Two German cartographers, Stephan Hormes and Silke Peust, have created an atlas that renders the world's place names into their original meanings. The book is titled, "The Atlas of True Names." To produce it, Hormes and Peust distilled the names of hundreds of cities, countries, mountains, deserts, and the like, down to their etymological essences, and then wrote out the results in modern English. "New York City," for instance, is given as, "New Yew-Tree Village," and "Great Britain" is recast as "Great Land of the Tatooed." Hormes told Der Spiegel a few days ago that he was inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings;" the place names that Tolkien bestowed upon Middle Earth (such as, Mirkwood, or Mount Doom), he said, "are so clear that every kid understands them." As can be expected, the etymologies of real place names are frequently unclear, and linguistic skeptics have already started to pick apart the project. But the atlas was not intended to be a work of scholarship. It is a playful mediation on words -- one that the authors hope will restore "an element of enchantment to the world we all think we know so well."
Agents with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service raided Gibson Guitar Co.'s manufacturing facility in Nashville, yesterday, to search the premises for evidence of illegal wood. The raid is something of a watershed, as it is the first of its kind to be carried out under the authority of an environmental law called the Lacey Act. For decades, the Lacey Act has barred the smuggling of wildlife into this country, but last year Congress expanded its legal protection to plants by criminalizing the possession of wood that has been harvested or traded in violation of any other country's environmental laws. An important aspect of the new legislation is that it does not allow for an "innocent owner" defense, meaning that illegal wood can be confiscated even if American buyers do not know of its black-market provenance. The Nashville Post reported that the federal agents seized wood, guitars, computers, and boxes of files from the Gibson facility. (Gibson has said that it is "fully cooperating" with the government.) If the investigation results in prosecution, the case is bound to be complex. Until the raid, Gibson's CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, was a board member of the Rainforest Alliance, and for several years now he has been urging members of his industry to use wood that is certified as sustainable. (About forty per cent of Gibson's guitars "contain some certified wood," according to the Forest Stewardship Council.) Federal agents suspect that Gibson imported illegal hardwood from Madagascar, where, in the past several months, political chaos has been accompanied by exceptional rates of environmental degradation. The species under investigation appears to be rosewood or ebony -- it is not clear which. Since January, an estimated thirty-five million dollars worth of Madagascan rosewood has been cut every month -- much of it by criminal syndicates and armed gangs working in national parks. Several weeks ago, Andry Rajoelina, a politician who seized power in Madagascar during a military coup this spring, issued a decree legalizing the sale of certain types of rosewood and ebony.
In a few months, Paul Watson and members of his Sea Shepherd Conservation Society are scheduled to set sail from Australia to the Southern Ocean, off the coast of Antarctica, to harass the Japanese whaling fleet during its annual hunt there. In 2007, I wrote about a similar expedition that Watson had commanded, and about his evolution as an activist and eco-provocateur. Since then, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has been busy generating more mischief, and attracting more publicity, ridicule, and ire. With the help of Animal Planet, the cable network, Watson has turned his annual trips to the Southern Ocean into a successful reality show, called, "Whale Wars." The show has achieved enough notoriety to be parodied on "South Park," which aired an episode earlier this year, titled, "Whale Whores." (The artists of "South Park" depicted Watson as a man of immense girth -- his belly sagging far below the confines of his shirt -- and as a sea captain who proclaims, "Yeah, we're badass," but who ultimately is killed by a Japanese harpoon.) More damaging than the satire, perhaps, was the Canadian government's confiscation of one of Watson's ships -- the MV Farley Mowat -- during a Sea Shepherd campaign conducted last year to interfere with the hunting of seals. At the time, Canada's Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, Loyola Hearn, called Watson and his crew "a bunch of money-sucking manipulators," and Watson responded by calling the seizure "an act of war." This spring, when the Canadian government put up the Farley Mowat for sale, Watson warned potential buyers, "You don't steal a ship from a pirate without repercussions." But it is unlikely that he will do anything about the loss of that old and rusting vessel, as it was virtually unseaworthy, and he has long wanted to get rid of it. Just recently, Watson announced a new addition to his fleet: a black trimaran speedboat that looks like it was stolen from the set of Batman. (See video above.) The ship, named the Ady Gil, after the Hollywood mogul who in large measure paid for it, reportedly cost $1.5 million dollars, and holds a world record for circumnavigating the globe (sixty days, twenty-three hours, forty-nine minutes). Apparently, it is difficult to detect by radar, travels up to fifty knots, and can even dive through large waves, rather than pass over them. Watson's crew fortified the Ady Gil with a ton of kevlar armor. How it will survive in a confrontation with the flagship of the Japanese fleet, the eight-thousand-ton Nisshin Maru, remains to be seen.
Last month, Raymond Girouard, a former staff sergeant in the Army who was convicted of negligent homicide, among other crimes, for his actions in Iraq, was released on parole from the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. He returned to his home in Sweetwater, Tennessee. As I wrote in The New Yorker earlier this year, members of Girouard's unit murdered three detainees in 2006 during a vast air-assault mission called Operation Iron Triangle; five soldiers belonging to his squad later testified that Girouard had helped orchestrate the killings. Despite the convictions, Girouard maintains his innocence, and his community has stood by him. According to the Advocate & Democrat, a paper based in Sweetwater, Girouard was given a "homecoming" welcome by an enthusiastic crowd. The town mayor, Doyle Lowe, and Congressman John Duncan, Jr. spoke in a park on Girouard's behalf. "As a young man he served our country, and made decisions most of us have never thought about making, and will never have to make," the mayor said. Duncan, who had lobbied for Girouard's early release, told the people in attendance, "God's path has led him back here to us and, I, along with everyone else, want to welcome him home."
