If you owned Manhattan island and were, er, persuaded to trade it away, what would you hope to get in return?

So these are the Banda Islands of modern-day Indonesia. You can see Run all the way over there on the left.

"In the 17th century, nutmeg was considered precious -- it grew only on the Banda Islands in the East Indies and was thought to protect against plague. With the Treaty of Breda, which ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch (who had prevailed militarily) secured a worldwide monopoly on nutmeg by forcing England to give up Run, the most remote of the Banda Islands. But the English did manage to get a little something in return: a lightly inhabited New World island called Manhattan."

-- from "Lessons from the Past," David Goodstein's American Scientist
review of Napoleon's Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History

by Ken

This came as news to me. I always thought of the English just taking the colony of New Amsterdam away from the Dutch and leaving them crying. (Not so much the people living in New Amsterdam, who were there to make money, mind you, and pretty much went right ahead with their plan once they had a different flag flying over their heads. But I figure the Dutch owners took it personally. Like if you were the Dutch governor general of the little colony, you were out of a job.) Who knew that the English eventually forked over what we today would call "compensation," and not in the form of draft choices. Following the ancient precepts of island-trading (this part I'm just making up), they gave an island for an island (this part, however, I'm not making up).

BEHOLD THE ISLAND OF RUN

It's pronounced, we're told, to rhyme with "dune," and is also known as Rhun and Pulo Run. It's seen here from an approaching boat.

All photos by Muhammad Fadli via National Geographic

Writer Janna Dotschkal explains in "The Spice Trade’s Forgotten Island," an installment in National Geographic's "PROOF: Picture Stories" series, that "there’s just something about an isolated island that captures my imagination." Which apparently mad her a sucker for the Run story.

Run isn't the "important trade lynchpin" it was back in the 17th century, when it supplied nutmeg to a nutmeg-crazy world. (One assumes that back then nutmeg lovers knew that you have to grate the stuff to order off a little nutmeg nut -- that the flavor of the powedered you get in the little cans and bottles pretending to be nutmeg bears no relation to the real stuff.) Nowadays, in fact, Run is way off the beaten travel path. You don't just log onto Travelocity and book a flight there, or even a bracing ferry ride from some convenient destination port. As Janna learned in her e-correspondence with photographer Muhammad Fadli, who we're told "is part of the Arka Project, a photography collective based in Indonesia," it took him "a four-hour flight, an eight-hour voyage on a passenger liner, and a rickety boat ride" to get there, with the goal of "captur[ing] its isolation."

AND ONCE MUHAMMAD GOT THERE?

Here's what Janna learned via e-conversation:

JANNA DOTSCHKAL: How did you first hear about Run island? Why did you want to photograph it?

MUHAMMAD FADLI: I am a big fan of history and I read a lot of it, regardless [of] the genre. Several years ago, I stumbled across a short magazine article written by a famous Indonesian author. He wrote a brief passage about the swapping of Run for Manhattan. I haven’t let it go since then. Run is an important part of my larger ongoing project about the Banda archipelago, a group of ten tiny islands in the middle of [the] Banda Sea.

JANNA: Tell me more about the history of Run. Why is it important?

MUHAMMAD: It was the setting of some of the earliest European ventures in Asia and played a central role in the economic history of the world. It was all because of nutmeg, [considered] the most precious of all spices—once worth its weight in gold—which was almost exclusively grown in the Banda.


National Geographic caption: Djamal Sabono, a fisherman and nutmeg farmer, stands on one of Run’s beaches.

Finding the Banda and the rest of the Spice Islands was the main motivation behind Europe’s age of exploration. The Dutch succeeded in controlling most parts of the Banda, while the English laid their claim on Run, which was considered one of their first colonies overseas.

And then the tale about Run’s swapping with Manhattan. This is a key point that can probably help people connect with the story. Everyone knows Manhattan but not Run, even though they share one history.

JANNA: What’s it like to live on the island now?

MUHAMMAD: Life in Run is pretty simple. There’s no mobile phone signal or cars, and electricity only runs for a few hours in the evening. Coming from Jakarta, it was quite difficult for me to adjust at first. I had a hard time sleeping at night because it was all too silent. There was a strange feeling of isolation too.

JANNA: How did you want to capture the mood on the island?

MUHAMMAD: I love making portraits and landscapes. I chose to photograph Run like this because I was dealing with the past—which is now essentially nothingness. So I needed to focus on all its subtleties, whether it’s a landscape, details, or people. It’s mostly just wandering around and hoping to find something valuable. In Run, I spent more time photographing the people because they are part of the history. I think the story would fall apart if I didn’t collaborate with them.


National Geographic caption: A newlywed couple in Run. The groom comes from the island of Ambon but decided to hold the wedding in Run.

JANNA: Did you have any interesting or unusual experiences on the island?

MUHAMMAD: When I asked how to get to the nutmeg farm in the forest, most people were hesitant to answer. It turned out that just a few weeks earlier, a farmer was found dead and dismembered in the forest. People said it was a supernatural phenomenon, making the argument that no predators inhabit the island. In Indonesia, the biggest Muslim country in the world, Islam is still intertwined with local beliefs. Especially in remote places, people still believe ancestors’ spirits are everywhere. Run is one of those places.

In the end I managed to go to the farms, but for the sake of my safety the villagers insisted that I be accompanied by a local. Ridiculously enough, they sent a ten-year-old boy to go with me.


National Geographic caption: Lapase shows off his catch of the day, a nearly 21-pound yellowfin tuna.

JANNA: What do you hope to show people with this project?

MUHAMMAD: I want to show how the history of global trade shaped people’s fate and how it might not be as glorious as we’ve heard. The spice trade brought fortunes for the seafaring Europeans, but it acted like a curse for the islanders. Once [nutmeg] lost its value, they were all forgotten. It is a kind of reflection on what is still so common, even today. While history clearly provides us certain lessons, we only can learn them if we are aware of it. I’m not hoping for some sort of sudden change to happen because of my photographs. As long as I can make people aware of the story, that’s enough for me.

To see more photos, and to see these in larger format, visit the article onsite.

#

Marijuana begins slipping its way into the American mainstream

The dueling pot covers, courtesy of The Cannabist (click to enlarge)

"When American institutions as stolid as Time and National Geographic run cannabis on their covers, without the words 'crackdown' or 'out of control' or 'fear', the ground has truly shifted."

-- Bruce Barcott, author of Weed the People: The
Future of Legal Marijuana in America, in an
e-mail to The Cannabist staffer Ricardo Baca

by Ken

When I opened my mailbox today, there staring out at me was the new National Geographic with the cover you see above, and the giant cover line: "WEED: The New Science of Marijuana." For reasons that some of you may already have guessed, that got my attention.

Marijuana isn't a subject that's ever been of much interest in me. When I was of an age to dabble, and most of the people my age were doing a lot more than dabbling, I was apparently no good at it -- the couple of times I tried to smoke the stuff, all that happened was that I gagged on the smoke, and gagging isn't anything I've ever gone looking for ways to experience. So I've generally taken a pass on heated debates about legalization, suspecting that the fierce opponents are overestimating its downsides and its proponents underestimating them.

Medical marijuana is something else, though, but again it's not something that was an especially personal issue for me. Anecdotal as the evidence for its benefits might be, that evidence seemed to me more than sufficient to outweigh any of the downsides for the sufferers who might benefit from it. This was still pretty abstract, though, until I witnessed at close range -- or as close a range as you can get from 3000 miles away -- the intensity of Howie's sufferings before he finally sought out a trustworthy source and availed himself of it and the kind of relief he has gotten, which he wrote about in a post last week, "How Much Good Can Medical Marijuana Do Patients?"

So I know, first off, how cautiously, how skeptically, he approached it. As he himself has written here, pot once played an important role in his life, and the role it played was something he emphatically didn't want to revisit -- as he told me frequently, he really, really didn't want to get high. What's more, while he was undergoing chemotherapy, his doctor, whom he trusts highly, issued a strict "uh-uh" order. But when he finished those treatments, and was still suffering a host of debilitating side effects starting with really high degrees of neuropathic pain and near-inability to eat or sleep, and he had tried everything else that the medical establishment had to offer, he did find a source who could guide him through the incredibly fraught world of medical marijuana in California, where the overwhelming majority of customers aren't buying for medicinal use and the overwhelming majority of sellers are people you really, really shouldn't want to be doing business with, for any reason, ever, the results were, as again he has written here, both quick and pretty astonishing.

I learned from Howie too that most of what passes for "received opinion" in the medical community, and therefore also what we might call "controlling" medical opinion in the country at this time, comes from older doctors who don't seem to mind that, really, they don't know anything about the actual potential benefits and risks. Perhaps because that "controlling" opinion squares so neatly with the knee-jerk "it's a sin" opinion of our self-appointed guardians of morality, it has been sufficient to all but stifle the kind of research you would figure would normally go into forming some kind of informed opinion on the subject.

So we're in this situation where people who are almost proud to know nothing whatsoever about the subject exercise the power to make it next to impossible for us to learn any more than we know. I suspect that, as with such other matters as abortion and homosexuality which have been held captive by our society's self-appointed moral ignoramuses, a lot more flexibility has come into play when it comes to their own nearest and dearest, which certainly represents a step beyond the categorical "uh-uh, no way." However, from this point it's still generally an arduous process for authorities to connect the dots and begin to lift the curtain for other people.

I should say that I still haven't actually read the National Geographic piece. What I did do right away, though, was to go online and see if I could find a link that would enable you to read the piece. I did, as you'll see, but I found more than that. Above all, I found this piece on the website The Cannabist:

National Geographic, Time both have science-of-pot cover stories this week

By Ricardo Baca, The Cannabist Staff

Have a look at your local bookseller’s magazine rack this week. It might even be worth an Instagram — for history’s sake.

Two of America’s most fabled magazines’ current cover stories are exploring the known and unknown science of marijuana. On National Geographic’s cover: “Weed: The New Science of Marijuana.” On Time magazine’s cover: “The Highly Divisive, Curiously Underfunded and Strangely Promising World of Pot Science.”

That the two magazines, with nearly 210 years of publication shared between them, are coincidentally running these stories simultaneously says something about the ever-shifting national conversation surrounding cannabis.

“Politicians and voters need to wake the fuck up and smell the weed,” wrote Redditor envyxd on a r/trees post about the dueling covers.

Bruce Barcott — author of the book Weed the People and co-author of Time’s piece this week — took notice of the two magazines’ timing in a recent email exchange.

“When American institutions as stolid as Time and National Geographic run cannabis on their covers, without the words ‘crackdown’ or ‘out of control’ or ‘fear’, the ground has truly shifted,” Barcott told me.

So here they are: Hampton Sides’ Science seeks to unlock marijuana’s secrets [you have to be registered for free access, but registration is free -- Ed.], from National Geographic. And [Bruce] Barcott and Michael Scherer’s The great pot experiment, from Time [only a preview is available free to nonsubscribers -- Ed.].

[Time notes: "Portions of (Bruce Barcott's and Michael Scherer's) article were adapted from Barcott’s new book Weed the People, the Future of Legal Marijuana in America, from TIME Books. -- Ed.]

The message I'm getting is that we've reached a milestone in that process of processing the subject of pot based on reality rather than blindly received moral gobbledygook.


WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT --

The Washington Post's Emily Wax-Thibodeaux reports, in "Senate panel backs allowing vets to ask about medical pot for PTSD,":

Veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and other chronic pain issues may be able to ask their VA doctors for a new treatment soon: medical marijuana.
This week, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to back the Veterans Equal Access Amendment. Under the measure, Veterans Affairs (VA) would be allowed to recommend medical marijuana to patients for medicinal purposes for everything from back pain to depression to flashbacks.

Veterans who support the proposal say that it is safer and helps more than the addictive and debilitating painkillers that are often prescribed. They say using medical cannabis can help combat PTSD’s insomnia and panic attacks.

The legislation would overturn VA’s policy that forbids doctors from talking to patients about medical pot use.

And note the party of the senator who introduced the bill:

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who introduced the legislation, argued that forbidding VA doctors from talking about the option of medical marijuana is unconstitutional. He said that First Amendment rights include the right of patients to discuss whatever they want with their doctors.

Senator Daines goes on to say, "They can't discuss all the options available to them that they could discuss if they literally walked next door to a non-VA facility. I don't believe we should discriminate against veterans just because they are in the care of the VA."

The legal issue for the VA is that "the federal government classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, like heroin and LSD," which "means it has no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse." But if I've understood Howie correctly, doctors in California -- which like the District of Columbia allows medical marijuana -- don't seem to be allowed to raise the subject of medical marijuana either, or at least not the ones he's dealt with.

One interesting note in the WaPo piece : "Several studies have shown that states that allow medical marijuana for health purposes also found a decrease in the number of painkiller-related overdoses." Read more onsite.

#

Is it "good news" about science deniers that they've always been with us?

"We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge -- from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change -- faces organized and often furious opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts. There are so many of these controversies these days, you'd think a diabolical agency had put something in the water to make people argumentative. . . .

"The scientific method doesn’t come naturally -- but if you think about it, neither does democracy. For most of human history neither existed. We went around killing each other to get on a throne, praying to a rain god, and for better and much worse, doing things pretty much as our ancestors did."

-- Washington Post science writer Joel Achenbach, in the
March National Geographic cover story (the reference to
"the safety of fluoride" will be become clear in a moment)

by Ken

Yes, I'm afraid the best news we're going to take away from the cover story in the March National Geographic, "Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?," is that science deniers have always been with us. Because the other major takeaway is that, it appears, they'll always be with us, and, it appears, there isn't a damned thing we can do about it, because they believe what they believe, and facts to the contrary only make them believe it harder.

And, oh yes, if you're thinking that they're more numerous, more powerful, and more dangerous than they've been before, nothing in the piece will disabuse you.

There's some good news in that the author of the piece is the Washington Post's wonderful science writer Joel Achenbach, and as anyone who has read him either in the paper or on the website knows, he's pretty much the ideal person for the job: smart, broadly knowledgeable, calm, and compassionate. I can't imagine a much better job on the subject for a general audience. It is, I think, a beautiful piece, and everyone should read it.

Which just makes the takeaways from it that much more depressing to, you know, take away.

At this point I think we could use a good laugh or two, so let's take a look at this classic scene from Dr. Strangelove, as the way-off-his-rocker Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), bunkered inside his sealed-off Air Force base while the preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union that he's engineered plays out, tries to "educate" the increasingly hysterical British RAF Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers). Trust me, this is the most fun we're going to have here.



Joel starts us off with a snatch of this gorgeous scene (beginning at about 1:41 of our clip):

RIPPER: Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?
MANDRAKE: Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes, yes.
RIPPER: Well, do you know what it is?
MANDRAKE: No. No, I don’t know what it is. No.
RIPPER: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?

Joel proceeds to point out that by the time Stanley Kubrick's "comic masterpiece," Dr. Strangelove, came out, in 1964, "the health benefits of fluoridation had been thoroughly established, and antifluoridation conspiracy theories could be the stuff of comedy." This, of course, is what makes General Ripper's obsession with it so funny. This, and the fact that, nevertheless, there were crazy people in 1964 who believed something not nearly far enough from what Jack D.R. did. What's more, Joel says,

you might be surprised to learn that, half a century later, fluoridation continues to incite fear and paranoia. In 2013 citizens in Portland, Oregon, one of only a few major American cities that don’t fluoridate their water, blocked a plan by local officials to do so. Opponents didn’t like the idea of the government adding “chemicals” to their water. They claimed that fluoride could be harmful to human health.

Actually fluoride is a natural mineral that, in the weak concentrations used in public drinking water systems, hardens tooth enamel and prevents tooth decay—a cheap and safe way to improve dental health for everyone, rich or poor, conscientious brusher or not. That’s the scientific and medical consensus.

To which some people in Portland, echoing antifluoridation activists around the world, reply: We don’t believe you.

It's at this point that Joel delivers the "We live in an age" lines I've quoted at the top of this post. Only now you can get the references to the safety of fluoride and to putting something in the water. Did I mention that Joel is a really gracious writer? Just a sweetheart to read.

Joel notes that the takedown of science has penetrated pop culture, as in the film Interstellar, where the schoolbooks of this "futuristic, downtrodden America" teach that "the Apollo moon landings were faked."


NO, IT'S NOT A NEW THING

[Click to enlarge (a little).]

SQUARE INTUITIONS DIE HARD: That the Earth is round has been known since antiquity -- Columbus knew he wouldn't sail off the edge of the world -- but alternative geographies persisted even after circumnavigations had become common. This 1893 map by Orlando Ferguson, a South Dakota businessman, is a loopy variation on 19th-century flat-Earth beliefs. Flat-Earthers held that the planet was centered on the North Pole and bounded by a wall of ice, with the sun, moon, and planets a few hundred miles above the surface. Science often demands that we discount our direct sensory experiences -- such as seeing the sun cross the sky as if circling the Earth -- in favor of theories that challenge our beliefs about our place in the universe. [National Geographic caption]

Looking at our worldwide epidemic of science denialism (I think it's a mistake to refer to it as "doubt," or to the people who engage in it as "doubters," when what they're about is denial), it's easy to think of it as a modern phenomenon, perhaps in reaction to what may seem to be a takeover of our lives by science.

In a sense all this is not surprising. Our lives are permeated by science and technology as never before. For many of us this new world is wondrous, comfortable, and rich in rewards—but also more complicated and sometimes unnerving. We now face risks we can’t easily analyze.

We’re asked to accept, for example, that it’s safe to eat food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) because, the experts point out, there’s no evidence that it isn’t and no reason to believe that altering genes precisely in a lab is more dangerous than altering them wholesale through traditional breeding. But to some people the very idea of transferring genes between species conjures up mad scientists running amok—and so, two centuries after Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, they talk about Frankenfood.

The world crackles with real and imaginary hazards, and distinguishing the former from the latter isn’t easy.

And he engages in a splendid description of the kinds of problems we face in knowing who and what to believe and about who and what. But as the reference to Frankenstein may have hinted, he's here to tell us that the "doubters" have always been with us. And it comes in good part from deep confusion about what science is and tries to do, which is, essentially, to give us the tools to make decisions about those questions of who and what to believe, who and what to fear, based on rigorous and continuously evolving investigation of real-world evidence.

Now Joel has so much to say on this subject, or rather these subjects, that I feel particularly remiss in jumping over most of it -- how many times do I have to tell you to read the damned piece> -- but instead I'm going to refer you to the caption for the "Square and Stationary Earth" map above, and in particular to that last sentence: "Science often demands that we discount our direct sensory experiences—such as seeing the sun cross the sky as if circling the Earth—in favor of theories that challenge our beliefs about our place in the universe."


YESSIR, REGULAR FOLKS TRUST THEIR EYES AND EARS


National Geographic caption: "A worker adjusts a diorama of a moon landing at the Kennedy Space Center." Aha! So this must be how they faked it!

They aren't gonna be fooled by fancypants talk that contradicts what they see and hear. Except that time and again what they think they see and hear is wrong, and as Joel carefully explains, even those of us who accept scientific precepts still tend to cling to "our intuitions -- what researchers call our naive beliefs." At the same time we don't like random or unexplained things ("our brains crave pattern and meaning"), and so we're awfully vulnerable to attempts to explain everything in terms consistent with those naive beliefs, and so we can be suckers for everything from flat-earth hogwash to the craziest of conspiracy theories, all the more so in a time that has bred distrust for smarty-pants "authority."

The conspiracies emphatically include Sen. James Inhofe's favorite one: global warming. Joel points out that the idea of a global-warming conspiracy is preposterous on its face: "The idea that hundreds of scientists from all over the world would collaborate on such a vast hoax is laughable—scientists love to debunk one another." (And it's "very clear," as he also points out, "that organizations funded in part by the fossil fuel industry have deliberately tried to undermine the public's understanding of the scientific consensus by promoting a few skeptics.")

What's more, Joel argues, it isn't just a "scientific communication problem." Research suggests that better-educated people not only are able to believe anti-scientific theories but tend to believe than even more strongly than less-educated people.

Because, as I think many of us have come to understand, facts don't have a lot to do with what people believe. People tend to believe what they want to believe, and that tends to be what the people they feel a shared identity with believe.

Science appeals to our rational brain, but our beliefs are motivated largely by emotion, and the biggest motivation is remaining tight with our peers. “We’re all in high school. We’ve never left high school,” says Marcia McNutt [a geophysicist "who once headed the U.S. Geological Survey and is now editor of Science, the prestigious journal"]. “People still have a need to fit in, and that need to fit in is so strong that local values and local opinions are always trumping science. And they will continue to trump science, especially when there is no clear downside to ignoring science.”

And as long as it's who we are that conditions what each of us believes about the universe that science is trying to give us tools to understand, reasoned argument doesn't stand to help us a lot.

"If you're a rationalist," Joel says, "there's something a little dispiriting about all this." After all, he says,

evolution actually happened. Biology is incomprehensible without it. There aren’t really two sides to all these issues. Climate change is happening. Vaccines really do save lives. Being right does matter—and the science tribe has a long track record of getting things right in the end. Modern society is built on things it got right.

Doubting science also has consequences. The people who believe vaccines cause autism—often well educated and affluent, by the way—are undermining “herd immunity” to such diseases as whooping cough and measles. The anti-vaccine movement has been going strong since the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet published a study in 1998 linking a common vaccine to autism. The journal later retracted the study, which was thoroughly discredited. But the notion of a vaccine-autism connection has been endorsed by celebrities and reinforced through the usual Internet filters. (Anti-vaccine activist and actress Jenny McCarthy famously said on the Oprah Winfrey Show, “The University of Google is where I got my degree from.”)

In the climate debate the consequences of doubt are likely global and enduring. In the U.S., climate change skeptics have achieved their fundamental goal of halting legislative action to combat global warming. They haven’t had to win the debate on the merits; they’ve merely had to fog the room enough to keep laws governing greenhouse gas emissions from being enacted.

Joel makes an excellent case that, contrary the hope of some environmental activists that scientists will become more engaged as policy advocates, the likely effect of this would be increase the perception that they're advocates rather than truth-seekers.

It’s their very detachment, what you might call the cold-bloodedness of science, that makes science the killer app. It’s the way science tells us the truth rather than what we’d like the truth to be. Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else—but their dogma is always wilting in the hot glare of new research. In science it’s not a sin to change your mind when the evidence demands it. For some people, the tribe is more important than the truth; for the best scientists, the truth is more important than the tribe.

SO WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE US?

Joel harks back to something said to him by geophysicist Maria McNutt -- that "scientific thinking has to be taught, and sometimes it’s not taught well."

Students come away thinking of science as a collection of facts, not a method. [Occidental College's Andrew] Shtulman’s research has shown that even many college students don’t really understand what evidence is. The scientific method doesn’t come naturally—but if you think about it, neither does democracy. For most of human history neither existed. We went around killing each other to get on a throne, praying to a rain god, and for better and much worse, doing things pretty much as our ancestors did.

"Now we have incredibly rapid change," Joel writes, "and it’s scary sometimes."

It’s not all progress. Our science has made us the dominant organisms, with all due respect to ants and blue-green algae, and we’re changing the whole planet. Of course we’re right to ask questions about some of the things science and technology allow us to do. “Everybody should be questioning,” says McNutt. “That’s a hallmark of a scientist. But then they should use the scientific method, or trust people using the scientific method, to decide which way they fall on those questions.” We need to get a lot better at finding answers, because it’s certain the questions won’t be getting any simpler.

Let me say again that I really haven't done anything like justice to Joel's piece. But one thing I don't think I've overlooked is any grounds for hope. In fairness, I did warn you that this wasn't going to be a lot of fun. Maybe we should have just watched Dr. Strangelove. That wouldn't have helped with the problem, but at least we would have had a good time.

#

Time again to test our geographic mettle with those fiends from National Geographic (Zombies? Zombies??? Gimme a break!)

Zombies, eh?

by Ken

We haven't done this in a while, and when I saw the new issue of National Geographic in the mailbox this evening when I got home from today's urban gadding (first a visit to NYC Transit's Bergen Sign Shop out in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, then a Historic Districts Council walk up in Harlem and even farther up in Mott Haven, the Bronx, focusing on three still-in-use Carnegie-paid-for public libraries, with a drive-by of a third on the bus en route to the Bronx), I thought, you know, we haven't done this in a while!

So here it is, direct from the address insert in this month's subscription mailing:

1  Izmir, Adana, and Bursa are major cities in what country?

2  The Strait of Malacca links the South China Sea with which ocean?

3  Name the largest city in Scotland, which is located on the Clyde River.

4  The Corfu Channel separates the Greek island of Corfu from which neighboring country?

5  What country north of Ghana, formerly known as Upper Volta, won independence from France in 1960?

THE ANSWERS

I DID JUST . . . WELL, NEVER YOU MIND HOW I DID

Okay, okay, I got three right, and two others maybe not quite as right. I'm frankly a little dubious about (4), the answer to which seems hardly worth concerning ourselves with. So maybe I don't know exactly where Corfu is. Am I expected to keep track of every last Greek island? Hey, there are, uh, millions of them. And then --


HOLD ON! RECOUNT! I WANT A RECOUNT!

Now just a doggone minute! When did [name withheld] become Scotland's largest city? Everybody knows that [name withheld] is the capital and Edinburgh the largest city. Okay, Edinburgh isn't on the Clyde (it's on the Firth of Forth, as I was reminded when I looked it up), and I should have remembered that (besides, shouldn't that be "the River Clyde," not "the Clyde River"?), but it hardly mattered since I knew perfectly well what the largest city in Scotland is -- I've got this! And in any case I can hardly be expected to keep track of every confounded river in the world.



Oh.

Never mind.

#

OK, geography whizzes, it's time once again to strut your geographical stuff. Plus: "How do you show the unshowable?"

This cover was trickier than we civilians probably would have thought, since how, after all, do you illustrate black holes, which can't be seen? Tom O'Neill tells the story in "Behind the Cover: March 2014 -- How do you show the unshowable?"

by Ken

In January I passed along the monthly geography quiz that National Geographic cleverly prints on the sheet that -- stuck inside the sealed plastic that carries your subscription copy -- serves as your address label ("Who's up for a jography quiz? Plus Garrison Keillor's 'personal geography' of 'home'"). I guess I was feeling kind of cocky because somehow or other (well, it involved a certain amount of guessing) I had gotten all five questions right. That just about never happens. There are months when I'm lucky to get one of the five questions right.

That quiz accompanied the February issue of the magazine. I only just remembered that I've been carrying the March issue around for weeks now, stuck in my briefcase, with the plastic sheathing still intact. Today I finally cracked it open, and I only managed three out of five, though one of the ones I didn't get -- the country of which Tbilisi is the capital -- was one I should have gotten, if only my brain hadn't become so balky about coughing up names that I know are stored in there somewhere. On the other hand, one of the ones I got right -- the "small African country located on the Gulf of Aden" question -- I wasn't at all sure about. The name sprang out of that same brain with no particular connection to anything, and I wasn't even prepared to swear that it was the name of a country. On number 5, I just guessed, and I guessed wrong.

You win some, you lose some. Anyway, here's the March quiz.

Are You a Geo Genius?
Test your knowledge with questions from the National Geographic Bee.

1  Which small African country located on the Gulf of Aden averages less than six inches of rain each year?

2  The Blue Nile flows through Lake Tana, which is located in the northern part of what country?

3  The Indus River, one of the longest rivers in South Asia, empties into what sea?

4  Tbilisi, located on the banks of the Kur River, is the capital of what country?

5  Lake Volta is located in which West African country known for its production of palm oil?

QUIZ ANSWERS BELOW

BY THE WAY, IF YOU DIDN'T HAPPEN TO SEE
THE JANUARY PIECE WITH THE EARLIER QUIZ --

I would encourage you to look at it, not so much for the geography quiz as for the appreciation of (and link to) Garrison Keillor's "Personal Geography" of his home back in the day as well as now, the Twin Cities. The piece ranges widely, backward and forward, over time as well as space; it's one I think you're going to remember for a long time to come.


QUIZ ANSWERS

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Who's up for a jography quiz? Plus Garrison Keillor's "personal geography" of "home"

The cover story of the February 2014 National
Geographic is "The New Science of the Brain."

by Ken

I don't know how long National Geographic was including a monthly geography quiz on the mailing insert that includes the subscriber's address on subscription copies before I noticed it. But however long it was, it spared me that many months' or more likely years' worth of humiliation. Because once I started looking at the quizzes, I started stinking at them. So let's not kid ourselves, the fact that this month I suddenly got all five questions right probably has something to do with why I'm making a federal case of it tonight. True, one of my answers was a guess, but it was a semi-educated one; there's a limit to how many countries the answer to no. 5 could be to start with. And true, several of these questions are a lot easier than the ones we usually get in these quizzes. I mean, with the island in no. 4 identified as Hispaniola, how sad would you have to be to get this one wrong?

Still, I guessed right on no. 5, and swept the rest of the admittedly readily sweepable field.

Are you a Geo-Genius?
Test your knowledge with questions from the National Geographic Bee.

1
The Rio de la Plata borders Argentina and what smaller country?

2
The Balearic Sea and Ionian Sea are both part of what larger sea?

3
Which Southeast Asian country, crossed by the Tropic of Cancer, is bordered by India and China?

4
Cape Engaño, easternmost point on the island of Hispaniola, is in what country?

5
Xultún, a typical Maya site with mural-filled rooms, is located in which Central American country?

BUT THE MUST-READ ITEM IN THE ISSUE IS . . .


Olivia Rowe is my aunt Josephine's great-granddaughter. Her level gaze and dark hair remind me of Aunt Jo, who was a gardener and kept a flock of chickens. Olivia keeps pigeons, 14 of them. This one is named Angel.

Above is one of the illustrations that accompanies "There's No Place Like Home: A Personal Geography by Garrison Keillor" (with photos by Erika Larsen), and the caption is obviously by the author. "Home," of course, is the Twin Cities, and the promised "personal geography" isn't just mental; there is in fact a precious "crude map" drawn by the author called "TWIN CITIES (ROUGHLY)," which really does provide a nice basic orientation. ("The key to our geography," Garrison says, "is the river. Anyone can get lost trying to navigate the freeways through the suburbs, but once you find the Mississippi, you know where you are.") The map includes both of St. Paul's lakes and all six of Minneapolis's ("pools of ease and elegance on the asphalt grid"), but not Lake Minnetonka, "the prairie Riviera, off to the southwest."

Editor-in-Chief Chris Jones explains in his Editor's Note, "A Prairie Home":

A few years ago I was in the middle of a meeting when one of our senior editors ushered in a tall man with a large, expressive face, wearing owlish glasses and dressed in a khaki suit. In a voice once described as "a baritone that seems precision-engineered to narrate a documentary about glaciers," he addressed the group and pitched a story idea. He wanted, he told us, to do a story about his own "personal geography." That man was the author, radio personality, and storyteller Garrison Keillor, and there could be only one answer to the appeal.

Keillor’s reminiscence, "There's No Place Like Home," is the result. You might say it's a piece he's been writing his whole life. Ostensibly, it's about Minneapolis-St. Paul. He conjures word pictures of neighborhoods with stucco bungalows, lakes with names like Minnetonka and Nokomis, and the sweep of the rocket tail fins on a white Cadillac convertible. But it's also something different and very special.

Keillor's piece is an interior geography; it's the map of a man's soul. In summoning up the Twin Cities of his youth and adulthood, he talks about what it means to be not just from a place, but of a place. Early on, he says, he realized that Minneapolis-St. Paul was a much better place than Manhattan in which to be an original. In his essay Keillor tells us why where you come from matters. "If you want to know the truth," he says, "I feel understood there."

Keillor likes driving rural Minnesota roads. “One evening,” says photographer Erika Larsen, “I went along.” She shot this near Buffalo Lake.

Actually, it's not just "understanding" that Garrison feels in the Twin Cities. Here's how he explains it:

"So how was it to grow up there then?" they say. "Oh, you know. It could've been worse," I reply. We are not braggarts and blowhards back where I come from. But if you want to know the truth, I feel understood there. I sit down to lunch with Bill and Bob or my sister and brother whom I've known almost forever, and it's a conversation you can't have with people you met yesterday. You can flash back to 1954 and the island in the river where we used to mess around, or the front office you shared with Warren Feist that looked across the street to the Anoka Dairy, or the toboggan slope behind Corinne's house, no footnote necessary, and they are right there with you. I come home and feel so well understood. I almost don't have to say a word. I was not a good person. I have yelled at my children. I neglected my parents and was disloyal to loved ones. I have offended righteous people. People around here know all this about me, and yet they still smile and say hello, and so every day I feel forgiven. Ask me if it's a good place to live, and I don't know -- that's real estate talk -- but forgiveness and understanding, that's a beautiful combination.

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Why should you care about the Albertine Rift? The November National Geographic does a spectacular job of explaining

The Albertine Rift extends 920 miles from Lake Albert in the north to Lake Tanganyika in the south. The giant but much shallower Lake Victoria, by the way, isn't a true rift lake at all, though as the National Geographic article explains, its underlying geology explains why the East African Rift splits below Uganda into western and eastern portions. (By all means click to enlarge this map, which this isn't a National Geographic map, by the way. It's from the Woods Hole Research Center's PAWAR project.)


"As the global population soars toward nine billion by 2045, this corner of Africa shows what’s at stake in the decades ahead. The Rift is rich in rainfall, deep lakes, volcanic soil, and biodiversity. It is also one of the most densely populated places on Earth. A desperate competition for land and resources—and between people and wildlife—has erupted here with unspeakable violence. How can the conflict be stopped? Will there be any room left for the wild?"

-- the introductory blurb for the November
National Geographic feature "Rift in Paradise"

"The paradox of the Albertine Rift is that its very richness has led to scarcity. People crowded into this area because of its fertile volcanic soil, its plentiful rainfall, its biodiversity, and its high altitude, which made it inhospitable to mosquitoes and tsetse flies and the diseases they carry. As the population soared, more and more forest was cut down to increase farm and grazing land. Even in the 19th century the paradise that visitors beheld was already racked with a central preoccupation: Is there enough for everyone?"

-- from Robert Draper's main article text

"The Albertine Rift, as writer Robert Draper and photographers Pascal Maitre and Joel Sartore show us in this month’s story, is a landscape shaped by violence -- the convulsions of plate tectonics produced its beautiful lakes, savannas, and mountains. But the overlay of human violence on its geography is unremittingly ugly. The Rift is a malignant tangle of human need and suffering."

-- from Geographic Editor Chris Johns's Editor's Note

"In the [Ugandan] capital city of Kampala, one gets a taste of what the end of the world might look like. Uganda is a country that can sustainably hold 8 to 9 million people. They're at 34 million now, on their way to 80 to 90 million by mid-century. The cars are out of a Mad Max movie. People cook meat in the dark by burning charcoal in tire rims. Mounds of garbage are everywhere. It's filthy, grueling, and crushing."

-- from photographer Joel Sartore's sidebar essay,
"Close Call in Paradise"

by Ken

I've written a number of times about one of my favorite New York City tour leaders, Jack Eichenbaum, with whom I've done tours organized by the Municipal Art Society, the New York Transit Museum, the Queens Historical Society (Jack is the Queens borough historian), as well as tours of his own (notably the more or less day-long "Life on the #7 train"), trying to explain that what sets Jack apart from other tour guides is in part his profession: not "architectual historian" or "urban historian," but urban geographer.

Oh, I know. You're saying, "OMG, this one is going to start yammering now about bleeping geography. There is truly no God."

What can I say? I know Americans hate geography. Almost as much as they hate history, and they only hate history more because they're more often poked and prodded about historical jibberjabber they don't want to know about. Whereas Howie and I have had lifelong fascinations with geography. Not identical fascinations, but fascinations strong and deep enough to be an important underpinning of our bond.

So when I do a walking tour with Jack Eichenbaum, I know I'm not going to get so much about the design of the buildings, as I will from other tour leaders. What I'm likely to get striking insight into is how the development of regions and towns and cities and neighborhoods has been shaped by the configuration of land and water as related to the surrounding area and impacted on by climate and weather. So much of New York City's development, for example, has been strongly influenced by transportation -- as with the arrival and placement -- all geography-influenced -- of trolleys and ferries, and later railroads and subways.

Which is by way of trying to explain why I've been blown away by a spectacular set of features in the November National Georgraphic focusing on a seemingly arcane subject: the Albertine Rift of East Africa. Oh, I've known in a general way about the East African rift system, and with maybe a little prompting I could have explained that it's a major north-south fault system at the juncture of the Nubian and Somali plates (to the west and east, respectively). But in truth I would have been kind of vague about what geographical form this rift system takes -- kind of vague, and wrong.

In my head I've got the phrase "East Africa Rift Valley," and so I always think "valley" -- that the rift takes the form of a valley in the region where the two great plates are pulling apart. And there is a certain amount of valley in the East African Rift system. But there are also substantial mountains and, perhaps most significantly, resource-rich highlands, along with those big lakes, the "Great Lakes of Africa."

This issue of the Geographic includes one of the society's famous "map supplements," a feature that used to excite me but hasn't much for a lot of years now. This one, though, has on one side the best map I've ever seen of the region, and on the other side a host of visual elements that help the reader understand just what goes into making up the region's geography. It's been a couple of weeks now, and I'm still beginning to digest this material. It actually shows us, not just tells but shows, the four basic kinds of terrain found in the Albertine Rift. Just extraordinary stuff. I'm sorry I couldn't find any of it online to share.

National Geographic caption for this photo by Pascal Maitre: Rule of the gun prevails in North Kivu, a conflict-ravaged province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Mai-Mai Kifuafua, one of many local militias, flaunts its power on a road where it extorts money from villagers and travelers. For almost 20 years near-constant fighting over land, mining riches, and power has terrorized the people.

In addition, before this issue I certainly wouldn't have understood how this underlying geography has set the stage, in the western part of this rift system, known as the Albertine Rift, for a goodly chunk of the worst violence and destruction taking place on the planet in recent decades. The paragraph I've quoted at the top of this post, from Robert Draper's main article, has its stage set by these two paragraphs:

The horrific violence that has occurred in this place -- and continues in lawless eastern Congo despite a 2009 peace accord -- is impossible to understand in simple terms. But there is no doubt that geography has played a role. Erase the borders of Uganda, the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo], Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania and you see what unites these disparate political entities: a landscape shaped by the violent forces of shifting plate tectonics. The East African Rift System bisects the horn of Africa -- the Nubian plate to the west moving away from the Somalian plate to the east—before forking down either side of Uganda.

The western rift includes the Virunga and Rwenzori mountain ranges and several of Africa's Great Lakes, where the deep rift has filled with water. Called the Albertine Rift (after Lake Albert), this 920-mile-long geologic crease of highland forests, snowcapped mountains, savannas, chain of lakes, and wetlands is the most fecund and biodiverse region on the African continent, the home of gorillas, okapis, lions, hippos, and elephants, dozens of rare bird and fish species, not to mention a bounty of minerals ranging from gold and tin to the key microchip component known as coltan. In the 19th century European explorers like David Livingstone and John Hanning Speke came here searching for the source of the Nile. They gazed in awe at the profusion of lush vegetation and vast bodies of water, according to the scholar Jean-Pierre Chrétien: "In the heart of black Africa, the Great Lakes literally dazzled the whites."

National Geographic Editor Chris Johns provides this up-front Editor's Note from which I've also quoted up top, which in fact I hadn't read until I was preparing this post:

What began as an attempt to do my job in Africa’s Albertine Rift still haunts me. A lovely young woman carrying firewood on her back was walking through lush forest. My guide, a local schoolteacher, asked the woman if I could take her picture. She readily agreed. Afterward I asked if it was appropriate to reward her graciousness. As I gave her a modest amount of money to make her life a little easier, a man swinging a machete burst out of the forest, screaming that he was her husband. In a drunken rage, he demanded more cash and threatened us. As we began to drive off, I glanced at the rearview mirror and saw the man beating her. I stopped and ran toward the stricken woman, but my guide pulled me back. He knew the man, he said. The situation could become more violent if I intervened. The man saw us and stopped his assault. They both waved me on. Reluctantly, I returned to my car, furious at the man and with myself, because I felt responsible for what had happened.

Five years later, in 1994, that region was the scene of more violence: the mass murder known as the Rwandan genocide.

The Albertine Rift, as writer Robert Draper and photographers Pascal Maitre and Joel Sartore show us in this month’s story, is a landscape shaped by violence -- the convulsions of plate tectonics produced its beautiful lakes, savannas, and mountains. But the overlay of human violence on its geography is unremittingly ugly. The Rift is a malignant tangle of human need and suffering. For millennia, people have crowded into the region, attracted by its fertile land and minerals. “The paradox,” Draper says, “is that its very richness has led to scarcity,” and in the story you will read why. This dilemma provokes the unshakable worry: Is there enough for everyone? That’s the pervading question in this seventh story in our Seven Billion series on world population.

I think we're all familiar with place names like Rwanda and Burundi, with their recent history of genocidal violence, and of course perennially suffering Uganda (directly to the north of the Albertine Rift, but obviously intimately connected), and the eastern Congo city of Goma, which most of us are probably aware has become a catch basin for the horrific overcrowding and even more horrific violence besetting the region. It has grown from a minor regional outpost to a refugee-swollen dumping ground of 3 million, and to make matters worse, it's poised between two impending natural catastrophes: the already-active (and already-deadly) volcano Nyiragongo and the likely-to-explode vast concentrations of methane in Lake Kivu to the south.

Refugee-gigantized Goma (photo also by Pascal Maitre) is already a human disaster area, without reference to the potentially catastrophic dangers it faces from deadly volcano Nyiragongo and potentially explosive methane-loaded Lake Kivu.

One last point: At a time when the general assumption is that print magazines have no further use, this is a story that can only be told properly in print, with that map supplement at the ready. Good one, National Geographic!

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