In the Peruvian Amazon, two Indigenous groups have been battling the government and oil companies for decades to prevent an incursion they believe would forever alter their homeland. An immense…
Avoiding the loss of human life and the economic fallout caused by future pandemics will require a seismic change in our approach to the causes of the emergence of disease-causing…
Mining, both legal and illegal, impinges on more than one-fifth of Indigenous territory in the Amazon, according to a new study from the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the Amazon…
The world’s protected areas are largely a jumble of disjointed refuges, separated from each other by the encroachment of human impacts, a recent study has found. Fewer than 10% of…
Early on in his new book, The Nature of Nature: Why We Need the Wild, marine ecologist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence Enric Sala offers a warning about our ability to…
New Guinea's diversity of life, cultures and landscapes has long inspired prominent scientists, from Alfred Russel Wallace to Jared Diamond. Sitting just below the equator at the nexus of Asia…
In 2016, a mountain lion known as P-45 killed 10 alpacas on a ranch in California’s Santa Monica Mountains. That’s rare behavior for a mountain lion, writes wildlife biologist Mark…
Companies and governments are pushing for the privatization of land around the world as a way to get at economically valuable resources, according to a recent report from the Oakland…
A pork and chicken producer has expanded its operations in northern Ecuador with the help of funding from the World Bank's commercial lending arm, despite sustained complaints from local communities…
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…
John is a staff features writer with Mongabay. He 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 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 and their two cats. Follow him on Twitter: @johnccannon.
