"This pandemic is taking away our wise men," Zebelio Kayap, the Indigenous leader of the Organization of Border Communities of Cenepa (ODEFROC), says in a broken voice. Kayap speaks with…
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…
The recent deaths of four Indigenous Yanomami babies and subsequent disappearance of their bodies from a hospital in Brazil have revealed yet another hardship in the way the coronavirus pandemic has impacted Indigenous communities.
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…
(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…
COVID-19 in the Amazon COVID-19 represents a particularly insidious threat for remote villages in the Amazon, where the nearest ICU bed is, on average, 315 kilometers (nearly 200 miles) away. The…
BOGOTA, Colombia — Droughts are lasting longer because of climate change and human intervention, but where does climate change leave off and human exploitation of natural resources begin? The Wayuu…
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.…
The first case of a member of an indigenous community in Peru testing positive for Coronavirus was recorded late last month. The person in question, Aurelio Chino, is an indigenous…
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.
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. Additional support was provided by Earthsight. In late 2013, during a hearing convened by the local legislature of Indonesia’s Maluku province, a…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. Additional support was provided by Earthsight. When the politician in charge of Indonesia’s Aru Islands signed permits for a vast sugar plantation,…
Visual artist Denilson Baniwa and singer Djuena Tikuna are taking the Amazon to galleries and stages around the world, sharing the rainforest’s socio-environmental diversity and bringing up questions about its future.
2019 closed out a "lost decade" for the world's tropical forests, with surging deforestation from Brazil to the Congo Basin, environmental policy roll-backs, assaults on environmental defenders, abandoned conservation commitments,…
PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea — The upstart deforestation over the past year and a half that's sidling up to Pochon Lili’s land has him worried. "As a landowner, I'm…
In search of ways to occupy new positions of power in their villages, 200 women from 16 different ethnicities held the first summit on gender issues in the Xingu Indigenous Territory
The 2010s opened as a moment of optimism for tropical forests. Widely available satellite imagery via platforms like Google Earth brought new levels of accountability which, for the first time,…
Nineteen-year-old Pornchita Fahpratanprai had never participated in a climate strike before. High up in the mountains of Omkoi district in Chiang Mai, Thailand, far from Facebook and Instagram posts of…