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 FURTHER
C O N T E N T S
P R O O F
8
The Bears of Summer
Polar bears lounging
in soft beds of purple
flowers? A photogra-
pher reveals the lesser
known life of the ice
bear during the Arctic’s
warm season.
P H OTO G R A P H S BY
M A RT I N G R E G U S , J R .
19
E X P L O R E
THE BIG IDEA
Everest Broke It.
Scientists Fixed It.
Climbers installed a
next-gen weather
station to withstand
extreme conditions at
the top of the world.
BY F R E D D I E W I L K I N S O N
ARTIFACT
On the Trail of
Toxic Green Tomes
These pretty but poi-
sonous books may be
lurking in your library.
BY J U ST I N B ROW E R
ALSO
Grass-Cutting Voles
Grenades of the Crusades?
SEPTEMBER 2022
On the Cover
Hikers trek to the Citadel
in Utah’s Bears Ears
National Monument, an
American treasure that’s
been politically contested.
The photograph is a com-
posite of 44 images taken
over a period of 36 hours.
STEPHEN WILKES
31
ATLAS
A Turbulent Trip
Around the World
On the 500th anniver-
sary of the first circling
of the globe, its history
remains murky in spots.
BY M O N I C A S E R R A N O,
S O R E N WA L L JA S P E R ,
PAT R I C I A H E A LY, A N D
EVE CONANT
INNOVATOR
Seeking Solutions in
Amazonian Microbes
Scientist Rosa Vásquez
Espinoza hopes to find
therapeutic organisms
in Peru’s Boiling River.
BY H I C K S WO GA N
S E P T E M B E R | CONTENTS
F E AT U R E S America in
a New Light
As the climate warms,
it’s more important
than ever to protect
the nation’s natural
wonders—for the sake
of animals, plants, and
people. A big part of
this effort: expanding
how we think about
conservation.
BY EMMA MARRIS
P H OTO G RA P H S BY
STEPHEN WILKES
I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y
D E N I S E N E S TO R ........
Keepers of
Community
In a politically divided
time, altruists bring
Americans together.
BY REBECCA LEE
S A N C H E Z ; P H OTO G R A P H S
BY A N D R E A B RU C E ....
Out of Sight
Forest floors teem
with microscopic and
fantastical creatures.
BY FERRIS JABR
P H OTO G RA P H S BY
OLIVER MECKES AND
P. 36 N I C O L E O T TA W A . . . . .
Saving History
in Yemen
Preservationists try to
salvage a rich culture
as civil war rages on.
BY IONA CRAIG
P H OTO G RA P H S BY
P. 64 M O I S E S S A M A N .... P. 100
A Beach for All
In Bangladesh, locals
from varied walks of
life stroll this long
stretch of sand.
BY NINA STROCHLIC
P H OTO G RA P H S BY
P. 82 I S M A I L F E R D O U S ..... P. 126
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S E P T E M B E R | FROM THE EDITOR

SINCE 1888,
THE MAGAZINE
HAS HAD
Meet the New
Editor in Chief
11 EDITORS IN
CHIEF.

B Y N AT H A N LU M P PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK THIESSEN

W H E N I WA S A K I D growing up in a
small town in Wisconsin, I was a vora-
cious reader with eclectic tastes. One
week I’d get into comets. Then whales.
Herculaneum. Tectonic plates. Senegal.
I’d read something that would pique my
interest, and head to the library to find
books from which I could learn more.
I was lucky that my grandmother—
someone who taught me a lot about the
benefit of remaining curious through-
out life—gave our family a subscription
to National Geographic when I was
eight or nine years old. More often than
not, the catalyst for my new obsession
was an article in the magazine that
exposed me to something I hardly
knew existed or that I thought I knew
but didn’t really understand.
As I grew older, it was National Geo-
graphic that opened my eyes to the
wonder of our world. What I discovered
in its pages helped me build a more
complete and nuanced picture of our
planet—the glory, the challenges, and
above all, the thrilling diversity of peo-
ple, places, and things.
It was also National Geographic
that ultimately inspired me to get
out there and do my own exploring.
Experiencing more of our world not
only increased my knowledge; it rein-
forced the importance and urgency of
preserving and protecting our planet.
Although this issue is my first as
National Geographic’s editor in chief, associated with an organization that At National Geographic’s
Washington, D.C., head-
our incredibly talented team produced has had such outsize influence on my
quarters, the magazine
it mostly before my arrival. As a reader, life. In the coming months, we’ll be archive is full of issues I
I’d particularly recommend our fasci- formulating plans for National Geo- remember from my youth,
nating cover story, “America in a New graphic’s future, in our effort to remain including this May 1986
edition with a cover story
Light,” which explores the frontiers as essential, relevant, and authorita- about the Serengeti.
of American conservation as we look tive as ever. I’m excited about what we
to protect 30 percent of our land and have ahead for you, and I hope you’ll
water by 2030. join us on the journey.
I’m delighted to be able to intro-
duce myself here, and honored to be
EDITOR IN CHIEF Nathan Lump STAFF PHOTOGRAPHERS Becky Hale, Mark Thiessen NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PARTNERS
PHOTO ENGINEER Tom O’Brien
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
JUNIOR PHOTO ENGINEER Matt Norton
SENIOR MANAGEMENT ENGINEERING COORDINATOR Eric Flynn Rebecca Campbell, Jean M. Case, Joshua W.
SPECIAL PROJECTS MANAGER Alexandra Moreo D’Amaro, Kareem Daniel, Robert H. Langer, Kevin
EXECUTIVE EDITOR/HISTORY & CULTURE J. Maroni, Debra M. O’Connell, Fredrick J. Ryan, Jr.,
Debra Adams Simmons CARTOGRAPHY Jill Tiefenthaler, Michael L. Ulica
MANAGING EDITOR/MAGAZINES David Brindley
SENIOR EDITORS Riley D. Champine,
SENIOR EXECUTIVE EDITOR/NEWS & FEATURES
Matthew W. Chwastyk, Christine Fellenz
Indira Lakshmanan NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MEDIA
EDITORS Soren Walljasper, Rosemary P. Wardley
DIRECTOR/VISUALS & IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES
SENIOR MAP EDITOR Scott Zillmer EVP & GENERAL MANAGER
Whitney Latorre
GIS MANAGER Yanli Gong
MANAGING EDITOR/DIGITAL Alissa Swango David E. Miller
RESEARCH EDITOR Patricia Healy
MANAGING EDITOR/INTEGRATED STORYTELLING
Michael Tribble SENIOR MANAGEMENT
INFOGRAPHICS
VP INTERNATIONAL MEDIA Yulia Boyle
NEWS/FEATURES DIRECTOR John Tomanio
VP DIGITAL EXPERIENCES Marcelo Galdieri
SENIOR ARTISTS Fernando G. Baptista, Alberto
EXECUTIVE EDITOR/LONG FORM David Lindsey VP MARKETING Julianne Galvin
Lucas López
EXECUTIVE EDITOR/SHORT FORM Patricia Edmonds SVP & EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Nathan Lump
SENIOR EDITORS Manuel Canales, Monica Serrano,
DEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR/SHORT FORM Brooke Sabin DIRECTOR/PRINT OPERATIONS John MacKethan
Jason Treat
EDITORS AT LARGE Peter Gwin, John Hoeffel
ASSOCIATE MANAGER/PRODUCTION Diana Marques
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Yudhijit Bhattacharjee,
ASSOCIATE EDITORS Katie Armstrong, Taylor
Heather Greenwood Davis, Nadia Drake, Robert NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY
Maggiacomo, Lucas Petrin
Draper, Cynthia Gorney
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING
EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT Gretchen Ortega Dr. Jill Tiefenthaler
EDITORIAL PROJECT MANAGER Nia Cheney DIRECTOR Kennedy Elliott
MANAGER Brian T. Jacobs SENIOR MANAGEMENT
ANIMALS SENIOR EDITOR Ryan Morris
EXECUTIVE EDITOR Rachael Bale PRESIDENT AND CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER
SENIOR EDITOR/SHORT FORM Eve Conant Michael L. Ulica
ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR Christine Dell’Amore
SENIOR DEVELOPERS Abhinanda Bhattacharyya, CHIEF DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION OFFICER
SENIOR EDITOR Oliver Payne
Eric Blom, Alice Fang Shannon P. Bartlett
SENIOR WRITER/EDITOR Douglas Main
UX DESIGN EDITOR Nicole Thompson CHIEF COMMUNICATIONS, MARKETING & BRAND
WRITER/EDITOR Natasha Daly
GRAPHICS EDITOR Ben Scott OFFICER Crystal Brown
WILDLIFE WATCH REPORTERS Dina Fine Maron,
Rachel Fobar CHIEF HUMAN RESOURCES OFFICER Mara Dell
DESIGN
CHIEF SCIENCE & INNOVATION OFFICER Ian Miller
ENVIRONMENT DIRECTOR Marianne Seregi
EXECUTIVE EDITOR Robert Kunzig CHIEF EXPLORER ENGAGEMENT OFFICER Alex Moen
MANAGER Hannah Tak CHIEF ADVANCEMENT OFFICER Kara Ramirez Mullins
SENIOR EDITOR Lori Cuthbert
SENIOR EDITORS Elaine Bradley, Tim Parks, CHIEF LEGAL OFFICER Sumeet Seam
SENIOR WRITER/EDITOR Laura Parker
Hilary VanWright CHIEF TECHNOLOGY & INFORMATION OFFICER
SENIOR WRITER Craig Welch
EDITOR Sandi Owatverot Jason Southern
WRITERS Alejandra Borunda, Sarah Gibbens
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Sakke Overlund CHIEF OF STAFF & PROGRAM ALIGNMENT Kim Waldron
HISTORY & CULTURE
CONTRIBUTING DESIGNER T.J. Tucker CHIEF STORYTELLING OFFICER Kaitlin Yarnall
DEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR Nancy San Martín
RESIDENT Alisa Gao CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER Rob Young
SENIOR EDITOR Glenn Oeland
SENIOR ARCHAEOLOGY WRITER/EDITOR Kristin Romey IMMERSIVE STORYTELLING BOARD OF TRUSTEES
SENIOR WRITER/EDITOR Rachel Hartigan
DEPUTY DIRECTOR Kaitlyn Mullin CHAIRMAN Jean M. Case
WRITER Nina Strochlic
SENIOR MANAGER Jennifer Murphy VICE CHAIRMAN Katherine Bradley
REPORTING RESIDENT Jordan Salama
SENIOR PRODUCERS Cosima Amelang,
SCIENCE Zach Baumgartner, Veda Shastri Brendan P. Bechtel, Afsaneh Beschloss,
EXECUTIVE EDITOR Victoria Jaggard Ángel Cabrera, Elizabeth Comstock, Joseph M.
PRODUCERS/EDITORS Rebekah Barlas, Tiffany
SENIOR EDITORS Jay Bennett, Bijal P. Trivedi DeSimone, Alexandra Grosvenor Eller, Paula
D’Emidio, Shweta Gulati, Milaena Hamilton
WRITERS Michael Greshko, Maya Wei-Haas Kahumbu, Deborah Lehr, Claudia Madrazo, Kevin J.
REPORTING RESIDENT Priyanka Runwal AUDIO Maroni, Strive Masiyiwa, Dina Powell McCormick,
TRAVEL EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Davar Ardalan Mark C. Moore, George Muñoz, Nancy E. Pfund,
EXECUTIVE EDITOR George W. Stone Frederick J. Ryan, Jr., Rajiv Shah, Ellen R. Stofan,
MANAGER Carla Wills
ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR Amy Alipio Jill Tiefenthaler, Anthony A. Williams
SENIOR EDITOR Eli Chen
SENIOR EDITORS Jennifer Barger, Anne Kim-Dannibale
HOSTS Amy Briggs, Peter Gwin
EDITOR Allie Yang EXPLORER IN RESIDENCE
SENIOR PRODUCERS Brian Gutierrez, Jacob Pinter
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Starlight Williams Enric Sala
PRODUCERS Khari Douglas, Ilana Strauss
COPY DESK EXPLORERS AT LARGE
SOCIAL MEDIA & AUDIENCE
DEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR Amy Kolczak DEVELOPMENT Shahidul Alam, Robert Ballard, Lee R. Berger,
SENIOR COPY EDITOR Cindy Leitner James Cameron, Sylvia Earle, J. Michael Fay,
DIRECTOR Chris Thorman
COPY EDITORS Caroline Braun, Jennifer Vilaga Beverly Joubert, Dereck Joubert, Louise Leakey,
SENIOR MANAGERS Sarah Gardner, Josh Raab
RESEARCH MANAGER Sarah Polger Meave Leakey, Maya Lin, Rodrigo Medellín
SENIOR AUDIENCE PRODUCERS Kam Burns,
DIRECTOR Alice S. Jones
Nathan Strauss
RESEARCH EDITORS Taryn L. Salinas, Heidi Schultz,
AUDIENCE PRODUCERS Delaney Gordon,
Brad Scriber
Golshan Jalali
PHOTOGRAPHY SOCIAL STRATEGISTS Katarina Parent,
Elizabeth Thompson
DEPUTY DIRECTOR Sadie Quarrier
EDITOR AT LARGE Kurt Mutchler NEWSLETTERS

ANIMALS EXECUTIVE EDITOR David Beard

ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR Alexa Keefe SENIOR PHOTO EDITOR Jen Tse
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HISTORY & CULTURE DIRECTOR Janey Adams

ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR James Wellford
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SCIENCE
SENIOR PHOTO EDITOR Todd James
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MANAGER Francis Rivera
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PRODUCERS Emily Martin, Kimberly Pecoraro
ASSOCIATE PRODUCER Sylvia Mphofe
PRODUCTION SERVICES

ASSOCIATE PHOTO EDITOR Ian Morton DIRECTOR/ADMIN Bill Reicherts

TRAVEL PRODUCTION MANAGER Mike Lappin
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PHOTOGRAPHY RESIDENT Bunni Elian
INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS

PHOTO EDITOR/SHORT FORM Julie Hau SENIOR DESIGN EDITOR Darren Smith
SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHY SPECIALIST Elena Sheveiko TRANSLATION MANAGER Beata Nas
PHOTO COORDINATOR Maya Valentine INTERNATIONAL EDITOR Leigh Mitnick
 C O M E F A C E -T O - F A C E
WITH INCREDIBLE
WILDLIFE
TRAVEL WITH NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

From elephants on the African savanna to giant tortoises in the Galápagos, come face-to-
face with iconic wildlife when you travel with National Geographic. Exploring alongside
our top wildlife biologists and naturalist guides, you’ll feel the excitement of spotting animals
in the wild and gain a deeper understanding of rare species and habitats—and the efforts
National Geographic supports to protect them.

Visit our website or call to learn more about our trips.

N ATG E O E X P E D I T I O N S .C O M | 1 - 8 8 8 -3 51 -3 274
 P R O O F

N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C

VO L . 2 4 2 N O. 3

THE BEARS
OF SUMMER

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LO O K I N G
MARTIN GREGUS, JR. AT T H E
E A RT H
During the short summers of the F RO M
Canadian Arctic, polar bears take to E V E RY
the land—and the land takes on a POSSIBLE
vibrant array of colors. ANGLE

8 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
Even as a drone hovered
above to get this shot,
a large male polar bear
that photographer Martin
Gregus, Jr., calls Scar never
stirred in this bed of fire-
weed. Gregus says he
named many of the bears in
hopes it would help people
relate to them as individu-
als needing protection.

SEPTEMBER 2022 9
P R O O F

Top left: The bears that Gregus calls Betty and Veronica wrestled over this boulder for nearly an hour before he caught
them forming the shape of a heart. The two seemed inseparable, often playing and hunting together. Top right: Two large
cubs appear to guard their mother while a male passes by, just out of the frame. For Gregus, the image recalls Cerberus, the

10 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
multiheaded dog of Greek mythology. Bottom right: Aurora and her cub, Beans, hunker down as a storm approaches.
Thunder and lightning have recently become more frequent in this region as a result of climate change, Gregus says.
Every time the sky cracked, the bears started shaking, like dogs hearing fireworks.

SEPTEMBER 2022 11
P R O O F

Polar bears spend so much time in the water that many scientists consider them to be marine mammals. In some cases,
they’ve been recorded swimming for more than a week straight and clocking over 400 miles. To get underwater images

12 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
like this one of a polar bear moving from melting sea ice onto dry land, Gregus developed camera rigs and techniques that
allowed him to get close to the animals without being seen by them.

SEPTEMBER 2022 13
P R O O F

In this part of the Arctic, everything’s flat, Gregus says. That means even a small boulder can provide a better view—if a
bear hasn’t succumbed to sleep, that is. The bears, including Veronica (shown), often stood on this rock, scouring the area

14 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
for seals to eat or bears to avoid. Gregus hopes to return to this coast, where he sees the bears “thriving and adapting to
the environment.” But he knows that in most of their range, polar bears are suffering from the warming temperatures.

SEPTEMBER 2022 15
P R O O F

THE BACKSTORY
A MONTH AMONG SUMMERING POLAR BEARS SHOWS A SOFTER
S I D E O F T H E W O R L D ’ S L A RG E S T T E R R E S T R I A L P R E DATO R .

“ YO U A LWAY S S E E polar bears on ice female, Wilma, appeared to be so

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 person-
alities. There was the persistent cub
he named Hercules. He lost a leg yet
managed to survive his first two sum-
mers. An enormous female, Wanda
(below), seemed to be feared by other
bears but spent her days doing yoga-
like stretches in the fireweed. Another
comfortable with Gregus that she’d
nurse her cubs, Pebbles and Bamm-
Bamm, close enough for him to hear
their purring. Gregus also witnessed
behaviors he’d rarely seen before, such
as bears grazing on plants and hunting
tern chicks by chasing them into the
surf. For now, actions like those may be
helping this polar bear population cope
with the effects of climate change—but
others elsewhere are starving.
“All of these pictures show bears that
are fat, healthy, and playful,” Gregus
says. So although from a global per-
spective everything may be going wrong
for polar bears, “obviously something’s
going right here.” — JA S O N B I T T E L

“We’d look around and say, ‘Where’s Wanda?’ Because if she was there, we didn’t have to
worry about any other bears,” says Gregus, of the large but laid-back female.
 WET AGE-RELATED MACULAR
DEGENERATION (WET AMD)

KEEP LIVING LIFE

THROUGH YOUR EYES
TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR SIGHT WITH EYLEA

If Wet AMD has impacted your eyes—and how you see life—fight back with EYLEA.

EYLEA can help improve vision— EYLEA helped maintain vision

which may help you read letters improvements for up to 4 years
and see details more clearly with continued treatments in a clinical study

INDICATIONS
EYLEA® (aflibercept) Injection 2 mg (0.05 mL) is a prescription medicine approved for
the treatment of patients with Wet Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD), Macular
Edema following Retinal Vein Occlusion (RVO), Diabetic Macular Edema (DME), and
Diabetic Retinopathy (DR).
IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION
EYLEA® (aflibercept) Injection is a prescription medicine administered by injection
into the eye. You should not use EYLEA if you have an infection in or around the
eye, eye pain or redness, or known allergies to any of the ingredients in EYLEA,
including aflibercept.
Injections into the eye with EYLEA can result in an infection in the eye and retinal
detachment (separation of retina from back of the eye) can occur. Inflammation in
the eye has been reported with the use of EYLEA.
In some patients, injections with EYLEA may cause a temporary increase in eye
pressure within 1 hour of the injection. Sustained increases in eye pressure have
been reported with repeated injections, and your doctor may monitor this after
each injection.
There is a potential but rare risk of serious and sometimes fatal side effects,
related to blood clots, leading to heart attack or stroke in patients receiving EYLEA.
 FDA-APPROVED treatment in its class
for patients with Wet AMD*

The most common side effects reported in patients receiving EYLEA were increased
redness in the eye, eye pain, cataract, vitreous (gel-like substance) detachment,
vitreous floaters, moving spots in the field of vision, and increased pressure in the eye.
You may experience temporary visual changes after an EYLEA injection and
associated eye exams; do not drive or use machinery until your vision
recovers sufficiently.
Contact your doctor right away if you think you might be experiencing any side
effects, including eye pain or redness, light sensitivity, or blurring of vision, after
an injection.
For additional safety information, please talk to your doctor and see the full
Prescribing Information for EYLEA.
You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the
FDA. Visit www.fda.gov/medwatch, or call 1-800-FDA-1088.
Please see the Consumer Brief Summary on the adjacent page.
*IQVIA Medical claims: Number of injections administered Q1 - Q4 2020; Data on File.
04/2022
ASK A RETINA SPECIALIST ABOUT EYLEA VISIT EYLEA.COM EYL.22.04.0014
 (Pronounced: eye•lee•ah)

Consumer Brief Summary The most common side effects include

This summary contains risk and safety information for patients about EYLEA. It
does not include all the information about EYLEA and does not take the place
of talking to your eye doctor about your medical condition or treatment.
What is EYLEA?
EYLEA is a prescription medicine that works by blocking vascular endothelial
growth factor (VEGF). VEGF can cause fluid to leak into the macula (the
light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eye responsible for sharp central vision).
Blocking VEGF helps reduce fluid from leaking into the macula.
What is EYLEA used for?
EYLEA is indicated for the treatment of patients with:
• Neovascular (Wet) Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD)
• Macular Edema Following Retinal Vein Occlusion (RVO)
• Diabetic Macular Edema (DME)
• Diabetic Retinopathy (DR)
How is EYLEA given?
EYLEA is an injection administered by your eye doctor into the eye. Depending
on your condition, EYLEA injections are given on different schedules. Consult
with your eye doctor to confirm which EYLEA schedule is appropriate for you.
Who should not use EYLEA?
Do not use EYLEA if you have an infection in or around the eye, eye pain or
redness, inflammation in the eye, or are allergic to aflibercept and/or any other
ingredients in EYLEA.
What is the most important information I should know about EYLEA?
• EYLEA must only be administered by a qualified eye doctor. Injection
into the eye with EYLEA can result in an infection in the eye and retinal
detachment (separation of retina from back of the eye) can occur.
Inflammation in the eye has been reported with the use of EYLEA. If
your eye becomes red, sensitive to light, painful, or develops a change
in vision, seek immediate care from an eye doctor
• In some patients, injections with EYLEA may cause a temporary
increase in eye pressure within 1 hour of the injection. Sustained
increases in eye pressure have been reported with repeated injections,
and your eye doctor may monitor this after each injection
• There is a potential but rare risk of serious and sometimes fatal side effects
related to blood clots, leading to heart attack or stroke in patients
receiving EYLEA
• Serious side effects related to the injection procedure with EYLEA
are rare but can occur including infection inside the eye and retinal
detachment
• You may experience temporary visual changes after an EYLEA injection
and associated eye exams; do not drive or use machinery until your
vision recovers sufficiently
• Because EYLEA is composed of large molecules, your body may react to
it; therefore, there is a potential for an immune response (allergy-like)
in patients treated with EYLEA
What are possible side effects of EYLEA?
EYLEA can cause serious side effects, including
• See important safety information listed under “What is the
most important information I should know about EYLEA?”
• Increased redness in the eye
• Eye pain
• Cataract
• Vitreous (gel-like substance) detachment
• Vitreous floaters
• Moving spots in the field of vision
• Increased pressure in the eye
There are other possible side effects of EYLEA. For more information, ask your
eye doctor.
It is important that you contact your doctor right away if you think
you might be experiencing any side effects, including eye pain or
redness, light sensitivity, or blurring of vision, after an injection.
You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription
drugs to the FDA. Visit www.fda.gov/medwatch, or call
1-800-FDA-1088.
What should I tell my eye doctor before receiving EYLEA?
• Tell your eye doctor if you have any medical conditions
• Tell your eye doctor if you are pregnant or are planning to become
pregnant. It is not known if EYLEA may harm your unborn baby
• Tell your eye doctor if you are breastfeeding. It is not known if EYLEA
may harm your baby. You and your eye doctor should decide whether
you should be treated with EYLEA or breastfeed, but you should not
do both
How is EYLEA supplied?
EYLEA is supplied in a clear, colorless to pale yellow solution. It is provided in a
pre-filled glass syringe or glass vial containing the amount of product required
for a single injection into the eye, which is 0.05 mL (or 2 mg of the medicine
product).
Where can I learn more about EYLEA?
For a more comprehensive review of EYLEA safety and risk information,
talk to your health care provider and see the full Prescribing Information at
EYLEA.com.
Manufactured by:
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
777 Old Saw Mill River Road
Tarrytown, NY 10591
EYLEA is a registered trademark of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
© 2020, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. All rights reserved.
Issue Date: November 2020
Initial U.S. Approval: 2011
based on the August 2019 EYLEA® (aflibercept) injection full Prescribing information.
11/2020
EYL.20.06.0003
 IN THIS SECTION

Poisonous Books

E X P L O R E Lawn Mowing Voles

Amazonian Microbes
Spanning the Globe

I L L U M I N AT I N G T H E M Y S T E R I E S — A N D W O N D E R S — A L L A R O U N D U S E V E R Y D AY

N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C VO L . 2 4 2 N O. 3

Everest Broke It.

Scientists Fixed It.
I N 2 0 2 0 E A R T H ’ S H I G H E S T W E AT H E R S TAT I O N W E N T D A R K . N O W A N E W,
I M P R O V E D V E R S I O N H A S B E E N D E P L O Y E D AT T H E R O O F O F T H E W O R L D.

BY FREDDIE WILKINSON

Tenzing Gyal-
O N A P I C T U R E - P O S TC A R D DAY I N 2 0 2 1 ,
zen Sherpa crested the Balcony, a windswept rest spot
high on Mount Everest’s Southeast Ridge. In front of
his crampons, half buried in the hardened snow, were
the remains of the world’s highest weather station.
When the station was first assembled and bolted to
the rock, it looked like an elaborate backyard antenna
festooned with bird feeders and weather vanes. In
reality it was $30,000 of precision instruments to
measure wind, humidity, temperature, solar radi-
ation, and barometric pressure. Now the mangled
seven-foot-tall mast lay on its side, embedded in ice.
Tenzing, a 31-year-old electrician and mountain
guide, removed his phone from his down suit and
began taking pictures of the scene. The Balcony
Station had stopped transmitting on January 20,
2020—seven months after it was installed. It was
one of five automatic weather stations placed in May
2019 as part of a partnership between the National

PROPELLER ANEMOMETER ILLUSTRATION: TAYLOR MAGGIACOMO, NGM STAFF

E X P L O R E || THE BIG IDEA

READINGS FROM THE

STATION INSTALLED IN 2019
H AV E P R O V I D E D A T R O V E
OF INSIGHTS INTO THE
METEOROLOGICAL ‘HIDDEN
REALM’ OF EVEREST AND
SURROUNDING MOUNTAINS.

Geographic Society; Tribhuvan University in Kath-

mandu, Nepal; and the Nepalese government, with
funding from Rolex. The project’s co-leaders, climate
scientists Tom Matthews and Baker Perry, say the sta-
tion readings relayed via satellite have provided a trove
of insights into the meteorological “hidden realm” of
Everest and the surrounding Hindu Kush Himalaya.
Kneeling in the snow next to the wrecked station,
Tenzing removed a screwdriver and wrench from his
pack and unfastened a small gray Pelican case that
was bolted to the mast. In it was a data logger that
contained the last information the station had col-
lected before succumbing to the extreme conditions.

ABOUT THE TIME the Balcony Station stopped trans-

mitting, the wind sensors below it—at the next high-
est station, on the South Col—went off-line as well.
“We saw a gust of about 150-odd miles an hour right
before, so there’s no wondering what happened,”
Matthews says. Then before that technology could
be repaired, COVID-19 halted all activity on Ever-
est’s south side for 2020. It wasn’t until last year that
Tenzing and another Sherpa finally could visit the
Everest network for its first official maintenance.
At the lower stations they installed new sensors,
replaced batteries, and inspected fittings and bolts.
Tenzing then proceeded up to the Balcony Station
to assess the damage and retrieve its data logger.
But he wasn’t done. The team already was plan-
ning the mangled equipment’s replacement, an
improved weather station, and Tenzing was to survey
a new, higher location for it. He continued upward
until he reached Bishop Rock, a landmark named for
Barry Bishop, a former National Geographic maga-
What the weather
zine editor and member of the first U.S. expedition to stations detected
summit Everest, in 1963. At 28,904 feet, Bishop Rock
is about 131 vertical feet below the summit—and the
chosen site for the new station.

any moving part will even-

AG A I N S T T H E W E AT H E R , CH Mt. Everest
29,032 ft
NE INA 8,849 m
tually fail. Ask Keith Garrett. PA
L
As director of technology at the Mount Washington
Observatory in New Hampshire, Garrett maintains Balcony Station
a network of 18 automated weather stations across
the White Mountains. Sitting in the trajectory of ASIA
three major storm tracks and only a hundred miles
from the North Atlantic, Mount Washington rou- Mt.
Everest
tinely records winds in excess of 100 miles an hour 2 mi

during more than a hundred days a year. “We’ll see 2 km

20 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
Among the revelations still emerging from 2019 and 2020 On the 2022 National
weather station data: High-altitude snow and ice have been Geographic Society–led
vanishing much faster than previously thought. “The summit expedition, Kami Temba
Sherpa (at left) and
of Mount Everest may well be the sunniest place on Earth,”
Tenzing Gyalzen Sherpa
climate scientist Tom Matthews says—and when that energy install the new weather
is reflected from or absorbed into the mountain’s surface, it station. Its data will
causes solid ice to change directly to vapor, producing signifi- provide information on
cant losses of the ice mass even at air temperatures well below subjects from melting
zero. “There’s more melting going on than we knew at high glaciers to changing
crop cycles.
altitude,” he says, “which affects our estimates of how much
snow there is” and can affect appraisals of glaciers’ sensitiv-
ity to temperature change. Station data also produced useful
findings for Everest mountaineers: For example, Matthews
discovered that the amount of oxygen available to climbers
on the upper slopes varies considerably with the weather.
PHOTO: ARBINDRA KHADKA,
Ultimately, what the station network tracks will touch the lives NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

of 1.9 billion people who rely on the region’s freshwater. —F W NGM MAPS

SEPTEMBER 2022 21
E X P L O R E | THE BIG IDEA
temperature sensors ripped clean off,” Garrett says.
“I’m trying to think of something that has not broken.”
All this made Mount Washington ideal for testing
version two of the Everest weather stations.
Violent winds were a key factor the team had to
consider. Part of the benefit of putting a weather
station near Everest’s summit is that it can measure
the jet stream. But that also means the wind sen-
sors have to be able to endure sustained periods of
hurricane-force winds.
And yet a station’s wind sensors generally are
among its most vulnerable instruments. Even sturdy
devices will require maintenance or new parts, Gar-
rett says, especially in Everest’s harsh conditions.
By far the most durable wind sensor is a pitot
tube anemometer, invented in the 18th century by
French engineer Henri Pitot. Widely used in modern
aviation, it’s the narrow metal tube protruding from
the wings and noses of aircraft. It has a big advan-
tage of no moving parts and the big disadvantage of
weighing a lot to carry up a mountain. So, working
in collaboration with the National Geographic team,
Garrett radically stripped down existing pitot tech-
nology, reducing a 44-pound system to less than five.
After a winter of testing on Mount Washington’s
summit, the new sensor seemed viable. It only needed
to be carried to the roof of the world and installed.
and Tenzing
T H I S PA S T S P R I N G , P E R RY, M AT T H E W S ,
returned to Everest. With them were 12 other Sherpas,
most participants in the original weather station expe-
dition. The team assembled at Base Camp, along with
hundreds of recreational mountaineers and guides
congregating for the main 2022 climbing season.
The new station they brought to install on Bishop
Rock had several upgraded components, including
the new ultralight pitot tube wind sensor design. The
plan was to remove parts of the destroyed station at
the Balcony and assemble the new one at the Bishop
Rock site Tenzing had scouted the year before.
Though the trek to install the station was not with-
out risk, it would yield direct benefits. Weather data
are essential to a big mountain climb, helping guides
plan expeditions and keep clients safe. Then if things
go wrong and a climber must be retrieved, provid-
ing real-time data to helicopter pilots and rescuers
greatly increases the odds of success. Tenzing puts
it simply: “We save more climbers’ lives.”
On May 9, team members began to arrive at
Top of the world tools
1. Lightning protection device 2. Wind vane 3. Stainless steel,
three-cup anemometer (wind speed) 4. Propeller anemometer
(wind speed and direction) 5. Satellite communication device
6. Pitot tube anemometer (wind pressure) 7. Air temperature
and relative humidity sensors 8. Net radiometer 9. Solar panels
10. Protective cases housing data logger, barometric pressure
sensor, radios, and battery. Instruments in blue are updates
or additions to the original 2019 weather station.
TAYLOR MAGGIACOMO, NGM STAFF. SOURCE: BAKER PERRY, APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY
Bishop Rock at 9 a.m. The wind raked over Everest at
45 miles an hour, pushing the windchill down
to 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
As weather station setup began, Matthews found
the fingers on his right hand were wooden with frost-
bite; he could offer no real help. But the Sherpa guides
had been preparing for this moment since 2019. Eight
team members each climbed with a 24-volt battery
in their down suit, warming it for use in the drill
installing the vital anchor bolts.
In the biting air, installation took about three hours,
an hour longer than the team had hoped. Tenzing
completed the final wiring to power up the station.
By the time he, Matthews, and their Sherpa partners
made it back to the South Col several hours later,
the new station was already sending data. “We have
a good chance of measuring a full winter’s wind,”
Matthews notes. “That would be fascinating.”
Meanwhile, news had broken that a Chinese team
had installed its own network of seven weather sta-
tions on Everest—on the mountain’s north side, the
opposite side from the climb Tenzing, Matthews, and
Perry led. As for the altitude of the highest station in
the Chinese network: It’s reported to be roughly the
same elevation as Bishop Rock. Just a stone’s throw
from the summit.
Does this mean that there’s a new international
race to put weather stations on the world’s highest
mountain? Matthews downplays such talk. “I believe
more information coming from Everest is far better
for everyone,” he says. j
Freddie Wilkinson is a professional alpinist and mountain guide.
The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and
protecting the wonder of our world, funds the work of Explorers,
from mountains and rainforests to the ocean. Learn more about
the Perpetual Planet Expeditions at natgeo.com/perpetualplanet.
1
2
3
4
5
7
6 8
9
10
E X P L O R E | ARTIFACT

FROM MURDER MYSTERIE S to forensics manuals,

the books in libraries and collections often contain

ON THE TRAIL poison. The word “poison,” that is; poison the subject.
But in a toxic twist, poison the substance is being
found in books, like the lucent green ones below. Their

OF TOXIC TOMES bindings were dyed with a Victorian-era pigment that

was known as emerald green—and contained arsenic.
Melissa Tedone and Rosie Grayburn, conservation
scientists at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, are
T W O C O N S E R VAT O R S ’ M I S S I O N : working to locate and catalog the books, and to raise
TO S H E D L I G H T O N T H E P O I S O N O U S public awareness of them. Their effort, the Poison
P I G M E N T S I N 1 9 T H - C E N T U RY B O O K S Book Project, has uncovered 88 of the arsenic-laced
volumes by using advanced spectroscopic techniques.
PHOTOGRAPH BY REBECCA HALE
The detection processes are intentionally careful so
they’re not “damaging works of art,” Grayburn says.
Most emerald-green-treated books were produced
in the 1850s, and thousands still may exist around
the world, Tedone and Grayburn say. Chronically
handling the poisoned books might make a person
mildly sick, they say—but nothing short of devouring
one would pose a serious risk. Tedone’s advice: “You
don’t need to panic and throw them away.”
To help get books identified, the project sent book-
marks with safety warnings and images of the green
In the 1800s, the vivid
green pigment in these covers to institutions in the United States and 18
books’ bindings was other countries. So far, toxic books have turned up
popular in parts of in six collections. “Any library that collects mid-19th-
Europe and the U.S.—
even though arsenic’s century cloth publishers’ bindings is likely to have
toxicity was known. at least one or two,” Tedone says. — J U S T I N B ROW E R
 TA K E A
S M A RT S T E P
TOWA R D A
MORE SECURE
FUTURE
Establishing a charitable gift annuity with
the National Geographic Society is a great
way to receive guaranteed payments for
life and save on taxes—while protecting
our planet for generations to come.

C O P Y R I G H T 2 0 2 2 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C S O C I E T Y
P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F E D S O N VA N D E I R A

A N N U I T Y R AT E S H AV E I N C R E A S E D ! S E C U R E YO U R F U T U R E W I T H L I F E T I M E PAYM E N T S .
E X P L O R E | BREAKTHROUGHS

Acres of aspens = one colossal tree

At more than 6,500 tons, a grove of quak-
ing aspens growing on 106 acres in Utah is,
D I S PAT C H E S by weight, Earth’s largest known land
organism. What look like 47,000 separate
FROM THE FRONT LINES trees are in fact genetically identical stems
OF SCIENCE rising from one root system. Deer and cattle
A N D I N N OVAT I O N eating new aspen shoots threaten to kill
this peculiar being—a tree that for millennia
has been its own forest. — C R A I G W E L C H

ARCHAEOLOGY

Grenades
hurled in
Crusades?
In the Near East,
ceramic vessels
in spheroconical
shapes are com-
mon artifacts.
Recent chemical
analysis suggests
that some were
used as explosive
grenades during
the Crusades
in 11th- or 12th-
century Jerusalem.
Incendiary de-
vices weren’t new.
ANIMAL BEHAVIOR
Archaeologists have
found evidence of

CUTTING THEIR RISKS hand grenades in

12th-century Cairo,
T O K E E P B I R D S O F P R E Y AT B AY, T H E S E F O U R - F O O T E D naphtha firepots
LAWN MOWERS ENGINEER THEIR ECOSYSTEM. in ninth-century B.C.
Assyria, and a chem-
Trimming the grass around their homes may
be a chore for many humans, but for Brandt’s
ical fireball used
voles it’s a matter of life and death, new against Alexander
research shows. The little rodents are found the Great in 327 B.C.
in grasslands in Mongolia, Russia—and China, —A D R I E N N E M AYO R
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 avoiding
areas where their hunting cover had been mowed by the voles,
according to the study. Its findings are a reminder of how a single
species, however small, can alter an entire ecosystem. —A N N I E ROT H

PHOTOS (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT): DIANE COOK AND LEN JENSHEL; ERICH LESSING, ART
RESOURCE, NY; ZHIWEI ZHONG; KLEIN & HUBERT, NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY
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In Amazonian microbes,
she seeks solutions to
big challenges.
Flowing through Peru’s rainforest is
a roughly four-mile stretch of water
known as the Boiling River. Fed by
geothermal springs, it reaches more
than 200°F—hot enough to kill animals
that slip into its path. The river has long
been the stuff of legend, even dismissed
by some Peruvians as nonexistent.
But to Rosa Vásquez Espinoza, a
Lima-born chemical biologist and
National Geographic Explorer, the
Boiling River is very real. As the creator
of MicroAmazon, a multidisciplinary
examination of the rainforest at its tini-
est, she’s studying the microbes in the
river’s extreme environment. “No one
has ever explored these organisms,”
says David Sherman, head of the Uni-
versity of Michigan lab where Vásquez
Espinoza is a researcher. The aim is to
determine if the microbes “could offer
new avenues to developing antibiotics,
antifungal agents, or antivirals,” he says.
In 2019 Vásquez Espinoza and her
collaborators took microbial samples
from 19 sites in and along the river. Now
they’re making a virtual map of their
work featuring video, photography, and
data. Vásquez Espinoza hopes it will
facilitate further research. Her ultimate
goal: “When we think about the Ama-
zon rainforest biodiversity, we think
beyond what we see with our eyes.” j
The National
Geographic Society
has funded Vásquez
Espinoza’s work since
2019. Learn more about
its support of Explorers
researching our planet’s
critical landscapes at
natgeo.com/impact.
 AT L A S | E X P L O R E

A TURBULENT TRIP
On the 500th anniversary of the first circling of the globe,
the journey remains murky. Only one of five ships completed
the expedition—and Ferdinand Magellan wasn’t on it.
B Y M O N I C A S E R R A N O, S O R E N WA L L JA S P E R ,
P A T R I C I A H E A LY, A N D E V E C O N A N T

a leaky ship made

I N T H E FA L L O F 1 5 2 2 ,
port in Spain with 18 haggard crewmen,
all that survived of some 240 who’d
manned a bold, mercantile mission.
Charles I, the young Spanish king, no
longer was willing to rely on overland
trade routes for the cloves and nutmeg
so coveted in Europe. He commissioned
an expedition to find a new route to
Pacific islands rich with spices, and as
captain he hired Ferdinand Magellan,
a skilled Portuguese sailor who firmly
believed the Earth was round, a theory
not yet proved. In September 1519, five
ships set sail, outfitted to collect nearly
550 tons of spices in two years. The voy-
age stretched to three, as sailors charted
routes by the sun and stars. They sur-
vived with help from Indigenous people
they met, treating some fairly but others
cruelly or violently. Forsaking trade for
conquest, Magellan attacked an island
in the Philippines and was killed in the
surf. That left a new captain, Basque
navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano, to
guide the Victoria home to Sanlúcar de
Barrameda (below). The ship returned
with a fraction of the trip’s intended
cargo and an unplanned achievement:
proof that the Earth was round.

ILLUSTRATION: MATTHEW TWOMBLY

E X P L O R E | AT L A S

AROUND THE WORLD

The armada was commissioned to find a westward and proselytizing. Magellan would violate the man-
route to the Moluccas, or the Spice Islands, and return date, with disastrous and historic results. This first
the same way. Leaders were to honor treaty lines, circumnavigation of the globe—a singular feat of
approved by the pope, dividing global exploration exploration and science—changed the world forever,
rights between Spain and Portugal. They also were sparking globalization, the spread of Christianity,
to focus on trade routes and refrain from conquest and abuses of colonization for centuries to come.
EUROPE
PORTUGAL
N O R T H DEPART AUG. 10, 1519
SPAIN RETURN SEPT. 8, 1522
Seville
A M E R I C A Sanlúcar de
Barrameda
A t l a n t ic Tenerife
Gulf of
TROPIC OF CANCER
Mexico
O c e a n
Treaty of The leaking ship’s hungry crew
New Spain
(SPAIN)
Caribbean Tordesillas stops at the Portuguese Cape
Sea demarcation line Verde Islands for food; 13 men
FOR PORTUGAL

Cape Verde Is.

row ashore and are arrested
FOR SPAIN

(PORTUGAL)
for violating treaty lines.
Castilla de Oro
(SPAIN)
Gulf of
EQUATOR Guinea A F R I C A

Foods spoil and supplies SOUTH Zanzibar

(PORTUGAL)
run low during the Pacific
Ocean crossing. Lacking
fresh fruit or vegetables, AMERICA
many sailors die of scurvy.
Mozambique
(PORTUGAL)

P a c i f i c Guanabara Bay
(Rio de Janeiro)
TROPIC OF CAPRICORN

O c ea n
Río de
la Plata Once across the Atlantic, the
crew trades with Indigenous
people for fresh provisions Cape of
PATAGONIA

Good Hope
and hunts wildlife, including
penguins and sea lions.

On land and sea St. Julian

Much of the arduous journey involves Unsuccessful mutiny
long stops to make repairs, build trade Santa Cruz
relations, and wait out stormy weather. Cape Strait of Magellan
Desire
Cape Horn
Armada leader Stopped
Magellan Carvalho
Espinosa Elcano Sailing
Remaining ships San Antonio Magellan
Santiago stop for winter returns to dies; a new
sinks months Spain leader is chosen
1519 1520 1521
SEPT. NOV. JAN. MAR. JULY SEPT. JAN. MAR.

Río de St. Julian Santa Cruz Guam Cebu

Tenerife la Plata
Sanlúcar Navigating Crossing Homonhon Mactan
de Barrameda
Strait of Pacific
Seville Guanabara Bay Magellan Ocean Limasawa

ILLUSTRATIONS: MATTHEW TWOMBLY. SOURCES: ELKANO 500 FOUNDATION; JOSE ELEAZAR R. BERSALES AND GEORGE EMMANUEL R. BORRINAGA,
UNIVERSITY OF SAN CARLOS; GUADALUPE FERNÁNDEZ MORENTE, FUNDACIÓN NAO VICTORIA
 FIVE SHIPS TO ONE
Only the Victoria, the arma-
da’s second smallest vessel,
returned—but the sale of
San Antonio* Trinidad Concepción Victoria Santiago its cargo, 381 sacks of cloves,
Freight (tons): 144 132 108 102 90 made the trip profitable.

The crew amicably nego-

Exceeding the mandate tiates for provisions with
for the voyage—to chart a some groups of maritime
new trade route—Magellan traders, but clashes with
meddles in local affairs and others on land and sea.
loses his life in battle. JAPAN

Philippine
P a c i f i c
A S I A TROPIC OF CANCER

Sea

IN DIA O c e a n Hawaii
PHILIPPINE Magellan killed
(PORTUGAL) Goa ISLANDS Guam
Bay of Cebu Homonhon
Arabian Sea Bengal Mactan
Palawan
Balabac Limasawa
Mindanao More than three
Sarangani months at sea
Malacca Brunei Bay without stopping
(PORTUGAL) Moluccas
EQUATOR (Spice Islands) EQUATOR
SU

BORNEO Tidore
MA
TRA

I n d i a n Makassar NEW
(PORTUGAL) Wetar GUINEA
Victoria risks a new

o
lag
Timor
southwest route in

ip e
O c e a n Portuguese waters

ch
Coral

Ar
t u
Sea mo
After two years, the expe- Tua
TROPIC OF CAPRICORN dition finds the Moluccas.
AUSTRALIA Loaded with spices, its last
two ships head for Spain by
opposite routes: one east-
ward, one westward.

NEW
Amid headwinds and raging storms, ZEALAND
the voyage is slowed and a mast breaks

Kerguelen Is.

Trinidad heads
east and is
Lacking enough Ships stop to The crew discovers
captured
crew, Concepción repair leaking a time change of Expedition
is set aflame hulls a full day returns to Spain
1522
JULY SEPT. NOV. JAN. MAR. MAY SEPT. EXPEDITION
TOTAL
1,123 DAYS
AWAY
Brunei Balabac Moluccas Cape Seville
Bay Verde Is. 37,800
Mindanao Sarangani Sanlúcar NAUTICAL
Balabac Sailing around de Barrameda MILES
Palawan Palawan the tip of Africa TRAVELED

*SHAPE OF EACH SHIP IS APPROXIMATED. SEPTEMBER 2022 33

 ®

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 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C SEPTEMBER 2022

America, Illuminated . . . P. 36
Community Keepers . . . P. 64
Soil Micro-Magic . . . . . . . . . P. 82
Yemen’s History . . . . . . . . P. 100
Bangladeshi Beach . . . . . P. 126

F EAT U R E S

82
A SINGLE
GRAM OF
FOREST SOIL
CAN CONTAIN
AS MANY AS
A BILLION
BACTERIA,
OFTEN THE
QUARRY OF
ORGANISMS
SUCH AS THIS
BALLOON-LIKE
CILIATE.

IMAGE: OLIVER MECKES AND NICOLE OTTAWA, EYE OF SCIENCE

America
IN A NEW LIGHT
Parks and refuges aren’t enough. Preserving
our land, water, and wildlife in a warming climate
means practicing conservation everywhere.

BY EMMA MARRIS
PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEPHEN WILKES
ILLUSTRATIONS BY DENISE NESTOR

36
Bears Ears
SOUTHEASTERN UTAH

This spectacular landscape is a

symbol of the risk to some of the
country’s unique and irreplaceable
places. One president preserved
it at the urging of Native Americans
who hold it sacred; another tried
to open it to drilling and mining.
A national monument rich with
archaeological sites, it includes the
Citadel, once a fortified cliff dwell-
ing, now a popular hiking spot.
Stephen Wilkes took 2,092 photos
over 36 hours and selected 44 for
this image, capturing a sunrise, a full
moon, and a rare alignment of four
planets. “Beyond the sense of awe
and beauty,” he says, “there’s a pal-
pable sense of history with every
step you take.”

To create these landscapes, Wilkes

found a vantage point and photo-
graphed all day and all night. He then
chose a number of photos to merge
digitally into a composite image to
tell a story about a single day.
J Bar L Ranch
MELVILLE, MONTANA

Near Yellowstone National Park,

the ranch aims to raise cattle while
also conserving habitat for prong-
horn, moose, trumpeter swans, and
sage grouse, to name a few. Many
fences have been modified to allow
wildlife to cross the ranch. Herds are
bunched and moved frequently to
mimic buffalo, whose tread shaped
these grasslands. The bulls in this
scene—assembled from 60 photos
out of 2,509—graze before moun-
tains known as the Crazies, as time
passes from daybreak to sunset
to starlit night. Wilkes was deeply
impressed by the ranch hands.
“They’re the real deal,” he says.
“Their whole being, their whole life,
is connected to this land.”
Shi Shi Beach
NORTHWESTERN WASHINGTON

An isolated strand in Olympic National

Park showcases the need to protect
earth and water, as the Makah—whose
ancestral land this is—have done for
centuries. During treaty negotiations,
the chief at the time insisted, “I want
the sea. That is my country.” This
seashore, Wilkes says, is “spellbinding”
and unlike any he’s ever seen. The
tide arrives explosively, whirling
around sculpted sea stacks, and reveals
kelp and sea stars when it recedes.
“I was able to capture these dramatic
changes in light—in the color in the
water and in the actual tide itself.”
In merging 46 of 1,626 photos, Wilkes
contrasts this dynamic seascape with
a woman in a contemplative moment.
Conservation But last year, the federal government proposed
taking 23 species of plants and animals off the
endangered species list—not because they’ve

works. In the recovered, but because they’re now extinct. We

have to do better.
My friend Karl Wenner shows up to meet me

past century 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

or so, efforts to Lakeside Farms in the Klamath Basin, a dry

part of southern Oregon that has lost nearly all
its wetlands. Without marshes, water runs into

save American Upper Klamath Lake unfiltered and carrying

phosphorus-rich volcanic soil, causing algal
blooms that harm two federally listed sucker

species like species found nowhere else on Earth. Every

summer for decades now, nearly all the juvenile
fish have died, leaving an aging population.

the peregrine Wenner’s farm floods its fields in the winter,

both to kill weeds and to create waterfowl habi-
tat. In the past, I’ve come by to see huge flocks of

falcon, the ducks and swans coasting in to spend the night.

We’d post up on a dike with binoculars and watch
great vortices of waterfowl swirl down onto the

American bison, water. His passion for birds is infectious.

But when the water was pumped off in the
spring, it was so full of phosphorus that it

and the Pacific counted as pollution. So this year, with about

$350,000 from the U.S. government, Wenner
and his co-owners created permanent wetlands

gray whale have AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

Explore how geography drives

succeeded. the forces of nature, shaping

and reshaping the land.
Streaming now on Disney+.
A yellow-headed
blackbird perches
above four ducks—
clockwise from top,
a northern shoveler,
canvasback, buffle-
head, and northern
pintail—nestled amid
barley and water
willow, which flourish
in wetlands.

AMERICA IN A NEW LIGHT 47


Large public protected areas
were the backbone of
America’s conservation strategy
in the 20th century,
and they are still important.
on 70 of their 400 acres. The tangle of wetland
plants will capture phosphorus-laden sediment
before the farm’s irrigation water is returned to
the lake. In addition, it’s year-round habitat for
plants, birds, and—soon—baby suckers. “You
can’t go back to before Europeans came to the
basin,” he says, “but you can make it rhyme.”
Despite his enthusiasm, Wenner tells me he can’t
sacrifice profit to carve out this space for wildlife.
“It has to pencil out,” he says.
His new wetland is a perfect rectangle, bor-
dered by reeds and willows, with a partially
submerged dike—a dotted line of islands for
geese to nest on. As we drive alongside, Wen-
ner tells me about the wildlife he’s seen in the
new marsh, including lots of ducks: buffleheads,
scaup, shovelers, canvasbacks, mallards. He
spots a flash of color in the reeds. “Oh! The first
yellow-headed blackbirds of the year!”
There is no single way to do conservation.
Restoring ecosystems, fighting climate change,
regulating hunting and fishing, eliminating
pollution, helping trees beat deadly diseases,
moving plants and animals to cooler habitats,
killing introduced predators—all can play a role.
But the core idea is very straightforward:
Plants and animals need somewhere suitable
to live. Overharvesting is the main threat in the
sea; on land and in freshwater, it’s habitat loss.
To work, every other strategy depends on the
existence of a suitable environment.
Seven days after his inauguration, President
Joe Biden signed an executive order that set
a goal: “conserving at least 30 percent of our
lands and waters by 2030.” What counts as “con-
served,” however, remains to be decided. The
“30x30” proposal derives from a push to set a
similar target for the entire planet, organized
by the Campaign for Nature, a partnership of
the Wyss Campaign for Nature and the National
Geographic Society.
Conservation itself is broadly popular—a
truly bipartisan issue in a deeply divided United
48 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
States—but agreeing on the specif-
ics of what will count toward the
30 percent is sure to be contentious.
Allowing working lands and waters
and city parks to be counted is likely
to upset some conservationists. But
any plan to designate almost a third
of the country as strictly protected
is also almost certain to alarm those
who see thoughtful use as compat-
ible with conservation—a group that includes
many farmers, ranchers, fishers, hunters, and
members of tribal nations eager to continue or
resume traditional practices.
As it slowly rolls out its 30x30 vision, the Biden
administration is sending signals that it intends
to define “conserved” expansively, including
efforts outside of parks and refuges. Conserva-
tion can be “something that brings us together as
a country,” Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland
told me. “We have worked very hard to make
sure that we’re engaging tribal communities,
private landowners, folks who both make their
living with the Earth, and folks who use it as a
means of recreation.”
Large public protected areas were the back-
bone of America’s conservation strategy in
the 20th century, and they are still important. The
total area of parks and sanctuaries may even
grow. Several new marine sanctuaries have been
nominated: Chumash Heritage in California,
St. George Unangan Heritage in Alaska, and
Hudson Canyon in New York among them. On
land, advocates for protected areas have called
for new national monuments, including Castner
Range in Texas; 750 square miles of meadows,
mountains, and old-growth forest in Oregon’s
Cascades; and Spirit Mountain—called Avi Kwa
Ame by the Mojave people—in southern Nevada.
But monuments and parks are not enough. To
safeguard all our species, all our ecosystems—
and to make sure that they have the resources
and space to adapt as the climate continues to
warm—we need to do conservation everywhere.
On private timberland. On farms. In cities.
The National
Geographic Society,
committed to illuminat-
ing and protecting the
wonder of our world,
has funded Explorer
Stephen Wilkes’s pho-
tography since 2016.
ILLUSTRATION BY JOE MCKENDRY
 CHAPTER ONE
APPALACHIAN LACE
To connect habitat with corridors so nature can adapt,
conservationists are turning to working lands.
S E V E N T Y- E I G H T P E R C E N T
of the protected land in
the United States is in the
West, but most of the
vulnerable biodiversity is
found “back East,” as we
Westerners say. Just one
river in the Appalachian
Mountains, the Clinch,
has 118 native species of
fish—almost as many
freshwater species as the
entire state of California.
The South is truly “a
piscine rainforest,” as one
scientific article puts it.
I went back East myself, wanting to see what’s
being done for species like eels and elk and oys-
ters in a landscape with fewer large national
parks and preserves. I found people working to
protect species in the places where people live
and work, so that humans and threatened spe-
cies can thrive together.
The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest
conservation nonprofit, recently arranged the
acquisition of 253,000 acres of Appalachian for-
est, rich with freshwater habitat, for $130 mil-
lion. The parcels lie in southwest Virginia and
on the Kentucky-Tennessee border—an area
larger than Shenandoah and Acadia National
Parks combined. The property’s new owner is a
limited partnership managed by the nonprofit
but backed by “impact investors,” people look-
ing to use their money to make a profit and a
difference. It’s still working land.
I’ll admit I was skeptical that land could make
enough money to please investors while protect-
ing species, but I was willing to be convinced.
The conservancy staff managing the project are
logging some areas, leaving very large buffers
around streams. They say small, strategic cuts
A bull elk
bugles
during
the rut.
create a diversity of habitat types and mimic
natural disturbances, although critics dispute
that clear-cutting can ever be considered con-
servation. In other areas, they’re selling the
carbon credits for the trees they don’t log to
companies or other institutions looking to off-
set their emissions. Carbon markets, too, have
been criticized as a “dangerous distraction” from
systemic change. In addition, the project man-
agers are leasing the hunting and recreational
rights on much of the property. And on seven
former coal-mining sites, they plan to install
solar farms.
I’d heard about “mountaintop removal” min-
ing but had never seen it up close, so I ask Brad
Kreps and Greg Meade, two conservancy staffers
who work on the Cumberland Forest Project, to
take me to the site of a proposed solar farm. On
the way, we drive through hollows so steep and
narrow that only one row of small, run-down
houses fits along the creek. Just beyond their
backyards, the Cumberland Forest property
begins. Kreps points out railroad cars used to
carry coal, idle for so long that kudzu vines
have clambered all over them. Coal is fading.
AMERICA IN A NEW LIGHT 49

If you want to do
conservation everywhere,
then you have to include places
where people are using
the land or sea to make money.
Appalachia knows it. The communities here are
poor, and there’s not much work.
The solar farms will create a few jobs, though
a fraction of those being lost in the coal industry.
Logging supports a few more. The Nature Con-
servancy says ATV and hiking trails are already
encouraging more tourism. The organization
also intentionally structured the purchase so
that the land would still be taxed. “People live
in these landscapes,” says Kreps. “If we bought
all this land, put a fence around it, and took it
off the tax rolls, we wouldn’t have local support.”
Meade, director of the Cumberland Forest
Project, nods. “The bigger you get in scale, the
more you need to incorporate mixed use.” Set-
ting aside a postage-stamp park is one thing. But
conserving large areas means that you have obli-
gations to communities that live there.
The mining on the mountaintop is fin-
ished. The accessible coal is gone, along with
the mountaintop itself. What remains is a flat
plain—an incongruous mesa among the pointy
ridges that characterize this landscape. There’s
very little to see here. Dirt, small plants, a fire
ring with empty shotgun shells in it. It seems like
an ideal site to install a bunch of solar panels.
What this place does have is a remarkable view
of ridge after ridge of forested land, receding into
a misty horizon. The property is a complex set of
discontinuous parcels punctured by inholdings,
an Appalachian lace. But it contains a variety of
latitudes, altitudes, and microclimates that offer
options for the future—and enough continuity
that animals can range freely. Among those ani-
mals is one long missing from these woods: elk.
Elk were hunted out of the East by the late
19th century. In the early 2010s, with consider-
able volunteer labor from enthusiastic hunting
organizations, Virginia imported 75 elk from
Kentucky—a population that itself had been
seeded from those in the Rocky Mountains. Vir-
ginia officials decided to release the majestic
ungulates on a flattened mountaintop—another
50 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
former coal-mining site—that is
now part of the Cumberland For-
est property.
Leon Boyd, chairman of the
Southwest Virginia Coalfields
Chapter of the Rocky Mountain Elk
Foundation and self-described old
country boy, volunteers with the
reintroduction project. Boyd shows
me some antlers shed this year, fan-
tastical objects. It astonishes me that the animals
can produce a set of these anew every year. It
feels like a magical power.
Boyd takes me, along with two state scientists,
to see the animals in their new habitat. We drive
up through trees, past coal-bed methane pumps,
then pop out onto another Appalachian mesa,
this one a pale green meadow. Silhouetted on the
horizon is a massive bull elk, its heavy antlers
ready to drop.
“Growing up in this area, we had very little
wildlife to hunt or even see,” Boyd says. His father
was a timber cutter and a coal miner, and Boyd
himself is a well driller for the oil and gas indus-
try. It wasn’t until his boss took him and a few
other employees to New Mexico to hunt elk that
he fell in love with the species, with “how they
move and travel as a herd over the landscape.” 
We go walking across the field, tacking to the
left of a gang of elk, through a mix of plants
developed by state biologists to feed elk, pol-
linators, and birds. It includes grasses but
also wildflowers: black-eyed Susans and other
coneflowers. Virginia’s elk project leader, Jackie
Rosenberger, points out a slight depression in a
rocky patch of ground—a killdeer nest, with four
sea green, speckled eggs.
The elk aren’t far off, and I can smell them,
a strong musky scent. They gaze serenely at
us, their massive roan bodies held up on long,
ballet-dancer legs. This population hasn’t been
hunted—yet. But the goal, Rosenberger explains,
is a “huntable population,” and this year will
see the very first hunt, for just six bulls. Almost
32,000 people have applied. In addition, from
viewing stands, tourists can see elk fight and
bugle during the fall rut or tend to their calves
in the spring. “We are already seeing return vis-
itors, spending money in nearby communities,”
Boyd says. “Each year it keeps getting better.
That’s how we know it’s working.”
The Nature Conservancy doesn’t want to
manage this land indefinitely. The plan is
 ALASKA
(U.S.)
Fairbanks
Anchorage YUKON
Free to Roam
Many animals will adapt to new climate conditions
Wildlife has space to by changing habitats—if they can find a safe route.
move freely in large To see where animals might be able to move, sci-
natural areas such as
Alaska and the Yukon. entists modeled the continent’s most likely wildlife
Protecting specific corridors. The aim: to conserve connections that
paths is rarely needed. remain and restore flow where it’s been lost.
R

Edmonton
O
C

Vancouver
K

2 C A N A D A
Y

Seattle

Montréal
Portland
Ottawa
G R EAT 6

S.
Toronto
M O

YELLOWSTONE Boston

T
Boise

M
NATIONAL PARK Minneapolis

N
New York
U N

IA
3 Philadelphia
Salt Lake City Chicago

C H
U N I T E D S T A T E S Washington, D.C.
T A I N

San

A
Francisco Denver St. Louis

L
A
P
P L AIN S AP
Las Vegas
Nashville 4
S

Los Angeles
1 Phoenix Atlanta

Dallas

Hermosillo New Orleans 5

The wall on parts Houston
of the U.S.-Mexico Chihuahua
border blocks wildlife Miami
crossings, endangering
Torreón
species such as jaguars, Monterrey
ocelots, and Mexican La Paz
gray wolves.
MEXICO

Guadalajara

Mexico
City
Modeled flow
of wildlife
HIGH
concentrated 1 3 5
into corridors In Los Angeles, a wildlife Chicago’s Burnham Wildlife The Florida Wildlife Corridor
overpass being built will be Corridor preserves native is a nearly 18-million-acre
the world’s largest, spanning ecosystems used by patchwork of parks, forests,
10 highway lanes, to let three million migratory rivers, ranches, and farms that
cougars and other animals birds along the city’s connects habitats for about
MODERATE safely pass. lakefront. 700 plant and animal species.
diffused over
broader areas
2 4 6
The Yellowstone to Yukon The Cumberland Forest In Vermont, a statewide
Conservation Initiative Project conserves more network of volunteer crossing
aims to create a 2,000- than 250,000 acres of guards with flashlights escorts
LOW mile-long wildlife corridor private forests, many frogs and salamanders across
impeded by
cities, agriculture, for elk, grizzlies, and with vital links to roads at nighttime during
or bodies of water golden eagles. public forests. spring migrations.

MATTHEW W. CHWASTYK, NGM STAFF; MARTY SCHNURE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPLORER

SOURCES: R. TRAVIS BELOTE, THE WILDERNESS SOCIETY; USGS
 Protecting Nature
Conserving the Future Land in just about every par
categories needing conserv
The United States has joined more than 90 countries in a pledge to its environment that mat
far have included diverse vo
to combat climate change and species extinction by safeguarding safeguarding cultural herita
30 percent of Earth’s land and water by 2030. These maps show areas innovative, community-led

where scientists think conservation would offer the greatest benefit

to people and nature, based on four key environmental goals. New Seatt
congestion
Shi Shi without ca
Beach

100%
Unprotected Protected of counties in the contiguous U.S. contain at least
one of the four priority areas mapped below. Seattle
Top 30% most important places
for four key conservation goals
WA S H I N G T O N

8%
Providing clean drinking water of the priority regions mapped below
Saving wildlife Flathead
are currently protected. Reservation
Preserving ecosystem diversity Portland
Trapping carbon

Other established
protected area 13% of all U.S. land and inland waters are
officially protected.

OREGON

PROVIDING CLEAN DRINKING WATER SAVING WILDLIFE Lakeside Farms Boise

Natural landscapes filter rain into drinking water. In Preserving 30 percent of the nation’s most essential Lower Klamath N.W.R. IDAHO
the lower 48 states, 83 million people rely on forested wildlife habitat could protect 99 percent of its mammals,
watersheds for over half their drinking water. birds, reptiles, and amphibians.

Reno As Nevada rapidly

urbanizes, residents are
collaborating to protect
San Francisco corridors on public lands.

N E VA D A U
Fresno
CA L I F O R N I A
Las
Vegas
Bakersfield

ARIZO
heim
Los Angeles Ana Riverside
c h Santa Ana
Long Bea

San Diego Scott

PRESERVING ECOSYSTEM DIVERSITY TRAPPING CARBON Chula Vista Phoenix
Some portion of every native ecosystem needs to be main- Today’s forests—if protected from major disturbances—
tained to safeguard Earth’s natural processes. Great Plains grass- can absorb nearly all the carbon dioxide produced by
lands and eastern woodlands are among the least protected. U.S. passenger cars every year. In Arctic Alaska, the
Imago Initiative supports
more sustainable rural
livelihoods and new
models of Indigenous- e
led land protection. h

ALASKA

Fairbanks
n
n
Anchorage a

MONICA SERRANO AND MATTHEW W. CHWASTYK, NGM STAFF; MARTY SCHNURE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPLORER
SOURCES: R. TRAVIS BELOTE AND TIM FULLMAN, THE WILDERNESS SOCIETY; SETH SPAWN-LEE, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN–MADISON; ISRIC SOILGRIDS; LINDA HWANG, TOP 30 PERCENT
TRUST FOR PUBLIC LAND; FORESTS TO FAUCETS, U.S. FOREST SERVICE; GLOBAL DEAL FOR NATURE; CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS; USGS DATA UNAVAILA
e Close to Home Top 30% most important places
for four key conservation goals
THE NATURE EQUITY GAP
Millions face barriers to experiencing nature and all its benefits,
rt of the country falls into at least one of the especially in low-income areas and communities of color. Addressing
Providing clean Preserving environmental injustices is a critical part of conservation.
vation—so every community can make changes drinking water ecosystem diversity
ter. Some of the most successful projects so
oices in decision-making and an emphasis on
ge alongside nature. Several of today’s most
conservation efforts are highlighted below.
Both ecosystems
and carbon
3x Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans are three times as
likely as white Americans to live far from natural areas.

Saving wildlife Trapping carbon

le bus lines reduce The Confederated Salish and Kootenai
n and offer hikers Tribes in Montana are restoring white-
rs access to trailheads. bark pine forests, which hold cultural
significance, retain snowpack, and
70% The majority of low-income Americans in the contigu-
ous United States live in nature-deprived areas.
Top 30 large U.S. cities most in need
of more equitable access to parks More than one-third of U.S. children lack public green
28m space within a 10-minute walk of their home.

support scores of animal species.

Black communities in Philadelphia

have campaigned to save urban
R

sanctuaries such as the John Heinz

National Wildlife Refuge, which
O

M O N T A N A protects an essential tidal marsh MAINE

N O R T H D A K O TA and provides access to nature
M I N N E S O TA
C

hikes and bird-watching.

MICH.
VT.
K

J Bar L
G

Ranch
Y

N.H.

S
WISCONSIN
R

Minneapolis

N
Boston
S O U T H D A K O TA

I
E

NEW YORK MASS.

A
M

MICHIGAN R.I.

T
A

WYOMING
CONN.

N
Detroit
O

Saw Mill River

Salt Lake City

U
T

PENNSYLVANIA New York

Chicago

O
IOWA nd
Cle v el a
U

Philadelphia N.J.
NEBRASKA

M
Des Moines
INDI ANA O H I O Holterholm Farms
N

CO L O RA D O ILLINOIS DEL.
U TA H
Denver
A N

MD.
T

U N I T E D S T A T E S W. VA. Washington, D.C.

A
A

Bears Ears VIRGINIA

I

National KANSAS St. Louis Louisville Chesapeake Bay

Virginia Beach
H

Monument MISSOURI Clinch River Chesapeake

I
I

headwaters Great Dismal

C

KENTUCKY Swamp
Cumberland Forest A Durham
N
N

Project L Greensboro
NA Nashville A N O R T H CA RO L I N A
P Charlotte
S

TENNESSEE
S

OKLAHOMA P
A
Albuquerque Memphis
ARKANSAS SOUTH
tsdale Atlanta
CAROLINA
NEW MEXICO
The carbon-storing Great Dismal
MISSISSIPPI Swamp was a refuge for gener-
ations of Indigenous and Black
Irving Garland ALABAM A GEORGIA
people escaping subjugation and
Arlington Dallas
enslavement. Their descendants
El Paso
advocate establishing a national
heritage area for the greater region.
e T E X A S Jacksonville
h LO UI SIAN A FLORIDA
Austin Couturie Forest
Houston New Orleans
Orlando

n
n Project
El conserves
Paso, whichmore
is mostly Latino, Memphis and 72 other cities are
a than 250,000
is workingacres of
to conserve Castner improving equitable access to
Juneau private forests,
Range for many
outdoor recreation parks in part by turning school-
s, and with vital links
and to to
safeguard the desert yards into neighborhood parks Hialeah
publiccity’s
forests.
source of drinking water. during nonschool hours. Miami

T AREAS CALCULATED SEPARATELY FOR CONTIGUOUS U.S. AND ALASKA.

ABLE OR INCOMPLETE FOR HAWAII AND U.S. TERRITORIES.
City Park
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

The hundred-acre Wisner Tract, a for-

mer golf course wrecked by Hurricane
Katrina, is being returned to a more
natural state with a diverse array of
habitat: lagoon, swamp, marsh, live oak
forest, and meadowland. It’s a retreat
for birds such as egrets and geese, city
dwellers from “all walks of life,” and
“just about every breed of dog that
you could ever imagine,” Wilkes says.
Restoring degraded urban spaces and
providing equitable access to nature
are key goals in conservation’s next
phase. Two scissor-lift cranes lofted
Wilkes about 60 feet, revealing the
skyline and light-striped Superdome,
less than five miles away. To create this
image, he chose 43 out of 2,012 photos.
to set up permanent provisions that would allow
public access as well as restrict development
in the most ecologically valuable parts, and
then sell the land and distribute the profit to
the investors.
Using impact investors to protect ecosystems
is just one way people have attempted to recon-
cile conservation with capitalism. I am sympa-
thetic to conservationists who are skeptical that
the two systems can ever really work together
and believe that the pursuit of profit will always
lead to overuse of natural resources. But if you
want to do conservation everywhere, then
you have to find a way to include places where
people are using the land or sea to make money.
CHAPTER TWO
FARMERS TO THE BAY
Some ecosystems are threatened by what happens upstream,
so conserving them must be a watershed-wide effort.
N OW H E R E I S T H E N E E D
for better incentives for
conservation more evi-
dent 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 them-
selves as stewards of the
land but too often find
their efforts thwarted.
Market pressures, perverse regulatory incen-
tives, 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-square-
mile watershed spanning six states flow into the
58 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
Meade told me the Cumberland Forest Proj-
ect would never make enough money to please
investors without selling credits on carbon mar-
kets. Only a total of about a thousand acres a
year is logged, and much of that is in stands
where the most valuable trees already have
been selectively logged. “Anything marketed
as pulpwood today is more valuable as carbon,”
he says.
Doing conservation on working lands is much
easier when there are systems that reward con-
servation behavior—whether that’s voluntary
markets or government programs. As Wenner
says, it has to pencil out. You have to make con-
servation pay better than destruction.
Limiting runoff
from farmland
protects habitat
for aquatic life,
such as oysters.
200-mile-long estuary. If streams are polluted,
the bay will be too. And dirty, turbid water kills
seagrass, which forms a habitat for other species,
such as blue crab, striped bass, and white perch.
Even turning the entire bay into a protected area
could not save it from threats upstream. That’s
why the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, started
in 1967 to “Save the Bay,” as its iconic bumper
stickers urge, has an office as far
north as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Smarter investment could
Wetland restoration would help
absorb these pollutants. But there
empower farmers to be
are ways to farm that reduce runoff. environmental leaders. They
Crops can be planted without tilling
the soil. Cover crops can hold soil deserve to be well paid for
in place while fields are fallow. And
animals can be kept from overgraz-
preserving America.
ing and trampling stream banks.
I wanted to see a farm that’s an example of
what’s possible, and the foundation recom-
mended I pay a visit to Ron Holter, a fifth-
generation Maryland dairy farmer whose
Holterholm Farms is one of many such small
operations west of Baltimore. In the spring of
1995, after an agricultural extension class and “a
lot of prayer,” Holter moved his cattle—which he
had fed mostly in barns—outside. He divided the
land, which he had plowed to grow grain to feed
the cows, into 68 three-acre paddocks. The cattle
are moved daily, so each paddock is grazed for
less than a week a year. This allows the grass to
rest, giving the roots a chance to grow deep and
strong, which prevents erosion. Cow manure is
all the fertilizer the pasture needs. It certainly
looks bucolic, with a herd of Jerseys lounging
in an undulating pasture of fescue, chicory, and
white clover.
In the old days after a rain, he recalls, water
ran through his field, red with soil. When he
switched to what he calls “holistic planned graz-
ing,” the water turned clear. Then, as his pasture
grew deep, tangled roots and its microbial soil
community thrived, the water stopped flowing
altogether. His land now holds three times the
water it once did.
Holter plunges in a shovel so I can inspect the
soil. “Bacteria form microbial glue,” he explains
proudly, as I run my fingers through the moist,
caramel-colored dirt, which is indeed gluey—
and fragrant. “We’ve increased soil organic mat-
ter to 6 percent from 3 percent,” Holter says. His
pasture is literally twice as alive as it used to be.
Farmers like Holter take a leap into the
unknown when they switch to grazing systems
like this, often called rotational grazing. The
Chesapeake Bay Foundation tries to make it eas-
ier, providing funding, advice, and connections
to programs that defray some costs. Holter has
applied for federal funds to upgrade his system
for bringing water to his small pastures. He no
longer buys seed corn or fertilizer. He doesn’t
need to plow, sow, or harvest, so he rarely uses
his tractor. He’s also able to sell his organic,
grass-fed milk for more because consumers will
pay more. But it still takes guts. Holter lost farm-
ing friends when he made the switch.
It’s worth noting that while rotational grazing
can address the impacts of cattle on watersheds,
grass-fed cows still belch methane, a powerful
greenhouse gas. One study suggested those emis-
sions could be canceled out by carbon seques-
tered in permanent pasture. But other researchers
maintain that the ideal future might be one where
humans drink less milk and eat less beef.
In 2021, farmers, ranchers, and forest land-
owners received more than $3.3 billion through
U.S. Department of Agriculture conservation
programs, covering more than 108 million acres.
Those are big numbers, but more can be done.
Programs that incentivize harmful practices—
grants for waste lagoons at confined animal
feeding operations, for example—could be
phased out. Smarter investment in conservation
for farms and forests could truly empower farm-
ers to be environmental leaders. These men and
women deserve to be well paid for preserving the
places that make America beautiful.
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation doesn’t
just advise and support farmers; it also tries to
inspire them by bringing them to the bay itself.
“If you don’t know it, you don’t love it,” says Matt
Kowalski, a restoration scientist. “If you don’t
love it, you won’t try to protect it.”
And so I find myself on an aluminum work-
boat bobbing above an oyster reef in Chesapeake
Bay, surrounded by half a dozen farmers wearing
Wrangler jeans and muck boots. We’ve talked
about inputs to the bay from farms. And now
we’re talking about cleaning the water on the
other end. Chris Moore, an ecosystem scientist
with the foundation, is explaining why he and
his colleagues have been supporting oyster res-
toration. Turns out the scrumptious shellfish
are also fantastic filters, each cleaning as much
AMERICA IN A NEW LIGHT 59
as 50 gallons of water a day. “Oysters work bet-
ter than an aquarium filter from PetSmart,” he
says. There used to be so many oysters in the
bay that they could filter the entire volume in a
week, consuming nitrogen and phosphorus from
runoff and ejecting the excess as pellets that set-
tle to the bottom. But in the 1980s, disease and
continuous trawling destroyed reefs up to 15 feet
high constructed over thousands of years.
Moore and the other foundation staff pull up
a handful of clustered oysters. The farmers gin-
gerly handle the wet, spiky agglomerations. One
empty shell has a vivid red beard sponge grow-
ing on it. Another shell has a mud crab tucked
inside, which decides to pinch me. “When I see
the worms coming up from the soil, I know that
I’ve got good soil,” says Jenni Hoover, a farmer
from Mount Airy, Maryland. “And so seeing the
CHAPTER THREE
A CREEK IN YONKERS
City nature is both an amenity for urbanites
and valuable habitat for some species.
E V E N M O R E T H A N FA R M S ,
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.
60 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
crabs, the little baby crabs, over with the oysters
is a really positive sign.”
The Chesapeake Oyster Alliance, a group
of nonprofits, community organizations, and
oyster growers and harvesters, is promoting
aquaculture in floating boxes and seeding baby
oysters on artificial reefs of discarded shells or
concrete. The goal is 10 billion oysters. These
reefs can also protect coastal communities from
more intense storm surges. It’s climate change
adaptation you can eat with a squeeze of lemon.
Together, Moore explains, farmers and oyster
growers can, in fact, “Save the Bay.” Someone
shucks a four-inch oyster to show the group.
Demonstration over, the oyster is up for grabs.
No one volunteers, so I seize the opportunity and
gleefully eat it myself. I jot down a few tasting
notes: “marine, mossy, terrestrial, rich soil.”
A great
blue heron
catches an
eel near a
fish ladder
that eels
use to swim
upstream.
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.
I’ve been nurtured by city parks my whole
life; they are where I learned to
value other species, starting with Peregrine falcons, endangered
crows and cedars. My friend Roy
Tsao, who teaches political theory
until they were saved
and philosophy at Pratt Institute by breeding and reintroduction,
in Brooklyn, says taking up birding
later in life has made him a happier actually thrive better in cities
man. “It has completely changed
the way I feel about living in New
than in the countryside.
York City,” he says. “It makes you
aware of the seasons. In late March there are
woodcocks in Midtown.”
Urban green space—from rooftop gardens
to pocket parks to the linear forests of street
trees—isn’t just about making us feel good,
though. Real conservation can occur in these
spaces— especially for birds, plants, insects,
and other small wildlife. A naturalist studying
the Gottlieb Native Garden, a single acre in Bev-
erly Hills, California, documented over 1,400
species in the past five years, from cougars
and ospreys to varieties of bark lice previously
unknown to science.
Greenways and urban streams can be corri-
dors through the concrete for plants and wildlife.
Sometimes cities can even be refuges. New York
City’s Central Park is famous among birders
because it’s a haven for birds migrating up and
down the East Coast. Grassland birds such as
dickcissels and Savannah sparrows are more
likely to see their eggs hatch and chicks fledge
in urban areas around Chicago than in rural Illi-
nois. Peregrine falcons, endangered in North
America until they were saved by breeding and
reintroduction, actually thrive better in cities
than in the countryside, because there are so
many pigeons and other birds for them to eat.
Nothing illustrates the promise of urban con-
servation more poetically than “daylighting” a
creek. It’s easy to forget that all cities were built
on ecosystems, and many had rivers and creeks
running through them. As cities grew, these
waterways were typically confined to pipes or
culverts. In Yonkers, an unofficial “sixth bor-
ough” just north of New York City, Saw Mill
River, which once powered mills to cut timber
and grind grain into flour, gradually turned
into a polluted mess. In the 1920s the last 2,000
feet was covered with a parking lot. But since
2012, 800 feet of that section has run through
a landscaped channel, sparkling in the sun in a
new 2.2-acre park. More recently, other sections,
deeper downtown, have been uncovered.
I take a train from Manhattan to Yonkers to
see it. The creek turns out to be visible from
the platform. Just outside the station, I am met
by Brigitte Griswold and Candida Rodriguez of
Groundwork Hudson Valley, one of the many
organizations that helped unbury the creek.
We cross the street and take in the satisfying
sight—and sound—of a burbling river in the cen-
ter of downtown. We see a fish ladder, installed
for the sea-born eel babies—called “glass eels”
because they are completely transparent—to
climb upstream to grow big.
This project, initiated by community lead-
ers more than 20 years ago, is a hard-won and
expensive reality, involving the state, the city of
Yonkers, Groundwork, Scenic Hudson, and the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That first 800 feet
cost $24 million. But Yonkers mayor Mike Spano
says the project has been “a major catalyst for the
renaissance of downtown Yonkers and the city
as a whole,” adding that it inspired more than
four billion dollars in redevelopment, includ-
ing 3,000 apartments. “Green gentrification”
can be an ironic consequence of urban conser-
vation, but Yonkers has required some units to
be low-income housing.
After native plants were installed along the
new channel, wildlife appeared as if by magic.
Muskrat, herons, turtles, and ducks are spotted
here regularly. Another section hosts a hydro-
electric wheel that powers nearby streetlights.
In a streamside park, two men are whiling away
the afternoon. “I like the water. I like the ducks,”
one tells us, appreciatively.
Griswold once worked on more traditional
conservation projects, but she wanted to do
something that connected people to the non-
human world—in part so they would come to
care for it enough to fight for it. That meant
doing it in the city. Not everyone can afford to
visit flagship national parks, she says.
Rodriguez shows me areas on a Yonkers map
that were redlined—set aside for nonwhite
AMERICA IN A NEW LIGHT 61
residents, spurned by lenders. They have fewer
trees and more concrete. Access to nature is not
evenly distributed.
Fixing that injustice may be the best way to
create a generation that cares enough about
other species to save them.
EPILOGUE
GROWING RELATIONSHIPS
Instead of walling ourselves out, we need to
learn to live well with other species.
B AC K H O M E I N T H E
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 farm-
ers 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, cold
water down the Klamath River to keep endan-
gered Chinook and coho salmon alive.
Don Gentry, until recently the Klamath Tribal
Council chairman, is very worried about the
c’waam and the koptu, as the suckers are called
in the Klamath language. Before colonization,
these fish were crucial for the tribe’s survival
62 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
Rodriguez says the daylighted creek offers
a place for people to unwind, creates a buzzy
location for businesses, and protects threatened
species like eels. “A triple win,” she calls it. Gris-
wold sums it up: “There’s a beautiful thing in
downtown Yonkers, and it belongs to all of us.”
A c’waam, a type
of sucker, swirls
around three
juvenile fish.
when winter food stocks ran low. Every spring,
the fish are honored and blessed by tribal elders
in a ceremony. They are a deeply significant cul-
tural food, but because of their decline, tribal
members haven’t harvested them since 1986.
“I am really concerned about losing our
koptu,” Gentry says, citing the more gravely
endangered species. “When I go along the lake,
and I look at the mountains with their snow, I
just think about how beautiful our homeland is,”
he says, but his thoughts always turn to the fish.
“It doesn’t take long to go there. I can’t wake up
in the morning and not think about this.”
The tribe is working to recover the suckers,
running a hatchery to preserve the genetic
diversity of the species and researching the
conditions they need to thrive. This spring,
the tribe sued the federal govern-
ment for sending water to farmers Conservation needs to be
at a time when lake levels were
lower than the minimums called
about protecting other species
for in the government’s own report with people. It’s about
on the species’ needs. Gentry
believes that the basin has “a cer- improving our relationships
tain resilience and productivity,”
which should allow it to support
with the nonhuman world.
agriculture as well as waterfowl and
suckers. But he says sharing the water, espe-
cially as climate change worsens and leads to
longer droughts, will require cooperation. That
isn’t happening yet—in part because of ideolog-
ical divisions rooted in colonialism.
The model of conservation centered on parks
and other strictly protected areas is sometimes
called fortress conservation, and it too can be
traced to colonialism. It has been increasingly
criticized for setting as its goal a wilderness
devoid of humans, a fantasy that never really
existed. In what is now the United States, humans
were already present as the glaciers from the last
ice age were retreating, meaning that our ecosys-
tems all developed with humans in them.
Many grasslands, wetlands, and forests were
shaped for millennia by people through peri-
odic burning. And many species were carefully
tended, including oaks in California; clams in the
Northwest; Four Corners potato, goosefoot, wolf-
berry, and sumac in the Southwest; and chestnuts
in the East. The Klamath people managed 10,000
acres of a wetland lily called wocus, whose seeds
produce excellent flour. Today wocus is hard to
find around Upper Klamath Lake. Sometimes,
removing people hurts other species.
Reviving Indigenous management tech-
niques—such as prescribed fire, clam gardens,
and traditional fishing practices—is all the rage
in conservation. Like conservation in timber-
lands, farms, and cities, tribal management is
about simultaneously meeting the needs of peo-
ple and of other species. It’s about flourishing
together. Conservationists are realizing their
work isn’t about protecting other species from
people—although limiting access or harvests
can at times be necessary. Instead, conservation
needs to be about protecting other species with
people. It is about improving our relationships
with the nonhuman world, not severing them.
On a cold spring afternoon, a truck hauling a
600-gallon tank arrives at Wenner’s farm. Inside
are 1,712 baby c’waam and koptu from a federal
hatchery. It’s time to put this human-made wet-
land to work as a nursery for endangered fish.
Wenner, as is his nature, is in an ebullient
mood. Despite the drought and tensions over
scarce water, he’s optimistic about the future.
He’s seen how fast wetland species returned to
his farm when he invited them back. “Immedi-
ately, this fall, we had 10,000 ducks and geese
on these 70 acres.” With more cash and help for
landowners to navigate the red tape, he thinks
the Klamath Basin could be a case study for
landscape-scale conservation. The question, he
says, is “whether we can look at the big picture
and get everyone pulling in the same direction.
It is not happening yet.” But, he adds, “if we can
do it here, we can do it anywhere.”
Tree swallows catch midges above our heads,
and blackbirds call over the white noise of traffic
on the nearby highway. A U.S. Fish and Wildlife
biologist opens a valve on the tank, and a cascade
of water and fish rushes into a waiting net. Baby
suckers are about four inches long, dark olive on
their backs, silver on their bellies. Wenner car-
ries the first net to his marsh. The moment the
little fish hit the water, they disappear, perfectly
camouflaged. In a few weeks, another batch will
arrive, this one from the tribal hatchery. Wenner
is a barley farmer and a fish farmer now. “How do
you feel, Karl?” I shout out, like a sports reporter
interviewing a winning quarterback. “I feel good!”
He shouts back. “I feel good.”
As the scientists work, one fish sloshes out
of the net, landing in the muddy road. Without
thinking, I reach down and pick it up. Feeling its
muscular body wriggle in my hands, I run to the
water and let it go. It flashes silver, rights itself,
and swims off into the future. j
Emma Marris is the author of Wild Souls: Free-
dom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World.
Stephen Wilkes has been pursuing his epic Day to
Night project since 2009. As a kid, Denise Nestor
learned to draw by sketching animals and people
that she found in National Geographic.
AMERICA IN A NEW LIGHT 63
KEEPERS OF COMMUNITY

THEY STEP UP,

AND MAKE
US BETTER
What makes a community in
a divided nation where many
people are suffering? Across the
U.S., it’s altruists and volunteers
dedicated to helping others.

BY REBECCA LEE SANCHEZ

PHOTOGRAPHS BY
ANDREA BRUCE

Members of the Black-

feet Nation’s Tatsey
family watch for grizzly
bears from a safe
distance at Badger-
Two Medicine—130,000
acres of sacred, for-
ested terrain for the
Blackfeet in Montana.
The tribe has been
involved in a decades-
long battle against
oil and gas develop-
ment on this land.

65
T
HEY ARE THE GLUEthat holds com-
munities 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 pre-
serve 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 Geo-
graphic journalists traveled across the United
States to see how the ideas Tocqueville described
are holding up in a country that can seem inex-
orably divided by race, income, politics, and
religion. They visited health workers, farmers,
coal miners, students, and many more to iden-
tify a sampling of those who are sewing the
threads of community in today’s America.
What the journalists found most pressing was
not division shaped by politics or other beliefs,
but rather a deep need that unites people. Carmona Cruz Mon-
serrate gets a house
Whether it was because of a lack of healthy food visit from Sonia Ven-
in Detroit or the 2018 fires that ravaged the West tura, who founded an
Coast, many stressed communities are barely organization to help
residents on the island
holding things together. But they’re resilient, of Vieques, Puerto
thanks partly to residents who dedicate much of Rico. Ventura, shown
their lives to helping their neighbors. Here are a in May 2021, died
recently at the age
few of those keepers of community; read about of 79, but her group’s
more at natgeo.com. —T H E E D I T O R S work continues.

ADDITIONAL FUNDING FOR PHOTOGRAPHY IN THIS PROJECT WAS PROVIDED BY CATCHLIGHT.

 The National
Geographic Society,
committed to illuminat-
ing and protecting the
wonder of our world,
has funded Explorer
Andrea Bruce’s work
chronicling democracy
in America since 2018.
ILLUSTRATION BY JOE MCKENDRY

KEEPERS OF COMMUNITY 67
CHAPTER I: THE GARDENER

HE PLANTED SOME
CROPS, AND GREW
SO MUCH MORE
Mark Covington
returned to his child-
hood street in Detroit
in 2008 to find aban-
doned lots littered
with illegally dumped
trash. Rather than just
clean up the garbage,
he planted a garden,
which has grown to a
sprawling community
collective that helps
feed residents and
enrich their lives.
CHAPTER I: THE GARDENER

MICH.

M ICHI GAN
MICHIGAN
UNITED STATES
Lansing

Detroit

CHRISTINA SHINTANI, NGM STAFF

I
F M A R K C OV I N GTO N H A D A LO O KO U T
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 min-
ute 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 Col-
lective 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 collec-
tive. Early in the day, the vibrant green crops
giving life to tomatoes, cabbages, eggplants,
legumes, and more are awash with gold, as if
being watered by the sun. The sounds of dogs
and goats, pigs, roosters, and a colony of stir-
ring bees drown out the sounds of the city. All at
once the neighborhood blight, though still just
across the street, feels at a distance.
In a place where many homes and shops are
shuttered or burned out, Covington reflects
what Tocqueville called the “spirit of provin-
cial liberty”—community participation in
self-governing—amid what Covington calls
“systemic demise.”
“The city has a history of neglecting us,” Cov-
ington says. He’s focused on bringing back the
lively neighborhood where he grew up—even
as years of neglect have led some longtime
residents to flee. To him, community is about
Jamesha Irving
gathers vegetables
at Covington’s urban
garden at the Georgia
Street Community
Collective in Detroit
with her fiancé, William
Knight, and daughter,
Alijah Davis.
“getting in where you fit in.”
Covington’s odyssey began after he lost his job
at a hazardous-waste facility in Sterling Heights,
Michigan, in 2007. Within a couple of months he
had returned to his childhood street. Walking
to a store one day, he saw garbage piled high in
vacant, abandoned lots.
“It was dirty,” he says. “There were always
vacant lots, but they had always been main-
tained for children to play on. I knew that if I just
cleaned them up, people would dump on them
again, but if I planted stuff, they might not.”
Covington started with a small community
garden, and almost immediately neighbors
began asking to participate. One mother sent
three children to help him build a larger garden

70 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
where the kids could grow food, stay busy during
the summer, and add structure to their lives.
When older residents dropped by to recount
their difficulty paying for medicine and food,
Covington made the garden a little bigger so
they could pick what they needed. To his sur-
prise, the community began to grow around the
growth of his garden.
Little by little the seeds, now literal and fig-
urative, took root, as the hands on the garden
that would evolve into a farm multiplied. The
collective now owns 15 lots, purchased from
the city with donations and grants. How the
animals—goats, pigs, ducks, chickens, tur-
keys, honeybees, two dogs, and a cat—came
to live at the farm is a story of serendipitous
accumulation. They now make up a small col-
lection that helps educate visitors.
What began as an effort to remove trash and
deter littering has turned the intersection of
Georgia and Vinton into a site of communion. On
one corner: a public garden with vegetable and
flower beds, a movie screen, and picnic tables.
On another: the fruit orchard and pollinator gar-
den. On another: a farm and a community center
in a building that was established with the help
of a benefactor and granted to the collective by a
probate court judge. Nearby are garlic beds and
a greenhouse, funded by a grant.
“It’s somewhat spiritual for me,” Covington
says. “It’s like a sanctuary. People come here and
don’t want to leave.”
KEEPERS OF COMMUNITY 71
The Tatseys hold a
birthday party for
a family member and
invite other children
from the Blackfeet
Indian Reservation in
Browning, Montana.
They have made it
their mission to help
Blackfeet children
learn and connect with
their tribal ancestry.

CHAPTER II: THE GUARDIANS

ON A MISSION
TO SAVE NATIVE
LAND AND CULTURE
CHAPTER II: THE GUARDIANS

GLACIER N.P.
Blackfeet Indian Reservation

Badger-Two Medicine area

M ON TAN A
Helena

MONTANA
UNITED STATES

T
of
R AV E L I N G TO T H E S AC R E D L A N D S
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 emer-
ald 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 ter-
rain for the Blackfeet Nation—is temporarily
blocked by three grizzlies.
This is land where, in the 1980s, the U.S. gov-
ernment granted 47 leases to pave the way for oil
and gas drilling, a move vigorously opposed by
the Blackfeet. The land’s beauty is undeniable:
Blackfeet leaders say that six years ago, when
17 oil leases remained, Devon Energy agreed to
return the 15 it held after company represen-
tatives visited tribal elders and recognized the
land’s magnificence. (At the time, Sioux protests
over a proposed pipeline in North Dakota also
had drawn unfavorable attention to those seek-
ing to drill on Indigenous peoples’ land.)
Leases that belonged to Louisiana- based
Solenex LLC were canceled by the Obama
administration in 2016, a decision upheld in
court in 2020. The Blackfeet, alongside activ-
ists and environmental groups, continue to fight
appeals by Solenex.
The effort to protect the land and prevent oil
John Murray, a
historic preservation
officer for the Blackfeet
Nation, says that young
people in Browning—
headquarters of
the Blackfeet Indian
Reservation—are at
risk of losing their con-
nection to their roots.
and gas drilling is one of two main causes that
are the focus of tribal leaders and at the center of
Blackfeet life. The Blackfeet have fought energy-
related development in the region bordering the
approximately 1.5-million-acre reservation and
Glacier National Park. It’s a battle that reflects
many of the conflicts that date to the beginning
of the United States’ expansion across the conti-
nent: the U.S. government’s treatment of Native
Americans, its imposition of reservations, and
its acquisition of Native lands.
The other cause for Blackfeet leaders is
teaching traditions to a generation that many
elders say is plagued by problems they link to
the influences of Western culture.
“Sacred areas are tied to places that connect

74 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
our people, families, and individuals to origin
stories, spiritual experiences, and resources
needed for our ways and survival,” Terry Tatsey,
whose family has worked to protect the land
and educate children on Blackfeet history, said
in an email. It’s important to connect young
Blackfeet to “the practices, values, protection,
and stories of our relationship to all things.”
During his travels across the United States in
the early 19th century, Tocqueville noted Con-
gress’s actions to claim Native lands, quoting
from legislative documents that described the
government’s strategy to pay tribes for their land
based on what it would be worth after the game
on it “is fled or destroyed.”
The documents state that to the government,
paying Native Americans a fraction of their
land’s worth and removing them from it would
be more convenient and “agreeable to the forms
of justice, as well as more merciful, than to assert
the possession of them by the sword.”
The Blackfeet are still fighting the effects of
this strategy, and the role Badger-Two Medi-
cine has played in keeping culture and spirit
alive here is impossible to replicate, archaeolo-
gist Maria Nieves Zedeño says. It’s a place, she
says, where the Blackfeet historically could “be
free”—and perform ceremonies such as Sun
Dances outside the purview of missionaries and
government agents, without persecution.
Like Tatsey, John Murray, a historic preser-
vation officer for the Blackfeet, fears the tribe
KEEPERS OF COMMUNITY 75
CHAPTER II: THE GUARDIANS

is at risk of forgetting its traditions. Young

people living in downtown Browning, Mon-
tana—headquarters for the Blackfeet Indian
Reservation—face the challenges of poverty,
drug addiction, and suicide.
Those problems have plagued a community
where, in the words of the late chief Earl Old Per-
son, some “strive to come back from Western
influence,” while others try to embrace it.
In an effort to link younger generations with
their roots, Blackfeet leaders take children on
field trips throughout the sacred land to teach
them about the ancestors who lived there and
the value in keeping it free of development. The
plants, the wildlife, and the soil all have ties to
the tribe’s cultural traditions.
Zedeño, who has worked alongside Mur-
ray for years, leads an archaeological dig that
focuses on land where Blackfeet ancestors
practiced a now extinct way of life. Its find-
ings provided an extensive record of Blackfeet
existence on the land for the lawsuits that kept
Murray entangled in the decades-long battle
against drilling leases.
“It’s been a long road—35 years or so—but
there are no wells up there,” Murray says. “There
will never be drilling in Badger-Two Medicine.”
The story of the Blackfeet and Badger-Two
Medicine is about protecting one of America’s
Native lands—a place at the genesis of Indige-
nous history and creation stories, the foundation
of every value in Blackfeet culture and commu-
nity: family, education, identity, survival.
The Blackfeet see the land as their keeper.
It’s where they learned about buffalo running
and pack building from the wolves and got their
songs from the birds. The Blackfeet way of life is
imbued with the spirit of the land. One without
the other means both cease to exist in the same
way. Leaders are passing on those lessons, with
increasing urgency, to Blackfeet in Browning.
Each July, the nation’s traditions are honored
at the North American Indian Days celebration.
The annual parade “brings our traditions back
to people living in the downtown,” says Darrell
DeRoche, a Blackfeet youth mentor. “There
are some people here who have never been to
Badger-Two. We are doing our best to change
that, bring our traditions here, and bring people
to the land. To keep our history strong.”

76 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
 Darrell DeRoche,
wearing traditional
regalia, and other
Blackfeet take part
in an annual summer
parade in Browning
for North American
Indian Days. Ancestral
traditions include
passing on a way of life
that revolves around
what Blackfeet call
the spirit of the land.

KEEPERS OF COMMUNITY 77
Valerie Murufas sits
on a tree stump next
to where her house
once stood in Paradise,
California. She’s
rebuilding her home,
one of the nearly
14,000 burned down
in the 2018 Camp
fire—the most destruc-
tive wildfire in the
state’s modern history.

CHAPTER III: THE caregivers

A HEALING TOUCH
FOR THOSE WHO
LOST EVERYTHING
CHAPTER III: THE CAREGIVERS

Paradise
CALIFORNIA
UNITED STATES
Sacramento

CALI FORNIA

F
OR RESIDENTS HERE, November 8,
2018, was life changing.
The Camp fire, the deadlie st
firestorm in California’s modern his-
tory—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 human-
itarian 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 and jobs themselves.
Feather River Hospital was the biggest
employer in town and was closed for a while
after the fire. It’s where Randall and her mother,
Denise Gundersen, also a nurse, had worked. “We
gave good care at that hospital,” Randall says.
Randall and her sister, Elisabeth Gundersen,
a nurse practitioner, realized there were several
gaping holes in aid. Among them: medical care
and housing, which were long-standing prob-
lems in the county, one of California’s poorest.
Together, the sisters and their mother helped
create what became Medspire Health. It started
as triage. They also put out calls on social media
for help. Elisabeth returned to Paradise from
San Francisco, where she had lived and worked,
Elisabeth Gundersen,
a nurse practitioner,
bandages the leg
of Chip Bantewski,
who suffers from
diabetes-related sores.
Bantewski, like some
50,000 other people,
was displaced by the
2018 fire. Gundersen
helped set up medical
care for those in need.
Denise joined from neighboring Magalia, and
they held their first mobile clinic in March 2019.
The clinic essentially is made up of tables and
chairs set up sometimes in a building, other times
in tents. It relies on donations to provide free care.
“We used our community to get what we
needed,” Elisabeth says. “We would get what
we needed without the rules.”
Drawing from a network of volunteers, they
do things made difficult by the lack of resources:
refill prescriptions, order lab tests, replace docu-
ments lost in the fire, and check vital signs. They
host quarterly clinics, give vaccines, provide men-
tal health counseling, and offer general wellness
screenings. When the pandemic hit, they set up
a 24-hour phone line to ensure that patients with

80 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
chronic conditions, or who were afraid to leave
their homes, could get care. They make house
calls or arrange for doctors to do so. The Med-
spire team also works telehealth lines and treats
patients living in tent cities.
“When you’re poor and you need services,
the system really beats you down. That can be
degrading,” Elisabeth says. Some patients “feel
worthless, and their health is de-prioritized
because of that, so we try to do concierge Medi-
care for poor people.”
Chip Bantewski, who was one of Denise’s
patients at the hospital, was discharged the
day before the fire. Today he relies on Medspire
for medical care. Elisabeth and Denise meet
him with supplies in hand before dressing the
diabetes-related sores on his legs.
Bantewski describes his sores as phantoms
he can feel but not see. Elisabeth and Denise,
meanwhile, teach his companion the wrapping
technique so she can dress his legs at home.
Almost four years after the fire, Bantewski is liv-
ing in a tent trailer. The Medspire team is trying
to find him a proper trailer before winter.
“We don’t care about who you are, if you have
insurance, if you’re rich or poor,” Elisabeth says.
“You need health care; we know how to do it.
Let’s just do it.” j
This is multimedia journalist Rebecca Lee Sanchez’s
first story for National Geographic. Andrea Bruce
photographed a story about women in politics
around the world for the June 2020 issue.
KEEPERS OF COMMUNITY 81
BY FERRIS JABR

IMAGES BY OLIVER MECKES

A N D N I C O L E OT TAWA

Out
of
Sight
 The newfound species
seen here is one of
about 1,300 known
types of tardigrades. It
was discovered in moss
growing on dead tree
trunks in Germany’s
Black Forest. Far too
small to see with the
unaided eye, this crea-
ture is among billions
of life-forms on the
forest floor that are
essential to the health
of the planet.

Magnified 24,000 times

At the microscopic level, soil from

Germany’s Black Forest is a fantastical
realm — one that’s mirrored in
wooded ecosystems worldwide.

83
 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.

Fungi like this

Resinicium bicolor are
among the first deni-
zens of the forest soil
to start breaking down
dead trees because
they can digest lignin,
the complex compound
that helps form woody
cell walls in plants.
There would be no soil
without microscopic
fungi, mites, worms,
and other minuscule life
decomposing organic
material this way.

7,000 X
 Scales of silica cover
the single-celled body
of a testate amoeba.
These types of amoe-
bas are named for
the hard shells they
create, possibly for pro-
tection against envi-
ronmental changes
within the forest litter.

14,000 X
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?

and dark as cocoa.

D I RT, O F C O U R S E — S O F T, R I C H ,
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 much more.

88 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
 Black Forest ranger
Charly Ebel (at right)
helps photographer
Oliver Meckes (mid-
dle) and biologist
Nicole Ottawa collect
samples of earth where
the forest has been
untouched by logging
for more than a hun-
dred years. Meckes
and Ottawa’s work is
revealing the spectacu-
lar diversity of life that
thrives belowground
and sustains the
ecosystem above.
ESTHER HORVATH

Grayston’s lifelong devotion to soil began
in her backyard. As a young girl in Stockton-
on-Tees, England, she helped her mother sow
seeds and tend to the apple trees, roses, and
rhubarbs in their garden. Grayston loved the
author Beatrix Potter—not only for her chil-
dren’s books about mischievous rabbits but
also for her scientific illustrations of fungi and
the many fabulous forms they thrust through
the earth.
In college, where Grayston had access to
microscopes, she became fascinated by soil’s
constellations of creatures too small to study
with the naked eye. She knew she had found her
calling. After earning a Ph.D. in microbial ecology
from the University of Sheffield, in 1987, Grayston
worked for an agricultural biotechnology com-
pany in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, followed by
a research position with the Macaulay Land
Use Research Institute (now the James Hutton

OUT OF SIGHT 89
 HOW WE MADE
THESE IMAGES
The pictures in this
article were taken
with a scanning
electron microscope,
which uses electrons
instead of light to
capture fine details.
SEMs produce
grayscale images,
so these have been
colorized to showcase
different life-forms.

A single piece of woody

debris can be a bustling
hub for forest microbes.
Here, a bristle worm
(at left) and two types
of mites meet in the
uppermost layer of
soil in the Black Forest.
Mites are particularly
important to forest
ecosystems, breaking
down a cornucopia of
dead and living matter
and cycling nutrients
back into the earth.

110 X
Institute) in Scotland. There she began collabo-
rating with plant ecologists, sowing the seeds for
an undertaking that would engross her for much
of her career: the complex connections between
soil’s smallest and largest inhabitants, microbes
and trees.
By combining innovative field studies with
sophisticated techniques in genetic sequenc-
ing, Grayston and other ecologists have created a
much richer portrait of a secret society hidden in
the forest floor—a largely invisible community
without which that ecosystem would collapse.
“A great deal of biodiversity is belowground,
but historically, we have not known much
about it,” Grayston says. “That’s really started
to change in the past couple decades.”
F
of many
A R B E LOW T H E L E A F Y C A N O P I E S
forests, webs of filamentous fungi link
roots into mycorrhizal networks through
which trees exchange water, food, and
information. Single-celled amoebas fuse into
shape-shifting blobs called slime molds, which
ooze within or along the earth, hunting bacteria
and fungi. Tiny arthropods known as springtails
scurry around, occasionally catapulting them-
selves more than 20 times their own body length
in a fraction of a second. Oribatid mites, each
about one-tenth the size of a lentil, lumber along
what to them are mountains and canyons, walk-
ing only half the length of a bowling lane in a
GERMANY
EUROPE
Berlin
BLACK FOREST
Tuttlingen
92 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
typical lifetime of about one and a half years.
Other creatures are so tiny that they can move
only by squirming or paddling through the thin
films of water that surround plants and particles
of soil. Those bizarre beings include transpar-
ent, noodle-shaped roundworms; rotifers with
whirling crowns of hairlike fibers that pull food
into their vaselike bodies; and tardigrades,
which resemble eight-legged gummy bears with
claws and spiky suction tubes for mouths.
Even tinier are the protozoans: a diverse group
of single-celled organisms that sometimes move
by fluttering their numerous appendages or by
contorting their gelatinous interiors. The forest
floor also teems with all manner of bacteria and
archaea, which are superficially similar to bacte-
ria but make up their own kingdom of life.
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.
Soil is not, as was once believed, an inert sub-
stance in which trees and other plants conve-
niently anchor themselves to extract whatever
they need. It’s increasingly clear that soil is a
dynamic network of habitats and organisms—an
immense, ever changing tapestry woven with the
threads of innumerable species. Soil is itself alive.
Grayston and other ecologists now argue
that this modern understanding requires
substantial changes to forestry. The common
practice of clear-cutting does far more wide-
spread and long-lasting damage than ever
imagined, they’ve discovered. It’s not enough to
consider how felling trees alters the forest from
the trunk up. To be truly sustainable, forestry
also needs to reckon with the consequences for
all that lies beneath.
B
ILLIONS OF YEARS AGO, Earth had
no soil—only a rocky crust that rain,
wind, and ice gradually wore down. As
microbes, fungi, lichen, and plants pop-
ulated the land, they greatly accelerated the ero-
sion of rock by burrowing into it, dissolving it with
secreted acids, and breaking it apart with roots.
At the same time, decomposing life enriched
the mineral crust with organic matter. Recogniz-
able forest soils first appear in the fossil record
during the Devonian period, between 420 and
360 million years ago.
Today life continues to maintain Earth’s soils
in all terrestrial ecosystems. The forest floor is
ROSEMARY WARDLEY, NGM STAFF. SOURCE: GREEN MARBLE
full of essential nutrients, such as carbon, nitro-
gen, phosphorus, and potassium. Without the
daily activities of tiny creatures, Grayston and
her colleagues point out, many of these ele-
ments would remain locked in place or other-
wise be inaccessible.
As plants photosynthesize, converting the
sun’s energy into carbon-rich molecules, they
exude a portion of these compounds through
their roots into the dirt, where microbes and
fungi consume them. In exchange, mycorrhi-
zal fungi and certain rootbound microbes help
them absorb water and nutrients and convert
chemically recalcitrant forms of nitrogen into
molecules the plants can use.
When plant parts wither and die, worms,
arthropods, fungi, and microbes decompose their
often resilient tissues into smaller components,
returning their nutrients to the soil. In parallel,
the continual movements of tiny animals—all
their crawling, slithering, and tunneling—
mix different layers of soil together, distrib-
ute nutrients throughout, and keep it aerated.
By digesting huge quantities of dirt, secreting
slimy substances, and depositing durable fecal
pellets, worms, slugs, and arthropods imbue the
earth with organic matter and help particles stick
together, improving soil structure.
In 2000, while working for the Macaulay Insti-
tute, Grayston traveled to Tuttlingen, a German
town that straddles the Danube River, so that
she and her colleagues could investigate soils
in the Black Forest. This roughly 2,300-square-
mile region in the southwestern part of the
country, known for its mountain woodlands,
has long been prized by the mining and lumber
industries. The researchers visited a few sites
distinguished by 70-to-80-year-old beeches with
supple, silver barks and gnarled trunks. Beech is
one of the most common deciduous tree species
in Europe, valued for firewood and timber. Some
of the areas the team surveyed had been heavily
logged; others were relatively untouched.
Grayston used metal augers to extract plugs
of forest soil from the different sites, stored the
samples in coolers, and whisked them back to
Scotland for closer examination. Laboratory
tests and cell cultures revealed that in one part
of the woods, intensive harvesting had signifi-
cantly diminished the abundance of microbes.
At the time, these connections were tantalizing
but still rather mysterious in their details. In the
past two decades, however, Grayston and other
Recognizable forest
soils first appear
in the fossil record
during the Devonian
period, between
420 and 360
million years ago.
scientists have learned much more about the
interdependence of plants and soil microbes and
the importance of these relationships for forest
ecosystems as a whole.
 G
R AY S T O N M OV E Dto Vancouver in 2003
to become a professor of microbial soil
ecology at the University of British
Columbia and has worked there ever
since. She’s grown particularly fond of the
region’s towering western red cedars and simi-
lar conifers, as well as the morels, chanterelles,
and other delicious fungi that spring up between
them like gifts from the forest. Here, Grayston
and several collaborators have further inves-
tigated how different types of forestry change
soil’s microbial communities.
Many of their studies compare three types
of logging: clear-cutting, which strips all trees
from a given site; aggregated retention, which
preserves clumps of trees; and dispersed reten-
tion, which selectively removes individual trees,
retaining a uniform distribution.
To test soil health, Grayston and her colleagues
buried nylon-mesh bags filled with fine roots
in patches of forest that had been harvested in
different ways. They left the roots to be decom-
posed by the tiny animals, fungi, and microbes
and dug them up a few months to several years
later. Back at the lab, the researchers performed
various tests—such as sequencing DNA and mea-
suring levels of essential nutrients—to identify
the organisms associated with the roots and
determine how active they had been.
In many cases, clear-cutting reduced soil bio-
diversity and hindered nutrient cycles. Intensive
logging also frequently shifted the demographics
OUT OF SIGHT 93
Fungal filaments frame
a spiky-bodied rotifer,
a microscopic animal
common in freshwater
ecosystems. In soil,
rotifers propel them-
selves through the thin
films of water that
surround plant parts
and dirt particles,
eating organic debris
along the way.

2,400 X
 CLOCKWISE FROM
TOP LEFT

Looking like a fairy’s gift

basket, the fruiting body
of a slime mold releases
spores from its perch
on woody debris draped
in fungal filaments.
Slime molds feast on
other microbes found in
decaying plant matter.

400 X

Commonly known as
hairybacks, the micro-
scopic animals in the
phylum Gastrotricha
survive in the thin films
of water that perme-
ate soil particles. They
move through damp
earth using their hairlike
cilia, searching for bac-
teria, microalgae, and
other microbes to eat.

2,500 X

Most springtails, like

the pair seen here,
grow no larger than
a fifth of an inch. The
name comes from the
tail-like appendage
that allows them to leap
more than 20 times
their own body length
to escape danger.

100 X

This amoeba from the

genus Korotnevella was
found in wet forest soil.
These single-celled crea-
tures can be formidable
predators, enveloping
bacteria, fungi, and other
microbes with their
amorphous bodies and
digesting them whole.

10,000 X

96 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
OUT OF SIGHT 97
of soil communities, allowing a relatively small
number of species to dominate.
But not all harvesting methods were equally
detrimental. The abundance, diversity, and
activity of microbes remained relatively high
throughout stands that had been uniformly
thinned. In sites reduced to clumps of trees,
the researchers found similarly robust and lively
communities of microbes only in the immedi-
ate vicinity of those clumps. The farther the
98 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
researchers moved from the remaining patches
of trees, the more lifeless the soil became.
Related research tracing the flow of carbon
through tree roots revealed that the zone of
influence of a tree or cluster of trees—the area
across which they actively supply microbes
and other tiny organisms with carbon-rich
molecules—extends about 33 feet on average.
Retaining patches of trees in otherwise naked
soil—even large patches—can do only so much.
 Outside of a 33-foot zone surrounding those veg-
etal islands, microbial populations will suffer.
Dispersed retention is better for soil health,
Grayston says, because it typically preserves a
tree every 46 to 52 feet, which allows their roots
and respective zones of influence to overlap,
providing carbon to microbes throughout the
forest floor.
Dispersed retention and other selective meth-
ods of harvesting are becoming more common
in some regions of the world, but clear-cutting is
still widely practiced in North America because
it is more efficient, costs less, and requires less
complicated machinery. Aggregated retention
usually is favored over dispersed retention for
similar reasons.
“We need to reconsider forestry practices,”
says environmental microbiologist Petr Baldrian
of the Czech Academy of Sciences’ Institute of
Microbiology. “Clear-cutting is economical, but
it comes at a huge cost to the state of the soil.
We need to find a balance between the needs of
industry and the needs of the forest.”

R
EFLECTING ON THE FUTURE of Earth’s
forests—in particular, their soils—Gray-
ston is both excited and concerned.
She’s thrilled by the grand mystery of
all that remains to be discovered, which is essen-
tially why she chose to study microscopic life
in the first place. “We’ve made a lot of strides,”
Grayston says, “but we still don’t know who is
actually active at certain times and which spe-
cific organisms are really important for different
processes in the soil.”
At the same time, she is alarmed by the con-
tinued decline of forests in many parts of the
world because of overharvesting, poor land man-
agement, and the stresses of climate change.
Some mycorrhizal Given that Earth’s overlapping ecosystems are
fungi make their homes
inside plant cells,
so highly interconnected and so integral to the
as seen in this cross survival of complex life, the damage we inflict
section of a European on the planet’s trees and soils ultimately harms
blueberry root. This
symbiosis allows soil
us too.
residents of very differ- “We’d be buried knee-deep in litter if we didn’t
ent sizes to exchange have soil microorganisms,” Grayston says. “With-
nutrients—a beneficial
balance for the forest.
out them, life on Earth would cease. They could
do fine without us, but we couldn’t do much
2,200 X without them.” j

Ferris Jabr is a science writer based in Oregon.

Photographer Oliver Meckes and biologist Nicole
Ottawa document the microscopic world through
their project Eye of Science.

OUT OF SIGHT 99
SAV I NG YEMEN’S
As war threatens millions of Yemenis, historians and archaeologists are struggling to
H I STORY
preserve symbols of a prosperous, ancient culture.

BY I O NA C R A I G
P H O TO G R A P H S BY M O I S E S SA M A N

Laborers in Yemen’s
capital of Sanaa
rebuild a 350-year-old
mud-brick residence
owned by the Al
Jerafi family. The city,
controlled by Houthi
rebels since 2014,
is subject to air strikes
from a coalition force
led by Saudi Arabia
and the United Arab
Emirates. One attack
in 2015 damaged
the Al Jerafis’ home,
which has been in the
family for 150 years.

101
Young souvenir ven-
dors playfully await
visitors at the rubble-
strewn entrance to
Kawkaban, a popular
tourist destination.
An air strike in February
2016 destroyed the
millennia-old citadel,
killing seven people.
Aida Ahmed Moham-
med (behind desk),
the director of the
National Museum of
Aden, meets with her
staff in an empty exhi-
bition hall. More than
2,000 of the museum’s
most valuable artifacts
are stored in a bank
vault in the port city
of Aden.
S
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
of a
TA N D I N G AT T H E B O T T O M
dusty wadi, I crane my neck to take in the huge
structure rising above me: row upon row of pre-
cisely cut stone, set seamlessly without mortar
some 2,500 years ago, soaring 50 feet into the
Children forced from
their homes by Houthi
advances pass time
around a tree in a dis-
placement camp in the
desert on the outskirts
of Marib. Once the
seat of the powerful
ancient kingdom of
Yemen, its earth-and-stone walls spanned an Saba, modern Marib
has evolved from a
area nearly twice as wide as Hoover Dam. The sleepy oil town to the
still standing colossal sluices were part of a front line of a civil war.
sophisticated system that controlled the flow
of seasonal rains from Yemen’s highlands to
its parched desert in the east, nurturing agri-
cultural oases across almost 25,000 acres of
wasteland. And in the middle of it all, a thriving
economic hub: Marib, capital of Saba, the Ara-
bian kingdom most famously associated with
its legendary leader Bilqis, immortalized in the

106 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
Bible and the Quran as the queen of Sheba.
At Marib’s peak, starting in the eighth century
B.C., this dam was the source of prosperity for
the Sabaean capital—and the reason it existed as
a fertile, food-producing, water-abundant stop-
ping point for thirsty camels and hungry traders.
The kingdom flourished in southern Arabia,
where prized frankincense, myrrh, and other
aromatic resins were bought and sold at the
affluent heart of an incense trail that stretched
from India to the Mediterranean. Saba was also
a critical point of the caravan economy, where
valuables such as ivory, pearls, silks, and pre-
cious woods were taxed as they moved between
East and West.
Fast-forward to the 21st century, and Marib’s
wealth now lies in oil and gas reserves beneath
the sands of the surrounding governorate
with the same name. This makes the city a stra-
tegic target in the war between Yemen’s Houthi
rebels and a Saudi Arabia and United Arab
Emirates–led coalition supporting local forces
opposed to the Houthis’ expansion, a war that
has wracked Yemen for eight years. Since 2020
the ancient capital has been the primary front
and one of the last metropolitan redoubts for the
internationally recognized Yemeni government.
In the failing light I wander around the remain-
ing walls of the dam’s network of barriers, awed
at the construction of the massive earthen walls
and wondering at the complex logistics required
to sustain a thriving city in southern Arabia
S AV I N G Y E M E N ’ S H I S T O R Y 107
 TURKEY TURKM.

FRACTURED LAND
Tehran
Medit. Sea SYRIA
A AFG.
IRAQ I IRAN
JORDAN
S KUWAIT
A BAHRAIN PAK.
QATAR
Yemen has long been divided among various factions. In the

Re
EGYPT
Riyadh Abu Dhabi

dS
seventh century A.D., its disparate kingdoms gave way to conflict SAUDI ARABIA

a
between Shiite and Sunni Muslim sects. Centuries later, its stra- 750 miles,

Se
U.A.E. OMAN
maximum range of
tegic trade location piqued the competitive interests of foreign

n
Houthi missiles

ia
powers. Today a civil war is costing Yemen both its past and its SUDAN ab
ERIT. YEMEN Ar
present, as archaeological riches are destroyed and lives are lost. Sanaa 300 mi
A F R I C A
300 km

Houthi forces have launched Iranian-supplied

missiles into Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E.

GO
VE d
CO RNM an
NT
RO ENT h S
HO L ha rita
Farasan Sadah CO UTH Al K
Islands NT
RO I
L
Kingdom of Saba
Midi Harad From about 800 B.C. until A.D. 275,
Al Harf the kingdom prospered through
the lucrative incense trade. Some
scholars believe the biblical queen
MAIN of Sheba hailed from here.

Y E
R e

Hajjah Amran
S
Al Ma
T

hwi
Kamaran I. t
d

A
As Salif Great Dam of Marib
ba n
Kawka SANAA Once over
more2,000
than feet
2,000long,
feetthis
long,
i
S e

eighth-century
this eighth-centuryB.C. engineering
B.C. engineer-
Da m a featfeat
ing of the Sabaean
of the Sabaeankingdom diss-
kingdom
rib

Great
h

M tributed seasonal
distributed waters,
seasonal allow
waters, w-
A

Most
a

Al Hudaydah air strikes, ing for irrigated

allowing farming
for irrigated and
farming. Shabwah
over 1,700
a

Timna
MYAR

QA TA B A N
Bayt al Faqih
Dhamar
m

Zabid
A N
WS
Rada
Jabal Zuqar
ḨI

Island A
a

Ataq
Al Hanish Ibb Habban
al Kabir I.
h

District with
E

the highest total Al Bayda

Taizz
R

air strike deaths, 348

il
I

Al Mukha (Mocha)
nc
T

National Resistance
u

o
(U.A.E. backed) C
)
R

n
ed

Shuqrah
s i tio a ck
sb
E

ran Jaar
Bab

Southern T te
m i ra Port of Aden
A

rab E Lahij
(United A
el

ETHIOPIA This natural harbor has been a

is n
H
Ma

hub of trade for over three mil-

M

yy Mu
a

un r Aden
(Pe ad
n

lennia. The Yemeni government

de

ri m )
moved to the city in 2015 after
b

DJIBOUTI
Gulf of Aden Houthi rebels captured Sanaa.

Brief history of yemen

1000 B.C.-A.D. 600 525-628 897 1839 NOV. 1967

Caravan kingdoms
Ancient city-states
including Main, Saba,
Qataban, and Him-
yar flourish in the
relatively fertile high-
lands along profitable
trade routes.
Religious strife Shiite north Age of empires Independence
Spreading Jewish Followers of Zaidi Britain captures the Hastened by a
and Christian faiths Islam, a Shiite sect, port of Aden, which bloody insurgency,
replace native poly- establish a dynasty in becomes a protector- Britain fully with-
theism. They yield northern Yemen that ate. A decade later draws from South
to a succession of endures for centuries the Ottoman Empire Yemen. North Yemen
Muslim leaders in a variety of forms occupies the north, had been autono-
starting in 628. until the 1960s. including Sanaa. mous since 1918.

MATTHEW W. CHWASTYK, NGM STAFF. SCOTT ELDER

SOURCES: ARMED CONFLICT LOCATION AND EVENT DATA PROJECT; CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE; RISK INTELLIGENCE; YEMEN DATA PROJECT;
ANCIENT YEMEN DIGITAL ATLAS, GERMAN ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE; LANDSCAN 2020, OAKRIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY; DATA @ OPENSTREET MAP
 L I
H A
K
A L
B Empty Quarter
R U The Rub al Khali, meaning “quarter
of emptiness,” is a nearly Texas-size
desert on the Arabian Peninsula—
and holds the largest “dune sea”
S A U D I A R A B I A in the world.

sert
amu dah De
Ibn H

atif San d
Shiqaq al Ma

N OMAN
Shihan

Thamud

E
l
i
h

a
M a
n
M
As Sayar Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
Formed from the Saudi and Yemeni Fatk M
ount
branches of the militant Islamist group, ain
s
the nonaligned AQAP remains active, car-
Shibam rying out sporadic attacks in the region.
Sayun
Al Ghayzah
W T
Al Qamar
M A Al
Ma Bay
D R A hra
h
H A
Haswayn
Elite Forces
rami
Had y t i Sayhut
u a Q
a
A l S e
Ash Shihr n
Al Mukalla
b i a
a
A r

Civil war factions Deaths from coalition air strikes Ancient Yemen
Houthi populated area (Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., and regional Archaeologically rich area
allies backed by the U.S., 2015-2022)
Houthi Yemeni government SABA Major ancient kingdom
control populated area 300 fatalities in district

Government Force allied 150

control with government
50
30 mi
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) District bombed, no fatalities 30 km N

MAY 1990 OCT. 2000 SEPT. 2014 MAR. 2015 APR. 2022
Unification U.S.S. Cole bombed Rebellion Wider conflict Stepping down
South Yemen loses Al Qaeda attacks the Amid protests A Saudi and Emirati– President Abdrabbuh
crucial support U.S. warship in Aden’s against a planned led coalition enters Mansour Hadi, who
from the collaps- harbor. In 2002 the new constitution the war in support replaced Saleh in
ing U.S.S.R.; north U.S. retaliates with its and rising fuel prices, of the ousted gov- 2012, cedes power
and south join under first successful tar- Zaidi Houthi forces ernment and begins to a governing
northern leader Ali geted drone strike, seize Sanaa and the an aerial bombing council amid a
Abdallah Saleh. near Marib. port of Al Hudaydah. campaign. nationwide truce.

AREAS OF CONTROL ARE SHOWN AS OF JUNE 2022.

Members of a wedding
party made up of local
tribesmen visit the
ruins of the nearly
3,000-year-old Awwam
Temple, where Sabaeans
once worshipped their
god of irrigation and
agriculture, Almaqah.
The temples of Marib
are at risk as Houthis
fight to seize the city.
 LEFT

Almost twice as long as

Hoover Dam, the Great
Dam of Marib was built
in the first millennium
B.C. and sustained life
in Yemen’s eastern
desert for more than a
thousand years. Today
only the towering lime-
stone sluices remain;
the North Sluice was
damaged by a coalition
air strike in 2015.

RIGHT
A young man living in
the nearby Al Rawdah
displacement camp
stands by the shore
of the modern Marib
dam’s reservoir. Since
the latest war began
eight years ago, more
than 19,000 Yemenis
have been hurt or
killed by coalition
forces’ air strikes.
Over four million have
been displaced from
their homes.

S AV I N G Y E M E N ’ S H I S T O R Y 113
thousands of years ago. Then the familiar sound
of artillery broiling in nearby mountains echoes
across the wadi. A sandstorm shrouds
“Did you hear that?” Ammar Derwish, my the pillars of Marib’s
Baran Temple, where
Yemeni assistant and translator, whispers in the Sabaean priests and
near dark. The next blast is a little louder, and the priestesses once
answer comes before his question is repeated. clouded the air with
incense. The trade in
“Yes, I heard it.” precious woods and
fragrant resins fueled
the ancient economy
that built these monu-
runs parallel

Y
EMEN’S CURRENT WAR
ments, which are slowly
to, and in some places directly over, being engulfed by sand
the treasures of its past. Its ancient that archaeologists say
will help protect them
kingdoms—Saba, Qataban, Main, from looters.
Hadramawt, Himyar, Awsan—are
NEXT PHOTO
the genesis of the Arabian Peninsula’s civili-
Coalition air strikes
zation. From feats of hydraulic engineering to
destroyed an archae-
meticulous inscriptions, this history tells of a ological museum in
merchant people and a sophisticated, settled Dhamar, a city roughly
60 miles south of
civilization far removed from the long-held
Sanaa, in May 2015,
stereotypes of desert-wandering Arabs domi- after Houthis had
nant in 19th- and 20th-century Western popular turned the building
into a weapons store-
culture and its depictions of the region.
house and prison.
The war began in 2014, when northern Houthi The more than 12,000
rebels took the capital, Sanaa, with the help of objects in its collection
were buried in the rub-
loyalists of former president Ali Abdallah Saleh.
ble. Volunteers recov-
His successor, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, was ered what they could,
put under house arrest. Hadi fled to exile in Saudi including fragments of
one of the oldest min-
Arabia, prompting the Saudi kingdom to launch
bars (pulpits) in the
an aerial bombing campaign with the support of Islamic world.
a regional coalition backed by the United States
and other Western nations. All sides have shown
little regard for the 30 million civilians at their
mercy, and the threats to Yemenis and the dan-
gers to their heritage go hand in hand. the queen of

Museums have been leveled by air strikes;
hundreds of distinctive, centuries-old, multigen-
erational family homes destroyed; pre-Islamic
temples bombed; and Sufi religious shrines
razed by militants.
In the face of the devastation, a small but
dedicated network of Yemeni historians,
archaeologists, and others passionate about
the country’s past are pursuing their own qui-
etly determined mission to preserve Yemen’s
antiquities—ancestral artifacts that are locked
in the nation’s museums, hidden in warehouses,
and still buried safely beneath the sand. Mindful
of the priorities of their fellow citizens and the
millions of people displaced by the conflict, they
focus their endeavors on future preservation for
present-day Yemenis who have a more pressing
concern: survival in the midst of war.
O
VER MILLENNIA,
Sheba’s capital evolved from the
largest city in southern Arabia to a
dilapidated, 21st-century provincial
town synonymous with gun-toting,
kidnapping tribesmen enraged by a central gov-
ernment that whisked away revenue from its oil
and gas reserves with little to no local benefit.
Marib also became associated with al Qaeda,
after militants from the group’s Yemeni branch
claimed to have carried out attacks on oil and
gas pipelines and on foreigners. Yet, since 2014,
these stereotypes of lawlessness have been
replaced with another. Today’s Marib is almost
unrecognizable from the dust bowl town of eight
years ago, with scores of new houses, a brand-
new beltway, and hotels and restaurants built
by those fleeing Houthi territory and fighting.
Marib is now Yemen’s wartime boomtown.

114 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
 Instead of camels carrying incense of years
past, trucks laden with bags of cement for
houses and hotels trundle back and forth
across the desert to Marib. Oil production that
shuddered to a halt in 2015 gradually resumed
and now supports an economy that makes the
city effectively independent from the rest of
the country.
The population of Marib and its surrounding
governorate—fewer than a half million before
the war—has increased up to sevenfold, swelled
by displaced people escaping Houthi-controlled
areas and contested territories. An estimated
85 percent of the Marib governorate’s popula-
tion are those displaced by the conflict.
The city’s change in fortune, however, is
once again under threat. A Houthi offensive
launched in early 2021 hit the mountains
that loom behind Marib’s ancient dam and
intensified earlier this year. The city is now in
range of rebel missiles, dozens of which have
landed in districts where dusty displacement
camps, home to more than 200,000 Yemenis
and migrants, sprawl as far as the eye can see.
So far, the destructive airpower of the coali-
tion forces—in addition to killing and injuring
more than 19,200 civilians countrywide since
2015—has kept the Houthis at bay. As the front
lines shift, Marib’s residents await their fate,
one that may mean seeking shelter for the third
or fourth time in this war. This year has seen
the longest period of respite from the violence.
A two-month cease-fire that began in April was
extended for a further two months in June, in
the hope that political talks might bring the
war to an end.
The conflict’s most active front line is of
greatest concern for the civilians it threatens,
S AV I N G Y E M E N ’ S H I S T O R Y 115
What value can
be put on history,
to preserve it for
future generations,
when the children
of the present are
dying from hunger?
and the damage already done to Yemen’s cul-
tural legacy demonstrates that those fighting
this war have no hesitation in turning esteemed
heritage sites into battlefields. In May 2015 a
coalition air strike hit one of the sluice gates
of the Great Dam of Marib, tearing through its
remaining tower. A cascade of rubble is left in
its place.
To the east of the modern city are Saba’s sto-
ried temples, the Baran and the Awwam, the
queen of Sheba’s throne and sanctuary, respec-
tively. Spaced less than a mile apart, these
unique temples—dedicated to Saba’s chief
deity, Almaqah, god of irrigation and agricul-
ture—are the source of much of what precious
little we know about the Sabaean world.
Details of how the Sabaeans worshipped
and prayed are murky. What is known is that
the frankincense and myrrh traded at Saba
were widely used in rituals of several religious
denominations of the day. Traders and pilgrims
continually passing through would venerate
Almaqah as they stopped at Marib’s oases on
their long, treacherous journeys across the des-
erts of the Arabian Peninsula. Saba led the way
in writing and language. Its cultural influences
on architecture, iconography, and decoration
spread throughout southern Arabia, carried
farther afield by traveling merchants.
118 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
Saba’s affluence made Marib a target for rival
kingdoms and conquering armies. In the first
century B.C., Rome, after vanquishing Syria and
Egypt, diverted the lucrative trade route from
overland to sea, bypassing the city. Two Roman
legions and auxiliary troops had tried and failed
to take Marib after besieging it around 25 B.C.,
but once trade was rerouted, Saba’s power dete-
riorated. The neighboring kingdom of Himyar
annexed Saba in A.D. 275.
Well before the latest war, Yemen’s royal tem-
ples were targets of looters and of voracious for-
eign archaeologists who assumed ownership of
any finds. Arguably the most famous—to some,
infamous—of the latter was Wendell Phillips, an
American who excavated several sites in south-
ern Arabia from 1950 to 1952.
“Time fell asleep here, and the husks of
ancient civilizations were buried in deep sand,
preserved like flowers between the leaves of a
book,” Phillips wrote in his 1955 book, Qataban
and Sheba, about his first visit to Yemen. “The
land looked forbidding, but it was rich with the
spoils of time, and I wanted to unearth some of
those riches, digging down through sand and
centuries to a glorious past.”
Dig Phillips did, most famously at the
Awwam Temple, where he was the first to
uncover the treasures of the Sabaean complex,
exposing soaring pillars, an enormous walled
enclosure, and a cemetery that held 20,000 of
the kingdom’s citizens. Excavations revealed
the temple dated from the early first millen-
nium B.C. Awwam, along with Baran, has
become one of the most widely known histori-
cal sites in Yemen, associated with iconic stone
pillars, bronze and alabaster figurines, and dis-
tinctive inscriptions.
Eventually, Phillips fled Marib following rising
tensions with local authorities and tribes who
accused him of incompetence, failure to pay
local workers, and trying to smuggle artifacts.
Phillips was reluctantly received by the British
who controlled Aden to the south; the governor
of the British protectorate later described him as
“a danger and unscrupulous.” Phillips’s work at
the Awwam Temple was followed by European
and American archaeological teams that contin-
ued to unearth more of the site, finding artifacts
and detailed inscriptions that made Marib one of
the most popular destinations on Yemen’s once
busy tourist trail.
Today the rare visitor can tread solo across
the protective sand, dusting it back with an
inquisitive hand to reveal the smooth stones
of the temple’s floor, polished by pilgrims over
the centuries. One can also admire the ibex
sculptures standing sentry at broad ceremonial
staircases and track the puzzling contours of
the distinctive—almost Star Trek-ian—inscrip-
tions that tower and wind around the inner
enclosure of the sanctuary. Even in the glaring
light of a desert day, Awwam feels mystical. But
the temple’s most important artifacts are now
at the National Museum in Houthi-controlled
Sanaa, closed because of the conflict, or thou-
sands of miles away in the museums and private
collections of the West and the Persian Gulf.
The final expedition to the Awwam Temple,
led by Phillips’s sister, Merilyn Phillips Hodg-
son, ended after a 2007 al Qaeda car bombing
that killed two Yemenis and eight Spanish
tourists at the site’s entrance. In the years after,
a 2,300-year-old inscribed alabaster statue
base was ripped from the temple floor; it last
appeared at an auction house in Paris.
The past 15 years of archaeological neglect,
however, has also been a blessing for the exposed
antiquities of Marib’s sanctuaries: In the Awwam
Temple, more than six feet of sand has reburied
critical areas of the sacred precinct. “It’s better
that everything is under the ground. The sand
is safety,” ruefully concludes Sadeq al Salwi, the
Marib director for the General Organization of
Antiquities and Museums (GOAM), a Yemeni
government agency.
route
F
O L L O W I N G T H E C A R AVA N
south into Shabwah governorate
and Saba’s ancient neighbor and
rival, the kingdom of Qataban, is
its former capital, Timna. It’s less
than 40 miles as the crow flies from Marib but
more than a three-hour drive in wartime Yemen.
Ammar and I count the skull-and-crossbones
signs warning us of minefields as he guides
our SUV across a sand squall. Camels, emerg-
ing like ghostly figures along the roadside, pick
at shrubs. This area has changed hands more
than once between Houthis and coalition forces
during the conflict. Locals carefully avoid speak-
ing ill of either side, not knowing who might be
in control next week or next month.
At Timna, the damage to the country’s cul-
tural heritage is revealed at its destructive worst.
During our walk through the city’s remains, the
ground bleeds 2,000-year-old pottery sherds
and more recent additions: spent shells from
AK-47s and tanks, and the brassy hulls of 50-
caliber machine-gun bullets. Empty ammu-
nition boxes litter foxholes dug down into the
ruins of Timna’s main temple dedicated to
Athtar, a god of thunder known to be vengeful.
The Houthis utilized the tactical benefit of the
raised ground Timna was built on, turning it
into a military position and inevitably drawing
the bombs of Saudi and Emirati fighter jets.
The heart of the Athtar Temple has been torn
open, hemorrhaging gray, blue, and red hues
of stone that set Timna apart from the yellow
Jurassic limestone of Marib. A 33-foot-wide,
10-foot-deep crater is all that’s left to see on
the sanctuary’s eastern flank. The gaping hole
from the coalition air strike dwarfs two young
children skipping over boulders thrown by the
bombing’s explosive force.
The Italian Archaeological Mission in Yemen
excavated at Timna from 1990 to 2005 and
funded construction of a new museum there
that was empty when they left amid deterio-
rating security. The building is littered with
rubble, walls blown out by battle damage. Before
Yemen’s most recent unrest, foreign tourists
came daily to Timna, according to Abdallah
Dawam, the site’s longtime chief security guard
and our guide around the ruins.
bombed-out
T
I M N A’ S U N F I N I S H E D ,
shell of a museum is one of three
such institutions in the governor-
ate under the care of Khyran al
Zubaidi, the director of GOAM’s
Shabwah branch. There is also one in Bayhan,
shuttered for 25 years, and another in Ataq, the
provincial capital of Shabwah. The government
allocation for the three museums is just 16,000
Yemeni riyals (less than $20) a month.
Much like his colleague Al Salwi in Marib,
Al Zubaidi has been an archaeologist in Yemen
for more than 35 years, and he’s been the head
of antiquities in Shabwah since 1986. As he reels
off the dozens of foreign-led excavations he’s
been part of, it’s apparent the wealth of first-
hand knowledge he’s gathered likely makes
him and Al Salwi the world’s leading experts
on the Sabaean and Qataban kingdoms.
Al Zubaidi’s passion for history is infectious
S AV I N G Y E M E N ’ S H I S T O R Y 119
 LEFT

Malik Ali Najib, a third-

generation master
builder of traditional
Yemeni homes, inspects
a renovation in Sanaa’s
Old City. The modern
capital remains an
occupied political
prize and a target of
air strikes; however, a
two-month cease-fire
that began this past
April was extended for
a further two months in
June, in the hope that
political talks might
end the war.

RIGHT

Mjaheed Adeeb,
employed by UNESCO
to refurbish buildings
in the city of Shibam in
the eastern governor-
ate of Hadramawt, lifts
handfuls of raw mate-
rial: mud. The World
Heritage site boasts
towering earthen
structures, earning it
the moniker “Manhat-
tan of the Desert.”

S AV I N G Y E M E N ’ S H I S T O R Y 121
A man wends through
the narrow alleyways
of the capital’s Old
City. Its distinctive
architectural character,
featuring multistory,
mud-brick buildings
decorated with ornate
geometric patterns,
won it recognition
as a World Heritage
site in 1986.
as he shows us around Ataq’s museum.
The archaeologist’s 32-year-old son, Ahmed,
points out that concern for Yemen’s cultural
heritage is low on the list of priorities for the
authorities. The lack of electricity and water
and concerns over security are bigger prob-
lems. “But this,” Ahmed says, referring to his
father’s dedication to Yemen’s heritage and
holding his hand over his chest, “this is in his
heart.” One thing is for certain: The archaeolo-
gist isn’t doing the job for the money. Even with
his decades of experience, Al Zubaidi is paid
approximately a hundred dollars a month by
the Yemeni government, slightly higher than
a soldier's income.
More than 70 percent of Yemenis need
humanitarian aid in a country that before the
war imported (paying in U.S. dollars) up to
90 percent of its food. Starvation is being used
as a weapon of warfare, and the United Nations
has repeatedly warned of famine conditions
in Yemen, despite food being plentiful in the
markets. A de facto blockade by the anti-Houthi
coalition has seen imports plummet along
with the currency; meanwhile the Houthis have Taking respite from
Yemen’s protracted
been accused of hampering aid distribution civil war, men and chil-
and ramping up taxes to fund their war effort. dren dance to the beat
The price of basics such as wheat, flour, and of drums at the Al
Taweel family wedding
rice has increased by 250 percent, while the in the streets of Sanaa’s
value of the Yemeni riyal has fallen nearly Old City in July 2021.
80 percent against the U.S. dollar over the
course of the war. To make matters worse,
almost half of the country’s wheat comes from
Ukraine and Russia. “People will sell anything
to fill their bellies and feed their children. find during

It’s a matter of life or death,” Al Zubaidi says
of the increasing problem of looted artifacts.
In his own attempts to save objects, he has
wandered local markets, negotiating to try
to claim back for the museum any antique
pieces he can. Last year he used his govern-
ment salary to give a reward of approximately
$450 for some 20 pieces he estimates are from
around 700 B.C., including several complete
vases and alabaster figurines. He’s still wait-
ing to be reimbursed by the government for
the objects, which are now on display in the
museum. The people selling these objects
don’t know the value of them, Al Zubaidi notes.
But what value can be put on history, to pre-
serve it for future generations, when the chil-
dren of the present are dying from hunger? His
question hangs in the air.
A
L Z U B A I D I ’ S G R E AT E S T
his years of work was in Shabwat,
capital of the Hadramawt king-
dom. It was a distribution center
for the frankincense produced
there and famed in its heyday for its numer-
ous temples. Local sheikh Hassan Rakna walks
Ammar and me through Shabwat’s ruins, stop-
ping to rest at the top of a 30-foot-wide stair-
case. He describes the discovery of a stunning
winged lion—with horns of an ox and a cobra for
a tail—that was found at the site. Al Zubaidi was
part of the excavation team that unearthed the
stone griffin, believed to be from the third cen-
tury A.D. Along with many of Shabwat’s most
precious artifacts, the piece has been locked away
for safekeeping in the vaults of the National Bank
of Aden, a 230-mile drive to the southwest.
Another eight days’ camel walk south from

124 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
Shabwat along the ancient caravan route, the flat-
tened peak of an extinct volcano rises hundreds
of feet from the white sands where the Arabian
Peninsula meets the Gulf of Aden. Climb to the
summit to face a blustering easterly wind rush-
ing through the rubble of an old watchtower, and
you can imagine what this place might have been
like two millennia ago: merchants, porters, and
customs guards in the busy royal port of Qana;
ships destined for Egypt and India with price-
less payloads previously off-loaded from camel
trains into black stone warehouses, the remains
of which still dot the cliffside.
But daydreams about bygone kingdoms can
be fleeting here, as armored convoys and bat-
tered pickups mounted with guns and fighters
still speed down paved highways where Saba’s
storied caravans once crossed.
On the long desert road out of Shabwah to
Aden, Ammar and I drive through another sand-
storm, and the lonely sound of an oud trickles
through the car stereo. The melody entwines
with verses from Yemen’s most famous modern
poet, the late Abdallah al Baraduni, whose words
feel so much more relevant to Yemen today than
the prosaic waxings of colonial archaeologists
who saw the country’s history as frozen and
static, as blossoms dried in a book.
“In the caverns of its death my country nei-
ther dies nor recovers. It digs in the muted
graves looking for its pure origins,” Al Baraduni
laments. “For its springtime promise that slept
behind its eyes. For the dream that will come for
the phantom that hid.” j
Iona Craig has reported from Yemen since 2010,
winning multiple awards for her coverage of the
ongoing conflict. Magnum photographer Moises
Saman has worked extensively in the Middle East.
S AV I N G Y E M E N ’ S H I S T O R Y 125
A cotton candy vendor
plies his fluffy wares
at Cox’s Bazar, a
roughly 60-mile
stretch of beach on
the southernmost
tip of Bangladesh.
 A
BEACH
FOR
ALL
Flower vendors,
livestock,
and well-dressed
beachgoers
crowd Cox’s Bazar,
Bangladesh’s
beloved holiday
destination.

BY

NINA STROCHLIC
PHOTO GRAPHS BY
ISMAIL FERDOUS

127

Visitors can ride horses
or walk along Cox’s
Bazar, which still bears
the name of a local
market founded in
1799 to commemorate
a British East India
Company officer.
Each year millions of
Bangladeshis visit
the sandy strip.
The National
Geographic Society,
committed to illumi-
nating and protecting
the wonder of our
world, has funded
Explorer Ismail Ferdous’s
work since 2019.
ILLUSTRATION BY JOE MCKENDRY
NGM MAPS
NEPAL BHU TAN ASIA
BANGLADESH
INDIA
BANGLADE S H INDIAN
OCEAN
INDIA Dhaka
M YA N M A R
Cox’s Bazar
Ba y o f Be n g a l
TO THOSE OUTSIDE BANGLADESH,
Cox’s Bazar is the world’s largest refugee camp, home to nearly
a million exiled Rohingya who fled what the United States has
declared a genocide in neighboring Myanmar. But many Bangla-
deshis know Cox’s Bazar as a favorite tourist destination—and
as one of the world’s longest natural sand beaches, hemming
about 60 miles of shoreline along the Bay of Bengal.
These disparate Cox’s Bazars are separated by a ridge of hills
and checkpoints that place the beach and the refugee camp in
“two different worlds,” says Ismail Ferdous. He knows both well.
One of Ferdous’s earliest memories is of riding a train to Cox’s
Bazar for a family beach vacation. More recently, as a photog-
rapher, he has documented the Rohingya crisis.
On a winter’s day early in 2020, Ferdous took a break from
working at the camp to walk along the beach, 18 miles away. The
temperature topped 100°F, and the shore was packed. Sprawled
or strolling along the beach were garment workers, telecom exec-
utives, street vendors, and madrassa students. Some had ridden
10 to 15 hours on an overnight bus just to spend the afternoon
in the water.
Ferdous grew up in the capital city of Dhaka but lived abroad
for a decade. When he returned to the shore of Cox’s Bazar, he felt
a surprising jolt of culture shock—the scene was so different from
beaches in Europe and the U.S. He embraced this perspective,
training his lens on rent-per-ride horses and modestly dressed
swimmers under the blinding midday sun. With the ocean as a
backdrop, the crowded beach looks deceptively serene, even empty.
He returned twice more. On his last visit, in February, Ferdous
brought his parents, sisters, brother, and two nieces along for a
vacation. It had been more than 20 years since the family had
been there together. “My mom still writes me about it, saying,
‘Thanks for doing this,’ ” he says. j
Staff writer Nina Strochlic last wrote about the Appian Way.
Ismail Ferdous documents social and humanitarian issues.
A BEACH FOR ALL 129
Countless selfies and photos of beach games and sunsets are snapped at Cox’s Bazar every day, but
photographer Ismail Ferdous knew his simple portraits with the sea and sand as settings would stand out.

130 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
“The things people overlook, I paid attention to,” says Ferdous, noting the tremendous variety of
beachgoers at work and at play. Here, “you’ll meet people from 64 districts with 64 accents.”

A BEACH FOR ALL 131

 Freely roaming cattle
are a common sight
at Cox’s Bazar and
throughout Bangla-
desh. These cows may
have been attracted
to discarded food—
or perhaps, like the
humans around them,
they appreciate the
cooler air near the
water and the beach’s
soft sand.
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