The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 caught Costa Rica’s Cabécar Indigenous communities at a precarious time. Amid the species-rich forests of the Talamanca Cabécar Indigenous territory, climate change had already begun…
Funders of a $1.7 billion pledge announced at the 2021 U.N. climate conference say they disbursed around 19% of the money to bolster the land rights of Indigenous and local…
In October 2020, a set of maps appeared in the pages of Nature apparently proposing a straightforward solution to the twin crises of global biodiversity loss and climate change. Splashed…
In her new book, Karen Bakker relates a story from Brazilian researcher Rafael José de Menezes Bastos that crystallizes how differently some humans process and respond to the sounds around…
"Nature, red in tooth and claw.” According to Alfred Tennyson's poem, “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” that line describes "Creation's final law." Scholars say it captures the sometimes ruthless nature of ……
A spate of North Atlantic right whale deaths that began in 2017 shook the scientists who study the critically endangered species. That year, 17 whales died, and the losses prompted…
Heat waves are reshaping life in the Mediterranean, with few of the sea’s coves, bays and shorelines untouched, according to a recent study looking at the impact of marine heat…
Giant tortoises (Chelonoidis spp.) have trundled across the Galápagos Islands for perhaps 3 million years. Over that time, they’ve evolved to survive with little food or water in the islands’…
Since 1960, the world has lost an area of forest larger than the island of Borneo, according to a recent study. That net loss of 817,000 square kilometers (315,000 square…
Some 50,000 wild species provide for many of the world’s people, according to a recent report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). But today, those…
A focus on valuing nature through the lens of the market has contributed to the global biodiversity crisis, according to a recent report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity…
The world’s largest bank of the partially decomposed plant matter known as peat in the tropics is even more extensive than initially thought, according to a new study. The peatlands…
Tropical deforestation is a cost our planet pays every day for the food we eat. The palm oil in our ice cream, the steak on our tables, and the soy…
Iluka Alain was a bit surprised when the two men turned up on a motorcycle in December 2021 in Bofekalasumba, the village where he’s chief in the northwestern Democratic Republic…
The Sepik River takes an unhurried 1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles, to snake from the lush highland rainforests of western Papua New Guinea, swerving momentarily across the border into Indonesia’s…
The Tongass National Forest in the U.S. state of Alaska is a special place for conservation biologist Dominick DellaSala, even after decades of traveling the world to study temperate rainforests.…
In the introduction to his new book, conservation biologist David Shiffman quotes Senegalese forestry engineer and conservationist Baba Dioum: “In the end we will conserve only what we love; we…
On a breezeless, sunbaked beach in Borneo, one of the biggest challenges paleobotanist Peter Wilf faced in his team’s hunt for plant fossils was getting used to a new set…
The first time you see a proboscis monkey (Nasalis larvatus), you might be hit with a mix of fascination, joy and perhaps some confusion: muscular limbs attached to a pot-bellied…
It might be surprising to learn that, in a lake as large as Victoria, a single fish could shape so much of East Africa’s history, culture and, now, an uncertain…
The Mediterranean is a cradle — of civilization, of agriculture, of history. But the region, stretching across southern and southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, is also a…
As hot and muggy as most tropical rainforests are, you only need to leave their florid confines and step onto a recently razed plot of land to feel an immediate…
In the past decade, the European bison (Bison bonasus) has made a comeback in Central and Eastern Europe. Hunters had killed the last known bison in the region nearly a…
Current pledges to cut emissions won’t be enough to slow climate change, according to a new report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). U.N. Secretary-General António…
Organizations in the Malaysian state of Sabah have filed a complaint with the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples about a once-secretive deal aimed at locking up…
The rate at which carbon escaped from the deforestation of tropical forests more than doubled in the first two decades of the 21st century, according to new research. Earlier assessments…
International conservation groups are calling on countries in the Global North to provide billions more dollars every year to protect the world’s biodiversity. “The future of humanity is literally at…
Climate change is endangering the health of the planet, humanity, and the species and ecosystems that anchor life on Earth, according to a report released Feb. 28 by the Intergovernmental…
Years of artisanal mining along the Madre de Dios River and its tributaries have left their marks, both seen and unseen. Miners, swarming to the region in a modern-day goldrush,…
Midway through a recent documentary called Last of the Right Whales, we get a drone’s-eye view of half a dozen jet-black right whales cuddling and caressing while lolling in an…
John is a staff features writer with Mongabay. Follow him on Twitter: @johnccannon.
John became a correspondent for Mongabay in 2014 and joined the site's team full time in October 2016. John's journalistic work has also appeared in New Scientist, Slate.com, Yale Environment 360, Pacific Standard, Science (online), Business Insider and Bicycle Times. John has been a guest on the BBC as well as NPR's All Things Considered and Living on Earth, and he has also had several short stories published in literary magazines. He studied biology as an undergraduate at the Ohio State University and has a graduate degree in science writing from UC Santa Cruz. Always eager to find local perspectives on globally relevant stories, John has reported from Brunei, Cameroon, Central Africa Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Peru and Rwanda. He currently lives in Afghanistan with his wife.
