5.28.25

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

(00:22):
the article I began last time, entitled Unraveling the Mysteries
of the Congo by Melani Goubi. Since twenty thousand five,
the number of postgraduates in forestry has grown from just
six to more than three hundred. To day, this new
vanguard of Congolese scientists is striving to understand one of

(00:44):
the most massive and understudied ecosystems on our planet at
a time when it's needed. Most Scattered across some sixty
thousand acres, Jangambi's dilapidated colonial facilities remain a testament to
the research stations tainted or origins. The nearest major city
is Kisangani, about seventy miles away, which is where Belgium's

(01:06):
King Leopold in eighteen eighty five founded one of the
first settlements of what would become his own private colony,
the Congo Free State, after his government refused to sanction
a state backed expansion into the territory. The king's emissaries
arrived to discover the rainforest vast tropes of rubber vines
which could be tapped for latex to fuel the global

(01:29):
rubber boom to harvest evermore latex. However, the nascent colony
required a workforce, and Leopold's officials contracted with private companies
that enslaved indigenous people in vast numbers and estimated ten
million people were killed as a result of famine, disease
and the colonizer's brutality. The government of Belgium had wrested

(01:51):
control away from Leopold by nineteen o eight and established
the Belgian Congo. During its rule, the new government created
the National Institute for Argonomic Study of the Belgian Congo
at Yanambi to explore the rainforest and figure out what
other crops could be successfully cultivated there. Colonial Belgian researchers

(02:12):
collected and analyzed tens of thousands of plant specimens and
stored them at Ngambi, where they are still housed today
in the Angambi Stations. Archives head librarian, Christian Bessombi Efanta,
leads me to a corner behind rows of wooden bookcases
filled with decades of scientific journals. The collection includes black

(02:33):
and white photographs, several of which he spreads out across
a large mid century desk, pointing to images of beans
and seeds at various stages of sprouting, along with close
ups of the different roots and leaves of many plants.
Belgians wanted to understand the structure of each existing species
and determinates economic value. He explains this led to the

(02:55):
rise of palm tree, rice and coffee plantations, including the
introduction of a still popular variety of robusta coffee bean.
Other photographs captured a darker side of the station's story,
showing black men stuck laboring in the test fields while
white scientists worked in laboratories. By the time Yogambi was built,

(03:19):
that the Belgian Congo had ended the Free State's most
monstrous practices, but the dynamics at the research station remained
steeped in colonial exploitation. Our grandfathers, our fathers were only
workers here, Offanta says. They did almost everything manually, always
under Belgian's orders, regardless of the scale of the work.

(03:39):
That's how everything you see here, the infrastructure was built
by our ancestors. They were forced to do many things
against their will for survival. By nineteen sixty, Congolese pro
independence leaders had rallied enough support to force Belgian authorities
to grant the country independence and organize general elections. Belgian
researchers left without having trained a single Congolese scientists to

(04:03):
replace them. The Belgians did not want to train anyone
to be their equal. The goal was to subjugate Afonta, says,
and so after their departure, everything remained in a state
of lethargy. But not everyone abandoned Yan Gambhi at independence.
The workers from surrounding villages recruited by Belgian scientists to
perform small technical tasks, kept quietly going along about with

(04:27):
these tasks, even without the guarantee of payment from the
newly formed Congolese state. And when they became too old
to carry on, their sons took over, continuing the important
duty of chronicling changes throughout the region five times a day.
Observers like Henry Alongui Agualais still do the work that
has gone on for generations at the research station. One morning,

(04:51):
I joined him as he heads out to a grassy
field a few miles away to meticulously record the meteorological
data available from an assortment of rudimentary instruments that are
arranged at intervals like a contemporary art installation. Using a
penned paper, he checks the readings on a pair of
rain gages, the same ones that were installed in nineteen

(05:12):
twenty eight, thermometers and a totalizing anemometer which measures the
speed and direction of the wind over time. My father
began working here decades ago. It was his life, a
Gualle says, But he was too tired, so Angualle took
over the job from his father, who passed away just
six months after retiring. In the meantime, the Congo Basin's

(05:34):
lack of reliable data on long term climate change meant
that the rainforest continued to be excluded or misrepresented in
global reports and analysis. In twenty twenty one, it was
one of only two regions worldwide without enough data for
the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to assess
past trends in extreme heat, findings that other governments might

(05:57):
use in determining what places deserved more resources for continuing
study or even emergency aid. More than fifty years after independence,
the Yangambi Station was still operating on a minimal budget,
with handwritten records stored in a decrepit office alongside stacks
of yellowing paper bundles. Emmanuel Kasango Yakusu, a forestry PhD.

(06:22):
Candidate at Ghent University in Belgium who teaches at the
University of Kisangani, first learned in twenty eleven about the
ongoing efforts of the station's climate observers while seeking data
that signal how communities dependent on the forest might face
new challenges with climate change. When I first walked in here,
it was like walking into a gold mine, he tells me,

(06:44):
picking up a bundle dating back to the nineteen seventies.
So Yakusu began working with the department staff to digitize
the records, focusing on temperature and rainfall. The team was
about to chart sixty years of data tracking daily meteorologic
changes from nineteen sixty to twenty twenty, save for nineteen
sixty five, when political unrest meant activities at the station

(07:08):
ground to a halt. The collective findings published in twenty
twenty three reveal a mean daily temperature increase of a
third of a degree fahrenheit point eighteen celsius per decade.
The region has also seen a disruption of rainfall patterns
toward drier dry seasons and shorter, more intense rainy seasons

(07:28):
with fewer rainy days throughout the year. The temperature increases
and changes in rainfall timing and intensity have become more
pronounced since the turn of the twenty first century. Today,
the staff at the center are fully trained and equipped
with computers and a scanner to update the database independently.
Their work with regional wind patterns influenced decisions on where

(07:50):
the flux tower should be located and how it should
be designed. Jose Mobifo nud Yapo, who directs climatology research
at the SUNS Station, remembers when Yukusu called to announce
that their hard work was being formally recognized. That day,
I got my staff together and told them what you
do here, never re un underestimate it, do it right,

(08:13):
as per our motto here at climatology honesty accuracy. He says,
we felt valued for Yukusu. Kimbeisa Nyapopo there and their
peers shaping the science as a crucial part of recovering
from when the forest was harvested harnessed for colonial gains.

(08:34):
For them, the future of their communities is at stake.
More than sixty percent of the d RC's workforce are farmers.
Hotter growing seasons with less regular rain means they can
expect lower crop yields, while more weeds and pests prolipherally.
I grew up in Kisangani and all my life I've
seen how farmers struggle to make ends meet, says Yukusu,

(08:55):
who now also works as a consultant with the World Bank.
Along with the Congolese government, the Bank is developing the
region's first climate contingency plan, identifying potential emergencies and designing
responses with the right kind of bank for local farmers.
While extreme weather events are becoming the norm in many places,

(09:15):
most client climate impact research has focused on rich nations,
leading to an attribution gap as robust levels of data
are lacking in low income countries, which may leave people
behind with little support to mitigate, prepare and adapt with
climate change. Things are going to get worse, says Yukusu.
They need urgent support. We need to create dynamic agricultural

(09:39):
calendars and modernize farming techniques. Yukusu and other Congolese scientists
have been lobbying for international funds to create a network
of weather stations in the DRC to gather accurate data
across more Land. DRC has one of the lowest densities
of weather stations in the world, says Simon Lewis, a

(10:00):
climate change and rainforest researcher at the University of Leeds
in England who supports the effort. Lewis led a team
several years ago to map the extent of the Congo
Basin Peatlands. The team discovered that they are the largest
tropical peatlands in the world, storing three years worth of
global fossil fuel emissions. But as Lewis recounts, his only

(10:20):
advantage was to receive unrestricted funding to explore this fuzzy
area via a science prize. The massive logistical and scientific
efforts demanded on the ground were only possible because of
the deep local knowledge of our Congolese partners, he says.
They knew about the peatlands and the potential for major
discovery there, but the resources were not available to them.

(10:42):
In twenty twenty three, Lewis joined a coalition of regional
scientists to create the Congo Basins Science Initiative, a research
group seeking two hundred million dollars in funding to green
light more home grown studies, a move that is world
changing potential to transform our understanding of the rainfall. The effort,
patterned after a similar successful program in the Amazon, has

(11:05):
already attracted investment from the United Kingdom, including more graduate
level scholarships for researchers at partner institutions in Central Africa
and the UK. Science is extractive in nature, Lewis says,
we need to build equal partnerships and inclusivity between local
and foreign scientists, not just because it is right, but

(11:26):
because it is the only way we can scale up
the work that needs to be done before it's too late.
Why the Congo Basin appears to be more resilient than
the Amazon remains an incredibly complex question, and researchers are
looking for answers in the trees. Back at Jangambhi, Yakusu
leads me down a trail through the surrounding forest and
then signals that we should head deeper. Into the underbrush.

(11:49):
As we leave the path, the texture of the ground
suddenly changes, crackling softly as dry branches snap beneath our feet,
and then grows squishy as we step over the soft
husk of a decomposing tree trunk. We finally stop in
front of a huge tree with a wide, smooth trunk
that jots high into the canopy, part of the Mahogany
family of trees that belongs to a particular native species

(12:12):
called Nadrophagma eutile. The tree is part of another long
term survey that's been happening at the station. To inspect
it properly, Yakusu unslings his backpack and produces a wood poorer,
shaped a bit like an oversized corkscrew, placing it against
the trunk a few feet above the ground. When he
turns the handle, the hardwood seems to resist at first,

(12:34):
creaking under the pressure being applied. After a few minutes,
Yukusu extracts a long, thin core sample of wood from
the inner layers, which he carefully inserts into a protective sleeve.
You have to be careful to not let it break,
he says. Inside the station's Modern Wood Biology lap. Another
first in the DRC, researchers would be able to compare

(12:55):
the tree's height and trunk diameter with visible rings from
the core sample to determine changes in its growth over
time in relation to the climate. As we've demonstrated the
rainforest as warming, Yakusu says, this means that the environment
in which these trees grow is changing and the conditions
for growth are no longer optimal. In the long run,

(13:16):
decreased tree growth could lead to higher tree mortality in
the region, one factor responsible for the Amazon's diminishing capacity
to store carbon. Already, some tree species are disappearing in
the research stations archives. Detailed records on a tree from
the same genus and trando from Mamaga Hollustra show that

(13:37):
it was once the most studied species at yng Gambhi,
but in this forest you won't find a single pollustra
to day, says Yukusu. At the same time, some trees
are proving more resistant to extreme climate shifts, which could
hold the key to helping the forest adapt. Chadrak Kafuti
and Bryce Jovac, two tropical ecologists working at Yanggambi's Wood Lab,

(14:02):
have been closely studying the adaptation of Peracopsis elata, a
large leaved hardwood with a surprising capacity to pause its
growth during periods of drought or when sunlight is scarce.
That kind of resilience could help direct replanting in areas
where the forest has been logged for lumber or affected
by wild fires, which are increasingly common. Without strong environmental protection,

(14:27):
the Congo Basin is projected to lose twenty percent twenty
seven percent of its undisturbed rainforests by twenty fifty. But
these Central African scientists work with the knowledge that the
rainforest has never been untouched landscape. It is a place
that has been and will be continually reshaped by human habitation.
Exploring the outcome of such interactions may lead to other surprises.

(14:50):
For instance, Nest luambois, a forest ecologist who manages Janggo
Yang Gambi's wood Lab, is studying whether some human made
dist urbances, such as clearing for villages and slash unburned agriculture,
may partly explain why the Congo Basin is still absorbing
relatively high amounts of carbon today. Over time, these clearings

(15:12):
have given way to new growth, encouraging trees like Paracopsis elata.
Before we leave the survey site, Yakusu retrieves the borer
and fills the hole in the tree with leaves to
prevent insects from crawling inside and causing damage. He pats
the trunk gently, as though saying goodbye to an old friend.
Each of the scientists at Yanggambi has developed a soft

(15:34):
spot for a particular species of tree, often the one
each has been studying over the years. For farbres Kimbasa,
that special plant is the combretum lukehede, a somewhat gnarled
tree that does not grow any higher than about twenty
feet here, making it sometimes difficult to spot from his
perch atop the flux tower. It could keep going, but

(15:57):
instead it will break and give birth to many small
trees on the same trunk. He tells me at one point,
it's sharing and caring for others. What could be more beautiful.

Speaker 2 (16:06):
The next article is from May twenty twenty five National
Geographic Rediscovering the ancient Empire that history forgot. They forgot.
They fought the Egyptians and sacked Babylon. They built elaborate
cities across modern Turkia and beyond, and then the Hittites vanished,
lost to history for thousands of years. But today new
discoveries are restoring the legend of a forgotten superpower. This

(16:32):
article by Andrew Curry. At its height, the ancient city
of Hutasa, capital of the Hittite civilization, must have been
on inspiring Built into a steep hill side in what
is today central Turkya, the city was ringed by tall
brick walls, who was home to as many as seven
thousand people, vast temple complexes, and an imposing stone rampart

(16:53):
visible from miles away. Today, the hillside is home to
a mystery. No pillars or high walls mark the room
ruins of the palace and temples that once stood, just
stone foundations, half covered by dry grass. Some of the
city's gates still stand guarded by statues of lions, sphinxes,
and an axe wielding god, but much is gone. The

(17:14):
mud brick walls have crumbled over the centuries. Floods and
snow melt have eroded the original hillside, sending buildings full
of clay tablets cascading down the slopes. Paters still are
the clues that might explain what happened to the powerful
Hittites people, a lost empire that researchers are now beginning
to understand with greater clarity. The disappearance of the Hittites

(17:37):
around eleven eighty b C. Was a vanishing act with
few parallels in history. For at least four hundred fifty years,
the Hittites controlled much of modern day Chyrchia and beyond,
from close to the shores of the Black Sea to
the rivers of Mesopotamia and the waters of the Mediterranean.
They built sophisticated cities, impressive temples, and an elaborate palace

(17:58):
in the rugged countryside Vanitolia. They authored massive archives of
cuneiform tablets containing numerous ancient languages and sacred rituals. Their
kings benefited from trade roots that reached far beyond the
Hittite homeland. Their armies once even penetrated deep into Mesopotamia.
Their tangle with Egypt's Rameses the Great at the Battle

(18:20):
of Kadesh resulted in the world's first peace treaty. They
were able to fight the Egyptians and the Babylonians and
Assyrians had to treat them as equals. Said Andreas Schachner
of the German Archaeological Institute, which has been carrying out
digs at the Hutasa site for nearly a century. Yet
the Egyptians, the Assyrians, they were all part of historical memory,

(18:42):
the Hittites were extinguished completely. Scholars didn't register the Hittite's
existence until three thousand years later, when carvings at ancient
Egyptian temples and diplomatic correspondents discovered on clay tablets set
off an international hunt for the location of their capital.
Little remained at the suspected site besides monumental foundations, but

(19:04):
digs there in the early nineteen hundreds unearthed a trove
of clay cuneiformed tablets, confirming suspicions that Hatusa was the
lost Hittite capital. From what they have continued to unearth
at Hatusa, once vibrant center of commerce, culture, and conquest,
researchers have compiled an eloquent record of life in the empire.

(19:26):
They have assembled details on everything from royal squabbles and
religious ceremonies to the proper punishment for killing a dog.
Yet the causes for the empire's collapse remain mysterious. How
did the mighty Hittites vanish without a trace, and what
can their sudden end teach us to day. Between early
June and late October, Shaschner spends seven days a week

(19:48):
criscrossing Hatchusa and overseeing a team of Turkish and German archaeologists,
as well as scores of local workers. He traverses the
city's hills in a battered passenger van. His black dog
knocks routinely at his side. As director of the German
Archaeological Institute's excavations, he has been making sense if the
sites jumbled ruined since two thousand six. Nothing is in

(20:11):
its original place, Shashner said, with a sigh, There is
so much destruction. One day, not long ago, I joined
him at the city's Great Temple Complex, a hub of
ritual spaces, courtyards, store rooms, and secret chambers, not far
from what were Hotusa's northern gates. I followed him as
he wound his way through waste high stone blocks, gesturing

(20:33):
upward now and again to refer to the plastered and
possibly painted walls that would have towered thirty feet above
our heads. He took me to a space once considered
the center of the Hittite universe. The Great Temple dedicated
to the storm god Tarhuna and his partner, the Sun,
goddess of Arna. Foundations surrounding the temple preserve the outlines

(20:55):
of eighty store rooms that previously contained vessels full of wine, water,
and grain. Researchers have discovered inventorious hinting at the riches
stored in the temple's treasury. When the king came back
from a campaign, all the booty was for the storm god.
Shashnar told me he would have brought it here. One
question that Shashnar hopes to solve is why the Hittites

(21:17):
situated their capital here. There are worse places than Central
and Atoilia to base an empire, but not many. Half
Way between the back Black Sea and the deserts of Syria,
Hutasa sits in a land of unlikely extremes. Fresh Water
springs are abundant in the rocky, virtually unfarmable mountains near
by the region's few plains, on the other hand, are

(21:39):
bone dry most of the year unless they are submerged
by seasonal floods. Close reading of Hittite texts, combined with
environmental data shows that droughts gripped the region every few decades,
regularly pushing populations to the brink of starvation and beyond.
Archaeologist Brulent Djenk, who works with Shashnar at Tusa, frames

(22:01):
the mystery of why the city was built here with
amused admiration considering the climate and surroundings. Its mind blowing
that they had all this here, said Jenk, teaches at
Turkya's mardin Artukla University. The real question is how did
they build an empire in the middle of this central
Anatourian hell. The answer a combination of resilience, adaptation, and planning.

(22:26):
For the centuries that they reigned, the lords of Hotusa
managed to squeeze just a little more out of the
land than anyone before or since. Based on what we
know of hurting practices and the myriad animal bones found
at Hotusa, Shashner thinks the surrounding hills supported tens of
thousands of sheep and goats, providing a four footed alternative

(22:47):
to the irrigation dependent farms that supported Egypt and Mesopotamia.
To supply water for industrial and agricultural uses, the Hittites
cut storage spot ponds into Hotusa's hillsides dug into clay
soil to be filled by groundwater. Some were longer than
an Olympic swimming pool and up to twenty six feet deep.

(23:07):
Immense air tight underground pits meanwhile, contained enough grain to
feed their animals in periods of drought. All of this
infrastructure was surrounded by strong walls that ran for an
astonishing four miles along the city perimeter, engineered to contend
with the hilly terrains, steep slopes, and deep ravines. Between
two thousand and three and two thousand and six, a

(23:29):
seventy one yard long segment of it was reconstructed using
only materials that would have been available to the Hittites,
including wood, rock, and three thousand tons of mud brick.
Based on this experiment, research calculated that building just a
half mile of wall would have taken one thousand men
a year a stunning feet of logistics. Touring the site

(23:51):
with Shachner, I rode along as he piloted his van
up a twisting, one laid road to reach Hutasa's highest spot. Here,
the city's most impressive building projects survives your copy. An
elongated rampart standing one hundred thirty feet high. And eight
hundred twenty feet long. The white Stone embankment features a
narrow gate decorated with sphinx statues, adding to its imposing

(24:14):
visual impact. A portion of the city's protective wall ran
across the top. On a clear day, this monumental structure
is visible from twelve miles away, gleaming white amid the
green and gray mountaintops. Imagine the ambassador of Babylonia, who's
seen everything, says Shakner, and then he turns this corner
and sees this building that's as spectacular as anything in

(24:36):
Mesopotamia or Egypt. I've seen a lot of sights and
can't think of any that are as spectacular from a
long way away as this one. This is how they
executed control over the landscape. Amazingly, Hatusa still yielding new discoveries.
The day after my trip up the mountain with Shakner,
I returned to the summit to meet jank At Karpaki

(25:00):
and found him at the mouth of a tunnel that
passes underneath the rampart. He stood in an arched passageway
that's about nine feet tall, two hundred thirty feet long,
and wide enough to accommodate two people walking side by side.
As I entered the unlit tunnel, I became acutely aware
of the hundreds of tons of dirt and rock above
our heads. Jentch, the grandson of a stone mason, wasn't worried.

(25:23):
This is all this all interconnects like a tapestry made
of stone, he said, gesturing to the tunnel walls. It
takes really fine masons to make this. Half Way down
the passageway we stopped bending low. Jank showed me a
pinkish palm sized painting on a stone wall, a symbol,
one of two hundred forty nine that he discovered in
the tunnel in twenty twenty two, with each glyph representing

(25:46):
a word. The symbols had somehow gone unnoticed by the
hundreds of archaeologists and hundreds of thousands of curious tourists
who have passed through the tunnel since it was rediscovered
in eighteen thirty four. Since Jenks made with the light
of his cell phone, Shakner has worked with imaging specialists
to scan the tunnel's interior, creating a three D model

(26:09):
that might help scientists fathom the symbol's significance. For example,
some marks appear in threes, like the glyphs for mountain
and path, and the symbol representing the holy mountain Tudhalia,
as well as the god by the same name. Maybe
it's meant to say the path through Mount Tudhalia, Shachner said.
Far from the tunnel, symbols on a very different wall

(26:31):
have provided critical information on the reach and power of
the Hittites. When archaeologists in Egypt uncovered the funeral temple
of Feral Ramses the Second, also known as Rameses the Great,
they found references to a battle that remains perhaps the
Hittite's most enduring contribution to history. In his temple complex
along the Nile River, Ramses, one of Egypt's strongest rulers,

(26:55):
documented the most memorable moments of his reign, including his
twelve seventy four beasts battle with the force of Hittite
king mutwal Talis the Second at Kadesh, an ancient city
not far from modern day Damascus. A Florida Stealing relief
depicts the pharaoh's heroics in the face of what he
claimed were nearly fifty thousand Hittite warriors. Egyptian and Hittite

(27:18):
chariots wheel and charge as a larger than life, Rameses
surveys the bloody chaos. Today, many historians consider the Battle
of Kadesh the biggest chariot battle ever fought, rather than
a resounding victory for Ramses, though the clash was probably
more of a stalemate. In the aftermath, the frontier separated,

(27:38):
separating the two empires barely shifted. Relations between the two
powers remained unresolved for fifteen years until Ramses and Mutwa
Talis's successor worked out the world's oldest known parody treaty.
This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine. For today, the
reader has been Marsha. Thank you for listening, Keep on listening,

(28:01):
and have a great day.