NEW YORK — On an early December morning last year in the state of Maranhão, Brazil, half a dozen members of the Indigenous Guajajara people packed their bags with food,…
Sunday – Indigenous Peoples’ Day – felt like anything but a celebration. We are supposed to be celebrating and honoring Indigenous Peoples but – instead – we are mourning the…
My name is Arkilaus Kladit. I’m from the Knasaimos-Tehit tribe in South Sorong Regency, West Papua Province, Indonesia. For decades my tribe has been fighting to protect our forests from…
Between the departments of Boyacá and Santander in Colombia is one of the last remnants of tropical rainforest of the Middle Magdalena Valley. The Serranía de Las Quinchas is so…
BOGOTA — The first time biologist Luis Jorge Vargas visited the Conejera wetlands in 1993 it was as an undergraduate doing research. He said he and his fellow classmates remained…
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…
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…
As the COVID-19 crisis enters its fifth month since being declared a pandemic in March, environmental defenders who protect some of the world’s most threatened ecosystems have had to adapt…
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…
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…
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…
(Baca dalam Bahasa Indonesia.) Part 1: ‘Maybe they didn’t expect us to find it’ In April 2019, an Indonesian delegate stepped onto the stage at a conference hosted by Interpol,…
Some indigenous communities in the Amazon rainforest are being devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic, recalling memories of the severe toll wrought by diseases introduced during first contact with the outside…
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…
Scientists have discovered a new insect-eating pitcher plant, Nepenthes cabanae, in the Philippines’ southern Mindanao region. Thriving in a small area within a known conflict zone, the pitcher plant has…
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…
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”…
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…
On any given morning, women from Brazil’s Moygu and Arayó villages can be found gathering baskets, bags and machetes. They pack water and beiju, a bread made from manioc flour,…
I used my Brazilian name above, but in my community, I am known as Wino Këyashëni. I belong to the Marubo people, one of the seven ethnic groups that inhabit…
Yohanes Terang, the well-known and respected Dayak poet who took up social and environmental activism long before it became a mainstream concern in West Kalimantan, Indonesia Pak (Mr) Yohanes, as…
PUTUMAYO, Colombia - Yehimi Fajardo only had to hear the shriek of the common potoo (Nyctibius griseus) once to understand why this night bird is accused — so unfairly —…
Applications to mine on indigenous lands in the Amazon have increased by 91% under the Bolsonaro administration. Among the applicants are mining giant Anglo American, small-scale cooperatives whose members are embroiled in a range of environmental violations, and even a São Paulo-based architect.
As Earth's largest rainforest, the Amazon is the planet's single greatest repository of biodiversity, houses the largest number of uncontacted indigenous tribes, and is home to the world's mightiest river.…
Extreme flooding in the Ecuadoran Amazon has caused widespread disarray along the banks of the Bobonaza River, all amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past couple of weeks, the surging…
Companies, with the support of governments, are using the coronavirus pandemic as a chance to secure less stringent regulations governing their impacts on forests and the environment, according to the…
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…
In early March 2020, I visited the tri-border area of Peru, Colombia, and Brazil and used the opportunity to explore a cluster of potential deforestation hotspots detected by Global Forest…
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.
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,…