Let’s start with the most important one, from Eric Tah at LAGA. Please if you are going to quote anything from my interview with him, use these corrections:
Dear Alex,
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to get this right before actually making it public, I have copied the areas that concern me and or LAGA for …Read More
This investigation was made possible by a grant from the Leon Levy Foundation
Last November Survival International, the London-based tribal people’s advocacy group, ran a story on its Web site about a big-game hunter and trustee of World Wildlife South Africa named Peter Flack who went on a safari into the rain forest of Cameroon …Read More
Washington Post review: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/where-headhunting-once-thrived-natives-now-gather-before-communal-televisions/2017/05/12/5cd11322-1003-11e7-9d5a-a83e627dc120_story.html?utm_term=.53aa3c6c11ea
Millbrook Independent review: http://www.themillbrookindependent.com/content/wasting-borneo-dispatches-vanishing-world
Op-ed on Yale’s Environment 360 site: http://e360.yale.edu/features/vanishing-borneo-saving-one-of-worlds-last-great-places-palm-oil
Interview on Mongabay: https://news.mongabay.com/2017/06/borneos-biocultural-holocaust-an-interview-with-author-alex-shoumatoff/
Download the article here.
Download the article here.
Download excerpt from Global Chorus: 365 Voices on the Future of the Planet
Download “We Knew What Love Was”
Smithsonian Magazine has published my piece on the giraffes, with beautiful photos by Melissa Groo.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/save-giraffes-put-our-necks-out-180962128/
Here’s a review of my dear friend photographer Nathan Farb’s show, “The Russians,”
This is the full text of an introduction I wrote for the new, Trinity Press edition of Louis Sarno’s memoir, Song From The Forest. It was edited down, and stuff about other Pygmy groups and their music was taken out, so I am putting the original version here.
I long to get back to Yandoumbe and …Read More
Smithsonian Magazine has published my piece on the destruction by the logging and palm-oil industries of Borneo’s rain forest and the ancient way of life of the Penan Hunter gatherers, who still hunt with blowguns. Last fall peat fires which should never have been set killed thousands of orangutans in Kalimantan, from starvation and smoke …Read More
A Letter From Rwanda. Part One : Reunion with the Gorillas.
Whom I hadn’t seen since l986, when I was writing about the murder of Dian Fossey. The experience today, by up to 80 ecotourists a day visiting ten different families, is really well done, you get up close and personal and en famille with our …Read More
Smithsonian Magazine has published my piece on the white spirit bear of British Columbia, with magnificent photographs by Melissa Groo
Click to read the article
While we’re on the subject of this amazing ancient country, here’s a piece I did on the fall of Ethiopia’s dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam in l991. It has a lot of interesting political and cultural and ethnohistorical information. The late eminent historian of the African Horn, Harold Marcus, accompanied me to Zimbabwe and Addis and …Read More
let’s see if I can patch in the pdf of the whole Dispatch, with photos, which the Dispatches section isn’t allowing me to do but we’re working on it. Here goes. Crikey, it won’t include the photos. you’ll have to go to the dropbox link of the Dispatch, in the Dispatches section, for them
THE GREAT …Read More
Vanity Fair has published “The Devil and the Art Dealer,” my piece on the old recluse in Munich who was found with a billion dollars worth of looted Nazi art in his apartment
Click to read the article
Smithsonian Magazine has published in its March issue an article by me with stunning images by Melissa Groo about the 600,000 sandhill cranes that gather on the Platte River in Nebraska to dance and fatten up for the trip to their arctic and subarctic breeding grounds.
Click to read the article
The Last of Eden, about the critically endangered Awa tribe of the eastern Amazon, by Alex with photos by Sebastiao Salgado, was published in the December 2013 Vanity Fair.
Read the article on Vanity Fair
An essay by Cyril Cristo, whose constant pestering of my editor’s assistant was responsible for Vanity Fair assigning “Agony and Ivory.” Cyril lives in Santa Fe and cares deeply about the life on earth. He has produced a number of beautiful coffee table books of his photos of wild animals, notably Walking Thunder about the …Read More
The Waterfalls of Ithaca: Thoughts on nature, history, and our future
–Louise Silberling, Ithaca, NY
(All photos © 2012 Louise Silberling)
Forest Falls, Ithaca, NY
The waterfalls of Ithaca, NY are a natural treasure and geological wonder. There are hundreds of waterfalls, some spectacular, some humble. Gorges cutting through the shale, sandstone, and limestone are everywhere. Fifteen thousand years …Read More
I gave this talk on February 24, 2013, at the Waccabuc Country Club in South Salem, New York. For the Westchester Land Trust’s annual Leon Levy Environmental Symposium, for whose symposium two years ago I spoke at Bedford Historical Hall (Dispatch #64: Westchester, Bedford, and the Education of a Conservationist).
A number of people came …Read More
Alberta’s Nefarious Tar Sands
After I got arrested in Bohemian Grove (all for a good cause : the piece I wrote for Vanity Fair– see Dispatch #57, “Bohemian Tragedy”– helped stopped the Bohemian Grove Club’s clandestine logging of its magnificent redwoods) the fam and drove up the coast to Vancouver and from there over the glorious …Read More
I had a delightful interaction with a very old African-American man in the grocery parking lot tonight. Very slowly he pushed his cart, bent and leaning onto it, and mumbling discontentedly. I heard him say as I passed him
“I must be losing my mind completely.”
I slowed and said “yeah, me too.”
He stopped, surprised that someone …Read More
Vanity Fair has published in its June issue my portrait and memoir of 44th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue, where I used to hang out thirty years ago when I had an office at the New Yorker’s old digs at 25 West 43rd. It’s an interesting piece of writing. A lot of people connected …Read More
And here’s a picture of Yangzom with her mother and grandmother. She’s an actor and a prominent activist for the Tibetan cause.
We got talking about Tibet. The recent news is horrible. A young woman immolated herself in Eastern Tibet, the Chinese are forcing all Tibetans to be educated in Chinese. The magical spiritual culture of …Read More
This is a article I wrote for BBBB.
by Alex Shoumatoff
A long-time contributing editor of Vanity Fair and the editor of DispatchesFromTheVanishingWorld.com, Shoumatoff has been advocating for traditional peoples all over the word for forty years.
I was deeply affected by Mesnak, the first full-length feature film and fully native production about Canada’s North, and …Read More
We became Facebook friends and last July when I was visiting the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in Ithaca, where she lives, we had dinner. Melissa is a tall, statuesque, striking blonde. She grew up on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, but since then has lived from California to Paris to Santa Fe, doing everything …Read More
I remember a few months after I wrote my 2007 Vanity Fair piece on the famine in the remote Indian tribal state of Mizoram that comes every 48 years due to an explosion of the jungle rat population due to the flowering of the particular single species of bamboo that covers most of the state …Read More
By Elaine Rosenberg Miller
I first met Max Krauser the day our family moved into our new home in
Teaneck, New Jersey, a leafy suburb six miles north of New York City.
My parents had bought a large house at the top of a hill on a street named
Ogden Avenue.
It was mid-winter break between college semesters. I was …Read More
This just in from Heather Pepe, a woman who grew up in our town in the Adirondacks, one of Keene’s great families, the Pepes, and moved down to Tobago in the early nineties and has lived through the transition of the sunny, easy-going, sustainable island way of life to the violent lootin’ and shootin’ anything …Read More
The Chinese nouveaux riches, or bao fa hu, whose hankering for ivory objets and jewelry is driving the current wave of slaughter of elephants in Africa– about a hundred a day– are the most important audience for my Dispatch on elephants and the ivory trade,which appeared in the August issue of Vanity Fair and has …Read More
The Twin Towers, a Memoir
By Elaine Rosenberg Miller
The summer I was twenty, I worked for the Pipefitters and Steamfitters Union, one of the trades constructing the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. The ceiling tiles in the room in which I sat had not yet been installed and one morning, a …Read More
By Alex Shoumatoff, Photograph by Guillaume Bonn
RANGE LIFE: A herd of elephants, photographed in Amboseli National Park, Kenya. With China’s growing appetite for ivory, poaching is on the rise all over Africa.
Another carcass has been found. On the Kuku Group Ranch, one of the sectors allotted to the once nomadic Maasai that surround Amboseli National …Read More
What do we know about this virus?
BY: ALEX SHOUMATOFF
July 11, 2009. At this point, now that it has spread to virtually every corner of the globe, where it first emerged hardly matters. The priority is to save as many lives as possible. If the true Ground Zero of this pandemic is ever discovered, it probably …Read More
BY: ALEX SHOUMATOFF
The Mogollons, leading citizens of Cartegena, have asked us to dinner. Lucho was the administrator of the port for many years. He went to Exeter and speaks flawless American English. Yolanda, his stylish wife, runs the modern art museum. Their daughter Pia is in charge of restoring the extraordinary fortifications of this picturesque …Read More
This piece was published in the July, l987, Vanity Fair. It is one of the ousted dictator stories that Tina Brown had me doing. The others were Alfredo Stroessner, Mengistu Haile Meriam, and Mobutu Sese Seko. I’d love to do one on Gadaffi. I was just in the Central African Republic for the first time …Read More
By Alex Shoumatoff
Photos © Don Sullivan
A few months ago, I got a call inviting me on a tour of a proposed UNESCO World Heritage in Manitoba. The hosts – the Province of Manitoba and the corporation leading the UNESCO bid, Pimachiowin Aki – took the risk of inviting a range of journalists on the …Read More
Here’s a speech I gave in my hometown, Bedford, New York, for the Westchester Land Trust’s annual annual Leon Levy environmental symposium, at the Bedford Historical Hall, on March 6, 2010. It’s called
“Westchester, Bedford, and the Education of a Conservationist”
For every person, the place where you grew up becomes your inner universe, the focus of …Read More
By Alex Shoumatoff
The Oil and the Turtles
The short version originally published in Vanity Fair
Origninal Unedited Version
The much more detailed and unedited version as I originally wrote it. (Adobe PDF)
Notes on the Dialect and Culture of the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York by Alex Shoumatoff, with deep gratitude to Ann McCrory, Bob Worth, and the Winslow Foundation for enabling me to get this fur.
Download the Notes on the Dialect and Culture of the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York (pdf)
September 14, 2010: Dispatch #58: Bohemian Legacy (as it appeared in the July issue of Vanity Fair’s International edition; not to be confused with Bohemian Tragedy, a couple of Dispatches down). Boston-born William Lobkowicz, from an old Bohemian princely family, went back to Prague after the Velvet Revolution and got back everything that had been …Read More
June, 2010
“Back in l993 Harold Marcus and I went to Mogadishu and snuck behind enemy lines and interviewed General Mohammed Farah Aidid, who had a $25,000 price on his head, put on it by the U.N., because of his fighters’ slaughter the Pakistani peacekeepers. I slept in a room in a sweltering house that belonged …Read More
by Alex Shoumatoff, with deep gratitude to Ann McCrory, Bob Worth, and the Winslow Foundation for enabling me to get this fur.
Thirty years ago, in 1979, I was living in my native north-central Westchester County, and I started going up to a cabin that a friend in Katonah, Ben Kernan, had in Keene Valley, in …Read More
sometimes you got to buck the tide,
when it’s washing you up
and leaving you stranded on the sand
dead of dreams and hope
and what you know is right
and who you are
is being pulled out to sea
and drowned
you gotta buck the tide
you take a stand
you gotta choose a side
when society isn’t lifting a finger
even for its own self-preservation
no …Read More
Members of the ultra-exclusive Bohemian Club—2,500 of America’s richest, most conservative men, including Henry Kissinger, George H. W. Bush, and a passel of Bechtels, Basses, and Rockefellers—are known to urinate freely against the ancient redwoods that cover their 2,700-acre property. Have they been chopping down the trees as well? According to one former member turned …Read More
It was 1981. I was a scientist working for a large natural resource company, and was, along with my boss, visiting a factory in rural Tennessee. We had gone there to try to persuade management and workers, people who knew the real world, that our inventive skills could, for a fee, be put to work …Read More
Click here to read the Dispatch on Vanity Fair.com.
Dispatch
#50: New Sorrows for the Rio DoloresClick here for print friendly version – Adobe PDF Version
Here is a full version
of the song, Nuclear War by Sun Ra
“One afternoon while sitting in the white-washed stone, restored barn gallery where I had a show a few years ago, I became mesmerized by the efforts of a moth fluttering persistently against a window in its attempt to follow the light. The poignancy of that struggle touched me deeply, as it has so many times …Read More
by Hajnal Kiss
A Primer on Cambodia, by Hajnal Kiss on Vimeo.
Hajnal is a 32-year-old woman from Budapest, Hungary, who was an exchange student for the winter term at the McGill School of Business. She heard the talk I gave to Karl Moore’s class see the link above “how can I become involved.” Her primer on …Read More
A unique South-East Asia experience – Cambodia, the land of Khmer people
By Hajnal Kiss
Hajnal is a 32-year-old woman from Budapest, Hungary, who was an exchange student for the winter term at the McGill School of Business. She heard the talk I gave to Karl Moore’s class see the link above “how can I become involved.” …Read More
As it appeared originally in Vanity Fair’s May Green issue.
Eveny reindeer herders in the Tomponski district of far eastern Siberia. The melting of the permafrost is threatening their ancient way of life. Photographs by Subhankar Banerjee.
On August 2, 2007, two 26-foot-long Russian submersibles, Mir-1 and Mir-2, descended through a hole in the ice at the …Read More
Donald Trump wants to put a luxury golf resort on a gloriously unspoiled swath of Scottish seacoast. His plan has come under fire by environmental activists and led to a battle that has reached the highest levels of government. Plus, he’s up against another character: local fisherman Michael Forbes.
by Alex Shoumatoff
THE DONALD: Trump on the …Read More
Tracing the interconnected origins of world music—from flamenco to the blues—Alex Shoumatoff travels to India in search of the Gypsy music of Rajasthan.
By Alex Shoumatoff
The overnight train from New Delhi to Rajasthan is called the Pink City Express, and at nine in the morning it pulled into the big, seething capital city of Jaipur. After …Read More
Coming from a long line of Russian naturalists and explorers, it’s not surprising that I should have ended up making my livelihood by traveling to the world’s kamchatki, as Russians call faraway places– remote, inaccessible corners of the planet like the Amazon, Madagascar, and Tibet– and writing about them. Had I been born a hundred …Read More
January 20, 2008 : Dispatch # 43: The Rats Are Back. Every 48 eight years a certain species of bamboo flowers in a remote tribal state in India, triggering an explosion in the rat population. What happens to the rats could be a ghastly parable for us. Originally published in the December, 2007 issue of …Read More
November 9, 2007: Dispatch #42: (Product) RED provides life saving drugs to Africans with AIDS. Could the future of philanthropy be consumer driven? Originally published in Vanity Fair’s July, 2007 Africa issue as “The Lazarus Effect.” Click here to read the Dispatch
Originally published in the June issue of Walrus Magazine as “A Russian Tragedy.” In fact, I was just in Russia for three weeks in September, 2007, and despite the very real and unresolved issues in this Dispatch, the people are happier and nicer than I’ve ever seen them in the 25 years I’ve been visiting …Read More
Dispatch #40: Brazil’s Mata Atlantica: The Critically Endangered Coastal Rainforest of Brazil, With a Postscripton the Musicality of Birdsong. By Alex Shoumatoff www.dispatchesfromthevanishingworld.com
The Atlantic Coastal Forest, or Mata Atlântica, is the second-largest rainforest in Brazil, after the Amazon. One of the most biologically rich and varied, and most devastated, biomes on the planet, it runs …Read More
August 9, 2007: Dispatch #39: “The Dehydration of the Amazon Rainforest,”originally published in Vanity Fair’s May, 2007 green issue as “The GaspingForest.” Click to read the Dispatch: Part 1 , Part 2
By Alex Shoumatoff
DUDE-ZILLA – Americans consume paper at an annual rate of 740 pounds per capita, seven times that of the world as a whole. The advent of the computer has paradoxically generated vastly more paper consumption.
Your unwitting complicity in the degradation of the planet begins the moment you wake up. You switch on your …Read More
By Alex Shoumatoff
Writers tend to have an inflated sense of their own importance and lasting worth. Mine was deflated in 1999, by a visit to the basement of Alfred Knopf, the eminent publishing house. I was doing a magazine piece on the remarkable, feisty couple, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, who founded it. There, on row …Read More
By Alex Shoumatoff
This originally appeared in the January, 2007 Travel + Leisure, and is reproduced from travelandleisure.com.
In search of family history—and to meet a long-lost, distant cousin—Alex Shoumatoff crosses the country to the ancient city of Novgorod and finds a place of exhilarating beauty and personal resonance. From January 2007
I think of myself sometimes as …Read More
By Alex Shoumatoff
This article originally appeared in the UK edition of Vanity Fair
and on VanityFair.Com, in September of 2006.
Reinhold Messner at Castle Juval, his home in South Tyrol, Italy, 2001. Photograph by Jonas Karlsson.
A decades-old mountaineering scandal has bubbled back up to the surface: did climbing legend Reinhold Messner—who made his name by being the …Read More
By Clara Castelar
Click here to see the photo gallery, including images of places and people related to the topic.
My mother’s family has a talent for the improbable. This is something I only came to appreciate when I tried to chart the paths that led my Melo and Oliveira ancestors from Iberia to sleepy little towns …Read More
By Alex Shoumatoff
From the plane we catch glimpses of the Urubamba River, below Machu Picchu, plunging thousands of feet, then snaking through an ocean of trees that spreads east until it is lost in haze—the Amazon, the world’s largest and most diverse rainforest. We land in the humid furnace of Puerto Maldonado, the fourth-largest city …Read More
This article originally appeared in the January of 2006 issue of Vanity Fair Magazine. All photographs by Jonathan Becker, Vanity Fair’s ‘Photographer at Large,’ with exception of the opening aerial photo by Vincent Laforet.
About the Contributor
Names of past graduates on display in a hallway of the Upper School.
For the past 150 years St. Paul’s School, …Read More
By Alex Shoumatoff
January 10, 2006. A somewhat different version of this appeared in the winter 2006 Onearth magazine.
Five of the ten days I was in Mali last March, I never saw the sun. It was blotted out by an epic dust cloud that spread hundreds of miles in every direction, borne by the harmattan, the …Read More
By Alex Shoumatoff
A somewhat different version of this appeared in the September-October 2005 Audubon Magazine.
In the l970s I was the resident naturalist at a nature sanctuary in Mount Kisco, New York, an hour north of the city. On our Sunday morning bird walks we noticed species that were unusual in this far north, : …Read More
By Alex Shoumatoff
January 11, 2006 A version of this, in which Hoagy was changed into moi, ran in the July, 2005 Travel + Leisure magazine.
Hoagy Carmichael Jr. was up to his waist in the Grand Cascapedia, the Pebble Beach of salmon rivers, on Quebec’s Gaspé coast. With the effortless grace and unerring precision of …Read More
By Alex Shoumatoff
And now, for a change of pace, a blast from the past: a piece called “The End of the Tyrannosaur,” about the overthrow of Paraguay’s long-time despot, General Alfredo Stroessner, that was published in the September, l989 Vanity Fair, with Goldie Hawn doing an exuberant shimmie on the cover. Not many American journalists …Read More
By Alex
Original Magazine Article
The Bloodvein, a Canadian Heritage River, flows 186 miles through Manitoba’s roadless wilderness to Lake Winnipeg.
Manitoba Hydro wants to build transmission lines (that no one needs) through a proposed World Heritage site. First Nations and conservationists have a better idea.
It is the beginning of September, and my 10-year-old son Oliver and I …Read More
By Alex Shoumatoff
I wrote this back in l997, when the Grimaldis were celebrating their 700th anniversary on the Rock. It is being published here, now, for the first time. Prince Ranier’s death a few weeks ago reminded me of its existence. He was a lovely man, and we really hit it off. His eccentric family– …Read More
By Alex Shoumatoff
Bamako : A Blues Lover’s Pilgrimage to the Motherland
There is at first glance nothing about Bamako to suggest that it is one of the hottest music spots on the planet. Bamako is the capital of Mali, the parched, land-locked West African country, two thirds of which is in the Sahara desert, which was …Read More
By Craig Lapp
The collection of slideshows are in Apple Quicktime. Click here to download Quicktime if you don’t already have it.
The best way to view these slideshows is to Right click, and select “save target as” or “save file” and save these to your hard drive.
If you are using a Mac, hold the “option” key …Read More
Cultivating Culture: Emergence or emergency?
By Jonathan Golick
August 2003
Copyright J. Golick 2003 ©
All rights reserved. No use without permission.
Introduction
In 1994 I spent several months in Mali, West Africa. It is a country with a rich and ancient cultural heritage where more than a dozen local languages are spoken. At first the unfamiliar social customs and elaborate …Read More
SASHA CHAVCHAVADZE – STATEMENT
The medium of matches combined with paper is a perfect metaphor for the uncertain and volatile culture in which we live. Though the work has an anarchic aspect – the potential for destruction by fire, the need for an explosion of meaning in a culture that has lost its bearings, it …Read More
by Edward Leffingwell
I had heard about this great scene in Sao Paulo revolving around a man called Kim Esteve. In February of l999 the opportunity came to check it out. Kim is a bosom buddy of the New York-based photographer Jonathan Becker, and Jonathan and I were doing a piece for Vanity Fair on …Read More
(originally appeared in the Winter 2004 issue of On Earth, the Natural Resource Defense Council’s magazine)
The Flyover If there were an international tribunal that prosecuted crimes against the planet, like the one in The Hague that deals with crimes against humanity, what is happening on the Cumberland Plateau in eastern Tennessee would undoubtedly be …Read More
This is a blurb I wrote for Temple Grandin’s extraordinary book, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior. Ms. Grandin was made famous by Oliver Sack’s profile in the New Yorker, An Anthropologist on Mars, subsequently collected in a book with the same title. Rupert Sheldrake’s Dogs Who Know When …Read More
Ten years after arguably the most savage genocide in human history, the comprehension of how such an unspeakably horrible thing could have happened is still anything but clear. The chain of causes is long and complex, and how far back into Rwanda’s history one chooses to trace it, and the relative importance one gives to …Read More
Update, November 2004:
We have just posted some movies in Apple Quicktime format from when Alex Shoumatoff (aka “The Suitcase”) was in Armenia researching this dispatch. The 12 Gates “Beautiful City Jam” below is a traditional spiritual as played by the Reverend Gary Davis. Please click on the links below to view them in a browser …Read More
The Greatest Show on Earth
Each spring, on the plains of Manitoba, tens of thousands of red-sided garter snakes come boiling out of the depths of the earth. Before dispersing, they come together to mate in what is truly one of nature’s most riveting spectacles.
By Alex Shoumatoff / Photography by Chip Simons
The males emerge from the …Read More
Draft of an entry on the decimation of the Amazon Indians for a forthcoming three-volume encyclopedia on genocide and crimes against humanity, to be published by MacMillan, under the general editorship of Diane l. Shelton
_______________________________________________
The decimation of the Amazon’s native people over the past four centuries illustrates two patterns outlined in Benjamin Whitaker’s l985 …Read More
I am now [having sung and strummed a few peace songs with my three little boys] going to give a brief speech that is probably going to get me audited and sent to Guantanamo, but here goes :
The John Brown Homestead seems a somewhat strange venue for a peace rally, considering that Brown’s approach …Read More
June 25, 2003 :
1. The Largest Prairie-Dog Town On Earth
On March 16, the fam and I set out from Montreal for Chihuahua to see the world’s largest extant prairie-dog town. Its 150,000 residents live on roughly 90,000 acres of shortgrass prairie there. Technically, this is a complex, made up of many interconnected towns, which …Read More
This piece was commissioned by TheSpook, a lively Web rag started by the multi-talented and multifaceted Anthony Sapienza, who subsequently changed the name to Metropole. Posting it as a Dispatch is admittedly a bit of a stretch—what, after all, does investigative golf have to do with the vanishing world ?—but I’m including it because it’s …Read More
by Alex Shoumatoff
Dr. Maurice Dongier, a neuropsychiatrist who studies the causes of alcoholism at McGill University, and I are related by marriage, through an extended family of Rwandese émigrés in Montreal. His son is married to the sister of my wife’s sister’s husband (if you can follow that). At a recent family gathering, Maurice …Read More
1. The Ocean As The Last Frontier of Planetary Stewardship
In l997 I wrote a proposal for a long magazine piece about the state of the world’s oceans, part of a series on the state of the environment at the turn of the millennium, that never happened. “I will first head for the pool …Read More
(A shorter and in some ways better version of this, deftly edited, as usual, by Sheila Glaser, appears in the March, 2003 issue of Travel & Leisure.)
The Pantanal do Mato Grosso, in west-central Brazil, south of the Amazon, is the largest swamp on earth. In the summer rainy season, from October to March, it …Read More
(This is the full, the complete, unexpurgated “twenty-three-thousand-plus” Dispatch, more than seven times longer than the report the Kaplan Fund commissioned. But there was so much of interest that I wanted to do it full justice, because few people are aware of the amazing churches in the northern plains of Canada, and they are going …Read More
by Alex Shoumatoff, based on his visit to the island March 19-26, 2001
Cuba is rife with philanthropic possibility on both the architectural and ecological
preservation fronts. The casual visitor is impressed by how well this last bastion of communism seems to work for all its citizens, how despite the embargo there is food and health care …Read More
by Alex Shoumatoff
I wrote this for Men’s Journal in l998, was paid, and never heard from them again and forgot about it myself, so I can only speculate on the reasons why it was never published. I am posting it as an interim dispatch, taking a quick breather from my book, because it illustrates the …Read More
Four years after this conference, it is 50 degrees in Montreal in December, which just experienced the warmest October and November on record, like much of eastern North America. Al Gore, the great white hope for the environment, is history at the moment, but he may rise again from the ashes. In any case, we …Read More
By Elizabeth Fisk
These Dispatches could use a voice and a take or two other than my own, particularly since I am really cranking on my Rwanda book and am not traveling and don’t have the time until around March 1st to post anything substantial except for old work myself. Fortuitously, Liz Fisk has gloriously and …Read More
Twenty years ago, I spent two months traveling around Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Having spent some time in the Amazon, I wanted to see how the world’s second-largest rainforest compared. It was my first trip to Africa, and the unfettered joie de vivre and creativity of the Zairois (who are actually …Read More
The original version for the United Nations Foundation
For those who want to go more deeply into the situation in eastern Congo, here is the 26,000-word site report I delivered to the United Nations Foundaton in October of last year. It contains the greatest detail on the status of the parks and their wildlife and on …Read More
Rolling Stone Edit
This has been distilled and adapted from the original report for the United Nations Foundation, and has benefited from deft editing by Rolling Stone’s Bill Tonelli.
–AS
Kahuzi Biega was supposed to be the safest of the parks on my itinerary. The last one, Virungas, was totally overrun by “negative forces,” as the various …Read More
On August 8 of this year, 2001, I drove from our place in the Adirondacks to Cambridge, Massachusetts to discuss a possible future Dispatch with a Shamar Rinpoche, a high lama of the kagiu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, and an American practitioner whom I have known since childhood. The drive across New England took five …Read More