Tag archives for Asia
Escape From Vietnam
Posted by Cathy Hunter on April 30, 2013 
On April 30, 1975, the Vietnam War officially ended with the fall of Saigon to Communist forces. Many Vietnamese fled their country, including one Special Forces officer who painstakingly planned his escape and paid $200 on the black market for a copy of a March 1971 National Geographic map to guide him.
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Why would members of remote tribal communities, heads of state, Nobel Laureates, local activists, scientists, artists, and people like you plan to travel to Salamanca Spain? The l0th World Wilderness Congress will convene there on October 4 involving a great diversity of people, professions and activists who understand the importance of wild nature to…
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Every week, embark with host Boyd Matson on an exploration of the latest discoveries and interviews with some of the most fascinating people on the planet, on National Geographic Weekend.
Life for Captive Elephants
Posted by Sasha Ingber on February 7, 2013 
More than half of Thailand’s elephants are in captivity. Once used for transportation, religious festivals, and war stemming back to 2000 BCE, adult elephants today work in illegal logging and tourism camps, while calves simply wander the city streets. Most of Thailand’s working elephants are considered private property. As the only source of revenue for their owners,…
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Allahabad is a city of 1.2 million people, and despite the proximity of its bigger, noisier neighbour, the Kumbh Mela, life goes on there—including death. The funeral ghats on the Ganges were moved away from the sangam—the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers—for the duration of the festival, but they are still within the…
It’s 4am on January 27, an auspicious date for bathing called Paush Purnima. The full moon hangs big and sharp above the shroud of smoke that covers the Kumbh. It’s still dark, and people are moving quietly and calmly from all directions towards the sangam, the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers. The temporary…
There is a stubborn rumour here at the Kumbh Mela that some people come to abandon elderly female relatives and children in the crowd. There are two lost and found camps on site, one of which is run by 86-year-old Raja Ram Tiwari, who took the initiative after seeing an old woman weeping uncontrollably at…
Naga Baba Jai Giri Ji has long, long hair. He hasn’t cut it for 15 years, and when he dances in the processions that the holy men lead to the sangam on bathing days, he loops it over his arms so that it doesn’t trip him up. Lakshman Giri is also famous for his headgear,…
If you climb up to high ground above the river plain, you begin to get a sense of the scale of the Kumbh Mela, especially at night. It stretches off in all directions. The sky above it is as light as the sky over a large metropolis, only there are no highrises here—nothing much higher than a lamp-post, in fact. The noise from hundreds of loudspeakers is incessant and very loud—like a human rainforest, technically enhanced.
The stars are aligned. The first aiders are on standby. The latrines are dug. And the city of Allahabad is waiting to see how many tens of millions of people will descend on it between now and March 10. One thing is certain: the Kumbh Mela, a giant gathering of Hindu pilgrims that takes place every 12 years in four cities in northern India, and that is celebrated this year in Allahabad, is unique.
Posted by Guest article by Bernadetta Devi “Rare Earths” are a group of 17 elements that are currently used in a wide array of modern technologies, ranging from hard disk drives to lamp phosphors to hybrid car batteries. At present 90% of these minerals are mined in China due to a range of economic and environmental factors.…
Posted by Reports from the wildlife trade monitoring organization Traffic, African media outlets, and scholarly researchers point to well-developed trade in pangolins from African source countries to China.
Posted by Earlier this year Rolex announced the five winners of the 2012 Rolex Awards for Enterprise, who are being honored in New Delhi, India, on November 27. This profile looks at the work of 2012 Laureate Sergei Bereznuk, director of the Phoenix Fund, a small environmental NGO in Russia. Bereznuk and his team of six people are carrying out an impressive range of activities to preserve the endangered Siberian tiger over a territory of 64,000 square miles (166,000 square kilometers).
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This week, National Geographic magazine published extraordinary new images of wild Asiatic cheetahs in Iran. That National Geographic was able to photograph these rarest of cheetahs is testament to 11 years of conservation work by the Iranian Department of Environment. As the only country on Earth that has managed to keep this remarkable cat alive, Iran deserves to be congratulated. (Photo by Frans Lanting, from the November 2012 issue of National Geographic Magazine.)
Cartographic Diligence
Posted by Juan Valdes on October 23, 2012 One of the greatest advantages of living in the digital age is that geopolitical events, regardless of what remote corner of the planet they occur, are posted on the web within minutes if not hours after they happen. Sometimes pivotal events occur in little-known places (to most Americans) such as Abbottabad, Pakistan—the site of the…
Can National Happiness Survive on an Organic Diet?
Posted by Dan Klotz on October 18, 2012 
The small kingdom of Bhutan is known for establishing the “gross national happiness” tool, a “multidimensional measurement” that looks at its citizens’ quality of life and well-being. Lately, it has been making waves for its government’s ambition to become the first 100% organic country in the world. Its only competition? The Pacific Island of…
National Geographic’s undercover investigation into how the global religious market for ivory is a driving force in the slaughter of thousands of African elephants has prompted extensive media coverage — and calls for an official inquiry — in the Philippines. Bryan Christy reported in the October 2012 issue of National Geographic that he traveled to the…
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The migration of globally endangered Egyptian vultures is under high-tech surveillance Eastern Turkey environmental organization KuzeyDoga celebrated September 1 International Vulture Awareness Day at Turkey’s first vulture restaurant in Igdir with another first for Turkey’s vultures. first vulture restaurantOn August 17, we started satellite-tracking globally endangered Egyptian vultures for the first time in Turkey, in collaboration with Turkey’s Ministry of Forestry…
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We live in a beautiful world. For generations, tribal peoples have been the guardians of their diverse habitats - tundra, sea-ice, mountains, deserts, oceans and prairies; for most, land and life are inextricably linked. Earth is the bedrock of their lives, the provider of food and shelter, the sacred burial ground of their ancestors and…
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“REDD is the new beast in the forest,” said Patrick Anderson of the Forest Peoples Programme in Indonesia here at Climate Change Mitigation with Local Communities and Indigenous peoples workshop in Cairns, Australia. Deforestation gobbles up an area the size of Greece (13 million hectares) every year. As if that loss wasn’t bad enough, it…
The cherry trees are blooming in Washington. Tuesday, March 27, 2012, marks 100 years since First Lady Helen Taft and the Japanese ambassador’s wife, Viscountess Iwa Chinda, planted the first two trees. No photographs of the event exist, and newspaper accounts were sketchy. But historical records offer a picture of what happened that day and how it came about.
“Planning is not part of our culture. You just get up in the morning and do what you need to do for the day,” said Marilyn Wallace of the Kuku Nyungka ‘mob’ (aboriginal nation) in northern Queensland, Australia. “Bama,” people caring for their local territory, is an important part of aboriginal culture and identity,…
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It may seem strange to suggest that the motivation behind our global economies, conflicts, cultures, and politics can be summed up within the mindset of the herdsman on the grassy steppe. But then again, the largest contiguous empire in human history was created by one of those nomads, and his name was Chinggis (Genghis) Khan.
Tiger Poachers Get Stiff Sentences
Posted by David Robinson on March 9, 2012 
Two men received substantial prison sentences after being convicting of poaching in Thailand earlier this year. One convicted tiger poacher, a Vietnamese citizen, received four years in prison; the other, a Thai national, received five—the most severe punishment for wildlife poaching ever given in Thailand. The men had been convicted in Thai court on February 19.…
Cute – but endangered – The Lions of Gir
Posted by International League of Conservation Photographers on March 5, 2012 
After having spent an amazing time in the vicinity of this incredible animal, I only hope that the right people will change their mind and give these lions a chance, so that we once again can see them roam freely as they should – Uri Golman
