Sunday Stills: Brazil Comes Out Ahead—in Climate Change

Watch: The Iceberg Shred View the email on a web browser. Sunday Stills ISSUE 18 Sunday, June 15, 2014 PROOF A Wrinkle in Time PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN STANMEYER “The thing about time is that time isn’t really real. It’s just your point of view.” —James Taylor “I knew already in 1977 about the moving hands of time,” writes photographer John Stanmeyer. “Calendar time. Geological time, yet only my personal experience of aging affirmed any reality of time. In actuality, [Taylor’s] song about life resonated far more on the science emanating from that one verse than any other lyrics—our sense of time and the spacial sense of time is not actually a reality. It was just a perspective or indeed, my point of view.” READ NEWS Brazil Comes Out Ahead PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX WEBB Brazil’s success in slowing rain forest destruction has resulted in enormous reductions in carbon emissions and shows that it’s possible to zealously promote sustainability while still growing the economy. Tropical ecologist Daniel Nepstad notes, “Brazil is known as a leading favorite to win the World Cup, but they also lead the world in mitigating climate change.” READ PROOF A Powerful Self-Portrait Casts a Long Shadow Photograph by Felicia Simion “At one point, the self-portrait became more than just a portrait of myself. I started to look beyond what I saw inside the mirror, searching for my one and only identity.” —Felicia Simion While editing an assignment on self-portraits, assistant photo editor Marie McGrory started a discussion in the office among her peers: “Janna remembered Maynard Owen Williams’s reflective self-portrait and Coburn shared Cindy Sherman’s Untitled 96. In recent memory, I took interest in Kyle Thompson’s work,” Marie writes. “This project revitalized my love for those raw and revealing moments when a photographer turns the camera on themselves.” READ PROOF Life in Africa, Unfiltered PHOTOGRAPHS BY Jane Hahn, glenna gordon, and Peter DiCampo Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill founded Everyday Africa to fill a gap they perceived in the coverage of Africa—the normal. ‘Truthfully, our metric for success is to see ourselves become irrelevant—not because we’ll feel the project is complete, but because eventually people won’t need to look to our [Instagram] feed to see these types of images anymore,” Peter says. “The beauty of the Everyday Africa project is its simplicity—this isn’t a project that will teach you any great deep truths about Africa. It’s a project with [the] specific goal of showing the normal, familiar, mundane, everyday moments that commonly go unphotographed and unshared.” READ NEWS Early Birds PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBB KENDRICK Today’s hummingbirds ferry pollen from blossom to blossom, helping flowering plants reproduce. Their occupational ancestors, however, were birds of a different feather. According to a paper published in this week’s Biology Letters, a fossilized bird from millions of years ago offers the earliest, most direct evidence to date of bird pollination. READ Show Your Support: SHOP DONATE SUBSCRIBE TRAVEL BECOME A MEMBER You are receiving this email because ignoble.experiment@arconati.us is signed up to receive National Geographic communications. If you prefer not to receive emails from us, please unsubscribe. To ensure that you receive your National Geographic emails, please add ngs@e.nationalgeographic.com to your address book now. Learn how. Contact Us | Privacy Policy | About Us | Customer Service National Geographic | 1145 17th Street N.W. | Washington, D.C. 20036 Copyright © 2014 National Geographic Society. All Rights Reserved.