THE HOT ZONES Smithsonian PDF Free Download
1 / 119/119
100%
SMITHSONIAN.COM
MOSQUITOES!
KILL
ALL THE
They are
our deadliest
enemy. We
have the
technology
to wipe
them out.
Should we?
THE HOT ZONES
Smithsonian
June 2016 I smithsonian.com
Photograph by
Rafal Olechowski /
Shutterstock
BURIED TREASURES
DIGGING UNDER
MEXICO’S
PLUMED SERPENT
PYRAMID
DEFENDING
THE ELEPHANT
COMMANDOS
FIGHT FOR
AFRICAN
WILDLIFE
WALKING ON WATER
CHRISTO’S NEW
MASTERPIECE—
WRAPPING AN
ITALIAN LAKE
BLOOD IN THE CLOUDS
THE MOST
TREACHEROUS
BATTLE OF
WORLD WAR I
I
l
l
i
n
o
i
s
R
i
v
e
r
M
i
s
s
i
s
s
i
p
p
i
R
i
v
e
r
M
i
s
s
i
s
s
i
p
p
i
R
i
v
e
r
M
i
s
s
o
u
r
i
R
i
v
e
r
Red Wing
La Crosse
Dubuque
Davenport
Burlington
Hannibal
Chester
Cape Girardeau
Columbus
New Madrid
Helena
Vicksburg
Natchez
Oak
Alley
St. Francisville
Baton Rouge
Greenville
Tunica
Houmas House
New Orleans
Memphis
St. Louis
Minneapolis-
St. Paul
LOUISIANA
MISSISSIPPI
ARKANSAS
KENTUCKY
TENNESSEE
MISSOURI
ILLINOIS
WISCONSIN
MINNESOTA
IOWA
ALL NEW RIVERBOATS
Historic Destinations Delicious Cuisine Gracious Service Local Traditions
Mississippi
Join Us on e
Lasting MemoriesNightly Entertainment
Call today for a
FREE Cruise Guide
AmericanCruiseLines.com
1-800-460-6187
This is an extraordinary journey along
one of America’s greatest rivers. Explore
historical treasures and cultural traditions
aboard our brand new paddlewheelers
on an 8 to 22-day cruise along the grand
Mississippi River.
River Cruising Done Perfectly™
Contents
JUNE 2016
Contributors
Discussion
Phenomena
American Icon: Carleton Watkins
Art: Off the Deep End
Small Talk: Mary Roach
Adaptation: The Neanderthal Diet
Essay: Wild Irish Sage
Fast Forward: Hacking the Amazon
Art of the Impossible
Christo’s latest installation, opening this month on a lake in Italy, will make walking on water
sublime. BY JEFF MACGREGOR
Ask Smithsonian
A World Without
Mosquitoes
With the advent of gene-editing
technology, scientists now have the
ability to eradicate one of humankind’s
deadliest foes. But should they?
BY JERRY ADLER
Power Player
Rallying crowds in Greenwood, Mis-
sissippi, 50 years ago, activist Stokely
Carmichael galvanized the civil rights
movement with an impassioned call for
“black power” BY WIL HAYGOOD
Blood in the Clouds
A century ago, the high, rugged peaks
of Italy’s Dolomites became a killing
ground, the site of some of the worst
fighting in World War I—or in any
war since BY BRIAN MOCKENHAUPT
Wildlife Warriors
In central Africa, a former Israeli
commando and his team are deploying
battle-tested tactics and the latest
technology to stop the runaway slaughter
of elephants BY JOSHUA HAMMER
Passage to the Gods
The discovery of a tunnel
beneath a storied pyramid
at the ancient Mexican
metropolis of Teotihuacán
oers new clues to a lost
civilization BY MATTHEW SHAER
A carved
stone jaguar at
Teotihuacán.
Prototype shown with options. Production model may vary. ©2015 Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.
toyota.com/prius
WHAT’S NEXT
With a lower center of gravity, wider stance and new double-wishbone
rear suspension, the 2016 Prius is making getaways even more
thrilling. An exhilarating ride is what’s next.
Contributors
Brian Mockenhaupt
Despite years of rock-climbing experience, the Army veteran and
Outside contributing editor says the ascents he made in the Dolomites
for “Blood in the Clouds” were a technical challenge. “There was a long day
when we did 19 pitches, 1,800 feet,” Mockenhaupt recalls. “I’d never done
anything that long.” But the story he was pursuing, about the Italian soldiers
who scaled the same peaks to attack the Austrians in World War I, kept
things in perspective. “Climbing at night with no safety equipment, and
someone at the top waiting to kill you, it meant the climbing itself
was the least dangerous part.”
Stefen Chow
With a background in mountaineering (including a successful
ascent of Mount Everest), Chow says the hardest part of
photographing high in the Dolomites wasn’t the climbing, but
not speaking the language. The Beijing-based photographer’s
work frequently appears in the Wall Street Journal and
Fortune, and he is working on a long-term project called
“The Poverty Line,” about the food choices available to
impoverished people around the world.
Amy Crawford
Crawford, who is based in Boston and has been writing for
Smithsonian for ten years, frequently covers art for the
Phenomena section. “It can be harder to write short than long,”
she says concisely, making a point that anyone who has tried
to write haiku can appreciate. Her latest piece dives into the
work of Heather Perry (“Off the Deep End”), who photographs
people underwater while holding her breath. “She said she
tends to outlast her subjects.”
Jeff MacGregor
The Smithsonian correspondent has long been fascinated by—obsessed with?—the
monumental artist Christo. Since 1983, MacGregor has been to Christo installations
in Florida, California and New York. For his story on Christo’s upcoming work (“Art of
the Impossible”), MacGregor visited the artist’s Manhattan studio and also spent a
week with him and his busy team in Italy. MacGregor was so absorbed in the project,
The Floating Piers, that by the time he visited the lake where it will be displayed for
two weeks beginning in June, he felt its absence, “as if it was already missing from
the landscape.” The sought-after Christo, he said, “is never not working, but he was
incredibly gracious with his time.”
Pete Muller
The Nairobi-based photographer says he tends to focus on “issues of conflict,
masculinity and violence.” He spent weeks on “Wildlife Warriors,” an assignment
that he described as uniquely dangerous. “Even if you don’t get into a firefight,” Muller
says, “there are all kinds of things that can make you sick, and you’re very far away.
I have never been to places more remote.” His work on this story was supported by
the Magnum Emergency Fund.
Jennie Rothenberg Gritz
The new Smithsonian senior editor caught up with the renowned “wild” gardener
Mary Reynolds in Ireland. Reynolds, who advocates getting in touch with nature
to divine how plants themselves want to grow, urged Rothenberg Gritz to jump
into a forest pond with her. (She declined.) Reynolds is unique: “She uses Irish
stories about curses and spells to explain why intentions matter in gardening,” says
Rothenberg Gritz.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Wil Haygood
The author of The Butler (the story that inspired the award-winning movie)
and Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That
Changed America, Haygood is one of the nation’s leading observers of the civil
rights movement. In “Power Player,” he takes a fresh look at a historic moment in
the career of the activist Stokely Carmichael. Haygood is currently the Boadway
Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Miami University.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY Justine Potin
THE MOST INCLUSIVE
LUXURY EXPERIENCE™
2-FOR-1 ALL-INCLUSIVE FARES
FREE
UNLIMITED WIFI
FREE
ROUNDTRIP AIR*
FREE
ROUNDTRIP BUSINESS CLASS AIR*
ON EUROPEAN VOYAGES
FREE
UNLIMITED SHORE EXCURSIONS
FREE
LUXURY HOTEL PACKAGE†
FREE
SPECIALTY RESTAURANTS
FREE
UNLIMITED BEVERAGES INCLUDING
FINE WINES AND PREMIUM SPIRITS
FREE
OPEN BARS AND LOUNGES
PLUS IN-SUITE MINI-BAR REPLENISHED DAILY
FREE
PRE-PAID GRATUITIES
FREE
TRANSFERS BETWEEN
AIRPORT AND SHIP
CALL 1.844.4REGENT
(1.844.473.4368)
VISIT RSSC.COM
OR CONTACT YOUR
TRAVEL AGENT
*FREE Roundtrip Air includes ground transfers and applies to coach flights
only from the following U.S. & Canadian gateway cities: ATL, BOS, CLT, DEN,
DFW, DTW, EWR, FLL, IAD, IAH, JFK, LAX, LGA, MCO, MDW, MIA, MSP, ORD,
PBI, PHL, PHX, SAN, SEA, SFO, TPA, YUL, YVR, YYZ. FREE Roundtrip Air
includes all airline fees, surcharges and government taxes. Airline-imposed
personal charges such as baggage fees may apply. For details, visit
exploreflightfees.com. FREE Roundtrip Business Class Air applies to guests
sailing in Penthouse Suites and higher on European flights only and is per
person, each way. For additional terms and conditions visit RSSC.com
†� Applies to Concierge Suites & higher.
The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum and research
complex dedicated to public education, service and scholarship in the arts,
sciences, and history. The name of the Smithsonian Institution and the
sunburst are registered trademarks of the Smithsonian Institution and
Regent Seven Seas Cruises® is an authorized user.
MK_MAY161128
THE SMITHSONIAN COLLECTION
by Smithsonian Journeys
Smithsonian
YOU REALLY CAN HAVE IT ALL
Ever is ...
Ever wim ...
Ever want ...
Inside @NASA’s plans to send humans to Mars with Dava
Newman via @SmithsonianMag.
@Asaf_Bitton ON TWITTER
Discussion
FROM THE EDITORS While the May
issue as a whole explored cutting edge
technology and research, “Battle for the Soul
of Star Trek” took a deep dive into cultural
history, marking the 50th anniversary of the
TV show’s debut. “Even I didn’t know some
of this stuff,” science fiction writer Tom
Marcinko tweeted. Highlighting the theme
of the three-day Future Is Here festival that
the magazine hosted in Washington, D.C.,
Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner,
appeared onstage and lit up social media
when he said the technology of “Star Trek”
is “not that far-fetched” anymore.
“Trek” Effect
“Star Trek” in all of its incarnations has profoundly aected pop culture, science and
technology, but there is no one it has aected more than its legion of fans. As one of those
fans, I can state with conviction that I wouldn’t be the person I am now, as a writer, as a
teacher, as a human being, if “Trek’s” optimistic take on humanity and its direction had
not shaped my worldview.
Kristin Dilley
FACEBOOK
Up in the Air
It’s exciting to see the future in transportation (“Ready for Takeoff”), where the poten-
tial for error is “shifted from the driver to the programmer.” Unfortunately, computers,
software and wireless communication are only as reliable as their weakest links. Sig-
nificant advances in removing software bugs and becoming impervious to hacking and
jamming are needed. The last two decades of “progress” has not slowed the growing risk
of their use.
Peter Dunham
SYRACUSE, NEW YORK
Drone cars and flying cars will be an improvement over distracted and emotional human
drivers. Pure technology, focused solely on the task at hand, will allow humans to harm-
lessly perform all the “passenger behaviors” they currently perform behind the wheel.
Terrie Corbett
FACEBOOK
Planet Money
While we spend an inordinate amount of money on space exploration (“Next Stop Mars”),
with minimal benefits for mankind, our oceans and waterways are being destroyed. Let’s
funnel these dollars into projects here on Earth.
Joseph Lehrhaupt
VIA EMAIL
Rebel with a Cause
Thank you for Nathaniel Philbrick’s fine article on Benedict Arnold (“Traitors and Haters”).
Obviously there was a lot more involved in his defection than most Americans are aware of.
Had it not been for his wife, his name might not be synonymous with traitor.
Gary N. Miller
VIA EMAIL
Citizen Welles
Any question of Citizen Kane’s authorship (“Sparks Fly Over Tabloid Biz Flick!”) was re-
solved with Robert L. Carringer’s 1978 essay in Critical Inquiry, “The Scripts of Citizen
Kane.” Carringer studied the collection of script records—“almost a day-to-day record
of the history of the scripting”—that was then still intact at RKO. He reviewed all seven
drafts and concluded that “the full evidence reveals that Welles’s contribution to the
Citizen Kane script was not only substantial but definitive.” For a short time I was Car-
ringer’s research assistant and was involved with this project.
George H. Scheetz
BATAVIA, ILLINOIS
To Smithsonian Members
Some members have been receiving “renewal notices” sent by independent magazine companies that are not authorized
by Smithsonian. Many of the mailed notices list a price higher than you would find on an order card in this issue and are
called “Notice of Continuation/New Order.” Such unauthorized solicitations are an industrywide problem that is not
isolated to Smithsonian. Any renewal or billing notice you receive directly from Smithsonian about your membership will
be mailed from either Washington, D.C. or Tampa, Florida. We do have agreements with a small number of authorized
magazine companies to sell subscriptions. If you have any questions or concerns about whether an offer you receive
by mail or by phone is legitimate, please do not hesitate to contact us first.
Email: Smithsonian.ConsumerAffairs
@customersvc.com
Phone: 800-766-2149
Mail: Smithsonian Magazine,
P.O. Box 62170, Tampa, FL 33662-2170
CONTACT US
Send letters to LettersEd@si.edu or to Letters, Smithsonian, MRC 513, P.O. Box 37012, Washington, D.C.
20013. Include a telephone number and address. Letters may be edited for clarity or space. Because of
the high volume of mail we receive, we cannot respond to all letters. Send queries about the Smithsonian
Institution to info@si.edu or to OVS, Public Inquiry Mail Service, P.O. Box 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013.
FOLLOW US
@Smithsonianmag
Facebook.com/smithsonianmagazine
AMERICAN ICON
henomena
A CURATED LOOK AT SCIENCE, HISTORY AND CULTURE
The beauty of Yosemite, long before Ansel Adams
Love at
First Sight
In June of 1864, as Sherman’s armies were moving to-
ward Atlanta and Grant’s were recovering from a bloody
loss at Cold Harbor, President Abraham Lincoln took a
break from the grim, all-consuming war to sign a law pro-
tecting a slice of land “in the granite peak of the Sierra Ne-
vada Mountains.” The act granted the area “known as the
Yo-Semite Valley” to the state of California, to “be held
for public use, resort, and recreation . . . inalienable for all
time.” It was the federal government’s first act to preserve
a part of nature for the common good—a precursor of the
National Park Service, now enjoying its centennial—and
it might not have happened but for an obscure 34-year-old
named Carleton Watkins.
Born in a small town in New York, Watkins headed
west in 1849 to seek his fortune in California’s gold rush,
to no avail. After apprenticing to a pioneer daguerreo-
typist named Robert Vance, he made his money shooting
mining estates. In the summer of 1861, Watkins set out
to photograph Yosemite, carrying a literal ton of equip-
ment on mules—tripods, dark tent, lenses and a novel
invention for taking sharp photographs of landscapes
on glass plates nearly two feet across.
We associate Yosemite with the photographs of Ansel
Adams, who acknowledged Watkins as one of “the great
Western photographers,” but it was Watkins who first
turned Half Dome, Cathedral Rocks and El Capitan into
unforgettable sights. Weston Naef, a photography cura-
tor and co-author of a book about Watkins, described
him as “probably the greatest American artist of his era,
and hardly anyone has heard of him.”
Sketches and awed descriptions of Yosemite’s grand
views had reached the East in the mid-1800s, but noth-
ing provoked public reaction like Watkins’ photos, which
were exhibited at a gallery in New York in 1862. “The
views of lofty mountains, of gigantic trees, of falls of wa-
ter...are indescribably unique and beautiful,” the Times
reported. The great landscape painter Albert Bierstadt
promptly headed to Yosemite. Ralph Waldo Emerson
said Watkins’ images of sequoias “are proud curiosities
here to all eyes.”
Watkins’ works coincided with a move by California
boosters to promote the state by setting aside lands in
Yosemite, home to “perhaps some of the greatest won-
ders of the world,” Senator John Conness bragged to
Congress in 1864. Historians believe that Conness, who
owned a collection of Watkins photographs and was a
friend of Lincoln’s, showed the images to the president
the year before he signed the bill protecting Yosemite.
Watkins’ fame as a photographer rose, and he journeyed
throughout the West: Columbia Gorge, the Farallones,
Yellowstone. But he kept returning to Yosemite. Today, it
can be hard for us postmodernists, who are more used to
images of wilderness than the thing itself, and who tend
to associate photographs of Yosemite with clothing ads,
to imagine the impact of those first vivid pictures. Yet
somehow they retain their power—make us “look anew
at nature itself, shining with a clarity that is at once ordi-
nary and yet very magical,” says Christine Hult-Lewis, a
Watkins expert.
In his later years, Watkins lost his eyesight, and then
his livelihood. The 1906 earthquake destroyed his studio
and many of his negatives (and threw 4-year-old Ansel
Adams against a wall, giving him a crooked nose). For a
time Watkins lived with his wife and children in a boxcar.
He died 100 years ago this month, 86 years old, broke and
blind, at Napa State Hospital, an asylum. Two months
later, President Woodrow Wilson established the Na-
tional Park Service, a steward for the sublime place Wat-
kins had shown to a war-weary nation. -BY BROOKE JARVIS
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Watkins photographed
vistas like the valley’s
Half Dome.
The Domes.
Sharing a pool with the Bowdoin College swim team was like “being in the
water with sea otters,” says Heather Perry, who captured this playful moment
while holding her breath at the bottom of the pool. Many aquatic photographers
use scuba gear, but Perry prefers freediving (she feels that a breathing apparatus
would just get in her way). The Maine native, who began her career as a marine
biologist, has returned to the water again and again in her two decades behind
the camera, using the medium to explore the question of our place in the
natural world. Certainly the most buoyant answer can be found in her portraits
of swimmers, bubbly images revealing the freedom and joy that people of all
ages and shapes find in the water. “It’s the only place on earth you can feel truly
weightless,” she says. “We’re made of water, we come from water, and I think it’s
the place the human body is most at home.” –AMY CRAWFORD ART
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Off the
Deep End
Is it crazy to think that people are
at their most natural in the water?
“A lot of
freediving is
psychological,”
says Perry,
who finds the
experience
meditative.
Extreme Paleo
Humans tend to dismiss Neanderthals as dimwits, yet the brains of our
doomed cousins were actually larger than our own. “If you go to a site
from 150,000 years ago,” says Miki Ben-Dor, a Tel Aviv University ar-
chaeologist, “you won’t be able to tell whether Neanderthals or Homo
sapiens lived there, because they had all the same tools.” Which helps
explain why, to fathom how our fates diverged, he recently scrutinized
Neanderthals’ bodies instead of their skulls.
While humans have barrel-shaped chests and narrow pelvises, Ne-
anderthals had bell-shaped torsos with wide pelvises. The prevailing
explanation has been that Neanderthals, often living in colder and drier
environments than their human contemporaries, needed more energy
and therefore more oxygen, so their torsos swelled to hold a bigger re-
spiratory system.
But Ben-Dor had a gut feeling this was wrong. What if the dierence
was what they ate? Living in Eurasia 300,000 to 30,000 years ago, Ne-
anderthals settled in places like the Polar Urals and southern Siberia—
not bountiful in the best of times, and certainly not during ice ages. In
the heart of a tundra winter, with no fruits and veggies to be found, ani-
mal meat—made of fat and protein—was likely the only energy source.
Alas, though fat is easier to digest, it’s scarce in cold conditions, as
prey animals themselves burn up their fat stores and grow lean. So
Neanderthals must have eaten a great deal of protein, which is tough
to metabolize and puts heavy demands on the liver and kidneys to re-
move toxic byproducts. In fact, we humans have a “protein ceiling” of
between 35 and 50 percent of our diet; eating too much more can be
dangerous. Ben-Dor thinks that Neanderthals’ bodies found a way to
utilize more protein, developing enlarged livers and kidneys, and chests
and pelvises that widened over the millennia to accommodate these
beefed-up organs.
For confirmation of his theory, Ben-Dor looks to today’s Inuit peoples,
who live in northern climes, subsist at times on an all-meat diet and have
larger livers and kidneys and longer ribs than average Europeans.
To cope with the fat famine, Neanderthals probably also specialized
in hunting gigantic animals like mammoths, which retain fat longer in
poor conditions, and require greater strength but less energy and speed
to kill. (Mammoths don’t run away, and you only have to kill one to feast
for months.)
But as these mega-beasts vanished, the burly Neanderthals likely
struggled to chase down smaller, swifter prey. Meanwhile, humans,
with our narrow pelvises and agile forms, scampered into the future.
-ABIGAIL TUCKER ADAPTATION
SMITHSONIAN.COM
A new theory links the Neanderthals’ fate to their meat-heavy diet
ILLUSTRATION BY
Eric Palma
Call today for a free cruise guide
1-888-669-5812
www.PearlSeasCruises.com
CHICAGO
Muskegon
Mackinac
Island
Little Current
Sault St Marie
Parry Sound
Midland
Windsor
TORONTO
Niagara
Falls
Lake
Erie
Lake Ontario
Lake
Huron
Georgian Bay
Lake
Michigan
Lake
Superior
Pearl Seas
Cruises®
This unique 11-night Great Lakes cruise takes you
through areas notable for their beautiful scenery.
Explore four of the Great Lakes and the charming
towns along their shores with Pearl Seas Cruises.
Explore Well.
Cruise the Great Lakes
Best-selling author of Stiff and Gulp. Her latest book is
Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, out this month.
Mary Roach
You have a knack for finding strange lines of
work. What’s the oddest you’ve uncovered?
Running the insect kitchen in the entomology
branch at the Walter Reed Army Institute of
Research. When I visited, the chef was making
meals for sand fly larvae. (Sand flies present a
threat to troops in the form of leishmaniasis.)
It’s rare to find a recipe that begins, “Mix rabbit
feces, alfalfa and water . . . ”
Corpses play a big role in this book.
What about this second life of bodies
is so interesting?
That it’s possible to make a more profound
contribution to society after you’re dead than
before. The ability to feel no pain is a kind of
superpower that corpses, in the hands of sci-
ence, can use to help make the world better.
Also interesting, especially in military science,
is the discomfort around their use in research.
Even though they’re dead—are bone and tissue
and skin now—they still look like people. And
we have a natural, if irrational, reluctance to
“harm” them.
What breakthrough in military science is
unfairly overlooked?
Lower-tech stuff falls through the cracks. A
simple V-shaped chassis for personnel carriers
that deflects the energy from an IED. Or an
improved tourniquet that fits in a pocket and
you can install on your own limb to stop
a life-threatening bleed.
SMALL TALK
SMITHSONIAN.COM
On a recent spring evening, the landscape designer Mary Reynolds
greeted admirers in West Cork, Ireland, looking like one of the nature
spirits that inspire her work. She wore a flower-covered green dress, her
auburn hair still damp and tousled from a dip in a forest pool. “I needed
to immerse myself, to feel all those watery plants under my feet,” she
confided. Then she turned to chat with an elderly man in Gaelic.
Throughout Europe, the ebullient Reynolds is famous for upending the
gardening establishment with her subversive designs. A biopic based on
her life, Dare to Be Wild, won an audience prize at the Dublin International
Film Festival last year. Her new book, The Garden Awakening, sold out on
Amazon UK the day of its release. “She’s really onto something,” says the
Irish rock star Glen Hansard (best known for the movie Once). “We must
nurture the wildness within us and see the beauty in the wildness without.”
Reynolds wasn’t always so wild. When she began designing gardens two
decades ago, she was willing to create nearly anything a client wanted. “It
could’ve been Japanese or Italian,” she says. “It could’ve been a Versailles
garden in a 20-square-meter space.” Then one night in 2001, she dreamed
she was a crow flying over an ancient forest. When she woke up, the mes-
sage seemed clear: “I shouldn’t be making any more pretty gardens.”
After that, Reynolds focused on evoking mystical Irish landscapes. In
2002, at the age of just 28, she won a gold medal at the prestigious Chelsea
Flower Show. Improbably, she beat Prince Charles and other luminar-
ies with an entry that included weeds, rabbit droppings and giant stone
thrones. The BBC and RTÉ invited her to film garden makeovers, and the
British government commissioned a garden at Royal Kew. She drew in-
spiration for that work from the W.B. Yeats poem “The Stolen Child”: A
path led visitors onto a moss-covered island shaped like a sleeping fairy
woman. “Fairies, to me, embody the spirit of the land,” she says. “I wanted
to lead people back to that place.”
Not everyone responded enthusiastically. “Some people at Chelsea
said, ‘God, this is like a Celtic Disneyland,’” Reynolds recalls. A Dublin
newspaper derided her for “Paddywhackery”—suggesting she’d created
the garden equivalent of Lucky Charms.
But her work has profound meaning in a country where the Penal Laws
long forbade Catholics from owning land. Ireland’s most celebrated gar-
dens were English-designed, with sweeping lawns, manicured hedges
and meticulous knots of roses. Reynolds invented a new, defiantly Irish
aesthetic. For Chelsea, she enlisted the help of traditional stonemasons
and plant experts. “We were quite a raggedy crew and a source of amuse-
ment to the other entrants,” recalls Christy Collard, a builder from the
Future Forests Garden Centre in West Cork, who supervised the project.
(He also became romantically involved with Reynolds, a major plot point
in the film.)
It’s Reynolds’ approach to planting that truly sets her apart. She chooses
varieties that naturally grow together and doesn’t believe in weeding or
breaking up the soil. More esoterically, she asks the land what it wants to
become. “The gardens we have now are controlled, manipulated spaces,”
she told the crowd at her book launch in West Cork. “It’s like forcing a
child to wear a pink tutu.”
What land really wants, says Reynolds, is to evolve into a forest. Her
book (the U.S. edition comes out in September) lays out a ten-year plan
that incorporates trees, root vegetables, creeping vines and optional
chickens. After reading it, the British environmentalist Jane Goodall
sent Reynolds a video message, gushing, “I love the way you bring in the
spirituality of the land.”
At times, the book reads almost like an anti-gardening manifesto. But
Reynolds doesn’t believe in letting the land revert to wilderness. “The
soil would heal itself,” she says. “All the little creatures would come back.
But something important would be missing: We wouldn’t be part of that
process.” -JENNIE ROTHENBERG GRITZ ESSAY
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Wild Irish
Sage
With weeds,
critters and Celtic
symbols, Mary
Reynolds is trying
to change what it
means to garden
“The land
connects with
us in ways we
don’t always
understand,”
says Reynolds.
teach me to
HAVE A BIG
PROBLEM.
I want to learn how to think, not what
to think. So why does school prioritize
memorization over creative thinking?
Teach me to think outside the box so
I can find answers to larger questions.
Let’s demand and design high schools that equip all
students with the skills to succeed in the 21st century.
Join the conversation at XQsuperschools.org.
Hacking
the Amazon
Of all the ways that the industrialized world has encroached on the
indigenous people of the Amazon, you might not think that the most
disastrous intervention is also the simplest: free food.
But that’s one takeaway from new research led by the Stanford ecolo-
gist José Fragoso. The study, the largest of its kind, drew on interviews
with some 9,600 indigenous people in southern Guyana and surveys
of wildlife populations over 46,000 square kilometers—an area almost
the size of Costa Rica. Researchers tallied village populations and used
satellite images to gauge forest cover. Then they plugged that unprec-
edented data into a supercomputer, ran elaborate programs to predict
the impacts of multiple interventions on multiple outcomes, and pro-
jected those findings far into the future.
What they found is
that ecosystems can
survive, though in di-
minished form, if mod-
est amounts of forest
are converted to farm-
land. But bringing in
outside consumables
can push local ecosys-
tems past the breaking
point. For instance, while a village might grow by 40 percent in the
100 years after health workers introduce commercial medications—a
sustainable increase—that village could double in size over roughly the
same period if it began relying on outside food, the research shows. And
that larger population would lead to the collapse of the surrounding
ecosystem, because villagers would have to kill more wildlife and clear
more farmland to survive.
The research suggests how to better protect the world’s remaining wild
places and the people living in them. Fragoso is working with govern-
ments and others to help Amazon villages maintain self-suciency. In-
stead of trucking in crates of food, he says, create jobs to preserve local
languages. He isn’t against helping people in need: “It’s a question of how
do we do this better, rather than don’t do it at all.” -THOMAS STACKPOLE FAST FORWARD
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Paradoxically,
food aid can cause
game like the black
curassow to be
overhunted.
OF THE
BRAZILIAN
AMAZON
IS SET
ASIDE FOR
INDIGENOUS
PEOPLE
Can a pioneering computer model save indigenous people
from our best intentions?
ART
CHRISTO
The renowned Christo dazzles the world again, this
time using a lake in northern Italy as his canvas
Art of the Impossible
by Jeff MacGregor
For Christo, working in his SoHo studio,
art is a “scream of freedom.”
hristo Invites Public to Walk on
Water
—headline, The Art Newspa-
per, April 2015
“I thought, ‘I’m going to be 80 years old. I’d like to do something
very hard.’”
—Christo
The lake is impossible.
The lake is a painting of a lake; the water a painting of water. Like floating
on a second sky. Too blue. Too cool. Too deep. Impossible. The mountains, too.
Too steep, too green with trees, too white with snow. Villages pour down the
hills and run russet and ocher and brown to the water’s edge. Red tile rooftops
necklace the shore. Flat calm, and at midday the quiet carries from one end of
Lago d’Iseo to the other, from the vineyards to the mines to the small hotels.
The stillness here has weight. He raises
his voice.
“Floating Piers will be three kilome-
ters long. And will use 220,000 poly-
ethylene cubes. Fifty centimeters by
50 centimeters. Two hundred twenty
thousand screws. Interlocking.”
KiloMAYters. CentiMAYters. His
English is good, but the Bulgarian ac-
cent is thick. Even now, so many years
later. He tilts his chin up to be heard.
“Ninety thousand square meters of
fabric.”
MAYters.
“Not just on the Piers, but in the streets also.”
The hair is a white halo beneath a red hard hat and above the red anorak.
Dress shirt and jeans. Oversized brown boots. He is slender, big-eared and fine-
boned, with long, expressive hands. Not tall but straight, unbent even at 80. He
radiates energy and purpose.
“From Sulzano to Monte Isola and out to Isola di San Paolo,” he says, pointing.
“Each pier built in sections 100 meters long. Then joined.” Behind the glasses
the eyes are dark, lively, tired. He smiles. This, the talking, is part of the art, too.
“Sixteen meters wide, and slope into the water along the sides,” he gestures a
shallow angle with his right hand, “like a beach.” Two dozen members of the
Italian press and two dozen local politicians nod and stand and whisper.
“One hundred sixty anchors. Each anchor weighs five tons,” Christo says.
He’s standing just aft of the deckhouse on the boat the divers use to sink
those anchors. The boat is a long platform on long hulls. Like him, the boat
and the divers are from Bulgaria. The divers have been out here most of the
winter, working in the dark and the cold and the unimaginable silence of the
Christo’s works
“cross boundaries
in our imagination
about what’s possible.
People like the sense
of joyousness they
celebrate, the joy in the
work. The openness
and exuberant colors.”
deep lake. “One hundred meters depth,” says Christo. The boat is a few hun-
dred yards oshore, near the floating corral where finished sections of pier
are tied up. Waiting.
He moves from group to group —everyone gets a comment, everyone gets a
quote, a photo—surrounded by reporters and local mayors.
“Thirty-five boats. Thirty Zodiacs. Thirty brand-new motors.”
Cameras. Microphones. Notebooks.
“Sixteen days. Hundreds of workers.”
The smile widens.
“This art is why I don’t take commissions. It is absolutely irrational.”
In the construction shed onshore, still more Bulgarians are back from lunch.
Two teams screw together the Floating Piers block by block by block, eight
hours a day, seven days a week. It will take months. You can hear the sound of
the big impact wrench for miles in the quiet.
Two weeks at a time, he is the most famous artist on earth.
Christo. Last name Javache. Born June 13, 1935, in Bulgaria. Studies art.
Flees the Soviet advance across the Eastern bloc at 21, arrives in Paris spring,
1958. Meets his future wife and collaborator that year while painting her
mother’s portrait. The first wave of fame comes when they block the rue Vis-
conti in Paris with stacked oil drums. A sculptural commentary on the Berlin
Wall and oil and Algeria and culture and politics. That was 1962.
“At a very early moment in postwar art, they expanded our understanding
of what art could be,” says art historian Molly Donovan, an associate curator
at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. “Crossing the boundary out
of the gallery and the museum—by putting works in the public sphere, in the
built environment—that was really groundbreaking in the early ’60s.”
Then small wraps and faux storefronts and draped fabrics and wrapped foun-
tains and towers and galleries. Then 10,000 square feet of fabric wrapping the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Then in 1969 a million square feet of
fabric draped and tied over the rocks outside Sydney and they are suddenly/not
suddenly world famous. “The concept of art was so narrow at the time,” recalled
Australian artist Imants Tillers, “that Wrapped Coast appeared to be the work of
a madman.” Filmmakers start following them. Journalists. Critics. Fans. Detrac-
tors. Then the debate over what it is. Conceptual art? Land art? Performance art?
Environmental art? Modernist? Post-Minimalist?
As critic Paul Goldberger has said, it is “at once a work of art, a cultural
event, a political happening and an ambitious piece of business.”
Valley Curtain, Colorado, 1972. Two hundred thousand, two hundred square
feet of fabric drawn across the canyon at Rifle Gap. Running Fence, California,
1976. A wall of fabric 18 feet high running 24.5 miles through the hills north
of San Francisco into the sea; now in the collections of the Smithsonian In-
stitution. Surrounded Islands, Miami, 1983. Eleven islands in Biscayne Bay
surrounded by 6.5 million square feet of bright pink fabric. The Pont Neuf
Wrapped, Paris, 1985. The oldest bridge in the city wrapped in 450,000 square
feet of fabric, tied with eight miles of rope. The Umbrellas, Japan and Califor-
nia, 1991. Three thousand one hundred umbrellas, 20 feet high, 28 feet wide;
blue in Ibaraki Prefecture, yellow along the I-5 north of Los Angeles. Cost? $26
million. Two accidental deaths. Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1995. One million
square feet of silver fabric; nearly ten miles of blue rope; five million visitors
in two weeks. The Gates, New York City, 2005.
“They cross boundaries in our imagination about what’s possible,” Don-
ovan says. “People like the sense of joyousness that they celebrate, the joy
in the work. The work isn’t whimsical,
necessarily. They’re serious works.
The openness and exuberant colors—
people respond to that.”
“Their projects continue to work
on your mind,” she says. “Why do they
feel so powerful or meaningful? On the
global scale, they’ve elicited a lot of
thought about what art can be, where it
can be, what it can look like. They’ve re-
ally broadened the locations for where
art can happen.”
So in 2005 when 7,503 gates open
along 23 miles of paths in Central Park, attracting more than four million vis-
itors, columnist Robert Fulford wrote in Canada’s National Post, “The Gates
came and went quickly, like an eclipse of the sun. In their evanescence they
recalled the Japanese cult of the cherry blossom, which blooms briefly each
spring and in Japanese poetry symbolizes the brevity of life.”
“I think the really amazing thing about Christo, the reason why he has found
the sweet spot between the art world and the world at large—and is such a
popular public figure,” Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times says, “is
because he realized that if he took art, if he used the political process and
public space as the place in which to make art, and to bring the public into the
process itself, that he would redefine both the audience for this art and also
redefine what had been called public art before.”
“Our work is only for joy
and beauty,” Jeanne-
Claude would say, or
“It is not a matter of
patience, it is a matter
of passion.” This is
his first major project
without her.
Halfway between Bergamo and Brescia; halfway from Milan to Verona on
the road to Venice—Lago d’Iseo is the fourth-largest lake in Lombardy. It is a
low-key summer resort with a history going back to antiquity. The mountains
are veined with marble and iron and have been quarried and mined for more
than 1,000 years. Franciacorta, Italy’s answer to Champagne, is made from the
grapes grown on the lake’s southern shore. In the 1920s there was a famous
seaplane factory near the little town of Pilzone. But the lake has never had the
allure or the matinee idol star power of its more famous neighbor, Lake Como.
Until now.
From June 18 to July 3, 2016, Christo will reimagine Italy’s Lake Iseo. The
Floating Piers will consist of 70,000 square meters of shimmering yellow fabric,
carried by a modular dock system of 220,000 high-density polyethylene cubes
floating on the surface of the water.
—christojeanneclaude.net
It isn’t really yellow. Is it? More like saffron. Like The Gates in Central Park.
Like Valley Curtain. That signature color of theirs. Orange, but not orange.
Orange brightened by something like gold; tempered by something like red.
Maybe. And it’ll be dierent at the edges where it’s wet. Darker. Like Jeanne-
Claude’s hair.
Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon. The general’s daughter. Organized.
Tough. Funny. Argumentative. Charming. Beautiful. Christo Javache’s lover
and wife and partner in art for more than 50 years. Famously born on the same
day. Famously inseparable. She was the one out front, the one oering quotes.
“Our work is only for joy and beauty,” Jeanne-Claude would say, or “It is not
a matter of patience, it is a matter of passion.”
She died in 2009. The name Christo belongs to them both. This is his first
major project without her.
Maybe the best way to understand her, to understand them, is to go online
and watch the film from her memorial at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
When she says “Artists do not retire. They die,” it knocks you back.
Christo is sitting in the café of a lakefront hotel being interviewed by a writer
from Elle magazine. He explains how the Floating Piers will connect the main-
land to the island of Monte Isola for the first time ever. He talks about the
beauty of the medieval tower on the island, the Martinengo, and the abbey at
the summit, and he talks about tiny Isola di San Paolo, a Beretta family vaca-
tion home, and he tells her about the complex engineering and the ridiculous
expense and what a bright, brief complication it will all be.
“Sixteen days, hundreds of workers, $15 million.”
He explains the financing—he pays for every project by selling his art, no
donations, no sponsorships—and suggests she read the 2006 Harvard Busi-
ness School case study to learn the details of how they do it.
In the months and years leading up to every installation, he produces hun-
dreds of smaller pieces of art: preparatory sketches, studies, models, paintings,
collages. This he does alone. Today the New York studio is filled with scores of
canvases in every size and shade of blue; lakes and piers in every medium from
pen to pencil to pastel, crayon to paint to charcoal; islands and towers and ab-
beys mapped as if by satellite, or sketched in a few quick strokes; simple as a
color block, or complex and precise as an architectural elevation. Some of the
multipanel pieces are several meters wide by a meter or more high and sell for
hundreds of thousands of dollars to a loyal circle of collectors.
No more will be produced once The Floating Piers has come and gone.
At the shed a few hundred meters up the shore, The Floating Piers team
works out of a converted shipping container. The little room is immaculate.
Lined with tables and shelves and lockers and computers, stacked with equip-
ment and documents, buzzing with purpose. Three people on three phones
having three conversations in three languages. The espresso machine hisses
and pops.
There’s Wolfgang Volz, project manager. He’s the smart, charming, compact
German who’s worked on every Christo and Jeanne-Claude project since 1971.
Vladimir Yavachev, operations manager, Christo’s nephew—tall, dark, funny.
Diver and cinematographer, he started his career with Xto and JC more than 20
years ago—by carrying Wolfgang’s camera bag. His wife and daughter, Izabella
and Mina, are here as well. Working. Frank Seltenheim, assembly manager—
who got his start as one of the climbers draping fabric over the Reichstag. Anto-
nio Ferrera, documentarian, who records every waking moment of every proj-
ect. Marcella Maria Ferrari, “Marci,” new chief administrator. “She’s already
one of us,” says Wolfgang, who is also simultaneously on the phone with New
York. New York in this case being Jonathan Henery, Jeanne-Claude’s nephew
and the vice president for all the projects. Slim, mid-40s, he worked shoulder to
shoulder with her for 20 years and does now what she did. Organize. Catalog.
Energize. Mediate.
The office in New York is an old cast-iron building in SoHo. Christo and
Jeanne-Claude moved there from Paris in 1964, bought the building from
their landlord in the early 1970s and never left. The reception room smells of
flowers and honey and patchouli, and there’s always music playing low some-
where. And if you go to visit Christo, he’ll come down from the studio to greet
you, his French cus tied with string and covered in charcoal dust, and talk to
you about anything. About the old days downtown with Warhol and Jasper and
the guys.
“Oh sure,” he says, “yes, Andy and Rauschenberg, Johns, in that time, we were all
trying to make our work visible.”
About what’s next.
“We’re waiting now for the federal appeals to tell us about Over the River [a
long-planned fabric installation on the Arkansas River in Colorado]. It could
happen any moment.”
About Jeanne-Claude.
“I miss most the arguments about the work.”
And he is not only polite, he is warm and aectionate and engaged, and he
never says it, he’s too well-mannered, but he wants to get back to work. As soon
as you go, as soon as you shake hands and head for the door, he’s on his way back
upstairs to the studio.
Catastrophe.
In front of all those reporters, Christo said the ropes for the project come from
the USA.
“They come from Cavalieri Corderia,” Vlad says. “Up the road in Sale Mara-
sino! Five kilometers from here! Where you’re speaking tonight!”
“Oyoyoy,” says Christo, his comic incantation of surprise or confusion or
self-mockery.
“You have to say first thing that the ropes for Floating Piers come from Cava-
lieri Corderia of Sale Marasino.” Vladimir is emphatic.
This is important. Every project uses as many local vendors and fabricators
as possible. Nearly a quarter of a million floating cubes are being blow-molded
around the clock in four factories in northern Italy, for example. Goodwill and
good business.
“Oyoyoy. Cavalieri Corderia of Sale Marasino.”
You’ll hear him whispering it the rest of the day.
The presentation at the community center in Sale Marasino is the same one
he gave two weeks ago at a high school in New York City, but the simultane-
ous translation slows it down a little. Wrapped Coast. Valley Curtain. Running
Fence. Surrounded Islands. Pont Neuf. Reichstag. The Gates.
That Christo speaks in run-on sentences powered by his enthusiasm makes
a translator’s job harder; she delivers the Italian version prestissimo—but can
never quite catch up.
First thing he says: “I want to thank the ropemakers of Cavalieri Corderia
for all the rope we’re using. Excellent.” The room erupts in a round of applause.
The small theater is full, maybe 300 people. This is one of the last stops on
the charm campaign. They’ve done this show in almost every village around
the lake. The audience sees all the projects PowerPointed—from Wrapped
Coast to The Gates in a series of photos, a greatest hits flyover, then a few
sketches of The Floating Piers’ 220,000 cubes. 70,000 square meters of fabric.
160 anchors. Five tons, etc. And so forth.
He’s out front now, where she used to be.
“The art is not just the pier or the color or the fabric, but is the lake and the
mountains. The whole landscape is the work of art. It’s all about you having a
personal relationship with it. You in it, experiencing it. Feeling it. I want you
to walk across it barefoot. Very sexy.”
Translation. Applause. Then the audience Q and A.
“How much will it cost?” is almost always the first question.
“Nothing. It is free. We pay for everything.”
Christo finances his installations by selling artwork: A collage like the one above
commands a quarter-million dollars.
“How do we get tickets?”
“You don’t need tickets.”
“What time does it close?
“It will be open around-the-clock. Weather permitting.”
“What happens when it’s over?”
“We recycle everything.”
“How do you stay so energetic?”
“I eat for breakfast every day a whole head of garlic, and yogurt.”
And Christo always answers two last questions, even when no one asks them.
What is it for? What does it do?
“It does nothing. It is useless.”
And he beams.
Now photographs and autographs with anyone who wants one. Then the
mayor takes him up the hill to dinner.
A lovely rustic inn high among the trees. Orazio. In the main dining room, in
honor of Christo, an arrangement of every local dish and delicacy. Table after
table of antipasti and meat and fish and bread and wine and vinegar from the
fields and farms and streams around the lake. A nervous young man rises and
makes an earnest speech about the unparalleled quality of the organic local
olive oil. When he finishes, two cooks carry in a whole roast suckling pig.
At a table in back Christo picks at a small plate of pickled vegetables and
roast pork and bread and olive oil while encouraging everyone else to eat up.
“Sometimes we have to remind him to eat at all,” says Vladimir. Wolfgang is
on and o the phone about the upcoming meeting in Brescia with the prefetto,
the prefect, a kind of regional governor. Very powerful.
After dinner, two things. First, someone presents him with a “wrapped”
bicycle. It is oddly reminiscent of his earliest work; that is, there’s a wrapped
motorcycle of his from the early 1960s in a collection somewhere worth mil-
lions. He’s very gracious about the bike.
Then local author Sandro Albini takes Christo’s elbow and spends several
minutes explaining his theory that the background of the painting La Gio-
conda (the Mona Lisa) is actually Lago d’Iseo. He makes a convincing case.
Leonardo visited here. The timing works. Mr. Albini is a quiet sort, but deter-
mined, and the talk goes on awhile.
Giving you the chance to think of Leonardo and art and Christo and how
artists work into late life and what that might mean. Some artists simplify as
they grow old, the line becoming gestural, the brush stroke schematic; some
complicate, and the work becomes baroque, rococo, finding or hiding some-
thing in a series of elaborations. Some plagiarize themselves. Some give up.
Matisse, Picasso, Monet, Garcia-Márquez, Bellow, Casals. There’s no one
way to do it. Maybe it’s the desire for a perfection of simplicity. “The two
urges, for simplicity and experiment, can pull you in opposite directions,”
says Simon Schama, the art historian. He situates Christo and his projects in
a long tradition, a continuum extending from Titian to Rembrandt to Miró to
de Kooning. “The essence of it is simple, but the process by which it is estab-
lished is a great complication.” That’s the tension of late life essentialism. The
elemental language of Hemingway in The Old Man and the Sea. Late Mozart,
the Requiem. Beethoven, the chilling clarity of the late String Quartets. (So
modern they could have been written last week.) Think of Shakespeare, the
late plays. The Tempest. Or the Donald Justice poem, “Last Days of Prospero,”
part of which reads:
(What tempests he had caused, what lightnings
Loosed in the rigging of the world!)
If now it was all to do again,
Nothing was lacking to his purpose.
The idea for the piers is more than 40 years old. Christo and Jeanne-Claude
got the notion from a friend in Argentina who suggested they make an envi-
ronmental piece for the River Plate. Couldn’t be done. Then they tried Tokyo
Bay, but the bureaucracy was impossible and the technology wasn’t there.
Construction on Lago d’Iseo, Christo says, was as challenging as “building a highway.”
Hence the thought:
“I’m going to be 80 years old. I’d like to do something very hard.”
The old man is heir to the young man’s dream. The old man honors a prom-
ise. Artists do not retire.
Christo thanks Mr. Albini and heads for the car.
Now back to the shed.
Now to work.
Then to sleep.
Now a field trip. To the top of the hill behind the factory. The owners know
someone who knows someone who owns an estate on the ridgeline a thousand
feet up from the shed. Nine people in a Land Rover Defender on a road like a
goat trail drive to the top of the mountain.
It’s a stately old place gated and terraced with low walls and gardens and
olive trees. The view from every corner is the whole dome of heaven, a world
of Alps and lake and sky.
Christo stands alone at the edge of the garden for a long time. Looks down to
the water. Looks down to the sheds. Picturing in the world what he’s already
made in his mind. From here he can see it complete.
“Beautiful,” he says to no one in particular.
Vlad, less moved in the moment by beauty than by opportunity, points at a
high peak a few kilometers east and says, “We can put the repeater over there.”
They’ll have their own radio communications network for The Floating Piers.
Operations, security, personnel, logistics.
Then Vlad and Wolfi and Antonio are arranging a portrait-sitting for Marci
on one of those low walls, using a smartphone to see if the background matches
that of the Mona Lisa—as was explained to them all at such great length. Mar-
ci’s smile is indeed enigmatic, but the results are inconclusive.
So. La Gioconda. Think of how it makes you feel. Think of The Gates. Run-
ning Fence. The Umbrellas. Wrapped Reichstag. Surrounded Islands. Think
of the power of art. The Gates didn’t change Central Park. The Gates didn’t
change Manhattan. The Gates changed you. Years later you still think of them.
We reserve for art the same power we grant religion. To transform. Tran-
scend. To comfort. Uplift. Inspire. To create in ourselves a state like grace.
Now Brescia, and the prefect.
Same presentation, but in a high marble hall to a modest audience of local
swells. The prefetto, square-jawed, handsome, humorless in a perfectly tai-
lored blue suit, leads o. Then Christo.
“What I make is useless. Absurd,” and so forth, through the years and the
projects. He spends a few minutes on two future possibilities. Over the River,
and The Mastaba, a massive architectural undertaking, permanent this time,
an Old Kingdom tomb hundreds of feet high built of oil drums in the deserts
of Abu Dhabi.
When Christo speaks at these things, you get the sense—infrequently but
powerfully—that he’s waiting for Jeanne-Claude to finish his sentence.
After the PowerPoint the power, and a party for the local gentry in the
prefetto’s ocial suite of rooms.
Fancy appetizers, tiny and ambitious, to be eaten standing. Franciacorta in
flutes. An entire tabletop of fresh panettone.
For the next hour Christo stands in place as a stream of local dignitaries
present themselves. He shakes hands and leans in to listen to each of them.
Antonio floats by with his camera. They’ll ask all the same questions. When?
How much? What next?
There’s always a little space in the circle for her.
If you watch him closely enough you can see it. Or maybe you just think you
see it. Want to see it. There’s a space to his left. And that thing he does with his
left hand when he’s talking to the politicians and the bureaucrats. How the fin-
gers flex and the thumb brushes the fingertips, like he’s reaching for her hand.
Now west out of Brescia on the autostrada. Christo, Wolfgang, Antonio. Fast.
140, 150, 160 kilometers per hour—the big Mercedes a locomotive in the dark.
Wolfgang driving. Christo deep in the back seat behind him. Antonio up
front riding shotgun with the camera in his lap. “I thought that went well,” he
says. “They were very nice. They really rolled out the red carpet for us.”
“They did,” says Wolfgang.
Christo is quiet for the first time since morning, looking out the window
into Hour 15 of a 20-hour day. Italy is a blur.
“Still . . . ”
“I think they really like us . . . really like the project.”
“Still,” Wolfgang says, “I’d wish for a little less red carpet and a little more
action.”
Absently, looking out his window, Christo nods.
“You saw that conference room,” Wolfgang says to Antonio. “We’ve spent a
lot of time in that conference room. Hours. Hours and hours.”
“On the permissions?”
“Yes. We have all the permits and all the permissions. Now. But it took a
lot of meetings around that table. Month after month. Me and Vlad back and
forth. Christo. Back and forth. They are very, um, deliberate.”
And this is part of the art, too, the private meetings and the public hearings
and the proposals and counter proposals and the local politicians nodding and
smiling. The photo-ops.
“What about the trac plan?” Christo asks. “Could you tell did he read the
trac plan?”
“I don’t know,” Wolfgang says. “I don’t think so.”
“Oyoyoy,” Christo says low from the far corner of the car.
The trac plan for The Floating Piers is 175 pages long. It took a year to
prepare. It cost €100,000.
“Maybe he’s read it,” Wolfgang says, his hands motionless on the wheel.
“Maybe he hasn’t. He’s inscrutable.”
Floating Piers will draw perhaps 500,000 visitors in 16 days to a town with
one main road.
“Oyoyoy.”
“Yes. Indeed. Oyoyoy.”
“When will they read it?”
“Who knows? They are in no hurry.”
“We are,” says Christo.
“Always,” says Wolfgang.
“It would be better to start sooner.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“And not leave this for the last minute. The buses. The police. The roads.
The people. Oyoyoy. How could they not read it yet?”
“Maybe he read it. Maybe they all read it.”
“Why do they wait? What do they have to do? Nothing. Nothing. They just
have to agree to it. Just have to say yes. They don’t even have to pay for any-
thing. We pay for everything.”
Then everyone is quiet. Italy rushes past. The instrument panel glows.
“Still,” Antonio says, “they were very nice.”
Maybe this is the life you’d choose for yourself if you could. Nights all over
the world in strange, wonderful places. You and your family. Loved by every-
one.
Now a restaurant in Palazzolo sull’Oglio, a small town a half-hour south of
the lake.
“Bellissimo grande!” calls a woman on her way out the door as she sees
Christo walking past her. Big beautiful.
Vlad found this place. A fourth-generation family cucina run by Maurizio
and Grazia Rossi. Modest. Close to the train station. Dark wood. Frosted glass
doors. A workingman’s place. On the bar is a Faema E 61 espresso machine
as big and bright as the bumper of an antique Cadillac. The dining room in
back is hung every which way with the work of local painters. It’s the kind of
restaurant you’re nostalgic for even as you’re sitting in it.
“Relax,” Christo says. “Sit down. Eat.”
And they do. Frank the climber is
here, and Izabella and Mina, and An-
tonio and Wolfi and Vlad, Marci and
Christo, and the sweet, long-faced pres-
ident of the lake association, Giuseppe
Faccanoni. All at the big table up front.
Simple menu. Large portions. Tripe
soup. Passata di fagioli. White lasa-
gna. Local fish. Local meat. Local wine.
The owner’s uncle makes the cheese.
Franciacorta from the slopes of Lago
d’Iseo. “Salute!”
Conversations and sentence fragments around the table, overlapping dia-
logue like something out of Preston Sturges. For example, they moved out of
a lakeside hotel into a chateau up in the hills.
“We’re saving €30,000 a month,” says Vladimir. “Mina, honey, what do
you want?”
“There’s a billiard room,” Christo says.
“I don’t want the meatballs,” says Mina.
“But no one has used it yet,” says Wolfgang. “I’ll have the tripe. We’re all
working seven days a week.”
“Grazie,” says Maurizio.
“Maybe the meatballs,” says Izabella.
Plates come and go, meatballs are eaten, wine poured. Eventually, briefly,
the trac plan comes around again.
“Oyoyoy.”
Mina is asleep on Izabella’s lap. It’s late. Wolfi and Marci are going back and
forth on their phones with the carabinieri. An alarm went o at the shed, but
no one knows why. Wolfgang thinks the night watchman tripped it himself.
Dessert now, and Maurizio wants Christo to try the homemade halvah. “I
know what my child likes and I know what Christo likes,” Vlad says to him.
Simon Schama,
the art historian,
situates Christo and
his projects in a long
tradition, a continuum
extending from Titian
to Rembrandt to Miró to
de Kooning.
“He won’t like the halvah.”
He does not like the halvah.
So they bring him a big wedge of vanilla cake with fresh whipped cream.
For the rest of the table the owner brings out cookies made by a cooperative
of refugee women he sponsors from North Africa. Then espresso. Coming up
on midnight.
Vlad takes most of the table home to the chateau. Wolfi drives back to the
shed on the lake to work a few hours in the quiet, and to check the alarm.
At dawn it’s silent around the lake. Nothing moves but the sun.
Somehow all this exists outside the punch-line postmodernism of kitsch
and performance art, outside the smooth jazz standards of mid-century living
room modernism, outside earnestness or irony or intention, outside category
of any kind. Somehow the installations are as intimate as they are monumen-
tal, and no matter what else is happening, inside the work of art where you
stand you’re safe.
The Floating Piers.
Maybe the real work of an artist’s life is the artist’s life.
A month later he’s back in New York City. He works early. He works late. He’s
upstairs in the studio, making the big pieces to pay for the piers. The French
cus are dark with charcoal.
Vlad calls. Wolfi calls. Marci calls. Calls come all day every day with updates
from Italy: more sections finished; more anchors sunk; bills in/checks out;
trucks come/trucks go; tourists block trac to catch a glimpse of the shed;
of the piers; of Christo. The prefetto needs more paperwork. The days are
tick-ticking away.
If you were to visit him, you’d meet him in that second-floor reception area.
Reporters step in/reporters step out. Christo’s tired, but his eyes are bright
and the handshake’s firm.
You’d smell that perfume and hear that music, and by now you’d know the
perfume was Jeanne-Claude’s. Angel, by Thierry Mugler. Christo sprays it ev-
ery day, upstairs and down. And the music is the Mozart she loved, the Piano
Concerto No. 27, Mozart’s last, and he plays it on a loop, low, as the magic to
conjure and keep her.
Then another dinner downtown.
“Three kilometers,” Christo says. “Two hundred twenty thousand poly-
ethylene cubes. The Rolls-Royce of cubes. Ninety thousand square meters of
fabric on the piers and in the streets.”
MAYters.
He’s building the piers out of breadsticks now, laying first the long line from
Sulzano to Peschiera Maraglio, then the angles from Monte Isola to Isola di
San Paolo. The little island is surrounded by carefully broken breadsticks. The
piers are taken up and eaten when dinner arrives.
A couple of prawns. A bite of salad. Half a glass of red wine. “Eat,” Jonathan
says.
“We sold a big one.”
“How much?”
“One million two.”
“One point two emm?”
“Yes.”
Now the wedge of vanilla cake. Fresh whipped cream.
Art is not an antidote to loss. Just an answer to it. Like the painting of a
woman by a lake. Like walking on water for two weeks. Years of daredevil en-
gineering and unnecessary eort for something so ephemeral. He’ll make an-
other trip to Italy. Then back to New York. Then Abu Dhabi. Then New York.
Then Italy. More shows. More galleries. More museums. Maybe Colorado.
Maybe Abu Dhabi. Maybe.
Tonight he hurries home. He’ll work late.
“There is a madness of things to be done!”
Such a bright, brief complication. And artists do not retire.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
mosquitoes
A WORLD WITHOUT
BY
JERRY
ADLER
photographs
by David Yoder
New gene-
editing
technology
gives
scientists
the ability to
wipe out the
carriers of
malaria and
the Zika virus.
But should
they use it?
SMITHSONIAN.COM
SMITHSONIAN.COM
TO THE NAKED EYE, THE EGG OF THE
Anopheles gambiae mosquito is just a dark speck, but under
a 100-power microscope, it shows up as a fat, slightly curved
cucumber, somewhat narrower at one end. In the wild, it is
typically found in shallow, sunlit puddles in sub-Saharan Af-
rica, but it can survive in any number of wet places at around
80 degrees Fahrenheit. In a laboratory in London, behind three
sets of locked doors enclosing negative-pressure containment
vestibules, Andrew Hammond, a doctoral student in molecular
genetics, picks up a clump of Anopheles eggs on a small paint-
brush and lines them up on a microscope slide. Hammond looks
for the narrow end, where the germ line cells that will form the
next generation are located. With delicate nudges of a joystick,
he maneuvers a tiny needle through his field of vision until it
just penetrates the egg membrane, and the click of a button
releases a minute squirt of DNA. Whether the genetic material
reaches and binds to its target region
is then a matter of luck, and
luck is, generally, with the mosquito.
Hammond’s success rate, of
which he is very proud, is around 20 percent.
A. gambiae has been called the world’s most dangerous
animal, although strictly speaking that applies only to the fe-
male of the species, which does the bloodsucking and harms
only indirectly. Its bite is a minor nuisance, unless it happens
to convey the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, for
which it is a primary human vector. Although a huge inter-
national eort has cut malaria mortality by about half since
2000, the World Health Organization still estimates there
were more than 400,000 fatal cases in 2015, primarily in Af-
rica. Children are particularly susceptible. The Bill and Me-
linda Gates Foundation prioritized malaria in its more than
$500 million commitment to fight infectious disease in devel-
oping countries. A portion of that money ends up here, in the
laboratory of Andrea Crisanti at Imperial College, London, a
short walk from Harrods.
Crisanti, a tousled, sad-eyed man with a gentle smile, was
trained as a physician in Rome. Later, studying molecular biol-
ogy in Heidelberg, he developed his lifelong interest in malaria.
He set out on the trail of A. gambiae some 30 years ago, after
he concluded that the best way to eradicate the disease was to
attack the mosquito rather than the parasite. “The vector is the
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Achilles’ heel of the disease,” he says in his soft Italian accent.
“If you go after the pathogen [with drugs], all you are doing is
generating resistance.”
Humans have been at war with members of the family Culici-
dae for over a century, since the pioneering epidemiologist Sir
Ronald Ross proved the role of Anopheles in malaria and U.S.
Army Maj. Walter Reed made a similar discovery about Aedes
aegypti and yellow fever. The war has been waged with shovels
and insecticides, with mosquito repellent, mosquito traps and
mosquito-larvae-eating fish, with bed nets and window screens
and rolled-up newspapers. But all of these approaches are self-
limiting. Puddles fill up again with rain; insects evolve resistance
to pesticides; predators can eat only so much.
By the time Crisanti joined Imperial College, in 1994, mo-
lecular genetics had suggested a new approach, which he was
quick to adopt, and in which his lab is now among the most
advanced in the world. Scientists had discovered how to insert
beneficial mutations—such as the gene for Bt, a natural insecti-
cide—into agricultural crops such as corn. Why not, then, cre-
Above: Mosquito larvae hatch
in Perugia. Since mosquitoes
reproduce quickly, a gene drive
can spread through an entire
population in just a few months.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
ate a lethal mutation and insert it into the DNA of a mosquito?
One problem was that mosquitoes weren’t bred in a factory, as
commodity corn increasingly is. In the wild, mosquitoes mate
randomly and propagate by Mendelian inheritance, which
dictates that a mutation spreads slowly, if at all. Unless the
man-made mutation conveyed some strong evolutionary ad-
vantage—and the whole point was to do the opposite—it would
most likely disappear.
In 2003, Austin Burt, a colleague of Crisanti’s at Imperial Col-
lege, suggested a solution: coupling the desired mutation with a
“gene drive” that would overwrite the ordinary processes of in-
heritance and evolution. Recall that genes are spelled out by DNA
sequences woven into chromosomes, which come in pairs (23
pairs in a human, 3 in a mosquito). A “gene drive” involves copy-
ing a mutated gene from one chromosome onto the other mem-
ber of the pair. The key is that when the pairs split to form the
eggs and sperm, it won’t matter which chromosome gets passed
along—the engineered gene will be there either way. Thus a single
mutation would, in theory, be “driven” into practically every mos-
quito in a breeding population.
For the next dozen years, Crisanti, working with a senior re-
search fellow named Tony Nolan and others, obsessively pur-
sued variations of this approach, designing one gene mutation
that would render females sterile and another that would lead
to a huge preponderance of males. The challenge was creating
the particular gene drives that duplicated those mutations—a
tedious, years-long process of constructing custom DNA-snip-
ping enzymes.
Then, in 2012, the UC Berkeley researcher Jennifer Doudna
and her colleagues developed a revolutionary new technique
for editing DNA. Researchers had known for years that certain
genes in bacteria had short, repeating chunks of DNA. (CRISPR
stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic
repeats.”) When a virus invaded, the bacteria copied part of the
virus’ genetic code, slotting it into the spaces between the re-
peating CRISPR chunks. The next time the bacteria saw that
piece of code, an enzyme called Cas9 would guide its RNA to ex-
actly that sequence in the gene of the invading virus. It would cut
out the DNA with incredible precision and fuse the strand back
together. Doudna and her colleagues harnessed this process in
SMITHSONIAN.COM
the lab, using it to quickly and easily edit any part of a gene they
targeted. The following year, separate teams led by MIT bioengi-
neer Feng Zhang and Harvard’s George Church showed it would
work in living cells.
It was the universality as well as the accuracy that set CRISPR-
Cas9 apart from other gene-editing techniques. Unlike the cus-
tom enzymes Crisanti and his team had been painstakingly
building, Cas9 seemed to work in any type of cell. Researchers
saw implications for treating genetic disorders, for improving
agriculture—and for more sinister applications, such as creat-
ing biowarfare agents. CRISPR also brought Crisanti’s dream a
giant step closer to reality. Now, he and his team could program
Cas9’s guide RNA to pinpoint any part of a gene and transfer
over the material they wanted to copy.
If Crisanti’s approach works, you could, in theory, wipe out
an entire species of mosquito. You could wipe out every species
of mosquito, although you’d need to do them one at a time, and
there are around 3,500 of them, of which only about 100 spread
human disease. You might want to stop at fewer than a dozen
species in three genera—Anopheles (translation: “useless,” the
malaria mosquito), Aedes (translation: “unpleasant,” the princi-
pal vector for yellow fever, dengue and Zika) and Culex (trans-
lation: “gnat,” responsible for spreading West Nile, St. Louis
encephalitis and other viruses).
For thousands of years, the relentlessly expanding popula-
tion of Homo sapiens has driven other species to extinction by
eating them, shooting them, destroying their habitat or acci-
dentally introducing more successful competitors to their en-
vironment. But never have scientists done so deliberately, un-
der the auspices of public health. The possibility raises three
dicult questions: Would it work? Is it ethical? Could it have
unforeseen consequences?
The feasibility question is being studied in Crisanti’s London
lab, where the injected eggs will hatch into larvae. The ones
harboring the mutation are identified by a “marker” gene, which
glows under a microscope when viewed in certain lights. The
mutants of interest are then returned to the warm, humid air
of the mosquito rooms, to stacked trays with walls of white
plastic mesh. On one side, there’s a long socklike tube, ordi-
SMITHSONIAN.COM
narily tied in a knot, through which researchers can insert
an aspirator to gently vacuum up specimens. If you hold your
hand nearby, the females, sensing the nearness of blood, gather
on that side. When it’s time for their blood meal, which will
nourish the hundred or so eggs a female will lay at one time, an
anesthetized mouse is laid belly-down on the cage roof, and the
females fly up to bite it through the mesh. (The males, which
live on nectar and fruit in the wild, feed on a glucose-water
solution, wicked up from a small glass bottle.) These insects
live up to a month longer in the controlled environment of the
cages than in the wild, where they often don’t survive more
than a week or two.
The next phase of the research takes place in Perugia, Italy,
home to one of the world’s oldest universities, founded in 1308,
and to a small, elite research consortium, Polo d’Innovazione
Genomica. A few miles from the winding alleys of the medieval
hilltop village, in a glass-walled building on a stark windswept
plaza, is Polo’s secure lab, with six ceiling-high “field cages,”
each with an area of 50 or 60 square feet. Signs on the doors
In a study published last year,
Andrea Crisanti, right, and his
colleagues were able to spread an
infertility mutation to 75 percent of
a mosquito population.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
warn away visitors who might have been exposed to malaria,
since they could infect an escaped mosquito if it bit them. The
air inside is tropical. Instead of live mice, females are fed on
small dishes of bovine blood, warmed to body temperature and
covered with paran, to give them something to land on. The
females are attracted to the pheromones in human sweat, espe-
cially from the feet. Lab workers say they sometimes wear their
socks all weekend and bring them to work on Monday to rub on
the feeding dishes.
Inside, the lighting changes to simulate a 24-hour tropical
day, and environmental cues trigger the swarming behavior
that is crucial to mating. “That is how many insects mate,” ex-
plains the chief entomologist, Clelia Oliva. “The males swarm,
and the females fly through the swarm and find a mate, and
they come together in the air. If you cannot replicate that, you
cannot determine if your line is going to succeed in the wild.”
An escapee from one of the cages flits past Oliva as she is talk-
ing, and she dispatches it with the slap she perfected while
studying mosquitoes on Reunion Island, in the Indian Ocean.
Researchers are skeptical about whether it is even possible to
wipe out mosquitoes. “Global elimination of an entire species, I
think, is a little far-fetched,” says Steven Juliano, an ecologist at
Illinois State University. But, he adds, “I think they have a good
chance of reducing local populations, maybe even eradicating
a species in a locality.”
Something like that has been done with other creatures.
Starting in the 1950s, the American entomologists Edward
F. Knipling and Raymond C. Bushland eliminated the screw-
worm, an agricultural pest, from the United States and much
of Central America. Their approach, called “sterile insect tech-
nique,” involved breeding and hatching millions of flies, steril-
izing the males with low-level gamma rays, then releasing them
in numbers sucient to swamp the wild population. Females
that mated with the sterile males produced infertile ospring.
It took decades, but it worked—the two men were awarded the
World Food Prize in 1992—and the same technique now is used
to contain outbreaks of the Mediterranean fruit fly.
But when the sterile insect technique was tried against
mosquitoes, the results were mixed. It requires that the re-
leased males compete successfully with their wild counter-
“We can
remake the
biosphere
to be what
we want,
from woolly
mammoths
to nonbiting
mosquitoes.
How should
we feel about
that?”
SMITHSONIAN.COM
parts in mating, and there is evidence that in mosquitoes,
the same radiation that makes them sterile may also im-
pair their mating behavior. Whatever female mosquitoes
are looking for in a mate, these males seem to have less of it.
So researchers have also been looking at variants of ster-
ile insect technology that don’t require radiation. A pilot
project has begun in the city of Piracicaba, in southeastern
Brazil, by the British biotech company Oxitec. The target in-
sect is A. aegypti, the main culprit in spreading yellow fever,
dengue and other viral diseases, and the work has taken on
greater urgency in the last six months, because A. aegypti
also is a vector for the Zika virus, blamed for an outbreak of
terrifying birth defects in the Americas.
In Oxitec’s program, male larvae bred with a lethal muta-
tion are raised in water dosed with the antibiotic tetracy-
cline, which inactivates the lethal gene. When those males
mate with wild mosquitoes, their offspring, deprived of tet-
racycline, die before they can reproduce. CEO Hadyn Parry
claims “greater than 90 percent suppression of the wild
population” in five studies that covered relatively small ar-
eas in Brazil, Panama and the Cayman Islands. Now the
company wants to expand to the subtropical U.S., and it re-
cently passed a key regulatory hurdle to bring the program
to the Florida Keys.
Oxitec’s technology predates CRISPR, and it doesn’t use a
gene drive. Its goal is not to exterminate Aedes, but to reduce
the local population to where it can no longer serve as a vec-
tor for human disease. That is, of course, a temporary solu-
tion to a perennial problem. Mosquitoes don’t usually travel
more than a few hundred yards from where they hatch, but
people do, and they can take yellow fever with them. And the
mosquitoes themselves can travel the globe on airplanes and
ships. Aedes albopictus, the “Asian tiger mosquito,” arrived
in the Western Hemisphere a few years ago, possibly in a
shipment of tires, and spreads many of the same diseases
as A. aegypti. So even if the Oxitec program succeeds, it will
likely need to be repeated at intervals. “You begin to see why
Oxitec is a business,” one American entomologist said dryly.
SMITHSONIAN.COMSMITHSONIAN.COM
Anopheles mosquitoes (shown here in
the Perugia lab) exist on every continent
apart from Antarctica, but most malaria-
related deaths take place in Africa.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
There’s not much doubt that eradicating Anopheles gambiae
and Aedes aegypti would save many lives, and for most people
that’s a good enough reason to do it. “I don’t think the world would
be a worse-o place if local populations of these species were
eliminated,” Juliano says, “and it wouldn’t bother me any more
than eliminating the smallpox virus.” Even the great conserva-
tionist E.O. Wilson, the world’s most famous entomologist, has
said he wouldn’t mourn A. gambiae. “Keep their DNA for future
research,” he says, “and let them go.”
Still, there are voices calling to proceed slowly. “If we were
to intentionally set out to cause the extinction of a species, we
should think about that,” says Henry Greely, a Stanford law pro-
fessor and bioethicist. “I would want there to be some consid-
eration and reflection, and a social consensus, before we take
that step.” His argument is based partly on the slippery slope: If
mosquitoes, then why not rats? “I’m not sure I care if mosquitoes
suer, if they can suer. But mammals or birds, I do care.”
But suppose the target were the malaria parasite itself, which
as a single-celled protozoan has even a smaller claim on our
sympathy than an insect? At UC Irvine, Anthony James, a ge-
neticist, has been working since the 1980s on breeding mos-
quitoes that, while viable themselves, do not transmit P. falci-
parum. The virus has a complicated life cycle that takes up to three
weeks to move from the mosquito’s gut to its circulatory system
to the salivary glands, from which it is transmitted. James real-
ized that if he could endow the mosquito with genes that produce
antibodies to P. falciparum, he could destroy the parasite without
having to kill even one insect. He created the gene for the antibod-
ies, but he needed a way to make it spread in the wild.
Then he heard about CRISPR-Cas9—in particular the work
being done at UC San Diego by a molecular biologist named
Ethan Bier, who recently put a mutation into fruit flies. Bier al-
lows that some situations might warrant removing a genus like
A. aegypti from a vast area of the world where it isn’t native.
Whenever possible, though, he prefers less-invasive methods.
“I like this approach, of modifying the mosquitoes rather than
rendering them extinct,” says Bier. “We’re doing enough of that
already. As a human
being I don’t want to be involved in the
eradication of a species, even an insect.” James has success-
fully engineered the antibody-producing genes and is working
SMITHSONIAN.COM
SMITHSONIAN.COM
on the gene drive. He could have insects ready for field tests in
a matter of months but can’t predict how long the approval pro-
cess will take. “We’re not about to do anything foolish,” he says.
If society chooses to eliminate one or more species of mos-
quito, what are the downsides? Mosquitoes play a critical role
in a few environments, such as the Arctic tundra, where they
hatch out by the billions over a short period and are a significant
food resource for birds. In most other places, biologists believe,
the ecosystem could survive the loss .
Still, according to Nolan, “Our goal is not to eliminate malaria
mosquitoes from the face of the earth. If we succeed, people won’t
even notice. There will be plenty of mosquitoes out there.”
It’s possible, even likely, that another species would take the
place of the mosquitoes we exterminated. For instance, A. ae-
gypti could be replaced by a mosquito from the Culex pipiens
species complex. Culex, which is a vector for the West Nile virus,
“does very badly when Aedes is present,” Juliano notes, but it
might be expected to thrive in its absence. On the other hand, the
newcomer might be a relatively harmless species; the ecological
niche for mosquitoes doesn’t require them to carry diseases fatal
to human beings. In the long term, the pathogens could evolve
to be spread by the mosquitoes that are still around, but there’s
plenty of time for humans to worry about that.
The larger concern, arguably, is over the use of CRISPR itself,
and the awesome power it unleashes over the environment. “We
can remake the biosphere to be what we want, from woolly mam-
moths to nonbiting mosquitoes,” Greely muses. “How should
we feel about that? Do we want to live in nature, or in Disney-
land?” Another fear is that CRISPR puts a potential weapon in
the hands of terrorists, who could use it to engineer epidemics.
“Just as gene drives can make mosquitoes unfit for spreading
the malaria parasite, they could conceivably be designed with
gene drives carrying cargo for delivering lethal bacterial toxins
to humans,” warns David Gurwitz of Tel Aviv University.
The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Med-
icine thought enough of the threat to convene a conference
last fall on the implications of gene drive technology for bio-
security. But many scientists think this is an overblown concern
(along with the other horror-movie scenario, of a high-school
Malaria alone
accounts for
60%
of mosquito-
related deaths.
Fatality rates
are especially
high among
young children.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
student in his basement using CRISPR to make a dog that glows
in the dark). “A gene drive in a mosquito would make a very poor
bioweapon,” says Kevin Esvelt, an ecologist at MIT, who has writ-
ten extensively on the subject. “They are slow [compared with
disseminating a deadly microbe], they are easy to detect, and it’s
straightforward to build a reversal mechanism.”
But Esvelt has other ethical concerns about using CRISPR tech-
nology on animals: “We will have engineered the ecosystems of
people elsewhere in the world without their knowledge or consent.
We go from the default assumption that the things we engineer
will not spread, to assuming they will. Normally you can make any
kind of fruit flies you want—natural selection will wipe the floor
with them. But as soon as you’re thinking of a gene drive technol-
ogy, you have to assume whatever you’re making will spread once
it gets outside the lab. Human error will win out, if not deliberate
human action.”
Yet Esvelt himself is already thinking about whether and
how to someday use a CRISPR gene drive in a mouse, the main
animal reservoir of Lyme disease—and a mammal. He would
engineer a local population to carry antibodies for the bacteria
that cause Lyme. (The disease spreads from mice to humans
through tick bites.)
If CRISPR works in a mouse, it will almost certainly work
in a human being. The least controversial application would
be for inherited diseases such as muscular dystrophy—which
would most likely involve repairing the somatic (non-reproduc-
tive) cells of a child or an adult. But Chinese scientists just an-
nounced the results of their second study of CRISPR in human
embryos. (They used nonviable embryos from fertility clinics.)
The results revealed “serious obstacles” to the approach, but the
technology is fast improving. Harvard scientists, for instance,
recently modified the CRISPR method so it can change a single
letter of the genetic code, making it easier to prevent diseases
like Alzheimer’s and breast cancer. CRISPR also opens the Pan-
dora’s box of editing the germ line cells that pass on their genetic
material to succeeding generations. This could be of enormous
benefit to a small number of people who carry genes for dis-
orders such as Huntington’s disease. More problematically, it
could encourage parents to custom-build their ospring, delet-
ing genes that are unwanted but not life-threatening (for lactose
It was human
technology
that spread
these diseases
across the
globe, and
now technol-
ogy is oering
a way to
contain them,
or even
defeat them
altogether.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
intolerance, say), or adding ones that convey traits such as ath-
letic ability, longevity—or intelligence.
This possibility has given rise to a lot of op-ed angst about
“playing God,” which certainly should be taken seriously. Leav-
ing aside the philosophic objections, the practical downside
is that we don’t know all of the genes that will actually make
someone smarter (or taller, stronger, healthier, faster and so
forth) and the only way to find out for sure is to try dierent
combinations on various embryos and wait for them to grow
up. By that time, if we got it wrong, it would be too late to fix,
not least for the humans who were the unwitting subjects of
the experiments.
That, in the eyes of most ethicists, is an insurmountable
problem. An International Summit on Human Gene Editing
in Washington, D.C. last December aired many of these issues,
revealing a split between the medical community, which wants
to help patients in the here and now, and some researchers,
who worry about the implications of the tabloid headline an-
nouncing the birth of the first Frankenbaby.
Meanwhile, mosquitoes flit about the villages and cities of cen-
tral Africa, land silently on sleeping children and bite. The fight
against malaria has made much progress in the last decade, but at
a huge cost that may not be sustainable indefinitely. In the West-
ern Hemisphere, the threat of Zika has led to extraordinary mea-
sures, including warnings in whole regions of South and Central
America for women to consider postponing childbearing. This
summer will tell us if the disease will strike in the parts of the
U.S. where two Aedes species live—Florida and a strip of the Gulf
Coast that is likely to expand as the winters warm in a changing
climate. (The second of those two American Aedes species, A. al-
bopictus, is a confirmed carrier of the virus and can be found as far
north as New England.) Public-health ocials are already bracing
for the possibility of a spate of babies with the devastating diagno-
sis of microcephaly and associated brain damage. It was human
transportation technology that spread these diseases across the
globe. Now technology is oering a way to contain them, or even
defeat them altogether, at the risk of unleashing powerful forces
whose eects we can only dimly predict.
Will we do it—we humans, the species with the relentless ap-
petite for knowledge? The fruit of that particular tree has never
WHEN
ANIMALS
KILL
Snakes and sharks
may be the stu of
nightmares, but
they cause far fewer
deaths than parasites
and viruses carried
by mosquitoes. Here
are some dangerous
animals and the
estimated annual
deaths they’ve caused
in recent years.
Mosquitoes
Transmit malaria and
other diseases
725,000
deaths globally per year
Snakes
94,000 to 125,000
Freshwater Snails
Transmit
schistosomiasis
20,000 to 200,000
Dogs
Mostly by
transmitting rabies
55,000 to 60,000
Triatomine bugs
Transmit Chagas
disease
10,000
Scorpions
3,250
Sharks
6
SMITHSONIAN.COM
been left uneaten for very long. Crisanti, for his part, is ready
to pick it. “I want to see malaria wiped out in my lifetime,” he
says softly. He is 61.
THE BUZZ ABOUT ALTERED BUGS
How the revolutionary technique CRISPR-Cas9 gives scientists the ability to insert an infertility gene
into a mosquito—so the gene “drives” into a population, eventually causing its demise
MUTANT
MOSQUITO
ENGINEERED GENE
WILD GENE
Scientists create genetic
code that disrupts
reproduction in female
mosquitoes and inject
the custom DNA into a
fertilized mosquito egg.
As the insect develops,
the engineered gene
is incorporated into
the cells that generate
sperm in males and
eggs in females.
When an altered mosquito mates with a wild insect, their offspring’s chromosomes are
paired. The engineered DNA comes with a highly targeted editing enzyme, which helps
insert the alteration into the wild chromosome.
With the altered gene
on both chromosomes,
it will become more
prevalent in a popula-
tion (in contrast to natu-
ral mutations that lack
the gene drive mecha-
nism). The altered gene
(shown as a circle, right)
is carried by male mos-
quitoes (orange), which
remain fertile. Females
that inherit the altera-
tion from both parents
are sterile.
ENGINEERING
THE GENE
DOWN THE
GENERATIONS
Now both chromo-
somes in the pair
carry the mutation.
The Cas9 enzyme
snips out a gene on
the wild chromosome.
A mosquito inherits
one chromosome
from each parent.
The wild chromosome
repairs itself, with the
altered gene as a template.
Mosquitoes have three pairs of chromosomes
total (humans have 23), but a sperm or egg cell
contains just one member of each chromosome
pair. In an altered insect, the engineered gene
(in orange) is now part of a chromosome in the
sperm or egg.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Even amid the
carnage of World
War I, the battle
in the northern
Italian mountains
was like nothing
the world had ever
seen—or has
seen since
BY BRIAN
MOCKENHAUPT
BLOOD
IN THE
CLOUDS
photographs
by Stefen Chow
Two Italian
soldiers dodged
sniper fire and
blasted rock
while scaling the
Tofana di Rozes
to seize a position
overlooking
Austrian troops.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Just after dawn
we slipped into the forest and hiked a steep
trail to a limestone wall. A curious ladder of
U-shaped steel rungs was fixed to the rock.
To reach the battlefield we would trek sev-
eral miles along this via ferrata, or iron road,
pathways of cables and lad-
ders that traverse some of
the most stunning and oth-
erwise inaccessible territory
in the mountains of northern
Italy. We scaled the 50 feet
of steel rungs, stopping ev-
ery ten feet or so to clip our
safety tethers to metal cables
that run alongside.
A half-hour in, our faces
slick with sweat, we rested
on an outcropping that
overlooked a valley car-
peted with thick stands of
pine and fir. Sheep bleated
in a meadow, and a shep-
herd called to them. We
could see the Pasubio Ossu-
ary, a stone tower that holds
Austrian soldiers won the
race to the high ground
(below, in 1915) in what
was later called “The
White War” because of the
snow and extreme cold.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
the remains of 5,000 Italian and Austrian soldiers who fought in
these mountains in World War I. The previous night we had slept
near the ossuary, along a country road where cowbells clanged softly
and lightning bugs blinked in the darkness like muzzle flashes.
Joshua Brandon gazed at the surrounding peaks and took a swig
of water. “We’re in one of the most beautiful places in the world,”
he said, “and one of the most horrible.”
In the spring of 1916, the Austrians swept down through these
mountains. Had they reached the Venetian plain, they could have
marched on Venice and encircled much of the Italian Army, break-
ing what had been a bloody yearlong stalemate. But the Italians
stopped them here.
Just below us a narrow road skirted the mountainside, the Ital-
ians’ Road of 52 Tunnels, a four-mile donkey path, a third of which
runs inside the mountains, built by 600 workers over ten months
in 1917.
“A beautiful piece of engineering, but what a wasteful need,”
said Chris Simmons, the third member of our group.
Joshua grunted. “Just to pump a bunch of men up a hill to get
slaughtered.”
For the next two hours our trail alternated between heady
climbing on rock faces and mellow hiking along the mountain
ridge. By mid-morning the fog and low clouds had cleared, and
before us lay the battlefield, its slopes scored with trenches and
stone shelters, the summits laced with tunnels where men lived
like moles. We had all served in the military, Chris as a Navy
corpsman attached to the Marine Corps, and Joshua and I with
the Army infantry. Both Joshua and I had fought in Iraq, but we
had never known war like this.
Our path joined the main road, and we hiked through a bu-
colic scene, blue skies and grassy fields, quiet save for the sheep
and the birds. Two young chamois scampered onto a boulder
and watched us. What this had once been strained the imagina-
tion: the road crowded with men and animals and wagons, the
air rank with filth and death, the din of explosions and gunfire.
“Think of how many soldiers walked the same steps we’re
walking and had to be carried out,” Joshua said. We passed a hill-
side cemetery framed by a low stone wall and overgrown with
tall grass and wildflowers. Most of its occupants had reached
the battlefield in July of 1916 and died over the following weeks.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
They at least had been recovered; hundreds more still rest
where they fell, others blown to pieces and never recovered.
On a steep slope not far from here, an archaeologist named
Franco Nicolis helped excavate the remains of three Italian
soldiers found in 2011. “Italian troops from the bottom of the
valley were trying to conquer the top,” he had told us at his of-
fice in Trento, which belonged to Austria-Hungary before the
war and to Italy afterward. “These soldiers climbed up to the
trench, and they were waiting for dawn. They already had their
sunglasses, because they were attacking to the east.”
The sun rose, and the Austrians spotted and killed them.
“In the ocial documents, the meaning is, ‘Attack failed.’
Nothing more. This is the ocial truth. But there is another
truth, that three young Italian soldiers died in this context,”
Nicolis said. “For us, it’s a historical event. But for them, how did
After their fierce defense of
the Castelletto (background),
Austrian soldiers called it the
Schreckenstein, meaning the
“Rock of Terror.”
SMITHSONIAN.COM
they think about their position? When a soldier took the train to
the front, was he thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to the front of
the First World War, the biggest event ever’? No, he was think-
ing, ‘This is my life.’”
As Joshua, Chris and I walked through the saddle between the
Austrian and Italian positions, Chris spotted something odd nes-
tled in the loose rocks. For nearly two decades he has worked as a
professional climbing and skiing guide, and years of studying the
landscape as he hikes has honed his eye for detail. In previous days
he found a machine gun bullet, a steel ball from a mortar shell and
a jagged strip of shrapnel. Now he squatted in the gravel and gently
picked up a thin white wedge an inch wide and long as a finger. He
cradled it in his palm, unsure what to do with this piece of skull.
The Italians came late to the war. In the spring of 1915, they
abandoned their alliance with Austria-Hungary and Germany
to join the United Kingdom, France and Russia, hoping for sev-
eral chunks of Austria at the war’s end. An estimated 600,000
Italians and 400,000 Austrians would die on the Italian Front,
many of them in a dozen battles along the Isonzo River in the far
northeast. But the front zigzagged 400 miles—nearly as long as
the Western Front, in France and Belgium—and much of that
crossed rugged mountains, where the fighting was like none
the world had ever seen, or has seen since.
Soldiers had long manned alpine frontiers to secure bor-
ders or marched through high passes en route to invasion. But
never had the mountains themselves been the battlefield, and
for fighting at this scale, with fearsome weapons and physical
feats that would humble many mountaineers. As New York
“If you do not die from hunger or cold,
then someday soon you will be blown into
the air. The Castelletto must be held.
It will be held to the death.”
SMITHSONIAN.COM
World correspondent E. Alexander Powell wrote in 1917: “On
no front, not on the sun-scorched plains of Mesopotamia, nor
in the frozen Mazurian marshes, nor in the blood-soaked mud
of Flanders, does the fighting man lead so arduous an existence
as up here on the roof of the world.”
The destruction of World War I overwhelms. Nine million
dead. Twenty-one million wounded. The massive frontal
assaults, the anonymous soldier, faceless death—against
this backdrop, the mountain war in Italy was a battle of
small units, of individuals. In subzero temperatures men
dug miles of tunnels and caverns through glacial ice. They
strung cableways up mountainsides and stitched rock faces
with rope ladders to move soldiers onto the high peaks, then
hauled up an arsenal of industrial warfare: heavy artillery
and mortars, machine guns, poison gas and flamethrowers.
Ultimately, the fighting (an
Italian trench in the Pasubio
Mountains) served as a
sideshow for other battles that
determined the war’s outcome.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Italy entered World War I in May 1915, turning on its ex-ally
Austria-Hungary. The fighting soon devolved into trench
warfare in the northeast and alpine combat in the north.
The Italian Front
Bitter Battles
A June 1915-March 1916
The Italians launch the first five Battles of the
Isonzo, attempts to cross the Isonzo River in the hope
of taking Trieste. Throughout the war, fighting along
the river will claim some 300,000 Italian casualties
and 200,000 Austrian.
B April 17, 1916
The Italians detonate five tons of explosives under
Austrians holding the Col di Lana, shattering 10,000
tons of rock, killing 100 to 200 Austrians—and still
failing to take a strategic pass in the Dolomites.
C May 15-June 10, 1916
The Austrians mount the Trentino Offensive—
also called the “Punishment Expedition,” intended to
avenge the Italians’ betrayal. The mountain attack
rocks the Italians back some 12 miles before they
halt the Austrians at Monte Pasubio, where the
two armies are stalemated on adjoining peaks. The
Austrians suffer 150,000 casualties, the Italians
147,000.
D August 1916-September 1917
The next six Battles of the Isonzo produce little
gain for either side, but both sides are nearly spent.
E June 10-29, 1917
The Italians attack along a broad front in the
mountains, and, in hand-to-hand combat, take
Mount Ortigara—which the Austrians promptly
retake. Italian casualties: 23,000. Austrian: 9,000.
F October 24-November 19, 1917
In the Battle of Caporetto, Austrian and German
forces push the Italians back some 60 miles and
take 270,000 prisoners.
G June 15-23, 1918
The Austrians—without German help—
assail the
Italians in the Battle of the Piave River, but they
get nowhere and suffer some 150,000 casualties.
H October 23-November 2, 1918
The Italians crush the Austrians in the Battle of
Vittorio Veneto, taking some 300,000 prisoners
and ending fighting on the Italian Front.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
And they used the terrain itself as a weapon, rolling boul-
ders to crush attackers and sawing through snow cornices
with ropes to trigger avalanches. Storms, rock slides and
natural avalanches—the “white death”—killed plenty more.
After heavy snowfalls in December of 1916, avalanches bur-
ied 10,000 Italian and Austrian troops over just two days.
Yet the Italian mountain war remains today one of the
least-known battlefields of the Great War.
“Most people have no idea what happened here,” Joshua
said one afternoon as we sat atop an old bunker on a moun-
tainside. Until recently, that included him as well. The little
he knew came from Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms,
Storming the Castelletto
May 1915-July 1916: German, then Austrian, troops occupy a blade of rock
called the Castelletto, depriving the Italians of a major supply route for an
attack throughout the Dolomites. After a year’s futile shelling, the Italians
tunnel under the rock and blast it into shards.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
and later reading Erwin Rommel, the famed Desert Fox of
World War II, who had fought in the Italian Alps as a young
officer in World War I.
Joshua, who is 38, studied history at the Citadel and under-
stands the theory of war, but he also served three tours in Iraq.
He wears a beard now, trimmed short and speckled with gray,
and his 5-foot-9 frame is wiry, better for hauling himself up
steep clis and trekking through the wilderness. In Iraq he had
bulked to nearly 200 pounds, thick muscle for sprinting down
alleyways, carrying wounded comrades and, on one afternoon,
fighting hand-to-hand. He excelled in battle, for which he was
awarded the Silver Star and two Bronze Stars with Valor. But he
struggled at home, feeling both alienated from American society
and mentally wrung out from combat.
In 2012 he left the Army as a major and
sought solace in the outdoors. He found
that rock climbing and mountaineer-
ing brought him peace and perspective
even as it mimicked the best parts of
his military career: some risk, trusting
others with his life, a shared sense of
mission.
Once he understood the skill needed
to travel and survive in mountains, he
looked at the alpine war in Italy with
fresh eyes. How, he wondered, had
the Italians and Austrians lived and
fought in such unforgiving terrain?
Chris, who is 43, met Joshua four
years ago at a rock gym in Washington
State, where they both live, and now
climb together often. I met Joshua
three years ago at an ice-climbing event
in Montana and Chris a year later on
a climbing trip in the Cascade Moun-
tains. Our shared military experience
and love of the mountains led us to ex-
plore these remote battlefields, like
touring Gettysburg if it sat atop a jag-
ged peak at 10,000 feet. “You can’t get
An Austrian cannon
SMITHSONIAN.COM
to many of these fighting positions without using the skills of a
climber,” Joshua said, “and that allows you to have an intimacy
that you might not otherwise.”
If the Italian Front is largely forgotten elsewhere, the war is ever-
present across northern Italy, etched into the land. The moun-
tains and valleys are lined with trenches and dotted with stone
fortresses. Rusted strands of barbed wire sprout from the earth,
crosses built from battlefield detritus rise from mountaintops, and
piazza monuments celebrate the heroes and the dead.
“We are living together with our deep history,” Nicolis, the
researcher, told us. “The war is still in our lives.” Between
climbs to isolated battlefields, we had stopped in Trento to
meet with Nicolis, who directs the Archaeological Heritage
Oce for Trentino Province. We had spent weeks before our
trip reading histories of the war in Italy and had brought a
stack of maps and guidebooks; we knew what had happened
and where, but from Nicolis we sought more on who and why.
He is a leading voice in what he calls “grandfather archae-
ology,” a consideration of history and memory told in family
lore. His grandfather fought for Italy, his wife’s grandfather for
Austria-Hungary, a common story in this region.
Nicolis, who is 59, specialized in prehistory until he found World
War I artifacts while excavating a Bronze Age smelting site on an al-
pine plateau a decade ago. Ancient and modern, side by side. “This
was the first step,” he said. “I began to think about archaeology as
a discipline of the very recent past.”
By the time he broadened his focus, many World War I sites had
been picked over for scrap metal or souvenirs. The scavenging
continues—treasure hunters recently used a helicopter to hoist
a cannon from a mountaintop—and climate change has hastened
the revelation of what remains, including bodies long buried in ice
on the highest battlefields.
On the Presena Glacier, Nicolis helped recover the bodies of
two Austrian soldiers discovered in 2012. They had been buried
in a crevasse, but the glacier was 150 feet higher a century ago;
as it shrank, the men emerged from the ice, bones inside tat-
tered uniforms. The two skulls, both found amid blond hair, had
shrapnel holes, the metal still rattling around inside. One of the
skulls had eyes as well. “It was as if he was looking at me and not
SMITHSONIAN.COM
vice versa,” Nicolis said. “I was thinking about their families,
their mothers. Goodbye my son. Please come back soon. And they
completely disappeared, as if they never existed. These are what
I call the silent witnesses, the missing witnesses.”
At an Austrian position in a tunnel on Punta Linke, at nearly
12,000 feet, Nicolis and his colleagues chipped away and melted
the ice, finding, among other artifacts, a wooden bucket filled with
sauerkraut, an unsent letter, newspaper clippings and a pile of
straw overshoes, woven in Austria by Russian prisoners to shield
soldiers’ feet from the bitter cold. The team of historians, moun-
taineers and archaeologists restored the site to what it might have
been a century ago, a sort of living history for those who make the
long journey by cable car and a steep hike.
“We cannot just speak and write as archaeologists,” Nicolis said.
“We have to use other languages: narrative, poetry, dance, art.” On
the curved white walls of the Museum of Modern and Contempo-
rary Art in Rovereto, battlefield artifacts found by Nicolis and his
colleagues were presented without explanation, a cause for con-
templation. Helmets and crampons, mess kits, hand grenades and
pieces of clothing hang in vertical rows of five items, each row set
above a pair of empty straw overshoes. The eect was stark and
haunting, a soldier deconstructed. “When I saw the final version,”
Nicolis told us, “I said, ‘Oh my God, this means I am present. Here
I am. This is a person.’ ”
When Joshua stood before the exhibit, he thought of his own
dead, friends and soldiers who’d served under him, each memo-
rialized at ceremonies with a battle cross: a rifle with bayonet
struck in the ground muzzle-down between empty combat boots,
a helmet atop the rifle butt. Artifacts over empty shoes. I am pres-
ent. Here I am.
The sky threatened rain, and low clouds wrapped us in a chilly
haze. I stood with Joshua on a table-size patch of level rock, half-
way up a 1,800-foot face on Tofana di Rozes, an enormous gray
massif near the Austrian border. Below us a wide valley stretched
to a dozen more steep peaks. We had been on the wall six hours al-
ready, and we had another six to go.
As Chris climbed 100 feet overhead, a golf ball-size chunk of
rock popped loose and zinged past us with a high-pitched whir
like whizzing shrapnel. Joshua and I traded glances and chuckled.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
The trenches remain (bottom left,
an Austrian position in the Pasubio
mountains), but the alpine battlefields
have been scavenged for a century.
Still, more artifacts—and remains—
are coming to light as glaciers recede,
providing an intimate glimpse
into an industrialized war. In 2012,
archaeologist Franco Nicolis (top left)
helped recover the skull of a soldier
whose eyes had been preserved in
the cold. “It was as if he was looking
at me and not vice versa,” he says.
A cigarette box (middle left) had
a soldier’s drawing inside. World
War I relics he and others collected
were shown at a contemporary art
museum (above) without labels, as
objects for contemplation.
Hell in a Very Cold Place
SMITHSONIAN.COM
The Tofana di Rozes towers over a 700-foot-tall blade of rock
called the Castelletto, or Little Castle. In 1915 a single platoon of
Germans occupied the Castelletto, and with a machine gun they
had littered the valley with dead Italians. “The result was star-
tling: In all directions wounded horses racing, people running
from the forest, frightened to death,” a soldier named Gunther
Langes recalled of one attack. “The sharpshooters caught them
with their rifle scopes, and their bullets did a great job. So an Ital-
ian camp bled to death at the foot of the mountain.” More and
better-armed Austrians replaced the Germans, cutting o a major
potential supply route and muddling Italian plans to push north
into Austria-Hungary.
Conquering the Castelletto fell to the Alpini, Italy’s mountain
troops, known by their dashing felt hats adorned with a black ra-
ven feather. One thought was that if they could climb the Tofana’s
face to a small ledge hundreds of feet above the Austrians’ strong-
hold, they could hoist up a machine gun, even a small artillery
piece, and fire down on them. But the route—steep, slick with run-
o and exposed to enemy fire—was beyond the skill of most. The
assignment went to Ugo Vallepiana and Giuseppe Gaspard, two
Alpini with a history of daring climbs together. Starting in a deep
alcove, out of Austrian view, they worked up the Tofana di Rozes,
wearing hemp-soled shoes that oered better traction than their
hobnailed boots and dampened the sounds of their movements.
We were climbing a route not far from theirs, with Chris and
Joshua alternating the lead. One would climb up about 100 feet,
and along the way slide special cams into cracks and nooks, then
clip the protective gear to the rope with a carabiner, a metal loop
with a spring-loaded arm. In other places, they clipped the rope to
a piton, a steel wedge with an open circle at the end pounded into
the rock by previous climbers. If they slipped, they might drop 20
feet instead of hundreds, and the climbing rope would stretch to
absorb a fall.
Vallepiana and Gaspard had none of this specialized equip-
ment. Even the carabiner, a climbing essential invented shortly
before the war, was unknown to most soldiers. Instead, Gaspard
used a technique that makes my stomach quiver: Each time he
hammered in a piton, he untied the rope from around his waist,
threaded it through the metal loop, and retied it. And their hemp
ropes could just as easily snap as catch a fall.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
As we neared the top of our climb, I hoisted myself onto a four-
foot lip and passed through a narrow chute to another ledge. Joshua,
farther ahead and out of sight, had anchored himself to a rock and
pulled in my rope as I moved. Chris was 12 feet behind me, and still
on a lower level, exposed from the chest up.
I stepped onto the ledge and felt it give way.
“Rock!” I shouted, and snapped my head to see my formerly
solid step now broken free and cleaved in two, crashing down the
chute. One piece smashed into the wall and stopped, but the other
half, maybe 150 pounds and big as a carry-on suitcase, plowed
toward Chris. He threw out his hands and stopped the rock with
a grunt and a wince.
I scrambled down the chute, braced my feet on either side of
the rock and held it in place as Chris climbed past me. I let go,
and the chunk tumbled down the mountainside. A strong whi
of ozone from the fractured rocks hung in the air. He made a fist
and released his fingers. Nothing broken.
My poorly placed step could have injured or killed him. But I
imagine the two Alpini would have thought our near-miss trivial.
On a later climbing mission with Vallepiana, Gaspard was struck
by lightning and nearly died. This climb almost killed him, too.
As he strained for a handhold at a tricky section, his foot slipped
and he plummeted 60 feet—into a small snowbank, remarkable
luck in vertical terrain. He climbed on, and into the Austrians’
view. A sniper shot him in the arm, and Austrian artillery across
the valley fired shells into the mountain overhead, showering
him and Vallepiana with jagged metal shards and shattered rock.
Still, the two reached the narrow ledge that overlooked the
Austrians, a feat that earned them Italy’s second-highest medal
for valor. Then, in what certainly seems an anticlimax today,
the guns the Italians hauled up there proved less eective than
they had hoped.
But the Italians’ main eort was even more daring and dif-
ficult, as we would soon see.
In a region of magnificent peaks, the Castelletto is not much
to behold. The squat trapezoid juts up 700 feet to a line of sharp
spires, but is dwarfed by the Tofana di Rozes, which rises an addi-
tional 1,100 feet just behind it. During our climb high on the Tofana
wall we couldn’t see the Castelletto, but now it loomed before us.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
The remains of more than
5,000 unknown soldiers lie
in the Pasubio Ossuary.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
We sat in an old Italian trench built from limestone blocks in
the Costeana Valley, which runs west from the mountain town
of Cortina d’Ampezzo. If we strained our eyes, we could see tiny
holes just below the Castelletto’s spine—windows for caverns
the Austrians and Germans carved soon after Italy declared war
in 1915.
From these tunnels and rooms, which oered excellent pro-
tection from artillery fire, their machine gunners cut down any-
one who showed himself in this valley. “You can imagine why
this was such a nightmare for the Italians,” Joshua said, looking
up at the fortress. In the struggle for the Castelletto we found in
microcosm the savagery and intimacy, the ingenuity and futility
of this alpine fighting.
The Italians first tried to climb it. On a summer night in 1915,
four Alpini started up the steep face, dicult in daylight, surely
terrifying at night. Lookouts perched on the rocky spires heard
mued sounds in the darkness below and stepped to the edge,
eyes and ears straining. Again, sounds of movement, metal
scraping against rock and labored breathing. A sentry leveled
his rifle and, as the lead climber crested the face and pulled
himself up, fired. The men were so close the muzzle flash lit the
Italian’s face as he pitched backward. Thumps as he crashed
into the climbers below him, then screams. In the morning the
soldiers looked down on four crumpled bodies sprawled on the
slope far below.
The Italians next tried the steep and rocky gully between the
Castelletto and the Tofana, using a morning fog as cover. But
the fog thinned enough to reveal specters advancing through
the mist, and machine gunners annihilated them.
In the au-
tumn of 1915 they attacked from three sides with hundreds of
men—surely they could overwhelm a platoon of defenders—
but the slopes only piled deeper with dead.
The Alpini reconsid
ered: If they couldn’t storm the Castel-
letto, maybe they could attack from within.
Just around the corner from the Castelletto and beyond the
Austrians’ field of view, Joshua, Chris and I scaled 50 feet of
metal rungs running beside the original wooden ladders, now
broken and rotting. At an alcove on the Tofana wall, we found
the tunnel opening, six feet wide and six feet high, and the dark-
ness swallowed our headlamp beams. The path gains hundreds
SMITHSONIAN.COM
of feet as it climbs through the mountain, steep and treacherous
on rock made slimy with water and mud. Fortunately for us, it’s
now a via ferrata. We clipped our safety harnesses onto metal
rods and cables fixed to the walls after the war.
The Alpini started with hammers and chisels in February of
1916 and pecked out just a few feet a day. In March they acquired
two pneumatic drills driven by gas-powered compressors, hauled
up the valley in pieces through the deep snow. Four teams of 25
to 30 men worked in continuous six-hour shifts, drilling, blasting
and hauling rock, extending the tunnel by 15 to 30 feet each day. It
would eventually stretch more than 1,500 feet.
The mountain shuddered with internal explosions,
sometimes 60 or more a day, and as the ground shook beneath
them the Austrians debated the Italians’ intent. Perhaps
they would burst through the Tofana wall and attack across
A cross marks the Austrian
line in the Pasubio mountains,
a relic of their 1916
“Punishment Expedition.”
SMITHSONIAN.COM
the rocky saddle. Or emerge from below, another suggested.
“One night, when we’re sleeping, they will jump out of their
hole and cut our throats,” he said. The third theory, to which
the men soon resigned themselves, was the most distressing:
The Italians would fill the tunnel with explosives.
Indeed, deep in the mountain and halfway to the Castelletto, the
tunnel split. One branch burrowed beneath the Austrian positions,
where an enormous bomb would be placed. The other tunnel spi-
raled higher, and would open on the Tofana face, at what the Ital-
ians figured would be the bomb crater’s edge. After the blast, Alpini
would pour through the tunnel and across the crater. Dozens would
descend rope ladders from positions high on the Tofana wall, and
scores more would charge up the steep gully. Within minutes of the
blast, they would finally control the Castelletto.
The Austrian platoon commander, Hans Schneeberger,
was 19 years old. He arrived on the Castelletto after an Ital-
ian sniper killed his predecessor. “I would gladly have sent
someone else,” Capt. Carl von Rasch told him, “but you are the
youngest, and you have no family.” This was not a mission from
which Schneeberger, or his men, were expected to return.
“It’s better that you know how things stand up here: They do
not go well at all,” von Rasch said during a late-night visit to the
outpost. “The Castelletto is in an impossible situation.” Nearly
surrounded, under incessant artillery bombardment and sniper
fire, with too few men and food running low. Throughout the val-
ley, the Italians outnumbered the Austrians two to one; around
the Castelletto it was perhaps 10 or 20 to one. “If you do not die
from hunger or cold,” von Rasch said, “then someday soon you
will be blown into the air.” Yet Schneeberger and his few men
played a strategic role: By tying up hundreds of Italians, they
could ease pressure elsewhere on the front.
“The Castelletto must be held. It will be held to the death,”
von Rasch told him. “You must stay up here.”
In June, Schneeberger led a patrol onto the face of the Tof-
ana di Rozes to knock out an Italian fighting position and, if
possible, to sabotage the tunneling operation. After precarious
climbing, he pulled himself onto a narrow lip, pitched an Al-
pini over the edge and stormed into an outpost on the cliside,
where a trapdoor led to Italian positions below. His trusted
SMITHSONIAN.COM
sergeant, Teschner, nodded at the floor and smiled. He could
hear Alpini climbing up rope ladders to attack.
A few days earlier, a half-dozen Austrians standing guard on
the Tofana wall had started chatting with nearby Alpini, which
led to a night of shared wine. Teschner did not share this anity
for the Alpini. One Sunday morning, when singing echoed o the
rock walls from the Italians holding Mass below, he had rolled
heavy spherical bombs down the gully between the Castelletto
and the Tofana to interrupt the service.
Now in the small shack he drew his bayonet, threw open the
trapdoor and shouted, “Welcome to heaven, dogs!” as he sliced
through the rope ladders. The Alpini screamed, and Teschner
laughed and slapped his thigh.
The attack earned Schneeberger Austria-Hungary’s highest
medal for bravery, but he and his men learned nothing new about
the tunneling, or how to stop it. Between daily skirmishes with
Italian sentries, they pondered everything they would miss—
a woman’s love, adventures in far-o lands, even lying bare-
chested in the sun atop the Castelletto and daydreaming about a
life after the war. Yet the explosions provided an odd comfort: As
long as the Italians drilled and blasted, the mine wasn’t finished.
Then the Austrians intercepted a transmission: “The tunnel
is ready. Everything is perfect.”
With the mountain silent and the blast imminent, Schnee-
berger lay on his bunk and listened to mice skitter across the
floor. “Strange, everyone knows that sooner or later he will have
to die, and one hardly thinks about it,” he wrote. “But when death
is certain, and one even knows the deadline, it eclipses every-
thing: every thought and feeling.”
He gathered his men and asked if any wanted to leave. None
stepped forward. Not Latschneider, the platoon’s oldest at 52, or
Aschenbrenner, with eight children at home. And their wait began.
“Everything is like yesterday,” Schneeberger wrote on July 10,
“except that another 24 hours have passed and we are 24 hours
closer to death.”
Lt. Luigi Malvezzi, who led the tunnel digging, had asked for
77,000 pounds of blasting gelatin—nearly half of Italy’s monthly
production. High command balked at the request, but was swayed
by a frustrating detail: The Italians had pounded the Castelletto
SMITHSONIAN.COM
with artillery for nearly a year, to little eect. So for three days,
Italian soldiers had ferried crates of explosives up the tunnel to
the mine chamber, 16 feet wide, 16 feet long, and nearly 7 feet
high. Through fissures in the rock, they could smell the Austrians’
cooking. They packed the chamber full, then backfilled 110 feet of
the tunnel with sandbags, concrete and timber to direct the blast
upward with full force.
At 3:30 a.m. on July 11, as Hans Schneeberger lay on his bunk
mourning a friend who’d just been killed by a sniper’s bullet,
Malvezzi gathered with his men on the terrace leading to the tun-
nel and flipped the detonator switch. “One, two, three seconds
passed in a silence so intense that I heard the sharp ping of the
water dripping from the roof of the chamber and striking the pool
it had formed below,” Malvezzi wrote.
Then the mountain roared, the air
filled with choking dust, and Schnee-
berger’s head seemed ready to burst.
The blast pitched him out of bed, and
he
stumbled from his room and into a
fog of smoke and debris and stood at the
lip of a massive crater that had been the
southern end of the Castelletto. In the
darkness and rubble, his men screamed.
The fight for this wedge of rock had
gained such prominence for Italy that
King Victor Emmanuel III and Gen.
Luigi Cadorna, the army chief of sta,
watched from a nearby mountain. A
fountain of flame erupted in the dark-
ness, the right-hand side of the Castel-
letto shuddered and collapsed, and they
cheered their success.
But the attack proved to be a fiasco. The
explosion consumed much of the nearby
oxygen, replacing it with carbon monox-
ide and other toxic gases that swamped
the crater and pushed into the tunnel.
Malvezzi and his men charged through
the tunnel to the crater and collapsed,
unconscious. Several fell dead.
Evacuating the
wounded by cable car.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Alpini waiting high on the Tofana wall couldn’t descend be-
cause the explosion had shredded their rope ladders. And in the
steep gully between the Castelletto and the Tofana, the blast
fractured the rock face. For hours afterward huge boulders
peeled o like flaking plaster and crashed down the gully, crush-
ing attacking soldiers and sending the rest scurrying for cover.
We traced the Alpinis’ route through the tunnel, running our
hands along walls slick with seeping water and scarred with
grooves from the tunnelers’ drill bits. We passed the tunnel
branch to the mine chamber and spiraled higher into the moun-
tain, clipping our safety tethers to metal cables bolted to the walls.
Around a sharp bend, the darkness gave way. Along with the
main detonation, the Italians triggered a small charge that blasted
open the final few feet of this attack tunnel, until then kept se-
cret from the Austrians. Now Joshua stepped from the tunnel,
squinted in the daylight, and looked down on what had been the
southern end of the Castelletto. He shook his head in awe.
“So this is what happens when you detonate 35 tons of explo-
sives under a bunch of Austrians,” he said. Joshua had been near
more explosions than he can remember—hand grenades, rock-
ets, roadside bombs. In Iraq a suicide car bomber rammed into
his outpost as he slept, and the blast threw him from his bed, just
as it had Schneeberger. “But that was nowhere near the violence
and landscape-altering force of this explosion,” he said.
We scrambled down a steep gravel slope and onto a wide snow-
field at the crater’s bottom. The blast had pulverized enough
mountain to fill a thousand dump trucks and tossed boulders
across the valley. It killed 20 Austrians asleep in a shack above
the mine and buried the machine guns and mortars.
It spared Schneeberger and a handful of his men. They scrounged
a dozen rifles, 360 bullets and a few grenades, and from the crater’s
edge and the intact outposts, started picking o Italians again.
“Imagine losing half your platoon instantly and having that
will to push on and defend what you’ve got,” Joshua said. “Just
a few men holding o an entire battalion trying to assault up
through here. It’s madness.”
I felt a strange pulse of anticipation as we climbed out of the
crater and onto the Castelletto. At last, the battle’s culmina-
SMITHSONIAN.COM
tion. Chris disappeared in the jumble of rock above us. A few
minutes later he let out a happy yelp: He’d found an entrance
to the Austrian positions.
We ducked our heads and stepped into a cavern that ran 100 feet
through the Castelletto’s narrow spine. Water dripped from the
ceiling and pooled in icy puddles. Small rooms branched o the
main tunnel, some with old wooden bunks. Windows looked out
on the valley far below and peaks in the distance.
Such beauty was hard to reconcile with what happened a cen-
tury ago. Chris had pondered this often throughout the week.
“You just stop and appreciate where you’re at for the moment,”
he said. “And I wonder if they had those moments, too. Or if it was
all terror, all the time.” Emotion choked his voice. “When we look
across it’s green and verdant. But when they were there, it was
barbed wire and trenches and artillery shells screaming around.
Did they get to have a moment of peace?”
Joshua felt himself pulled deeply into the combatants’ world,
and this startled him. “I have more in common with these Aus-
trians and Italians who are buried under my feet than I do with a
lot of contemporary society,” he said. “There’s this bond of being
a soldier and going through combat,” he said. “The hardship. The
fear. You’re just fighting for survival, or fighting for the people
around you, and that transcends time.”
The Austrians’ and Italians’ losses and gains in these moun-
tains made little dierence. The alpine war was a sideshow to
the fighting on the Isonzo, which was a sideshow to the Western
and Eastern Fronts. But for the soldier, of course, all that matters
is the patch of ground that must be taken or held, and whether
he lives or dies in doing that.
The day after the blast, the Italians hoisted machine guns onto
the Tofana and raked the Castelletto, killing more Austrians.
The rest scurried into the tunnels where we now sat. Schnee-
berger scribbled a note on his situation—33 dead, position nearly
destroyed, reinforcements badly needed—and handed it to
Latschneider.
“You only die
once,” the platoon’s old man said, then crossed
himself and sprinted down the wide scree slope between the
Castelletto and the Tofana, chased by machine gun bullets. He
ran across the valley, delivered the note to Captain von Rasch—
and dropped dead from the eort.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Reinforcements
came that night, and Schneeberger marched his
few surviving men back to the Austrian lines. The
Italians charged
through the crater a few hours later, lobbed tear gas into the
tunnels and captured the southern end of the Castelletto and
most of the relief platoon. A few Austrians held the northern
end for several days, then withdrew.
In the Austrian camp, Schneeberger reported to von Rasch,
who stood at his window with stooped shoulders and wet eyes,
hands clasped behind his back.
“It was very hard?” he asked.
“Sir,” Schneeberger said.
“Poor, poor boy.”
SMITHSONIAN.COM
National Treasure
Power Player
Stokely Carmichael’s rallying cry marked a turning
point in the movement
from the
smithsonian
national portrait
gallery
SMITHSONIAN.COM
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Stokely Carmichael had already served 49 days inside a
Mississippi prison farm for nonviolent civil rights activism
when he returned to the state in June of 1966. Just 25 years
old, a Howard University philosophy major who turned
down a postgraduate scholarship at Harvard to become a
leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), he was already a prominent voice in the movement.
On the night of the 16th, Carmichael addressed a crowd of
some 600 people gathered in a park in Greenwood to protest
the shooting ten days before of the activist James Meredith,
ambushed in Hernando while marching in support of voter
registration. Meredith, who had earlier integrated the Uni-
versity of Mississippi, survived, and the protesters were
going to march for him.
“We have been saying ‘Freedom’ for six years,” Carmichael
declared in a thundering voice. “What we are going to start say-
ing now is ‘Black Power!’” The demand tore through the air like
lightning. “We have begged the president,” Carmichael said.
“We’ve begged the federal government. That’s all we’ve been
doing, begging and begging. From now on, when they ask you
what you want, you know what to tell them.”
It was a watershed moment: Carmichael, in his “Black
Power” message, was breaking with Martin Luther King Jr.’s
mantra of nonviolence. As Carmichael put it at the time, “We
were never fighting for the right to integrate, we were fighting
against white supremacy. We must dismiss the fallacious no-
tion that white people can give anybody his freedom. A man is
born free.”
Carmichael’s rallying call got the attention of the national
press, including Time magazine, whose editors considered put-
ting the riveting young leader on its cover. African-American
personalities had rarely appeared on the cover of Time, and the
few who did before 1966—Louis Armstrong, Joe Louis, Sugar
Ray Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, among them—had crossed
over into mainstream white society.
by Wil Haygood
PHOTOGRAPH BY Jason Pietra
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Time commissioned the best- known African-American artist
in the nation, Jacob Lawrence, to produce the portrait. Lawrence
traveled to Atlanta, where Carmichael sat for the artist. Lawrence
later would recall his subject as “fiery, very active, and very much
in command.” The finished portrait—today in the collections of
the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery—depicts Carmichael
outfitted in denim overalls, the kind fieldworkers wore on Missis-
sippi plantations. Over his left shoulder, a panther looms menac-
ingly into view: This was justice stalking America.
The news magazine Time
commissioned Jacob Lawrence
to create this portrait of Stokely
Carmichael but never published it.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
The magazine, according to my review of its archival records,
had planned to feature Carmichael on the cover of the issue
dated July 15, 1966. But when that issue of Time hit the news-
stands, the cover instead showed Indonesian leader Gen. Raden
Suharto, who at the time was consolidating power and purging
opponents. Why the switch? I found no documents to explain it.
The magazine’s own coverage hints at a change of direc-
tion: An article in the July 1 issue, “The New Face of Racism,”
criticized Carmichael himself. “Many militant ideologues are
impatient with what they consider the glacial pace of progress
in civil rights,” declared Time. “They espouse instead a racist
philosophy that could ultimately perpetuate the very separat-
ism against which Negroes have fought so successfully. Oddly,
they are not white men but black and their slogan is ‘Black
Power!’” The panther known as Stokely, it seems, had stalked
himself right o the cover of Time.
University of Texas historian Peniel Joseph, author of
Stokely: A Life, speculates that doubts may have developed
at Time almost immediately after the portrait was assigned.
“They did not want to be seen promoting a person on its cover
who law enforcement was saying was promoting riots,” says
Joseph. Another factor, he thinks, may have been national polls
“showing that more people were approving of Martin Luther
King Jr. than Stokely.”
In 1967, Carmichael departed SNCC and joined the more
militant Black Panthers. By 1969, seeking a worldwide move-
ment, he left the Panthers and moved to Guinea in West Africa.
“Black power,” he asserted, “can only be realized when there
exists a unified socialist Africa.”
Carmichael traveled from then on as an organizer and
speaker for the pan-Africanism cause. He built ties with groups
including the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Irish
Republican Socialist Party. Carmichael, who changed his name
to Kwame Ture, died of cancer in Guinea at age 57 in 1998.
Even in his final days, he was known to answer the phone
with his signature salutation: “Ready for the revolution!”
SMITHSONIAN.COM
The chance discovery of a SECRET TUNNEL
beneath a nearly 2,000-year-old pyramid in
Mexico leads to the heart of a lost civilization
BY MATTHEW SHAER PHOTOGRAPHS BY JANET JARMAN
PASSAGE
GODS
to
the
The Temple of the
Plumed Serpent is adorned
with carved snake heads
and slithering bodies.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
In the fall of 2003, a heavy
rainstorm swept through the ruins of Teoti-
huacán, the pyramid-studded, pre-Aztec me-
tropolis 30 miles northeast of present-day
Mexico City. Dig sites sloshed over with wa-
ter; a torrent of mud and debris coursed past
rows of souvenir stands at the main entrance.
The grounds of the city’s central courtyard
buckled and broke. One morning, Sergio Gó-
mez, an archaeologist with Mexico’s National
Institute of Anthropology and History, arrived
at work to find a nearly three-foot-wide sink-
hole had opened at the foot of a large pyra-
mid known as the Temple of the Plumed Ser-
pent, in Teotihuacán’s southeast quadrant.
Gómez believes the
tunnel is “one of the most
important discoveries in the
history of Mexico.”
SMITHSONIAN.COM
“My first thought was, ‘What exactly am I looking at?’” Gó-
mez told me recently. “The second was, ‘How exactly are we
going to fix this?’”
Gómez is wiry and small, with pronounced cheekbones,
nicotine-stained fingers and a helmet of dense black hair that
adds a couple of inches to his height. He has spent the past
three decades—almost all of his professional career—working
in and around Teotihuacán, which once, long ago, served as a
cosmopolitan center of the Mesoamerican world. He is fond of
saying that there are few living humans who know the place as
intimately as he does.
And as far as he was concerned, there wasn’t anything be-
neath the Temple of the Plumed Serpent beyond dirt, fossils
and rock. Gómez fetched a flashlight from his truck and aimed
it into the sinkhole. Nothing: only darkness. So he tied a line of
heavy rope around his waist and, with several colleagues hold-
ing onto the other end, he descended into the murk.
Gómez came to rest in the middle of what appeared to be a
man-made tunnel. “I could make out some of the ceiling,” he told
me, “but the tunnel itself was blocked in both directions by these
immense stones.”
In designing Teotihuacán (pronounced tay-oh-tee-wah-
KAHN), the city’s architects had arranged the major monuments
on a north-south axis, with the so-called “Avenue of the Dead”
linking the largest structure, the Temple of the Sun, with the
Ciudadela, the southeasterly courtyard that housed the Temple
of the Plumed Serpent. Gómez knew that archaeologists had
previously discovered a narrow tunnel underneath the Temple
of the Sun. He theorized that he was now looking at a kind of
mirror tunnel, leading to a subterranean chamber beneath the
Temple of the Plumed Serpent. If he was correct, it would be a
find of stunning proportions—the type of achievement that can
make a career.
“The problem was,” he told me, “you can’t just dive in and
start tearing up earth. You have to have a clear hypothesis, and
you have to get approval.”
Gómez set about making his plans. He erected a tent over the
sinkhole, to keep it away from the prying eyes of the hundreds of
thousands of tourists who visit Teotihuacán each year, and with
the help of the National Institute of Anthropology and History
SMITHSONIAN.COM
arranged for the delivery of a lawnmower-size, high-resolution,
ground-penetrating radar device. Beginning in the early months
of 2004, he and a handpicked team of some 20 archaeologists
and workers scanned the earth under the Ciudadela, returning
every afternoon to upload the results to Gómez’s computers. By
2005, the digital map was complete.
“THIS CITY WASN’T
DESIGNED TO ANSWER OUR
QUESTIONS.
”
The view from atop the
Temple of the Moon.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
As Gómez had suspected, the tunnel ran approximately 330 feet
from the Ciudadela to the center of the Temple of the Plumed Ser-
pent. The hole that had appeared during the 2003 storms was not
the actual entrance; that lay a few yards back, and it had apparently
been intentionally sealed with large boulders nearly 2,000 years
ago. Whatever was inside that tunnel, Gómez thought to himself,
was meant to stay hidden forever.
Teotihuacán has long stood as the greatest of Mesoamerican
mysteries: the site of a colossal and influential culture about
which frustratingly little is understood, from the conditions of
its rise to the circumstances of its collapse to its actual name.
Teotihuacán translates as “the place where men become gods” in
Elaborately decorated
conch shells are found
throughout the city.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, who likely found the ruins of
the deserted city sometime in the 1300s, centuries after its aban-
donment, and concluded that a powerful ur-culture—an ances-
tor of theirs—must have once resided in its vast temples.
The city lies in a basin at the southernmost edge of the Mexi-
can Plateau, an undulating landmass that forms the spine of
modern-day Mexico. Inside the basin the climate is mild, the
land riven by streams and rivers—ideal conditions for farming
and raising livestock.
Teotihuacán itself was likely settled as early as 400 B.C., but it
was only around A.D. 100, an era of robust population growth and
increased urbanization in Mesoamerica, that the metropolis as
we know it, with its wide boulevards and monumental pyramids,
The three-foot-long, remote-
controlled Tláloc II robot is
equipped with an infrared
scanner and video camera.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
EARLY URBANISM
Teotihuacán’s ceremonial city center was built
around the Avenue of the Dead, which runs for
more than two miles. As many as 200,000 people
lived in the surrounding areas, in some 2,000
structures not unlike apartment complexes.
Workers (below)
examine earth from
the Adosada Platform,
a smaller structure
abutting the Temple of
the Plumed Serpent.
Nearly 100,000 tons of
earth have been removed
from the tunnel, which
Gómez hopes to finish
excavating this summer.
Covering 40 acres, the
Ciudadela (“the Citadel”)
was able to hold tens of
thousands of the city’s
residents during public
ceremonies.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
was built. Some historians have theorized that its founders were
refugees driven north by the eruption of a volcano. Others have
speculated that they were Totonacs, a tribe from the east.
Whatever the case, the Teotihuacanos, as they are now known,
proved themselves to be skilled urban planners. They built stone-
sided canals to reroute the San Juan River directly under the Av-
enue of the Dead, and set about constructing the pyramids that
would form the city’s core: the Temple of the Plumed Serpent, the
even larger 147-foot-tall Temple of the Moon and the bulky, sky-
obscuring 213-foot-tall Temple of the Sun.
Clemency Coggins, a professor emerita of archaeology and art
history at Boston University, has suggested that the city was de-
signed as a physical manifestation of its founders’ creation myth.
“Not only was Teotihuacán laid out in a measured rectangular
grid, but the pattern was oriented to the movement of the sun,
which was born there,” Coggins has written. She is far from the
only historian to see the city as large-scale metaphor. Michael
Coe, an archaeologist at Yale, argued in the 1980s that individual
structures might be representations of the emergence of human-
kind out of a vast and tumultuous sea. (As is in Genesis, Meso-
americans of the time are thought to have envisioned the world
as being born from complete darkness, in this case aqueous.) Con-
sider the Temple of the Plumed Serpent, Coe suggested—the same
temple that hid Sergio Gómez’s tunnel. The structure’s facade was
splashed with what Coggins called “marine motifs”: shells and
what appear to be waves. Coe wrote that the temple represents
the “initial creation of the universe from a watery void.”
Recent evidence suggests that the religion practiced in these
pyramids bore a resemblance to the religion practiced in the
contemporaneous Mayan cities of Tikal and El Mirador, hun-
dreds of miles to the southeast: the worshiping of the sun and
moon and stars; the veneration of a Quetzalcoatl-like plumed
serpent; the frequent occurrence, in painting and sculpture, of
a jaguar that doubles as deity and protector of men.
Yet peaceful ritual was apparently not always enough to sustain
the Teotihuacanos’ connection to their gods. In 2004, Saburo
Sugiyama, an anthropologist from the University of Japan and
Arizona State University, who has spent decades studying Teo-
tihuacán, and Rubén Cabrera, of Mexico’s National Institute of
Anthropology and History, located a vault under the Temple of the
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Moon that held the remains of an array of wild animals, including
jungle cats and eagles, along with 12 human corpses, ten missing
their heads. “It is hard to believe that the ritual consisted of clean
symbolic performances,” Sugiyama said at the time. “It is most
likely that the ceremony created a horrible scene of bloodshed
with sacrificed people and animals.”
Between A.D. 150 and 300, Teotihuacán grew rapidly. Locals
harvested beans, avocados, peppers and squash on fields raised
in the middle of shallow lakes and swampland—a technique
known as chinampa—and kept chickens and turkeys. Several
heavily tracked trade routes were established, linking Teoti-
huacán to obsidian quarries in Pachuca and cacao groves near
the Gulf of Mexico. Cotton came in from the Pacific Coast, ce-
ramics from Veracruz.
By A.D. 400, Teotihuacán had become the most powerful and
influential city in the region. Residential neighborhoods sprang
up in concentric circles around the city center, eventually com-
prising thousands of individual family dwellings, not dissimi-
lar to single-story apartments, that together may have housed
200,000 people.
Recent fieldwork by scholars like David Carballo, of Boston
University, has revealed the sheer diversity of the citizenry of
Teotihuacán: Judging by artifacts and paintings found inside
surviving structures, residents came to Teotihuacán from as
far afield as Chiapas and the Yucatán. There were likely Ma-
yan neighborhoods, and Zapotec ones. As the scholar Miguel
Angel Torres, an ocial at Mexico’s National Institute for
Anthropology and History, told me recently, Teotihuacán was
probably one of the first major melting pots in the Western
Hemisphere. “I believe that the city grew a little like modern
Manhattan,” Torres says. “You walk around through these dif-
ferent neighborhoods: Spanish Harlem, Chinatown, Korea-
town. But together, the city functions as one, in harmony.”
The harmony did not last. There is a hint, in the demoli-
tion of some of the sculptures that adorn the temples and
monuments, of periodic regime change in the ruling class of
Teotihuacán; and, in the depiction of shield- and spear-tot-
ing warriors, of clashes with other local city-states. Perhaps,
as several archaeologists suggested to me, civil war swept
through Teotihuacán, culminating in a fire that seems to have
SMITHSONIAN.COM
damaged vast sections of the interior of the city around A.D.
550. Perhaps the fire was caused by a visiting army. Perhaps
a large-scale migration occurred.
In A.D. 750, nearly 700 years after it was established, the city
of Teotihuacán was abandoned, its monuments still filled with
treasures and artifacts and bones, its buildings left to be eaten by
the surrounding brush. The former residents of Teotihuacán, if
UP ABOVE, THERE WAS THE TEMPLE
OF THE SUN AND THE ETERNAL DAY.
DOWN BELOW, THE STARS, AND THE
DEEPEST NIGHT.
A “flying dog” saucer
was found intact.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
they were not killed, were presumably absorbed into the popula-
tions of neighboring cultures, or returned along the established
trade routes to the lands where their ancestral kin still lived
throughout the Mesoamerican world.
They took their secrets with them. Today, even after more
than a century of excavation at the site, there is an extraordi-
nary amount we do not know about the Teotihuacanos. They did
have some kind of quasi-hieroglyphic written language, but we
haven’t cracked it; we don’t know what tongue was spoken in-
side the city, or even what the natives called the place. We have
a conception of the religion they practiced, but we
don’t know
much about the priestly class, or the relative piety of the city’s
citizenry, or the makeup of the courts or the military. We don’t
know exactly what led to the city’s founding, or who ruled over
it during its half-millennium of dominance, or what exactly
caused its fall. As Matthew Robb, the curator of Mesoamerican
art at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, told me, “This city
A conservator restores a
vase depicting a Tláloc-
like deity.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
wasn’t designed to answer our questions.”
In archaeology and anthropology circles—to say nothing of
the popular press—Sergio Gómez’s discovery was greeted as
a major turning point in Teotihuacán studies. The tunnel un-
der the Temple of the Sun had been largely emptied by looters
before archaeologists could get to it in the 1990s. But Gómez’s
tunnel had been sealed o for some 1,800 years: Its treasures
would be pristine.
In 2009, the government granted Gómez permission to dig,
and he broke ground at the entrance of the tunnel, where he in-
stalled a staircase and ladders that would allow easy access to
the subterranean site. He moved at a painstaking pace: inches
at a time, a few feet every month. Excavating was done manu-
ally, with spades. Nearly 1,000 tons of earth were removed
from the tunnel; after each new segment was cleared, Gómez
brought in a 3-D scanner to document his progress.
The haul was tremendous. There were seashells, cat bones,
pottery. There were fragments of human skin. There were
elaborate necklaces. There were rings and wood and figurines.
Everything was deposited deliberately and pointedly, as if in
Hot-air balloons float above
Teotihuacán just after dawn. In the
foreground is the Pyramid of the
Moon, with the Pyramid of the Sun
in the distance.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
oering. The picture was coming into focus for Gómez: This
was not a place where ordinary residents could tread.
A university in Mexico City donated a pair of robots, Tlaloque
and Tláloc II, playfully named for Aztec rain deities whose im-
ages appear in early iterations throughout Teotihuacán, to in-
spect deeper inside the tunnel, including the final stretch, which
descended, on a ramp, an extra ten feet into the earth. Like me-
chanical moles, the robots chewed through the soil, their camera
lights aglow, and returned with hard drives full of spectacular
footage: The tunnel seemed to end in a spacious cross-shaped
chamber, piled high with more jewelry and several statues.
It was here, Gómez hoped, that he’d make his biggest find yet.
I met Gómez late last year, on a smoldering afternoon. He was
smoking a cigarette and drinking coee out of a foam cup. Tides
of tourists swept to and fro over the grass of the Ciudadela—
I heard scraps of Italian, Russian, French. An Asian couple
stopped to peer in at Gómez and his team as if they were tigers
at a zoo. Gómez looked back stonily, the cigarette hanging o his
bottom lip.
Gómez told me about the work his team was doing to study
the 75,000 or so artifacts they had already found, each of which
needed to be carefully cataloged, analyzed and, when possible,
restored. “I would estimate that we’re only about 10 percent
through the process,” he said.
The restoration operation is set up in a cluster of buildings not
far from the Ciudadela. In one room, a young man was sketching
artifacts and noting where in the tunnel the objects had been
found. Next door, a handful of conservators sat at a banquet-
style table, bent over an array of pottery. The air smelled sharply
of acetone and alcohol, a mixture used to remove contaminants
from the artifacts.
“It might take you months just to finish a single large piece,”
Vania García, a technician from Mexico City, told me. She was
using a syringe primed with acetone to clean a particularly tiny
crack. “But some of the other objects are remarkably well pre-
served: They were buried carefully.” She recalled that not long
ago, she found a powdery yellow substance at the bottom of a jar.
It was corn, it turned out—1,800-year-old corn.
Passing through a lab where wood recovered from the tunnel
SMITHSONIAN.COM
was being carefully treated in chemical baths, we stepped into
the storeroom. “This is where we keep the fully restored arti-
facts,” Gómez said. There was a statue of a coiled jaguar, poised
to pounce, and a collection of flawless obsidian knives. The ma-
terial for the weapons had probably been brought in from the
Pachuca region of Mexico and carved in Teotihuacán by master
craftspeople. Gómez held out a knife for me to hold; it was mar-
velously light. “What a society, no?” he exclaimed. “That could
create something as beautiful and powerful as that.”
In the canvas tent erected over the entrance to the tunnel,
Gómez’s team had installed a ladder that led down into the
earth—a wobbly thing fastened to the top platform with frayed
twine. I descended carefully, foot over foot, the brim of my
hard hat slipping over my eyes. In the tunnel it was damp and
cold, like a grave. To get anywhere, you had to walk on your
haunches, turning to the side when the passage narrowed. As
protection against cave-ins, Gómez’s workmen had installed
several dozen feet of scaolding—the earth here is unstable,
and earthquakes are common. So far, there had been two par-
tial collapses; no one had been hurt. Still, it was hard not to
feel a shiver of taphophobia.
Through the middle of Teotihuacán studies runs a division like
a fault line, separating those who believe that the city was ruled
by an all-powerful and violent king and those who argue that it
was governed by a council of elite families or otherwise bound
groups, vying over time for relative influence, arising from the
cosmopolitan nature of the city itself. The first camp, which in-
cludes experts like Saburo Sugiyama, has precedent on its side—
the Maya, for instance, are famous for their warlike kings—but
unlike Mayan cities, where rulers had their visages festooned on
buildings and where they were buried in opulent tombs, Teoti-
huacán has oered up no such decorations, nor tombs.
Initially, much of the buzz surrounding the tunnel beneath
the Temple of the Plumed Serpent centered on the possibility
that Gómez and his colleagues might finally locate one such
tomb, and thereby solve one of the city’s most fundamental
enduring mysteries. Gómez himself has entertained the idea.
But as we clambered through the tunnel, he laid out a hypoth-
esis that seemed to stem more directly from the mythological
readings of the city laid out by scholars like Clemency Coggins
SMITHSONIAN.COM
and Michael Coe.
Fifty feet in, we stopped at a small inlet carved into the
wall. Not long before, Gómez and his colleagues had discov-
ered traces of mercury in the tunnel, which Gómez believed
served as symbolic representations of water, as well as the
mineral pyrite, which was embedded in the rock by hand. In
semi-darkness, Gómez explained, the shards of pyrite emit a
throbbing, metallic glow. To demonstrate, he unscrewed the
nearest light bulb. The pyrite came to life, like a distant galaxy.
It was possible, in that moment, to imagine what the tunnel’s
designers might have felt more than a thousand years ago: 40
feet underground, they’d replicated the experience of standing
amid the stars.
If, Gómez suggested, it was true that the layout of the city
proper was meant to stand in for the universe and its creation,
might the tunnel, beneath the temple devoted to an all-encom-
passing aqueous past, represent a world outside of time, an
underworld or a world before, not the world of the living but of
the dead? Up above, there was the Temple of the Sun and the
eternal day. Down below, the stars—not of this earth—and the
deepest night.
I followed Gómez down a short ramp and into the cross-
shaped chamber directly under the heart of the Temple of the
Plumed Serpent. Four archaeologists were kneeling in the dirt,
brushes and thin-bladed trowels in hand. A nearby boombox
blared Lady Gaga.
Gómez told me he had not been prepared for the sheer diver-
sity of the objects he encountered in the farthermost reaches
of the tunnel: necklaces, with the string intact. Boxes of beetle
wings. Jaguar bones. Balls of amber. And perhaps most intrigu-
ingly, a pair of finely carved black stone statues, each facing the
wall opposite to the entryway of the chamber.
Writing in the late 1990s, Coggins speculated that religious
tradition at Teotihuacán would have been “perpetuated in
the linked repetition of ritual,” likely on the part of a priest-
hood. That ritual, Coggins went on, “would have concerned
the Creation, Teotihuacán’s role in it, and probably also the
birth/emergence of the Teotihuacán people from a cave”—a
deep and dark hole in the earth.
Gómez gestured at the area where the twin figures once
SMITHSONIAN.COM
stood. “You can imagine a scenario where priests come down
here to pay tribute to them,” he explained—to the Creators of
the universe, and of the city, one and the same.
Gómez has one more crucial task to undertake: the excavation
of three distinct, buried sub-chambers located below the resting
place of the figurines, the final sections of the tunnel complex
as yet unexplored. Some scholars speculate that the elaborate
ritual oerings on display here, and the presence of pyrite and
mercury, which held known associations with the supernatural
among ancient Mesoamericans, provide further evidence that
the buried sub-chambers represent the entryway to a particular
type of underworld: the place where the city’s ruler departed
the world of the living. Others argue that even the discovery
of long-sought human remains buried in spectacular fashion
would hardly close the book on the mystery of Teotihuacán’s rul-
ers: Whoever is buried here could be just one ruler among many,
perhaps even some other kind of holy person.
For Gómez, the sub-chambers, whether they are filled with
more ritual relics, or remains, or something entirely unex-
pected, might be best understood as a symbolic “tomb”: a final
resting place for the city’s founders, of gods and men.
A few months after leaving Mexico, I checked in with Gó-
mez. He was only marginally closer to uncovering the cham-
bers beneath the end of the tunnel. His archaeologists were
literally often working with toothbrushes, so as not to damage
whatever lay beneath.
Regardless of what he found at the end of the tunnel, once his
excavation was complete, he promised me, he’d be satisfied. “The
number of artifacts we’ve uncovered,” he said, pausing. “You could
spend a whole career evaluating the contents.”
SMITHSONIAN.COM
WILDLIFE WARRIORS
FORMER COMMANDOS DEPLOY
HARD-CORE GRIT AND HIGH-TECH GEAR
TO BATTLE AFRICA’S OUT-OF-CONTROL
ANIMAL POACHERS
BY JOSHUA HAMMER
PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETE MULLER
In the Democratic
Republic of Congo,
trainer Franck
Cunniet, far right,
trains rangers for a
confrontation with
poachers.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
he port of Ouesso,
in the Republic of Congo,
sprawls along the east bank of the Sangha River, a wide,
murky stream that winds through the heart of Africa.
One recent morning, a crowd gathered around a rotting
dock in the harbor to gape at the sight of seven white
men stepping gingerly into a 30-foot-long pirogue.
Carved out of a tree trunk, and barely wide enough to
accommodate a person with knees squeezed together,
the pirogue rocked dangerously and seemed about to
pitch its passengers into the oil-slicked water. Then it
steadied itself, and we settled onto blue canvas folding
chairs arranged single file from bow to stern. The shirt-
less captain revved up the engine. The slender craft
puttered past clumps of reeds, scuttled rowboats and
an overturned barge, and joined the olive green river.
We were heading upstream to a vast preserve in the
Central African Republic (CAR), and between here and
there lay 132 miles of unbroken rainforest, home to el-
ephants and western lowland gorillas, bongo antelopes,
African forest buffaloes, gray-cheeked mangabeys and
bush pigs, as well as soldiers, rebels, bandits and poach-
ers. Leading our group was Nir Kalron, a 37-year-old for-
mer Israeli commando who has built a thriving career
selling his military expertise to conservation groups and
game parks across Africa. Kalron’s sidekick, Remi Pog-
nante, served in French military intelligence in Afghani-
stan and Mali. They were joined by a three-man docu-
mentary film team from the United States and Spain, the
photographer Pete Muller and me.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Kalron had been working to rescue several thousand for-
est elephants in the Dzanga-Sangha Reserve, 1,544 square
miles of rainforest in southwestern CAR. The smallest of
three elephant species, with oval-shaped ears and straighter,
downward-pointing tusks, these creatures inhabit the densely
wooded rainforests of Liberia, Ivory Coast, the two Congos and
the Central African Republic. But nowhere is their predica-
ment worse than in CAR, site of one of the continent’s most
notorious animal slaughters: the massacre three years ago of
26 forest elephants by Sudanese ivory hunters wielding semi-
automatic rifles.
Shortly after the killings, Western conservationists based in
the neighboring Republic of Congo asked Kalron and the se-
curity firm that he founded, Maisha Consulting, to protect the
remaining elephants. Through a unique combination of gritty
freelance diplomacy, high-tech surveillance and intimations of
powerful connections, Kalron helped quiet the violence. Today,
Nir Kalron travels at the front
of a pirogue on his way to the
Central African Republic.
“We’re here to shake things
up for poachers,” he says.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
according to the World Wildlife Fund, which administers the
park alongside the CAR government, Dzanga-Sangha is one
of the few places in Africa where “elephant poaching is now
rare”—a little-known success on a continent plagued by illegal
animal killing.
The killing in Zimbabwe of a protected lion named Cecil by a
U.S. trophy hunter last July sparked justifiable outrage world-
wide, but the far greater crime is that heavily armed gangs,
working with sophisticated criminal networks, are wiping out
elephants, rhinos and other animals to meet the soaring de-
mand for ivory, horn and the like in China, Vietnam and else-
where in the Far East. Between 2010 and 2012, ivory hunters
shot down an astonishing 100,000 elephants across Africa—
more than 60 percent of central Africa’s elephant population
has been lost during the ten-year period beginning in 2002—
according to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. To coun-
ter that unprecedented decline, governments and other wild-
Hundreds of elephants gather
each day at this “bai,” or
clearing, in Dzanga Bai National
Park, deep in the jungles of the
Central African Republic.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
life custodians have increasingly adopted a range of military
tactics and farmed out work to private companies. Some of
these outfits specialize in training park rangers. Others deploy
state-of-the-art radar, supersensitive buried microphones,
long-range cameras and drones to monitor protected areas.
But even the experts agree that Maisha (Swahili for “life”) op-
erates in a class of its own. It oers what Kalron calls “one-stop
shopping,” selling intelligence, surveillance equipment, mili-
tary training and even conflict resolution in Africa’s hardest-
hit region.
“We’ve got people on our sta from every discipline—ana-
lysts from the inner sanctum of Israeli intelligence, special op-
erations guys, technical experts,” says Kalron. “We’ve got Arab
speakers, Somali speakers, Hausa speakers. Each person is at
the top of his field. They join us not only for the money, but be-
cause they have an emotional stake in the work.” When it comes
to poaching, he adds, “if you don’t say, ‘I want to get these guys,’
then you’re not for Maisha.”
I’ve covered poaching in Africa for more than two decades,
from Kenya to Zimbabwe to Chad, observing how a brief period
of hope in the 1990s and early 2000s gave way to the horrifying
wanton slaughter of today. It strikes me that Kalron’s approach,
which is not without controversy, is worth looking into. Can a
privatized army apply the techniques of counterinsurgency to
the conservation wars? Or do such militarized tactics invite
only more disorder, while failing to address the economic and
social roots of the poaching problem? So I grabbed the chance
to join Kalron on a journey to the site of the forest elephant
massacre to gauge the impact of his interventions there. As it
happened, that’s where I ended up running through the forest
to save my own life, confronted by an unappreciated dimension
of the poaching epidemic, what I’ve come to think of as the re-
venge of the wild: the hunted turned hunter.
Still in the Republic of Congo, we motored up the Sangha in our
canoe, passing unbroken tropical forest, and stopping in the port
of Bomassa near the border. We climbed the riverbank for a call
at the headquarters of Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, where
Kalron and his fellow former commandos have been training
Congolese rangers.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
When Kalron initially took on that job, he told me as we walked
up the muddy steps, he was surprised that the rangers were not
just inept from a lack of training but also physically weak. “These
guys had manioc muscles,” said Kalron, referring to the starchy,
low-protein Congolese dietary staple. But the rangers were ac-
customed to hardship, and Kalron and Pognante got them to run
miles each day and practice wresting poachers into custody. The
Maisha team also, as discipline for being late, divided them into
groups of eight to carry a half-ton log. If the rangers spoke out of
turn, Kalron and Pognante sealed their mouths with duct tape
and had them sing the Congolese national anthem. “We didn’t try
to break them mentally, but that’s what happened,” Kalron said.
Over six weeks, though, only one ranger dropped out. “These guys
professionalized our anti-poaching teams,” says Mark Gately, the
Wildlife Conservation Society country director for the Republic
of Congo, who hired Kalron and Pognante. “I don’t know of anyone
else who could have done the job they did.”
As we continued motoring upstream, Kalron pointed out a
Cameroonian Army post on the west bank, where, he says, sol-
diers fired AK-47s over his head in a (failed) shakedown attempt
on one of his last trips. A few miles farther along, we reached the
border. A tattered Central African Republic flag—bands of blue,
white, red, green and yellow—fluttered over a shack. Scrawny
chickens pecked at weeds; a rusting sign urged “Prevent AIDS
by Abstinence.”
CAR, which freed itself of French rule in 1960, ranks at or near
the bottom in every category of human development, weighed
down by decades of exploitation, corruption, violence and pov-
erty. The recent surge in animal poaching is linked to the po-
litical chaos. In 2003, former army chief François Bozizé seized
power with the support of Chad’s oil-rich president, Idriss Déby.
But when the relationship ruptured, in 2012, Déby encouraged
a coalition of mainly Muslim rebels—Muslims make up 15 per-
cent of CAR’s population—to seize control of the country. The
coalition, called the Séléka, hired Chadian and Sudanese mer-
cenaries, and they captured the capital, Bangui, in March 2013.
It was just two months later that, with the Séléka’s apparent
complicity, 17 Sudanese ivory hunters invaded Dzanga-Sangha,
climbed a game-viewing stand and gunned down 26 elephants,
hacked out the tusks and left the corpses. Exactly what became
SMITHSONIAN.COM
of the ivory isn’t known, but the best guess is that the poachers
trucked it to Bangui or across the border to Sudan, from which
it was smuggled to the Far East. (Months later, the Séléka were
driven out of Bangui by a mainly Christian paramilitary group,
the “anti-balaka,” which massacred numerous Muslim civilians
and drove nearly half a million people from the country. Now
CAR is run by a newly elected government committed to sta-
bilizing the country after an interim period overseen by 6,000
African Union peacekeepers and a few hundred French special
forces. Some of those troops remain on the ground.)
When Kalron first arrived at the scene of the forest elephant
massacre, the meadow was littered with skulls, bones and rot-
ting pieces of flesh. Seeking advice and contacts on the ground,
Kalron had phoned Andrea Turkalo, a Wildlife Conservation
Society scientist who is also aliated with Cornell Univer-
sity and has studied elephants at Dzanga for more than two
decades. She was in Massachusetts after fleeing the park for
the first time in 26 years: “I got this call out of the blue. I said,
‘Who the hell is this?’ Nir said, ‘We’re going to go in and see
In 2015, poachers killed 24,000
African elephants. Above, a bull
crosses the grounds of a Wildlife
Conservation Society field office in
the Republic of Congo.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
what we can do.’ I said, ‘What?’”
Turkalo urged Kalron to get in touch with a man named Cha-
mek, a Muslim who owned a small shop in Bayanga, the town
nearest the park. He and a small group of traders had estab-
lished good relations with the Séléka militia, persuading the
rebels to respect the local population. With Chamek making
the introductions, Kalron and his crew, including French and
Arabic speakers, met the Séléka commander in front of his
men. They proered manioc and pineapples, and handed out
boxes of anti-malaria tablets and first-aid kits. After several
more trips, and more bestowing of gifts, including shoes, a Ko-
ran and a pocketknife, they extracted a promise from the rebel
commander and his men to protect animals in the park from
further poaching.
Kalron and his team also recovered spent AK-47 cartridges
at the elephant massacre site—and shed new light on the atroc-
ity. The cartridges matched ones that they’d found at another
elephant killing ground, Bouba Ndjida National Park in Cam-
eroon, where poachers killed as many as 650 elephants in 2012.
Cartridges from both sites were manufactured in Iran and used
almost exclusively by paramilitary groups with backing from
the Sudanese government. “The evidence gave a compelling
portrait of a Sudanese poaching gang,” says Varun Vira of the
Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) in Washington,
D.C., which put out a report based on Kalron’s fieldwork and
briefed the U.S. Congress and State Department on the crime.
I could be sitting one day having coffee
in Africa with a Russian guy who
then was selling weapons to Hezbollah. It
didn’t feel right. The poachers were using
heavy weapons. It was a real war.
I
realized, this is what I want to do.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Tito Basile, the manager of Dzanga-Sangha, said that without
Maisha’s intervention, the Séléka would have looted the park,
killed guards and slaughtered more elephants. “It would have been
very dicult to face these Séléka militiamen on our own,” he told
me as we swatted mosquitoes on the porch outside his oce in the
gathering darkness.
Naftali Honig, director of a Brazzaville-based nongovernmen-
tal organization that lobbies to tighten anti-corruption statutes,
says Kalron’s crew was uniquely qualified to resolve the crisis
nonviolently. “You needed someone present there who had a
capacity to see eye to eye with the rebels who had taken over the
country, and Maisha could do that,” he says. “The average con-
servation group will not have conflict-resolution negotiators on
its sta.”
Kalron and company “did something decisive,” says Turkalo, the
U.S. researcher, “going in there unarmed, talking to people whom
we thought were marauding lunatics. They are the real deal.”
Kalron grew up in Yavne, a coastal town south of Tel Aviv, the
son of a navy pilot who served in the Yom Kippur War; his mater-
nal grandfather was a secret agent in the Shai, the precursor to
the Mossad. As a kid Kalron was adventurous and had a hanker-
ing for trouble. “My mother didn’t like me hanging out with him,”
said Omer Barak, a former Israeli Defense Forces intelligence
ocer and journalist who has known Kalron since kindergarten.
As boys Barak and Kalron played in huge dunes on the outskirts
of town; Kalron liked to leap o the summits and bury himself in
the sand. “He always had the urge to head out to the most danger-
ous places,” says Barak, who now works for Maisha Consulting.
Kalron joined the Israeli special forces in 1996 and was dis-
patched to Lebanon, where he carried out covert operations
against Hezbollah guerrillas. He finished his service in 2000.
For several years he worked for an Israeli company that bro-
kered sales of attack helicopters and other military hardware to
African governments, but he soured on that. “I could be sitting
having coee in Africa with a Russian guy who then was selling
weapons to Hezbollah,” he says. “It didn’t feel right.” So he got a
job training Kenya Wildlife Service rangers at Tsavo National
Park, which was struggling to hold o Somali bandits who were
killing elephants. “The poachers were using heavy weapons. It
SMITHSONIAN.COM
was a real war,” he says. “I realized, this is what I want to do.”
As the canoe motored up to the CAR border post on the Sangha
River, a handful of troops and ocials in rags came alive at the sight
of our unlikely group. We got out of the boat and for half an hour
Kalron chatted up the soldiers and immigration ocials in French.
He returned with our stamped passports. “How does that Guns N’
Roses song go? ‘All we need is a little patience,’ ” he said with a grin.
Moments later we were motoring upriver again, on our way
to the Dzanga-Sangha Reserve to see how the elephants were
faring. Long after dark, the lights of a jungle camp glimmered
on the eastern bank of the Sangha. After 14 hours on the river,
we pulled up to a dock and carried our bags to an open-walled
house at the base of a trail lined with seven thatched-roof bun-
galows. This was the Sangha Lodge, owned by a South African
ornithologist, Rod Cassidy, and his wife, Tamar. “The tourists
are starting to trickle back,” Cassidy told us, as we shared a din-
ner of lamb, homemade chutney and cold beer.
Kalron holds a ranger recruit’s
knees with his foot during
calisthenics in the village of Bili,
in DRC. Exercise is a key part of
the rangers’ training.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
The next morning, Kalron led us in a four-wheel-drive vehicle
down a track through the jungle. Several times we got out and
pushed the vehicle through muddy pools of water. After half an
hour we reached the park headquarters: bungalows around a dirt
courtyard, with paintings of the indigenous wildlife—leopards,
hippos, crocodiles, pangolin (anteater-like mammals), bongos,
forest bualoes, wart hogs, mongooses—covering the scued
walls. While Kalron discussed security with the park superin-
tendent, I came upon an incongruous sight: a scrawny white
man of late middle age, skin burnished to the color of a chestnut,
using WiFi to check his email on an aging laptop and speaking
with a New Jersey accent.
He was Louis Sarno, the musicologist, who first came here in
the 1980s to study the music of the Bayaka Pygmy clan, which
he describes in his book-and-CD package Bayaka: The Extraor-
dinary Music of the Babenzele Pygmies. Sarno, a Newark native,
stayed on to live among the natives, married a Pygmy woman
and adopted two children. When the Séléka seized the area in
early 2013, Sarno fled with the Pygmies into the forest, building
shelters out of sticks and hunting antelopes and porcupines.
“After three weeks the Séléka left; we thought it was clear, and
then another group of Séléka came and I was told it was bet-
ter to evacuate,” said Sarno, who was wearing a black fedora,
khaki shorts and a tattered “Smoking Since 1879 Rolling Pa-
pers” T-shirt. Sarno fled downriver to the Republic of Congo
with Turkalo, the American researcher; he had hitched a ride
back upriver with Kalron and crew.
I hiked with Kalron to the elephant massacre site—the Dzanga
bai, a clearing the size of a dozen football fields, where hundreds
of animals gather day and night to ingest nutrients from the
muddy, mineral-rich soil. Trees thrust 80 feet into the metallic
gray sky. Heavy rain had submerged the trail in waist-deep wa-
ter, turning the ground into a soup of mud and elephant dung.
Tété, our Pygmy guide, whom Kalron calls “the great honey
chaser” because of his ability to climb impossibly tall trees and
collect dripping combs to feed his family, led the way through
the swamp. He kept an eye out for forest gorillas and poisonous
snakes infesting the water.
When we arrived at the viewing stand, the clearing was
teeming with life. I counted three dozen elephants—pre-
SMITHSONIAN.COM
adolescents, babies and one old bull that had covered himself com-
pletely in mud. Lurking around the edges of the clearing were a
dozen giant forest hogs and a small group of sitatunga, kudu-like
antelopes with chocolate fur and spiral horns.
Kalron and Pognante checked the batteries on four concealed
cameras that provide a panoramic view of the clearing. Kalron
hoisted himself onto the roof to examine the direction of the
satellite dish, which sends live feeds from the cameras to the
reserve’s headquarters and to Maisha’s oce in Tel Aviv. He also
replaced the antenna and made sure the solar panels that charge
the batteries were intact. The elephants kept coming. After an
hour, the number had grown to 70; they were peacefully drink-
ing, trunks embedded in the mineral-rich mud. “There were no
elephants here for a week when we found the carcasses,” Kalron
said, adding that the presence of many calves was a sign that the
elephants had gained confidence since the slaughter.
Kalron and Pognante decided to remain in the viewing stand
overnight to listen to the elephants. Just before dusk, I started
back down the trail with Tété and the WWF’s Stephane Crayne,
who had returned to Dzanga-Sangha park two months earlier
to resume the conservation group’s operations there. As we
rounded a corner and emerged from the jungle, just a few hun-
dred feet from the park entrance, Tété froze. Ahead of us, loll-
ing in a pool beside the gate, was a huge bull elephant.
Tété stared at the elephant, clapped his hands and let loose
a stream of invectives in Bayaka. The elephant sprayed water,
snorted, flared its ears and lumbered toward us. Tété turned and
ran down the trail. A single thought passed through my mind:
When your tracker bolts for his life, you’re in trouble.
We veered o the trail and cut through a muddy field. The slime
yanked a sneaker o my foot. Tété plunged deeper into the for-
est, dodging tree trunks, six-foot-high anthills and ankle-deep
streams. I could hear a beast crashing through the forest yards
away. Few things are more terrifying, I realized, than a rampag-
ing elephant that you can hear but not see. We slogged for an hour
through reed beds and waist-deep muck before finding refuge in
a ranger station.
Kalron showed up at the lodge the next morning, and we told
him what had happened. “That’s Jackie Two,” he said, adding
that the bull had charged nearly everyone who has worked in-
SMITHSONIAN.COM
side the park. “He’s got a chip on his shoulder. You’re lucky he
didn’t kill you.” Later I phoned Turkalo in Massachusetts, and
she attributed Jackie Two’s bad temper to trauma: A poacher
had shot his mother dead in front of him when he was an in-
fant. My encounter with the bull suggested to me that this greed-
fueled phase in the killing of Africa’s wild animals may have con-
sequences that are even more profound than people have thought.
The traumatized survivors of poaching sprees are perhaps acquir-
ing a new sense of who humans are: They are learning, it seems, to
regard us as the enemy—even to hate us.
Any private security force raises questions about account-
ability: Maisha is no exception. In Garamba National Park in
the Democratic Republic of Congo, the private nonprofit orga-
nization African Parks hired Kalron and his company to train
rangers, but they ended up taking a more aggressive role. They
chased a band of poachers through the bush for several days
and wound up engaged in a gun battle with the gang near the
border of South Sudan. “In general we are unarmed, but that
time we got permission from the government to carry weap-
ons,” Kalron admits. (Nobody was killed in the skirmish.) In
this case, he says, the mission, conducted jointly with the army
and rangers, was fully authorized by the military: “We are ex-
tremely careful in how we do active operations.”
And since a security outfit’s revenue depends on responding
to threats, it seldom has an interest in minimizing the danger.
Instead of focusing on solving problems,
these [critics] are saying, ‘fight the
demand.’ This kind of thing drives me
crazy. What should I do, take over
China? My specialty is trying to
stop the bleeding.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
At a recent European Union strategy conference on protected-
area management, held in Brussels, a few speakers and audi-
ence members accused Maisha and others of hyping the risk
posed by the Somali Islamist militant group al-Shabab and the
Sudanese poaching gangs inside Africa’s game parks. Kalron
responded by displaying photos of Séléka rebels carrying re-
coilless rifles and machine guns in Dzanga-Sangha. Skeptics
also argue that targeting the armed gangs in the anti-poaching
struggle ignores the larger problems. The South African writer
Adam Welz has argued that “the continental-scale slaughter
of rhinos and elephants continues to intensify,” while other
approaches to saving wildlife have been given short shrift, “in-
cluding improving justice systems and launching eorts to
reduce consumer demand for wildlife products.”
True enough, but I wonder if it isn’t asking too much that
Kalron and company should not only meet armed bandits
head-on but also eliminate high-level political malfeasance
and counter deep economic forces. Kalron himself feels the
criticism is misplaced. “Instead of focusing on solving prob-
lems, these [critics] are saying, ‘fight the demand.’ This kind of
thing drives me crazy,” Kalron told me. “What should I do, take
over China? My specialty is trying to stop the bleeding. Using
paramilitary and law enforcement stu can be highly eective.
But—and there’s a big but—if you don’t have the ability to work
with local authorities, and confront corruption and tribal issues,
then you’ll fail.”
Part of Maisha’s success is due to bringing new technologies
into remote forests and parks where smugglers had long oper-
ated out of sight. Kalron had shown me some of his latest gear in
Tel Aviv, in a field near Ben Gurion Airport where half a dozen
Maisha sta members met up. Beside four-wheel-drive vehicles
and a table with a laptop computer, Kalron tested a DJI Phantom
2 pilotless quadricopter equipped with a 14-megapixel camera
and WiFi for live video streaming. Kalron and I walked through
the bushes to inspect a custom “snap trap” camouflaged in a thorn
tree: It consists of an unattended camera with a motion detec-
tor capable of distinguishing humans from animals, an acousti-
cal receptor that can detect a rifle shot, and a spectrum analyzer
that picks up the presence of a poacher’s radio or cellphone. The
camera transmits real-time images via satellite and has enough
SMITHSONIAN.COM
battery power to stay concealed in the bush for a month or more.
Then the demonstration began: A “poacher” wandered past the
snap trap, which captured his image and relayed it to the laptop.
Alerted to the presence of an armed intruder, a sta member de-
ployed the drone. It hovered 100 feet above the bush, transmitting
high-definition images to the computer. The poacher fled, pursued
by the quad. The Maisha team unleashed a Belgian shepherd dog;
a small video camera attached to his collar transmitted data in
real time. The dog leapt up, grabbed the padding on the poacher’s
arm, and wrestled him to the ground. “We’ll place this [setup] in
Dzanga-Sangha,” Kalron said. “It will be perfect there.”
Having spent a good deal of time with Kalron and seen him
and his coworkers in action, and knowing well the ruthlessness
of Africa’s new breed of high-powered poachers, I have come to
share Turkalo’s view of Kalron’s approach: “We need more people
with real military background [in the conservation field]. The
big problem is that the wildlife organizations hate to be seen as
militaristic. But people in the United States don’t understand the
Kalron (at Dzanga-Sangha) de-
mands total commitment from
his team. “If poaching doesn’t get
you angry,” he says, “you’re not
made for the mission.”
SMITHSONIAN.COM
nasty people you’re dealing with. You have to deal with them in a
like manner.”
That approach would come to define Kalron and Maisha even
more in the coming months. Since they trained Dzanga-Sangha’s
70 or so rangers, anti-poaching measures seem to be succeeding.
Tourists have continued returning to the park, Jean-Bernard Ya-
rissem, World Wildlife Fund national coordinator for the CAR,
would tell me.
But Kalron and his team have moved on to other hot spots across
Africa. Today they are working closely with wildlife authorities in
Uganda, the birthplace of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army,
the messianic rebel cult, and also training anti-poaching dogs and
rangers in northern Kenya, a frequent zone of conflict with So-
malia’s al-Shabab terrorists. And Kalron has sta in Cameroon,
near the Nigerian border, where the radical Islamist group Boko
Haram is reportedly using profits from poaching to help fund its
operations. “You name a hell hole with a rebel group, and we’re
there,” Kalron says. The group’s application of counterterrorism
methods to wildlife protection has also brought it full circle: Now
In the middle of the night,
ranger recruits in the Central
African Republic converge for
a training exercise on hand-to-
hand combat techniques.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
it’s providing advice on intelligence regarding terrorist threats to
governments in “both Europe and North America,” Kalron says—
without going into detail. “They value us because of our experience
in the Middle East and Africa.”
After three days in Dzanga-Sangha, we climbed into another
motorized pirogue for the long journey down the Sangha River
to Ouesso, then by road to Brazzaville. The elephant rampage
notwithstanding, there was a sense that things had gone well.
The surveillance equipment in the Dzanga bai was in work-
ing order; the World Wildlife Fund had re-established a pres-
ence in the park; the forest elephants seemed out of danger, at
least for the time being. Kalron had signed a contract to retrain
Dzanga-Sangha’s rangers.
As we reached the outskirts of Brazzaville at 3 a.m., after a
22-hour journey, we pulled up to a roadblock manned by a po-
lice force that has a reputation for being corrupt. “Where are
your papers?” a surly sergeant demanded, and Kalron, stepping
out of the car, showed him passports and documents from the
Wildlife Conservation Society, his sponsor in the Republic of
Congo. The sergeant insisted that the team’s Congolese visas
had expired. The policeman demanded hundreds of dollars in
“fines”; Kalron refused. The two men faced each other on the
deserted street in the run-down, humid Congolese capital. Kal-
ron stayed calm, arguing that the ocer had read the expira-
tion date wrong, quietly refusing to turn over any money. After
about an hour, the sergeant gave up and allowed us to pass.
Kalron guided us through the empty streets to the Conser-
vation Society guesthouse, past three burned-out Jeeps and a
house blasted by grenades and bullets—the residue of a feud
between President Denis Sassou Nguesso and a rogue military
ocer a few months earlier. “We had front-row seats at the
battle,” said Kalron, and if I’m not mistaken, he was smiling.
ADVERTISEMENT
FOR MORE INFORMATION GO TO
SMITHSONIAN.COM/MUSEUMDAYLIVE
AT PARTICIPATING MUSEUMS WITH A MUSEUM DAY LIVE! TICKET
WE ARE PROUD TO
CELEBRATE OUR
12THANNUAL
FREEADMISSION
Brought to you by
Why do humans have
canine teeth?
Patrick McGannon, Surprise, Arizona
All primate species have them, says Sabrina Sholts,
a curator of physical anthropology at the Museum
of Natural History. Early hominids may have
found those four sharp teeth at the corners of the
jaws a handy weapon for taking prey, preventing
others from taking them prey and competing for
mates. Over millions of years, possibly in response
to dietary changes, the teeth became smaller. We
modern humans use them to bite food and open
cellophane-wrapped packages.
I’ve read both that modern humans interbred with
Neanderthals and that they didn’t. Which is it?
Robert Redinger, Grant, Michigan
There is evidence that they did, in a limited way, says
Richard Potts, director of the Human Origins Pro-
gram at the Museum of Natural History. Neander-
thal DNA makes up a small percentage of the DNA
in non-African people today, suggesting that people
who migrated beyond Africa 50,000 to 60,000 years
ago interbred with Neanderthals, despite their dif-
fering bodies (see “Extreme Paleo”). People re-
ceived Neanderthal genes related to some important
functions, including blood clotting, but for unknown
reasons, the two seem to have stopped interbreed-
ing after that. Most researchers consider the Nean-
derthals, who went extinct about 40,000 years ago, a
separate species.
Are bees attracted to flowers by color or scent?
Patricia L. Orr, Carolina, Puerto Rico
Color and scent—and more. David Roubik, an
entomologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research
Institute, notes that bees are 100 times more
sensitive to odor than humans are. In addition, the
insects’ attraction to color includes ultraviolet light,
which humans can’t see. Plus recent research has
found that electricity also plays a role. Flowers have
a slightly negative charge relative to the ambient air;
bees get a positive charge from flying. The bees seem
to sense the dierence, which helps pollen stick
to their bodies.
Did the Smithsonian Institution ever call on Theodore
Roosevelt to identify a mammal specimen?
Bruce Ralston, Temecula, California
The 26th president was a recognized expert on large
mammals in North America, and he had a long rela-
tionship with the Smithsonian. (Among other things,
he led a yearlong Smithsonian expedition to Africa to
collect specimens in 1909.) But Darrin Lunde, collec-
tions manager at the Museum of Natural History,
says there is no evidence that the Institution called on
him for taxonomic help.
Why does Earth have only one moon when other
planets have more than one?
Kenneth Haines, Taylor, Michigan
Planets acquire moons in dierent ways. Mars,
for example, captured its two moons when they
wandered within its gravitational pull, says David
DeVorkin, curator of space at the Air and Space
Museum. Other planets and moons may have “co-
formed,” or settled out of the celestial dust at the same
time. Our moon apparently formed out of debris left
from a collision about 4.5 billion years ago between
Earth and a mass of rock roughly the size of Mars.
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Ask
Smithsonian
YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED BY OUR EXPERTS
Submit your queries at
Smithsonian.com/ask
TEXT BY Katie Nodjimbadem
ILLUSTRATION BY
Eric Diotte
SMITHSONIAN.COM
S m i t h s o n i a n smithsonian.com
EDITOR IN CHIEF Michael Caruso
ART DIRECTOR Maria G. Keehan
DEPUTY EDITOR Terence Monmaney
DIRECTOR OF EDITORIAL OPERATIONS Debra Rosenberg
SENIOR EDITORS Kathleen M. Burke, T. A. Frail, Arik Gabbai,
Jennie Rothenberg Gritz
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Thomas Stackpole
NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT Ron Rosenbaum
COLUMNISTS Amanda Foreman, Brian Greene, Sue Halpern,
Bill McKibben, Clive Thompson
CORRESPONDENTS Jeff MacGregor, Matthew Shaer, Abigail Tucker
CONTRIBUTORS Jerry Adler, Richard Conniff, Joshua Hammer, Tony Horwitz,
Franz Lidz, Michelle Nijhuis, Tony Perrottet,
Elizabeth Royte, Ariel Sabar, Paul Theroux
CHIEF PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR Molly Roberts
COPY CHIEF Karen Larkins
DIGITAL EDITOR, MUSEUMS Beth Py-Lieberman
ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR Erik K. Washam
ASSOCIATE PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR Jeff Campagna
DESIGNER Heather Palmateer
TABLET DIGITAL DESIGNER Valerie Ruland-Schwartz
DIGITAL EDITOR, SMITHSONIAN.COM Brian Wolly
COPY EDITOR Jeanne Maglaty
ASSOCIATE WEB EDITOR Megan Gambino
STAFF REPORTER Katie Nodjimbadem
ASSISTANT WEB EDITORS Jackie Mansky, Maya Wei-Haas
ART SERVICES COORDINATOR Tiffany Y. Ates
EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Naomi Shavin, Michelle Strange
SMITHSONIAN ENTERPRISES
PRESIDENT Christopher A. Liedel
CHIEF CONTENT OFFICER Barbara Rehm
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, MEDIA GROUP Alan Chu
CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER Amy P. Wilkins
CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER Bruce Dauer
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, RETAIL GROUP Ed Howell
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, CONSUMER & EDUCATION PRODUCTS Carol LeBlanc
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, PROGRAMMING John Mernit
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT Mark Bauman
CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER Bill Allman
VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Nicholas Namba
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER Grace Clark
DIRECTOR OF AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT Jacqueline Moen
ADVERTISING
PUBLISHER, MEDIA/BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Lori Erdos
ACCOUNT MANAGERS New York: Jaime Duffy, Meryle Lowenthal, Walker Mason,
Northeast: Alex Shumway
Midwest: Lorna Phillips
Detroit: Lisa Steele
Southwest: Nuala Berrells
West: Steve Thompson, William G. Smith,
Molly Balantine, Mediacentric, Inc.
United Kingdom: Julian Staples, J.S. Media Associates
Japan: Yoshinori Ikeda, Mayumi Kai
Korea: B.J. Kim
Direct Response: MI Media Services, LLC, Marie Isabelle
ADVERTISING REVENUE ANALYST Jonathan Harris
MARKETING/RESEARCH
ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER, MARKETING Judy Glassman
MARKETING DIRECTOR Ellyn L. Hurwitz
ART DIRECTOR Annie K. Sullivan
ASSOCIATE MARKETING MANAGER Kate Kerley
ASSOCIATE RESEARCH MANAGER Linda Lawrence
INTERACTIVE ADS OPERATIONS COORDINATOR Christina Marocco
MANAGER, LIVE EVENTS Melanie E. Seitz
CONSUMER MARKETING
CONSUMER MARKETING DIRECTOR Lisa Dunham
PLANNING DIRECTOR Timothy M. Smith
RENEWALS AND GIFT DIRECTOR Susan Warner
NEW BUSINESS DIRECTOR Lori Paldino
RENEWALS & INTERNET MANAGER Michael Ivler
GIFT MANAGER Jonathan Balangon
MARKETING MANAGER, NEW BUSINESS David Lloyd
MARKETING COORDINATOR, NEW BUSINESS Rose Drayton
RENEWALS MARKETING COORDINATOR Kevin Romano
MANUFACTURING
DIRECTOR Sarah Kingsley
PREPRESS DIRECTOR Katherine Balch
PREPRESS MANAGER Frank Matthew Hale II
PREPRESS SYSTEMS MANAGER Penie Atherton-Hunt
COLOR AND QUALITY MANAGER Bill Whitcher
ONLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
DIRECTOR, DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY Todd Stowell
DIRECTOR, PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT Perrin Doniger
MARKETING MANAGER Lynette Mong
SENIOR DIGITAL DESIGNER Shaylyn Esposito
DIGITAL PRODUCERS Lauren Johnson, Melissa Wiley, Caroline Williams
WEB DEVELOPER Sean Henderson
BUSINESS OFFICE
DIRECTOR, CORPORATE BUDGET & ANALYSIS Ed Dequina
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Shola Akinrolabu
ADMINISTRATIVE SUPPORT MANAGER James A. Babcock
ACCOUNTANT Joanne Hubbard
HUMAN RESOURCES
DIRECTOR Dana S. Moreland
BUSINESS PARTNER Jennifer Alexander Thorpe
HR COORDINATOR Sibyl A. Williams-Green
EDITORIAL OFFICES MRC 513, Washington, D.C. 20013-7012, (202) 633-6090
SUBSCRIPTIONS (800) 766-2149, P.O. Box 62170, Tampa, FL 33662-0608,
Smithsonian.com
OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES (813) 910-3609
MAIN ADVERTISING OFFICE 420 Lexington Avenue, Suite 2335, New York, NY 10170,
(212) 916-1300
SMITHSONIAN.COM
SECRETARY David J. Skorton
BOARD OF REGENTS
CHANCELLOR The Chief Justice of the United States
CHAIR Mr. John W. McCarter, Jr.
VICE CHAIR Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson
MEMBERS
The Vice President of the United States
Hon. John Boozman
Hon. Patrick J. Leahy
Hon. David Perdue
Hon. Xavier Becerra
Hon. Tom Cole
Hon. Sam Johnson
Hon. Barbara M. Barrett
Mr. Steve Case
Mr. John Fahey
Mr. Robert P. Kogod
Dr. Risa J. Lavizzo-Mourey
Mr. Michael M. Lynton
Mr. David M. Rubenstein
SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL BOARD
CHAIR
Mr. Robert D. MacDonald
VICE CHAIR
Ms. Brenda J. Gaines
VICE CHAIR Mr. Allan R. Landon
VICE CHAIR
Mr. Philip K. Ryan
NATIONAL BOARD Mr. Rodney C. Adkins, Mr. Gordon M. Ambach, Ms. Valerie Anders,
Mr. William H. Bohnett, Mrs. Peggy P. Burnet, Mrs. Suzi Cordish,
Mr. Roger W. Crandall, Mr. Edgar M. Cullman, Jr., Mrs. Wendy W. Dayton,
Mr. Vincent J. Di Bona, Mr. Trevor Fetter, Mrs. Sakurako D. Fisher,
Mrs. Julie A. Flynn, Mr. William J. Galloway, Mrs. Shelby M. Gans,
Mr. Ronald Gidwitz, Mr. Rick Goings, Dr. Myra M. Hart, Mr. Edward R. Hintz,
Mrs. Nancy Hogan, Mrs. Emily Zug Huebner,* Ms. Judy S. Huret,
Ms. Jennifer Walston Johnson, Mr. Dennis J. Keller, Mr. Jonathan M. Kemper,
Mr. Paul G. Koontz, Mrs. Betsy Lawer, Ms. Cheryl Winter Lewy,
Mr. David M. Love, Mr. Kevin M. McGovern, Ms. Sarah E. Nash, Dr. Jorge G. Puente,
Mr. G. Jeffrey Records, Jr., Mrs. Kristin M. Richardson, Mr. John Cutler Ryan,
Ms. Deborah Sara Santana, Mrs. Marna Schnabel, Dr. Elisa Stephens,
Ms. Fredericka Stevenson, Mr. Michael E. Tennenbaum, Mr. John K. Tsui,
Mr. L. John Wilkerson, Ph.D., Ms. Deborah L. Wince-Smith
HONORARY MEMBERS Mr. Robert McC. Adams, Mr. William S. Anderson, Hon. Max N. Berry,
Mr. L. Hardwick Caldwell III, Mr. G. Wayne Clough, Mr. Frank A. Daniels, Jr.,
Mrs. Patricia Frost, Mr. James M. Kemper, Jr., Mrs. Jean B. Mahoney,
Mr. Paul Neely, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Mr. Wilbur L. Ross, Jr.,
Mr. Lloyd G. Schermer, Hon. Frank A. Weil, Mrs. Gay F. Wray
*Ex-Officio
SMITHSONIAN.COM
Credits
COVER
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CONTRIBUTORS
PHENOMENA
ART OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
A WORLD WITHOUT
MOSQUITOES
BLOOD IN THE CLOUDS
POWER PLAYER
PASSAGE OF THE GODS
WILDLIFE WARRIORS
ASK SMITHSONIAN
Rafal Olechowski / Shutterstock
Janet Jarman; José Manuel V. Fragoso; George Bernard /
Science Source; Stefen Chow; Photo by Jason Pietra. ©2016
The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation,
Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Pete Muller /
Magnum Foundation / Prime
Illustrations by Justine Potin
American Icon: Library of Congress
Art: Heather Perry
Small Talk: Jen Siska
Adaptation: lllustration by Eric Palma
Essay: Dara Craul; Emma Cooper Key; Mary Reynolds (2)
Fast Forward: José Manuel V. Fragoso
André Grossman ©2015 Christo; Wolfgang Volz; Map: Guilbert
Gates; Christo and Jeanne Claude Studio
David Yoder; George Bernard / Science Source; Mike Kemp
/ Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Sources: Kevin M. Esvelt,
Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard
Medical School; Tony Nolan, Imperial College London
Stefen Chow; SZ Photo / Scherl / The Image Works; Maps:
Guilbert Gates; Imagno / Getty Images; NGS Image Collection /
The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY
Photo by Jason Pietra; ©2016 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight
Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York
Janet Jarman; Source: Sergio Gómez, René Million and David M.
Carballo
Pete Muller / Magnum Foundation / Prime Collective; Map:
Guilbert Gates
Illustration by Eric Diotte
