Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Marsha for Radio I, and today I
Speaker 1: will be reading National Geographic magazine dated April twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
Speaker 1: is a reading service intended for people who are blind
Speaker 1: or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
Speaker 1: printed material. Please join me now for the continuation of
Speaker 1: the article I began last time, entitled The National Geographics
Speaker 1: Bold Thinkers, Scientists, explorers and Scout Scholars. Paddy Gonia, the
Speaker 1: activist making the outdoors a more welcoming space for the
Speaker 1: queer community. The outdoors can sometimes feel hostile for the
Speaker 1: queer community. That's a conclusion when Wily reached as a
Speaker 1: kid at a summer camp run by the Boy Scouts,
Speaker 1: I was indoctrinated into this militaristic, masculine outdoor system of
Speaker 1: you have to be strong to survive. Wiley recalls to
Speaker 1: day that kid raised under a stifling vision of the
Speaker 1: outdoors needs of movement built on a very different story,
Speaker 1: and does so in heels. After going viral in twenty
Speaker 1: eighteen for hiking in six inch heeled boots, the world's
Speaker 1: premiere backpecking queen was born Patty Gonia, an activist in
Speaker 1: Drag who's striving to make LGBTQ people feel more at
Speaker 1: home in the outdoors. I think the narrative writ large
Speaker 1: for the queer community is to run to big cities
Speaker 1: for acceptance, says Patty, who uses she her pronouns in drag.
Speaker 1: And I feel like I ran the other way into
Speaker 1: the woods, Patty recalls from her home in bend Ore, Oregon,
Speaker 1: while out on a hike around a favorite pond. She's
Speaker 1: known to perform in lavish costumes, some made from un
Speaker 1: upcycled camping tents. Though her approach to climate change awareness
Speaker 1: is certainly novel, she's not a novelty act. Drag queens
Speaker 1: have always been at the forefront of community organizing and protesting,
Speaker 1: Patty says, a point reinforced by parks and Recreation star
Speaker 1: Nick Offerman, who invited her to perform at last year's
Speaker 1: Netflix Is a Joke festival in Los Angeles as part
Speaker 1: of a night of comedy devoted to inspiring action against
Speaker 1: climate change. Patty's set included an extended riff on the
Speaker 1: movie Finding Nemo in the male clownfish's ability to change
Speaker 1: its sex, the health of our ecosystem is no particularly
Speaker 1: sexy topic, Offerman says, nor is it easily made the
Speaker 1: subject of a comedy set, which makes Patty's expertise unique
Speaker 1: and impressive. Patty's activism has taken her to the White
Speaker 1: House and to Yosemite National Park, where she has been
Speaker 1: helping organized pride celebrations for park employees for several years.
Speaker 1: In two thousand twenty three, she released a music video
Speaker 1: with celebrated cellist Yo Yoma and Indigenous trans musician Quinn
Speaker 1: christoff Christofferson shot in Kenai Fiord's National Park in Alaska
Speaker 1: to bring awareness to the steadily retreating Exit Glacier. The
Speaker 1: place has deep meaning for the person behind the drag persona.
Speaker 1: It's where Wiley scattered his father's ashes after his death
Speaker 1: from cancer several years ago. While the reviews he had
Speaker 1: a complicated relationship with his father, but memorializing him while
Speaker 1: on a kayaking trip in his dad's home state provided
Speaker 1: some closure. Perhaps in the same way, Patty's advocacy work
Speaker 1: on behalf of Brave Trails, a nonprofit that offers a
Speaker 1: summer camp and backpacking trips for queer youth. Can here
Speaker 1: heal old wounds on the day we talk, Patty remains
Speaker 1: focused on the path ahead, trying to take pain and
Speaker 1: turn it into something different. She says, I think that's
Speaker 1: what queer people always try to do. By Mickey Rapkin. Next,
Speaker 1: Gabriella Hurst, the designer bringing climate consciousness to high fashion.
Speaker 1: A visitor to the Manhattan office of Gabriella Hurst doesn't
Speaker 1: need to peruse the impeccably well made clothes to spot
Speaker 1: proof of the fashion designer's impact. Those recycled cardboard hangars
Speaker 1: you see, Hurst says, pointing we were one of the
Speaker 1: first to develop them. Her abhorrence of the plastic kind
Speaker 1: owes to its frequent fate. The land to Day, the
Speaker 1: designer who grew up on a ranch in Uruguay and
Speaker 1: launched her eponymous brand a decade ago, is a prestige
Speaker 1: player in the world of fashion and embodies the quiet
Speaker 1: luxury movement. Even more distinctively. Herst, who has served for
Speaker 1: three change making years atop the Presian luxury House Clothing,
Speaker 1: is regarded as perhaps the most climate conscious designer in fashion.
Speaker 1: She does more than merely buzzy things like using dead
Speaker 1: stock fabrics, which she does, of course. She uses her
Speaker 1: position as a business leader to immerse herself in the
Speaker 1: global climate conversation. In twenty twenty three, she spoke at
Speaker 1: COP twenty eight with environmental and political heavyweights such as
Speaker 1: a US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Carey, discussing
Speaker 1: the promise of fusion energy. Sure, she understands the drape
Speaker 1: of a sweater, but she might prefer to discuss her
Speaker 1: quite nuanced opinions on alternative energy sources. Thanks to HER's activism,
Speaker 1: consumers are associating the label with far more than a
Speaker 1: flawless cashmere coat or her iconic Nina bag. The ideology
Speaker 1: is beginning to take precedence. The most rewarding kind of anecdotes,
Speaker 1: hers says, are when I hear the clients are buying
Speaker 1: these really beautiful pieces, and when our retailed team tries
Speaker 1: to wrap them up in this beautiful packaging, they say no,
Speaker 1: thank you, because I know Gabby would prefer us not
Speaker 1: to take the extra packaging. By Carrie Button next Arlow Parks,
Speaker 1: the singer songwriter using music to campaign for mental health.
Speaker 1: The London born musician and poet, Arlow Parks makes indie
Speaker 1: pop with the warmth and tenderness of folk and since
Speaker 1: her twenty twenty one debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams. She's
Speaker 1: become known for songs that are so strikingly candid and
Speaker 1: familiar that they can seem like diorama boxes filled with
Speaker 1: life's tiniest moments. I just have my notebook for every record,
Speaker 1: she says, and I'm collecting fragments and phrases and nuggets
Speaker 1: from my life, and that's where the music comes. Because
Speaker 1: her music is so possessed by interior life, it can
Speaker 1: naturally seem to yearn for a reckoning with our collective
Speaker 1: mental health. Her twenty twenty single black Dog, for instance,
Speaker 1: was written for a close friend who she feared was
Speaker 1: spiraling into depression. As she explains it, the reason why
Speaker 1: your moved to write something like this is to be
Speaker 1: kind of like, is anyone out there? Is anyone else
Speaker 1: experiencing this? In this way, granting solace to the lost
Speaker 1: and disheartened has since become part of a larger personal mission.
Speaker 1: Shortly after the release of Black Dog, Parks twenty four
Speaker 1: announced that she was working with a Campaign Against Living Miserably,
Speaker 1: a London based suicide prevention charity, and in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: three she met with members of UNICEF's Youth Advisory Board
Speaker 1: to write a poem later released on World Mental Health Day.
Speaker 1: Last year, she pushed further into activism, becoming the organization's
Speaker 1: youngest UK ambassador. I always knew that I wanted to
Speaker 1: shift the focus from me and my music into something
Speaker 1: that felt a little bit more expansive, using my privilege
Speaker 1: and the position that I was in to exact change,
Speaker 1: she says. While the world of her songs can be intimate,
Speaker 1: even insular, she's finding that the work of a unice
Speaker 1: of ambassador, navigating the effects of harm and giving voice
Speaker 1: to those marked by it, has to exist on a
Speaker 1: very large scale. Her first diplomatic trip took her to
Speaker 1: Sierra Leone, where she shadowed a series of youth advocates,
Speaker 1: sitting in on workshops and visiting support groups for addiction
Speaker 1: and victims of child marriage. That was the most beautiful
Speaker 1: thing to witness, she says, young girls learning to make
Speaker 1: sanitary pads and then teaching their younger sisters and their
Speaker 1: younger sister's friends. Ever the mpath, she sees herself as
Speaker 1: a translator and a bullhorn for their stories. It's about
Speaker 1: amplifying their voices and what they want the world to
Speaker 1: know about the work. She says, I really wanted them
Speaker 1: to speak through me. Parkes also intends for there to
Speaker 1: be a chared of dimension to her music. I wanted
Speaker 1: to feel like a soft place for people to land,
Speaker 1: she explains. It's obviously the softness of the actual music
Speaker 1: and the voice, but more than that, she says, she
Speaker 1: wants to create a place for people to just be
Speaker 1: and to think about who they are and how they
Speaker 1: love to listen and respond by Sheldon Pierce next York
Speaker 1: the Otherworldly Musician, offering a lesson in environmental pragmatism. York
Speaker 1: always seems to inhabit an alternate universe, a dream like
Speaker 1: space of the highest creative ambition, free from the constraints
Speaker 1: that govern mere mortals, which makes it all the more
Speaker 1: jarring when she injects her work with a dose of
Speaker 1: cold reality. In January, she released a concert film shot
Speaker 1: during her recent Cornucopia tour. The show featured signature York flourishes,
Speaker 1: including giant psychedelic projections of fungi and the flashing of
Speaker 1: an environmental manifesto, making an explicit appeal to the most
Speaker 1: urgent issue of our time. The Paris climat acorn is
Speaker 1: a modern utopia impossible to imagine, but overcoming our mental
Speaker 1: challenges is the only way we can survive. Over Zoom,
Speaker 1: one day last winter, she explained what she was getting at,
Speaker 1: namely a reframing of what's possible. When we look at
Speaker 1: the list of goals in the Paris Climate Accord, it
Speaker 1: looks absolutely unreachable, she says. I think what we have
Speaker 1: to do is set different goals that are reachable. While
Speaker 1: b Yorke's artistic aims have consistently been lofty, her environmentalism
Speaker 1: is grounded in practical concerns. She exists on the most
Speaker 1: rarefied plane that a pop star can reach. For decades,
Speaker 1: she's been a globally beloved visionary who can sell out arenas,
Speaker 1: but she still operates with the spirit and principles of
Speaker 1: an indie act from the nineties. Every other year, I
Speaker 1: try to pick one thing that I will fight quite
Speaker 1: hard for, she says. But I try to pick something
Speaker 1: where it's actually possible to overturn. It's big enough that
Speaker 1: it can matter, but small enough that you can make
Speaker 1: a change. In the past two years, Byork fifty nine has
Speaker 1: poured herself into the fight against commercial salmon farms in
Speaker 1: her native Iceland, after a hole in one's farm's pen
Speaker 1: allowed thousands of salmon to escape. There's a concern that
Speaker 1: those fish may breed with native species or pass along
Speaker 1: diseases and parasites, creating a potential ecological nightmare. Sometimes it's
Speaker 1: been difficult to bridge a gap between gen z vegans
Speaker 1: and like farmers who kill sheep every autumn to eat,
Speaker 1: she says, But on this fish farming project, everyone is united.
Speaker 1: To bring global awareness to the issue, she took an
Speaker 1: unreleased song out of her archive and recruited Rosalia, the
Speaker 1: Spanish pop star, to record vocals for it. Precedes. Proceeds
Speaker 1: from the song, titled Oral, are now supporting several ongoing
Speaker 1: lawsuits against the commercial fisheries. Next up Byorke is trying
Speaker 1: to enlist environmental activists to petition French President Emmanuel ma
Speaker 1: Conte to ban bottom trawling in the country's protected waters.
Speaker 1: It's another seemingly modest goal with the potential to make
Speaker 1: a tangible impact. I try to make the best of
Speaker 1: the fact that I come from a very small country
Speaker 1: that is very untouched, she says. Instead of doing ten things,
Speaker 1: I try to do one thing properly and follow it
Speaker 1: all the way to the end, not just be a
Speaker 1: face on some campaign and show up at a cocktail
Speaker 1: party and go home and not know what's going to
Speaker 1: happen next. Carla Perez, the half breaking mountaineer helping climbers
Speaker 1: with disabilities reach new heights. Carla Perez can feel the
Speaker 1: difference when she crosses the invisible line that marks eighty
Speaker 1: three hundred meters or roughly twenty seven thousand feet above
Speaker 1: sea level. Before that wall, you still have a lot
Speaker 1: of control over what you think and what you do,
Speaker 1: she says. But when Perez forty two climbs higher, things change.
Speaker 1: Her body responds sluggishly to her commands and there is
Speaker 1: no reprieve from the cold or the deep exhaustion. That's
Speaker 1: where the real test begins. Only five of the world's
Speaker 1: fourteen eight thousand meter peaks exceed eighty three hundred meters Everest,
Speaker 1: k two, Makalu, Kanchumadjunga, and Lotzi. Perez, a trailblazing mountaineer
Speaker 1: from Ecuador, has so far summitted the first three without
Speaker 1: the use of supplemental oxygen, and she plans to complete
Speaker 1: the set climbing this way without the support system that
Speaker 1: has helped make the highest peak in the world achievable
Speaker 1: for generations of climbers is her preferred challenge. She Asha
Speaker 1: helps others break their own boundaries through an accessibility project
Speaker 1: called mas arad de Unatzima Beyond a Peak. The group
Speaker 1: offers monthly outings into the mountains for Ecuadorians with disabilities,
Speaker 1: in part to honor and uncle, who had cerebral palsy
Speaker 1: which limited his opportunities to experience the outdoors. Always, when
Speaker 1: I was climbing a mountain, I was thinking, oh my god,
Speaker 1: he would love to be here. She says that joy
Speaker 1: follows her from the highest reaches of her homeland to
Speaker 1: the Himalaya and beyond. It's exploration of your body. Oh,
Speaker 1: a fewer limits of the possibilities that you have, she
Speaker 1: says about climbing unassisted into even thinner air and a
Speaker 1: very deep connection for me with Mother Earth. The first
Speaker 1: thing we do when we are born, she points out,
Speaker 1: is breathe. Next. Alexis Nicole Nelson, the social media star
Speaker 1: sharing the wonder of wild plants with a wider audience.
Speaker 1: When she was younger. Alexis Nicole Nelson had friends who
Speaker 1: didn't understand her passion for the outdoors. They pictured some
Speaker 1: grizzled white, macho man, says Nelson, who today has millions
Speaker 1: of followers on Tik Tok and as widely known as
Speaker 1: the Black Forager, a witty hiking companion with dual degrees
Speaker 1: in environmental science. In theater, she has become the perfect
Speaker 1: guide for sharing deep knowledge about edible vegetation alongside everything
Speaker 1: from lurp sugar, insect excretions and ulva and testinalis a
Speaker 1: form of seaweed she likes to sprinkle on popcorn to
Speaker 1: the race sist origins of trespassing laws by Lola Oga Nike. Next,
Speaker 1: Yara Shahidi, the actress unpacking the psychology of optimism. What
Speaker 1: does optimism mean to you right now? It's a question
Speaker 1: that Yarat Shahdi, best known for her role as the
Speaker 1: gen Z cool girl Zoe Johnson on the hit show
Speaker 1: black Ish and its spin off Grown Ish, both produced
Speaker 1: by ABC, which shares a parent company with National Geographics,
Speaker 1: often asks at the beginning of her new podcast, The
Speaker 1: Optimist Project, which wrestles with how to live a more
Speaker 1: fulfilling life as suicide rates rise in the United States
Speaker 1: and the world seems to wash in the anxiety inducing headlines.
Speaker 1: It's a question that is become ever more urgent. But
Speaker 1: when asked what optimism means to her Shahdi, twenty five,
Speaker 1: who has no trouble speaking up, she's publicly condemned acts
Speaker 1: of voter suppression and police brutality, pauses. For me. Optimism
Speaker 1: is a belief in self, she says, and a real
Speaker 1: belief that I am capable of hande whatever comes my way.
Speaker 1: Over the years, her own outlook has been shaped, in
Speaker 1: large part by plenty of profound conversations with the fascinating
Speaker 1: people who have always surrounded her. Shahidi, a Harvard graduate,
Speaker 1: has two brothers. One is an actor, the other works
Speaker 1: in fashion. Her father, Afshin Shahdi, is an immigrant from
Speaker 1: iran cinematographer and a former photographer for the late pop
Speaker 1: star Prince. Her cousin is the rapper Nos. Her grandfather
Speaker 1: was a black Panther discussions with those family members and
Speaker 1: with a wide range of illustrious acquaintances were always so
Speaker 1: stimulating that the actress and her mother, Carrie Shahiti, felt
Speaker 1: compelled to bring that energy, both introspective and socially conscious
Speaker 1: to a wider audience. We feel so fortunate to be
Speaker 1: having these conversations, says Carrie, who was Shahedi's co producer.
Speaker 1: But equally we felt the drive to make sure other
Speaker 1: people had the opportunity to hear what we were hearing.
Speaker 1: Launched late last year, the Optimist Project has already featured
Speaker 1: Saturday Night Lives Ego Nuan din Tony Award winning actor
Speaker 1: Courtney b Vance, and Lori Santos, a psychology professor whose
Speaker 1: online class, The Science of well Being is Yale's most
Speaker 1: popular course of all time. The medium is one that
Speaker 1: comes naturally to Shihiti, who describes growing up in a
Speaker 1: TV off household, explaining that her family preferred audio books
Speaker 1: and radio programs. She gravitated toward audio because it feels
Speaker 1: like a participatory medium. Your audience and your host have
Speaker 1: to meet halfway, she says. You rely on the audience's
Speaker 1: imagination to go on this journey, which may offer more
Speaker 1: opportunities for personal exploration. When Shihiti has used her visibility
Speaker 1: to encourage young people to vote and pursue careers in stem,
Speaker 1: she's now inviting listeners to slow down and reflect in
Speaker 1: those moments she thinks real change can occur. Oftentimes, it
Speaker 1: feels like we're so bogged down by the day to
Speaker 1: day of what our lives require that we don't have
Speaker 1: as much space to say, let's take a step back
Speaker 1: from schedules, from finances, from all these things that we
Speaker 1: need to be thinking about all the time. To just
Speaker 1: keep pushing forward, she says, what we need to do,
Speaker 1: she believes, is talk about what quality of life means
Speaker 1: to us. The actress may have different stressors than her listeners,
Speaker 1: but Shihiti reflects on how young people today don't see
Speaker 1: upward mobility as a given. Having to pour so much
Speaker 1: thought into basic survival doesn't give your brain space to
Speaker 1: think about, well, why are we living? She says, what
Speaker 1: would make me excited to wake up the next day.
Speaker 1: She acknowledges that this is a challenging moment for the
Speaker 1: next generation of leaders. But with that comes in onslaught
Speaker 1: a very inspired, very motivated young people, and honestly, we
Speaker 1: need every voice. We need every person spoken like a
Speaker 1: true optimist. Next, Don Cheedele, the acclaimed actor battling climate injustice,
Speaker 1: one at risk community at a time. This past January,
Speaker 1: as fires raged across Los ang Angelist Don Cheedele and
Speaker 1: his wife, alongside tens of thousands of others in the region,
Speaker 1: were forced to evacuate their home near the Pacific Palisades.
Speaker 1: We brought some clothes and things that can't be replaced,
Speaker 1: like pictures, paintings from our kids, and that was it,
Speaker 1: he says. It was an unusually close to home crisis
Speaker 1: for an actor and activists who has long been accustomed
Speaker 1: to engaging with them farther afield as a good will
Speaker 1: ambassador for the UN Environment Program and as a member
Speaker 1: of the board of directors of the Solutions Project, which
Speaker 1: has supported more than three hundred community organizations fighting for
Speaker 1: climate justice in forty five states. In a way, the fires,
Speaker 1: which consumed working class homes and mansions with equal rapacity,
Speaker 1: were a reminder that climate emergencies don't stop to check race, ethnicity,
Speaker 1: or bank accounts. It's a very stark demonstration of the
Speaker 1: egalitarian nature of a disaster. In the beginning, Cheetle says,
Speaker 1: putting a special emphasis on the last words at the end,
Speaker 1: we'll see because we know that in situations like these,
Speaker 1: those who are most vulnerable and have the least representation
Speaker 1: are the ones who are going to be most damaged
Speaker 1: and have the least ability to bounce back. It is
Speaker 1: this clear eyed perspective that makes Cheedle sixty a strong
Speaker 1: advocate for human rights and climate justice. With The Solution's
Speaker 1: Project in particular, he continues to highlight racial and gender inequalities.
Speaker 1: Founded in twenty thirteen by actor Mark Ruffalo and two partners,
Speaker 1: the organization has distributed more than fifty million dollars to
Speaker 1: front line communities across America, most of them like Rhees
Speaker 1: Saint James, which has battled the impacts of the petrochemical
Speaker 1: industry in Louisiana's Cancer Ali, and to nizzoni Ani, which
Speaker 1: seeks to protect indigenous culture and water access on Arizona's
Speaker 1: Black Mesa, are led by women of color. I've always
Speaker 1: been very concerned about justice and representation, Chietl says, then
Speaker 1: when you become a father, every concern in the world
Speaker 1: falls in your lap. Or his Austere nominated performance as
Speaker 1: a hotel manager, Paul Ruseabagina in two thousand fours a
Speaker 1: hotel Ronda, he produced the documentary d'arfour now on the
Speaker 1: genocide in Western Soudan, sometimes referred to as the world's
Speaker 1: first climate change conflict, as for many. Al Gore's twenty
Speaker 1: two thousand and six documentary and Inconvenient Truth opened Cheetle's
Speaker 1: eyes to the urgency of the crisis. What can we do?
Speaker 1: He recalls asking, and I think when you ask those
Speaker 1: questions to the universe, the universe answers and goes, well,
Speaker 1: how about this. He came to the Solution's project through
Speaker 1: his work alongside Ruffalo in five Marvel Avengers movies, and
Speaker 1: he's remained intentional about how movie stardom can direct attention
Speaker 1: to such endeavors. Often celebrities or whatever you want to
Speaker 1: call us, are trying to get out of the spotlight,
Speaker 1: while people who are championing these issues can't get in.
Speaker 1: He says. Of course, the La fires demonstrated two things
Speaker 1: that the line between out and in when it comes
Speaker 1: to climate change is blurry and will only grow more so,
Speaker 1: and Cheetle intends to stay engaged whichever side he's on.
Speaker 1: By Brett Martin. Next The Singular Beauty of collective Flight
Speaker 1: by Ed Young. New research reveals why starlings travel in
Speaker 1: those gorgeous shape shifting clouds on winter evenings throughout much
Speaker 1: of Europe and North America. An hour before sunset, thousands
Speaker 1: of starlings gather in the skies before descending to their
Speaker 1: night time roots. The birds put on one of nature's
Speaker 1: most spectacular displays. They pulse, ripple, and wheel as if
Speaker 1: they were a single entity, an amorphous, shape shifting creature
Speaker 1: with a delicate beauty of calligraphic brushstrokes and the erotic
Speaker 1: chaos of flickering flames. How could so many birds be
Speaker 1: so tightly coordinated. That's a mystery that researchers have sought
Speaker 1: to sow for more than a century. In nineteen thirty one,
Speaker 1: the ornithologist Edmund Sellos argued that a sterling murmuration, which
Speaker 1: he describes as a madness in the sky, could only
Speaker 1: arise through telepathy. Birds must think collectively all at the
Speaker 1: same time, he wrote, like many others, Seleus assumed that
Speaker 1: complex behavior must have equal complex origins, But in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, programmers and physicists started showing otherwise. They created
Speaker 1: computer models in which virtual individuals interacted according to deceptively
Speaker 1: simple rules, but none the less moved in ways that
Speaker 1: resembled coordinated flocks. These simulations were compelling, but researchers lacked
Speaker 1: good data on actual flocks to compare them against. Then,
Speaker 1: in two thousand five, a team led by married physicists
Speaker 1: Andrea Cavagna and Irene Giardina in Rome took a giant
Speaker 1: leap forward. Over many chilly evenings across three years, they
Speaker 1: climbed to the roof top of the Palazzo Massimo to
Speaker 1: photograph the cities, especially epic murmurations, with pairs of camera.
Speaker 1: Using these images, they reconstructed the three D position of
Speaker 1: each individual immumerations that included more than four thousand members.
Speaker 1: The team has learned that no matter how large the flock,
Speaker 1: each starling interacts with only seven neighbors, which might be
Speaker 1: as much as their brains can handle. The exact neighbors
Speaker 1: change from second to second, but the starlings don't track
Speaker 1: these shifting alliances. They merely fly in the same direction
Speaker 1: as whichever seven birds are nearest, while staying close but
Speaker 1: not too close alignment, attraction and avoidance. By plugging this
Speaker 1: trio of rules into a computer model, along with some
Speaker 1: basic aerodynamics, Charlotte Hemmeldrik from the University of Gruningen in
Speaker 1: the Netherlands created a virtual murmeration that resembles the real
Speaker 1: deal and matched the data from ROME. This showed that
Speaker 1: the Starlings need no overarching plan, no leader, and no
Speaker 1: telepathic hive mind. They barely need to communicate it all
Speaker 1: through the simplest of interactions playing out over distances a
Speaker 1: few feet. The breathtaking skies spanning complexity of ammurmurration emerges.
Speaker 1: Over the past two decades, the data from Rome have
Speaker 1: continued to reveal surprises. When a starling turns, its new
Speaker 1: alignment should influence its neighbors and their neighbors and so on.
Speaker 1: But you'd expect that mistakes would slowly creep in and
Speaker 1: the new directions would get lost, much as in the
Speaker 1: children's game of telephone. In fact, errors aren't magnified by
Speaker 1: the bird's movements, but washed away. The flock shows what
Speaker 1: physicists call scale free correlations, which is like a game
Speaker 1: of telephone, where information always arrives at the end uncorrupted.
Speaker 1: Giordina tells told me. This means that no matter how
Speaker 1: big the aerial display gets, the movement of each bird
Speaker 1: affects and is affected by all the others. If one turns,
Speaker 1: they all turn. Each Starling is paying attention to only
Speaker 1: seven others, but its senses effectively extend across the entire flock,
Speaker 1: and it can spond to events occurring hundreds of birds away.
Speaker 1: This is why the flock looks like a single entity.
Speaker 1: It really does behave like one void. By these discoveries,
Speaker 1: researchers have become increasingly ambitious and creative in their quest
Speaker 1: to understand the details behind mmerations. Hamioreich and colleagues, including
Speaker 1: Ralph's Storms and Marina Papadopoulou, have then studying the starlings
Speaker 1: evasive maneuvers by plunging at them with a robot designed
Speaker 1: to look like a peregrine falcon. You can't go into
Speaker 1: a field and wait for a predator to attack, which
Speaker 1: might happen one day in two months, pap Papadoppolou told me.
Speaker 1: The robot fixes that problem. Using footage from the faux
Speaker 1: foal folicon, she is cataloging maneuvers like the flash expansion
Speaker 1: where the flock scatters outward, or the vacuo we are
Speaker 1: a whole forms within the birds. She's tried to understand
Speaker 1: how the patterns arise depending on the falcon's behavior. The
Speaker 1: flocks prior formations or actions of individual starlings. Researchers also
Speaker 1: want to follow flocks over long periods. The room data
Speaker 1: were collected with fixed cameras that photographed the starlings only
Speaker 1: if they flew into view. As Papadolo says, the flock
Speaker 1: might be spelling your name outside the frame, but you're
Speaker 1: not collecting that data. Giardini's colleagues have solved the problem
Speaker 1: with a new network of rotating cameras that can follow
Speaker 1: the flocks. Now they just need the starlings. Unfortunately, there
Speaker 1: are much fewer flocks now. Giardini told me last year
Speaker 1: was a disaster. She didn't know why. Rooms starlings have declined.
Speaker 1: The city sees them as a nuisance and employees flashing
Speaker 1: lights and bullhorns to disperse them. But starlings are also
Speaker 1: disappearing throughout the rest of their native range. British populations
Speaker 1: have more than halved in the past sixty years, while
Speaker 1: Danish numbers have swindled by sixty percent. Sorens Selkier, who
Speaker 1: took the photographs on these pages, says, in the past
Speaker 1: two or three years, I've had a very hard time
Speaker 1: locating very large flocks. It's not just starlings either. Within
Speaker 1: the same time frame, Europe and North America have lost
Speaker 1: five hundred fifty million and two point nine billion birds, respectively,
Speaker 1: due to habitat loss and other human driven causes. On
Speaker 1: both continents, the commonest birds have suffered some of the
Speaker 1: greatest losses. Starlings illustrate the stakes of this decline. They
Speaker 1: remind us that it is not enough for a species
Speaker 1: to avoid extinction and merely exist. It must thrive in team.
Speaker 1: For many of Earth's most beautiful phenomena only emerge when
Speaker 1: living things act together in great numbers, whether it's a
Speaker 1: flock of starlings or the network of neurons in the
Speaker 1: people watching them. When witnessing a starling murmration, Soldier says,
Speaker 1: the external phenomenon seems to mirror something inside myself, illuminating
Speaker 1: the universal bond we have with nature. This concludes readings
Speaker 1: from National Geographic for to day your reader's been Marcia.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening, Keep on listening, and have a
Speaker 1: great day.