Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2021 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

MANY SUPERLATIVES can be applied to 2020, most of them negative. “Worst year ever,” I’ve heard people say—a subjective judgment we each would make differently. But it was unquestionably a harrowing year, marked by COVID-19’s tragic death toll, the hurtful racial strife, and the divisive political environment. In this special issue, “The Year in Pictures,” we’ve documented 2020 through the work of some of the world’s most gifted photographers. In our 133 years, National Geographic has never singled out one year for a retrospective like this. But if ever a year demanded that, 2020 does. In some respects, making this issue was not hard. We added more than 1.7 million images to the National Geographic archive last year—likely fewer than usual because the pandemic complicated travel assignments, but still a…

‘IT WAS SUCH A REVELATION, SEEING THIS PANDEMIC PLAY OUT ON GLOBAL AND GRANULAR SCALES.’ OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS I’ve been working on “Living Lullabies,” my project on how caregivers create safer spaces for their children through nighttime song and story. My reporting partner, Rupert Compston, and I went to the Turkish-Syrian border; for refugee and migrant families there, lullabies were a piece of home that they could take with them, almost as portable sanctuaries. We went to Liberia, where we spoke with young mothers who’d had their babies as teenagers, and saw how they were singing hope in their lullabies. Then we visited Mongolia, one of the coldest places in the world. To heat their homes, nomadic families would burn coal, which of course pollutes the air. We…

‘IN QUARANTINE AT HOME, I FOCUSED ON ONE SPECIES’—WITH UNEXPECTED RESULTS. I SPENT EARLY 2020 in a UC Riverside lab filming hummingbirds, trying to come up with new techniques for capturing their movements and behavior. The pandemic ended that; in mid-March we had to leave the university, and the whole state locked down. Normally I live with four other housemates; that grew to eight. It was sort of an impromptu commune and a wonderful time. We all really bonded, and I got to reconnect with folks I hadn’t spent much time with when I was on the road eight or nine months a year. I have a fellowship from National Geographic and the Rita Allen Foundation to study jellyfish. Initially it was to be a global project: flying to Japan,…

U.S. “WE HAVEN’T EVEN BEGUN TO SEE THE END OF IT YET.”—U.S. INFECTIOUS DISEASE EXPERT ANTHONY FAUCI IN JULY. MANY HEALTH-CARE WORKERS FACED A LACK OF ADEQUATE PROTECTIVE GEAR FOR MONTHS. P. 54 INDIA FOOD SHORTAGES The number of people facing food insecurity grew each month. P. 60 ITALY MORE THAN 1 MILLION DEAD That grim global milestone was reached in late September as COVID-19 deaths continued to rise. In Italy the army was brought in to transport coffins out of a hard-hit town when cases surged. P. 66 MINNESOTA 8 MINUTES, 46 SECONDS THE INITIAL CALCULATION OF HOW LONG GEORGE FLOYD WAS PINNED BENEATH POLICE OFFICERS BECAME A POTENT SYMBOL IN GLOBAL PROTESTS AGAINST SYSTEMIC RACISM. (PROSECUTORS LATER REVISED THAT TIME TO 7:46.) WHAT MATTERED MOST FOR MANY WAS…

SOME ISOLATIONS ARE INTENTIONAL—think astronauts, mountain climbers, monks—but for most of us, social interaction is a lifegiving electric charge. The year 2020 pulled that plug. In March the world tiptoed into isolation: Gatherings were banned, schools and offices closed. Stay-at-home orders cast an eerie silence over the world. Any setting that fostered interaction was imbued with fear. The era of coronavirus challenged our definitions of isolation. Was it being separated from our friends and family? Stuck outside our country, or kept from our work and education? As Brazil became a focal point of the pandemic, residents of the Copan apartment building, in São Paulo, shut themselves inside, afraid of how easily the virus could engulf Latin America’s largest residential structure. Even in the midst of 1,160 homes filled with artists,…

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC JANUARY 2021 • PAGE 79 KENYA AGAINST THE ODDS Their journey is a perilous one, but every year some 1.4 million wildebeests migrate around the Serengeti ecosystem to chase seasonal rains. P. 126 GLOBAL 50% GLOBAL NOISE POLLUTION DROPPED BY HALF Air pollution and water quality improved in cities around the world. 60 THOUSAND fish returned to the waters of Portland, Maine, thanks to biologists. P. 124 MICHIGAN STRONGER FAITH A quarter of Americans say the pandemic strengthened their faith. One grieving family’s symbolic and tender farewell seemed to transcend today’s troubled times. P. 144 MALAYSIA ESSENTIAL WORKERS SHELTER IN PLACE SOCIAL DISTANCE SELF - ISOLATION COVID-19 continued to define our days. But we did our best to look to the positive and rejoice in quiet moments. P.…

National Geographic photographers seem possessed of an inner GPS. Fueled by restless curiosity, they roam the planet in search of fresh perspectives to capture and new stories to tell. In 2020 this inner GPS took RUDDY ROYE to the front lines of America’s racial reckoning and set DAVID GUTTENFELDER on the trail of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the year’s losses and chaos, ANAND VARMA captured rare natural marvels, HANNAH REYES MORALES recorded soothing scenes of peace, and DIANA MARKOSIAN witnessed triumphs of the human will. On the following pages, the five answer this question: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC JANUARY 2021 • PAGE 7…

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents who lived in the neighboring town. My grandfather was an insurance auditor who drove around the state, checking out people’s fire escapes and whatever. He had to take photographs of emergency exits and smoke detectors. He gave me a camera, an old positive-negative Polaroid Land Camera that looked like an accordion, and that became my job. That’s what I thought photography was. He also gave me a couple of big boxes of the film, which I brought home with me. I started taking pictures—different kinds of pictures. At one point I was photographing a lot of farm foreclosures, and I remember walking into this farmhouse. The people had left behind family photos and old, beat-up furniture.…

MERRIAM-WEBSTER, the dictionary company, keeps track of words people look up most frequently online—not necessarily because the inquirers don’t know what the words mean, buause a formal definition sometimes helps sharpen our understanding of events. In 2020 “apocalypse” surged early. So did “calamity,” “pestilence,” “panic,” “hunker down,” and “surreal.” This was in the winter and early spring, when the daily effort to grasp what was happening around us seemed already beyond our imagination. In the summer, after the killing of George Floyd, “racism” lookups spiked. “Fascism.” “Empathy.” “Defund.” In September: “mental health.” The western United States was on fire by then, the southeastern states so rain-battered that the National Hurricane Center exhausted its usual storm names list and started in on Greek letters. Winds blew toxic wildfire smoke across thousands…

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC JANUARY 2021 • PAGE 101 WASHINGTON, D.C. “WITH THE KILLING OF GEORGE FLOYD, A SWITCH WENT OFF. IT LIT EVERYBODY UP.” ONE PROTESTER SUMMED UP THE EMOTIONS OF MILLIONS. p. 105 U.S. MILLENNIALS AND YOUNGER GENERATIONS MAKE UP 50.7% OF THE POPULATION. Born after 1981, these young people are fighting for change. P. 106 DELAWARE WOMEN In the United States, 2020 marked the 100th anniversary of women getting the right to vote. It also marked the election of Kamala Harris, the first woman to win the vice presidency. P. 117 NEW ZEALAND APART BUT CONNECTED Social media’s influence grew as we socially distanced. In New Zealand Maori women had long been using it to mobilize support for the return of ancestral land and other causes. P. 110 KENYA “IT’S…

‘OUR JOB IS TO BE PART OF THIS STRUGGLE IN A VERY POSITIVE WAY.’ MY SONS ARE 15 AND 12. We don’t do it every day, but frequently we sit down and talk about events. We talked about George Floyd, because I was in Houston to photograph the funeral after George died May 25 with a policeman’s knee on his neck. I started out by saying to them that when I was allowed to go into the church and photograph George, I did not photograph him for 12 minutes. Like, people were behind me going, Dude, let’s go. You know, the line of people waiting. But for me it was important to tell George’s body thanks. Thanks for his life. Thanks for the opportunities that we’re all going to get…

‘I FELT SO GRATEFUL THAT I COULD BE OUT IN THE WORLD. I HAD A SENSE OF PURPOSE.’ WHEN THE PANDEMIC HIT, I told my editors I’d go wherever they needed me—Italy, China, New York, any of the hot spots. Their response was, essentially, Easy, tiger. It’s not going to work like that anymore. Nobody was going anywhere. So I had to figure out what to do to contribute responsibly to a story that has affected everybody in the world. I soon realized it meant working in my own backyard, which for me means the Midwest. I started driving all over, sleeping some nights in my truck. I was looking for what the virus meant to people in “flyover country,” a part of the country that is often ignored. I…

‘WE HELPED STUDENTS HEAL FROM THE ABRUPT WAY THEIR YEAR ENDED.’ A LOT OF MY WORK as a photographer has been about revisiting and reconstructing the past. Getting a second chance. Last year I got to graduate from high school. I wanted to spend part of 2020 profiling one school in America affected by the pandemic. So many stories I was reading in the spring felt hopeless. “The Lost Year” was the headline of 2020. I was searching for a school that hadn’t given up. That’s when I read an article about Principal Mike Lewandowski, who was planning a socially distanced parade for the senior class of St. Francis High, a small school on the outskirts of Milwaukee. He had such energy. He wasn’t going to be defined by the…

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC JANUARY 2021 • PAGE 79 BELGIUM An estimated 7,000 health workers worldwide had died of COVID-19 by September, said Amnesty International. Doctors, nurses, and other staff in Belgium and many other countries worked exhausting shifts in overwhelmed hospitals. P. 84 U.S. WFH What began as a temporary shift to “working from home” became the new normal for millions. P. 87 GLOBAL 1.6 BILLION students were sent home as schools shut down ONE-THIRD of those students were unable to access remote learning. 24 MILLION students are projected to drop out of school. MILLIONS OF YOUTHS are at risk of being pushed into child labor as poverty grows. P. 78 RUSSIA 75TH anniversary celebrations of WWII’s end were delayed or canceled. P. 86 INDONESIA TRAVEL GRINDS TO A HALT The…

CALL IT THE YEAR the world boxed 12 rounds with fear, was left gasping and battered, but won by a decision—the decision to use crisis as fuel. It was the year the phrase “I can’t breathe” had multiple meanings, from overflowing hospital wards around the globe to deadly interactions on city streets. It morphed from an anguished plea to a battle cry as we squared our shoulders and we rose up. A dam of anger and grief broke open as the life was squeezed out of a man named George Floyd, sparking a global revolution. We battled the fear of being too close. Or too disconnected. Some raged at long-standing inequality. Months of confinement ignited the need for escape, not just for recreation but for proclamation. High school seniors lifted…