For more stories like these, subscribe today. Click here to order.

�������� ��� ������� • ����

Northern Light [Oulanka National Park]

Candle spruces stand frozen before a backdrop of the

northern lights, shimmering above one of Finland’s best

loved national parks.

For more stories like these, subscribe today. Click here to order.

�������� ��� ������� • ���� ���� ��� ����

T he next time I visit Oulanka Na-tional Park in the far north of Finland, I want to be two feet tall. Th at way the autumn mushrooms will come up to my knees, and I’ll

find myself walking in a waist-high forest of heather and lingonberries and crowberries and lichens. At that height, too, the wood-ant nests will tower over me. I will have to keep a sharp lookout for moose and reindeer, it’s true.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Oulanka at my normal height. Young Scotch pines grow on the slopes like closely spaced lances, and the old ones tower overhead, outgrowing the red of their bark as they age. Th e long winters and deep snows have trimmed the candle spruces into the slenderest of columns. In summer and fall the quiet northern light fl ickers on the leaves and the bark of silver and downy birches. Th is is the boreal forest, the forest that covers nearly all of Finland.

Here in Oulanka there is an uncharacteris-tic richness underfoot, a striking biodiversity, especially for a landscape that lies just a few miles south of the Arctic Circle. Th e main reason is limestone, an extrusion of youngish dolomitic rock—composed largely of carbonates—over-lying the older granites and gneisses that make up the bedrock in so much of the rest of Scan-dinavia. Th e carbonate helps neutralize what would otherwise be acidic soils, and it adds critical nutrients. “Without the limestone,” says Pirkko Siikamäki, head of the University of Oulu’s Oulanka Research Station, at the heart of the park, “Oulanka would be just like the rest of Finland.”

Instead, Oulanka is unlike almost anything else in the Finnish landscape, a place where a surprising number of biological zones con-verge. Because of its topographical diversity—high fells and low river valleys, mires, bogs, and

A Siberian jay, perched on a skeletal spruce, surveys a feast of blueberries. Underlaid by lime-stone, the forest fl oor is unusually rich for Finland’s far north, abounding with berries, mush-rooms, lichens, and rare orchids.

BY VERLYN KLINKENBORG

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER ESSICK

alluvial grasslands—it is a kind of crossroads for species that normally do not overlap. Here is one of the few places where European, Arctic, and even Siberian species come together, min-gling at the very edge of their ranges.

I came to Oulanka, as so many visitors do, to witness the grandeur of its glacial landforms—especially the canyons carved by the Oulanka River, which fl ows eastward through the park toward the border of Russia, just a few miles

away. But the farther I hiked along the park’s popular footpath, the Karhunkierros (Bear’s Ring) Trail, the less I found myself noticing the major features of this landscape: the kettle holes—basins created by melting boulders of ice left behind by glaciers—or the gaping crevices worn away by the Oulanka River, or even the canopy of pine and spruce boughs overhead. Instead, I found myself lost in contemplation of the forest fl oor.

Fevered by hopes of striking it rich, illegal miners claw sacks of “money stone”—gold ore—from the Pra River in Ghana. Their toil feeds the world’s hunger for gold, and leaves a ruined landscape in its wake.

I n dollars and suffering,it’s never been higher.

For more stories like these, subscribe today. Click here to order.

For more stories like these, subscribe today. Click here to order.

�������� ��� ������� • ������� ����

By Brook LarmerPhotographs by Randy Olson

he faces the dangers that have killed many of his fellow miners—explosives, toxic gases, tunnel collapses—to extract the gold that the world demands. Apaza does all this, without pay, so that he can make it to today, the 31st day, when he and his fellow miners are given a single shift , four hours or maybe a little more, to haul out and keep as much rock as their weary shoulders can bear. Under the ancient lottery system that still prevails in the high Andes, known as the cachorreo, this is what passes for a paycheck: a sack of rocks that may contain a small fortune in gold or, far more oft en, very little at all.

Apaza is still waiting for a stroke of luck. “Maybe today will be the big one,” he says, fl ash-ing a smile that reveals a single gold tooth. To improve his odds, the miner has already made his “payment to the Earth”: a bottle of pisco, the local liquor, placed near the mouth of the mine; a few coca leaves slipped under a rock; and, several months back, a rooster sacrifi ced by a shaman on the sacred mountaintop. Now, heading into the tunnel, he mumbles a prayer in his native Quechua language to the deity who rules the mountain and all the gold within.

“She is our Sleeping Beauty,” says Apaza, nod-ding toward a sinuous curve in the snowfi eld high above the mine. “Without her blessing we would never fi nd any gold. We might not make it out of here alive.”

It isn’t El Dorado, exactly. But for more than 500 years the glittering seams trapped beneath the glacial ice here, three miles above sea level, have drawn people to this place in Peru. Among the fi rst were the Inca, who saw the perpetually lustrous metal as the “sweat of the sun”; then the Spanish, whose lust for gold and silver spurred the conquest of the New World. But it is only now, as the price of gold soars—it has risen 235 percent in the past eight years—that 30,000 people have fl ocked to La Rinconada, turning a lonely prospec-tors’ camp into a squalid shantytown on top of the world. Fueled by luck and desperation, sinking in its own toxic waste and lawlessness, this no-man’s-land now teems with dreamers and schemers anxious to strike it rich, even if it means destroying their environment—and themselves—in the process.

Th e scene may sound almost medieval, but

Villagers in the war-weary Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo scrape for gold in a shaft dug decades ago by a Belgian company. Until recently, armed groups controlled Ituri’s rich mines, using gold to buy weapons.

Like many of his Inca ancestors, Juan Apaza is possessed by gold. Descending into an icy tunnel 17,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andes, the 44-year-old miner stuff s a wad of coca leaves into his mouth to brace himself for the inevitable hunger and fatigue. For 30 days each month Apaza toils, without pay, deep inside this mine dug down under a glacier above the world’s highest town, La Rinconada. For 30 days

For more stories like these, subscribe today. Click here to order.

EGYPT Stung by soaring food prices, angry Egyptians throng a kiosk selling government-subsidized bread near the Great Pyramid at Giza. Across the globe, rising demand and fl at supplies have rekindled the old debate over whether production can keep up with population.

THE END OF PLENTY SPECIAL REPORT THE GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS

�������� ��� ������� • ���� ������ �� ��

Last year the skyrocketing cost of food was a wake-up call for the planet. Between 2005 and the summer of 2008, the price of wheat and corn tripled, and the price of rice climbed fi ve-fold, spurring food riots in nearly two dozen countries and pushing 75 million more people into poverty. But unlike previous shocks driven by short-term food shortages, this price spike came in a year when the world’s farmers reaped a record grain crop. Th is time, the high prices were a symptom of a larger problem tugging at the strands of our worldwide food web, one that’s not going away anytime soon. Simply put: For most of the past decade, the world has been consuming more food than it has been produc-ing. Aft er years of drawing down stockpiles, in 2007 the world saw global carryover stocks fall to 61 days of global consumption, the second lowest on record.

“Agricultural productivity growth is only one to two percent a year,” warned Joachim von Braun, director general of the International Food

Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C., at the height of the crisis. “Th is is too low to meet population growth and increased demand.”

High prices are the ultimate signal that demand is outstripping supply, that there is simply not enough food to go around. Such agfl ation hits the poorest billion people on the planet the hardest, since they typically spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food. Even though prices have fallen with the imploding world economy, they are still near record highs, and the underlying problems of low stockpiles, rising population, and fl attening yield growth remain. Climate change—with its hotter grow-ing seasons and increasing water scarcity—is projected to reduce future harvests in much of the world, raising the specter of what some sci-entists are now calling a perpetual food crisis.

So what is a hot, crowded, and hungry world to do?

Th at’s the question von Braun and his col-leagues at the Consultative Group on International

Agricultural Research are wrestling with right now. This is the group of world-renowned agricultural research centers that helped more than double the world’s average yields of corn, rice, and wheat between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s, an achievement so staggering it was dubbed the green revolution. Yet with world population spiraling toward nine billion by mid-century, these experts now say we need a repeat performance, doubling current food production by 2030.

In other words, we need another green revo-lution. And we need it in half the time.

EVER SINCE OUR ANCESTORS gave up hunting and gathering for plowing and planting some 12,000 years ago, our numbers have marched in lock step with our agricultural prowess. Each advance—the domestication of animals, irriga-tion, wet rice production—led to a correspond-ing jump in human population. Every time food supplies plateaued, population eventually

leveled off. Early Arab and Chinese writers noted the relationship between population and food resources, but it wasn’t until the end of the 18th century that a British scholar tried to explain the exact mechanism linking the two—and became perhaps the most vilified social scientist in history.

Thomas Robert Malthus, the namesake of such terms as “Malthusian collapse” and “Mal-thusian curse,” was a mild-mannered mathema-tician, a clergyman—and, his critics would say, the ultimate glass-half-empty kind of guy. When a few Enlightenment philosophers, giddy from the success of the French Revolution, began pre-dicting the continued unfettered improvement of the human condition, Malthus cut them off at the knees. Human population, he observed, increases at a geometric rate, doubling about

IT IS THE SIMPLEST, MOST NATURAL OF ACTS, akin to breathing and walking upright.

We sit down at the dinner table, pick up a fork, and take a juicy bite, obliv ious to the

double helping of global ramifi cations on our plate. Our beef comes from Iowa, fed by

Nebraska corn. Our grapes come from Chile, our bananas from Honduras, our olive

oil from Sicily, our apple juice—not from Washington State but all the way from China.

Modern society has relieved us of the burden of growing, harvesting, even preparing

our daily bread, in exchange for the burden of simply paying for it. Only when prices

rise do we take notice. And the consequences of our inattention are profound.

Workers in India’s fertile Punjab pull an overstuffed load ofrice stalks to a farm where they will be used as animal feed. High-yielding varieties, along with subsidized fertilizer and irrigation, have helped India stave off famine for decades.

BY JOEL K. BOURNE, JR. PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN STANMEYER

Joel K. Bourne, Jr., is a contributing writer. John Stanmeyer’s photographs on malaria for National Geographic won a 2008 National Magazine Award.

For more stories like these, subscribe today. Click here to order.

A tagged northern spotted owl swoops toward a researcher’s lure in a young redwood forest.

Th ey can grow to be the tallest trees on

Earth. Th ey can produce lumber, support jobs,

safeguard clear waters, and provide refuge

for countless forest species.

If we let them.

The Super Trees

For more stories like these, subscribe today. Click here to order.

�������� ��� ������� • � ������ ����� ���

the top of his left foot. Aft er bushwhacking hun-dreds of miles in sandals, he was used to such insults to his 52-year-old feet. But this was the mother of all splinters. It bounced off a bone, lodged in a tendon, and refused to come out. Fi-nally his hiking partner, Lindsey Holm, grabbed it with a pair of pliers and aft er several sharp tugs, yanked it free.

“You could hear me yelling from mountaintop to mountaintop,” Fay says. “It was one of the most painful things I’ve ever experienced.” Which is something coming from a man who was once gored 16 times by an elephant. He taped up the wound, shouldered his pack, and as he had for the past three months, kept walking.

Aft er three decades of helping save African forests, Mike Fay, a Wildlife Conservation Soci-ety biologist and National Geographic Soci ety explorer-in-residence, now has redwoods in his blood. His obsession with the iconic American trees began a few years ago aft er he completed the Megatransect—his Livingstone-like explo-ration of the largest intact jungle remaining in Africa. (See the October 2000, March 2001, and August 2001 issues.) One day while driving along the northern California coast, he found himself gazing at swaths of clear-cuts and spin-dly second-growth forests. Another time in a state park, a six-foot-tall slice of an old redwood log on display caught his attention. Near the burgundy center a label read: “1492 Columbus.”

“Th e one that got me was about three inches from the edge,” Fay says. “ ‘Gold Rush, 1849.’ And I realized that within the last few inches of that tree’s life, we’d very nearly liquidated a 2,000-year-old forest.”

In the fall of 2007 he resolved to see for him-self how Earth’s tallest forest had been exploited in the past and is being treated today. By walking the length of California’s mythic range, from Big Sur to just beyond the Oregon border, he wanted to fi nd out if there was a way to maximize both timber production and the many ecological and social benefi ts standing forests provide. If it could be done in the redwoods, he believed, it could be done anywhere on the planet where forests are being leveled for short-term gain. As he’d done on the Megatransect, he and Holm—a self-taught naturalist born and raised in the red-wood country of northern California—took pic-tures and detailed notes on their 11-month trek, exhaustively recording wildlife, plant life, and the condition of the forest and streams. Th ey talked to the people of the redwoods as well: loggers, foresters, biologists, environmentalists, café owners, and timber company executives—all dependent on the forest.

It was an auspicious year to be walking the red woods. Aft er more than two decades battling environmentalists and state and federal regula-tors over its aggressive cutting practices, the oft vilifi ed Pacifi c Lumber Company was bankrupt and up for grabs. Even with most of the remaining old growth protected, the emblematic species

of the great forests—northern spotted owls, elusive little seabirds called marbled murrelets, and coho salmon—continued their dangerous decline, while the reeling economy and hous-ing bust were shuttering sawmills throughout the redwood range. Fires scorched hundreds of thousands of acres in the worst fi re season in memory. Tourism was down.

But something else was taking root among the trees Woody Guthrie lionized in “Th is Land Is Your Land.” Th e buzz among environmental groups, consulting foresters, and even a few tim-ber companies and communities was that the redwoods were at a historic crossroads—a time when society could move beyond the log/don’t log debates of decades past and embrace a dif-ferent kind of forestry that could benefi t people, wildlife, and perhaps even the planet. Th e more Fay walked, the more convinced he became.

“California revolutionized the world with the silicon chip,” Fay says, his voice decep-tively soft . “Th ey could do the same with forest management.”

FAY AND HOLM started their walk at the south-ern end of the forest, where the trees grow in scattered holdings and groves in the Santa Lucia Range and the Santa Cruz Mountains. Except in small parks like Muir Woods outside San Fran-cisco and Big Basin near Santa Cruz, where they encountered a few rare patches of ancient trees, they zigzagged 1,800 miles through stands that had been cut at least once and many that had been cut three times since 1850, leaving islands of larger second-growth forest in a sea of mostly small trees.

But on a glorious May day, nearly three-quarters of the way into the transect, they arrived at the southern end of Humboldt Redwoods State Park, home to the largest contiguous block of old-growth redwood forest left on the planet—some 10,000 acres. Th e alluvial fl ats along its creeks and rivers are prime redwood habitat, where the mix of rich soils, water, and fog rolling in from the ocean have produced the planet’s tall-est for est. Of the 180 known redwoods greater than 350 feet, more than 130 grow right here.

Fording a vein of emerald water known as the South Fork of the Eel, they climbed the far bank and entered the translucent shade of the most magnifi cent grove they’d seen yet. Redwoods the size of Saturn rockets sprouted from the ground like giant beanstalks, their butts blackened by fi re. Some bore thick, ropy bark that spiraled sky-ward in candy-cane swirls. Others had huge cav-ities known as goose pens—after the use early pio neers put them to—big enough to hold 20 people. Treetops the size of VW buses lay half-buried among the sorrel and sword ferns, where they’d plummeted from 30 stories up—the casu-alties of titanic wars with the wind, which even now coursed through the tops with panpipe-like creaks and groans. It’s no wonder Steven Spiel-berg and George Lucas fi lmed scenes for the Jurassic Park sequel and Return of the Jedi among the redwood giants: It felt as if a T. rex or a furry Ewok could poke its head out at any minute.

Redwoods are no less magical for foresters. Because their bark and heartwood are rich in compounds called polyphenols, bugs and decay-causing fungi don’t like them. And since there’s not a lot of resin in their stringy bark, larger redwoods are highly resistant to fi re.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about redwoods is their ability to produce sprouts whenever the cambium—the living tissue just beneath the bark—is exposed to light. If the top breaks off or a limb gets sheared or the tree gets cut by a logger, a new branch will sprout from the wound and grow like crazy. Th roughout the forest you can fi nd tremendous stumps with a cluster of second-generation trees, oft en called fairy rings, around their bases. Th ese trees are all clones of the parent, and their DNA could be thousands of years old. Redwood cones, oddly enough, are tiny—the size of an olive—and may produce seeds only sporadically. As a result, stump sprouting has been key to the survival of the redwoods throughout the logging era.

Th e trees have another trick foresters love.

On a cutover California hillside thick with scrubby redwoods, Scotch broom, and poison oak, Mike Fay missed a step, started to slide, and felt a stiletto jab

BY JOEL K. BOURNE, JR. PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL NICHOLS

Contributing Writer Joel Bourne reported on the global food situation in June. Photographer Michael Nichols is an editor at large for the magazine.

For more stories like these, subscribe today. Click here to order.

For more stories like these, subscribe today. Click here to order.

�������� ��� ������� • � ������ ����� ���

FORESTS IN THE AIR

MARBLED MURRELET The endangered web-footed seabird nests in the crowns of large conifers in old-growth forests, fl ying as far as 50 miles between nest and Pacifi c to feed.

RED HUCKLEBERRY

COPEPODS

FUNGI

WESTERN HEMLOCK

YELLOW�CHEEKED CHIPMUNK

LEATHERLEAF FERN

STELLER’S JAY

REDWOOD TRUNK

GROWING FROM LIMB

UNEXPECTED RESIDENTS Barely visible, aquatic crustaceans called copepods live in soil mats far above their usual home in streams. Needing only a thin fi lm of water to move, they likely swim up redwood trunks during storms.

CANOPY PREDATOR Climbing from the forest fl oor, the wander-ing salamander may stay in the canopy, hunting insects and other invertebrates. Lacking lungs, its body must remain moist to allow it to breathe through its skin.

HOW THE TALLEST TREES DRINK As water evaporates from leaves, more water is pulled up in a continuous chain. Special aspects of redwood cells may help water keep rising against gravity to extreme heights. Leaves also absorb water directly from rain and fog.

CANOPY SOIL Soil mats can store enough water to sustain a canopy community during the dry summer. The tree itself may benefi t by drawing water and nutrients through roots sent out by its additional trunks that rise from limbs.

PARTNERSHIP Fungi colonize the roots of woody plants in a symbiotic relationship, helping plants absorb nutrients and water. Fungi also speed decay of dead vegetation to produce canopy soil.

SEAN MCNAUGHTON, NG STAFF; DITA SMITH ART BY AMADEO BACHAR SOURCES: STEVE SILLETT, HUMBOLDT STATE UNIVERSITY; GEORGE KOCH, NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY

Hundreds of feet above the ground, the crowns of ancient redwoods shelter another forest. Th ickets of berry bushes, ferns, and other conifers—some large enough to bear cones—rise from dense mats of soil on broad limbs or in trunk forks. Th e soil, as thick as three feet, forms from decayed leatherleaf ferns and redwood leaves and bark, nourishing an aerial ecosystem unknown until the 1990s, when scientists fi rst climbed into the canopy.

AREA ABOVE

LEATHERLEAF FERN

COPEPODS

FUNGI

REDWOOD TRUNK

GROWING FROM LIMB

EVERGREEN HUCKLEBERRY

SALAMANDER

EVERGREEN HUCKLEBERRY

SALAMANDER

BA C

A

C

B