Update: The NGO Wildlife Direct, which has offices in Kenya, reports that Ephantus Mbare Gitonga was acquitted by a magistrate at Mombasa Law Courts on April 25, 2019. It could…
The past few years there has been a dedicated lobbying/promotional campaign among local amateur naturalists, professional conservationists, and international researchers to bring back Malay tapirs, Tapirus indicus, to Borneo. A…
Bats are a weird and wonderful branch of the tree of life. The only mammals that can truly fly, and the group that has developed echolocation or "seeing with sound"…
In October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report outlining strategies the world can pursue to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius and maintain healthy economies and…
Nature has never been more vulnerable than it is today. Despite gaining $125 trillion of value from nature every year, we have lost 60 percent of wildlife populations, 50 percent…
Something very significant for conservation happened recently, but only a few media outlets picked up on it. You can kind of understand why: a commitment by a group of soy…
Recent headlines around the world indicate that the government of Botswana is considering significant changes to the country’s approach to wildlife management. I give the government great credit for the…
“Why on earth would anyone give up working on tigers to focus on freshwater fish?” is the question I am asked most frequently since becoming the Executive Director of Shoal,…
Few people realize that Iran is home to cheetahs. Once found from the Arabian Peninsula to India, the Asiatic cheetah — genetically and ecologically distinct from its African counterpart —…
In recent years, companies operating in the Brazilian soy industry, such as Grupo André Maggi, Cargill, Bunge, and Archer Daniels Midland, have signed commitments to zero-deforestation in their supply chains…
This year, World Wildlife Day will celebrate life in the world’s oceans. It’s a fitting tribute. Oceans cover more than 70 percent of the world’s surface, harbor hundreds of thousands…
The Sinop Dam has become a critical test case — not only on the question of clearing reservoirs before filling, but also on the real effect of Brazil’s environmental legislation…
My organization, the Elephant Action League (EAL), spent 14 months investigating and infiltrating the illicit totoaba swim bladder supply chain, from Baja California in Mexico to Southern China. We released…
On February 20, Nature published a comment on hydropower claiming that dams are good for the climate and should be subsidized through the Climate Bonds initiative, a proposal that is…
A silver lining of global warming is that it is forcing every nation to rethink its future, to open its mind to new possibilities. The latest IPCC report gives the…
We can agree that deforestation continues to be a massive global problem — in 2016, the world lost over 29.7 million hectares (73.4 million acres) of tree cover, an area…
Through its insatiable consumption of agro-commodities like soy, palm oil, and beef, the EU is contributing to a global deforestation crisis. After stalling for years while it carried out study…
In the coming weeks and months, a number of Guatemalan palm oil producers are expecting to receive memberships in the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) — a move that…
Stretching from the historic Chesapeake Bay, down along the Atlantic coastline, across the Gulf of Mexico, into the mysterious bayou swamps of Louisiana, then into eastern Texas and up the…
Several years ago, my colleague Richard York and I were sitting outside on a Eugene, Oregon patio discussing Elizabeth Kolbert’s then-new book, The Sixth Extinction, and we came to an…
Normally we only hear about the problems and risks of biological control, the use of one introduced organism to manage another. But one inconspicuous insect has accomplished miracles across tropical…
On a late night in December, I arrived in the village of Lunjuk on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. A warm breeze welcomed me as I sat down with 30…
Last month, the Director General of WWF International, Marco Lambertini, issued an urgent call for what he called a global New Deal for Nature and People, or “a roadmap that…
On November 29, 2018, the 196 Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) adopted a decision that represents a high-water mark for the governance of protected areas and…
"A 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community," climate and energy professor Kevin Anderson once told Grist. Even if we cut emissions by 3.5 percent a…
The best fictional detectives — Holmes, Tennison, Mars, Warshawski, Wallander — all employ their almost miraculous skills of observation and deduction to solve a whodunit. They rely on instinct, yes,…
Imagine being able to know how many individual organisms occur at any given time across areas as large as whole continents or even the entire globe. Though satellites may one…
In my lifetime, global wildlife populations have seen an overall decline of more than half. That’s a statement of such enormity that it’s hard to process. The evidence comes from…
The general public knows about the precarious situation of the world’s mostly recently identified great ape — the Tapanuli orangutan — within the Batang Toru Ecosystem. There, the construction of…
On the morning of November 16 in Sacramento, California, amidst choking haze from the worst wildfires in the history of California, indigenous leaders from Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Nigeria, and the…
