Climate Change First Became News 30 Years Ago. Why Haven’t We Fixed It?

In the time it took to build the case that climate change is a pollution problem, it’s become unnervingly more than that.

THIRTY YEARS AGO, the potentially disruptive impact of heat-trapping emissions from burning fossil fuels and rain forests became front-page news.

It had taken a century of accumulating science, and a big shift in perceptions, for that to happen. Indeed, Svante Arrhenius, the pioneering Swedish scientist who in 1896 first estimated the scope of warming from widespread coal burning, mainly foresaw this as a boon, both in agricultural bounty and “more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the Earth.”

There were scattered news reports through the decades, including a remarkably clear 1956 article in the New York Times that conveyed how accumulating greenhouse gas emissions from energy production would lead to long-lasting environmental changes. In its closing the article foresaw what’s become the main impediment to tackling harmful emissions: the abundance of fossil fuels. “Coal and oil are still plentiful and cheap in many parts of the world, and there is every reason to believe that both will be consumed by industry so long as it pays to do so.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in late 1988, after a variety of factors had pushed the greenhouse effect into the spotlight. That year there was severe drought and heat in the United States and vast fires in the Amazon rain forest and in Yellowstone National Park. The outline of a solution had been forged just one year earlier as the world’s nations agreed on the Montreal Protocol, which set steps to eliminate certain synthetic compounds imperiling the atmosphere’s protective ozone layer.

The crystallizing moment came on June 23, in unnerving Senate testimony. James E. Hansen—a climate scientist who’d turned his attention from studying the searing conditions on Venus to Earth’s human-changed atmosphere—concluded bluntly that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now.”

My journalistic journey to learn about climate change science, impacts, and related energy choices began in earnest later that month in Toronto, at the first World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere. It’s never stopped, weaving from the North Pole to the White House, from solar-tech labs and nuclear plant fuel pools to the Vatican. Details changed, but in many ways the main issues remain roughly as I and other journalists found them in 1988.

That October, my Discover magazine cover story touched on the flooding threat to Miami, the potential amped-up power of hurricanes, China’s predicted emissions surge, the vulnerability of California’s snowpack and thus its water supply, and more. It also described vexing uncertainties in warming projections that remain today. It ended with this quote from Michael B. McElroy, then, as now, a Harvard University professor: “If we choose to take on this challenge, it appears that we can slow the rate of change substantially, giving us time to develop mechanisms so that the cost to society and the damage to ecosystems can be minimized. We could alternatively close our eyes, hope for the best, and pay the cost when the bill comes due.”

That warning probably sounds familiar. Scientists, climate campaigners, and concerned politicians have been making similar statements ever since. Their warnings have not kept emissions from increasing. Glen Peters, a scientist at the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, Norway, charted the rise of the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere from the year 1870—and found that nearly half that rise has come from human emissions in the past 30 years.

Plenty is happening with renewable energy technologies, with soaring growth in solar and wind systems and in performance of the batteries necessary to keep lights on when the sun is down and the air is still. But the world remains more than 85 percent reliant on fossil fuels to satisfy its thirst for energy. Gains in energy efficiency and renewable energy have been swamped by rising demand for fossil energy as poverty ebbs. In the U.S. and much of Europe, low-carbon nuclear power is in retreat as communities, recalling past scares, press to close aging plants, and high costs hinder the development of new ones.

What explains the lack of decisive progress on human-driven climate change? Having invested half of my 62 years in reporting and writing climate-related stories, blog posts, and books, I’ve lately found it useful—if sometimes uncomfortable—to look back for misperceptions or missed opportunities that let the problem worsen.

Can we name the main culprits? There are almost as many theories and targets as there are advocates of one stripe or another. Among them: lack of basic research funding (I was often in that camp), industry influence on politics, poor media coverage, and doubt-sowing by those invested in fossil fuels or opposed to government intervention. There’s also our “inconvenient mind”—my description for a host of human behavioral traits and social norms that cut against getting climate change right.

For years I thought the answer was like the conclusion in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express: that all suspects were guilty. But there’s another possibility. Maybe climate change is less an environmental wrong to be set right and more an emerging source of risk—a case of humanity’s planet-scale power outrunning, at least for now, our capacity for containing our momentous impacts. In a 2009 piece called “Puberty on the Scale of a Planet,” I toyed with this notion, suggesting that our species was in a turbulent transition from adolescence to adulthood, resisting admonitions to grow up—with fossil fuels standing in for testosterone.

But the situation is even more tangled. The more I reported in unlit Kenyan slums and Indian villages where people cook on illicit charcoal or hand-gathered twigs, the clearer it became that there’s no single “we” when it comes to energy, nor for vulnerability to climate hazards. The rich “we” can afford to convert to clean energy and cut vulnerability to heat, floods, and more. But the rest of humanity is still struggling to get the basic economic benefits that we’ve gotten from burning fossil fuels.

Research by an array of scientists and scholars supports a daunting conclusion: Climate change is unlike any environmental problem we’ve ever faced. We can’t “fix” it the way we’ve started to fix smog or the ozone hole, with circumscribed regulations and treaties and limited technological changes. Climate change is too big in space, time, and complexity; the emissions that cause it are too central a consequence of the effort of some 7.5 billion people now, and some 10 billion within several decades, to prosper on Earth.

The real shape of what’s happening to Earth emerges only when the greenhouse emissions surge is considered alongside other metrics for human activity. A 2015 scientific report titled “The Great Acceleration” included a planetary dashboard of graphs charting signals of human activity, from tropical forest loss to paper manufacturing to water use. Most have the same shape as the curve for CO2 emissions. Pollution and climate impacts, then, are symptoms of a broader situation: the human-Earth mash-up moment that’s increasingly called the Anthropocene.

Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, has begun assessing possible outcomes for our planet under different scenarios. He draws on the rapidly expanding body of knowledge about other planets outside our solar system that could harbor life and plots possible trajectories for Earth-like planets inhabited by sentient species.

While the mathematical models are fairly simple, three broad scenarios emerge, which Frank describes in a new book called Light of the Stars.The first scenario is the “soft landing,” in which a civilization and its planet come smoothly to a new, steady state. The second is “die off,” in which a planet’s environmental conditions degrade and populations drop precipitously but seem to survive. “It’s hard to know if a technological civilization could survive losing something like 70 percent of its population,” Frank says.

And there’s a third scenario: collapse. “The population rises, the planetary state ‘heats up,’ and at some point the population crashes down to zero,” Frank says. “We even found solutions where the collapse could happen after the population changed from a high-impact energy source—fossil fuels—to a lower-impact one, solar.”

Frank’s interplanetary perspective makes clear that the climate crisis is really more of a grand challenge, like the wars on cancer or poverty, that people work on over a lifetime, even generations, with a mix of urgency and patience. The change in perspective is troubling but also liberating: It means anyone with motivation and perseverance can make a difference—as a teacher or engineer, an artist or investor, or simply as an engaged planetary citizen.

In looking into space to assess Earth’s prospects, Frank has circled back to James Hansen’s starting point—his early research on our superhot neighbor, Venus. Earlier this year, I asked Frank what he sees in Earth’s future: Are we destined to be more like a struck match, flaring bright but briefly? Or could we glow on, like, say, a solar-powered LED?

Frank thinks it may be hard for any biosphere that evolves a planet-scale industrial civilization to avoid great disruption. “The question is, how often does the civilization make it through the transition to emerge as a still important part of the now changed biosphere,” Frank said. “Much may depend on the evolutionary heritage the species gets,” he says—whether populations can think and act as needed to adapt to, and responsibly manage, a new reality.

It’s a question for Earth, he says: “Do we have what it takes? I hope so, but I guess we’ll see pretty soon.”



unnervingly 令人胆怯地
disruptive 破坏的
heat-trapping gases 温暖化气体
perception 看法
boon 恩惠
bounty 馈赠
equable 稳定的
scatter 散布
convey 传达，搬运
in its closing 在末期，在结尾
impediment 障碍
tackle 着手处理
spotlight 关注点

severe 严重的

forge 锻造

eliminate 消除

synthetic 合成的，人工的

imperil 危及

testimony 证言

searing 炙热的

bluntly 直率的

detect 发现

earnest 热心的

weave 编织

Vatican 梵蒂冈

surge 洪水

vexing 令人烦恼的

quote 引用

alternatively 或者，二选一

soaring 上升的
reliant 依赖
swamp 淹没
poverty 贫穷
ebb 衰退，退潮
retreat 撤退
hinder 妨碍
decisive 决断的

culprit 罪犯

advocate 提倡者，支持者

coverage 新闻报道

invest 投资，花费

intervention 介入，干涉，调解

trait 特点

norm 规范，标准

See Photos of Life in Russia's World Cup Towns

Four of the 2018 World Cup sites rest along the historic Volga river, but life continues as normal outside the stadiums.

Russia’s mighty Volga river stretches 2,193 miles (3,530 kilometers) from the northwest of Moscow down to the Caspian Sea in the south. It’s the country’s principle waterway and the historic cradle of the entire state. Along Volga’s banks, Ivan the Terrible began Russia’s expansion during the 16th century, the Battle of Stalingrad claimed over 1.5 million lives in Volgograd in the early 1940s, and Vladimir Lenin was born in 1870 in Ulyanovsk. And now, in 2018, four cities along this monumental stretch of water will host World Cup matches.

While football fever may have consumed large parts of Russia during the tournament, Italian photographer Davide Monteleone, who spent 10 days exploring cities and towns along the Volga during the event, was most interested in the region’s deep-rooted culture and customs.

“Four out of the 11 host cities are on the Volga, but I didn’t want to take pictures of stadiums or fans, because I didn't want to do a story that was only for the moment,” Monteleone says. “It was the occasion of the World Cup, but the pictures that I took are of how the Volga was, is, and is going to be for a few years still.”

During his survey of life along “Mother Volga,” as the locals call it, Monteleone visited both large host cities—Volgograd, Kazan, and Samara—as well as the rural towns between them. In the smaller locales, such as Lipovka, Vinnovka, and Sviyazhsk, which are close, in Russian terms, to the host cities, life continued in the slow way it always has.

“Rural Russia is one of the most interesting parts, because it hasn’t really changed since the 18th or 19th century. The people conduct a very simple life,” he says. “Here, people were just getting on with their lives as they have done for years. They knew the World Cup was happening, but it was not really the main thing.” Evening activities would more likely involve playing traditional games or a gentle promenade around the main square, he says.

Monteleone’s photographic approach partly echoed this parochial, immutable pace of life. “Most of the time I worked with a large format camera with a digital back that required a tripod. It's pretty slow photography,” he says. Through this method, he created a series of formal, carefully constructed portraits that reveal a culture which still has religion, agriculture, and tradition at its heart. “I had a preconceived idea to try to have portraits that reveal the geography and the sociology of the place,” he says.

The large host cities, however, were caught up in the frenzied excitement of the country’s first World Cup, and the packed restaurants, bars, and newly erected arenas weren’t the only impacts of the tournament. Monteleone, who has been documenting Russia for more than 18 years, also noticed a shift in the general culture and demeanor.

“Russians are famous for being pretty cold most of the time, especially with foreigners,” he explains. “But everyone was very welcoming. And you saw this feeling of freedom that you could do whatever you want. For example, it was a little bit strange to see people dancing in the street and the police not doing anything. Normally, when people gather in the street they get dispersed.”

These cities, outside the usual attractions of Moscow and St. Petersburg, may have welcomed this temporary influx of tourists, but Monteleone suspects these changes won’t last once the streets empty. “It is a moment in contemporary Russia—it's good leverage for Putin and for the government to pursue this welcoming appearance to the world but I'm not sure it will have a big long-term impact,” he says. “Russia has a very slow history. When the World Cup finishes the people will go back to normal life.”

Monteleone’s ongoing work focuses on the relationship between the state and individuals in post-Soviet countries—and that’s just as present in the architecture as anywhere else. In Volgograd, the newly erected arena may be the main attraction for now, but The Motherland Calls, a towering 279-foot statue erected after the Battle of Stalingrad, still looms larger.

Original Website: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture-exploration/2018/07/russia-volga-river-life-towns-photos-culture/


mighty 巨大的
stretch 延伸
Caspian Sea 里海
cradle 摇篮
claim 剥夺（生命）
tournament 联赛
occasion 时候
conduct 实行
promenade 散步，骑马
parochial 狭小的，教区的
immutable 不变的
tripod 三角架
preconceived 预想的，先入的
frenzied 狂热的
erect 建设，树立
arena 竞技场
demeanor 态度
dispersed 分散的，被驱散的
influx 到来，流入
leverage 影响力
statue 塑像
loom 朦胧出现

Secret Code Prevents Cleaner Shrimp From Becoming a Meal

---- Reef shrimp and their fish clients use special signals that communicate cooperation, a new study says.

TELEVISION ADS OFTEN use animals to sell things. How many animals, though, advertise for themselves?

Cleaner shrimp do—their bold stripes and antennae movements advertise their services to fish clients, which have their own way of requesting some crustacean TLC.

Ocean Chatter

In a recent study, Eleanor Caves, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University, and colleagues looked more closely at these signals between Pederson cleaner shrimp and their clients in the Caribbean Sea.

The team analyzed 199 encounters between shrimp and 10 fish species at a field station in Curaçao, the most common being spotted goatfish and ocean surgeonfish.

When a fish approaches a shrimp and holds its body very still—called posing—the shrimp then wave their antennae, signaling they’re willing to clean (and get a meal of tasty parasites). Fish then typically turn a darker color, an indication they want to be cleaned.

Shrimp who waved or whipped their antennae picked parasites off the visiting fish in 80 percent of cases. Even if the shrimp hadn’t whipped their antennae, fish were three times as likely to get cleaned if they quickly turned dark in color.

Cleaner shrimp are colorblind and likely see in grayscale, Caves says, so the fish's darker hue is a vivid indicator. When shown lighter and darker images of triangles, circles, or rectangles on an iPad leaned up against a tank in the lab, shrimp would more frequently try cleaning the dark images.

Stayin' Alive

But why do fish allow shrimp—typical prey—to scour scales and gills and even get inside their mouths without eating them?

“Reef fishes can become overloaded with parasites and suffer health consequences without the services of cleaning organism,” and will pursue cleaning even before food and mating opportunities, says Nanette Chadwick, a marine biologist at Auburn University.

Fish will migrate to reefs where cleaners are added, Chadwick says, and if they are removed “large fishes migrate away and smaller, less mobile fishes may die.”

Benjamin Titus, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, notes that Pederson cleaner shrimp are “dedicated cleaners,” devoting their whole lives to this service. Pederson shrimp mostly eat parasites, he says, but they can also remove dead and damaged tissue, promoting healing.

The cleaners also have a mutualistic relationship with a variety of anemones, which offer a safe home among their toxic tentacles, possibly in exchange for the additional nutrients excreted by the fish when cleaned by the shrmp.

Reef fish “even use the sea anemones as visual cues to locate Pederson cleaner shrimp from a distance as they cruise around on the reef," Chadwick adds.

Evolving Cooperation

In doing the research, Caves found more evidence for how different species—a potential predator and potential prey—have evolved to communicate with one another without conflict.

“In this day in age,” she says, “this seems especially important to understand—the evolutionary basis for cooperation.”


reef 礁石
crustacean 甲壳类的
chatter 唠叨，闲聊
spot 发现
parasite 寄生生物
indication 指示
whip 抽打；鞭子
hue 色调
scour 冲涮，擦亮
pursue 追求，进行
gill 腮
dedicated 投入的，献身的
mutualistic 共生的
anemone 海葵
tentacle 触手，触角
excrete 排泄

Inside the Hidden Lives of a Centuries-Old Religious Community in Siberia

One of the things he remembers most is the services: small, intimate gatherings of no more than 15 people, standing together united in prayer. There was no church in Aidara, a tiny, remote village in Western Siberia, so families and their neighbors worshipped together in a dedicated prayer room in someone’s home. Services took place in the evening, and while some lasted only a couple of hours, others lasted up to seven, unfolding into the early morning. Religious icons decorated the corners of the room. Burning incense and candles cast a warm glow on the focused faces of Russian Orthodox Old Believers as they embraced the divine moments of their deeply embedded faith.

“I think that had the heaviest impact on me,” says Emile Ducke, a photojournalism student currently based in Moscow.

In the summer of 2016, Ducke spent time documenting the lives and rituals of the Russian Orthodox Old Believers, a sect of the Orthodox Church guided by traditions that predate the church’s 17th-century reforms. German-born Ducke was studying abroad in Tomsk, Siberia, at the time and says he became interested in the region’s more remote and isolated communities, particularly those in the northern region along the River Ket. Together with a fellow student, Ducke spent time traveling through villages near the river, learning about people’s daily lives and the obstacles they faced. It was then that they heard about the Old Believers in Aidara.

“We immediately caught interest, because [the Old Believer’s] history is deeply connected to Siberia and to the wider story of communities living there,” Ducke says.

The Old Believers separated from the Russian Orthodox Church following a set of reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon in 1652. The changes, which were made in order to more closely align with the Greek Orthodox churches, included the spelling of Jesus' name in the prayer books and the number of fingers used to make the sign of the cross. Unwilling to accept the revisions, Old Believers were imprisoned or persecuted. Many went into exile and moved to the isolated plains of Siberia.

Though there are populations of Old Believers living today in Moscow and parts of the Americas, those who remain in Siberia, particularly in Aidara, fascinate Ducke.

“We’re talking about this region where everything is already cut off,” Ducke says. “And going three hours by boat [to Aidara] means they are even more cutoff than most.”

The village seems to exist in a world all its own. “Arriving there is something special,” Ducke says. The only way to reach the town was to travel three hours along the Ket. A relative of one of the Aidara villagers took Ducke and his colleague upriver by a small motorboat to the settlement. From there, a nearly two-mile walk landed them in hayfields at the village’s edge. Aidara was practically hidden.

Ducke had little idea what to expect when he reached his destination, both from the landscape and from the people he’d encounter.

“Visually, it reminded me of the pictures of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, who 100 years ago had been on assignment for the Russian czar,” he added. Tsar Nicolas II commissioned Prokudin-Gorskii to document the Russian empire, and the photographer produced the first color photos of Russia in the early 20th century.

Ducke and his colleague stayed in an empty house owned by one of the families. It was fascinating to see how structured life was, Ducke says.

“There’s the religious life and the working life, and there isn’t so much in between,” he explains.

The Old Believers kept aspects of their religious lives out of focus. Eventually, though, some families invited Ducke and his colleague to their prayer services—a massive honor and a sign of trust, Ducke says, though they asked that he leave his camera behind.

“There are no pictures of the religion directly,” Ducke says. “I think the biggest challenge for me as a photographer is not being able to photograph such an essential part [of their world].”

He found other ways to translate their religious identities: photographing some of the children as they learn the Church Slavonic language from their prayer books; creating images of the Aidara cemetery, where the three-barred cross of the Russian Orthodox Church marks each grave; and making pictures of the Old Believers in their prayer clothes.

Though Ducke admired the community’s connection to nature, he could see the challenges that came with their chosen lifestyle. The Old Believers don’t have televisions or internet, but there are power stations that generate electricity during the day and people use tractors and motorcycles to carry out their daily tasks. Still, there are obstacles. Post is delivered by helicopter every two weeks, and summer brings the threat of forest fires in the woods that trace Aidara’s borders.

“There was a forest fire in the first days, and it was basically the whole community of Old Believers in the forest trying to lie down counterfires to cut off the fires,” Ducke says.

Alongside prayer services, witnessing the community come together to fight the fire was among the most moving experiences for Ducke during his time with the Old Believers. He believes it helped set the foundation for the bond he came to form with the community.

“We shared a lot of these moments, intense moments together, and I think this helped open the trust for [documenting] Aidara.”

service 礼拜仪式
intimate 安静的
in prayer 祷告
worship 礼拜
dedicated 专用的
unfold 展开
incense 香料
Russian Orthodox Old Believers 东正教旧礼仪派
divine 神圣的
embedded 深入的
ritual 仪式，习惯
sect 派系
predate 提早日期，居先
reform 改革
obstacle 障碍
revision 修正，改订
imprison 禁锢
persecute 迫害
exile 流亡
fascinate 吸引
hayfield 干草甸
czar 沙皇
commission 委任
out of focus 模糊
cemetery 非教会的共同墓地
intense 热烈的

As Tigers Become Rarer, Poachers Are Targeting Lions

LIMPOPO NATIONAL PARK, MOZAMBIQUE The four young lions died where they ate their final meal. They were found lying on sandy ground near the remains of a poisoned calf. No one witnessed the silent slaughter—only the gruesome aftermath. When park staff investigated the killings, they found that the faces and paws of all four cats had been hacked off.

"It’s not a nice thing to see,” says Marius Steyl understatedly. Steyl, the law enforcement operations manager at Limpopo National Park, in Mozambique, was a member of the team that investigated the killings in late January. “It’s the king of the jungle, and suddenly it’s just being wiped out by humans.”

According to Steyl, two men are suspected of the crime, likely killing the lions in retaliation for the cats having preyed on cattle. One man has been charged, and the other remains at large.

In Mozambique, and widely in Africa where lions are found, the continent’s most recognized predator is facing a growing threat. As tigers in Asia have become scarcer in the wild (fewer than 4,000 are estimated to remain), other big cats around the world are being targeted for their parts: leopards, jaguars—and now African lions.

Conservation groups in East and southern Africa say that during the past three years, increasing numbers of lions have been killed and mutilated for their claws and teeth, likely to satisfy demand in China and Southeast Asia, where the parts appear to mainly be used as pendants and amulets.

“There’s just a growing awareness of the availability of lions parts in Africa and their potential to stand in as tiger parts,” says Kristin Nowell, director of Cat Action Treasury, a U.S.-based organization devoted to the conservation of big cats in their natural habitats around the world. Nowell is also the coordinator of the “red list” for big cats with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which determines the conservation status of species.

“We’re quite concerned about the lion,” says Nowell, who contributed to the most recent IUCN assessment of African lions, in 2016, which listed them as “vulnerable.”

Across Africa wild lion populations have plunged by about 43 percent since 1993 to no more than 20,000 in 2014, according to the IUCN. Habitat loss and the reduction of lions’ wild prey by the bush meat trade are forcing them into dangerous contact with humans and their livestock. Cats that prey on cattle become the targets of retaliatory killings. And now, increasingly, poaching for lions’ body parts is compounding these problems.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which regulates the global wildlife trade, prohibits commercial trade in the parts of wild African lions. But South Africa, which has thousands of captive-bred lions, can legally export their parts—up to 800 lion skeletons a year. According to CITES, most go to Laos and Vietnam, where the bones are used as a substitute for tiger bone wine, considered a status symbol and used for treating various ailments and giving the drinker the “strength of a tiger.”

CITES also notes that during the past five years about 150 lion claws and teeth have been exported from South Africa to China and Vietnam. That number is the tip of the iceberg of trade between Africa and Asia, with the volume of illegal claws and teeth seized from Asian nationals during the same period exceeding those traded legally.

According to Nowell and others, South Africa’s legal trade is stoking Asian demand for lion parts as stand-ins for tiger parts and is fueling a growing illegal trade in the teeth and claws of wild lions, further reducing their numbers.

“AN OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE MONEY”

The IUCN’s 2016 lion assessment raised concerns that “wild lion parts from eastern and southern Africa could be drawn into the large illegal wildlife trade to Asia centered around elephant ivory.” The fears are now being realized.

In Mozambique in June 2017, a Chinese national was arrested at Maputo International Airport with lion teeth and claws, as well as items made with ivory. And in Senegal last August, lion teeth were seized as part of the biggest ivory haul in the country’s history. Then, in November, 19 lion teeth and 51 claws were discovered in South Africa in a package containing a rhino horn bound for Nigeria.

According to Nowell, the spike in wild lions being poached for their claws and teeth corresponds with a growth in other poached African wildlife being trafficked to Asia. “It’s not surprising that lions were sucked into that,” she says of the convergence with ivory and rhino horn. Like ivory, lion claws and teeth are valuable to all those involved in the trade: poor villagers supplementing their meager earnings by poaching, the middlemen who have connections to the top traders, and the sellers in Asia.

“If you’re in that trade, whether you’re selling ivory, rhino horn, body parts of lions, it’s the same markets, same ways of getting it out of the country, which the different levels of people involved know,” says Peter Leitner, Limpopo National Park’s project officer with the Peace Parks Foundation, a nonprofit group that helps establish transfrontier conservation areas. “It’s an opportunity to make money. So it’s more product. There is no doubt the same people are being used.”

What’s happening in Limpopo serves as a sobering case study. During the past three years poachers have taken claws and teeth from 20 of the park’s lions, reducing the known population by 15 percent, prompting fears that the cats could be wiped out in some areas.

According to Nowell, one reason poachers increasingly seem to be killing lions for their claws and teeth, rather than their skins or bones, is practical. “That could be quite a process, to butcher and extract the bones—quite heavy to carry off a full lion carcass—so a quick getaway might be part of it. Also, the teeth and claws are easier to smuggle.”

At present, according to the park’s Marius Steyl, the biggest poaching threat to lions in Limpopo is from organized criminals who snare lions’ prey animals and poison their carcasses to kill the cats. Monitoring what’s happening in the park, he says, is difficult. “The criminal has always got the advantage, in the sense that we don’t know where he is. We’ve got a big park—it’s 1.1 million hectares, so it’s a big area to cover.”

But Limpopo is fighting back.

At a remote camp on a warm April morning, 40 new recruits were being trained, most of whom would join the park’s field staff. In a mock takedown, recruits were slinking through the savanna carrying automatic weapons before pouncing on a poacher and arresting him. A handful of the recruits will join a special anti-poaching team dedicated to protecting lions.

“We’d like to get [there] before the lion gets killed,” Leitner says. To that end the team is being trained to follow the spoor of lions, look for poachers’ footprints, and remove snares and poisoned carcasses before lions feed on them.

The park is also bolstering its materiel, adding a new helicopter and vehicles, and has introduced a system of paying informants when successful arrests are made. “So we’re trying to fight this battle through information, and that’s the most efficient way of doing it,” Leitner says.

TIGER—OR LION?

According to Nowell, confiscations and NGO research shows that some sellers are passing off lion teeth and claws as tiger parts.

Unless you’re a big cat expert, knowing what’s actually on offer is anyone’s guess: What’s sold as tiger could be lion. And if the lion teeth on display are in fact just that, there’s no telling whether they’re from wild lions (and therefore illegal) or captive-bred lions from South Africa.

On sale at a sprawling antique and crafts market south of Beijing’s city center are pendants made with bear and wolf teeth, hair pieces out of pangolin scales, and at half-a-dozen stalls, purported tiger canines—decorated in silver, or engraved, or in their natural state—and claws.

“You just drill a hole through the bottom of the teeth and wear it as a necklace,” said a man, speaking on condition of anonymity. He was selling two brownish teeth for 1,600 yuan (about $250), which he claimed were from Bangladeshi tigers. “It will keep you safe,” he said.

At another stall, a young woman was selling what she advertised as tiger claws for up to about $65, depending on their size. “Use a black string, tie it up, hang it on yourself, and wear it like a necklace,” she said. (She too refused to give her name.) These things, she explained, represent the vigor and strength of the tiger. “Wearing them will protect you and keep you safe.” Because tigers are critically endangered, all such items are illegal, but the woman said that buyers who live outside China can put them in a box and claim it contains arts and crafts.

These days much trade in wildlife products is conducted online. On Taobao, a Chinese online shopping site that’s a subsidiary of Alibaba, I found lion teeth pendants on offer. One was selling for $126.

At no other time has Africa’s king of beasts been so threatened. Conservationists are urging more vigorous law enforcement to tackle the illegal trade in their parts and are pressing for a ban on the legal trade. “Lions are in trouble,” Nowell says. “There’s a fear that this trade problem could escalate and really get out of hand, like it did for the tiger.”


calf 小牛
gruesome 令人毛骨悚然的
aftermath （战争，灾害等之后的）状态
paw （有爪动物的）脚
hack off 砍掉
enforcement 执行
suspect 怀疑
retaliation 报复
charge 告发，指控
at large （犯人）在逃
leopard 美洲豹
jaguar 美洲虎
mutilate 切断手脚
pendant 项链坠儿
amulet 护身符
stand in 代替
assessment 评估
plunge 突降，俯冲
bush meat 打猎得来的野生动物的肉
livestock 家畜
retaliatory 报复的
poach 偷猎
convention 会议
substitute 代替品
ailment 慢性病
seize 逮住
stoke 拨旺火
fuel 刺激
haul 大批赃物
rhino 犀牛
spike 皮下注射
meager 贫困的，贫乏的
transfrontier 跨国界的
sobering 清醒的
practical 实用的
butcher 屠宰
carcass 残骸
smuggle 偷运
snare 捕捉
slink 悄悄的走
pounc 突击
spoor 足迹，臭迹
snare 陷阱
bolster 支持，援助

confiscation 没收
breed bred bred 养育，饲育
pendant 首饰
pangolin 穿山甲
purport 声称
engrave 雕刻
on condition 以。。。为条件
anonymity 匿名者
brownish 呈褐色的
vigor 精力，活力
subsidiary 附属事物，子公司
vigorous 有精力的，强壮的
tackle 着手处理
escalate 逐步升级

He Collected 12,000 Road Maps—Now We’re Discovering Their Secrets

Robert Berlo got hooked on maps at an early age. As a kid growing up in San Francisco he’d pore over roadmaps in the backseat of the car on family vacations. Sometime around age 11 he started collecting them.

By the time Berlo died in 2012 at 71 he’d amassed more than 12,000 roadmaps and atlases. But he did more than covet and collect them. Over the decades, Berlo spent countless hours mining his maps for data, creating tables, charts, graphs, and still more maps on everything from transportation systems to the population history of small towns. Now, Berlo’s collection is getting another life as a repository of previously hidden information.

“He was always the keeper of the knowledge,” says Berlo’s son Mark. When Mark was a boy, Berlo would plan out the best route for family trips and figure out the best places to stop for gas or get a bite to eat along the way. As an adult, while on trips with his wife and two sons, Berlo would type up index cards listing every town they’d pass along their route.

Berlo loved to take road trips, and he favored back roads to interstates, says his wife, Juanita. “He always had a set of maps in the car,” she says. “He could read them while driving and fold them back up while driving.”

When they weren’t traveling, the Berlos lived in Livermore, California. Robert worked nearby in the technical information department at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, first as an editor and later as deputy department head, putting his undergraduate degree in chemistry from MIT to work. “He was an extremely brilliant man,” Juanita says.

In the evenings after dinner, when other people might turn on the TV and mentally check out, Berlo would turn on classical music, sit at his desk, and work on his maps, often late into the night.

Juanita still lives in the couple’s mid-century house in Livermore. When I visited recently, she brought out a large envelope of her husband's maps and notes. Inside were neatly stacked timetables for MUNI, the bus and streetcar system for San Francisco, dating back several decades. There were sheets of MUNI route information torn from phone books and other sources, as if he’d been checking the official time tables against other listings. There were also many, many notes, both handwritten and typed, and a letter from a MUNI employee—apparently in response to a query from Berlo—describing how he could access historical information about routes and service.

Juanita also showed me several maps of imaginary places Berlo had drawn. One showed a city along the shores of Mono Lake in eastern California. Another, which covered the top of a small table when we spread it out, depicted a sprawling metropolis along the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Both had been drawn by hand on vellum in remarkable detail. The intricate street grids included neatly written names (some borrowed from Berlo's native San Francisco) and one-way traffic symbols. There were railroad lines, parks, creeks, and other features.

Mark Berlo thinks his dad drew these maps mostly for fun, like playing a paper and pencil version of the city-building video game Sim City in the days before video games. “When he drew a city, he drew it so it would function,” Mark says.

Berlo donated his map collection to Stanford University in 2011. The university also has several books he wrote and published himself. One of them, contained in a thick blue three-ring binder, sits somewhat incongruously on a shelf of cloth-bound books and atlases in the main library. The spine lists the title in large print: Population History of California Places. Inside are hundreds of pages of tables detailing the known populations of California towns and cities dating back as far as 1769, when the first Spanish mission was established in San Diego. The book, Berlo writes in the preface, is attempt to recreate the population history of every settled place that ever existed in the state of California.

Berlo wrote the book hoping to fill gaps in the population data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. Before 2000, he writes, the Census didn’t count people living in smaller unincorporated places—that is, places without legally defined boundaries. Berlo tracked down population estimates listed in unofficial sources, including his vast collection of roadmaps and atlases. In total, the book contains population data on 5,500 California cities, towns, and other settlements, only 500 of which were ever incorporated.

Based on the preface, the work appears to be “an exemplary amateur history conducted in a very professional manner,” says Jon Christensen, an environmental historian at the University of California, Los Angeles. The accuracy of Berlo’s population estimates depends largely on the accuracy of his sources, Christensen says, but he adds that Berlo seems to have done an exceptionally careful job of documenting his sources and leaving a trail that amateur or professional historians could follow.

Meanwhile, Stanford political scientist Clayton Nall has been using Berlo’s map collection to study the politics behind the development of the U.S. highway system and to investigate how the expansion of highways may have contributed to the urban-rural divide in American politics. A team of research assistants has so far spent about 3,000 hours digitizing Berlo’s Rand McNally road maps, which go back to 1926. Once the maps are digitized and processed, they can be used for statistical analysis—to look, for example, at whether more miles of highway were built in counties that had more representatives in their state legislature, or whether urban areas with more extensive highway systems saw more white flight in the second half of the 20th century.

The statistical nature of Nall’s project probably would have appealed to Berlo. Many collectors collect maps because they find them beautiful or relish having a rare edition of an historical map. Not Berlo.

Mark Berlo occasionally tagged along with his dad to events for map collectors, and he says there was a big difference between his dad’s mindset and everyone else’s. “He wasn’t there for the maps,” he says. “He was there for the statistical information that was on the maps.”

A few collectors were appalled by Berlo’s practice of stamping a blue serial number on every map he collected, Mark says. But the important thing to him was keeping track of all his maps in a computer database.

All in all, Mark says he thinks his dad did all this because he wanted to make a difference in the world, and because gathering information was one of the things he did best. “I don’t think there was any grand master theory he was working on,” he says. “He just wanted to collate the information and put it out there in a format people could use.”

get hooked on 上瘾
pore over 熟读，专研
amass 蓄积
atlas 地图集
covet 贪求
repository 宝库
back road　小道
deputy 副的
mentally 精神上
neatly 整洁地
stack 推起来
tear  tore(過去形) torn(過去分詞) 撕
query 询问
imaginary 虚构的
spread out 铺开
vellum 牛皮纸
intricate 复杂的
creek 小河
binder 装订
incongruously 不调和地
spine 书脊
mission 传教团体
Census Bureau 人口普查局
unincorporated 未组成社团的
exemplary 示范的
accuracy 正确性
digitize 电子化
legislature 议会
relish 引起兴趣的东西
mindset 思考方式
appall 使惊骇
serial 连续的，定期的
collate 校对

Oldest European Tree Found—And It's Having a Growth Spurt

A Heldreich's pine discovered in southern Italy has been thriving in a remote part of a national park for 1,230 years.

A craggy pine tree growing in southern Italy is 1,230 years old, making it the oldest tree in Europe that has been scientifically dated.

Moreover, the ancient pine seems to be living it up in its old age, researchers reported last week in the journal Ecology. Examinations show that the tree had a growth spurt in recent decades, where larger rings were added to its trunk even though many trees in the Mediterranean region have been experiencing a decline in growth.

The discovery shows that some trees can survive for centuries even when subjected to extreme changes in climate. This ancient pine, for example, would have germinated in a cold period during Medieval times and then lived through much warmer temperatures, including periods of drought. 

Analysing its growth through so many years of shifting conditions can help scientists better understand how forests at large might respond to modern climate change, the study team says.

“Studying multi-centennial trees is highly valuable to better predict the future impact of climate change on forest ecosystems,” says Maxime Cailleret from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, who studies tree mortality.

TURNING TO DUST

Gianluca Piovesan from the University of Tuscia and his colleagues came across the elderly Heldreich’s pine on a steep, rocky slope high in the mountains of Pollino National Park. While the tree looked very old, the team soon realized that determining its true age wouldn’t be as simple as dating its rings. The central part of the tree, which would have contained the most ancient rings, was missing.

“The inner part of the wood was like dust—we never saw anything like it,” says team member Alfredo Di Filippo. “There were at least 20 centimeters of wood missing, which represents a lot of years.”

The tree’s roots were in better shape, so the team decided to see if they could uncover its age using a novel method that combines a few existing techniques.

Although both the trunk and roots of a tree produce annual rings, they can develop at different rates so it’s not straightforward to correlate their growth. However, radiocarbon dating samples of its exposed roots allowed the researchers to determine when the tree germinated. The team was then able to cross-date ring growth in root and trunk samples to reveal the years missing from the trunk.

“By joining these two methods, we were able to establish the time frame much more precisely,” says Piovesan.

The tree’s age is impressive, considering the dense human population that’s formed in the region over the past millennia, says Oliver Konter from the University of Mainz in Germany, who found a 1,075-year-old pine tree in northern Greece that was previously the oldest known in Europe.

Forested areas have been heavily exploited by humans in this time frame, as land has been transformed for agriculture and cities have grown. However, remote areas such as the home of the ancient pines were spared, since the harsh landscape would have been hard to access. Although the park is home to thousands of Heldreich’s pines, most are between 500 and 600 years old. The team spotted just three others that are likely to be more than a millennium old.

IMMORTAL BELOVED

The team notes that recent global warming also hasn’t been a setback for the ancient trees. Although parts of deciduous forests in the region have died due to arid conditions and heat waves, Piovesan and his colleagues found that the old pine has thrived. Their tree ring analysis showed that after laying down smaller rings for a few centuries, wider rings have grown in the past two decades, which indicates better environmental conditions.

The reasons for the favorable growth are likely to be complex. In part, the high mountains have their own microclimate, where temperatures remain cooler. Piovesan and his team also think that a decrease in pollution due to recent European laws and rewilding efforts have played a role.

“It’s difficult, because there are few studies about the impact of warm periods on Mediterranean boreal ecosystems,” says Piovesan.

Furthermore, the unique biology of trees may be helping the old pine survive. In contrast to animals, ageing isn’t programmed into trees, so they are effectively immortal.

Sequoias and redwoods that grow in undisturbed landscapes in the U.S., for example, can sometimes be thousands of years old. Conifers, which are slow-growing, are known to live the longest, partly because they remain smaller for longer parts of their lives, making them less vulnerable to extreme events like droughts and storms.

“Old trees usually eventually die because of external disturbances, such as a strong wind,” says Di Filippo. 

In addition, old trees may be considered to be alive when only small parts of them are actually living. In the case of the ancient pine, most of its crown has died, but it could potentially continue living in this state for centuries more.


craggy 陡峭的，崎岖的，多岩石的
live it up 狂欢一场;过着逍遥的日子
in one's old age 进入老年，晚年
spurt （怒气，精力等的） 迸发; 突然喷出;
Mediterranean 地中海的
subject 使经受
subject the metal to intense heat 
germinate 发芽
drought 干旱
at large [放在名词后]全体
the public at large 社会全体
centennial 百年的
mortality 死亡率
steep 陡峭的
novel 新的，新奇的
straightforward  直截了当的; 坦率的; 明确的
correlate 联系；相关的
millennia 千年，黄金时代
spare 节省，使某人免遭（麻烦等）
millennium 千年
setback 妨碍，停滞
deciduous 落叶的
arid 干燥的
boreal 北方的，北风的，亚寒带的
ageing 老化
immortal 不死的，不朽的
Sequoia 红衫
conifer 针叶树
external 外部的