Seven financial firms key to rooting out deforestation, report finds
Exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, have swept through the financial world, building to a collective worth of $6.7 trillion by the second half of 2020. An ETF is a sort of…
Articles by John Cannon
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.
Timber organization’s backing ‘one step’ toward ‘peace park’ in Borneo
An intergovernmental organization representing countries that produce the bulk of the world’s timber has thrown its support behind a decade-long effort to protect the last remaining primary forest in the…
Protesters hold back military takeover of Balkans’ largest mountain pasture
Mileva "Gara" Jovanović's family has been taking cattle up to graze in Montenegro’s Sinjajevina Highlands for more than 140 summers. The mountain pastures of the Sinjajevina-Durmitor Massif are the largest…
11 notable books on conservation and the environment published in 2020
Books have provided a welcome refuge in 2020. The global pandemic has, in many cases, turned even routine travel into a risk not worth taking, and it has left many…
Soy moratorium averted New Jersey-size loss of Amazon rainforest: Study
The advent of the Amazon soy moratorium in 2006 seemed to usher in a new era of hope for ending deforestation for food production in the world’s largest rainforest. From…
Hope and peace: Bison return to the Rosebud reservation
The bison circled four times around the holding pen, before the lead animals took them into the 3,400-hectare (8,500-acre) pasture, their new home on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in the…
The promise of ‘bird-friendly’ cities: Q&A with author Timothy Beatley
Tim Beatley will humbly tell you that he’s not a birder. But in his new book, there are enough appearances by obscure members of the class Aves to suggest that…
Activists in Malaysia call on road planners to learn the lessons of history
Noormala Anwar’s frustration comes through in an Aug. 4 video she posted on Facebook. She swings her phone’s camera back and forth, revealing a bulldozer sitting right next to her…
Peruvian Indigenous groups thwart oil drilling in their territory — for now
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…
IPBES report details path to exit current ‘pandemic era’
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 covers more than 20% of Indigenous territory in the Amazon
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…
World’s protected areas lack connections, recent study finds
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…
‘Tamper with nature, and everyone suffers’: Q&A with ecologist Enric Sala
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…
Study revealing New Guinea’s plant life ‘first step’ toward protection
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…
The ‘Cougar Conundrum’: Q&A with author Mark Elbroch
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…
New report asks, do land titles help poor farmers?
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…
World Bank-funded factory farms dogged by alleged environmental abuses
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…
‘Saving sun bears’: Q&A with book author Sarah Pye
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…
COVID-19 and rainforest fires set up potential public health crisis
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…
Bison: (Back) home on the range
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…
Overlap of fire, COVID-19 peaks: A ‘catastrophe’ for Brazil’s Amazon
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”…
‘Don’t let your cat outside’: Q&A with author Peter Christie
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…
Gender-based violence shakes communities in the wake of forest loss
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…
Canadian company positions for mining ban lift in Argentine province
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,…
New database wrangles data on land rights projects around the globe
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…
Decades-old mine in Bougainville exacts devastating human toll: Report
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…
Gold mining threatens indigenous forests in the Brazilian Amazon
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.
Oil exploration at odds with peatland protection in the Congo Basin
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,…
Qualified success: What’s next for Peru’s Operation Mercury?
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…
Map reveals Canadian mining company’s environmental, social conflicts
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,…
Special series
Forest Trackers
- New oil refinery ‘a huge disaster’ for Nigerian forest reserve
- The Western Indian Ocean lost 4% of its mangroves in 24 years, report finds
- Poverty-fueled deforestation threatens Kenya’s largest water catchment
- Niger Delta mangroves in ‘grave danger’ from oil spills, poverty, invasive species
Oceans
- Indonesia’s sustainable fisheries push sails into storm in Java Sea
- Java fishers struggle with seine net ban amid rising costs, falling profits
- Agulhas Current enigma: An oceanic gap in our climate understanding
- U.S. charts course for adopting ropeless fishing to reduce whale deaths
Amazon Conservation
- In the Amazon, Bolsonaro’s far right may retain power even if Lula wins
- How close is the Amazon tipping point? Forest loss in the east changes the equation
- More droughts are coming, and the Amazon can’t keep up: Study
- European bill passes to ban imports of deforestation-linked commodities
Land rights and extractives
- Activists welcome decision to revoke permit for controversial Philippine gold mine
- Can Two New Bills Reshape Indigenous Rights and Illegal Gold Mining in Suriname?
- Venezuelan Amazon deforestation expands due to lawlessness, mining, fires: Reports
- Brazil miner sees Indigenous land as ripe for exploration if protections expire
Endangered Environmentalists
- Worries and whispers in Vietnam’s NGO community after activist’s sentencing
- Scientists call for end to violence against Amazon communities, environmental defenders
- Indigenous advocates sense a legal landmark as a guardian’s killing heads to trial
- In Brazil, an Indigenous land defender’s unsolved killing is the deadly norm
Indonesia's Forest Guardians
- Pioneer agroforester Ermi, 73, rolls back the years in Indonesia’s Gorontalo
- After 20 years and thousands of trees planted, Kalimantan’s veteran forester persists
- Aziil Anwar, Indonesian coral-based mangrove grower, dies at 64
- A utopia of clean air and wet peat amid Sumatra’s forest fire ‘hell’
Conservation Effectiveness
- ‘South Asia needs its own tiger plan’: Q&A with Nepal’s Maheshwar Dhakal
- Nepal was supposed to double its tiger population since 2010. It tripled it
- In prioritizing conservation, animal culture should be a factor, study says
- Young forests can help heal tropical aquatic ecosystems: Study
Southeast Asian infrastructure
- Java communities rally as clock ticks on cleanup of ‘world’s dirtiest river’
- ‘Cursed’ dam project in orangutan habitat claims 16th life in less than 2 years
- In Laos, a ‘very dangerous dam’ threatens an ancient world heritage site
- Bali’s new highway project sparks concerns about agriculture and conservation areas
