5.6.26

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome. This is Marsha from Radioli and today I will
be reading National Geographic magazine dated April twenty twenty six,
which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
is a reading service intended for people who are blind
or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
printed material. Please join me now for the continuation of

(00:23):
the series I began last time, entitled The National Geographic
thirty three Ewan McGregor Adventure in long Way Home, the
latest installment of Ewan MacGregor's epic motorcycle travel series. The
actor found himself in Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago, almost at

(00:47):
the north Pole. It was far from a tourist idol.
Coal mining has left a scar on the terrain. Nearby,
glaciers are retreating, and just as a capper leaving camp
to use the bathroom required to say an armed guard
to ward off polar bears. Despite all that, MacGregor gazed
out at the surrounding tundra with genuine wonder. The journey

(01:09):
to Stalbard was more than two decades in the making.
In two thousand and four, fresh off filming the Star
Wars trilogy that rocked his stardom to New Heights, MacGregor
climbed onto his BMW motorcycle and set out to circumnavigate
the globe, embracing the beautiful, the ugly and everything in between.

(01:30):
That trip, taken alongside fellow actor Charlie Boormann, became Long
Way Round, the first of four TV documentary series. It
also marked the birth of his second career as an adventurer,
offering unfiltered views of the world around him. We're encouraging
people to go out into the world and look at it,
McGregor says, especially these days when everybody's becoming more and

(01:53):
more attached to looking down into our phones. Between tidally
packaged itineraries for social media consumption and worries about issues
like sustainability, travel today can be tough. To all of this,
MacGregor offers a rousing counter argument, there's an amazing sense
of excitement when you're out of your own comfort zone

(02:14):
or your own cultural experience. Long Way Round, in which
MacGregor and Boorman traveled from London across Asia and all
the way to New York City, was followed by their
journey along the length of Africa in two thousand and
seven's Long Way Down. Then thirteen years later they rode
from Patagonia to Los Angeles in long Way Up. For

(02:35):
Long Way Home. The pair covered some seven thousand miles
through seventeen European countries, stopping at a reconstructed Viking village
and visiting a paragliding center in the Alps. Rarely has
anyone so joyously celebrated the active exploration in all its
exhilarating and messy glory. This is especially true of the

(02:56):
visits connected to MacGregor's ongoing partnership with UNISEF. I just
thought they raised money for kids who were in famine
situations or natural disasters. McGregor says. UNISEF does do these things,
but viewers of the long Way series get a much
wider view of unisef's work, from a rock climbing program
for at risk kids in Kazakhstan to a rehabilitation center

(03:21):
for child soldiers in Uganda. One such stop from Long
Way Round at a center for orphaned and homeless children
in Mongolia led MacGregor to adopt his daughter, jamyon now
twenty four. The show's reach and popularity has given UNISEF
the chance to put children their stories and voices front

(03:43):
and center, says Philip Goodwin, CEO of UNICEF UK. One
of MacGregor's inspirations for Long Way Round was writer Ted
Simon's classic motorcycle odyssey Jupiter Travels. Simon once wrote, the
challenge was to lay myself open to everybody and everything
that came my way. The prize was to change and

(04:04):
grow big enough to feel one with the whole world.
It's a gospel. Mac gregor has now spread to a generation.
Outside a fishing hut in Norway, he and Boorman encountered
a young man on a motorcycle journey of his own.
He said, I used to lay in my dad's lap
watching you too, and that's why I got a bike.
MacGregor remembers that makes you feel terribly old, but it

(04:26):
was also a cool moment. This by Brett Martin. Next
Catherine Zealand, creator the roboticist designing tech that keeps us moving.
Growing up, Catherine Zealand loved taking mother daughter hikes years
after declining health kept her mom off the trail. The

(04:46):
former Google staffer took an interest in mobility focused wearable tech.
Now her company's Skip is about to deliver its first
robotic outerwear pants for the ark Cherix brand that provide
torque at the knee to aid uphill hiking, boosting leg
power by forty percent. There are a step toward products

(05:08):
that could help sufferers of movement disorders like Parkinson's. Before
her mom died, Zealand says she tried a prototype climbing
four flights of stairs. She hadn't done that in more
than thirty years. Next, visionary Daniel ped pedra hitha up
the botanists rescuing in dangered orchids from extinction in the

(05:31):
mountains above Mediyine, Columbia. Daniel pedra Hita is building an
orchid Noah's Ark. Once a hobbyist grower, he's now launching
seed sharing initiatives with communities across Latin America, helping return
some of the three thousand plus species represented in his
collection to areas affected by deforestation, wildfires, and flower poaching.

(05:55):
Last year, he opened Alma del Bosque with an immense
pavilioned house twenty five thousand plants. He clones rare species
there and harvests microproscopic seeds by the millions so that
nothing slips past us. He says, so that we don't
allow any plant to go extinct. This by Alexandra Marvar.

(06:16):
Next Paolo Fanchuri Adventure The Fishermen Saving octopuses with underwater museums.
Polo Fanchuri first made waves in Tuscany, where he lives,
in fishes and in global conservation circles, for thwarting illegal
trawlers by lowering dozens of marble sculptures onto the seafloor,

(06:36):
where his underwater museum wrecks nets that destroy sea grasses
and reefs. Now he's targeting overfishing of octopuses. Working with
local students. He's commissioning artful terra cotta pods and dropping
them by the thousands over fishing grounds, where they'll entice
octopuses that otherwise seek shelter in fishermen's plastic traps. The

(06:58):
more we throw in the sea fund, Schuly says, the
more octopuses we save. This by Brian Kevin. Next, Visionaries
Idris and Sabrina Elba The power couple with a new
vision for sustainable development. Sherbro Island, a tropical outpost of
farmers and fishermen nestled in the crook of Sierra Leone's

(07:20):
arching Atlantic coastline is about the size of Chicago, but
its population of forty thousand wouldn't even fill Wrigley Field.
Electrical power and wireless internet are scares. Fishermen can't refrigerate
their catches long enough to sell them on the mainland,
and farmers often lack the expertise and equipment to harvest

(07:41):
much more than they need to survive. But Sherbro Island
has some enviable resources, including miles of unblemished beaches and lagoons,
as well as an abundance of replenishable fresh water. One
other invaluable asset the support of Golden Globe winning British
actor Idris Elba and his wife, Canadian model Sabrina Elba.

(08:02):
The couple see an opportunity there to marry ecological sustainability
with economic growth in a way they hope can be
a template for development projects across Africa and perhaps help
rewrite a whole continence narrative. Iris's father is from Sierra Leone,
Sabrina's mother is from Somalia, and growing up, Sabrina says

(08:24):
there were particular stigmas attached with being African. She remembers
seeing ads that seem to show abject people waiting for
a hand out. We wanted to see Africa represented the
way that we knew it to be, She says. We
wanted to change the story telling. Her husband, known for
the baritone potency he brings to Vestige t V dramas

(08:45):
like Luther and The Wire, along with films last year's
critically acclaimed thriller A House of Dynamite, first heard about
Sherbro Island years ago. A close family friend had tried
to convince him it would become a world class holiday destination.
At that juncture, I was just like, oh, okay, that
sounds interesting, says Idras fifty three, who co owns a

(09:08):
wine bar in London's King's Cross neighborhood. Like maybe I'll
build a night club. Maybe he built some tourism. He
made a mental note to visit some day. He got
the opportunity in twenty nineteen, while he and Sabrina now
thirty seven, were in Sierra Leone touring small family farms
as part of their ambassadorial roles with the International Fund

(09:29):
for Agricultural Development i FAD. It was during that trip
Idra says that he had something of an epiphany he'd
been venturing into philanthropy as his celebrity grew, supporting childhood
education and hunger relief programs in Africa, as well as
campaigning on behalf of at risk youths in the United Kingdom,

(09:49):
work for which he was recently knighted. But on that trip,
the ebre Elbas saw an opportunity to build something more
enduring and meaningful than a fancy vacation spot, and to
reframe the conversation, Sabrina says, from one of aid to
one of investment. Soon after, the couple launched the Elba
Hope Foundation, a way of bringing all of their philanthropic

(10:12):
endeavors under one umbrella, including an initiative to help empower
small scale farmers on Sherbrough and across Sierra Leone. Among
other things, the program involved guidance unsustainable farming methods and
resources to help cocoa and cashew farmers form co operatives
and access credit. Building that kind of capacity isn't a

(10:34):
matter of cutting checks, says Marsha Reid, the foundation's executive director,
but of time and training and education and investment. That
early focus on agriculture was a natural extension of the
elba's work with IPHAD, which had given them a master class,
Sabrina says, in how to support farming that doesn't damage

(10:54):
the planet, that protects rural people, that allows them to
have a means and away to economically support themselves. But
the scope of their ambitions for Sherbro Island has only
continued to grow. Last year, the elba's commitment to the
island took a huge step forward with the launch of
a three year initiative called the Hope Power Project to

(11:18):
electrify and wirelessly connect the entire island. They're doing it
by joining up with some deep pocketed corporate partners, brands
that Idras says gave the right answers when he asked,
do you want me to just wave a flag and
get some likes or are you interested in our ideas.
Octopus Energy, for instance, one of the UK's largest energy providers,

(11:39):
is building a wind and solar farm, including five wind
turbines and training Sherbro Islanders how to operate them. Service Now,
an AI workflow company for which Idris is a spokesperson,
is helping finance solar and clean water infrastructure. The Hope
Power Project will change lives on the island and the

(12:00):
Elba's see it as laying the groundwork for further green
development in the years to come, eventually transforming Sherbro into
a self supporting, renewably powered echo city. Do we want
to continue throwing concrete up and putting callouses on our world?
Or do we want to build structures and cities that

(12:20):
actually nourish our world? Idris asks, what are we going
to teach the next generation about how to build and develop?
And can Chubro be a blueprint for that? He knows
how ambitious it sounds, but with ambition, focus and commitment,
he says, you become more than just this celebrity putting
their name to something. You become a member of a
working engine, an engine powerful enough maybe to help a

(12:44):
small rural island tell a whole new African story next.
Louis van On the app developer breaking down language barriers
around the world. When Duolingo co founder and CEO Louis
van On realized his gamified language learning app had become
a teaching tool in refugee camps, he knew he could

(13:06):
do more to help His company waived fees for over
one hundred thirty five thousand displaced and low income students
on its engine English proficiency tests used by thousands of
North American and European universities for foreign admissions, and partnered
with the u N Refugee Agency on Admissions Counseling. Fan

(13:27):
An who emigrated from Guatemala to the United States as
a teen, says that facilitating global migration is honestly not
what we thought we could be doing, but the app's
free course offerings dramatically expanded last year with an AI
assist or, empowering those who need language learning most. Next,
Lauren eat Well Visionary, the engineer reducing emissions by giving

(13:51):
cargo ships wings. A former competitive sailor, Lauren eat Well
led the design of steel and fiberglass sales that can
be retro fitted onto cargo ships. Her wind wings function
like vertical airplane wings, generating thrust that can cut a
vessel's fuel usage by a third. Last September, the first

(14:12):
all new ship affixed with the sails completed its maiden voyage,
and more new billed vessels with sails are on order.
That's big. The shipping industry accounts for roughly three percent
of global greenhouse gas emissions. If you can make a
difference there, Eatwell says, you can make a real difference. Next,
Bourges Ousland and Vincent Colliard, the duo skiing across ice

(14:38):
caps to measure their decline. Last June, Norwegian National Geographic
Explorer Burg Ousland pulled his French adventuring partner Vincent Colliard,
out of a crevice on Canada's Ellesmere Island, miraculously unscathed.
The mishap nearly ruined the sixteenth and longest expedition of
their Ice Legacy Project, a quest to ski across the

(15:01):
world's twenty largest ice fields, gathering first hand data on
ice sheet fractures that satellites can't. Ice samples they collect
help glaciologists gauge climate change effects and places humans rarely glimpse.
They have four ice caps to go each no less daunting.
We keep on doing it, Colliard says, for the sake

(15:22):
of what's at stake. Next, Martin Wikelski, the biologists discovering
new wildlife threats from space. The satellite born receiver that
National Geographic Explorer Martin Wikelski's team sent into orbit last
fall is something of a protector. It allows Icarus Wakelski's

(15:43):
project to track the movement, behavior and health of animals
from insects to songbirds two ungulates fitted with the tiniest
of sensors. Wokelski, director of Germany's Mock's Plank Institute of
Animal Behavior, calls it nothing less than a New Earth
observation system, and it can solve mysteries that surround declining

(16:03):
species by capturing critical data about, say, migration routes and
habitat corridors, as well as signs of distress among populations
otherwise invisible to researchers. A companion's satellite is set to
launch this spring, and Wakelski expects to have up to
ten thousand animals tagged by year end, the longer term

(16:23):
goal ten times that next. Margaret wickens Pierce, the cartographer
re envisioning how maps communicate indigenous knowledge. The river that
most contemporary maps label Mississippi, a French adaptation of an
Objebue name, is undoubtedly is undoubtedly one of the world's

(16:45):
most charted. Not incidentally, it's also one of the most manipulated, levied, diverted, dredged,
and damned to control flooding and ease passage for commercial traffic.
Most contemporary maps maps of ITA twenty three hundred fifty
mile course reflect all that engineering, but cartographer Margaret Wickins Peers,

(17:07):
who works out of her home studio in coastal Maine,
is concerned with all those that maps don't show how
the Mississippi looked before the U. S. Army Corps of
Engineers reshaped it, and how Indigenous people living alongside it,
pasted and present, have adapted to its fluctuations in flood cycles.
Pierce believes that revealing those layers of understanding, amplifying Indigenous knowledge,

(17:32):
history and presence, can inspire us to more sustainably address
issues like habitat laws, aging infrastructure, and increasingly severe flooding.
It's why Pierce, a citizen Potawatomi tribal member and National
geographic explorer, is promoting a vision of an indigenised Mississippi
with a series of large scale map installations placed all

(17:55):
along it. The project, which she calls Mississippi Dialogues, is
a collaboration with tribal nations whose traditional territories include the river,
and it aims to correct what Pierce calls a pervasive
misunderstanding of the Mississippi as a line, a thing to
be crossed or traveled up and down, rather than a
living artery at the heart of many homelands. What we

(18:17):
see now is all Army Corps maps, she says. We
just see the locks and dams, the ways that the
river is controlled and paved, and this map is opening
up an unpaved river. The product is a high visibility
example of an indigenous led movement, both within and outside
the field of cartography, to challenge what generations of map makers, historians,

(18:39):
and policy makers have chosen to prioritize and reclaim what
they've left out. But Pierce's work is no simple rebuttal
It's an artful reminder that maps can be more than
scaled diagrams. Hers are repositories of stories and memories. They
are text rich with narratives that oddspool a few lines
at a time across soft washes of color, and they

(19:03):
link eons of history, showing modern highways, winding past details
from creation stories, and sights of nineteenth century colonial violence.
Pecking all that into a legible map requires painstaking effort.
A map that she recently finished of Inuit homelands in Canada,
commissioned by the University of Maine took more than two

(19:25):
hundred drafts to complete. That's not the only way in
which Pierce's work rewards patients. Her Mississippi project is seven
years in the making. Years she spent visiting tribal communities, elders,
and culture bearers all along the river, collecting stories and
insights about river stewardship that she weaves into the maps.

(19:45):
She seeks permission to learn and to share Indigenous place
names considered cultural property, though some knowledge remains reserved for
Indigenous communities, and her maps might encompass the homelands of
dozens of peoples, even their own backyard. Involves significant legwork.
To make a map depicting place names in the Panabscott language,

(20:07):
Perce spent three years visiting sites across Maine with Carol Dana,
a language teacher and elder from the panab Scott nation.
Dana praises the cartographer's way of working, which he says
is about more than just relabeling, trying to make people
more aware of the place names that we named them originally.
Dana says, for us to see it and experience it,

(20:28):
it heals us. Increasingly. It's not just tribal nations and
organizations embracing this approach. Last year, Pierce became the first
ever cartography focused recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, an
eight hundred thousand dollars prize popularly known as the Genius Grant.
It will help fund the Mississippi Project's first two installations

(20:51):
of an Envisioned fourteen, to be put up as soon
as this fall, in a city park in Minnesota and
at a nature preserve in Illinois. Pierce knows others look
to her work as a blueprint for what indigenous cartography
can be, but she rejects the label, believing that map
making is infinitely expandable and flexible, with many means of

(21:14):
mapping indigenous ways of life. The more I hear the
idea of indigenous cartography pushed into a corner and labeled
as a particular way of mapping, she says, I just
really want to smash that open and show people that
it's an entire world of possibility. This by Joseph Lee.

(21:34):
Next rowheat Chandra the Computer Scientists Saving Lives with AI.
Former Tech executive roheat Chandra was new to health care
when he took aim at one of its biggest challenges.
Sepsis an over aggressive immune reaction to infection that kills
up to a thousand Americans daily and for which there's
no test. Chandra partnered with a clinical team to design

(21:57):
an AI system that can aid in diagnosis by factoring
a patient's vitals, alerting staff to potential infection and the
time we need for antibiotics. In twenty twenty five, the
AI tool rolled out to twenty five hospitals in Florida
and Ohio. Next up, Chandra is building similar AI recognition

(22:17):
platforms to reduce hospital readmissions and automate outreach for cancer screenings. Next.
Aliya Bot, the actress putting animal welfare in the spot Life.
Ali A Bot grew up in Mumbai surrounded by animals,
in large part because her sister Shaheen wouldn't stop bringing

(22:37):
home stray kittens. There are millions in India, and they
often arrived at the Bot household in terrible condition, starving
or with infections. At one point, their mother attempted to
stop the parade of ailing kittens, so the girls would
smuggle their patients into their room and hide them there
as they convalesced. It was compulsive, almost Bot says my

(22:58):
heart opened up very young that love of animals would
stay with her into adulthood. Today, as one of Bollywood's
most recognizable actresses with almost ninety million Instagram followers, she
is using her massive reach to highlight animal and environmental
welfare through film projects, a series of children's books for
the next generation, and campaigns to take action. I was

(23:21):
in this position where I started to question whether my
voice had quality, she says. I said, Okay, let me
go to something that I feel very passionate about, and
that is animals. Bot's tactics are creative, varied, sometimes even
cat centric. Eternal Sunshine, the production company she founded in
twenty twenty one, has a logo featuring two cats. Bott

(23:44):
was an executive producer on Poacher, the twenty twenty four
hit mini series based on a real elephant poaching investigation
in India. Eternal Sunshine also has partnered with the Echo
Film Festival All Living Things to encourage filmmakers to turn
their lens on the environment. Stories have such an amazing
way to impact our minds, Bot says, once you tell

(24:07):
a story, it's there forever. Stories can have an especially
profound impact on children, and Bot is authoring a series
of children's books, the Adventures of ed Amana, about a
girl named Aliyah and her adopted dog Ed who go
on adventures to help animals. The first book is called
Ed Finds a Home. This effort builds on her successful

(24:29):
sustainable children's clothing and product label, also called ed Amama.
Kids have a natural excitement about animals, Bot said, describing
how her young daughter Raja points out every dog when
they're on drives. She hopes to help children hold on
to that enthusiasm as she has another inventive initiative, me Wardrobe,

(24:53):
esue Wardrobe or Misu, a concept where Bot sells her
clothes and those of other celebrities on the real cel
resale platform dulce V to extend the shelf life of garments,
thereby reducing landfill waste and helping the wider ecosystem of
circular fashion in India thrive, says dulca VI founder Kamal

(25:15):
Hiernan Dani. In doing so, Bot is also channeling funds
into a constellation of charities, with proceeds benefiting organizations like
the Bombay Natural History Society and Nature Conservancy. When she
doesn't contribute funding, Bot contributes visibility through Coexist, the online
platform she launched almost a decade ago to amplify the

(25:38):
efforts of eco friendly companies and charities. Bot does not
claim expertise in the many issues she champions. By normalizing learning, questioning,
and gradual change, she makes conservation and sustainability feel approachable, accessible,
and possible, says Dorita de Suza, who works with Bot
on her philanthropic endeavors. Her contagious curiosity is a through

(26:02):
line to all her initiatives, and it's complemented by her
compulsive empathy, undiluted since childhood. This by Lauren Larsen. Next,
Charudut Mishra, the conservationists saving wild cats in war zones.
Last June, India and Pakistani diplomats sat at a table,

(26:23):
just weeks after their country's traded missile strikes. Thanks in
part to national geographic explorer Charudut Mishra, executive director of
the Snow Leopard Trust, with leaders from nine other nations,
including often skirmishing Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, they reckon they re
committed to protecting nearly sixty thousand square miles of habitat.

(26:46):
Mishra's assistants negotiating cross border access also helps enable crucial science,
including a twenty twenty five first of its kind snow
leopard genomic survey. It gives me hope, he says, that
with nature, we can agree and come together. Next, Mark Rober,
the YouTuber motivating his big audience to make big impacts.

(27:09):
More than seventy two million YouTube subscribers thrilled to the
glitter bombs, squirrel obstacle courses, and other wild experiments of
former Nassau engineer Mark Rober. A fifteen ton jell O
pool is why you click, he says, but now you're
learning about the scientific method. In twenty twenty five, he

(27:29):
launched a free STEM curriculum for schools, and he's leveraging
viewer's report to tackle global problems. Last August, his hashtag
team Water campaign with YouTuber mister Beast raised forty million
dollars for solar wells, rainwater harvesting tech, and other clean
water infrastructure worldwide, much of it a few bucks at

(27:51):
a time from newly inspired kids. This concludes readings from
National Geographic Magazine for today. Your reader has been Marsha.
Thanks you for listen, Keep on listening, and have a
great day.