8.27.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome.

Speaker 2 (00:01):
This is Marcia for Radio I, and today I will
be reading National Geographic Magazine dated August twenty twenty five,
which is donated by the publisher as a reminder.

Speaker 1 (00:14):
RADIOI is a reading.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
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 art of
Calibi can last time entitled at Work with the Gorilla
Ballooness of South Korea by Paul Sellopek.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
Could be a North.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Korean spy, said Lee, a former agricultural engineer in the North,
or a pro North Korean citizen here. He added, there
are people who disapprove he means communist sympathizers. Lee launches
his airships at night from a remote valley near the DMZ.
He packs the balloons with thousands of pages of photocopied
essays on free will and less frequently with aspirin thumb

(01:02):
drives located with nature documentaries, women's nylons, anything scarce. In
the threadbare North, he lives in a rusting shipping container
at the site. His South Korean wife and son deserted
him for California, Desperate to connect with someone on the
other side of the fortified border. He takes the risk

(01:24):
of including his real name and phone number on his
political leaflets. After years of balloon releases, he admitted wearily,
nobody has called my entree to the ballooning world. The
younger Park still possesses a novice's enthusiasm. His balloons are
constructed from tough but lightweight plastic normally used for agricultural purposes.

(01:48):
An electronic ultimeter triggers clamps to release sacks of religious literature,
kish and other cargo from about five thousand feet. The
bags float down on tiny parachutes, which Park tracks via
GPS devices. On the night that he allowed me to
join him, his crew released all of their balloons at once.

(02:09):
Park arms stretched skyward, muttered a prayer. The team stood
gazing up for long seconds as the twenty five balloons
fluttered and climbed in the night breeze. Park said the
balloons would be picked up by South Korean radar in
twenty nine minutes, after which military police would come to investigate.
The balloonists began loading up in haste to depart. I

(02:31):
watched their handiwork ghost up into the darkness like a
sad miracle next can Forensic science Stopped the illegal wildlife
trade by Joshua Hammer. Novel technologies and fresh crime fighting
techniques are transforming the battle against trafficking, one gorilla handprint

(02:53):
at a time, the sound of a gunshot altered the
rangers that sometimes was a miss. Advancing through the forest
in thung Yai Naraswan Wildlife Sanctuary in western Thailand, they
arrived at a campsite littered with evidence of murder.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
The blood soaked carcass.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
Of a barking deer lay on the ground. Other bits
of victims, a khalije pheasant and a rare black leopard,
oozed on a cutting board and simmered in a soup kettle.
The rangers arrested four people at the scene on suspicion
of poaching protected species and violating gun laws, crimes punishable
by a maximum.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Ten year jail term. But there was a complication.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
The leader of the hunting group was prem Chai Karnusuta,
a construction empire tycoon and one of Thailand's most prominent
and powerful men. Karnasuta professed his innocence, apparently trusting that
his well paid lawyers would get him off, but he
hadn't counted on the doggedness and determination of Thailand's wildlife police.

(03:58):
The rangers cordoned off the crime scene and seize the carcasses,
along with three rifles, rounds of ammunition, the bush meat
in the cattle, and later even a pile of human excrement.
The evidence was then transported in sealed bags to a
crime lab in Bangkok, where technicians under the supervision of
Kanita Utavan, director of the Parks Department's Wildlife Forensics Laboratory Center,

(04:23):
sequenced the DNA of the bush meat and the feces,
and the Police Forensic Science Office conducted ballistics tests on
the carcasses call it CSI in the Bush. To combat
a surge and poaching and wildlife smuggling in Asia and Africa,
conservationists and police are turning to method's long reserve for homicides,

(04:44):
sexual assaults, and other crimes with human victims. DNA sequencing,
fingerprint analysis, infrared imaging to detect blood, ballistics tests, and
additional scientific techniques have been utilized with success against miscreants
ranging from pangolin poachers in Zimbabwe to peregrin nest raiders

(05:05):
in Scotland. A dramatic change in wildlife statutes has led
to the increasing reliance on forensics. In the past, poachers
and traffickers caught in the act typically pleaded guilty and
paid a token fine, But between twenty ten and twenty sixteen,
as poaching numbers, sword countries began to drastically raise their penalties.

(05:28):
They went from a fine of fifty dollars for possession
of ivory two up to ten years in prison, says
Rob Ogden, director of conservation science at the University of
Edinburgh and a specialist in DNA profiling. Criminals with resources
began hiring skilled lawyers to fight it out in court.
The defense started saying things like proved that its ivory.

(05:50):
Ogden says, persecution collapsed. Prosecution collapsed because they lacked the
scientific evidence. The scientific evidence analyzed in the Bangkok Lab
was critical in bringing Karnasuta to justice. The defense attempted
to discredit the forensics and the evidentiary chain of custody,

(06:11):
but Wetevan, the lab director, felt no doubt in left
no doubt in the judges minds that Karnasuta's group had
shot the animals. In twenty nineteen, a court sentenced the
tycoon to three years in two months and a two
million bought fifty nine thousand, seven hundred dollars fine, an
outcome hailed by the WWF as a victory for wildlife

(06:35):
and a victory for the rule of law. Karnasuta's conviction
comes at a time when wildlife and the rule of
law are both under siege. High prices for ivory, rhinal horn,
pangolin scales, and other wildlife products such as bush meat,
the growing sophistication of insurgent groups and international crime organizations,

(06:56):
and endemic corruption are all putting unprecedented pressure on endangered species.
In South Africa, poachers slaughtered ten thousand, three hundred thirty
four rhinos, both black and white, between two thousand and
six and twenty twenty four, the equivalent of two thirds
of the country's entire population. The majority of horns end

(07:17):
up in Vietnam and China, where they are carved into
decorative objects or ground into powder for sale allegedly as medicine.
Africa's elephant population dropped from four hundred seventy two two
hundred sixty nine to about four hundred fifteen thousand after
the Convention on International trade in endangered species sites CITES

(07:40):
in two thousand and eight permitted a one time sale
of ivory to China, stimulating demand and opening the floodgates
for laundered tusks. The numbers have stabilized, but the pacoderms
remain in danger. Pangolins, tigers, snow leopards, and many other
species are also considered at grave risk. Nations estimates the

(08:01):
global illegal wildlife trade to be worth as much as
twenty three billion dollars a year. Wildlife experts have begun
training law enforcement officers in Africa and Asia to back
up their arrests with evidence that will stand up in court.
Tracy Alexander, director of forensic Services for the City of
London Police, recalls that when she started working with police

(08:23):
in Zimbabwe, they would stop a car based on a tip,
find rhino horns in the back, four mobile phones and
three guns. The driver would say, I know nothing about this.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
I'm just the driver.

Speaker 2 (08:36):
The guy in the passenger seat would say he just
picked me up and I know nothing. The two guys
in the back would say, we just asked for a lift.

Speaker 1 (08:45):
Then they would let them go.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
Now the wildlife police learn how to dust for finger
prints technically known in forensics as finger marks or ridge details,
data mines, cell phones, conduct ballistic tests, and seal off
crime scenes. Grant Miller, counter trafficking adviser at the Zoological
Society of London who has trained ecological police in Mongolia

(09:09):
and park rangers in Thailand, the Philippines, Benin, Cameroon, Nepal,
Niger and Kenya, says that officers once passed around elephant
tusks and rhino horns and posed with the contraband without
using gloves, but they're coming to understand that effective crime
fighting means avoiding contamination and finding evidence that will be

(09:29):
admissible in the court room. In India, the Forest Department
and the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau implemented a cutting edge
intelligence gathering system that led to seventy three arrests and
the dismantling of an elephant poaching network that ravaged the
population in twenty fifteen. In Mongolia, a haven for vulnerable

(09:52):
and endangered species ranging from snow leopards to soccer falcons
and wild camels, the Ecologic Police teemed with the Zoological
Society of London and Mangolia's National Forensic Agency and the
Zoological Society lou Ujin. Now they're well trained and they

(10:12):
have a sophisticated forensic setup, says Alexander, including a DNA
lab the whole nine yards. The wildlife cops are also
benefiting from new tools aimed at improving evidence gathering. At
the London Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory in Lambeth, I
met Mark Moseley, a silver haired police photographer fifty who

(10:34):
spends his workdays snapping blood curdling images of homicide scenes.

Speaker 1 (10:40):
In his spare time, he experiments.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
With forensic innovations aimed at combating wildlife crime. Moseley achieved
his first breakthrough twelve years ago after his two young
daughters came across online photos of decapitated elephants while making
elephant themed birthday cards for their grandmother. The girls begged
their father to invented technique that would give the cops

(11:02):
an edge in the war against poachers.

Speaker 1 (11:04):
Moseley turned to.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
The method pioneered by Sir Edward Henry of the British
Colonial Police in India one hundred thirty years ago. Lifting fingerprints.
Elephant tusks are coated in cementum, a porous material that
resembles a sponge when looked at through an electron microscope,
and fingerprints left by poachers and smugglers rarely survive for

(11:27):
more than seven days using traditional powders. Moseley wanted a
material that would provide a record of the numerous hands
that pass over Ivory during the weeks that often elapse
between poaching in the bush and smuggling overseas. In twenty fifteen,
after months of testing compounds, Moseley came across supr Nanomagnetic powder,

(11:50):
a fingerprint enhancer made up of microscopic chemical particles that
can both absorb and repel sweat and oils. It proved
capable of reaching reaving finger ridge details for up to
twenty eight days after prints were deposited. The powder fit
into those tiny pores which the others couldn't do, so

(12:11):
we were bringing back much higher resolution, Moseley explained.

Speaker 1 (12:15):
Moseley's innovation took off.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
The International Fund for Animal Welfare IFAW, in partnership with
the United Kingdom's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, distributed one hundred
finger printing kits, two jars of the magnetic powder and
a magnetic wand brushes and lifting tape packed into a
durable plastic orange case, to police and rangers in twenty

(12:37):
three countries in Africa and Asia. In twenty seventeen, IFAW
announced that the Kenya Wildlife Service had arrested fifteen people,
including five police officers, after using the kits to identify
the suspects by their fingerprints on confiscated ivory. The kits
have also been tested successfully on rhino horns, tiger claws,

(12:59):
hippopotami teeth, sperm whale teeth and even eggshells.

Speaker 1 (13:03):
All coveted by trackickers.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
Moseley's kits have their limitations. Finger Print databases are still
so underdeveloped in Africa that the chances the marks will
turn up any matches remain low. Most African police departments
lack Wi Fi and mobile fingerprint scanners that allow officers
to send the images from cell phones to data centers,
which are also often lacking, and many cops don't seem

(13:29):
to be invested in the new method. I went to
a wildlife crime conference in Kenya after the kids were distributed.
Kits were distributed, says Alexander. I asked people there, how
many fingerprint marks did you get a few?

Speaker 1 (13:43):
How many IDs? We don't do that.

Speaker 2 (13:45):
We are the finger marks now, I've stashed them in
my drawer. In twenty fifteen, Grant Miller, then working for
the UK's Border Force, used the supranano powder to dust
an ivory shipment seized by customs at Heathrow Airport on
its way from Angola, trafficked by Vietnamese nationals. The dusting
turned up several sets of fingerprints, but technicians couldn't hit

(14:09):
on a match in the UK's vast database. Since the
highly publicized bus in twenty seventeen, not a single arrest
has been attributed to the powder kits. Despite those disappointments,
Tracy Alexander and her partners at King's College, London are
working with a fingerprint gathering technology called vacuum metal deposition,

(14:32):
which uses a sealed chamber and metal rods to bring
out prints on canvas, bags and other non smooth surfaces,
including elephant tusks that have been buried in the ground
for long periods and have accumulated a coating of dirt
or mud. London police once used the technology to expose
a victim's face on the pillow that was used.

Speaker 1 (14:51):
To smother her.

Speaker 2 (14:53):
The Zoological Society of London, meanwhile, is promoting a gel
lifter that can pull prints from panglin scales, whose uneven
surfaces like those of tortoise shells, also make.

Speaker 1 (15:04):
Ordinary powders useless.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
The pliable gel goes deep into the grooves and a
camera and a light source are used to expose the
finger ridges.

Speaker 1 (15:13):
But the gel has yet to.

Speaker 2 (15:14):
Be distributed for wildlife forensic purposes, and Lisa Highwood, who
rescues orphaned pangolins in Zimbabwe and rehabilitates and reintroduces them
into the wild, doubts it'll.

Speaker 1 (15:26):
Work in the African bush.

Speaker 2 (15:27):
You bring the gail into an environment with a temperature
of eighty eight to one hundred four.

Speaker 1 (15:32):
Degrees and it disintegrates. She says.

Speaker 2 (15:36):
So far, the biggest successes in wildlife forensics have had
nothing to do with identifying perpetrators. Because attorneys often challenge
prosecutors to prove that a seized object is say a
rhino horn or an elephant tusk, Forensic crime lamps run
DNA tests to determine the species beyond a reasonable doubt.

(15:56):
The Trace Wildlife Forensics Network, in Edinburgh based nonprofit has
provided funding and support for Kineta Wetavan's laboratory in Bangkok
since twenty ten, and has since worked alongside governments to
develop DNA testing facilities in Malaysia, Vietnam, South Africa, Botswana, Zombia, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, Gabon, Zimbabwe,

(16:23):
Namibia and Estwantini. Rob Ogden of the University of Edinburgh,
who is a co founder of Trace, recalls a Zombian
colleague mentioning a case in which it was argued that
a zebra skin belonged to a striped cow. Now such
blatant assertions are easily demolished in the lab, he demons.

(16:43):
He estimates that prosecutors present DNA evidence in wildlife cases
fifty times a year in Thailand and Malaysia. DNA sequency
can also prove that purported wildlife contraband.

Speaker 1 (16:57):
Isn't what it appears to be.

Speaker 2 (16:59):
Fraudsters often melt horse hoofs into the shape of a
rhino horn, which confect black market prices of twenty thousand
dollars or more a kilo. The DNA is not going
to lie in such a case, Ogden says, it changes
the nature of the offense from selling an endangered species
to mislabeling, which is a minor crime. Kyle Ewarts Traces

(17:23):
forensic research manager, last year launched tiger Base, a DNA
profiling system for the endangered big cats. Dozens of tiger
farms in Thailand breed the animals bluffily and offer tourists
the chance to feed adults and cuddle with cubs, but
some farms illegally snatch cubs from the wild and pass
them off as captive bread. A few also serve as

(17:46):
tiger slaughterhouses, clandestinely chopping up the corpses and selling their parts, pelts, claws, fangs,
even entire dead cubs and tiger bone wine in jars
on the black market in China and Vietnam. Tiger Base
aims to establish a DNA registry of captive tigers throughout
Southeast Asia to trace them to their points of origin,

(18:10):
to support investigations into tiger kittens, killers, and tiger launderers.
You get DNA profiles for all your captive tigers, and
if there's a new cub on the scene, you can say,
where did this cub come from? The Australian scientists told
me in the past they would say these two parents
and you had no way to disprove that, but now

(18:32):
we can. Forensic scientists are also using DNA to crack
down on the illegal trade in paragrine falcons, listed by
sites since the nineteen seventies as a protected species.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
In the nineteen nineties, the.

Speaker 2 (18:46):
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, in conjunction with
the UK Police and the Department of the Environment, pioneered
the use of genetics to identify raptor chicks stolen from
the wild. These birds were illegally declared to be captive
bred and were traded commercially. Over a decade later, following
a controversial relaxation of regulations and arise in peregrine prices

(19:10):
in the Middle East, wild chick thefts began to surge.
Lucy Webster of the Department of Science and Advice for
Scottish Agriculture updated the DNA methodology to help the police
crack down. Recently, Webster's DNA lab outside Edinburgh played a
key role in Operation Tantalon, a Scottish police investigation that

(19:32):
snared a gamekeeper and his son in a plot to
launder and sell twenty three wild peregrine chicks and two
eggs to wealthy falcon racers in the Middle East. DNA
sequencing is also being employed to pin down the geographical
origins of poached pangolins, elephants, and other endangered species. Investigators

(19:53):
hope the information will help map illegal trading routes, point
to specific organized crime groups, and single out vulnerable subspecies,
but most forensics experts concede that the day when such
data yield actionable intelligence is still far in the future.
Mark Moseley is also looking far ahead. Moseley's latest forensics

(20:14):
adventure is, like his Fingerprint project, a mix of the
visionary and the quixotic. Horrified by photos of several gorilla
hands for sale in an African market, he devised a
method of tracing the endangered apes in their body parts.
By doing so, he hopes to pinpoint areas of intense
poshing activity and gather intelligence on criminal gangs involved in

(20:38):
the gorilla trade. I thought, how can we do something
to identify the remains and create a deterrent, he told me.
Moseley's solution photograph and record the ridge details of the
hands and feet of gorillas when their sedated or being
released into the wild. A few years ago, he spent
months at the National History Museum, preparing for field work

(21:00):
photographing prints from taxa dermid apes or alcohol preserved extremities
dating to the Victorian.

Speaker 1 (21:07):
Era or earlier. Later, he moved to the.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
London and Chesington Zoos and the Espinal Foundation, where he
captured prints from gorillas sedated for surgery. Moseley's twenty one
year old daughter Mia, designed colorful graphics of gorilla hands
and an individual fingers for an academic paper about the project,
reflecting Moseley's efforts to bring a new generation into conservation. Now,

(21:34):
the Zoological Society of London and the UN's Great Apes
Survival Partnership are aiming to kickstart this in the wild,
Moseley says, although he has accumulated just four sets of
wild gorilla prints for his database, he insists he's optimistic.
Once it's out there and everybody becomes aware of it,
the data will drip feed in, he told me in

(21:56):
Wildlife Crime Forensics, everyone seems to be playing the long game. Next,
the world's oldest color photos are still developing. More than
a century after the invention of autochromes, the revolutionary pictures
are now decaying and revealing a new kind of Beauty
by Katy Kelliher. In the ear late nineteen eighties, the

(22:17):
late National Geographic Society photographer turned archidivist volkmar Venseil was
delving through storage when he stumbled onto something both breathtaking
and heartbreaking, a box of delicate glass panels, most of
them the sides of postcards displaying color images captured in
the early twentieth century. Many were deteriorating their once crisp scenes,

(22:39):
speckled with ghostly snowflakes, obscured by halos, and otherwise rendered surreal.

Speaker 1 (22:44):
By time and neglect.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
They were autochromes, the products of a turn of the
twentieth century race to capture the world in all its color,
and now the race was on to preserve them, even
as time transformed them in extraordinary ways. Introduced in nineteen
o seven by French inventors Auguste and Louis Lumiere, autochrome
technology was revolutionary in its day, relying on a light

(23:10):
sensitive silver emulsion covered with a fine layer of potato starch.
That powdery extract, then popular as thickener adhesive and fabric stiffener,
was crucial to capturing the chroma of the area of
the era, microscopic particles dyed green, orange, and violet were
scattered across a plate and sealed.

Speaker 1 (23:32):
On with varnish.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
When light struck the plate through a camera's open shutter,
each colored granule blocked a range of wavelengths corresponding to
colors of the visible spectrum, exposing the emulsion beneath to
countless tiny dots of variously filtered light. After a few
chemical baths in a dark room, the transparency that appeared

(23:55):
on glass was seen up clothes a point tolistic mosaic.
But go back and shine light through the plate covered
with another glass layer for protection, and a vivid, painterly
image emerged. National Geographics magazines first full time editor, was
an autochrome champion, commissioning and procuring glass plate works from

(24:17):
photo photographers around the world. Because exposure times were long,
much of early color photography consists of still lifes and landscapes,
but National Geographic acquired dynamic images of life as it's lived,
of crowded bazaars in Albania, of masked dancers in Tibet,
of riders atop brightly garbed elephants in India. Autochromes together

(24:40):
with similar processes involving glass plates remained the primary means
of making color photos until the nineteen thirty five debut
of cootochrome film, with its layers of emulsion that were
themselves photosensitive. In the film era, the Society's glass plates
were not carefully preserved. Wenzel, during more than forty years

(25:02):
as a National geographic field photographer, saw value in the
old photos, while many of his peers were focused on innovation.
When the Society thinned its collection in the nineteen sixties,
he rescued plates from the trash, taking them home for
safe keeping an eventual return to the archive. Others simply

(25:22):
moldered forgotten until Wenzel rediscovered.

Speaker 1 (25:25):
Them in off site storage.

Speaker 2 (25:27):
Upon becoming the Society's first official photo archivist.

Speaker 1 (25:31):
In nineteen eighty.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
Wenzel made it a mission to preserve, catalog and exhibit
the old photos and today National Geographics early color photography
collection comprises some thirteen thousand plates, including one of the
world's largest assemblages of autochromes. The largest is at the
muse Albert Kahan outside of Paris. But, as with many

(25:54):
remaining early color photos, national geographics have been altered by light, heat, humidity,
and improper handling plates have cracked and fissured. Oxidizing silver
particles have created radiant amoeba shaped orange blotches on the
autochrome descendants, known as dou Fet colors. Violet bruises are

(26:17):
evidence of vinegar syndrome, a chemical decay affecting layers of
film between glass named for its telltale scent and contagious
from plate to plate. Vinegar syndrome is a plague amongst
photographic archives, says Sarah manco director of the National Geographic
Society's Photo and Illustration Archives. It all sounds rather tragic,

(26:39):
but the blemishes also have given many of the plates
a strange new beauty. No longer pristine documents of history,
they become testaments to the ravage of time, abstracted, fragmented,
and obscured, like so many ancient and admired artifacts. What's
morris As image archivist Rebecca DuPont, witnessing the deterioration, a

(27:00):
process that will only ever play out once, offers lessons
about the science behind these objects. If you think about it,
photography is still a relatively new medium, only one hundred
fifty years old, DuPont says, and the objects in the
collection haven't yet reached the end of their lives. They're
in a special stage right now where we get to
see what happens to them. Even as the plates continue

(27:24):
to deteriorate. Some measure of permanence has been achieved. With
a twenty twenty grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities,
MACO and a team of archivists spent three years digitizing
the entire collection. These days, the originals are carefully organized
in temperature controlled storage. Those afflicted with vinegar syndrome are sequestered,

(27:45):
and many broken ones have been painstakingly pieced together. Degrading
always sounds bad, but they're also developing from documentary objects
into a weird science history project.

Speaker 1 (27:56):
DuPont says. Are the images we're.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
Looking at being lost or are they just being changed
into something new. This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine
for to day. Your reader has been Marsha. Thank you
for listening, Keep on listening, and have a great day.