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Out of Eden Postponed
Paul Salopek must be the world’s most patient man.
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A Long Term Trek
What interests me most is how this trek has shaped the man.
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Why Can’t We Leave the Sentinelese Alone?
Why can’t we just let these people be?
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It’s All So Fragile
I just read something very exciting on the National Geographic website. It seems that the Mayan city of Tikal and its environs in Guatemala were much, much, MUCH larger than we previously thought. All this time, we were thinking the area was home to about 5 million people during the Maya classic period between 250…
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Things Get Cloudier
The following sentence makes me feel really old: Things were a whole lot simpler when I was a child. I remember running home to proudly tell my mother that I now knew the names of all the clouds. Cirrus. Cumulus. Stratus. Nimbus. And the various combinations thereof, such as cumulostratus and cirronimbus. I took a…
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Racing Extinction
In my timeworn tradition of being years behind trends, I just saw an amazing documentary from 2015 on Hulu. It’s called Racing Extinction, and it’s both beautiful and horrifying. It has forever changed the way I look at the world. The cinematography is stunning. Many of the people involved in this documentary also worked for…
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The Plight of the Pangolin
I remember distinctly the first time I saw a picture of a pangolin. I was browsing a coffee table book on Africa at a friend’s house. I thought it was some sort of a joke. They look like the love child of an artichoke and an aardvark. But the situation got even more strange when…
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What’s Your Water Mark?
I came across some disturbing statistics on the National Geographic website just now. It takes 37 gallons of water to produce the average cup of coffee. Think of that next time, and every time, you drink one. If we each drank a cup of coffee each morning, it would use up 32 trillion gallons of…
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Epic Journey
If you read no other blog besides this one (I’m so freakin’ modest), you absolutely must check out that of Paul Salopek on the National Geographic website. He is the man who is taking the Out of Eden Walk, a seven year, 21,000 mile journey from the cradle of civilization in Ethiopia to the tip…
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The Wisdom of Maruge
This is Kimani Ng’ang’a Maruge. He spent most of his life fighting for the independence of Kenya. For his troubles he saw his wife and two children slaughtered before his very eyes by the British Imperialists. He also spent 8 years in prison where he was tortured. They whipped him, they cut off his toes.…