Several years ago, my colleague Richard York and I were sitting outside on a Eugene, Oregon patio discussing Elizabeth Kolbert’s then-new book, The Sixth Extinction, and we came to an…
Normally we only hear about the problems and risks of biological control, the use of one introduced organism to manage another. But one inconspicuous insect has accomplished miracles across tropical…
On a late night in December, I arrived in the village of Lunjuk on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. A warm breeze welcomed me as I sat down with 30…
1. The race is on to map the seafloor Is it true that we have explored the moon and Mars more thoroughly than the bottom of the ocean? Embarrassingly, yes.…
In 1982, an orangutan researcher working in Indonesian Borneo wrote to a colleague at the biology department at the National University in Jakarta. He told of meeting a traditional-medicine trader…
Last month, the Director General of WWF International, Marco Lambertini, issued an urgent call for what he called a global New Deal for Nature and People, or “a roadmap that…
On November 29, 2018, the 196 Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) adopted a decision that represents a high-water mark for the governance of protected areas and…
Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s President-elect, represents a globally significant threat to the world’s biggest tropical forest conservation legacy and the biggest tropical forest. If he does what he says he will…
"A 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community," climate and energy professor Kevin Anderson once told Grist. Even if we cut emissions by 3.5 percent a…
The best fictional detectives — Holmes, Tennison, Mars, Warshawski, Wallander — all employ their almost miraculous skills of observation and deduction to solve a whodunit. They rely on instinct, yes,…
Imagine being able to know how many individual organisms occur at any given time across areas as large as whole continents or even the entire globe. Though satellites may one…
In my lifetime, global wildlife populations have seen an overall decline of more than half. That’s a statement of such enormity that it’s hard to process. The evidence comes from…
The general public knows about the precarious situation of the world’s mostly recently identified great ape — the Tapanuli orangutan — within the Batang Toru Ecosystem. There, the construction of…
A Cerrado accord breakthrough could be at hand, conserving Brazil’s biodiverse savanna, and setting a new conservation precedent protecting not just forests but a mosaic of ecosystems.
On the morning of November 16 in Sacramento, California, amidst choking haze from the worst wildfires in the history of California, indigenous leaders from Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Nigeria, and the…
This week, the California Air Resources Board will meet to decide if it will adopt a set of comprehensive requirements for large-scale programs to reduce tropical deforestation emissions, known as…
November 6 is the UN’s International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict. A decade after a tragic war in Liberia that was largely…
One reserve is already gone and ten others are likely to go within the next few weeks when the legislature of one of Brazilian Amazonia’s most anti-environmental states votes on…
Gabon's President Ali Bongo announced on September 26, during a visit to a Rougier wood processing plant, that all forest concessions in Gabon will have to be certified with the…
Some corals look like giant boulders, others like branching trees—anything but what they actually are: animals. That is, unless you are lucky enough to see coral at night, when their…
