By Tom Clynes

On the Front Line of the Ebola Epidemic

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Author’s note: With Ebola back in the news I’m reposting this long-form feature article on the Ebola outbreak in Gulu, Uganda, which I reported with photographer Seamus Murphy for National Geographic Adventure. Seamus and I were confident, when we arrived in Gulu, that by following the doctors’ leads we could keep ourselves safe. It would soon become devastatingly clear just how naïve that assumption was. I often include this story, which was among the most harrowing of my career, in my keynote talks.

When the old Czech prop-plane lurches to a halt at the side of the military airstrip, the six doctors unfurl their stiff legs, disembark, and begin unloading. They shift 47 boxes—a metric ton of laboratory gear—onto a truck and drive toward town, trailing a spiral of orange dust as they pass army checkpoints and outsized churches, roadside vendors and crowds of people listening to radios, talking, and singing.

The most surprising thing is how ordinary it all looks, at first. Set in the middle of a fertile, if unrelieved, savanna, Gulu could be any other East African provincial center. Everywhere, people are on the move, some pedaling bikes, others riding on the fringed rear seats of bicycle taxis, most just walking. They walk upright, with stone-straight posture, some carrying babies on their backs, some balancing loads on their heads, some bare-footed, others in sandals. They walk—and the doctors drive—past the field where the Pope once spoke, from atop two shipping containers still piled one atop the other; past the turnoff that leads to the witch doctor’s house; past another road that leads to a small village near the forest—the forest where, perhaps, it all started.

It takes a few minutes, as if the doctors’ eyes were getting used to a new light, before hints begin to emerge that life here is far from normal. There are none of the usual swarms of children in school uniforms. White trucks drive through town, emblazoned with the red crosses and acronyms—UN, WHO, MSF—that portend crisis. The hospital building, where the doctors pull up, is wrapped in white plastic sheeting. At the door, a hand-lettered sign warns “No entrance without permission.” The sign is illustrated with a crude human figure, with an X drawn over it.

Read the entire story here.

Author, photojournalist and National Geographic speaker Tom Clynes travels the world covering the adventurous side of science and the environment. His work appears in National Geographic, The New York Times, Nature, Popular Science, The Atlantic, and other publications. As a keynote speaker, Tom works with organizations that want to catalyze creativity and engagement at their events, inspiring audiences and bringing them along on assignment to some of the world’s most intriguing places. To contact Tom and discover more about his memorable and inspiring programs, please email info@tomclynes.com.

By Tom Clynes

Warm beer won’t win you any friends up here, mate. Trucker Garry White’s Australian torture trek fuels the fridge.

Authors note: I stumbled onto this fun story on my first visit to Oz. It’s still one of my favorite pieces, and I often feature it in my keynote talks. 

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Hidden under the rainforest canopy at the top of Australia’s Cape York Peninsula, Pajinka Wilderness Lodge is a tropical retreat for wildlife lovers, bird watchers and fishermen. The lodge lies just short of the northernmost point in Australia, at the tip of a slender green finger that stretches up from the wide brown continent toward New Guinea. Locals call this spot simply The Top.

After a day in the sun deep-sea fishing with Pajinka’s manager, Alan Geary, a few guests cooled off at the lodge’s outdoor bar. Someone brought over a round of XXXX (Queensland’s home-brewed beer, pronounced “Four-X”) and asked Alan a question of essential interest:

In a place where the temperature rarely dips below 90 degrees, a place far too remote for electrical lines, how is it that the beer at Pajinka is always cold?

Alan answered with a tropical syllogism. For good conversation, he said, you need cold beer. To get cold beer, you need electricity. To get electricity, you need fuel for the generator. To get fuel to The Top…you need Garry White.

Three times a year, Alan told us, “this bloke Garry” pulls his full-size tractor-trailer rig out of Cairns and heads up the peninsula to the fuel depot at Weipa. There, he fills the tanker with diesel for the cattle stations and aboriginal settlements in the distant north, and for Pajinka. The 1,500-mile round trip—not a single foot of it on paved roads—takes him through the continent’s most inaccessible wilderness. He has to plow through jungle rivers, chain-saw through downed trees and shovel his way out of truck-gobbling mud holes. Every time he stops to change a flat tire or replace an axle, he’s bait for leeches, wild boars, taipans and giant crocs.

“It’s a well-known fact,” said Alan, “that he is the world’s toughest trucker.”

Read the entire story here.

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Author, photojournalist and National Geographic photographer speaker Tom Clynes travels the world covering the adventurous sides of science, the environment, education, and archaeology. His work appears in National Geographic, The New York Times, Nature, Popular Science, The Atlantic, and other publications. As a keynote speaker, Tom works with organizations that want to catalyze creativity and engagement at their events, inspiring audiences and bringing them along on assignment to some of the world’s most intriguing places. To contact Tom and discover more about his memorable and inspiring programs, please email info@tomclynes.com.

By Tom Clynes

One parent’s quest to raise analog kids in a digital age.

Authors note: This essay first appeared in Issue 4 of Adventure Journal.

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I was at the campfire, flipping pancakes, when 13-year-old Ethan came over and asked if he could use my phone.

“I want to show those guys a YouTube video,” he said, nodding toward his brother, Sam, and my sons, Charlie and Joe.

I looked up and arched an eyebrow. “Seriously, Ethan?” I said. “We all agreed this would be an electronics-free camping trip. Remember?”

“I know,” he said, “but it’s a video about camping.”

Before Ethan could fall further into the irony hole he was digging, I plopped a flapjack onto his plate and he rejoined the other boys. “I guess we’ll have to watch it when we get home,” he sighed.

Keeping kids connected with nature used to be simpler. For my own parents, it was mostly a matter of opening the back door and setting us loose in the neighborhood, where we’d find an orchard or a brush pile or some other semi-wild place to fool around.

But for 21st-century children, such improvised outdoors scenarios are increasingly rare. My parents’ generation didn’t use “parenting” as a verb, and what they called just kids being kids is now called free-range—a concept that alarms hyper-vigilant would-be advocates. Kids don’t have the same kind of license to run around outside, and even if they do there’s the ever-present draw of electronics. As smartphones and social media become ever more ubiquitous and embedded, the love of nature—what E.O. Wilson called biophilia—is morphing into videophilia, a love of electronic media.

“We’ve quickly gone from a place where the average child would choose active outside activities to one where kids choose sedentary activities involving computers and smartphones and video,” says conservation ecologist Patricia Zaradic. She and Oliver Pergams co-authored two studies that found that per-capita visits to national parks and forests, and other indicators of nature recreation, have declined in developed countries since the late 1980s, due in large part to the increase in the amount of time spent on electronic media.

The trends they’ve identified have alarmed conservationists, whose efforts to protect wilderness depend on the support of people who connected with nature during their formative years. A rising generation of adults with little experience with wild places and little understanding of their value may ultimately have a greater impact on biodiversity and ecosystem health than bulldozers, invasive species, or even greenhouse gas emissions, some think.

Read the entire story here.

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Author, photojournalist and National Geographic speaker Tom Clynes travels the world covering the adventurous sides of science, the environment, education, and archaeology. His work appears in National Geographic, The New York Times, Nature, Popular Science, The Atlantic, and other publications. As a keynote speaker, Tom works with organizations that want to catalyze creativity and engagement at their events, inspiring audiences and bringing them along on assignment to some of the world’s most intriguing places. To contact Tom and discover more about his memorable and inspiring programs, please email info@tomclynes.com.

A vast, interconnected network of ancient cities was home to millions more people than previously thought.

By Tom Clynes

Author’s note: This story, which I reported in Guatemala and Mexico, attracted the world’s attention more than most. It garnered more than a million reads on the National Geographic website and was picked up by nearly every major media outlet. One of the more curious reactions came from some members of the Church Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who argued that the new discoveries affirmed the Book of Mormon’s  historical narrative.

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In what’s being hailed as a “major breakthrough” in Maya archaeology, researchers have identified the ruins of more than 60,000 houses, palaces, elevated highways, and other human-made features that have been hidden for centuries under the jungles of northern Guatemala.

Using a revolutionary technology known as LiDAR (short for “Light Detection And Ranging”), scholars digitally removed the tree canopy from aerial images of the now-unpopulated landscape, revealing the ruins of a sprawling pre-Columbian civilization that was far more complex and interconnected than most Maya specialists had supposed.

“The LiDAR images make it clear that this entire region was a settlement system whose scale and population density had been grossly underestimated,” said Thomas Garrison, an Ithaca College archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer who specializes in using digital technology for archaeological research.

Garrison is part of a consortium of researchers who are participating in the project, which was spearheaded by the PACUNAM Foundation, a Guatemalan nonprofit that fosters scientific research, sustainable development, and cultural heritage preservation. The project mapped more than 800 square miles (2,100 square kilometers) of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the Petén region of Guatemala, producing the largest LiDAR data set ever obtained for archaeological research.

The results suggest that Central America supported an advanced civilization that was, at its peak some 1,200 years ago, more comparable to sophisticated cultures such as ancient Greece or China than to the scattered and sparsely populated city states that ground-based research had long suggested.

Read the entire story here.

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Author, photojournalist and National Geographic speaker Tom Clynes travels the world covering the adventurous sides of science, the environment, education and archaeology. His work appears in National Geographic, The New York Times, Nature, Popular Science, The Atlantic and other publications. As a keynote speaker, Tom works with organizations that want to catalyze creativity and engagement at their events, inspiring audiences with his stories and photos and bringing them along on assignment to fascinating locations around the globe. To contact Tom and find out more about his memorable and motivating programs, please email info@tomclynes.com.