Something amusing happened these past two months. A few high-profile members of the economic chamber of a local branch of forest certification organization tried to block me from joining the…
JAKARTA — One of the biggest palm oil growers in Indonesia has announced a plan to rehabilitate an area half the size of New York City to atone for its…
Juneteenth marks the date in 1865 where an estimated 250,000 enslaved people in Texas were freed, marking the official end of slavery in the Confederacy – two years after the…
The satellite’s eye view from high above northern Peru in mid-2013 laid out a stark reality: Ecologist Matt Finer and his colleagues were watching “blow by blow” in a series of…
Western corporations have been inflicting environmental damage overseas for generations, but the sharp rise in the scale of China's international ambitions and operations in recent years has put a spotlight…
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government’s decision to categorize the palm oil industry’s solid waste as non-hazardous has triggered environmental concerns. The industry uses huge volumes of a powdered clay called…
After a series of coal-slurry spills into the Malinau River in Indonesian Borneo, locals and environmental groups are calling for tougher sanctions, and for national banks to divest from the…
A group of 81 Indigenous leaders and environmental defenders from across the world have signed an open letter to BlackRock, saying the fund manager’s investments “continue to threaten our health,…
A longer Spanish version of this essay appeared in the Journal of Latin American Geography. Indigenous elders play a key role in the protection of their culture and livelihoods. A…
JAKARTA — An Indonesian forestry company with possible links to pulpwood and palm oil powerhouse Royal Golden Eagle has cleared forests the size of 500,000 basketball courts since 2016, some…
The illegal sale of protected land in the Brazilian Amazon has been going on for years, but a new BBC report got deeply inside the criminal network and found some land grabbers advertising on Facebook.
JAKARTA — At least 168 people, mainly children, have died after falling into abandoned mining pits across Indonesia over the past seven years, according to a new report. The report…
JAKARTA — Palm oil-driven deforestation is slowing down in Southeast Asia in 2020 but a handful of low-profile companies continue to drive the majority of the destruction, according to a…
This article was co-produced with The Gecko Project. JAKARTA — Indigenous people in Indonesia’s easternmost Papua province are protesting against a company that’s preparing to raze their ancestral forest for…
Like virtually everything in 2020, COVID-19 defined the year for tropical rainforests. Conservation was particularly hard hit in tropical countries.
On November 5, 2015 an iron ore mine tailings dam owned by Samarco, a joint venture of Vale and BHP Billiton, two of the world’s largest mining firms, collapsed in Mariana, Brazil. Life along Rio Doce has not been the same since.
On Oct. 22, four gunmen shot and killed anti-mining activist Fikile Ntshangase in her home in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province. The murder points to escalating pressure on communities across South…
SAMARINDA, Indonesia — On Sept. 6, five teenagers went together to a man-made lake in Indonesia’s East Kalimantan province, carved out of a coal-mining pit that had been abandoned and…
The environmental advocacy group Friends of the Earth has blasted BlackRock and other asset management titans in a new report that says they aren’t doing enough to curb global deforestation.…
JAKARTA — A new paper calls for greater coordination by governments around the world to tackle the persistent problem of organized crime in the fisheries industry impacting the wider economy.…
Spurred by a deadly Brazilian dam disaster in early 2019, a partnership between the U.N. and industry leaders has released new guidance on managing mining waste. Released Aug. 5, the…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. Paskalina called to me by waving her hand and asked me to come to her house in a whisper. It was my…
JBS, a Brazilian company repeatedly accused of “laundering cattle” in the past, has again allegedly been caught purchasing livestock illegally reared in an Amazonian indigenous reserve in Rondônia state, Brazil.
One day around 2010, Agustinus Tomba and his neighbors heard the sound of heavy machinery in their ancestral forest, in the Indonesian province of Papua. When they went to see…
The article was co-published with The Gecko Project. A decade ago, the Indonesian government began to heavily promote large-scale plantation developments in Papua province, a region of savannahs and rich…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. This post details the analysis we carried out to estimate the revenues generated by the Korindo Group from harvesting timber as it…
It was the middle of the afternoon in one of the world’s largest metropolises when the sky went black. Thousands of miles away, tens of thousands of fires raged, plunging…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. (Baca dalam Bahasa Indonesia.) Part 1: ‘Maybe they didn’t expect us to find it’ In April 2019, an Indonesian delegate stepped onto…
Some 600 indigenous people have seen their crops die due to the expansion of agribusiness in the state of Pará, Brazil. The streams used by the Munduruku have also been damaged, if not dried up.
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,…
