Articles by Matt Rinaldi
Born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1979, Matthew Rinaldi earned a BA in English from Fordham University in 2002. The following year he relocated to São Paulo, Brazil, where he would reside for 15 years. During that time, he learned the Portuguese language and developed a career as a translator specializing in contemporary art, culture, and photography, and working for some of the country's most prominent museums, cultural institutions, and publishing houses. Rinaldi also accumulated a scattering of writing credits, contributing chapters to Jonathan Runge's Rum & Reggae's Brasil, articles on the FLIP literary festival to Gobshite Quarterly, and a feature on the burgeoning urban farming movement in New York City to the Brazilian magazine RED Report. His literary translations have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Anomaly and Machado de Assis Magazine.
Special series
Forest Trackers
- Deforestation intensifies in northern Malaysia’s most important water catchment
- Authorities and Yobin communities clash as deforestation spikes in Indian national park
- Mennonite colony builds bridge, clears forest in Bolivian protected areas
- Satellites show deforestation surging in Indonesia’s Tesso Nilo National Park

Oceans
- In a hotter, drier climate, how serious is fire risk to island seabirds?
- Indonesia backtracks on plan criticized for ‘privatizing’ fisheries resources
- Love ‘em and loathe ‘em: Mediterranean grapples with tasty, voracious invasive crabs
- Overlooked and at risk, seagrass is habitat of choice for many small-scale fishers

Amazon Conservation
- Amazon deforestation on pace to roughly match last year’s rate of loss
- Brazil’s new deforestation data board sparks fear of censorship of forest loss, fires
- First-of-its-kind freshwater mangroves discovered in Brazil’s Amazon Delta
- Swiss pledge to stop illegal gold imports from Brazil Indigenous reserves

Land rights and extractives
- ‘The water is brown’: Community in Guyana rings the alarm over unsustainable mining near river
- Organized crime drives violence and deforestation in the Amazon, study shows
- Worries and whispers in Vietnam’s NGO community after activist’s sentencing
- Displaced by a dam, women defenders fight for their land rights in Colombia

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
- A utopia of clean air and wet peat amid Sumatra’s forest fire ‘hell’
- From Flores to Papua: Meet 10 of Indonesia’s mangrove guardians
- Why I stand for my tribe’s forest: It gives us food, culture, and life (commentary)
- Reforesting a village in Indonesia, one batch of gourmet beans at a time

Conservation Effectiveness
- 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
- How sharing and learning from failures can transform conservation (commentary)

Southeast Asian infrastructure
- In Laos, a ‘very dangerous dam’ threatens an ancient world heritage site
- Bali’s new highway project sparks concerns about agriculture and conservation areas
- Deforestation notches up along logging roads on PNG’s New Britain Island
- Plantations and roads strip away Papua’s forests. They’re just getting started
