Geographica: Hope!

Wonders abound in the latest National Geographic, which isn't always the case. Sometimes, in the Society's zeal to present nothing less than the entire world to its loyal readers, it inadvertently conveys so much of what's wrong with the world that those readers (this one, certainly) put down some issues ready for a good long cry - or a good stiff drink. The undeniable toll that mankind is wreaking daily on virtually every inch of the planet is difficult to balance out with anything like good news. Species are disappearing every single day; humans are multiplying at something very near to a billion a year; and worst of all, the very climate of the planet is changing, and changing so rapidly that nobody alive today will escape the consequences, and most of those consequences will be horrifying - probably in ways we haven't yet conceived. Sharks are being annihilated for their fins; abandoned old Soviet nuclear power plants are being raided for their weapons-grade plutonium; camels are mistreated throughout the Middle East. Bad news abounds.

The September issue manages to bring good news, and that feels great. Not the daffy fake-good news of the cover story, but real good news, from a motorized exoskeleton that could allow paralytics to move around again, to a dreamy little photo of a woman paddling her canoe in Florida and being joined by an inquisitive manatee.

And two of the issue's big feature articles are likewise bright with optimism. The first is by Charles Siebert and deals with Kenya's many orphanage-farms for parentless young elephants. The article is illustrated by several heartwarming photos by Michael Nichols, showing these pint-sized behemoths at their most vulnerable and adorable, receiving the patient and loving care of the humans who work at these orphanages. Siebert is very good at supplying the larger context along the way:

What makes this particular moment in the fraught history of elephant-human relations so remarkable is that the long-accrued anecdotal evidence of the elephant's extraordinary intelligence is being borne out by science. Studies show that structures in the elephant brain are strikingly similar to those in humans. MRI scans of an elephant's brain suggest a large hippocampus, the component in the mammalian brain linked to memory and an important part of its limbic system, which is involved in processing emotions. The elephant brain has also been shown to possess in abundance the specialized neurons known as spindle cells, which are thought to be associated with self-awareness, empathy, and social awareness in humans. Elephants have even passed the mirror test of self-recognition, something only humans, and some great apes and dolphins, had been known to do.

The claims here might be a bit narrow (the octopus and the raven, for instance, also routinely pass the mirror test), but anything that gives elephants even a small added chance of garnering more of the human protection every species in the world now needs to survive is welcome. They're a long-lived and slow-maturing species, so from humans they need the most precious gift of all: time.

The wonders that time can produce are on full display in the article by Verlyn Klinkenborg on the Adirondacks, accompanied by stunning photos by Michael Melford. The piece celebrates the 'primitive forest' vibe given off by the place - a feeling experienced by everybody who's ever been there in the happy present day. It's a feeling that would have been much more difficult to access a hundred years ago, when rampant mining and road-cutting had the place looking grimy and denuded throughout much of its range. As unbelievable as it feels when you're hiking through it, most of the Adirondacks has been reclaimed in the last century. Klinkenborg captures something of the magic:

What's arresting about the Adirondacks isn't the tantalizing promise of another view lying out of sight, though the park is an endless beaded chain of new perspectives. What's arresting is the absence of a view, the dense enclosure of the eastern forest, the depth of the biotic floor you step across as you move deeper and deeper into a kind of Leatherstocking shade. It seems irrational to feel the trees closing behind you, as if the forest is cutting you off from the present. But the gravity you feel - drawing you over rock and moss, through small streams where the light opens overhead, across deadfalls, and into pure dim stands of hemlock - is the returning wildness of the place.

I've trekked the Adirondacks many times and felt that same sense of enclosure - a weird and not entirely enjoyable feeling that can be profoundly stirring, even when you're shepherding a small crowd of noisy, inquisitive beagles. It's amazing to think that deep green atmosphere needed less than a century to re-assert itself after near-fatal deforestation. It's amazing to think that, and gives you hope.

In the Penny Press!

It need hardly be said that we here at Stevereads smiled approvingly at the cover story of the latest issue of National Geographic "Minds of Their Own," written by Virginia Morell and including magnificent photographs by Vincent Musi. Natioal Geographic is of course the world's greatest magazine by such a wide margin that direct comparisons are embarrassing, but even so, this has been a significantly fantastic last roughly ten months, and this issue - and this marvellous, thought-provoking (no pun intended) article only continues the streak.

Morell's piece is refreshingly almost entirely free of humanocentricisms - which makes it incredibly rare when it comes to any writing on this particular subject. Oh, don't get us wrong - there's still quite a bit of making nonhuman animals learn new languages, decipher spatial problems in sequence, talk in English, etc. - in other words, equating particularly human intelligence for all kinds of intelligence - but mercifully, there's quite a bit of better thinking in the article too, thinking that tries to step outside the age-old paradigm of chimps wearing human clothes.

The story is structured to have stars, and there they all are, in Musi's amazing photos, set against calm white backgrounds, looking out at human readers with clear, inhuman beauty and directness. The minds behind those inscrutible faces remain a mystery, but the playfulness - and the ease - with which these stars bemusedly try to bridge the gap between their worlds and man's world is as obvious as it is shaming. They are entire alternate civilizations, and their kinds have been whipped, train-carted, butchered, food-processed, machine-gunned, castrated, mocked, tortured, and mass-executed by humans (who've been no gentler with their own kind as well) - and yet, looking at these miraculous pictures, we see no rage, no resentment ... only an elementary curiosity and perhaps an abiding desire that mankind's awakening awareness of their potentials maybe prevent mankind from wiping them out entirely.

We see Azy the orangutan (currently residing in Iowa, of all places), who can easily out-think most chimpanzees. We see Shanthi the Asian elephant, who's in captivity in a zoo and yet still manages to display some fraction of her species' vast capacities for sociability and gestalt thinking. We see Edward, a Black Leicester longwool sheep, who's as good at recognizing human faces as any human reading the article. We see JB, a giant Pacific octopus, currently held in captivity in a Baltimore aquarium, who, we're confidently told, has a "distinct personality" and enjoys squirting the scientists who study him every day. We see Maya, a bottlenose dolphin, currently in captivity in Baltimore aquarium, whose beautiful face shows all the grace and forebearance so characteristic of tursiops truncatus. We see Alex, the African Gray Parrot, who not only knew a large vocabulary but wasn't shy about advertising that fact to other birds in the lab where he lived, telling the younger ones, in English, to "Talk clearly!" when they made some mistake in their new language.

And there's our cover girl, Betsy the Border Collie, who has a vocabulary of 340 words and routinely out-performs all the higher primates when it comes to intuiting human behavior. Her owners are glowingly proud, of course, and she continues to add to her 'verbal' acquisitions.

In reality, none of those learned behaviors is technically verbal. at least not in Betsy's case. Betsy's exemplary performance has nothing to do with what humans call intelligence - dogs by and large are strangers to that function, as it's known to humans or any other species that legitimately retains it (manatees, needless to say, aren't mentioned in the article). Dogs are amazingly elastic observers of all moving things, and as for humankind - well, man has no more devoted spectator nor could have than this species, these creatures who've mapped their own genetic future to that of mankind. It's their business to intuit what humans want, and they do it better than anybody else - in reality, that's what Betsy's doing, not learning words and really knowing what they mean, or even what it means for them to mean anything.

But this is a small quibble; the article itself does a fantastic job of exploring the concepts of intellect and selfhood - exploring just how universal those concepts might be among the living creatures on this planet. We whole-heartedly recommend you rush right out and buy a copy, read this revelatory article, and then politely introduce yourself to the next non-human you meet, even if it's the Reichmarshall.

Of course, this being National Geographic, there's a lot more worth in the issue than this one story. There's a very good article on the modern ecological problems faced by Iceland, and the article on new attempts to bring democracy to the beautiful landlocked Asian nation of Bhutan has enough surrealism in it to satisfy your inner Joseph Heller. The country's revered monarch, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, recently abdicated in favor of his son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, who is introducing Western-style democracy to his land. One village woman is quoted as being confused by this: "We have a good and wise king," she says. "Why do we need democracy?"

To which we here at Stevereads would only add, "Amen," but the surrealism gets better:

Even Bhutan's chief election commissioner concedes that he would prefer not to have elections. "Given the choice, of course, we'd want to continue to be guided by the monarchy," he says. So why change? "It's a simple thing: The king wants it."

Hee.

And if quandaries like that start to make you wonder if humans aren't the least rational beings on Earth, turn back to "Minds of Their Own" and read it again - it'll only get better the second time.