Three from the NatGeo blog: On the trail of endangered pangolins from Africa to restaurants in China; wrestling as peacebuilding in South Sudan; and an unprecedented scientific investigation into neonatal death in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.
Nov 252011
Three sacred rivers meet at Allahabad: The Ganges, born of clear Himalayan tributaries that first trickle and then rage down from India’s border with Tibet; its sister, the Yamuna, which shadows the Ganges to the west before curving past Delhi and the Taj Mahal to join her; and the mythical Saraswati, ancient and invisible, which is said to run beneath the earth.
Only the Saraswati reaches Allahabad in a pristine state.
My latest, at National Geographic.
Sep 242010
The forests of Bangladesh are dwindling by the day, creating a furry refugee crisis among forest-dwelling animals who are forced into towns and villages in search of food.
That’s where Sitesh Ranjan Deb comes in. The subject of my most recent piece for Nat Geo News Watch, Sitesh is a one man International Rescue Committee waging a lonely battle to save the animals of his native land. I think you’ll enjoy this tale of a gunman turned conservationist.
(Looking for news of The Black Nile? Check out this review by Issandr el Amrani in The National, and this exclusive excerpt from The Faster Times. )
Aug 042010
My newest piece, on the struggle for control of the Nile. Here’s the lead:
I was standing inside a colonial-era circuit house in a sprawling, malarial city called Malakal in southern Sudan. I had come to see a man about a river, but the man, an Egyptian hydrologist, wasn’t talking.
“It is forbidden,” he said solemnly, “to speak of the Nile.”
I pointed towards the window. “But it’s right there,” I said. This was, after all, a measuring station of the Egyptian water ministry, one of several it maintained in Sudan and Uganda to track the volume of the world’s longest river.
The hydrologist didn’t need to look out the window. He knew where the Nile was–he’d devoted his life to its study. But there was nothing he could say to a stranger about something so important to his nation’s survival. I might have had better luck inquiring about Tehran’s nuclear program.
You can read the whole article here, and check out other great writing on the environment at the NatGeo News Watch blog.
Mountain lions in New Jersey? Not as crazy as it might sound. Continue reading »
