Paul Salopek: prediction

Transcript context

…What kind of reading or prep do you do for each region? Or how do you choose what to consume? How does that process work? It starts pretty much the way foreign correspondents do their reading. You read other foreign correspondents’ work, mostly in your own language. I can read in Spanish, too, but the vast bulk of what I read is in English. I read reporters’ books, which lead to going to more specialized reading on everything, from climate to human rights to geology to biodiversity to language extinction. It’s just endless. In a way, all the years that I’ve been working as an international correspondent have kind of been prep work. The way I would approach a big story in Africa back when I was based in Johannesburg is pretty much the way I continue to approach research on this project, the difference being that now, because I’ve slowed down and taken more time, I can access more indigenous systems of knowledge that I didn’t have the time to do before. That involves everything from talking to a farmer who can instruct me on how gophers might predict weather by the shape of the berms that they push out of their holes in the morning — whether rain is coming or not — to talking to scientists from the regions that I’m walking to, talking to archeologists, talking to agronomists, talking to road-builders, talking to engineers, talking to the guys digging the ditch and putting a gas pipeline in, which just happened two days ago, and watching in wonder as they’re laying PVC pipe next to a river in western China, a fascinating, amazing technology that makes you both alarmed to be human but also proud to be human. We’re clever creatures. How do you fund the whole venture? How does that work?…

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