Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2025 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

AT NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC we are always actively engaged in examining and better understanding our world. So often we are exhilarated and inspired by its wonder and promise, but—at least for me—there are also times when it can be maddening and downright depressing to look around with eyes wide open, recognize clearly the daunting challenges we face, and witness the desire of so many to look away. In this issue we are launching a new initiative, the National Geographic 33, that we hope is a welcome antidote to that feeling. It shines a spotlight on accomplished individuals who are decidedly not looking away. Dedicating themselves to a range of concerns, from climate change to wilderness preservation to economic opportunity to mental health, these changemakers are using their ideas and influence to…

THE SELENA GOMEZ of now—Golden Globe–nominated actress, billionaire philanthropist, and entrepreneur—wouldn’t be possible without the Selena Gomez of several years ago, when the young singer was struggling with her mental health. In 2018 Gomez had an episode of psychosis, a condition in which a person experiences a break from reality, and later learned she had bipolar disorder. The actress decided to take a hiatus from her career and retreated from the spotlight. She explored different treatments, including dialectical behavior therapy, a form of talk therapy for patients experiencing intense emotional distress, eventually landing on a set of strategies and a treatment plan that worked for her. “It was really intense for a while,” Gomez, 32, says. “It’s not easy. But luckily, I’m in a much healthier mindset, and I just…

EMILY LIMAN IS raising the question of whether there are more than just five basic tastes. An expert in human perception, she’s revealed a class of proteins that detect both acids and ammonium chloride, the ingredient that gives Nordic salt licorice its astringent flavor. The work holds potential health benefits with new insight on otopetrins, compounds that have been linked to colon cancer. “Whenever we find a molecule in the body that has sort of a new function,” Liman says, we can better “understand how our body works and how we can manipulate it.”…

SANA JAVERI KADRI’S radical quest to disrupt the global spice industry started with one small action. She took aim at golden milk lattes. Nearly a decade ago, in 2016, Javeri Kadri was working in marketing for a large San Francisco grocery store when she noticed the fad sweeping America’s coffee shops. She knew the drink’s key ingredient, powdered turmeric, grew mostly in her native India. But unlike existing varieties of farm-to-table coffee, chocolate, or fruit, there was little visibility into the supply chain. When she returned to Mumbai early the following year, Javeri Kadri investigated and realized two things. Some regenerative farmers in India used distinct growing and processing techniques that resulted in varieties far superior to anything she’d seen across Mumbai and California. And yet no farmers seemed to be…

SOMETIMES TRAGEDIES can be breakthroughs. That’s what happened a few years ago when a University of Maryland Medical Center surgical team, led by Muhammad Mansoor Mohiuddin and Bartley Griffith, performed a revolutionary new procedure on a 57-year-old who had terminal heart failure. David Bennett, Sr., had been denied a traditional heart transplant due to a variety of health factors. Thousands of people each year face a similar reality, in part because the United States has an organ shortage crisis. Mohiuddin recommended an alternative: the heart of a pig, genetically modified to minimize the chance of rejection. The experiment, conducted in 2022, was a success—at least initially. Bennett died about two months later after his heart failed from immune complications. Mohiuddin’s second patient, a man named Lawrence Faucette, survived for nearly…

AFTER MORE than a decade of making films, Sterlin Harjo, whose work often focuses on Indigenous issues, was considering whether to leave the business. “My films were getting out at festivals and getting distribution, but not a lot of people saw them,” he says. “I was getting frustrated with the fact that I’d been working so hard and there just was not an easy way to make a living.” Instead of hanging it up, Harjo (Muscogee, Seminole) joined forces with Taika Waititi (Māori) to launch a television series that not only thrust him into the spotlight but also brought others along with him. The series, Reservation Dogs (produced for FX, which shares a parent company with National Geographic), debuted in 2021 and revolved around teenagers on an Oklahoma reservation. Harjo and…

TEN YEARS AGO, Michelle Yeoh was visiting Kathmandu, Nepal, with her now husband, Jean Todt, when the city was struck by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake. The couple had been attending an event at a low-rise hotel, and they narrowly escaped the devastation. “When the earth shook, I was immediately on the floor,” Yeoh recalls. “We literally had to crawl out because there was no way to stand.” In the aftermath of the earthquake, Yeoh was stunned by the destruction. Close to 9,000 people were dead and millions more displaced. What impacted her most was how helpless she felt. “If you are not a first responder, don’t try to help—you just get in the way,” she recalls. Yet weeks later, Yeoh returned to Nepal, in the midst of aftershocks and landslides,…

WHEN LUCIE BASCH was 24, she had zero coding experience. What the French entrepreneur did have, however, was a simmering disdain for how much good food winds up in the trash—about 30 percent of global production—which creates as much as 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions as it rots. Bakeries, restaurants, and grocery stores typically threw out perishable items at the end of the day. If someone could connect that supply to thrifty eaters, the food could be sold at a steep discount. She rallied suppliers first, then built a tech team. Thanks to Basch’s scrappy determination, Too Good to Go is the world’s largest marketplace for surplus food, operating in 19 countries with more than a hundred million users. “I think that’s actually what enabled the success,” she says.…

BJÖRK ALWAYS SEEMS to inhabit an alternate universe—a dreamlike space of the highest creative ambition, free from the constraints that govern mere mortals. Which makes it all the more jarring when she injects her work with a dose of cold reality. In January she released a concert film shot during her recent Cornucopia tour. The show featured signature Björk flourishes, including giant psychedelic projections of fungi, and the flashing of an environmental manifesto making an explicit appeal to the most urgent issue of our time: “The Paris climate accord is a modern utopia impossible to imagine, but overcoming our environmental challenges is the only way we can survive.” Over Zoom one day last winter, she explained what she was getting at—namely a reframing of what’s possible. “When we look at the…

“WHAT DOES OPTIMISM mean to you right now?” It’s a question that Yara Shahidi, best known for her role as the Gen Z cool girl Zoey Johnson on the hit show Black-ish and its spin-off, Grown-ish (both produced by ABC, which shares a parent company with National Geographic), often asks at the beginning of her new podcast, The Optimist Project, which wrestles with how to live a more fulfilling life. As suicide rates rise in the United States and the world seems awash in anxiety-inducing headlines, it’s a question that has become ever more urgent. But when asked what optimism means to her, Shahidi, 25, who has no trouble speaking up—she’s publicly condemned acts of voter suppression and police brutality—pauses. “For me, optimism is a belief in self,” she says.…

PHOTOGRAPHER Paul Nicklen LIKES 193,500+ WHERE Great Bear Rainforest, British Columbia, Canada THE KERMODE BEAR is found only in the temperate rainforests of Canada’s west coast. The subspecies is predominantly black, but on rare occasions a white variant—a so-called spirit bear—appears. Years ago, while on assignment for National Geographic, Explorer Paul Nicklen was told by his friend and guide Marven Robinson of the Gitga’at First Nation that a very special, very large male spirit bear might let Nicklen “into his world.” For two rain-soaked days the bear allowed them to follow it. Just as Nicklen was preparing to leave the forest, the sun broke through. He reached for his telephoto lens, but it had fogged. So he used his dry wide-angle lens. The result was “kind of a fluke,” he…

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPLORERS These contributors have received funding from the National Geographic Society, which is committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world. Learn more about the Society’s support of Explorers at natgeo.com/impact. Mélanie Gouby, p.16 For this issue, the writer and filmmaker traveled to the Congo Basin, where she reported on the efforts of homegrown researchers to protect a fragile ecosystem and “reclaim their place as leading scientists.” Gouby has worked in Africa for over a decade. Hannah Nordhaus, p.114 For this month’s story on imperiled sturgeons, Nordhaus traveled to Kazakhstan, Italy, Wisconsin, Alabama, and Tennessee. An earlier story she wrote for the magazine took her to Montana to cover initiatives that restore native prairies. Matthieu Paley, p.44 After 20 years living in Asia and traveling the…

FROM AN EARLY AGE, Edward Norton was given an education in what protecting the environment really requires. His father, Edward M. Norton, an environmental litigator, founded the Grand Canyon Trust and co-founded the Rails to Trails Conservancy. Norton’s maternal grandfather, the real estate developer and urban planner James Rouse, was a pioneer in low-income-housing policy. “I just grew up listening to people talking about social entrepreneurship, mission-driven strategy, and fundraising,” Norton, 55, explains. “Everyone around me was always on the stump, nobly trying to raise money. I certainly cannot remember a time my dad wasn’t raising money for environmental organizations.” Norton built his own career in a different field, riding his work in films like American History X, Fight Club, and 25th Hour to a perch as one of his…

A DECADE AGO, just as Sierra Leone’s Ebola epidemic was ending, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr saw the effects of another catastrophe: The tropical rainforests encircling the country’s capital, Freetown, had been cut down for housing and fuel. “I just suddenly noticed the level of deforestation,” she says. “I literally parked my car and wept.” Today temperatures there routinely exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit, accompanied by deadly floods and landslides during the rainy season, including a mudslide in 2017 that killed more than a thousand people. One of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world, Sierra Leone is also one of the poorest, severely restricting its ability to adapt to a crisis primarily caused by wealthy nations burning fossil fuels. If that sounds bleak, Aki-Sawyerr, who campaigned against the blood diamond trade and co-founded…

FOR MUCH OF THE YEAR, the ocean at Nazaré, a fishing village on Portugal’s coast, is placid. But in the winter, certain storms funnel swells through an underwater canyon, transforming the waves into moving mountains of water so colossal they have been described as the Everest of the ocean. Big-wave surfers have made pilgrimages to the town since 2011, when a video of Garrett McNamara barreling down a 78-foot wave established it as having one of the planet’s biggest breaks. Over much of the past decade, one of the select few women in the lineup has been Maya Gabeira, a Brazilian with a contagious laugh who harbored what some regarded as an outlandish dream: She too wanted to surf the biggest wave in the world. Growing up in Rio de…

THE IDEA WAS simple yet profound. What if you could use the plastic waste littering your home country to help solve its housing crisis? For architect Oscar Andrés Méndez and his business partner, electronics engineer Isabel Cristina Gámez, that inspiration led to an invention that embodies their core values. Their Colombia-based company, Conceptos Plásticos, transforms plastic, including bags, snack-food containers, and shampoo bottles, into a modular building system of bricks and columns. The Lego-like blocks are made of about 95 percent plastic; builders only need to supply a roof and windows. Since launching their company in 2010 in Bogotá, the team has refined their concept to be increasingly efficient. A typical two-bedroom house with a bathroom, living room, dining room, and kitchen now captures some six tons of plastic and…

THE LONDON-BORN musician and poet Arlo Parks makes indie pop with the warmth and tenderness of folk. And since her 2021 debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, she’s become known for songs that are so strikingly candid and familiar that they can seem like diorama boxes filled with life’s tiniest moments. “I just have my notebook for every record,” she says, “and I’m collecting fragments and phrases and nuggets from my life, and that’s where the music comes from.” Because her music is so possessed by interior life, it can naturally seem to yearn for a reckoning with our collective mental health. Her 2020 single “Black Dog,” for instance, was written for a close friend who she feared was spiraling into depression. As she explains it, “The reason why you’re moved…

WHEN TAYSHAN Hayden-Smith was growing up in London public housing, he dreamed of becoming a soccer star. His family’s small garden became his pitch, inspiring a pro career. After the Grenfell Tower fire devastated the same community in 2017, he returned home and began rehabbing urban parcels into green spaces. He founded Grow to Know, which makes nature more accessible to everyone while educating a diverse, new generation of gardeners. “In the garden, boundaries and barriers come down,” says Hayden-Smith, who’s doing his part to make blighted neighborhoods bloom again.…

FOR YEARS, Jennifer Uchendu had been warning fellow Nigerians about the imminent dangers of climate change without realizing that a related issue had escaped her attention: Simply put, she felt increasingly anxious and overwhelmed. Residents of the global South experience some of the most dramatic effects of climate change—flooded cities, drought-stricken farmland, excruciating heat waves—often without contributing significantly to the problem themselves. For Uchendu, who was acting as a sustainability consultant in local communities and had launched a blog, SustyVibes, to help young people reduce their carbon footprint and encourage more accountability among others, it felt like she couldn’t make a difference fast enough. International leaders certainly didn’t seem to be taking the challenges that her community faced seriously. “I came from a place of anger and frustration,” she says.…

COLE BRAUER DIDN’T grow up going to a yacht club. It was only as a college student, living in Honolulu, that the idea hit. “I just googled ‘sailing, Hawaii,’ ” says Brauer, now 30, of her casual introduction to the sport that changed her life. Last year, a decade after that start, Brauer became the first American woman to sail solo, nonstop, and unassisted around the world. When she set out, Brauer had about 10,000 Instagram followers, 85 percent of whom were men—pretty standard for a male-dominated sport. After 130 days at sea, she had roughly 500,000 followers, and the demographics had shifted: Half her audience was now female. Inspiring others matters to Brauer, who wants to demonstrate what’s possible for women—and for people who didn’t grow up around yachts.…

A FEW YEARS BACK, when filmmaker Adam McKay released his movie Don’t Look Up—an apocalyptic climate change satire—he was searching for a new way to talk about disaster. “As horrific as this all is,” McKay says about the climate crisis, “it’s important that we create a culture around dealing with this with humor.” Now McKay has the machine to make it happen. The director of Anchorman and The Big Short has started Yellow Dot Studios, maker of such viral hits as a fake Chevron ad juxtaposing idyllic shots of nature with a voice-over about our gasoline-fueled impending doom. The approach, McKay says, “allows for anger, outrage, frustration, raw sincerity.” Expressions that are hard to ignore.…

THE TRANSFORMATION of Héctor Bellerín began nearly 10 years ago, when he went vegan. He was a defender playing for Arsenal, in the English Premier League, and he wanted a better way to train and recover. “That opened so many doors,” Bellerín, 30, says of his foray into environmentalism. He started working with a nonprofit to plant trees in the Amazon—3,000 for every game Arsenal won. These days he’s playing for Seville’s Real Betis, in his native Spain, while working with the club to dramatically reduce the team’s carbon footprint. The initiatives are highly creative, like installing seats at the club’s stadium made from fishing nets recovered from the seafloor. “For me, it’s a pioneering system,” says Bellerín. “Loads of clubs around the world now are wanting to peek into what…

THE WAY SHU YANG sees it, the natural world has a lot to teach us. A chemical and biomolecular engineer, she employs biomimicry—the study of organically occurring structures—to inspire new and often more sustainable solutions that meet human needs. Two recent projects are a 3D-printed concrete that emulates properties seen in butterfly wings and an adhesive inspired by snail secretions. What’s next? “I have tons of ideas,” Yang says.…

THE OUTDOORS CAN sometimes feel hostile for the queer community. That’s a conclusion Wyn Wiley reached as a kid at a summer camp run by the Boy Scouts. “I was indoctrinated into this militaristic, masculine outdoor system of ‘You have to be strong to survive,’ ” Wiley recalls. Today that kid raised under a stifling vision of the outdoors leads a movement built on a very different story—and does so in heels. After going viral in 2018 for hiking in six-inch-heeled boots, the world’s premier “backpacking queen” was born: Pattie Gonia, an activist in drag who’s striving to make LGBTQ people feel more at home in the outdoors. “I think the narrative, writ large, for the queer community is to run to big cities for acceptance,” says Pattie (who uses she/her…

WHEN SHE WAS younger, Alexis Nikole Nelson had friends who didn’t understand her passion for the outdoors. They “pictured some grizzled white macho man,” says Nelson, who today has millions of followers on TikTok and is widely known as the Black Forager, a witty hiking companion. With dual degrees in environmental science and theater, she has become the perfect guide for sharing deep knowledge about edible vegetation alongside everything from lerp sugar (insect excretions) and Ulva intestinalis (a form of seaweed she likes to sprinkle on popcorn) to the racist origins of trespassing laws.…