5.14.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome. This is Marsha for Radio I, and today I
will be reading National Geographic magazine dated April twenty twenty five,
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
the article I began last time, entitled The National Geographics

(00:24):
Bold Thinkers, Scientists, explorers and Scout Scholars. Paddy Gonia, the
activist making the outdoors a more welcoming space for the
queer community. The outdoors can sometimes feel hostile for the
queer community. That's a conclusion when Wily reached as a
kid at a summer camp run by the Boy Scouts,

(00:44):
I was indoctrinated into this militaristic, masculine outdoor system of
you have to be strong to survive. Wiley recalls to
day that kid raised under a stifling vision of the
outdoors needs of movement built on a very different story,
and does so in heels. After going viral in twenty
eighteen for hiking in six inch heeled boots, the world's

(01:05):
premiere backpecking queen was born Patty Gonia, an activist in
Drag who's striving to make LGBTQ people feel more at
home in the outdoors. I think the narrative writ large
for the queer community is to run to big cities
for acceptance, says Patty, who uses she her pronouns in drag.
And I feel like I ran the other way into

(01:26):
the woods, Patty recalls from her home in bend Ore, Oregon,
while out on a hike around a favorite pond. She's
known to perform in lavish costumes, some made from un
upcycled camping tents. Though her approach to climate change awareness
is certainly novel, she's not a novelty act. Drag queens
have always been at the forefront of community organizing and protesting,

(01:49):
Patty says, a point reinforced by parks and Recreation star
Nick Offerman, who invited her to perform at last year's
Netflix Is a Joke festival in Los Angeles as part
of a night of comedy devoted to inspiring action against
climate change. Patty's set included an extended riff on the
movie Finding Nemo in the male clownfish's ability to change

(02:12):
its sex, the health of our ecosystem is no particularly
sexy topic, Offerman says, nor is it easily made the
subject of a comedy set, which makes Patty's expertise unique
and impressive. Patty's activism has taken her to the White
House and to Yosemite National Park, where she has been
helping organized pride celebrations for park employees for several years.

(02:35):
In two thousand twenty three, she released a music video
with celebrated cellist Yo Yoma and Indigenous trans musician Quinn
christoff Christofferson shot in Kenai Fiord's National Park in Alaska
to bring awareness to the steadily retreating Exit Glacier. The
place has deep meaning for the person behind the drag persona.

(02:56):
It's where Wiley scattered his father's ashes after his death
from cancer several years ago. While the reviews he had
a complicated relationship with his father, but memorializing him while
on a kayaking trip in his dad's home state provided
some closure. Perhaps in the same way, Patty's advocacy work
on behalf of Brave Trails, a nonprofit that offers a

(03:18):
summer camp and backpacking trips for queer youth. Can here
heal old wounds on the day we talk, Patty remains
focused on the path ahead, trying to take pain and
turn it into something different. She says, I think that's
what queer people always try to do. By Mickey Rapkin. Next,
Gabriella Hurst, the designer bringing climate consciousness to high fashion.

(03:41):
A visitor to the Manhattan office of Gabriella Hurst doesn't
need to peruse the impeccably well made clothes to spot
proof of the fashion designer's impact. Those recycled cardboard hangars
you see, Hurst says, pointing we were one of the
first to develop them. Her abhorrence of the plastic kind
owes to its frequent fate. The land to Day, the

(04:01):
designer who grew up on a ranch in Uruguay and
launched her eponymous brand a decade ago, is a prestige
player in the world of fashion and embodies the quiet
luxury movement. Even more distinctively. Herst, who has served for
three change making years atop the Presian luxury House Clothing,
is regarded as perhaps the most climate conscious designer in fashion.

(04:23):
She does more than merely buzzy things like using dead
stock fabrics, which she does, of course. She uses her
position as a business leader to immerse herself in the
global climate conversation. In twenty twenty three, she spoke at
COP twenty eight with environmental and political heavyweights such as
a US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Carey, discussing

(04:45):
the promise of fusion energy. Sure, she understands the drape
of a sweater, but she might prefer to discuss her
quite nuanced opinions on alternative energy sources. Thanks to HER's activism,
consumers are associating the label with far more than a
flawless cashmere coat or her iconic Nina bag. The ideology

(05:06):
is beginning to take precedence. The most rewarding kind of anecdotes,
hers says, are when I hear the clients are buying
these really beautiful pieces, and when our retailed team tries
to wrap them up in this beautiful packaging, they say no,
thank you, because I know Gabby would prefer us not
to take the extra packaging. By Carrie Button next Arlow Parks,

(05:28):
the singer songwriter using music to campaign for mental health.
The London born musician and poet, Arlow Parks makes indie
pop with the warmth and tenderness of folk and since
her twenty twenty one debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams. She's
become known for songs that are so strikingly candid and
familiar that they can seem like diorama boxes filled with

(05:50):
life's tiniest moments. I just have my notebook for every record,
she says, and I'm collecting fragments and phrases and nuggets
from my life, and that's where the music comes. Because
her music is so possessed by interior life, it can
naturally seem to yearn for a reckoning with our collective
mental health. Her twenty twenty single black Dog, for instance,

(06:11):
was written for a close friend who she feared was
spiraling into depression. As she explains it, the reason why
your moved to write something like this is to be
kind of like, is anyone out there? Is anyone else
experiencing this? In this way, granting solace to the lost
and disheartened has since become part of a larger personal mission.

(06:32):
Shortly after the release of Black Dog, Parks twenty four
announced that she was working with a Campaign Against Living Miserably,
a London based suicide prevention charity, and in twenty twenty
three she met with members of UNICEF's Youth Advisory Board
to write a poem later released on World Mental Health Day.
Last year, she pushed further into activism, becoming the organization's

(06:55):
youngest UK ambassador. I always knew that I wanted to
shift the focus from me and my music into something
that felt a little bit more expansive, using my privilege
and the position that I was in to exact change,
she says. While the world of her songs can be intimate,
even insular, she's finding that the work of a unice

(07:16):
of ambassador, navigating the effects of harm and giving voice
to those marked by it, has to exist on a
very large scale. Her first diplomatic trip took her to
Sierra Leone, where she shadowed a series of youth advocates,
sitting in on workshops and visiting support groups for addiction
and victims of child marriage. That was the most beautiful
thing to witness, she says, young girls learning to make

(07:39):
sanitary pads and then teaching their younger sisters and their
younger sister's friends. Ever the mpath, she sees herself as
a translator and a bullhorn for their stories. It's about
amplifying their voices and what they want the world to
know about the work. She says, I really wanted them
to speak through me. Parkes also intends for there to

(07:59):
be a chared of dimension to her music. I wanted
to feel like a soft place for people to land,
she explains. It's obviously the softness of the actual music
and the voice, but more than that, she says, she
wants to create a place for people to just be
and to think about who they are and how they
love to listen and respond by Sheldon Pierce next York

(08:23):
the Otherworldly Musician, offering a lesson in environmental pragmatism. York
always seems to inhabit an alternate universe, a dream like
space of the highest creative ambition, free from the constraints
that govern mere mortals, which makes it all the more
jarring when she injects her work with a dose of
cold reality. In January, she released a concert film shot

(08:44):
during her recent Cornucopia tour. The show featured signature York flourishes,
including giant psychedelic projections of fungi and the flashing of
an environmental manifesto, making an explicit appeal to the most
urgent issue of our time. The Paris climat acorn is
a modern utopia impossible to imagine, but overcoming our mental

(09:07):
challenges is the only way we can survive. Over Zoom,
one day last winter, she explained what she was getting at,
namely a reframing of what's possible. When we look at
the list of goals in the Paris Climate Accord, it
looks absolutely unreachable, she says. I think what we have
to do is set different goals that are reachable. While

(09:28):
b Yorke's artistic aims have consistently been lofty, her environmentalism
is grounded in practical concerns. She exists on the most
rarefied plane that a pop star can reach. For decades,
she's been a globally beloved visionary who can sell out arenas,
but she still operates with the spirit and principles of
an indie act from the nineties. Every other year, I

(09:49):
try to pick one thing that I will fight quite
hard for, she says. But I try to pick something
where it's actually possible to overturn. It's big enough that
it can matter, but small enough that you can make
a change. In the past two years, Byork fifty nine has
poured herself into the fight against commercial salmon farms in
her native Iceland, after a hole in one's farm's pen

(10:12):
allowed thousands of salmon to escape. There's a concern that
those fish may breed with native species or pass along
diseases and parasites, creating a potential ecological nightmare. Sometimes it's
been difficult to bridge a gap between gen z vegans
and like farmers who kill sheep every autumn to eat,
she says, But on this fish farming project, everyone is united.

(10:34):
To bring global awareness to the issue, she took an
unreleased song out of her archive and recruited Rosalia, the
Spanish pop star, to record vocals for it. Precedes. Proceeds
from the song, titled Oral, are now supporting several ongoing
lawsuits against the commercial fisheries. Next up Byorke is trying
to enlist environmental activists to petition French President Emmanuel ma

(11:00):
Conte to ban bottom trawling in the country's protected waters.
It's another seemingly modest goal with the potential to make
a tangible impact. I try to make the best of
the fact that I come from a very small country
that is very untouched, she says. Instead of doing ten things,
I try to do one thing properly and follow it
all the way to the end, not just be a

(11:21):
face on some campaign and show up at a cocktail
party and go home and not know what's going to
happen next. Carla Perez, the half breaking mountaineer helping climbers
with disabilities reach new heights. Carla Perez can feel the
difference when she crosses the invisible line that marks eighty
three hundred meters or roughly twenty seven thousand feet above

(11:43):
sea level. Before that wall, you still have a lot
of control over what you think and what you do,
she says. But when Perez forty two climbs higher, things change.
Her body responds sluggishly to her commands and there is
no reprieve from the cold or the deep exhaustion. That's
where the real test begins. Only five of the world's
fourteen eight thousand meter peaks exceed eighty three hundred meters Everest,

(12:07):
k two, Makalu, Kanchumadjunga, and Lotzi. Perez, a trailblazing mountaineer
from Ecuador, has so far summitted the first three without
the use of supplemental oxygen, and she plans to complete
the set climbing this way without the support system that
has helped make the highest peak in the world achievable

(12:28):
for generations of climbers is her preferred challenge. She Asha
helps others break their own boundaries through an accessibility project
called mas arad de Unatzima Beyond a Peak. The group
offers monthly outings into the mountains for Ecuadorians with disabilities,
in part to honor and uncle, who had cerebral palsy

(12:49):
which limited his opportunities to experience the outdoors. Always, when
I was climbing a mountain, I was thinking, oh my god,
he would love to be here. She says that joy
follows her from the highest reaches of her homeland to
the Himalaya and beyond. It's exploration of your body. Oh,
a fewer limits of the possibilities that you have, she
says about climbing unassisted into even thinner air and a

(13:12):
very deep connection for me with Mother Earth. The first
thing we do when we are born, she points out,
is breathe. Next. Alexis Nicole Nelson, the social media star
sharing the wonder of wild plants with a wider audience.
When she was younger. Alexis Nicole Nelson had friends who
didn't understand her passion for the outdoors. They pictured some

(13:32):
grizzled white, macho man, says Nelson, who today has millions
of followers on Tik Tok and as widely known as
the Black Forager, a witty hiking companion with dual degrees
in environmental science. In theater, she has become the perfect
guide for sharing deep knowledge about edible vegetation alongside everything
from lurp sugar, insect excretions and ulva and testinalis a

(13:56):
form of seaweed she likes to sprinkle on popcorn to
the race sist origins of trespassing laws by Lola Oga Nike. Next,
Yara Shahidi, the actress unpacking the psychology of optimism. What
does optimism mean to you right now? It's a question
that Yarat Shahdi, best known for her role as the
gen Z cool girl Zoe Johnson on the hit show

(14:20):
black Ish and its spin off Grown Ish, both produced
by ABC, which shares a parent company with National Geographics,
often asks at the beginning of her new podcast, The
Optimist Project, which wrestles with how to live a more
fulfilling life as suicide rates rise in the United States
and the world seems to wash in the anxiety inducing headlines.

(14:40):
It's a question that is become ever more urgent. But
when asked what optimism means to her Shahdi, twenty five,
who has no trouble speaking up, she's publicly condemned acts
of voter suppression and police brutality, pauses. For me. Optimism
is a belief in self, she says, and a real
belief that I am capable of hande whatever comes my way.

(15:02):
Over the years, her own outlook has been shaped, in
large part by plenty of profound conversations with the fascinating
people who have always surrounded her. Shahidi, a Harvard graduate,
has two brothers. One is an actor, the other works
in fashion. Her father, Afshin Shahdi, is an immigrant from
iran cinematographer and a former photographer for the late pop

(15:24):
star Prince. Her cousin is the rapper Nos. Her grandfather
was a black Panther discussions with those family members and
with a wide range of illustrious acquaintances were always so
stimulating that the actress and her mother, Carrie Shahiti, felt
compelled to bring that energy, both introspective and socially conscious

(15:44):
to a wider audience. We feel so fortunate to be
having these conversations, says Carrie, who was Shahedi's co producer.
But equally we felt the drive to make sure other
people had the opportunity to hear what we were hearing.
Launched late last year, the Optimist Project has already featured
Saturday Night Lives Ego Nuan din Tony Award winning actor

(16:06):
Courtney b Vance, and Lori Santos, a psychology professor whose
online class, The Science of well Being is Yale's most
popular course of all time. The medium is one that
comes naturally to Shihiti, who describes growing up in a
TV off household, explaining that her family preferred audio books
and radio programs. She gravitated toward audio because it feels

(16:28):
like a participatory medium. Your audience and your host have
to meet halfway, she says. You rely on the audience's
imagination to go on this journey, which may offer more
opportunities for personal exploration. When Shihiti has used her visibility
to encourage young people to vote and pursue careers in stem,
she's now inviting listeners to slow down and reflect in

(16:51):
those moments she thinks real change can occur. Oftentimes, it
feels like we're so bogged down by the day to
day of what our lives require that we don't have
as much space to say, let's take a step back
from schedules, from finances, from all these things that we
need to be thinking about all the time. To just
keep pushing forward, she says, what we need to do,

(17:11):
she believes, is talk about what quality of life means
to us. The actress may have different stressors than her listeners,
but Shihiti reflects on how young people today don't see
upward mobility as a given. Having to pour so much
thought into basic survival doesn't give your brain space to
think about, well, why are we living? She says, what

(17:31):
would make me excited to wake up the next day.
She acknowledges that this is a challenging moment for the
next generation of leaders. But with that comes in onslaught
a very inspired, very motivated young people, and honestly, we
need every voice. We need every person spoken like a
true optimist. Next, Don Cheedele, the acclaimed actor battling climate injustice,

(17:54):
one at risk community at a time. This past January,
as fires raged across Los ang Angelist Don Cheedele and
his wife, alongside tens of thousands of others in the region,
were forced to evacuate their home near the Pacific Palisades.
We brought some clothes and things that can't be replaced,
like pictures, paintings from our kids, and that was it,
he says. It was an unusually close to home crisis

(18:16):
for an actor and activists who has long been accustomed
to engaging with them farther afield as a good will
ambassador for the UN Environment Program and as a member
of the board of directors of the Solutions Project, which
has supported more than three hundred community organizations fighting for
climate justice in forty five states. In a way, the fires,

(18:36):
which consumed working class homes and mansions with equal rapacity,
were a reminder that climate emergencies don't stop to check race, ethnicity,
or bank accounts. It's a very stark demonstration of the
egalitarian nature of a disaster. In the beginning, Cheetle says,
putting a special emphasis on the last words at the end,
we'll see because we know that in situations like these,

(19:00):
those who are most vulnerable and have the least representation
are the ones who are going to be most damaged
and have the least ability to bounce back. It is
this clear eyed perspective that makes Cheedle sixty a strong
advocate for human rights and climate justice. With The Solution's
Project in particular, he continues to highlight racial and gender inequalities.

(19:22):
Founded in twenty thirteen by actor Mark Ruffalo and two partners,
the organization has distributed more than fifty million dollars to
front line communities across America, most of them like Rhees
Saint James, which has battled the impacts of the petrochemical
industry in Louisiana's Cancer Ali, and to nizzoni Ani, which

(19:44):
seeks to protect indigenous culture and water access on Arizona's
Black Mesa, are led by women of color. I've always
been very concerned about justice and representation, Chietl says, then
when you become a father, every concern in the world
falls in your lap. Or his Austere nominated performance as
a hotel manager, Paul Ruseabagina in two thousand fours a

(20:06):
hotel Ronda, he produced the documentary d'arfour now on the
genocide in Western Soudan, sometimes referred to as the world's
first climate change conflict, as for many. Al Gore's twenty
two thousand and six documentary and Inconvenient Truth opened Cheetle's
eyes to the urgency of the crisis. What can we do?
He recalls asking, and I think when you ask those

(20:28):
questions to the universe, the universe answers and goes, well,
how about this. He came to the Solution's project through
his work alongside Ruffalo in five Marvel Avengers movies, and
he's remained intentional about how movie stardom can direct attention
to such endeavors. Often celebrities or whatever you want to
call us, are trying to get out of the spotlight,

(20:51):
while people who are championing these issues can't get in.
He says. Of course, the La fires demonstrated two things
that the line between out and in when it comes
to climate change is blurry and will only grow more so,
and Cheetle intends to stay engaged whichever side he's on.
By Brett Martin. Next The Singular Beauty of collective Flight

(21:15):
by Ed Young. New research reveals why starlings travel in
those gorgeous shape shifting clouds on winter evenings throughout much
of Europe and North America. An hour before sunset, thousands
of starlings gather in the skies before descending to their
night time roots. The birds put on one of nature's
most spectacular displays. They pulse, ripple, and wheel as if

(21:37):
they were a single entity, an amorphous, shape shifting creature
with a delicate beauty of calligraphic brushstrokes and the erotic
chaos of flickering flames. How could so many birds be
so tightly coordinated. That's a mystery that researchers have sought
to sow for more than a century. In nineteen thirty one,
the ornithologist Edmund Sellos argued that a sterling murmuration, which

(22:02):
he describes as a madness in the sky, could only
arise through telepathy. Birds must think collectively all at the
same time, he wrote, like many others, Seleus assumed that
complex behavior must have equal complex origins, But in the
nineteen eighties, programmers and physicists started showing otherwise. They created
computer models in which virtual individuals interacted according to deceptively

(22:28):
simple rules, but none the less moved in ways that
resembled coordinated flocks. These simulations were compelling, but researchers lacked
good data on actual flocks to compare them against. Then,
in two thousand five, a team led by married physicists
Andrea Cavagna and Irene Giardina in Rome took a giant

(22:48):
leap forward. Over many chilly evenings across three years, they
climbed to the roof top of the Palazzo Massimo to
photograph the cities, especially epic murmurations, with pairs of camera.
Using these images, they reconstructed the three D position of
each individual immumerations that included more than four thousand members.

(23:09):
The team has learned that no matter how large the flock,
each starling interacts with only seven neighbors, which might be
as much as their brains can handle. The exact neighbors
change from second to second, but the starlings don't track
these shifting alliances. They merely fly in the same direction
as whichever seven birds are nearest, while staying close but

(23:29):
not too close alignment, attraction and avoidance. By plugging this
trio of rules into a computer model, along with some
basic aerodynamics, Charlotte Hemmeldrik from the University of Gruningen in
the Netherlands created a virtual murmeration that resembles the real
deal and matched the data from ROME. This showed that

(23:50):
the Starlings need no overarching plan, no leader, and no
telepathic hive mind. They barely need to communicate it all
through the simplest of interactions playing out over distances a
few feet. The breathtaking skies spanning complexity of ammurmurration emerges.
Over the past two decades, the data from Rome have

(24:10):
continued to reveal surprises. When a starling turns, its new
alignment should influence its neighbors and their neighbors and so on.
But you'd expect that mistakes would slowly creep in and
the new directions would get lost, much as in the
children's game of telephone. In fact, errors aren't magnified by
the bird's movements, but washed away. The flock shows what

(24:33):
physicists call scale free correlations, which is like a game
of telephone, where information always arrives at the end uncorrupted.
Giordina tells told me. This means that no matter how
big the aerial display gets, the movement of each bird
affects and is affected by all the others. If one turns,
they all turn. Each Starling is paying attention to only

(24:54):
seven others, but its senses effectively extend across the entire flock,
and it can spond to events occurring hundreds of birds away.
This is why the flock looks like a single entity.
It really does behave like one void. By these discoveries,
researchers have become increasingly ambitious and creative in their quest
to understand the details behind mmerations. Hamioreich and colleagues, including

(25:19):
Ralph's Storms and Marina Papadopoulou, have then studying the starlings
evasive maneuvers by plunging at them with a robot designed
to look like a peregrine falcon. You can't go into
a field and wait for a predator to attack, which
might happen one day in two months, pap Papadoppolou told me.
The robot fixes that problem. Using footage from the faux

(25:42):
foal folicon, she is cataloging maneuvers like the flash expansion
where the flock scatters outward, or the vacuo we are
a whole forms within the birds. She's tried to understand
how the patterns arise depending on the falcon's behavior. The
flocks prior formations or actions of individual starlings. Researchers also

(26:03):
want to follow flocks over long periods. The room data
were collected with fixed cameras that photographed the starlings only
if they flew into view. As Papadolo says, the flock
might be spelling your name outside the frame, but you're
not collecting that data. Giardini's colleagues have solved the problem
with a new network of rotating cameras that can follow

(26:24):
the flocks. Now they just need the starlings. Unfortunately, there
are much fewer flocks now. Giardini told me last year
was a disaster. She didn't know why. Rooms starlings have declined.
The city sees them as a nuisance and employees flashing
lights and bullhorns to disperse them. But starlings are also
disappearing throughout the rest of their native range. British populations

(26:46):
have more than halved in the past sixty years, while
Danish numbers have swindled by sixty percent. Sorens Selkier, who
took the photographs on these pages, says, in the past
two or three years, I've had a very hard time
locating very large flocks. It's not just starlings either. Within
the same time frame, Europe and North America have lost

(27:06):
five hundred fifty million and two point nine billion birds, respectively,
due to habitat loss and other human driven causes. On
both continents, the commonest birds have suffered some of the
greatest losses. Starlings illustrate the stakes of this decline. They
remind us that it is not enough for a species
to avoid extinction and merely exist. It must thrive in team.

(27:28):
For many of Earth's most beautiful phenomena only emerge when
living things act together in great numbers, whether it's a
flock of starlings or the network of neurons in the
people watching them. When witnessing a starling murmration, Soldier says,
the external phenomenon seems to mirror something inside myself, illuminating
the universal bond we have with nature. This concludes readings

(27:52):
from National Geographic for to day your reader's been Marcia.
Thank you for listening, Keep on listening, and have a
great day.