount a horse for a short ride up one last jagged, rocky incline to a plateau overlooking a gigantic expanse of nature. On this day, our path farther into Badger-Two Medicine—130,000 acres of sacred, forested terrain for the Blackfeet Nation—is temporarily blocked by three…

STANDING AT THE BOTTOM of a dusty wadi, I crane my neck to take in the huge structure rising above me: row upon row of precisely cut stone, set seamlessly without mortar some 2,500 years ago, soaring 50 feet into the fading desert sky. To call this ancient engineering marvel a mere dam feels almost derogatory. When the Great Dam of Marib was built in what is now Yemen, its earth-and-stone walls spanned an area nearly twice as wide as Hoover Dam. The still standing colossal sluices were part of a sophisticated system that controlled the flow of seasonal rains from Yemen’s highlands to its parched desert in the east, nurturing agricultural oases across almost 25,000 acres of wasteland. And in the middle of it all, a thriving economic hub:…

FROM OUR PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO A National Geographic Explorer focusing on conservation, natural history, and anthropology WHERE Peru’s Manú Biosphere Reserve WHAT Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX7 with a 14mm lens While Hamilton James was on assignment near Manú National Park—one of the planet’s most biodiverse places—he heard about the Blanquillo clay lick, where macaws gather each morning. Scientists suspect that these colorful, intelligent animals consume the clay because it helps them digest plant toxins and provides mineral salts. To capture this image, Hamilton James arrived at the wall before the macaws did. He swam across a creek at dawn, then set up a remote camera, stepped away, and waited for the birds to fly in. National Geographic is the most popular brand on Instagram, with more than 303 million followers. This page…

Among the revelations still emerging from 2019 and 2020 weather station data: High-altitude snow and ice have been vanishing much faster than previously thought. “The summit of Mount Everest may well be the sunniest place on Earth,” climate scientist Tom Matthews says—and when that energy is reflected from or absorbed into the mountain’s surface, it causes solid ice to change directly to vapor, producing significant losses of the ice mass even at air temperatures well below zero. “There’s more melting going on than we knew at high altitude,” he says, “which affects our estimates of how much snow there is” and can affect appraisals of glaciers’ sensitivity to temperature change. Station data also produced useful findings for Everest mountaineers: For example, Matthews discovered that the amount of oxygen available to…

Trimming the grass around their homes may be a chore for many humans, but for Brandt’s voles it’s a matter of life and death, new research shows. The little rodents are found in grasslands in Mongolia, Russia—and China, where they’re regularly observed trimming tall grasses near the openings of their burrows so they can watch the skies for predators such as shrikes, their chief avian adversary. When shrikes are flying around, Brandt’s voles use their teeth to fell the bunchgrass dotting their home fields. But the rodents neither eat the plant nor bring it into their burrows, scientists observed. As a test, the scientists put nets over the voles’ burrows so shrikes couldn’t get close—and the voles stopped cutting the grass. The shrikes seem to have adapted also: They began…

NOWHERE IS THE NEED for better incentives for conservation more evident than in agriculture, where environmentally damaging practices are still lamentably common. There are 895 million acres of farmland in the United States—nearly 40 percent of the country. Many—maybe most—farmers already see themselves as stewards of the land but too often find their efforts thwarted. Market pressures, perverse regulatory incentives, and deeply entrenched ways of doing things can keep them from farming in a way that produces food without sacrificing biodiversity. Often the biodiversity at risk isn’t even on the farms. Consider the Chesapeake Bay. Nitrogen and phosphorus from farms in a 64,000-squaremile watershed spanning six states flow into the 200-mile-long estuary. If streams are polluted, the bay will be too. And dirty, turbid water kills seagrass, which forms a…

THEY ARE THE GLUE that holds communities together, stepping up to assist their neighbors in times of crisis, need, and other challenges. Some are volunteers whose projects uplift their neighborhoods; others work to preserve their community’s culture. Still others are Good Samaritans who help older residents get basic necessities, or assist those displaced by disaster. And on and on. Throughout U.S. history, such altruists have stitched a sense of unity among their neighbors. Nearly 190 years ago, in his book Democracy in America, the French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville was impressed by how much of life in the young nation revolved around community-based leaders and groups. He saw them as local democracies that set social mores and helped ward off tyranny. During the past five years, National Geographic journalists…

FOR RESIDENTS HERE, November 8, 2018, was life changing. The Camp fire, the deadliest firestorm in California’s modern history—and one of the most devastating in the United States in a hundred years—had scorched the town of Paradise in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Eighty-five people were killed in Butte County, about 50,000 displaced. Roughly 19,000 structures—including 14,000 homes—were destroyed. Federally funded aid and nonprofit humanitarian organizations came and went. In some ways it was just as well, because there seems to be a consensus in Paradise that long-term assistance came with too many restrictions. So residents largely declined it. Birgitte Randall, a nurse, says many who remain in the town are living without a safety net. And everyone was affected, so residents couldn’t lean on neighbors who’d likely lost their homes…

Yemen has long been divided among various factions. In the seventh century A.D., its disparate kingdoms gave way to conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslim sects. Centuries later, its strategic trade location piqued the competitive interests of foreign powers. Today a civil war is costing Yemen both its past and its present, as archaeological riches are destroyed and lives are lost. BRIEF HISTORY OF YEMEN 1000 B.C.-A.D. 600 Caravan kingdoms Ancient city-states including Main, Saba, Qataban, and Himyar flourish in the relatively fertile highlands along profitable trade routes. 525-628 Religious strife Spreading Jewish and Christian faiths replace native polytheism. They yield to a succession of Muslim leaders starting in 628. 897 Shiite north Followers of Zaidi Islam, a Shiite sect, establish a dynasty in northern Yemen that endures for centuries…

“YOU ALWAYS SEE polar bears on ice and snow,” says photographer Martin Gregus, Jr. “But it’s not like they stop living in the summertime.” Determined to reveal this less depicted angle on the bears, he constructed a field station on the back of a small boat and spent 33 days north of Churchill, Manitoba, in the summers of 2020 and 2021. The more Gregus studied the bears, the more he learned of their personalities. There was the persistent cub he named Hercules. He lost a leg yet managed to survive his first two summers. An enormous female, Wanda (below), seemed to be feared by other bears but spent her days doing yogalike stretches in the fireweed. Another female, Wilma, appeared to be so comfortable with Gregus that she’d nurse her…

In the Near East, ceramic vessels in spheroconical shapes are common artifacts. Recent chemical analysis suggests that some were used as explosive grenades during the Crusades in 11th-or 12thcentury Jerusalem. Incendiary de-vices weren’t new. Archaeologists have found evidence of hand grenades in 12th-century Cairo, naphtha firepots in ninth-century B.C. Assyria, and a chemical fireball used against Alexander the Great in 327 B.C.…

The armada was commissioned to find a westward route to the Moluccas, or the Spice Islands, and return the same way. Leaders were to honor treaty lines, approved by the pope, dividing global exploration rights between Spain and Portugal. They also were to focus on trade routes and refrain from conquest and proselytizing. Magellan would violate the mandate, with disastrous and historic results. This first circumnavigation of the globe—a singular feat of exploration and science—changed the world forever, sparking globalization, the spread of Christianity, and abuses of colonization for centuries to come.…

EVEN MORE THAN FARMS, cities may seem like the opposite of “nature.” They are places for people—lots of people. If you want big protected areas, then encouraging people to live in dense cities makes sense. We can cluster like oysters, sparing land for other species. And we can live more lightly, using public transit and heating and cooling apartments instead of houses. But pushing urban density to the limit would squeeze out parks, gardens, and other green spaces—places that clean the air, shade and cool, and encourage us to exercise. Research indicates the presence of other species makes us happy. The late naturalist E.O. Wilson suggested that the effect, which he called “biophilia,” was biological. We evolved with plants and other animals, and we need them to feel psychologically whole.…

IF MARK COVINGTON HAD A LOOKOUT point to see the duality of life in his Detroit neighborhood, the corner of Georgia Street and Vinton Avenue would be it. At first you might notice what’s officially called blight—the decaying, boarded-up homes and the eeriness of dereliction. But stand a minute longer on the corner, and in the quiet of the morning you might hear the grunt of a pig, then two or three. Suddenly, there’s a ruckus. The pigs—five American guinea hogs, to be exact—have gotten out again. The gate to the Georgia Street Community Collective has been left ajar, and the pigs are on the loose outside their pen. Covington, founder of the collective and its urban farm, isn’t far behind. It’s a typical morning scene at the collective. Early…

At the microscopic level, soil from Germany’s Black Forest is a fantastical realm—one that’s mirrored in wooded ecosystems worldwide. A single gram of forest soil can contain as many as a billion bacteria, up to a million fungi, hundreds of thousands of protozoans, and nearly a thousand roundworms. SCOOP A HANDFUL OF SOIL FROM THE BLACK FOREST IN GERMANY, OR THE TONGASS IN ALASKA, OR THE WAIPOUA IN NEW ZEALAND. LIFT IT CLOSE TO YOUR EYES. What do you see? DIRT, OF COURSE—SOFT, RICH, and dark as cocoa. Pine needles and decaying leaves. Flecks of moss or lichen. The pale concertina of an inverted mushroom cap. An earthworm wriggling away from the light, perhaps, or an ant perplexed by the sudden change in altitude. Sue Grayston knows there is so…