Highlight Sheet
Episode 1508
Air Date: February 22, 2014
This week on National Geographic Weekend, join host Boyd Matson and his guests as they dangle from a hot air balloon over pristine forest, walk from Russia across Australia, protect Italy’s wildlife in a national park, share a language with chimpanzees, document Alberta’s tar sands, track the evolution of HIV, climb China’s mountains and bird watch, visit Morocco’s ancient bazaars, and ski New England’s unusually deep powder.
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Here’s this week’s show:
– Mattias Klum, a National Geographic photographer who has ventured to some of the world’s most pristine areas is concerned by what he sees. But he tells Boyd that for every challenge, there is an equal amount of opportunity. And his new book, The Human Quest, explores the opportunities that the planet offers within the boundaries of her resources. Klum also tells of his love for Borneo and the incredible lengths he has gone to in the past in order to get the stunning images that he does.
– Sarah Marquis has spent her life walking. From Canada to Mexico, from Siberia to the far side of Australia. She says that three miles per hour is the perfect speed and that humans were made to walk. But humans weren’t necessarily made to live alone in the Australia’s rugged Kimberly Region alone, surviving on grubs, found water, and her knowledge of local plants. Marquis, who has spent the last 23 years walking, usually alone, says that these four months will be the culmination of everything she has learned in her career as a professional adventurer.
– Italy isn’t the top vacation destination place to see wildlife and beautiful nature scenery, but Jeremy Berlin says that it’s a possibility that is often overlooked by tourists. In that country’s Gran Paradiso National Park, ibex and chamois goat-antelopes were protected from poachers by the park’s status as a royal hunting park, which turned into a national park after a few generations. The park even has had a few wolves in recent years. Berlin’s article about Italy’s rugged national park is in the February 2015 issue of National Geographic magazine.
– Non-human animals use verbal cues to communicate, but it has been difficult for scientists to prove that they use specific vocalizations to refer to other things in their environment, often food or predators. University of Zurich researcher Dr. Simon Townsend says that chimpanzees are one of the animals that use these “referential calls”. The apes are so malleable in their verbal skills that after two chimps were moved from a zoo in the Netherlands to one in Edinburg, Scotland. Once in their new home, over time, the chimpanzees changed their vocalizations used to refer to “apples” to better integrate with their new troop-mates. Dr. Townsend says that despite his time studying chimpanzee calls, he isn’t inclined to try to speak their “language”.
– Just as the United States is embroiled in debate over whether or not to build the Keystone XL pipeline, Canadians can hardly agree on what to call the substance the pipeline would be moving. Photographer
Louis Helbig‘s new book,
Beautiful Destruction portrays the “bituminous sands” more commonly known as “tar” or “oil sands,” depending on one’s view of their relative value. The book includes aerial photos of the whole tar/oil-sand industry in Alberta and the book also includes essays from people on both sides of the Canadian bitumen debate.
http://bit.ly/1BOrL3Ilink to original interview: https://soundcloud.com/nationalgeographicradio/beautiful-destruction-pleasing
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