Olivia

2015 Vacation Destinations: The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City

For most of my visit to New York City, the changes I saw from my 1988 trip were relatively minor — different stores in Times Square, that sort of thing. The amount of time that had passed didn’t really hit me until, of all things, when I went to the ladies’ room at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine (from here on in, I’ll just call it “St. John the Divine”).

St. John the Divine is an Episcopal cathedral at 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Morningside Heights. The cathedral, begun in 1892, is being built in the medieval style. Rather than putting stone over a steel structure, St. John the Divine is all stone. And this is why I say that it “is being built.” Original estimates of construction were that it would take literally centuries (some sources say as many as 700 years). They hired British stonemasons to come to the United States and train local residents in stonecutting.

Money for construction ran out sometime in the late 2oth century. As a result, St. John the Divine may remain unfinished forever. The scale of the project and the beauty of the building made an impression on me. Alex is taking European (or possibly World, I can’t remember what they’re calling it) History this year and so I insisted on visiting the cathedral so that he could see what the medieval cathedrals looked like in their youth. I recall that there were still stones in the side yard during my first visit, but as they are no longer doing any work on the cathedral, those stones are gone.

As to the scale of the cathedral, St. John the Divine bills itself as the largest cathedral (though Wikipedia puts it just barely second after Seville Cathedral), and the fifth-largest church building (Wikipedia puts it fourth), in the world. I tried several times (until Alex got really bored with the process) to take a good picture showing just how massive the cathedral is. I think the best shot I got was this one:

Aisle of St. John the Divine — One of the aisles of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City

St. John the Divine is accessible to wheelchair users, though they do give some tours which are not wheelchair accessible.

Oh, and about the bathrooms. When I was there in 1988, the restrooms were in a temporary structure. It has been a long time, but I seem to recall the stall doors were plywood. I needed a restroom again this year (I honestly did not say, “I wonder what the restrooms look like these days” and seek them out). I knew which direction they were from my first visit. They are now an apparently permanent part of the building, which was disorienting enough. But they look worn, like they’ve been there, well, for at least a quarter of a century.

National Geographic: National Geographic Partners (The Deal with 21st Century Fox)

Several of the people in my life are upset about the deal, announced on September 10, 2015, that 21st Century Fox now owns a 73% stake in National Geographic. National Geographic has gone on the record as saying that this is an attempt to raise money. They now have nearly a billion dollars to spend funding science and exploration (which, from what I can tell, triples the money available). And that’s a good thing.

The reason people are upset is because of the stake that Rupert Murdoch has in 21st Century Fox. They have termed the 21st Century Fox deal as “Rupert Murdoch just bought National Geographic.” I’ll admit that I don’t like Murdoch. I don’t like what he stands for. I don’t like his politics.

However, he did not “buy National Geographic.” I spent six years as a corporate paralegal, so I know something about how corporations work. As I said before, National Geographic Partners is a partnership with 21st Century Fox having a 73% stake. And from what I’ve seen, Murdoch has a 40% stake in 21st Century Fox (40% of 73% is around 29%, so that’s the amount of control that Murdoch, in particular, would have over National Geographic if he chose to exercise it). This makes him the largest shareholder, I think, and as such, so long as his decisions continue to make money for the shareholders, they aren’t likely to fight him. But 40% doesn’t make him “owner” of the company; if the shareholders who hold the other 60% decided they don’t like the way things are going, they can override him. By the way, for $27.02 as of the close of trading on September 10, you can become a shareholder in 21st Century Fox and have a say, however small, in National Geographic Partners.

Additionally, as of June, 2015, Murdoch is no longer Chief Executive Officer of 21st Century Fox. His son James is now running the company and James’s politics seem to be very different from his father’s. In fact, while researching the “Murdoch now owns National Geographic” question, I found a piece in which James says, of his new position as CEO of 21st Century Fox “I don’t let my politics get involved in my business.” He doesn’t come right out and say that he disagrees with the politics of Fox News, but that sure sounds to me like the disagrees with the politics of Fox News.

One of the things that has my friends upset is that Murdoch is a climate change denier, and one of the focuses of National Geographic is charting the development of climate change. However, James is not a climate change denier. In an interview from 2009 with The Guardian newspaper, James says, “All of the climate prediction models suggest we’re on the worst-case trajectory, and some cases worse than the worst case. That’s my depressing take on it.” He also, by the way, points out that science may be able to fix climate change if we listen to the scientists and give them a chance to do so.

Most of the executive positions at National Geographic will stay with people from National Geographic. The position of Chairman of the Board of Directors will change annually. This first year, the position will be held from someone from National Geographic and if I’m reading the reports correctly, someone from 21st Century Fox will be Chairman next year, then it will revert to someone from National Geographic.

The biggest reason I think that there is no reason to panic right now, however, is that this partnership between National Geographic and 21st Century Fox has actually been an evolving process over nearly 20 years now. National Geographic and 21st Century Fox have been in a partnership producing television shows together since 1997. If Murdoch merely wanted to use National Geographic as a soapbox for climate change denial, we would have seen it already.

Perhaps I’m wrong. If I’ve ever said that I was perfect, then I was wrong (though I do try really hard never to make the same mistake twice). But I don’t believe that this is the end, and that Murdoch is going to have some kind of pernicious influence on the magazine. From where I sit, Murdoch is not even going to really be a part of this at all. He did two things relating to this project. 1. He gave some money to 21st Century Fox 30 years ago (when it was still 20th Century Fox), which 21st Century Fox turned into more money, and then 21st Century Fox gave that money to National Geographic, and 2. he fathered and raised a non-climate-change-denying son whose level of input into the partnership is, at this moment, undefined.

My Travel Memories: Lion Country Safari, Loxahatchee, Florida

Lion Country Safari is a drive-through wild animal park with its primary focus, as the name implies, on the animals of the African savannah. Lion Country Safari was founded in 1967 as an attempt to bring a real safari experience to the people of the United States. The park originally only had a pride of lions, but over the past nearly 50 years the park has grown to over 900 individuals of over 20 species.

Traditionally, the animals have walked free, but safety concerns have led the owners of the park to install fences between the cars and the lions and chimpanzees, in particular.

However, during my visits to Lion Country Safari, at least two during the years before 1977 and one 2002, all of the animals, including the lions, roamed freely through their habitats; today, you can still have that experience with the herbivores such as the zebras and giraffes. On some of our trips, the animals got right up to our car, which is an amazing experience. On others, the animals were farther back in their habitats, so it didn’t really matter if they were free-roaming or not. An animal way back there might as well be behind a fence. You kind of have to take your chances on each visit. Apparently the animals are more active and therefore, more interesting, in the morning and while it is raining, so take that into account when making your plans.

Since Lion Country Safari is a drive-through park, it is as handicap-accessible as your vehicle is. There is now a walk-through park that I don’t seem to recall from other visits. The website for Lion Country Safari says that the walk-through park is designed to be handicap-accessible, though a wheelchair user may need assistance getting into and out of the petting zoo area.

National Geographic, March 2014, Part 2

I thought I wasn’t going to be able to finish this issue prior to the scheduled posting date of September 8. But I did. Whew!

Quicksilver, by Kenneth Brower, photographs by Brian Skerry

Quicksilver is a picture of overfishing, which seems to be a common theme in National Geographic in recent years, told through the population of bluefin tuna. Bluefin tuna live in all of the world’s oceans except, traditionally, for the Arctic Ocean (this has apparently changed in the months since this issue went to press).

Along the way, we see how important bluefin tuna are to Japanese culture. The first bluefin tuna of the season is subject to a bidding war that raises the price far above what a bluefin normally would cost. In 2013, the first bluefin tuna went for $1.76 million. We also watch scientists who are studying bluefin tuna using tracking devices to watch the movements of the fish. Scientists used to think that different populations of bluefin stayed to their own oceans, but the use of tracking devices has put an end to that idea.

Hopefully with proper studying and fishery management, the population of bluefin tuna will rebound and reach numbers that will ensure that people will be able to eat bluefin tuna long into the future.

Star Eater, by Mark Finkel, photographs by Mark A. Garlick

Star Eater starts off on the cheerful note of the expected extinction of Earth’s sun. This made me nervous. Contemplating the death of the universe is a nice thought experiment, I guess, but it’s not really something that makes me comfortable.

Things become a lot less personal in the second paragraph, though. This is when we start to talk about the forces that cause the creation of a black hole.

The rest of the article is about the way that black holes function, only now I’m more confused than ever. In one paragraph, Finkel tells us that black holes “roam the galactic suburbs” and, later, that some are “star-shredding, planet-devouring Godzillas,” but then later, he says “A black hole has no more vacuuming power than a regular star.” I am now thoroughly confused. So there are stars that wander the galaxy and the star-shredding Godzilla would have done it anyhow even if it hadn’t been turned into a black hole?

Then we talk about the relationship between the black hole and time. Finkel tells us that if you were to fall into a black hole, time is so elongated there that we would never see you fall in. You would just be stuck there on the edge of the black hole, from our perspective, “for an infinite amount of time.” But earlier Finkel told us that at the time this magazine went to press, a gas cloud was headed towards the black hole and that we would see a ring of debris form around the edge of the black hole as it eats the cloud. Why will we see the debris of the gas cloud form, but the person on the edge of the black hole would never fall in?

I actually very, very briefly considered studying astronomy at one point, and I’m glad that the consideration was very, very brief, because I’m clearly not smart enough for this.

People of the Horse, by David Quammen, photographs by Erika Larsen

The horse evolved in what is now North America. During the era of the Bering land bridge, some horses moved to Eurasia and then an extinction event happened in North America (perhaps they were hunted to extinction), leaving North America horseless. Horses were domesticated in Eurasia, and then thousands of years later, Christopher Columbus and future colonizers brought horses back to North America, where horses settled in as though they were at home, largely because they were. Many nations of Native Americans embraced them and made them part of their culture. And they are still a major part of Native American culture today.

Quammen gives us a little of the history of the horse, but People of the Horse is largely about the relationship between modern Native Americans and their horses. We meet Toni Minthorn, whose family didn’t have enough money to provide their children with toys. The family had 47 horses, however, which saved Toni’s self-esteem.

People of the Horse goes into the events of the Native American rodeo in great detail. I won’t even try to summarize, because I couldn’t do justice to it without quoting Quammen in detail. However, if you need information on the Native American rodeo and the Indian Relay, this article is definitely a good resource.

Call of the Bloom, by Susan McGrath, photographs by Merlin D. Tuttle

I love bats. Sometimes living in Texas gets me down (particularly when the temperature is over 100 degrees Fahrenheit), but the abundance of bats is definitely a plus. Just yesterday (as I write this; it will post about six days later), Alex and I were in Fort Worth, and we saw the wings of several bats in the parking garage. So, yeah. Bats.

There are numerous species of night-blooming flower and if you think about it, with nothing to pollinate them, the flowers would have died out. Sometimes the pollinator is a moth or the rare nocturnal variety of bee, but quite often the pollinator is a bat.

Call of the Bloom goes into the mechanics of how nectar-drinking bats find the flowers that produce the nectar, including having dish-shaped leaves that bounce the sound of the bat’s cry back at them strongly. We also see how those flowers have evolved to make it easy for the bat to get the nectar out While the bat is drinking the nectar, the stamen will drop pollen onto the bat, and the pollen sticks in the bat’s fur, where it remains until it falls off into the next flower. Interestingly, while many night-blooming flowers have smells that are pleasant to the human nose, the flowers that attract bats don’t necessarily smell so good to us. McGrath describes the smell as being like cabbage, sour milk, and skunk, among other smells.

The Mexican free-tailed bat is the bat that summers here in San Antonio, and they are known to drink some nectar. The night-blooming cereus, which does have a pleasant smell to the human nose, is one of the plants that bats pollinate.. I am tempted to get one for my front yard (so that the bats don’t get into conflict with my dog) and see if I can attract some bats next summer.

2015 Vacation Destinations: Central Park Zoo, Central Park, New York City

I’ve known that there was a zoo in Central Park for probably as long as I’ve known that there was a Central Park. I wasn’t sure where it was, but I suspected it was close to the center, pretty much where it turns out that the reservoir is. I don’t know why I imagined it was there. Partly it might be because it seemed that a zoo should take up a pretty decent amount of space, I think, and tucked away in a corner didn’t seem like it would be big enough for a zoo.

The movie Madagascar didn’t help that notion, by the way. Animals like lions, zebras, hippos, and giraffes need lots of space. According to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums Lion (Panthera leo) Care Manual, a lion needs at least 0.22 acres. That’s just a little smaller than the average lot size for a home in the American suburbs. Turns out that the Central Park Zoo doesn’t have any lions, zebras, hippos, or giraffes. There isn’t enough room for them. Just about the only parts of the zoo in the movie that look like they do in real life are the sea lion pool, which really is in the center of the zoo, and the clock with the arches underneath it. The clock, called the Delacorte Clock, is off to one side, rather in the middle. In fact, while researching this post, I found that the zoo from the movie is more similar to the zoo as it was before they remodeled it in the 1980s. The brick buildings with the arches and the enclosures with bars are very prominent in pictures from before 1980.

The history of the Central Park Zoo goes back to the mid-19th century when a bear cub was given to a messenger boy who worked in the park. Eventually, park employees collected other animals, and the city formed a menagerie. There was nothing like a menagerie or a zoo in the original plans for the park, which the architects, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, had made. Vaux suggested the menagerie be moved to the perimeter of the park between 77th and 81st Streets, where the American Museum of Natural History stands today. Olmsted suggested putting the zoo in the North Meadow. They broke ground for the new menagerie, but after the first foundations were laid, construction stopped and the menagerie ended up in the building that had previously held the arsenal for the New York State Militia, in the southeast corner of the park.

I wonder if there are any kind of cropmarks visible where those old foundations were laid. I recently had the experience of seeing a sort of cropmark (though from the ground level) in Lockhart State Park, and can’t help but think that there might just be some kind of difference in the grass of the North Meadow where the old foundations are under the dirt.

In 1934, the haphazard menagerie that had accumulated in Central Park was replaced by a new six-acre zoo, which was constructed in less than a year. The centerpiece of the new zoo was a sea lion pool, which is still there today. The sea lion pool was unusual for the era, because the designers looked at the way that sea lions live and designed it accordingly. These days, ideally every zoo has habitats designed in a similar way (though the San Antonio Zoo has fallen behind just a bit on that score — more on that in a future post).

In the 1980s, they renovated the zoo, getting rid of the old enclosures with the bars and designing new habitats that were more in keeping with the ways the animals live in the wild. This is also the era in which the zoo got rid of all of its large animals, sending them to zoos that had more space and could better care for them. The only large animals they kept were a pair of polar bears, each of which were euthanized when they developed inoperable tumors. The old polar bear habitat was later renovated and now houses two grizzly bears.

The current zoo, which opened in 1988, houses over 130 species in its relatively small area. One of the most popular, from what I saw when I was there, were the penguins. There was barely room to move in the penguin house and this is likely for two reasons. One, of course, is, as mentioned before, Madagascar (though we never did see the penguins smile and wave). The other is that for a time the Central Park Zoo’s penguin habitat had a gay couple, Roy and Silo, who made the news and also were the subject of a children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, about Roy and Silo raising a chick together (which also made the news). Roy and Silo split up when Silo fell for a new, female, penguin.

The zoo layout is kind of erratic. Visitors enter from the southwestern side and then the visitors go around the central part of the zoo, the Central Garden, in a clockwise direction. There are a whole bunch of exhibits behind the western part of the Central Garden. Somehow, following the natural flow of the zoo ended up with us missing the turn for the red panda exhibit, so once we were done with the penguins (which should have been the last stop), we looked at the map and had to backtrack to the turnoff for the pandas. Overall, though, it is a very nice zoo considering the space they have available (I do wish the red pandas had a little more space). The layout and traffic pattern of the zoo, combined with the fact that we had to backtrack, led me to completely miss the Arsenal Building that used to be the home of the menagerie. I didn’t even get an accidental picture of it.

I quite liked the Tropic Zone building. It had a lot of birds and also had a nice little display of short-tailed fruit bats. I love bats. It’s always fun to watch them fly, and they eat mosquitoes. Anything that eats mosquitoes is my friend.

The Central Park Zoo is quite hilly. This means that handicapped visitors might need additional assistance to get to some of the exhibits, and others might be off-limits entirely, depending on the wheelchair user’s stamina (and possibly his or her concern for the laws of gravity). The Central Garden and all of the buildings of the Central Park Zoo are wheelchair accessible.

References:

Accessibility – Central Park Zoo

Central Park Zoos: NYC Parks

National Geographic: March 2014, Part 1

Okay, so I can write up whole issues at a time, but I really cannot do justice to that many stories at once. So I guess I am going to go back to doing two or three articles at a time. If someday I am far enough ahead that I can paste several posts together into one entire issue, then I’ll do that. Either way, though, from now on, the most articles I will write up at one time will probably be three, no matter how they end up being posted.

Syria: The Chaos of War: Damascus: Will the Walls Fall? by Anne Barnard, photographs by Andea Bruce

That titles’s a mouthful. I’m not sure if Syria: The Chaos of War is going to be a series, or is just the title of this section of this issue, so I’m putting it in the title section here just in case.

The Syrian Civil War and/or Syrian Revolution, depending on whom you talk to, has been going on since 2011. This article is a look at what was the current state of the capital city, Damascus, in March 2014.

Damascus, the site of the conversion of the Apostle Paul, has always prided itself on being cosmopolitan. In the city, Jews, Christians, and Muslims have lived and worked in relative peace for centuries. That peace is now being threatened by the ongoing war. As this article went to press, no fighting was taking place within the city, but the military was stationed in the city and was shelling the suburbs. In words and pictures, we see the people of the Old City of Damascus living their lives as best they can in the middle of a war zone.

Syria: The Chaos of War: Journey Without End, photographs by Lynsey Addario, text by Carolyn Butler

Journey Without End is a pictorial of refugees fleeing the war in Syria. We see refugees in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and there is a map showing where in each country the refugees have settled.

Where the Greenstone Grows, by Kennedy Warne, photographs by Michael Melford

In Where the Greenstone Grows, Warne and Melford take us to Te Wahipounamu, part of the Te Wahipounamu-South West New Zealand World Heritage Area. We get a glimpse into the history and culture of the area, focusing on the nephrite jade, known in Maori as “pounamu,” that gives the area its name. Warne talks about the type of nephrite jade known as inanga pounamu, which takes its name from whitebait fish that are a delicacy in New Zealand and also the connection of the World Heritage Area to Gondwana, the southern part of the land mass known as Pangaea.

I am saving up for a trip to New Zealand (our goal is to go in 2019), and Alex is something of a rock hound. I suspect we may be taking a trip to the beaches of Te Wahiponamu.

My Travel Memories: Food at the Magic Kingdom, Walt Disney World, Florida

On my first and probably second trips to Walt Disney World (assuming those trips would have been around first and third grades), we mostly ate crummy hamburger and hot dog type food from the “quick service” outlets like the oddly named Pinocchio Village Haus.

Then when I was in I think it was fourth grade (I really wish we could find those photo albums!) my teacher mentioned that there was an actual sit-down restaurant upstairs in the castle. This was the also oddly named King Stefan’s Banquet Hall. I say that this name was odd because King Stefan was Sleeping Beauty’s father. Cinderella’s father didn’t have a name, and besides that, he wasn’t the king and wouldn’t have belonged in a castle. As the 21st Century approached, the suits at Disney apparently decided that a woman could be the host of her own damn banquet hall and the name was changed to Cinderella’s Royal Table.

My teacher told me that we had to have reservations some number of months ahead of time, so one of my parents (likely my mom) got on the phone and made them. And it was wonderful. I was kind of an unusual child. Most “kiddie foods” like hot dogs did little for me, unless they were very good, and I was a teenager by the time the chicken nugget became a common thing (discovering that one of my friends loved McNuggets may well have damaged our relationship permanently). I did like fried chicken, but it had to be an identifiable part.

I loved King Stefan’s Table, but it was expensive, so it was a one-time thing. Fortunately, EPCOT was on the horizon by then, and that would change my eating-at-Disney habits for good. But that’s a story for 1982 and not for Before 1977.

I do have one last Magic Kingdom eating experience to share. It fits in with the theme of “food at the Magic Kingdom,” but doesn’t fit in chronologically. When my now-ex and I went to Walt Disney World in 1992, we bought a cookbook called Cooking with Mickey, Volume II. This book had a recipe called “Freedom Fighter Chicken.” My first thought was that sounded more like a superhero from a funny animal comic than an entree, but it’s really good. It has chicken and vegetables in a sauce made from white wine and white wine Worcestershire sauce. Freedom Fighter Chicken comes from the Liberty Tree Tavern in the Magic Kingdom, which neither my folks nor I had ever noticed was there during our 1970s visits, but I’m pretty sure it must have been, and it probably served real food at the time. In 2003, my folks, my now-ex, my son, and I all went to the Liberty Tree Tavern for dinner. Freedom Fighter Chicken is apparently a lunch menu item, because dinner is a family-style Thanksgiving dinner, which, as one would expect, was a little steep, but very good thus worth the money.

National Geographic May 2015

I have just shown myself that I can, in fact, read and write up an entire issue before I ran out of writeups from my old blog. I am writing this, for what it’s worth, on August 15, 2015, several weeks before it will go live on my blog. Following my old pattern, I should write up April 2014 next, but I cannot find that issue at the moment. Therefore, I will go on to March 2014 next.

It’s Time for a Conversation, by Joshua Foer, photographs by Brian Sherry

It’s Time for a Conversation follows several researchers into dolphin language. Dolphins vocalize and some believe that these vocalizations are a language. For example, when two dolphins at the Roatan Institute for the Marine Sciences are given a signal that means “tandem,” the two dolphins are to do a behavior in unison. The dolphins will go under the water and whistle at each other, then they will do the same behavior together. Are they playing a very sophisticated game of “follow the leader,” or are the sounds they exchange actually communicating a plan?

So far, scientists have not been able to find much in the way of meaning in the chirps and whistles of dolphins. They have been able to determine that dolphins give themselves names while they are calves. For the rest of their lives, if one dolphin uses the call that the dolphin chose as his or her name, that dolphin will respond. Beyond that, there has not been much progress.

It is possible that their intelligence is so different from ours that we will never be able to learn to “speak dolphin.” However, if it is possible for us to learn their language, someone, somewhere is bound to figure it out.

This article has one of my favorite photographs so far in this project. The opening image, on pages 30 and 31 of the issue, there is a photograph of spinner dolphins in Hawaii. The water is perfectly clear and what I assume is the bottom of the ocean is white, and looks more like clouds than sand. This is fairly disorienting, in a pleasant way, and gives me the impression that they are not swimming, but flying. Or, maybe they are flying.

Taking Back Detroit, by Susan Ager, photographs by Wayne Lawrence

In Taking Back Detroit, Ager writes about the attempt of some brave souls to bring the dying city of Detroit back to life. We start out with Anthony Hatinger, who is setting up a tilapia farm in a former liquor store. The Tilapia live in the basement and the water is pumped upstairs, where the fishes’ waste feeds the plants of an indoor garden. The garden consists largely of green leafy vegetables. Once the waste has been removed by the plants, the now-clean water flows back down to the fish in the basement.

And he is just one of many people who are breathing new life into the city. Ager is a journalist who grew up in Detroit and spent the first 25 years of her career there, so this topic is very personal to her.

The fate of Detroit is not nearly as important to me as it is to Ager. In a global sense, Chicago and Detroit are in the same region, but in a practical sense, they are really very far apart and I have only ever been to Detroit twice, once in the 1981 and once in 1987. My mom and I were appalled by the decline in such a short amount of time. So, for me, reading about Hatinger, and about John Hantz, who invested four million dollars in improving the lives of Detroiters by buying up empty lots and planting trees in them, were heartening to me. Green space is an issue dear to my heart anyhow (you will see a lot of posts on parks and other green spaces in my writing. Green space is important to the psychological well-being of people, and the people of Detroit need things that are helpful psychologically.

The work is just starting however. The schools of Detroit are still not performing as well as they should, and Detroit still has a disgraceful level of unemployment. And yet, people are moving into the city and helping to bring jobs and money into the city. And hopefully, with those jobs and money, what was once known as “The Paris of the Midwest” will someday, perhaps even someday soon, have a Renaissance of its own.

Quest for a Superbee, by Charles C. Mann, photographs by Anand Varma

In this era of colony collapse disorder many are worried about the future survival of the honeybee. Colony collapse disorder. is not one problem, but many. Some colonies die off because of the increase in chemical pesticides, but others are killed by disease, and still others by pests. Some colonies don’t die at all, but habitat loss causes them to move elsewhere.

This is not the first time bee colonies have died off in large numbers. Most recently, exactly 100 years ago this year, a virus wiped out hundreds of bee colonies. A young monk known as Brother Adam traveled the world looking for bees and eventually bred was became known as the Buckfast Bee. The problem is more complex now, since there are so many other causes, but if Brother Adam was able to breed a bee that would survive the virus, it may well be possible to breed, or genetically engineer a bee that will survive current threats.

Quest for a Superbee outlines some of the projects being done, in breeding, in genetic engineering, even the possibility of robotic bees — tiny drones that will fly into a field and pollinate the flowers. Some, however, think that nature will find a way and that, despite more significant losses, bees will become naturally resistant to the threats that are killing them off today. I say that so long as the new bees are tested properly in a closed environment before setting them loose in the outdoors, any and all possible solutions are welcome. If genetically engineered bees are what we need to get through until the honeybee evolves enough to survive current threats, then that is what we should do.

Harnessing the Mekong or Killing It? by Michelle Nijhuis, photographs by David Guttenfelder

Over the last 20 or so years, the nations that the Mekong River flows through, China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, have been damming the river in hopes of increasing the prosperity of these nations through the generation of electricity. And the “generating electricity” part seems to be working. The “increasing prosperity part” could use some work.

You see, the people who have lived along the Mekong for generations rely on the river for food, including fish and rice, and the number of fish in the river has dropped from levels that existed prior to the dams being built. Added to this is the threat of flooding. When it rains heavily upstream, the water has to go somewhere, and that “somewhere” is the villages alongside the river.

The lack of prosperity doesn’t end there. The governments and companies that have been building the dams are making lots of money by selling the power generated to other countries. Very little of the power generated is used by those in their own countries. Almost no one in Cambodia has electricity because the power generated in a way that will basically be free once the dam is paid for, is too expensive for the populace.

Can anything be done? Water experts and other ecologists would like to see development of the dams slowed down and planned better. Dams are being built haphazardly by each nation without regard for what the nearby nations are doing. There are places that the dams could be put where it would have minimal impact on those who live in the area, but it looks unlikely that the governments will work together for the good of their citizens any time soon.

Walking the Way, story and photographs by Michael George

Walking the Way is words and photographs about George’s trip down the Way of St. James (Camino de Santiago, in Spanish), a route that goes from France through Spain to Santiago de Compostela, a cathedral in Spain which is rumored to hold the remains of the Apostle James the son of Zebedee (as distinct from James the son of Alphaeus and also James the brother of Jesus).

The Way of St. James was originally a purely religious pilgrimage, but in modern times, 60 percent of those who walk it walk for nonreligious reasons, such as to get space from their daily lives or to contemplate a change in their lives.

For some reason, George specified that he walked the Way in the summers of 2012 and 2013. I had to dig up more information on this. Did George take the trip in two parts (which seems like cheating) or did he do it twice? Apparently, he did the walk twice. The first time, he was just out of college and facing a change in his life status and so he did the walk as a pilgrim. Then he returned a year later to meet the people and photograph his journey. The results of this second trip are largely what we see in this article.

2015 Vacation Destinations: Central Park, New York City

When my parents and I went to New York City in 1988, we spent part of one day in Central Park. As I recall, we walked up the west side of the park to about 79th Street, then walked across the park. We thought about going into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but decided against it because the recommended entrance fee was too steep. Then we went to a Czech restaurant (I think it was Vasata, which is now closed) and then back down the east side of the park and back to our hotel. This little bit of exposure to the park (which was not nearly as frightening as books and movies of the 1970s and early 1980s had led me to believe it should have been) only whetted my appetite to explore the whole thing.

As a result, when we went on our 2015 vacation, I set aside one whole day to explore the park. On the walk from our hotel, I gave Alex just a smidge of the history of the park. I talked about how Frederick Law Olmsted started with smaller trees, with a view towards how they would look when they became bigger trees. We had just seen some more of Olmsted’s work in 2013, when we went to the Biltmore Estate (more on that in what will probably be a couple of weeks when I get to our past North Carolina trips). I also told him that they’ve filmed a bunch of movies, television shows, and commercials in the park and that it’s likely that he’s already seen parts of Central Park but was unaware that was what he’d seen.

My plan was to walk up the west side of the park, visit The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, and then walk down the eastern side of the park. As fate would have it, however, Alex was not feeling 100%, so we ended up having to change our plans a bit.

We started out at Columbus Circle. My original hope was to make it all the way around before the zoo closed and then visit the zoo. My top walking speed is around four miles (6.44 kilometers) per hour, but about two miles (3.21 kilometers) per hour is a good, comfortable, walking speed for me. If we were able to keep it around two miles per hour, we could do the entire park, or at least the outer edge, in around three hours. With stops, that might go to four or five hours. If we started at around 10:00 a.m. we’d be back to the zoo by 4:00 p.m. easily, even taking an hour off to explore the church. That would give us at least an hour to explore the zoo, which would be more than enough time.

Once we started out, though, Alex ended up wanting pretty frequent rests. So we bumped the zoo up to the beginning of the day, since I didn’t think we’d get around to the other side of the park at all that day, and certainly not before the zoo closed. So we walked a path parallel to 65th Street and went to the zoo (which will get its own entry).

After the zoo, we walked a path on the other side of 65th Street, along the Sheep Meadow, on the way back to where we started from, and then took a break to have lunch. I in no way felt like I looked good enough to go into the Tavern on the Green, but they have this little Green to Go carry-out place with its own little patio. We ordered their version of a BLT (though without either mayonnaise or avocado, since neither of us like them), which comes on ciabatta bread. We then had a nice lunch on the patio before heading out into the park again.

We made a very serendipitous wrong turn at the intersection of West Drive and Terrace Drive. I missed the part where West Drive goes back north and we ended up by the Bethesda Fountain. I love the movie “Godspell,” so I always have a special fondness for the Bethesda Fountain and the lake, which are the locations of the baptism scenes. I spent the rest of the day “God Save the People” stuck in my head.

There were some kind of street performers doing a thing there, and Alex wanted to watch for a while. Once we were done at the fountain, we took Terrace Drive back west and caught West Drive going north again. At about 85th Street, we took a path that led out of the park. Turns out Alex was just about done with the park, so I negotiated a compromise. I really wanted to visit St. John the Divine, so I offered that if we took the street level those last 24 blocks and did the cathedral, we could take the subway back to the hotel. He agreed to this and so we stayed on the street until we reached 110th Street.

Our final full day in New York was a sort of flex day, when we were able to catch up on things that we had missed the rest of the week. We returned to cover the east side of the park on that day. It was unseasonably hot (the heat index was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius) and we had already done the Circle Tour (more on that later, as well) in the early part of the afternoon, so we needed to go back to the hotel to cool down for an hour or so. I also knew that I wouldn’t feel much like walking from our hotel and the park then the length of the park to get to 110th Street and then walk that same distance all over again in that heat, so we once again hit the subway. We took the 2/3 train to 110th Street and then walked around the north side of Harlem Meer and then south down the paths that paralleled Fifth Avenue. As the day got later, I was more reluctant to get too far from Fifth Avenue. The park is safer than it was back in the 1970s, but I was not enthusiastic about being in there too long after dark. As it turns out, we emerged at 59th Street just about sunset, so we still had quite a bit of sunlight left for me to take a few final pictures before we headed back to our hotel.

Along the way, we passed the Untermeyer Fountain, the Conservatory Gardens, the reservoir (I took pictures while Alex once again rested). We saw the Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but both were closed when we were there. This was actually fortunate. There is no way that we would have had the energy to do either museum justice, so since they were closed, I feel no guilt about passing them up. We took pictures of the obelisk that is one of the three known as “Cleopatra’s Needle” (I have now seen all three of them) and stopped for a while at Conservatory Water (the model boat pond) and the Alice in Wonderland and Hans Christian Andersen statues. As we left the park for the day we passed, once again, the zoo. The zoo was also closed, so it was nice that we went to the zoo that first day.

Cleopatra's Needle -- Central Park — Central Park’s version of Cleopatra’s Needle

We also noticed that the gates of the Park have names. We first noticed this at the Engineers’ Gate (which is where Alex rested while I took pictures of the reservoir), and then again when we passed the Artist’s Gate. It turns out that the gates had always had those names, given to them to reflect the people who would hopefully make use of the park, but that no signs had been put up reflecting these names until the 1990s.

I wish I could say that I got enough of Central Park in those two days, but I didn’t. I still have never seen the northwest corner or the center of the park. Fortunately, Central Park is not going anywhere. I will get back someday and then, finally, I may have seen enough of Central Park. For the first time, at least.

National Geographic May 2014

With this post, I will pretty much run out of National Geographic posts from my old blog. I am going to attempt to keep posting entire issues, but I may go back to the pattern I originally set up on the old blog, where I generally posted two articles at a time. If I were to keep posting entire issues, it likely would slow me way down on my reading. The magazines just seem to go faster when I read two and review two, rather than reading the entire issue.

The “pretty much” is because I do have three National Geographic posts left, but two are from the October 1888 issue, which I am still plugging away at slowly. National Geographic didn’t start trying to attract a general audience until around 1905, so those first 17 years of issues will be slow going.

A Five-Step Plan to Feed the World, by Jonathan Foley, photographs by George Steinmetz and Jim Richardson

Over the next 35 years, from 2015 to 2050, the food needs of the world will likely double. This is due not only to population increase, but also to the increase in prosperity of formerly impoverished nations. These developing nations are now demanding more in terms of meat, milk, and eggs, as well as of produce. As a result, scientists need to come up with new ways to feed these people while not wrecking the environment in the process. Foley led what he refers to as “a team of scientists” who have studied this very question and they came up with five steps that may help with this.

These five steps are to freeze agriculture’s footprint, to grow more on farms we’ve got, to use resources more efficiently, to shift diets (to less meat-intensive diets, for example), and to reduce waste.

These goals seem to be pretty obvious to me. Further, while this article gives a few examples of how these goals might be achieved, it then ends with “we already know what we have to do; we just need to figure out how to do it.” I felt sort of underwhelmed by this conclusion. I guess I should count it as a good thing that scientists are thinking about this topic at all.

Digging Utah’s Dinosaurs, by Peter Miller, photographs by Cory Richards

In Digging Utah’s Dinosaurs, we meet the Miller brothers, Ian and Dane, who are paleobotanists. We join the Miller brothers on an expedition at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, where they are searching for signs of the lost continent of Laramidia.

90 million years ago, the area which is now North America was two separate continents, Appalachia to the east and Laramidia to the west. The Western Interior Seaway lay between them. The Miller brothers, along with other scientists, are searching for the species of dinosaur who lived in this area and trying to figure out why the dinosaurs of northern Laramidia were so different from those in southern Laramidia. It is possible that there was a physical barrier of some sort, but they have not yet found any evidence of such a barrier. Instead, the going theory is that the area, much of which is now desert, was a tropical rainforest. This means that the herbivorous animals would not have had to have gone very far in search of food. This also means that any carnivorous animals in the area also would not have had to wander very far. The result would be a less dramatic version of how isolation caused divergence in Australia and Madagascar. The species would have had different pressures causing different traits to be selected for, resulting in very different species.

Finally, I noticed that the writer, Peter Miller, shares a surname with the Miller brothers. Miller is a very common name in the United States (the sixth most common, as of the 2000 census), so it is not impossible that this is a coincidence. However, it is also not impossible that all three Millers are related in some way. I have been unable to determine which of these it is.

The Ship Breakers, by Peter Gwin, photographs by Mike Hettwer

Oceangoing ships have a lifespan of 25 to 30 years. After that, it becomes so expensive to insure them that their only value is for scrap. Ships are not just made of steel. There are other substances involved, such as asbestos and lead. In most developed countries, the safety measures necessary for such work would eat into the profits from recycling the recyclable bits, such as the steel. As a result, “the bulk of the world’s shipbreaking” takes place in countries with lower safety standards, such as Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.

In The Ship Breakers, Gwin takes us to one of the shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, the shipbreaking yards recycle around 90% of each ship and, overall, make a profit of three to four million dollars a year. The yards used to be open to tourists, but a while ago, they closed the yards to visitors.

Gwin and Hettwer show us some of the process of shipbreaking in Bangladesh, in which these elderly ships are taken apart by hand. We also hear from an activist who wants the process of shipbreaking to be done in a cleaner, safer way. At the moment, the shipbreakers risk their lives daily and allow toxic chemicals to leach into the environment. Hopefully, someday the shipbreaking yards will find a cleaner, safer way to do their work without putting people out of their jobs.

The Generous Gulf, by Rob Dunn, photographs by David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes

When the European colonists arrived in North America, they were overwhelmed by the variety of life, and number of fish, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This was for two good reasons. First, their own waters back home had been overfished and second, the Gulf of St. Lawrence had an unusually high number of lifeforms because of its position. The waters of several rivers collect organic matter which becomes food for smaller lifeforms, which then become food for larger ones until you have cod, and herring, and sturgeon, and even whales and walruses. The Europeans seemed to think that the supply of fish and other animals was infinite and immediately set about overfishing the Gulf.

There is a new threat to the Gulf as well. Oil has been found under the Gulf and the oil company executives are making plans to begin drilling. This runs the risk of leaking into the Gulf and causing ecological damage. Hopefully the oil companies that are planning this well will be careful with the ecosystem that they are about to venture into.

Love and Loss on the Seine, by Cathy Newman, photographs by William Albert Allard

Love and Loss on the Seine is a series of vignettes of life on the Seine, the river that flows through the heart of Paris. We meet people who have chosen to live on barges in the river. We see workers setting up for Paris Plages, a summer festival in which the expressway along the right bank of the river is blocked off and turned into a beach with sand and portable palm trees. People discuss the color of the Seine with Newman. We see the history of Les Berges, a sort of River Walk for Paris, where the expressway along the left bank has been closed in favor of parks and restaurants. We visit a homeless shelter on a barge on the river. Newman discusses breaking the law on the Seine (no swimming or wading, no protests, no banners and so forth) with a police officer. We see people fishing on the Seine (a difficult task considering the embankments that have been there since the 1700s). We see Paris at 3:00 in the morning. We visit a mental hospital on a barge on the Seine (there is little to no aggression in the patients in this hospital; no one is sure why).

Overall, Love and Loss on the Seine is very quick, easy reading, and helped me see more of a city that I have only visited for one very pleasant day in 2002.

(originally posted in July and August 2015)