How to Read Ancient Mayan

By: | September 14, 2016

img_0515In this month’s issue of National Geographic, I tell a story of an ancient dynasty of Maya kings who made perhaps the region’s best attempt at creating what we might call an empire. It’s a twisting tale of political maneuvering and ambition unlike any other in the Pre-Columbian world.

It’s actually kind of incredible that we have the story at all. The reason we do is because the Maya were the only culture in the Americas to devise a complex form of writing. Originally, archeologists thought the bizarre scribbles on the sides of pots or walls was either pictograms – more of a stick figure cartoon – like the Mexica (Aztecs) used or else maybe a series of spiritual astronomical images – more of a drug-addled vision quest. But it wasn’t until the 1970s and 80s that experts realized that these bizarre pictures were neither, rather they were a complex form of writing that I could theoretically use to write this post.

So what is this form of writing? Isn’t it just a bunch of squiggly lines and wacky pictures? Well yes. And no. As I have written before on this blog, our own form of writing began in a similar way – a series of pictures of swords and oxen and other images. And just like the Maya, ancient peoples in the fertile crescent started adding rules and sounds to their collection until we ended up with the modern alphabet you are reading now. Continue reading →

Market Day

By: | September 13, 2016
Believe me, this is way less icky than some of the other offerings.
Nothing goes to waste at the Tomohon market.

Change is good. And today, here on LWON, I’m announcing a personal change. I’m coming out. As a vegetarian.

Some of you may be surprised that I’m not one already. With my career focus on animals and conservation, and my adoration for all creatures great and small, it might seem wrong for me to eat cows and chickens and pigs. Once, a snotty 10-year-old kid at a talk I was giving asked if I was vegetarian and, when I said no, he chided me for this conflict of interest. (Really, kid? I could just hear his mother’s voice coming out of his mouth. This was in Seattle, after all.) I was annoyed and kind of wanted to punch him in the nose. But he was kind of right that I was mixing my messages. Love and respect animals, I was saying, but steak sure is tasty.

Most living things are food to some other living thing somewhere in the world. We hunt because our ancestors hunted, and because animals are nutritious. In many parts of the world, meat is a vital part of the human diet. Animal consumption is deeply cultural, usually healthful, and often celebratory.

Continue reading →

A Letter to Myself: Summer is Survivable

By: | September 12, 2016
Photo of a drawing of a child playing on the beach
Remember this? Sometimes summer is ok.

A letter to myself, to be read in spring of 2017, when it starts getting hot again.

Dear Helen:

I know. The weather report is scary. It’s going to be in the 80s this week. Could be 85 by Friday. It means the worst: Summer. Is. Coming.

Yeah, I know. Summer is the worst. Washington, D.C. does not do summer gracefully. Washington, D.C. does summer sweatily, grumpily, heat-island-ly. Your apartment in particular does summer like a solar oven, and yeah, the air conditioning pretty much has to run from March to October without a break. Once you even had to run it on Christmas Day, but that was because you insisted on making a pot roast even though it was sunny and over 40℉.

But here’s the thing: Summer is survivable.

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | September 10, 2016

14541876022_da5913d74b_cSeptember 5 – September 9, 2016

Death weighed heavy on LWON this week — the death of a cardinal, the death of a Laotian activist, the death of yellow cedars, the probable death of a fox, and the looming death of a space probe.

On Monday, guest Rebecca Boyle took us from the tiniest tragedy in her backyard all the way to a neighboring solar system. Will we find intelligent life there? No one knows, but maybe “intelligence” isn’t quite what we’re seeking.

Two years ago, Michelle told us the story of the English teacher who helped Laotian organizer Sombath Somphone transform himself from subsistence farmer into environmental leader. This week Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to visit the country, so a redux seemed particularly fitting.

Michelle took Wednesday too. On an isolated Alaskan archipelago, where climate change has been particularly hard on yellow cedars, scientists are finding ways to turn the story of their deaths into music.

On Thursday, Ann answered that age-old question: What does the fox say? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding! Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow! Joff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff!

And on Friday, Jessa introduced us to the animated series that helped her family and many others bond with a hopeful little European spacecraft, a spacecraft that now has to say a final goodbye.

*******

Photo by Oliver Truckle, via Flickr

Rosetta and Philae: Plucky siblings for life

By: | September 9, 2016

rosettaOn September 30, the Rosetta orbiter will make a controlled collision with Comet 67P/C-G. It is not designed for landing, so this is the last we will hear from it. This date also marks an end to a happy period for my family that started in 2013 when my son was just four years old and the European Space Agency released the first of its “Once upon a time…” cartoons about the mission.

In the animation series, Rosetta is depicted as a calm pilot, older sister to the lander Philae. In the voice of an American grandfather, the narrator takes us through all of the latest developments in the mission as if we are sitting on his knee and he is reading a bedtime story. Historical context appears in the reading material the pair packed for the long journey, and other space probes are retroactively anthropomorphized, given relationships — grandfather, cousin — to Rosetta and Philae. Continue reading →

I Know What the Fox Says

By: | September 8, 2016

14541876022_da5913d74b_cAcross the street are two houses with two small yards, connected so they look like one, shaded by trees, one of which has a rope looped in it. The little kids come out of both houses, run through the shade into the dapple-spots of sunlight, disappear back into the shade, grab the rope and swing, climb up into the tree and perch like little panthers. Sometimes they sing. And one twilight, running into and out of the light, what they sang was “What does the fox say?”

The song was popular a few years ago but I’d never listened to it.  I went inside and googled it.  It’s an unsettlingly weird song by a Norwegian — what is it with those far northerners and their pale skins and light eyes and strange stories? The song is about a guy who knows that dogs say woof and elephants say toot but doesn’t know what the fox says; so a bunch of people dressed in animal costumes dancing in a woods tell him what the fox says, which is, among other things, Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding! Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow! Joff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff! You get the idea, they’re making it up, they don’t know what the fox says either.  These sounds, coming out of the dark from kids in trees across the street, Fraka-kaka-kaka-kaka-kow!, were also unsettlingly weird. Continue reading →

This is the Sound of a Forest Changing

By: | September 7, 2016

IMG_0437The Alexander Archipelago, a 300-mile-long sweep of islands off the southeastern coast of Alaska, is known for its isolation, its heavy rain, and its thick, ancient forests of hemlock, pine, spruce and yellow-cedar. Yellow-cedar, which John Muir called a “truly noble tree,” has long been prized for its fine-grained, butter-colored wood. But over the past century, as average temperatures have risen, shrinking spring snow cover has exposed more and more of the species’ shallow roots to freezing temperatures, and yellow-cedars have been dying off. Because the tree was and is used for so many human purposes—canoe paddles, ceremonial carvings, even bridges—the disruption is both ecological and cultural.

Ecologist Lauren Oakes wanted to know how the rest of the forest was responding to this long upheaval, so in the summers of 2011 and 2012, she and her field crew sampled forest stands in the archipelago, comparing tree size and species composition at different stages of yellow-cedar decline. In the south, where the decline is most advanced, she found that while some very old yellow-cedars are hanging on, there are few young trees—and those are usually outcompeted by other species such as western hemlock and Sitka spruce.

Oakes had glimpsed the future of the forest, and she wanted to communicate what she’d seen—especially to the people whose lives are still shaped by yellow-cedar. So after she summarized her results in the language of science—bar graphs, charts, and scatter plots—she decided to use the language of music, too.


Continue reading →

Redux: The Long Legacy of a Good Deed

By: | September 6, 2016

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Sombath Somphone, a respected civil-society leader in Laos, was abducted in Vientiane in December 2012 and has not been seen since. As President Obama becomes the first sitting U.S. president to visit Laos, we revisit this post about Somphone, his disappearance, and a long-ago turning point in his life.

Two years ago this week, a well-known environmental organizer named Sombath Somphone was detained at a traffic stop in downtown Vientiane, Laos, and driven away in a white pickup. He has not been seen or heard from since. You can read a lot more about Somphone, his work in Laos, and his wife’s remarkable efforts to call his abductors to account in my story for National Geographic. 

Right now, though, I’d like to tell you a story about his high-school English teacher.

Continue reading →