“The forest gives us everything, everything we need, but we also have to give it something in return,” says Carmelina Martinez. “It really is our heritage, we have to appreciate…
After a 20-minute canoe ride down the Curaray River, past a swamp that leaves her legs caked in mud up to her knees, Obe heads toward a waterfall set amid…
Chicago’s Field Museum presented the 23rd Parker/Gentry Award for conservation biology to the Instituto del Bien Común, an organization that works with indigenous communities in Peru, on May 24. The…
LOKOLAMA, Democratic Republic of Congo -- Sometime in March, I found myself trudging forward in a remote swamp in the heart of the Congo rainforest. As I worriedly tried to…
SUCUMBÍOS PROVINCE, Ecuador — “The land is dead,” says Camilo Pauche as he surveys with consternation the devastation that the oil industry has left in Pacayacu, a village in the Ecuadorian Amazon.…
“Walking Thunder” can feel like a family trip around the continent of Africa — if your parents were award-winning photographers and explorers. The mesmerizing film about the African elephant by…
The government of Tanzania is casting aside Maasai communities to make way for lucrative high-end safari tourism and hunting, says the Oakland Institute, a policy think tank, in a report…
JAKARTA — It took Yando Zakaria, an Indonesian anthropologist, four hours to convince the embattled Suku Anak Dalam tribe to get involved in his study last year on the cost…
Charles Toto’s epiphany came during his time working in the kitchen at a hotel in his home region of Papua in eastern Indonesia. The hotel catered to foreign visitors, many…
Some strategies for protecting forests and wildlife, such as protected areas and community forestry, have become immensely popular around the world. But do these conservation strategies truly achieve the objectives…
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government looks poised to derail a long-awaited bill on the rights of the country’s indigenous groups, calling it “not a necessity” and saying it will only…
JAKARTA — An effort by the Indonesian government to compile a single map of land-use cover across the vast archipelago is nearing completion seven years after it began, but continues…
In a move described as “unprecedented,” Colombia’s president Juan Manuel Santos announced Tuesday that the country intends to add 8 million hectares (80,000 square kilometers or 31,000 square miles) to…
Indigenous and environmental activist Saw O Moo was reportedly killed in Myanmar’s Karen State on April 5. According to the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN), Saw O Moo,…
Archaeologists have over the past few decades uncovered a growing body of evidence suggesting the pre-Columbian Amazon was not the sparsely populated, pristine rainforest it was widely believed to have…
QUITO, Ecuador - Nearly 100 indigenous women of the Ecuadorian Amazon spent five days protesting outside the country’s Presidential Palace last week. They were demanding a meeting with President Lenin…
LONG LAMAI, Malaysia — The tallest tajem trees have slash marks clear up to the canopy. Each diagonal cut released some of the tree’s heart-stopping sap to tip someone’s darts,…
The camera follows the men through the forest as they arrive at the splintered stump of what looks to have been a massive tree. “For me, the forest is a…
PUYO, Ecuador – About 350 Indigenous women from across the Ecuadorian Amazon gathered here yesterday to celebrate International Women’s Day, and, they say, to fight back against a system that…
Jaguar numbers at specific study sites in Central and South America are rising, based on surveys over the past decade and a half by the Wildlife Conservation Society. Elizabeth Bennett,…
