In his 2006 book, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, science writer David Quammen says, “Some people admire soldiers, or surgeons, or firemen, or astrophysicists, or medical missionaries, or cowboys. I admire…
The COVID-19 pandemic and the arrival of fire season in two of the world’s major rainforests are on a collision course, scientists and public health researchers say, and the results…
As a young boy living on South Dakota’s Rosebud Indian Reservation, Wizipan Little Elk remembers the first time he saw a buffalo herd. The experience ignited a passion, and at…
Researchers have detected the "first major fire of 2020" in the Brazilian Amazon three months ahead of the fire season, while other scientists warn that there could be a “catastrophe”…
The statistics capturing the effects that pets have on wildlife are mind-boggling. Cats in the United States alone kill at least 1.3 billion birds and up to 22.3 billion small…
KOKOPO, Papua New Guinea — Change. That’s what Monica Yongol has seen in her 54 years. In that time, the loggers and then the oil palm companies have moved into…
Like much of the world, Argentina remains locked down, its citizens more or less homebound due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Amid the torpor, Yamana Gold, a Canada-based mining company,…
The Land Portal Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in the Netherlands, recently released what it’s calling “the largest global database of land and property rights projects.” In around a decade…
On satellite images, the Panguna mine yawns amid the otherwise green mountain forests of central Bougainville Island in the South Pacific, a silty river valley tracing a jagged path from…
Illegal gold mining led to deforestation of thousands of hectares of forests inside indigenous reserves in the Brazilian Amazon, according to new satellite image analysis by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP). Mongabay had exclusive access to the report prior to its release.
The peatlands of the Congo Basin are home to more than just massive carbon stocks and some of our closest — and most threatened — relatives in the animal kingdom,…
More than a decade of illegal gold mining around the upstart town of La Pampa in the Peruvian Amazon has tainted local water supplies, razed forests adjacent to a world-class…
Pan American Silver, one of the world’s largest mining companies, operates eight mines in Central and South America that are beset with allegations of environmental disruption and human rights violations,…
The scale of excavation for copper and gold in the 1970s and 1980s at the Panguna mine, then one of the world’s largest open-pit mines, was massive: It swallowed up…
A new analysis based on estimated deforestation in the Amazon in 2019 pinpoints hotspots of forest loss and identifies several country-specific trends in the region. The figures project that deforestation…
Fish stocks around the world are doing better, in general, where science guides their management, according to a recent study. Publishing their findings Jan. 13 online in the journal Proceedings…
Fish are an indispensable source of food and protein for communities in many African countries. But the growth in industrial-scale fishing fleets around the continent has put that resource and…
Scientists know from a bevy of studies that the inclusion of indigenous peoples and local communities is critical to holding deforestation at bay across the tropics, even as a tide…
The effects of commercial logging, mining and farming can ripple beyond the boundaries of the operations, leading to the substantial loss and degradation of nearby forest for subsistence agriculture, a…
More than one-third of the world’s remaining pristine forests, known as intact forest landscapes, exist within land that’s either managed or owned by indigenous peoples, a new study has found.…
Governments could vastly improve the efficiency of money spent on conservation if they took a hard look at the species they prioritize, according to a recent study. The research probed…
Grappling with the challenges of minimizing carbon footprints, memoirs of careers spent on the frontlines of conservation and stark warnings about the future inhabitability of our world, the roster of…
PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea — The upstart deforestation over the past year and a half that's sidling up to Pochon Lili’s land has him worried. "As a landowner, I'm…
The outlook for eastern Africa's mountain gorillas is growing brighter, as a recent census released on Dec. 16 shows that the subspecies’ numbers have risen since 2011. Scientists believe there…
For seabirds, an Arctic Ocean with less sea ice could provide some tantalizing alternatives to the long-haul flights that some undertake each year. In a recent study, ecologist Manon Clairbaux…
The prevailing narrative about the Brazilian Amazon this past summer was that the world’s largest rainforest was burning. A more accurate assessment would be that vast areas that used to…
The world’s most impoverished communities don’t need to be told that intact ecosystems are vital to their health, says Joseph Walston, vice president for field conservation programs with the Wildlife…
A recent study suggests that a lot of fraudulently or inaccurately identified wood turns up in products on the U.S. market and that inspectors’ capacity to root out these issues…
VIRUNGA NATIONAL PARK, Democratic Republic of Congo — Seven meters. It’s one of the first instructions you get from the guides at Virunga National Park, nestled against the eastern border…
Tropical deforestation may spur the transmission of malaria at levels much higher than once thought, according to a recent study. Disease ecologist Andrew MacDonald and his Stanford University colleague Erin…
John is an American journalist currently based in Gaza City. Before that, he lived in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic. He has written for New Scientist, Slate.com, Yale Environment 360 and Bicycle Times, as well as other publications. John first wrote for Mongabay as a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz in 2008, became a correspondent in 2014 and joined the site’s team full time in October 2016. Always eager to find local perspectives on global stories, he has reported from Cameroon, CAR, DRC, Peru, Malaysia and Rwanda.
