Rolando Navarro Gómez has been the executive president of Peru's forestry monitoring agency, known as OSINFOR, or Organismo de Supervisión de los Recursos Forestales y Fauna Silvestre, since 2012. A forestry…
Yesterday, Brazil’s federal police in Minas Gerais charged Samarco CEO, Ricardo Vescovi De Aragao, for environmental crimes caused by the disruption of the Fundão tailings dam — Brazil’s largest environmental disaster.…
The much-awaited Nicaragua Canal --linking the Pacific Ocean with the Caribbean Sea-- has been mired in controversy and on hold since November. Now, indigenous communities in its path say they're being…
by 8 January 2016
Madre de Dios is the heart of Peru's Amazon; its cloud and tropical rainforests contain a great diversity of animals including birds, amphibians, and threatened species, aside from being home to Manu National…
The year is ending on a grim note in Peru: yet another environmental leader that vocally opposed a dam project has been murdered in his home in the town of Yagen, in…
It’s shift change time on the monitoring raft on Lake Tarapoto, deep in the Colombian Amazon. Lisette Johanna Escobar, an undergraduate student researcher at the Universidad Nacional in Leticia, climbs…
The pinabete pine tree from Guatemala has been cut down for decades, and there are few left that grow as tall as they used to be, 45 meters high. This 40 year-old specimen is…
The evictions On the edge of a large clearing below the steep forested ridges of Ecuador's Cordillera del Condor, in the province of Zamora Chinchipe, Luis Arévalo holds a mud-stained remnant…
Samarco is a joint venture between two mining companies, BHP Billiton Brasil Ltda. and Vale S.A., currently ranking as the 10th largest exporting company in Brazil. For five years, it…
A boat carries freshly-cut logs along the Tambopata River in Perú. Photo by George Powell. “We will keep working on these operations [such as 'Operación Amazonas']," said to Mongabay a Peruvian government…
Last weekend, while the official COP21 negotiations were going on north of Paris at a site called Le Bourget, leaders of indigenous nations in North and South America were in…
There has been a 25% increase in the number of wildfires in Brazil since January 2015. According to the country’s National Institute of Space Research, or INPE, this year 220,000 fires…
At 4:00 am on November 24, the Specialized District Attorney's Office on Environmental Issues in Loreto, in Peru's Amazon region, seized the equivalent of 60 trucks full of cargo, filled to…
Since November 23, the southeastern region of Madre de Dios in Peru has been paralyzed by street protests, road blockades, and tire burnings. Hundreds of illegal gold miners concentrated in…
The tragedy that struck Minas Gerais in early November caused by the rupture of two dams controlled by the Samarco mining company brings us to an uncomfortable fact: Vale S.A., one of…
The son of the president of a reforestation association who was murdered on November 19 vowed to continue his father’s work in Peru’s southern Amazonian forest. “We want to be…
Earlier this month, the Fundão dam in the state of Minas Gerais broke, starting the biggest environmental disaster in the country. Since then, the possibly 62 million liters of…
Two months after the first isolated fires were identified in Terra Indígena Arariboia, in the state of Maranhão, the trail of destruction is still visible. Although the fire was controlled,…
The Green Macaw (Ara ambiguus) is an Endangered species. Traffickers hunt it on the banks of Nicaragua’s San Juan River. Captured birds are often transported for sale to San Salvador…
The residents of the districts of Fitzcarrald and Manu, in the Madre de Dios region of southeastern Peru, want a road. Villagers from Diamante, Shipetiari, and Boca Manu describe its…
Last Wednesday, September 23, an estimated 200 indigenous residents from Sector Boca Manu, Comunidad Nativa Diamante, and Isla de los Valles located near Manu National Park decided to take their protests to the next…