KALUMPANG, Indonesia — In January, as representatives of a hydropower company explained their plan to dam the river near his home, Kasman wondered if he was staring at annihilation. Kasman…
“How do we tell the stories of people that history forgets and the present avoids?” journalist-turned-author Jori Lewis asks in the preface to her debut book, Slaves for Peanuts: A…
On a breezeless, sunbaked beach in Borneo, one of the biggest challenges paleobotanist Peter Wilf faced in his team’s hunt for plant fossils was getting used to a new set…
Today’s installment of the Mongabay Newscast is a special Earth Month episode in which we highlight the growing recognition of the role Indigenous peoples play as the world's top conservationists.…
The asteroid impact 66 million years ago that killed more than 75% of all species on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs, triggered an ecological catastrophe that took the neotropical rainforests…
For more than 50 years, Earth Day has been a celebration of protecting the planet and the array of life, including us, that it supports. Though that common goal seems…
Jair Bolsonaro and 6,000 of his appointees come from Brazil’s military, which historically sees Amazon infrastructure and development as vital to national security and to averting foreign invasion: Analysis.
Amazonia, with its towering trees, bright birds, pink dolphins and mysterious big cats, has been painted as the quintessential wilderness, an exuberant and endless landscape that evolved beyond the touch…
PALEMBANG, Indonesia — For those worried about the plight of the Sumatran tiger, of which only a few hundred remain, concern typically flows from a sense that all life is…
A massive fire ravaged Brazil’s National Museum (Museu Nacional) in Rio de Janeiro on the night of Sept. 2. The losses to the country’s oldest scientific institution and its approximately…
At 1,200 to 3,200 meters above sea level, the montane cloud forests on the eastern Andean flank in Ecuador lie between the Andes’ high-elevation grasslands (known as páramo) and the…
When I was ten, I acquired my first dog. Rani was a Doberman Pinscher—tall, lean, and a huge pushover. She was wonderfully friendly, but sadly misunderstood her whole life, regularly…
A dramatic painting of Christopher Columbus on the Santa Maria. Columbus' arrival and subsequent colonizing forces in the New World led to million of deaths due to disease. Painting by:…
Aztec drawing showing smallpox victims after first contact with Europeans in the 16th Century. Estimates vary but many scholar believe disease wiped out around 95 percent of the pre-Columbian population…
Jungle in Belize. New research finds Belize has been drying out for over a century, likely due to pollution from burning fossil fuels in the northern hemisphere which has left…
All of the world's moas exterminated by just a few thousand people A Haast's eagle divebombing a pair of moas. A new study finds that it only took a few…
Past whaling may have resulted in lost cultural knowledge for world's biggest mammals Relict whaling and sealing ships at Grytviken, South Georgia. Photo by: Liam Quinn/Creative Commons 2.0. In 1904,…
Rediscovered mammal had been slaughtered by the Inca hundreds of years ago The Machu Picchu arboreal chinchilla rat come back to life! Photo by: Roberto Quispe. Below one of the…
The Amazon rainforest in Yasuni National Park in Ecuador. Photo by: Jeremy Hance. The Amazon is the largest tropical forest on the planet, covering about 6.5 million square kilometers, although…
An interview with Christopher Jordan, a part of our on-going Interviews with Young Scientists series. Baird's tapir caught on camera trap in Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast. Photo courtesy of: Christopher Jordan.…
A new short documentary, Damocracy, highlights the battles over monster dam projects imperiling local people and wild rivers. Examining the Belo Monte dam in Brazil and the Ilisu dam in…
One of the survivors: the Takahē, a flightless rail from New Zealand. Photo by: © ZSL. Around 4,000 years ago intrepid Polynesian seafarers made their way into an untamed wilderness:…
Wallace's original map published in 1876, denoting six biogeographical realms. A recent study in Science extends Wallace's findings, creating eleven realms (see below). Click to enlarge. In 1876, British biologist…
Africa's Wildest Stories is a new initiative in Kenya to capture personal stories about the relationship of people to nature. Elephant Keeper Mishak Nzimbi (above) has been working at the…
The Amazon forest along the Tambopata River in Peru. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. A study last month in the journal Science argued that pre-Columbian peoples had little impact on…
Terraced rice paddies in Yunnan. Many of China's current agricultural areas were made by clearing forests and other natural vegetation hundreds to thousands of years ago. Photo by: Rhett A.…
This month, momentous events will occur on the global scene that will set the tone for whether 2012 will be a hopeful year or one in which dislocations and disconnects…
Line plot of global mean land-ocean temperature index, 1880 to present, with the base period 1951-1980. The black line is the annual mean and the red line is the five-year…
The Congo rainforest today in Gabon. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Three thousand years ago (around 1000 BCE) several large sections of the Congo rainforest in central Africa suddenly vanished…
