Articles by Isabel Esterman

This is the first article in our four-part series “The Rhino Debacle." It’s hardly the most likely place to meet a Sumatran rhino. But as you enter Zimmer Hall at…

JOHOR BAHRU, Malaysia – On Jan. 1, 2014, fishermen near Kampong Pok, a village on Malaysia’s southern shore, were alarmed to find a fleet of barges and dredgers dumping sand…

Traditional landholders in the Papua New Guinea highlands say they finally see signs of progress in a cycle of contentious negotiations over land rights and royalties at a massive ExxonMobil-led…

KUANTAN, Malaysia — Beijing is more than 4,200 kilometers (2,600 miles) north of the sandy beaches, oil palm plantations and tropical forests that distinguish peninsula Malaysia’s less prosperous South China…

KUALA LUMPUR — Before the May 9 election that swept Najib Razak and his Barisan Nasional coalition from power, the then prime minister of Malaysia presided over one of the…

“We stayed quiet for a while because after the customary fine they never came back," said Markus, deputy head of the village council in Ongko Asa, a traditional Dayak village…

Laos will suspend new hydropower projects and carry out safety inspections of all existing dams, the government announced last week. The Aug. 7 decision came in the aftermath of the…

KUALA LUMPUR — By 2012, when then-prime minister Najib Razak formally launched the River of Life project to improve water quality and restore the aesthetic virtue of the Klang River,…

GEORGE TOWN, Malaysia — Muddy carpets and soaked furniture lay in moldering piles on the streets of this state capital. It was Sunday morning, Oct. 29, 2017. Eight days earlier,…

Spring Energy is the just the sort of homegrown, super successful, keenly entrepreneurial company that developing nations across the world crave. Based in a tidy three-story building not far from…

The illicit demand for their horns and other body parts has pushed rhino populations in both Africa and Asia to the brink of extinction. In northeastern India, though, one father-daughter…

Landowners in Papua New Guinea’s Hela province have threatened to expand and escalate their blockade of a natural gas project there, after an attempt at negotiation fell through. Plant operator…

PADANG BIRAU, Indonesia: It’s been more than two months since Rasid has felt safe sleeping in his bedroom. Ever since a crack appeared in the wall, he’s slept in his…

ASSAM STATE, India: It’s 5 a.m. and Officer Zorba is reporting for duty at Kaziranga National Park, the global stronghold of the one-horned rhino (Rhinoceros unicornis) and the epicenter of…

PORT MORESBY — Heavily armed civilian groups have burned and damaged ExxonMobil construction equipment in a land dispute involving a natural gas plant in Papua New Guinea. The civil unrest…

As it seeks to diversify its sources of fuel, India is looking to get in on the ground floor of coal mining in previously unexploited deposits in Indonesian Papua. In…

In a forest in Borneo, a single two-horned rhino lives, separated from any other of her kind. Conservationists are currently planning to catch this Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) and bring…

This is the second article in a two-part series on poaching in Jaldapara National Park. In Part One, interviews with former poachers revealed the inner workings of wildlife trafficking in…

Interviews with former poachers reveal the inner workings of wildlife trafficking in West Bengal state.

In 2008, when a consortium led by ExxonMobil was drumming up support for a $19 billion natural gas extraction and processing project in Papua New Guinea, proponents of the development…