Innholdsfortegnelse for SEPTEMBER 2016 i National Geographic Magazine

Fifty-five years ago Sanford Greenberg was 20, newly blind through bad luck and misdiagnosis, and rightly angry at the world when he made a vow from his hospital bed. “No one should have to go blind,” he thought. “It was a promise I made not just to myself but to God.” It was, and remains, an enormous aspirational pledge. Around the world 39 million people—roughly one out of 200—are blind, as writer David Dobbs and photographer Brent Stirton reveal in this month’s cover story. Another 246 million are moderately or severely visually impaired. The human costs are staggering, both for those with vision loss and for the hundreds of millions of people who assist them. Greenberg is one of the fortunate ones. In 1961 he ignored the social worker who…

Each fall we ask readers to submit their best photographs to our annual contest. The entries are always spectacular: a mix of people, places, and nature captured in inventive and jawdropping ways. Last year we received 14,000 entries representing 171 countries. The winning images (on this page and the next) share a strong sense of modern geography—a new way to understand the human experience on a constantly changing planet. This year we’re taking our contest somewhere new, starting with a focus on nature photography. Submit your best nature image between August 15 and November 4 for a chance to win a trip for two to the Galápagos with National Geographic Expeditions as well as a portfolio review by a National Geographic expert. The grand prize winner will be named the…

Bangladesh A floating farm or school? It’s part of adapting to warming. ALIZE CARRERE Cultural ecologist For years Alize Carrere had heard about the disastrous effects of climate change, especially in developing countries. But in 2012 Carrere learned of a very different situation: a group of farmers in Madagascar who were figuring out how to farm in fields eroded by deforestation and heavy rains. Instead of depending on development aid to reforest washed-out areas, the farmers adapted. Soon they began to prefer farming in the eroded gullies, which became rich with water and nutrients. That sort of ingenuity in the face of hardship launched Carrere, a National Geographic grantee, on a journey to study climate change adaptation. “It’s such an abstract concept, so I wanted to know what it actually looked…

THE first fin whale appeared in Marmot Bay, where the sea curls a crooked finger around Alaska’s Kodiak Island. A biologist spied the calf drifting on its side, as if at play. Seawater flushed in and out of its open jaws. Spray washed over its slack pink tongue. Death, even the gruesome kind, is usually too familiar to spark alarm in the wild north. But late the next morning, the start of Memorial Day weekend, passengers aboard the ferry Kennicott spotted another whale bobbing nearby. Her blubber was thick. She looked healthy. But she was dead too. Kathi Lefebvre is talking about the whales as we crunch across a windy, rocky beach, 200 miles north of Kodiak. In a typical year eight whales are found dead in the western Gulf…

Assignment We spend a lot of time talking about big cats. We challenged the Your Shot community to demonstrate how small ones can be just as wild. Geralyn Shukwit Brooklyn, New York Shukwit and a friend were visiting Cachoeira, Brazil, when two kids invited them into their house to escape the heat. After one of the children put the family’s kitten on the table, their pet bird tried to get as far away as possible. EDITOR’S NOTE ‘ Photos like Shukwit’s help to reclaim cat photography from the trivial corners of the Internet, reminding us how majestic, wild, and beautiful domestic cats can be.’ Becky Harlan, Your Shot photo editor Paul Elijah Kline Hood River, Oregon One evening while driving home, Kline saw a grassy field glowing in golden light.…

An emerald ash borer hovers, checking out the female forms below him. He’s drawn by how light plays across their bodies. He picks one, approaches, initiates physical contact—and is zapped by 4,000 volts. Trying to mate with an electrified decoy is a grisly way to go. But entomologist Michael Domingue has no qualms about killing the emerald ash borer, or EAB for short. Since 2002 EABs have killed hundreds of millions of North America’s native ash trees. To catch them, Domingue and his Pennsylvania State University colleagues created a literal femme fatale: a faux female, battery-powered so it would lethally shock any male that mounted it. The scientists made a rough version of the decoy on a 3-D printer; EAB males looked but didn’t land. The researchers also made a…

The ancient city of Holmul isn’t much to look at. To the casual observer it’s just a series of steep, forested hills in the middle of the jungle in northern Guatemala, near the Mexican border. The jungle here in the Peten Basin is thick and warm but drier than you might expect. And silent, except for the drum of cicadas and the occasional calls of howler monkeys. Take a closer look, and you may notice that most of these hills are arranged in massive rings, like travelers huddled around a fire on a cold night. An even closer look reveals that parts of the hills are made of cut stone, and some have tunnels carved into their sides. In fact they’re not hills at all but ancient pyramids, left to…

An end-to-end trip through the Grand Canyon isn’t a particularly sane thing to attempt on foot. ‘If you break loose here, you can’t stop. You’re going into the abyss,” barks Rich Rudow. Normally he is unflappable, but as he knows too well, this is no place to let down one’s guard. We’re on a cliff roughly 3,500 feet above the Colorado River at the tip of the Great Thumb Mesa, a spectacular formation that thrusts out from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon like the bow of an immense ship. It is one of the canyon’s most remote spots, rarely seen even by the most hard-core backpackers. If you come this far out on the Thumb, there is no way to get down to the river without climbing gear,…

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TRANSPORTER Light-years away Scotty won’t be beaming us up anytime soon. But he may one day. Physicists have long been intrigued by teleportation. So far they’ve been able to move information encoded into particles of light via optical fiber—a process called quantum teleportation. COMBADGE Mission accomplished Smartphones—the real-world prototypes of Star Trek’s combadges—have been with us for years. Now hands-free communicators are starting to hit the market. As technology develops apace, such wearable devices could become ubiquitous. MEDICAL TRICORDER Getting there Helping people live long and prosper is a universal goal of medicine. Wearable devices that can noninvasively gauge heart rate, body temperature, and blood pressure already exist. Clinical-grade handheld monitors may be on the way. Since its first TV episode aired 50 years ago this month, Star Trek has…

From the day Christian Guardino was born, his mother, Elizabeth, knew that something was wrong with his eyes. They would jiggle and jerk and roll up into his head. One eye turned inward. When she fed him, instead of gazing up at her, Christian would stare at the brightest light around—a lamp if they were indoors, the sun if they were out. It was unsettling. The first eye doctor who saw Christian grimly referred the family to a specialist at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital. The specialist performed an electroretinogram (ERG), a procedure in which a tiny electronic sensor placed on the eye measures the retina’s response to bursts of light. A healthy retina will respond by firing an electrical signal down the optic nerve that produces, on the ERG…

It was frozen-toe, mid-February, north-country cold, under a cloudless sky, sun glinting off fresh snow. We were tromping out onto a wetland frozen nine inches deep. It felt like how the fur trade began, someplace long ago, far away. Bill Mackowski, in his 60th year of trapping, mostly around northern Maine, pointed out some alder branches sticking through the ice. Beavers start collecting poplar after the first cold snap, he explained, then pile on inedible alder to weigh down the poplar below the ice, where they eat it throughout the winter. He hacked through the ice with a metal pole, then passed it to me to try. “Feel how hard the bottom is on the run?” Beaten down by beaver traffic, he said. Breaking through the ice in another spot,…

A PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL nationalgeographic.com/proof Circuses are spectacles that enchant an audience. But for me the real magic happens behind the scenes. The daily life I witnessed backstage at two Vietnamese circuses—before, during, and after performances— was a captivating parallel to the performers’ onstage personas. During three trips from 2009 to 2012, I spent eight months in Vietnam. When I saw a circus in Hanoi, I was fascinated by its glamour. But as I got to know the performers personally, I felt compelled to show another aspect—to dignify their work and document their dedication. Gaining intimate access wasn’t easy: Circus artists prefer that people focus on their feats, not their lives. To win their confidence I had to go slowly. On my last trip I lived as they did then, taking…