public lands News

PHNOM PENH — “Make the bosses rich in Cambodia,” then-prime minister Hun Sen said at the 2012 inauguration of a sugar refinery in Kampong Speu province. “If a country has…

Engineers and realtors from southern Pará take advantage of their knowledge to abet land grabbers.

ALTAMIRA, Brazil — The warehouse donated to house the Castelo dos Sonhos farmers’ market for local growers has stood empty for nearly 15 years. Opened in 2008 and spanning 480…

“They bought new land and they are cutting wood where our ancestors were,” says a source in Meta, Colombia. “Us Mbya live from the forest, but here there’s barely anything…

DAK DOA, Vietnam — At the end of the rainy season, the hillsides in Dak Doa district, in central Vietnam's Gia Lai province, turn pink as the Cỏ Hồng grass…

PHNOM PENH — On the edges of Boeung Tamok, Phnom Penh’s largest lake, 25-year-old Kong Khun sheltered from the late June heat in a bamboo hut. Despite clear skies, Khun…

MARERENI, Kenya — It’s mid-morning in April, and Ngombo Tsuma is seated under a lone neem tree by one of his two grass-thatched huts. His wife sits by the door…

Organizations in the Malaysian state of Sabah have filed a complaint with the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples about a once-secretive deal aimed at locking up…

As thousands of people protested in Brazil’s capital against a “death package” of bills deemed anti-environmental and anti-Indigenous, the lower house of Congress agreed to fast-track one of those bills,…

Three young women from the Munduruku Indigenous group in the Brazilian Amazon run an audiovisual collective that uses social media to raise awareness about illegal invasions of their territory. “Many people no longer believe what we say, they only believe what they see,” says Aldira Akai, who, at 30, is the oldest member of the collective.

Since 2013, the Ka'apor expelled the Federal Brazilian Indigenous Agency from their territory in the state of Maranhão, creating a new government council, adopting their own education system and establishing permanent settlements along their borders to contain the illegal advance of loggers, land grabbers and miners.

MANAUS, Brazil — As she walks through the rubble, Yawaratsuni Kokama steps over loose bricks and piles of broken tiles, her eyes welling up. From time to time, she stops…

In 2021, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s biggest province, Tshopo, lost 12,000 hectares (30,000 acres) of intact forests to fires. Researchers based in the provincial capital, Kisangani, suspect the record-breaking…

In the Argentine city of Rosario, an award-winning urban agriculture program is marking nearly two decades as a model for how to put local farming and agroecology at the heart…

A project originally aimed to fuel agribusiness in one of the most heavily deforested parts of the Brazilian Amazon is now being touted by the government as a “green” and…

On Feb. 8, 2019, two weeks after the collapse of a dam holding mining waste killed 272 people and left a trail of destruction in Brumadinho, in the Brazilian state…

DUMAGUETE CITY, Philippines — Local authorities in the central Philippines pushing ahead with a land reclamation project that will bury four marine reserves face strong opposition from scientists, fishers and…

A dam holding back mining waste from Brazilian miner Vale is at risk of collapsing, a government audit says. The same company was responsible for two tailings dam collapses since…

132 Amazon protected areas have been offered for adoption, with three transnational companies signing on so far (French Carrefour, Dutch Heineken, and U.S. Coca Cola). Activists say traditional peoples are not being consulted.

The Brazilian president is making big promises to reduce Amazon deforestation, even as he moves to legalize large scale land theft with potentially catastrophic results for Earth’s climate and the Amazon.

Mileva "Gara" Jovanović's family has been taking cattle up to graze in Montenegro’s Sinjajevina Highlands for more than 140 summers. The mountain pastures of the Sinjajevina-Durmitor Massif are the largest…

2020 was supposed to be the year that the world assessed progress on a decade's worth of effort to stave off the sixth mass extinction — the first extinction driven…

Until recently, protecting the environment was a bipartisan issue for Americans. But in an era marked by bitter divides, this is no longer the case. Bruce Babbitt, former governor of…

It might be hard to believe in the current political climate, but public lands were a unifying issue for Americans until quite recently. Most Americans have supported the idea of…

While MRN, a mining firm makes big profits working within, and harming, a Brazilian conservation unit, traditional people can be fined for collecting Brazil nuts and fishing sustainably in a nearby protected area.

In 1997, Charles Moore was sailing a catamaran from Hawaii to California when he and his crew got stuck in windless waters in the North Pacific Ocean. As they motored…

In Brazil, indigenous lands make up 13.5% of the national territory and are home to half a million indigenous peoples speaking 280 distinct languages. New research, published in the journal…

In the late 1950s, a young graduate student from Switzerland named Hansjörg Wyss took a summer job with the Colorado Highway Department. In his free time, he explored, climbed, and…