National Geographic Magazine October 2021

WE’RE IN THE MIDDLE of one revolution—and are soon to launch another. These upheavals, both leading to a more sustainable future, are the products not of human conflict but of human ingenuity. Simply put, we’re utterly reinventing how we get from here to there. “Cars and trucks are undergoing their greatest makeover since the automobile’s inception more than a century ago,” writer Craig Welch notes in the first of this issue’s two stories on the future of transportation. Almost overnight, electric cars are proliferating, as carbon dioxide-belching internal combustion engines head for the endangered species list. In air transportation, the other mode we examine, change is more gradual. There are promising developments in sustainable aviation fuel made from waste products, planes fueled by “green” hydrogen, and aircraft with zero-emission, battery-powered electric engines. Most…

LOOKING AT THE EARTH FROM EVERY POSSIBLE ANGLE In images that could be mistaken for paintings, a photographer records how mine waste has ruined a valley near his Romanian hometown.…

THE ROȘIA POIENI copper mine appears like a wound on Romania’s Apuseni Mountains. An open-pit mine operated by a state-owned company, it draws from the largest copper deposit in the country. In 1978, needing somewhere to discard the mine’s waste, President Nicolae Ceaușescu initiated the removal of residents from the neighboring village of Geamăna. Water and the mine’s sludge were then released into the village and the Şesii Valley, forming an artificial, partly viscous lake. Gheorghe Popa grew up about two hours away by car, in the town of Aiud, at the base of the Apuseni Mountains. A pharmacist and nature photographer, Popa first encountered the dumping site in 2014. “To this day,” he wrote in the Romanian edition of National Geographic, “I can’t forget that chemical smell that even filled…

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MY MOTHER UPHELD a steely work ethic. Laboring in the fields, and laboring through 11 live births—news that made our local East Los Angeles newspaper—how could she not? She had grown up in L.A. during the violent anti-Mexican deportation raids of the 1920s and ’30s, when massive sweeps herded immigrants and citizens alike. And although she believed in marriage, she became bitterly resentful of her financial dependence on my father. Thus she was determined to prevent her six daughters, us girls, from falling into the same predicaments. With the capricious raids always reminding her how “disposable” we were as Latinas, she strove to create a female tribe unafraid of hard work, a loving commune unto ourselves. At home, there was no expectation of charity. We worked for every need outside of…

Women make up nearly half of the U.S. workforce and earn more college degrees than men, yet they are not projected to close gender pay gaps for years to come. The march to pay equity will take much longer for some women of color than others. If current trends persist, Asian women will likely achieve parity first and Black women and Latinas won’t reach parity this century. PROJECTIONS BASED ON PACE OF CHANGE FOR THE PAST 50 YEARS. DATA FOR NATIVE AMERICANS NOT AVAILABLE. GENERATION DEFINED AS A 25-YEAR PERIOD. MONICA SERRANO, NGM STAFF. KELSEY NOWAKOWSKI, IRENE BERMAN-VAPORIS. ILLUSTRATION: GERALDINE SY SOURCES: INSTITUTE FOR WOMEN’S POLICY RESEARCH; NASA; U.S. CENSUS; NOAA…