José Ramírez Talango is a retired teacher and beekeeper. When he was a child he used to walk through the jungle to reach Laguna Chakanbakán in the southeastern Mexican state…
Leticia Merino graduated from college with a degree in social psychology. But her plans to continue her studies in that field were thrown into doubt after she encountered a community…
Lucía Madrid spent her childhood in a land of trees and a time of flux. It was the 1980s in Mexico’s Sierra Norte de Oaxaca region, and communities were organizing…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. Additional support was provided by Earthsight. In late 2013, during a hearing convened by the local legislature of Indonesia’s Maluku province, a…
Homero Gómez González took a circuitous path to becoming an advocate for butterflies. After strongly opposing the creation of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, he became one of its most…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. Additional support was provided by Earthsight. When the politician in charge of Indonesia’s Aru Islands signed permits for a vast sugar plantation,…
For Ecuador, 2019 was a critical year for court decisions regarding environmental and social issues. At the end of 2018, the courts set precedent by ruling in favor of the…
Laura Jiménez, Manuel Herrera and Elías Santiago grew up in a land where elders proudly related how they managed to recover their forests, hearing them recount how the Mexican government…
RANOMAFANA and ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar — While many U.S. travelers dream of the fabled forests of Madagascar, for Malagasy conservationist Mahandry Hugues Andrianarisoa, 28, it was the verdant landscape of upstate…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. This month Mongabay and The Gecko Project published “Saving Aru,” an article chronicling how the people of Indonesia’s Aru Islands thwarted a…
This story was co-published with The Gecko Project. Additional support was provided by Earthsight. (Baca dalam Bahasa Indonesia.) I. The movement begins Late one rainy night in August 2013, a…
TENGGULUN, Indonesia — Around 20 Acehnese men sit cross-legged while smoking clove cigarettes on the terrace of a simple wooden building in this village on the island of Sumatra. The…
LAGOS, NIGERIA -- Surrounded by smoke-capped dense forest thick with tall, evergreen trees and wildlife, the Ekuri people in southeastern Nigeria’s Cross River state treasure the forest near their homes.…
OKUNI, Nigeria — The bulldozers returned to the forests of Cross River state in southeastern Nigeria in January. Their metal blades resumed tearing down rainforest, rubber and cocoa plantations, homes…
The island of Borneo is renowned by scientists for its biological bounty. From orangutans to pygmy elephants to towering dipterocarp trees, the forests of the world's third largest island are…
Following the end of its civil war in the summer of 2003, Liberia became a test case for how foreign investment in extracting natural resources could quickly improve people’s lives.…
KALIBIRU, Indonesia — For years, Parjan hoped his community might one day gain title to the Menoreh Hills. The green valley northwest of the Javan city of Yogyakarta was tilled…
PENGOTAN, Indonesia — Hundreds of top-heavy bamboo stalks stretch up from the ground and lean under their own weight over a road in Pengotan, a village on the island of…
When then-President of the Democratic Republic of Congo Joseph Kabila hoisted himself into a tractor to celebrate the first harvest of the Bukanga Lonzo agro-industrial park on March 5, 2015,…
LEBAK, Indonesia — “This forest is no longer a state forest.” The sign is one of the first things you see when you reach the Karang customary forest area in…
The Philippines was highly forested about a century ago. But today, forests cover less than a third of the country, due to logging, agriculture, fuelwood extraction and mining. To tackle forest depletion,…
Links to other stories in this three-part profile of the Concepción Chiquirichapa community’s stewardship of its sacred cloud forest will appear here once they are published: How a Mayan town restored…
The legal rights to manage local forests, recently awarded to communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), have the potential to improve lives and protect the country’s block of…
Links to other stories in this three-part profile of the Concepción Chiquirichapa community’s stewardship of its sacred cloud forest will appear here once they are published: How a Mayan town restored…
Links to other stories in this three-part profile of the Concepción Chiquirichapa community’s stewardship of its sacred cloud forest will appear here once they are published: Ancient spirituality guides a Maya…
JAKARTA — Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono began his first term as president of Indonesia in 2004 with a pledge to plant a million trees a year, in an effort to make…
When Liberia emerged from its civil war in 2003, one of the first major acts of its national legislature was to reform the laws that governed logging and forestry in…
Read other stories in this three-part profile of the Ruatāhuna community’s stewardship of its forest. A Māori community leans on tradition to restore its forest What makes a forest healthy?…
Read other stories in this three-part profile of the Ruatāhuna community’s stewardship of its forest. A Māori community leans on tradition to restore its forest Māori community reconnects youth with…
Read other stories in this three-part profile of the Ruatāhuna community’s stewardship of its forest. What makes a forest healthy? Māori knowledge has some answers. Māori community reconnects youth with…
