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transforming a vast savannah of hidden wonders. Here's what happens when progress outpaces our understanding of what might be worth preserving. It's called the Chiado Portuguese Foreclosed, and for nearly all of human history, this vast tropical savannah in central Brazil seems to have been shut off from the rest of

the world. People do live there. Hunter gatherer groups overcoming the formidable wilds have roamed Therado since the Stone Age, and in colonial times, those escaping slavery often disappeared behind the hills, where they built tight knit communities, unlocked the lands, subtle gifts, and settled in otherwise. Across centuries, hardly anyone ventured inside. The terrain was repellent to visitors, practically impossible

to traverse. Much of the chiroto as a dense, tailed mess of stunted trees and shrubs, the whole place crawling with snakes. It pales in lushness to the mighty Amazon rainforest to the north, the green lungs of the earth. Even some scientists who study the chiado call it ugly. The common term for it scrubland is campo suho dirty field. But the main reason that tchiato was ignored beyond indigenous peoples and those seeking refuge, is that no one could

find money in it. No hardwoods, no diamonds, no oil. The soul is highly acidic, deadly to most non native plants, and during the six month dry season the land is often ravaged by fire. Until the mid twentieth century, the tiato was dismissed by the capitalist world as a wasteland, best to leave a closed and move on. In the

nineteen fifties, Brazil found a use for it. The nation, leaping into the global economy, decided to construct a new capital city, a monument to Brazilian progress, in the center of the country. So a hunk of the tiado smack in the middle was cleared and Brazilia rose up. Five million people now live there. Only Salpaldo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte are bigger. Then in the nineteen seventies

came a more sweeping transformation. Brazilian agricultural scientists working in a government lab cooked up a fertilizer packed with lime that modified the harsh Shiado soil and enabled cash crops to grow. Industrial watering systems could counteract the dry season, and fire brigades would snuff out the flames. The Troado was opened for business. Bulldozers and tractors rolled in, and

thousands of square miles of scrubby chiato were scraped clean. Corn, sugar, cane, and especially soybeans were planted, then trucked across the country to seaports. China, the United States, and Europe bought them up, and the land clearing intensified. The largest agricultural corporations in the world established massive factory farms there. The Brazilian economy roared, more land was churned up. There seemed no limit. The

Chiado's size is Texas times three. The area, according to a twenty twenty one report from the World Bank, has the greatest art agricultural potential on the planet. Along with government workers and farm hands, a new generation of biologists, many lured by the science department at the University of Brasilia, also came to the Tchiado curious about this relatively unknown region,

always considered less worthy of study than the Amazon. Over the past two decades, scientific attention has focused on the area, even as it has shifted toward becoming an ecological sacrifice zone, what land use experts call a place lacking strong environmental protection that caters to human consumption, and the Chiato's great secrets have emerged. Turning away most humans from millennia appears to have been an ideal strategy for preserving extraordinary biodiversity.

The Chiato, researchers from the University of Brazilia and elsewhere have tallied is home to more than eleven thousand species of plants and trees, forty percent of which exist nowhere else. There are eight hundred bird species, twelve hundred fish species, and ninety thousand insect species. The golden firred, stilt legged maimed wolf prowls the Toroto, as does the giant ant eater, which grow seven feet long, not including its two foot tongue.

There are wide populations of bees, snakes, lizards, bats, and butterflies. About five percent of Earth's animal and plant species are thought to live in the Toroto, the biologically richest savannah in the world. The real secret, though, is what you can't observe. The soil in the Troto runs deep in places eighty feet and to help survive the dry seaves and its fires, many plants sprout extensive root systems. The

vast majority of the Chrodo's biomass is subterranean. Some trees that look like spinbly fence posts above are mussel rooted and brawny below. Biologists who examine this hidden realm called the Toroto the upside down forest. This underground world performs priceless ecological services. It's a massive carbon sink, locking away billions of tons of carbon dioxide in well buried roots as the Trotto is converted to farm land. The current rate is more than four thousand acres a day. The

greenhouse gas is released each year. According to the World Wildlife Fund WWF, the discharge drew to altering the Troto is equivalent to the annual emissions of fifty million cars. If all the carbon held by the trodo were discharged, this might single handedly push global warming over the one point five degrees celsius limit set by the United Nations at the Paris Climate Conference of twenty fifteen, a point at which the global ice sheets could inexorably melt, causing

the seas to inundate every coastal city. Deep soil is also a sponge. The troto collects and stores seasonal rains in immense subterranean chambers. The more land that's cut above the less water held below. These aquifers, geologists report, feed the headwaters of eight of the twelve major river basins in South Americada. Those underground tanks pump water all over the continent. If the Amazon is the lungs, the Troto is the heart. To get a place where the Chiado's

pulse can be experienced untamed in raw. Take the road north out of Brasilia. It first runs arrow straight through the suburbs, then direct to the factory farms. Rows of soybeans roll to the horizons. Grain trucks outnumber cars. Trectors spray the fields with white mist. More than one hundred and fifty million gallons of pesticides. Brazilian environmental journalists report

douse the chiroto each year. The land has been decimated, says Brazilian ecologist Paolo Lviira Editure of the Tirodos of Brazil, a book that explores the natural history of the region, and soybeans, for the most part, aren't eaten by people. They're shipped around the globe to feed cattle the world demands beef. After a couple of hours of driving, the windshields spattered with bugs, hills rise up, the giant farms dissipate,

and the Toroto exists in a natural state. The terrain admittedly can appear reared soil toxicity metals with tree growth making the trunks all gnarled and hunched. The frequent fires scorch the buds at the ends of branches, which are replaced by lower buds that grow at contorted angles. Then those eventually get fire burned too, and so on. It's basically a big thicket of elbows. Though not every Toroto

landscape looks Doctor Seuss strange. The Torodo is one huge, interconnected biome, composed of a dozen varieties of smaller ecosystems, ranging from open grassland to dense full sized woods. Driving deeper in some one hundred fifty miles from Brazilia, travelers approach Chapada dos vie d'erros, one of the two national parks in the Trotto, where sections of closed canopy forest

shroud tumbling rivers. There is a tourist town here, alto Paraizzo High Paradise, where a steady stream of visitors, primarily from other parts of Brazil. Higher certified hiking guides lounge in streams and purchase genuine Cchiado crystals from pendant necklace size to paper weight, dug from the ancient soil and perfect, say the shopkeepers for cleansing your aura. This is where the battle for the Shido is being waged, between those who cherish the other worldly place as it is and

those bending near land to their will. Less than ten percent of the Shrodo falls under any environmental protection, mostly at state parks and mixed use areas where people live and grow crops. Only three percent is under full federal preservation.

The national parks are just specks in the vastness. By comparison, about half of the Amazon biome is protected, and the Amazon is specifically named in the Brazilian Constitution as a national Heritage zone but not the Chiroto, and estimated four fifths of the entire Chiato has already been disturbed by human activities. Almost everything happening in the past fifty years. No one knows how many unique species of plants or

animals have already been lost. International conservation organizations like WWF and Global Fitness, as well as Brazilian groups such as the National Campaign in Defense of the Chiado, have mobilized. They seek to spread awareness of the Chiado and its precarious situation and implore the Brazilian government to safeguard what's left.

A team of Brazilian forestry scientists, in a notable twenty seventeen paper, demonstrated that the Cchiado's essential ground layers, which contain most of the endemic species, are painfully slow at self repair. A section of cleared land that had been abandoned for more than twenty years hardly seemed to regenerate much biodiversity. At times, Brazilian legislators seem receptive to the idea that consumption and conservation can exist hand in hand.

The same government lab that originally developed the fertilizer that fueled the Chiado's cultivation, has now been tasked with creating an improved version to significantly increase crop yield so economic growth can be maintained without surrendering more land. Technology can both harm us and save us the great roulette wheel of the modern world. So far, progress has been modest, with the leaders of Brazil more actively enforcing environmental protections

to slow the rate of deforestation. Meanwhile, plenty of historic grassland continues to be plowed over. There appears to be a reluctance among legislators to enact regulations that will likely harm finances, and the agribusiness undeniably is helping keep the economy of Brazil and the globe rolling along. At the same time, the National Campaign in Defense of the Tirado and science journalists have reported about the particularly convenient and

widespread belief that nothing is really being lost. Agricultural lobbyists have indicated to legislators that the Tirado's last untouched places are little but in fertile, uninhabited regions just waiting to turn a profit. Luciana Santos begs to differ. She was born in the Chiato and lives there still with her

husband and four young daughters. Her family is part of a community, a collection of villages known as a Quirambo, whose first members escaped slavery some two hundred and fifty years ago. Here enfolded into the hills just beyond the boundaries of Chapada dos via Daros National Park, the roads remain unpaved and electricity hasn't yet reached the farthest thatched roofed homes. Santos is thirty three years old. When she was young, she had to walk two hours to get to school

each way, though her daughters don't do that. There's a new school in her village that becomes a community library at night. Currently, there are forty four separate cuiambos in the Chiato and about eighty different indigenous ethnicities whose ancestors stretch back to pre European times. Some hunt, some farm,

some fish, some grays livestock. Everyone sings different songs. An accurate census of the Tarrato is elusive, but about one hundred thousand people are believed to live traditionally off the land. Several groups do not own the legal deeds to the territory, their future destined to be fraught with lawsuits and land battles. The community Santos comes from has embraced tourism, sharing the chiato they believe helps save it. They don't want bulldozers

approaching their hills. They have everything to lose. Any visitors willing to take the long drive from Brazilia are welcome. Santos is one of the guides walking the footpaths around her Quilambo. She sees through the chaos of shrubs and trees and bushes indecipherable to most outsiders, and points out ingredients she regularly uses. These leaves make a lotion for skin care, she says. Brew a tea with this for mussel ache. This one's good for bug bites. Tiny black

frogs dart abruptly across the path. They do that when it's about to rain, she says, and a few minutes later it does. Santos gained her knowledge of the natural world from her grandmother and mother, and some some from men too, but they're harder to learn from, and vows that she will pass on everything to her daughters. I will not allow our culture to die. Prepackaged goods occasionally arrive by truck, but her community, like every Quilambo, can

grow all its own food. They did it for a couple of centuries, coaxing the soil to yield rice, beans, pumpkins, cassava. Nothing is sprayed with pesticides. You could drink the water right out of the streams. Chickens and cows are raised for meat. Rivers provide fish. Berries are plentiful. Beiiti palm trees offer roofing material and creamy fruits. Mangaba trees produce

some like sugary treats. But the local favorite, Santo says, is definitely the pequis, a fruit native to the Chrodo's that's a little complicated and a touch dangerous to eat, as there are needlelike spines inside that must be carefully avoided. The flavor, a trace of bitter lemon and a hint of cheddar cheese, doesn't immediately appeal to everyone, but for those who can adapt to the taste, the pequis often

becomes a prized delicacy. The pequis, Santos implies, is like the trotto itself, if you're able to adjust in just the right ways, the prickliness and oddities are not merely tolerated, but deeply adored. I've never wanted to live anywhere else, she says. One person's wasteland is another's wonder. Witnessing the Toroto's wild glory, while also avoiding the afternoon heat, sometimes requires departing with a guide on the National Park trails

before dawn. Moths flit about your headlamp. Crystal fragments glint in the dark. There's a crazy amount of noise. Frogs burp, crickets squeak, a cacophony of insects, greet's first light. Some sound like power tools, others like kazoos and whistles and buzzers, a sense of teeming infinite life. Everywhere are twisted tree branches, the shadow staple and vines dangling down like loose wires from the undergrowth. Ferns stretch their herringbone fronds towards the light.

Brilliant splatches of color pop from the greenery, purple, jasmine, red hibiscus. A candle bush holds up bright yellow blooms, a grand chandelier, A blue morpho butterfly circles flying stained glass. The air is a heavy blanket, and the loamy scent lingers, termite mounds shaped like witches hats rise from the soil. A fat lizard lumber's tongue. Flitting black ants hauling husks of leaves to their nests look like a procession of

tiny windsurfers. A breeze triggered confetti of white petals tumbles out of a tree. Birds are constant companions, parakeets, humming birds, flycatchers, hawks, A Tucan bob's beak heavy through the air as if swimming the breaststroke. A pair of flamboyant macaws mate it for life. Rainbow over the tree tops, the trail steepens up a bowaberie slope, and a sound like rolling thunder starts and doesn't stop. It only intensifies, soon drowning out

even the bugs. Then the forest parts at a rocky outcrop on top of a hill, and there it all is an expansive sweep of untouched sharado, not a farm in sight, the green wilderness sliced open by a deep cliff walled canyon, the river within hurtling off a stairway of ledges, The raging waterfalls, the source of the thunder kick up clouds of mist. The sheer breadth of the view is dizzying and spectacular. The heart of Brazil still

beating strong, but for how long. The director of Chapada dos Varios Deiros National Park, a thirty seven year old biologist named Nayara Stacceski, says she is fearful the Chiato could pass any salvageable tipping point in less than a decade. This could all become a desert, she says, and everyone with a steak in the toroto will lose. Many Brazilian scientists who specialize in the Tchirado are in general agreement. It's hard to halt or even slow the march of

progress and the force of consumerism. I'm not optimistic, says Guarino Coli, and ecology professor of the University of Brasilia who studies the Toiroto's lizards and snakes. Coli indicates that it's not the celebrated areas like the Amazon Rainforest, for which people are willing to donate money and fight to protect, that we should worry about, but rather it is the lesser known, vulnerable lands that could determine our fate. How we treat the sharado is by extension, how we will

treat much of the world. What's at risk, according to the National Campaign in Defense of the Chiado, is the life of every being. There are no simple solutions. Everyone wants inexpensive commodities. If we don't farm the Tiado, we will have to farm elsewhere. Eight billion people need to be fed every day. All nations seek to grow their economy. Nobody is at fault, and everybody's at fault at the same time. We all have some responsibility for the devastation

of the Chiado, says Colli, so a being. Demand is soaring, and the expansion of farmland will almost surely continue. The lure of cheap cheeseburgers is strong. The Tarado, it is possible, will be a place that few will really miss until it's closed, forever and gone. Aw Brazil's Troto is changing. At the edge of the Amazon Range forests, Brazil's lesser known, less protected, and second largest ecosystem. The Toiado is rapidly transforming.

Its diverse savannahs, grassland and forests house some five thousand endemic species whose habitats are vanishing at extreme speed, Accelerating losses deforestation in the Chiado increased by sixty eight percent between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three, prompting new efforts to protect the area vanishing landscape. The Chiato's natural vegetation is being cleared to make way for cattle grazing

and crops including soybeans, rice, and sugar. Pastures for grazing now occupy twenty six percent of the Toroado, up from seventeen percent in nineteen eighty five. Today, natural savannahs make up twenty seven percent of the Troto, down from forty percent in nineteen eighty five. Next, Reviving medieval monsters, how modern artisans are honing an age old style of stonecraft and bringing new beauty to an English cathedral By Roth Smith.

On a damp spring morning in the ancient English city of York, a group of school children stopped in front of the iconic york Minster Cathedral and broke into giggles, sharing uneasy looks. Built over a period of two hundred fifty years and consecrated in fourteen seventy two, the church

is the largest Gothic cathedral in Britain. It features three huge medieval towers adorned with shimmering stained glass windows, but the kids were focused more intently on something at the edge of the stone Matian's yard outside the building that steered back at them. A large stone statue of a beastill creature in mid scream, clutching its head as a

frog sprang from its mouth. Weighing about half a ton, the freshly made carving is a classic example of a medieval grotesque, a style of ornate architectural decoration that most people see only at a day. During the Middle Ages, grotesques were placed atop religious buildings alongside similarly fanciful gargoyles, the key difference being that gargoyles are a style of

grotesque with functional rain spouts. This particular monster had been hand carved out of about fifteen hundred ten pounds of local limestone by one of Yorkminster's twelve full time stonemasons. It is essentially a modern replica. When eventually hoisted up onto one of the buttresses on the cathedral, it will replace a similar statue that had been eroded to a

faceless nub by centuries of wind and rain. We try to replace lke for like, says Lewis Morrison, the master stonemason who spent fourteen weeks carving the statue, but Morrison admitted that even he wasn't entirely sure that the original creation featured a frog. It was so badly worn you

couldn't tell much about it other than the pose. With a hand raised beside his head, he says, york Minster's stone masons face a tricky balance in restoring such architectural relics, so in addition to practicing the time honored techniques of stone carving, they've learned to harness modern technology and take some historically informed artistic license to recurate the beastly grotesque.

For instance, Morrison and his team ascended to the church's rooftop, where they used a camera capable of taking high quality images that can be stitched together into a three D model to render the statue's exact dimensions. Next, they carved a polyerethane model of the weatherworn original as a reference copy, following the same lines, proportions and silhouette of the original.

Morrison then spent weeks researching several similarly posed grotesques on york Minster and pouring over fourteenth century illustrated manuscripts before coming up with a theme and design He eventually chose the timeless theme of good inn evil. The beast holds its head while encountering the frog, which is a symbol of demons in medieval folklore. But viewers should also notice that the creature grips of fish in its other hand,

symbolizing Christianity. Once the design was approved by the cathedral's architect, the slow, intimate process of carving began. It's one that would have been readily recognizable to Morrison's medieval counterparts, with the same tools, same pale limestone, and same musical ring of steel on stone, clean cling sounding across the yard.

There's been a permanent stone mason's yard at Yorkminster for more than two hundred years, part of a rolling program of restoration and repairs that began in the late eighteenth century. Is a never ending job, says Alex Mcallian, director of Works and Precinct at Yorkminster. Our scaffolding is on one hundred year rotation today. However, these methods of restoration could

be to evolve. The cathedral recently opened a new workspace for its tradespeople, called the Center of Excellence for Heritage Skills and Estate Management, and over ten million dollars state of the art facility just around the corner from the cathedral. The workshop is equipped with computer controlled stone saws for roughly shaping blocks of limestone, along with laser scanners and

digital software to help measure and virtually model designs. These tools could be wielded to not only replicate artifacts, but also create entirely new ones, like a nearly two ton statue of the late Queen Elizabeth the sculpted from a block of French limestone that now stands outside on the west end of the cathedral. It's a big step into the future for us, says Mecallian, although we won't be

abandoning our roots in traditional craftsmanship. Every piece we make will still be finished by hand using the same tools mallet and chisel we've always used. It is vital that we do not lose humanity. Like the new Grotesque, the statue of the Queen should last throughout several centuries to come. There's always more work to be done, though, ensuring that plenty more beasts will be rising from the mason's yard over the centuries. Many of this stone details at york Minster,

the Gothic cathedral in York, England, eroded, requiring restoration or replacement. Building. This new grotesque demanded expert craftsmanship and creative problem solving, as some of the original details had been lost to the ages. How reindeer got to America. In the eighteen nineties, the idea of raising domesticated reindeer took root in Alaska, leading to a herd being imported to replace dwindling numbers

of free ranging caribou as a regional food source. In nineteen twenty nine, the Canadian government, inspired by the success of reindeer in Alaska, decided to buy a portion of the thriving herds and bring them east. The planned eighty month journey stretched to five brutal years. The team was beset by storms, stampedes, and dangerous run ins with wolves along the route. Beneath its destructive reputation, the red palm

wevil reveals a mesmerizing complexity. Each groove, curve and texture of its exo skeleton tells a story of adaptation, survival, and destruction. Deep in the Himalayan region of Ladakh, India, two monks from the Fugtal Monastery set off to collect food, fired wood, and building materials from the nearest village, which is a three hour hike away. Winter in Ladak's Zanskar Valley is brutal. Since there are no roads to the monastery, frozen rivers or ice roads become the only ways in

or out. Weaving the identities of local artists with endemic flowers and plants provides a way to reimagine the natural world that cradles the spirit of both the land and our people. A Filipino ritualist known as an Allaga invokes the spirits of the walling Walling, an endangered orchid species native to the Philippines. This concludes readings from National Geographic

Magazine for to day. Your reader has been Marsha. If you've enjoyed hearing this content, please give us a call at eight five nine four two two six three nine zero. Thank you for listening, and have a great day.