Geographical Magazine December 2023 Back Issue

All too often, it feels as if human innovation comes at the expense of nature. Take one of our most important inventions: the electric light. Life-giving in many ways, it allows humans to more safely navigate dark nights, but for fireflies it is nothing short of a nightmare. On page 24, Simon Payne shines a light (excuse the pun) on these little-understood beetles and reports on human efforts to reinstate firefly sanctuaries. While we may have a chance to save fireflies, for much of the Aral Sea, hope is over, as Chris Aslan reports on page 32. For the people of this region, home is now a very different place, and yet people carry on, as people everywhere do. It is perhaps this – our resilience – that redeems humans in the face of all our flaws, a theme we touch on when exploring the humanitarian crisis in Abyei (page 50), an often-forgotten region sandwiched between Sudan and South Sudan which faces a horrifying array of conflicts and pressures