National Geographic Magazine - UK December 2018

FOR THE PAST 130 YEARS, National Geographic magazine has offered its readers a portal to the farthest reaches of the Earth, and beyond. Our founders understood the power of storytelling: Since our first issue was published in September 1888, we’ve been the voice of the National Geographic Society, forming a powerful partnership that has helped shape the way our readers see the world—and themselves. To mark our anniversary, we worked with a range of notable British explorers and changemakers, who joined the National Geographic family as guest editors. They included Ranulph Fiennes, Brian Cox, Maria Balshaw, Ellen MacArthur, Mo Farah, and Tim Peake. As we bring this program to a close, we want to shine a spotlight on the inspirational work of National Geographic grantees. The yellow border is…

Paleoanthropologist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer Ella Al-Shamahi wants to uncover why we are the only species of hominin left walking the Earth. Her search for answers recently led her to the island of Socotra in war-torn Yemen, her ancestral homeland, to look for prehistoric caves. Birmingham-born Al-Shamahi is also a stand-up comic. She considers humor a way to present her scientific findings to a wider audience. “Not many people have jokes about land mines and caves. If my work gets too dark, I take a moment to remember the funny,” she says.…

Through the medium of film, Bertie Gregory wants to recruit others who care about animals as much as he does. The 25-year-old National Geographic Young Explorer recently captured video and images of the abundant wildlife that makes the subantarctic island of South Georgia such a powerful conservation success story. “After explorers arrived in the 1700s, the island’s seals were killed for their fur,” says Gregory, who spent three weeks on the island while filming his digital wild_life series for National Geographic. “They also hunted its whales and introduced rats that decimated its birdlife.” Protections were put into place, and today whales are returning, seals are thriving, and the island has been declared rat free. “South Georgia is proof that if we all care enough, and invest enough time, wildlife can…

PAUL ROSE LEFT SCHOOL with a single qualification in metalwork and a mind fueled by dreams of adventure. After training as a diving and climbing instructor, he’d found his life’s calling. “I realized scientific expeditions needed non-scientists as support,” he says. “Then by chance I met someone who worked for the British Antarctic Survey and he offered me a job.” Three decades later Rose is one of the world’s leading polar and undersea explorers—and an expedition leader on National Geographic’s Pristine Seas project. “It all started with Enric Sala in 2008,” he says. “Enric felt he was writing the ocean’s obituary while researching it, so he launched Pristine Seas to explore and protect its last wild places. We’ve since become very good at it.” That may be an understatement: 26…

ON THE NORTH SLOPE OF ALASKA, the culture of the Inupiat centers on whales. Each spring, men and women spend weeks on the tuvaq—the ice near the water—watching for bowhead whales migrating north from the Bering Sea to the Canadian Arctic. When one is spotted, a team pushes an umiak onto the water. There is typically one chance to harpoon the whale. If the hunt is successful, each person in the village can receive a share of the meat. This story of cultural continuity enthralled photographer Kiliii Yüyan. Yüyan is indigenous himself, a descendant of the Hezhe (Nanai in Russian) hunters and fishermen of northern China and southeast Siberia. Stories portraying indigenous communities as degraded or destitute miss their complexity, says Yüyan. “You have to be with them to see…

THE WORLD’S RICHEST countries, such as Luxembourg and the United States, have average incomes per person about 100 times higher than in the poorest countries, such as Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That’s a tragedy for poor countries. Is it also a looming tragedy for rich ones? Until recently all those poor people elsewhere were no threat to rich countries. “They” out there didn’t know much about our lifestyle—and even if they did and became angry, they couldn’t do anything about it. But today, poor remote countries are able to create problems for rich ones, and the reasons can be summed up in a word: globalization. As a result of the increased connections among all parts of the world, people in developing countries know more about differences…