Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Marcia for Radio I, and today I
Speaker 1: will be reading National Geographic Magazine dated March twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1: As a reminder, RADIOI is a reading service intended for
Speaker 1: people who are blind or have other disabilities that make
Speaker 1: it difficult to read printed material. Please join me now
Speaker 1: for the first article titled The Vanishing Beauty of Brazil's
Speaker 1: Charado by Michael Finkel. The world's largest agricultural boom is
Speaker 1: transforming a vast savannah of hidden wonders. Here's what happens
Speaker 1: when progress outpaces our understanding of what might be worth preserving.
Speaker 1: It's called the Chiado Portuguese Foreclosed, and for nearly all
Speaker 1: of human history, this vast tropical savannah in central Brazil
Speaker 1: seems to have been shut off from the rest of
Speaker 1: the world. People do live there. Hunter gatherer groups overcoming
Speaker 1: the formidable wilds have roamed Therado since the Stone Age,
Speaker 1: and in colonial times, those escaping slavery often disappeared behind
Speaker 1: the hills, where they built tight knit communities, unlocked the lands,
Speaker 1: subtle gifts, and settled in otherwise. Across centuries, hardly anyone
Speaker 1: ventured inside. The terrain was repellent to visitors, practically impossible
Speaker 1: to traverse. Much of the chiroto as a dense, tailed
Speaker 1: mess of stunted trees and shrubs, the whole place crawling
Speaker 1: with snakes. It pales in lushness to the mighty Amazon
Speaker 1: rainforest to the north, the green lungs of the earth.
Speaker 1: Even some scientists who study the chiado call it ugly.
Speaker 1: The common term for it scrubland is campo suho dirty field.
Speaker 1: But the main reason that tchiato was ignored beyond indigenous
Speaker 1: peoples and those seeking refuge, is that no one could
Speaker 1: find money in it. No hardwoods, no diamonds, no oil.
Speaker 1: The soul is highly acidic, deadly to most non native plants,
Speaker 1: and during the six month dry season the land is
Speaker 1: often ravaged by fire. Until the mid twentieth century, the
Speaker 1: tiato was dismissed by the capitalist world as a wasteland,
Speaker 1: best to leave a closed and move on. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties, Brazil found a use for it. The nation,
Speaker 1: leaping into the global economy, decided to construct a new
Speaker 1: capital city, a monument to Brazilian progress, in the center
Speaker 1: of the country. So a hunk of the tiado smack
Speaker 1: in the middle was cleared and Brazilia rose up. Five
Speaker 1: million people now live there. Only Salpaldo, Rio de Janeiro
Speaker 1: and Belo Horizonte are bigger. Then in the nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: came a more sweeping transformation. Brazilian agricultural scientists working in
Speaker 1: a government lab cooked up a fertilizer packed with lime
Speaker 1: that modified the harsh Shiado soil and enabled cash crops
Speaker 1: to grow. Industrial watering systems could counteract the dry season,
Speaker 1: and fire brigades would snuff out the flames. The Troado
Speaker 1: was opened for business. Bulldozers and tractors rolled in, and
Speaker 1: thousands of square miles of scrubby chiato were scraped clean. Corn, sugar, cane,
Speaker 1: and especially soybeans were planted, then trucked across the country
Speaker 1: to seaports. China, the United States, and Europe bought them up,
Speaker 1: and the land clearing intensified. The largest agricultural corporations in
Speaker 1: the world established massive factory farms there. The Brazilian economy roared,
Speaker 1: more land was churned up. There seemed no limit. The
Speaker 1: Chiado's size is Texas times three. The area, according to
Speaker 1: a twenty twenty one report from the World Bank, has
Speaker 1: the greatest art agricultural potential on the planet. Along with
Speaker 1: government workers and farm hands, a new generation of biologists,
Speaker 1: many lured by the science department at the University of Brasilia,
Speaker 1: also came to the Tchiado curious about this relatively unknown region,
Speaker 1: always considered less worthy of study than the Amazon. Over
Speaker 1: the past two decades, scientific attention has focused on the area,
Speaker 1: even as it has shifted toward becoming an ecological sacrifice zone,
Speaker 1: what land use experts call a place lacking strong environmental
Speaker 1: protection that caters to human consumption, and the Chiato's great
Speaker 1: secrets have emerged. Turning away most humans from millennia appears
Speaker 1: to have been an ideal strategy for preserving extraordinary biodiversity.
Speaker 1: The Chiato, researchers from the University of Brazilia and elsewhere
Speaker 1: have tallied is home to more than eleven thousand species
Speaker 1: of plants and trees, forty percent of which exist nowhere else.
Speaker 1: There are eight hundred bird species, twelve hundred fish species,
Speaker 1: and ninety thousand insect species. The golden firred, stilt legged
Speaker 1: maimed wolf prowls the Toroto, as does the giant ant eater,
Speaker 1: which grow seven feet long, not including its two foot tongue.
Speaker 1: There are wide populations of bees, snakes, lizards, bats, and butterflies.
Speaker 1: About five percent of Earth's animal and plant species are
Speaker 1: thought to live in the Toroto, the biologically richest savannah
Speaker 1: in the world. The real secret, though, is what you
Speaker 1: can't observe. The soil in the Troto runs deep in
Speaker 1: places eighty feet and to help survive the dry seaves
Speaker 1: and its fires, many plants sprout extensive root systems. The
Speaker 1: vast majority of the Chrodo's biomass is subterranean. Some trees
Speaker 1: that look like spinbly fence posts above are mussel rooted
Speaker 1: and brawny below. Biologists who examine this hidden realm called
Speaker 1: the Toroto the upside down forest. This underground world performs
Speaker 1: priceless ecological services. It's a massive carbon sink, locking away
Speaker 1: billions of tons of carbon dioxide in well buried roots
Speaker 1: as the Trotto is converted to farm land. The current
Speaker 1: rate is more than four thousand acres a day. The
Speaker 1: greenhouse gas is released each year. According to the World
Speaker 1: Wildlife Fund WWF, the discharge drew to altering the Troto
Speaker 1: is equivalent to the annual emissions of fifty million cars.
Speaker 1: If all the carbon held by the trodo were discharged,
Speaker 1: this might single handedly push global warming over the one
Speaker 1: point five degrees celsius limit set by the United Nations
Speaker 1: at the Paris Climate Conference of twenty fifteen, a point
Speaker 1: at which the global ice sheets could inexorably melt, causing
Speaker 1: the seas to inundate every coastal city. Deep soil is
Speaker 1: also a sponge. The troto collects and stores seasonal rains
Speaker 1: in immense subterranean chambers. The more land that's cut above
Speaker 1: the less water held below. These aquifers, geologists report, feed
Speaker 1: the headwaters of eight of the twelve major river basins
Speaker 1: in South Americada. Those underground tanks pump water all over
Speaker 1: the continent. If the Amazon is the lungs, the Troto
Speaker 1: is the heart. To get a place where the Chiado's
Speaker 1: pulse can be experienced untamed in raw. Take the road
Speaker 1: north out of Brasilia. It first runs arrow straight through
Speaker 1: the suburbs, then direct to the factory farms. Rows of
Speaker 1: soybeans roll to the horizons. Grain trucks outnumber cars. Trectors
Speaker 1: spray the fields with white mist. More than one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty million gallons of pesticides. Brazilian environmental journalists report
Speaker 1: douse the chiroto each year. The land has been decimated,
Speaker 1: says Brazilian ecologist Paolo Lviira Editure of the Tirodos of Brazil,
Speaker 1: a book that explores the natural history of the region,
Speaker 1: and soybeans, for the most part, aren't eaten by people.
Speaker 1: They're shipped around the globe to feed cattle the world
Speaker 1: demands beef. After a couple of hours of driving, the
Speaker 1: windshields spattered with bugs, hills rise up, the giant farms dissipate,
Speaker 1: and the Toroto exists in a natural state. The terrain
Speaker 1: admittedly can appear reared soil toxicity metals with tree growth
Speaker 1: making the trunks all gnarled and hunched. The frequent fires
Speaker 1: scorch the buds at the ends of branches, which are
Speaker 1: replaced by lower buds that grow at contorted angles. Then
Speaker 1: those eventually get fire burned too, and so on. It's
Speaker 1: basically a big thicket of elbows. Though not every Toroto
Speaker 1: landscape looks Doctor Seuss strange. The Torodo is one huge,
Speaker 1: interconnected biome, composed of a dozen varieties of smaller ecosystems,
Speaker 1: ranging from open grassland to dense full sized woods. Driving
Speaker 1: deeper in some one hundred fifty miles from Brazilia, travelers
Speaker 1: approach Chapada dos vie d'erros, one of the two national
Speaker 1: parks in the Trotto, where sections of closed canopy forest
Speaker 1: shroud tumbling rivers. There is a tourist town here, alto
Speaker 1: Paraizzo High Paradise, where a steady stream of visitors, primarily
Speaker 1: from other parts of Brazil. Higher certified hiking guides lounge
Speaker 1: in streams and purchase genuine Cchiado crystals from pendant necklace
Speaker 1: size to paper weight, dug from the ancient soil and perfect,
Speaker 1: say the shopkeepers for cleansing your aura. This is where
Speaker 1: the battle for the Shido is being waged, between those
Speaker 1: who cherish the other worldly place as it is and
Speaker 1: those bending near land to their will. Less than ten
Speaker 1: percent of the Shrodo falls under any environmental protection, mostly
Speaker 1: at state parks and mixed use areas where people live
Speaker 1: and grow crops. Only three percent is under full federal preservation.
Speaker 1: The national parks are just specks in the vastness. By comparison,
Speaker 1: about half of the Amazon biome is protected, and the
Speaker 1: Amazon is specifically named in the Brazilian Constitution as a
Speaker 1: national Heritage zone but not the Chiroto, and estimated four
Speaker 1: fifths of the entire Chiato has already been disturbed by
Speaker 1: human activities. Almost everything happening in the past fifty years.
Speaker 1: No one knows how many unique species of plants or
Speaker 1: animals have already been lost. International conservation organizations like WWF
Speaker 1: and Global Fitness, as well as Brazilian groups such as
Speaker 1: the National Campaign in Defense of the Chiado, have mobilized.
Speaker 1: They seek to spread awareness of the Chiado and its
Speaker 1: precarious situation and implore the Brazilian government to safeguard what's left.
Speaker 1: A team of Brazilian forestry scientists, in a notable twenty
Speaker 1: seventeen paper, demonstrated that the Cchiado's essential ground layers, which
Speaker 1: contain most of the endemic species, are painfully slow at
Speaker 1: self repair. A section of cleared land that had been
Speaker 1: abandoned for more than twenty years hardly seemed to regenerate
Speaker 1: much biodiversity. At times, Brazilian legislators seem receptive to the
Speaker 1: idea that consumption and conservation can exist hand in hand.
Speaker 1: The same government lab that originally developed the fertilizer that
Speaker 1: fueled the Chiado's cultivation, has now been tasked with creating
Speaker 1: an improved version to significantly increase crop yield so economic
Speaker 1: growth can be maintained without surrendering more land. Technology can
Speaker 1: both harm us and save us the great roulette wheel
Speaker 1: of the modern world. So far, progress has been modest,
Speaker 1: with the leaders of Brazil more actively enforcing environmental protections
Speaker 1: to slow the rate of deforestation. Meanwhile, plenty of historic
Speaker 1: grassland continues to be plowed over. There appears to be
Speaker 1: a reluctance among legislators to enact regulations that will likely
Speaker 1: harm finances, and the agribusiness undeniably is helping keep the
Speaker 1: economy of Brazil and the globe rolling along. At the
Speaker 1: same time, the National Campaign in Defense of the Tirado
Speaker 1: and science journalists have reported about the particularly convenient and
Speaker 1: widespread belief that nothing is really being lost. Agricultural lobbyists
Speaker 1: have indicated to legislators that the Tirado's last untouched places
Speaker 1: are little but in fertile, uninhabited regions just waiting to
Speaker 1: turn a profit. Luciana Santos begs to differ. She was
Speaker 1: born in the Chiato and lives there still with her
Speaker 1: husband and four young daughters. Her family is part of
Speaker 1: a community, a collection of villages known as a Quirambo,
Speaker 1: whose first members escaped slavery some two hundred and fifty years ago.
Speaker 1: Here enfolded into the hills just beyond the boundaries of
Speaker 1: Chapada dos via Daros National Park, the roads remain unpaved
Speaker 1: and electricity hasn't yet reached the farthest thatched roofed homes.
Speaker 1: Santos is thirty three years old. When she was young,
Speaker 1: she had to walk two hours to get to school
Speaker 1: each way, though her daughters don't do that. There's a
Speaker 1: new school in her village that becomes a community library
Speaker 1: at night. Currently, there are forty four separate cuiambos in
Speaker 1: the Chiato and about eighty different indigenous ethnicities whose ancestors
Speaker 1: stretch back to pre European times. Some hunt, some farm,
Speaker 1: some fish, some grays livestock. Everyone sings different songs. An
Speaker 1: accurate census of the Tarrato is elusive, but about one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand people are believed to live traditionally off the land.
Speaker 1: Several groups do not own the legal deeds to the territory,
Speaker 1: their future destined to be fraught with lawsuits and land battles.
Speaker 1: The community Santos comes from has embraced tourism, sharing the
Speaker 1: chiato they believe helps save it. They don't want bulldozers
Speaker 1: approaching their hills. They have everything to lose. Any visitors
Speaker 1: willing to take the long drive from Brazilia are welcome.
Speaker 1: Santos is one of the guides walking the footpaths around
Speaker 1: her Quilambo. She sees through the chaos of shrubs and
Speaker 1: trees and bushes indecipherable to most outsiders, and points out
Speaker 1: ingredients she regularly uses. These leaves make a lotion for
Speaker 1: skin care, she says. Brew a tea with this for
Speaker 1: mussel ache. This one's good for bug bites. Tiny black
Speaker 1: frogs dart abruptly across the path. They do that when
Speaker 1: it's about to rain, she says, and a few minutes
Speaker 1: later it does. Santos gained her knowledge of the natural
Speaker 1: world from her grandmother and mother, and some some from
Speaker 1: men too, but they're harder to learn from, and vows
Speaker 1: that she will pass on everything to her daughters. I
Speaker 1: will not allow our culture to die. Prepackaged goods occasionally
Speaker 1: arrive by truck, but her community, like every Quilambo, can
Speaker 1: grow all its own food. They did it for a
Speaker 1: couple of centuries, coaxing the soil to yield rice, beans, pumpkins, cassava.
Speaker 1: Nothing is sprayed with pesticides. You could drink the water
Speaker 1: right out of the streams. Chickens and cows are raised
Speaker 1: for meat. Rivers provide fish. Berries are plentiful. Beiiti palm
Speaker 1: trees offer roofing material and creamy fruits. Mangaba trees produce
Speaker 1: some like sugary treats. But the local favorite, Santo says,
Speaker 1: is definitely the pequis, a fruit native to the Chrodo's
Speaker 1: that's a little complicated and a touch dangerous to eat,
Speaker 1: as there are needlelike spines inside that must be carefully avoided.
Speaker 1: The flavor, a trace of bitter lemon and a hint
Speaker 1: of cheddar cheese, doesn't immediately appeal to everyone, but for
Speaker 1: those who can adapt to the taste, the pequis often
Speaker 1: becomes a prized delicacy. The pequis, Santos implies, is like
Speaker 1: the trotto itself, if you're able to adjust in just
Speaker 1: the right ways, the prickliness and oddities are not merely tolerated,
Speaker 1: but deeply adored. I've never wanted to live anywhere else,
Speaker 1: she says. One person's wasteland is another's wonder. Witnessing the
Speaker 1: Toroto's wild glory, while also avoiding the afternoon heat, sometimes
Speaker 1: requires departing with a guide on the National Park trails
Speaker 1: before dawn. Moths flit about your headlamp. Crystal fragments glint
Speaker 1: in the dark. There's a crazy amount of noise. Frogs burp,
Speaker 1: crickets squeak, a cacophony of insects, greet's first light. Some
Speaker 1: sound like power tools, others like kazoos and whistles and buzzers,
Speaker 1: a sense of teeming infinite life. Everywhere are twisted tree branches,
Speaker 1: the shadow staple and vines dangling down like loose wires
Speaker 1: from the undergrowth. Ferns stretch their herringbone fronds towards the light.
Speaker 1: Brilliant splatches of color pop from the greenery, purple, jasmine,
Speaker 1: red hibiscus. A candle bush holds up bright yellow blooms,
Speaker 1: a grand chandelier, A blue morpho butterfly circles flying stained glass.
Speaker 1: The air is a heavy blanket, and the loamy scent lingers,
Speaker 1: termite mounds shaped like witches hats rise from the soil.
Speaker 1: A fat lizard lumber's tongue. Flitting black ants hauling husks
Speaker 1: of leaves to their nests look like a procession of
Speaker 1: tiny windsurfers. A breeze triggered confetti of white petals tumbles
Speaker 1: out of a tree. Birds are constant companions, parakeets, humming birds, flycatchers, hawks,
Speaker 1: A Tucan bob's beak heavy through the air as if
Speaker 1: swimming the breaststroke. A pair of flamboyant macaws mate it
Speaker 1: for life. Rainbow over the tree tops, the trail steepens
Speaker 1: up a bowaberie slope, and a sound like rolling thunder
Speaker 1: starts and doesn't stop. It only intensifies, soon drowning out
Speaker 1: even the bugs. Then the forest parts at a rocky
Speaker 1: outcrop on top of a hill, and there it all
Speaker 1: is an expansive sweep of untouched sharado, not a farm
Speaker 1: in sight, the green wilderness sliced open by a deep
Speaker 1: cliff walled canyon, the river within hurtling off a stairway
Speaker 1: of ledges, The raging waterfalls, the source of the thunder
Speaker 1: kick up clouds of mist. The sheer breadth of the
Speaker 1: view is dizzying and spectacular. The heart of Brazil still
Speaker 1: beating strong, but for how long. The director of Chapada
Speaker 1: dos Varios Deiros National Park, a thirty seven year old
Speaker 1: biologist named Nayara Stacceski, says she is fearful the Chiato
Speaker 1: could pass any salvageable tipping point in less than a decade.
Speaker 1: This could all become a desert, she says, and everyone
Speaker 1: with a steak in the toroto will lose. Many Brazilian
Speaker 1: scientists who specialize in the Tchirado are in general agreement.
Speaker 1: It's hard to halt or even slow the march of
Speaker 1: progress and the force of consumerism. I'm not optimistic, says
Speaker 1: Guarino Coli, and ecology professor of the University of Brasilia
Speaker 1: who studies the Toiroto's lizards and snakes. Coli indicates that
Speaker 1: it's not the celebrated areas like the Amazon Rainforest, for
Speaker 1: which people are willing to donate money and fight to protect,
Speaker 1: that we should worry about, but rather it is the
Speaker 1: lesser known, vulnerable lands that could determine our fate. How
Speaker 1: we treat the sharado is by extension, how we will
Speaker 1: treat much of the world. What's at risk, according to
Speaker 1: the National Campaign in Defense of the Chiado, is the
Speaker 1: life of every being. There are no simple solutions. Everyone
Speaker 1: wants inexpensive commodities. If we don't farm the Tiado, we
Speaker 1: will have to farm elsewhere. Eight billion people need to
Speaker 1: be fed every day. All nations seek to grow their economy.
Speaker 1: Nobody is at fault, and everybody's at fault at the
Speaker 1: same time. We all have some responsibility for the devastation
Speaker 1: of the Chiado, says Colli, so a being. Demand is soaring,
Speaker 1: and the expansion of farmland will almost surely continue. The
Speaker 1: lure of cheap cheeseburgers is strong. The Tarado, it is possible,
Speaker 1: will be a place that few will really miss until
Speaker 1: it's closed, forever and gone. Aw Brazil's Troto is changing.
Speaker 1: At the edge of the Amazon Range forests, Brazil's lesser known,
Speaker 1: less protected, and second largest ecosystem. The Toiado is rapidly transforming.
Speaker 1: Its diverse savannahs, grassland and forests house some five thousand
Speaker 1: endemic species whose habitats are vanishing at extreme speed, Accelerating
Speaker 1: losses deforestation in the Chiado increased by sixty eight percent
Speaker 1: between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three, prompting new
Speaker 1: efforts to protect the area vanishing landscape. The Chiato's natural
Speaker 1: vegetation is being cleared to make way for cattle grazing
Speaker 1: and crops including soybeans, rice, and sugar. Pastures for grazing
Speaker 1: now occupy twenty six percent of the Toroado, up from
Speaker 1: seventeen percent in nineteen eighty five. Today, natural savannahs make
Speaker 1: up twenty seven percent of the Troto, down from forty
Speaker 1: percent in nineteen eighty five. Next, Reviving medieval monsters, how
Speaker 1: modern artisans are honing an age old style of stonecraft
Speaker 1: and bringing new beauty to an English cathedral By Roth Smith.
Speaker 1: On a damp spring morning in the ancient English city
Speaker 1: of York, a group of school children stopped in front
Speaker 1: of the iconic york Minster Cathedral and broke into giggles,
Speaker 1: sharing uneasy looks. Built over a period of two hundred
Speaker 1: fifty years and consecrated in fourteen seventy two, the church
Speaker 1: is the largest Gothic cathedral in Britain. It features three
Speaker 1: huge medieval towers adorned with shimmering stained glass windows, but
Speaker 1: the kids were focused more intently on something at the
Speaker 1: edge of the stone Matian's yard outside the building that
Speaker 1: steered back at them. A large stone statue of a
Speaker 1: beastill creature in mid scream, clutching its head as a
Speaker 1: frog sprang from its mouth. Weighing about half a ton,
Speaker 1: the freshly made carving is a classic example of a
Speaker 1: medieval grotesque, a style of ornate architectural decoration that most
Speaker 1: people see only at a day. During the Middle Ages,
Speaker 1: grotesques were placed atop religious buildings alongside similarly fanciful gargoyles,
Speaker 1: the key difference being that gargoyles are a style of
Speaker 1: grotesque with functional rain spouts. This particular monster had been
Speaker 1: hand carved out of about fifteen hundred ten pounds of
Speaker 1: local limestone by one of Yorkminster's twelve full time stonemasons.
Speaker 1: It is essentially a modern replica. When eventually hoisted up
Speaker 1: onto one of the buttresses on the cathedral, it will
Speaker 1: replace a similar statue that had been eroded to a
Speaker 1: faceless nub by centuries of wind and rain. We try
Speaker 1: to replace lke for like, says Lewis Morrison, the master
Speaker 1: stonemason who spent fourteen weeks carving the statue, but Morrison
Speaker 1: admitted that even he wasn't entirely sure that the original
Speaker 1: creation featured a frog. It was so badly worn you
Speaker 1: couldn't tell much about it other than the pose. With
Speaker 1: a hand raised beside his head, he says, york Minster's
Speaker 1: stone masons face a tricky balance in restoring such architectural relics,
Speaker 1: so in addition to practicing the time honored techniques of
Speaker 1: stone carving, they've learned to harness modern technology and take
Speaker 1: some historically informed artistic license to recurate the beastly grotesque.
Speaker 1: For instance, Morrison and his team ascended to the church's rooftop,
Speaker 1: where they used a camera capable of taking high quality
Speaker 1: images that can be stitched together into a three D
Speaker 1: model to render the statue's exact dimensions. Next, they carved
Speaker 1: a polyerethane model of the weatherworn original as a reference copy,
Speaker 1: following the same lines, proportions and silhouette of the original.
Speaker 1: Morrison then spent weeks researching several similarly posed grotesques on
Speaker 1: york Minster and pouring over fourteenth century illustrated manuscripts before
Speaker 1: coming up with a theme and design He eventually chose
Speaker 1: the timeless theme of good inn evil. The beast holds
Speaker 1: its head while encountering the frog, which is a symbol
Speaker 1: of demons in medieval folklore. But viewers should also notice
Speaker 1: that the creature grips of fish in its other hand,
Speaker 1: symbolizing Christianity. Once the design was approved by the cathedral's architect,
Speaker 1: the slow, intimate process of carving began. It's one that
Speaker 1: would have been readily recognizable to Morrison's medieval counterparts, with
Speaker 1: the same tools, same pale limestone, and same musical ring
Speaker 1: of steel on stone, clean cling sounding across the yard.
Speaker 1: There's been a permanent stone mason's yard at Yorkminster for
Speaker 1: more than two hundred years, part of a rolling program
Speaker 1: of restoration and repairs that began in the late eighteenth century.
Speaker 1: Is a never ending job, says Alex Mcallian, director of
Speaker 1: Works and Precinct at Yorkminster. Our scaffolding is on one
Speaker 1: hundred year rotation today. However, these methods of restoration could
Speaker 1: be to evolve. The cathedral recently opened a new workspace
Speaker 1: for its tradespeople, called the Center of Excellence for Heritage
Speaker 1: Skills and Estate Management, and over ten million dollars state
Speaker 1: of the art facility just around the corner from the cathedral.
Speaker 1: The workshop is equipped with computer controlled stone saws for
Speaker 1: roughly shaping blocks of limestone, along with laser scanners and
Speaker 1: digital software to help measure and virtually model designs. These
Speaker 1: tools could be wielded to not only replicate artifacts, but
Speaker 1: also create entirely new ones, like a nearly two ton
Speaker 1: statue of the late Queen Elizabeth the sculpted from a
Speaker 1: block of French limestone that now stands outside on the
Speaker 1: west end of the cathedral. It's a big step into
Speaker 1: the future for us, says Mecallian, although we won't be
Speaker 1: abandoning our roots in traditional craftsmanship. Every piece we make
Speaker 1: will still be finished by hand using the same tools
Speaker 1: mallet and chisel we've always used. It is vital that
Speaker 1: we do not lose humanity. Like the new Grotesque, the
Speaker 1: statue of the Queen should last throughout several centuries to come.
Speaker 1: There's always more work to be done, though, ensuring that
Speaker 1: plenty more beasts will be rising from the mason's yard
Speaker 1: over the centuries. Many of this stone details at york Minster,
Speaker 1: the Gothic cathedral in York, England, eroded, requiring restoration or replacement. Building.
Speaker 1: This new grotesque demanded expert craftsmanship and creative problem solving,
Speaker 1: as some of the original details had been lost to
Speaker 1: the ages. How reindeer got to America. In the eighteen nineties,
Speaker 1: the idea of raising domesticated reindeer took root in Alaska,
Speaker 1: leading to a herd being imported to replace dwindling numbers
Speaker 1: of free ranging caribou as a regional food source. In
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty nine, the Canadian government, inspired by the success
Speaker 1: of reindeer in Alaska, decided to buy a portion of
Speaker 1: the thriving herds and bring them east. The planned eighty
Speaker 1: month journey stretched to five brutal years. The team was
Speaker 1: beset by storms, stampedes, and dangerous run ins with wolves
Speaker 1: along the route. Beneath its destructive reputation, the red palm
Speaker 1: wevil reveals a mesmerizing complexity. Each groove, curve and texture
Speaker 1: of its exo skeleton tells a story of adaptation, survival,
Speaker 1: and destruction. Deep in the Himalayan region of Ladakh, India,
Speaker 1: two monks from the Fugtal Monastery set off to collect food,
Speaker 1: fired wood, and building materials from the nearest village, which
Speaker 1: is a three hour hike away. Winter in Ladak's Zanskar
Speaker 1: Valley is brutal. Since there are no roads to the monastery,
Speaker 1: frozen rivers or ice roads become the only ways in
Speaker 1: or out. Weaving the identities of local artists with endemic
Speaker 1: flowers and plants provides a way to reimagine the natural
Speaker 1: world that cradles the spirit of both the land and
Speaker 1: our people. A Filipino ritualist known as an Allaga invokes
Speaker 1: the spirits of the walling Walling, an endangered orchid species
Speaker 1: native to the Philippines. This concludes readings from National Geographic
Speaker 1: Magazine for to day. Your reader has been Marsha. If
Speaker 1: you've enjoyed hearing this content, please give us a call
Speaker 1: at eight five nine four two two six three nine zero.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening, and have a great day.