Jane Goodall, who revealed the intimate lives of chimpanzees and gave the modern world a language of hope, has died at the age of 91.

When she stepped into the forests of Gombe, Tanzania, in 1960, she carried little more than a notebook, binoculars, and an unlikely determination. She was not a scientist by training, but just a young woman from Bournemouth with a childhood fascination for Africa, encouraged by a mother who told her never to give up. Within a few years she had overturned long-held certainties. Her observations showed that chimpanzees were not mere instinctive creatures but rather societies of individuals: affectionate, ambitious, grieving, even warlike. They made and used tools, once thought the exclusive preserve of humans. Louis Leakey, the anthropologist who had sent her to Gombe, declared that her findings required humanity either to redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human.

For many, such discoveries would have been achievement enough. For Goodall, they were only a beginning. When she saw forests vanish and chimpanzee numbers fall, she shifted from science to advocacy. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute, launched sanctuaries, and created community programs that married conservation to human development. In 1991 she started Roots & Shoots, a movement that grew into tens of thousands of youth groups across more than a hundred countries. Where others lectured about despair, she insisted on nurturing hope.

She was tireless. Into her ninth decade, she circled the planet on near-constant tours, urging audiences to act and telling children that every day brings a choice of what sort of impact they will make. Her message was never sentimental. She saw clearly the destruction wrought by poverty, greed, and shortsighted politics. She recognized the violence within both chimpanzees and ourselves. Yet she spoke always of possibility. Forests could return, species could be rescued, and young people, unburdened by cynicism, could still build a more compassionate world.

Her influence extended beyond conservation. She helped dismantle the conceit that humans were alone in possessing mind and feeling, laying the groundwork for the broader recognition of animal sentience. She reminded governments and corporations alike that exploitation of the natural world was ultimately self-defeating. In 2002 she became a United Nations Messenger of Peace, though she preferred the company of schoolchildren planting trees to the applause of diplomats.

She leaves no shortage of honors: medals, prizes, foundations, even a day in Los Angeles named after her. But her truest legacy lies in those who, having once heard her soft but insistent voice, felt summoned to act.

She often pictured humanity standing at the mouth of a long, dark tunnel. At the far end shone a single star. That star was hope. It would not come closer on its own, she said. To reach it, we must roll up our sleeves and make our way forward together.

Banner: Courtesy of JGI

Biologists in Brazil have documented a jaguar swimming an estimated 2.3 kilometers, or 1.4 miles, across an artificial reservoir in the Cerrado savanna, the longest confirmed swim by the species to date. The previous scientific record, published in 1932, was of a jaguar swimming 200 m (660 ft).

“We knew that jaguars might have this ability to swim long distances. But what was missing was a confirmation through a technical record. That is the big difference here,” lead author Leandro Silveira, a biologist with the Jaguar Institute, told Mongabay by phone.

Researchers first encountered the male jaguar (Panthera onca) from a camera-trap image in May 2020 on the shore of the Serra da Mesa hydroelectric reservoir in Goiás state, central Brazil. Four years later, in August 2024, a camera on an island in the reservoir captured the same individual.

A thin outcrop is the only strip of land in the water separating the island from the mainland. This may have served as a halfway point, meaning the jaguar would have swum the first 1 km (0.6 mi) there, then completed the remaining 1.3 km (0.8 mi). The minimum distance considered is still more than six times the previous record.

For Silveira, the jaguar using the strip of land as a pitstop is technically possible and important to consider, but he said a direct swim is more likely.

“That idea of using the small islands to stop along the way and rest is a very human interpretation … He [the jaguar] doesn’t think like this,” Silveira said. “We can’t be incisive about these answers. We have the documentation, the irrefutable data that shows the event has taken place. But the rest is interpretation.”

Silveira said the jaguar appeared healthy in the 2024 footage, showing no signs of exhaustion after the swim. “The biggest surprise is that this was a natural behavior. The jaguar was not fleeing from a flood or catastrophe. He simply swam across.”

Until now, accounts of jaguars swimming long distances had largely been circumstantial or anecdotal. On Maracá Island, at least 6 km (3.7 mi) off Brazil’s northeastern Atlantic coast, a jaguar population has remained genetically healthy. Silveira said this suggests occasional crossings, backed by reports from fishermen, even though no scientific record exists.

“Evidence like this is very rare,” Fernando Tortato, conservation scientist at wildcat nonprofit Panthera, who wasn’t involved in the study, told Mongabay by phone. “We now know that a crossing may be difficult, but possible, that [the body of water] doesn’t constitute an absolute barrier. With this you can better understand how jaguars might move through a landscape.”

Banner image: Camera trap images of the jaguar before and after the crossing. Image courtesy of Silveira et al., 2025 (CC BY 4.0).

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.

The music began long before humans arrived. Rivers carried their basslines downstream, insects beat time in the dusk, and birds poured their arias into the dawn. For Dominik Eulberg, who grew up without radio or television, this was the only soundtrack. “Nature for me is the greatest artist of all,” he said. When he later discovered synthesizers, they felt less like inventions of silicon and circuitry than another register of the same ancient score.

Eulberg, an ecologist by training and DJ by trade, has made it his vocation to let those hidden symphonies be heard, reports contributor Manuel Fonseca for Mongabay. At festivals along the Main in Frankfurt, he layered the call of the corncrake over deep electronic pulses, thrilling dancers who mistook the bird’s cry for a machine. His albums, with names drawn from butterflies and plants, offer an invitation to hear biodiversity not as an abstraction but as melody and rhythm.

Eulberg isn’t alone. In the Peruvian Amazon, DJ Edwin Carrasco, known in the artistic world as Tayta Bird, and his collaborators record the chatter of macaws and the bass rumble of howler monkeys, weaving them into tracks that pulse with the rainforest’s vitality. Their “Nature Punk” is less rebellion than reminder: that music once came from sitting quietly in the forest, listening.

There is poignancy in this movement. As habitats shrink and species vanish, silence spreads. What these artists do is less about novelty than remembrance. They bottle fragments of the living world and return them, amplified, to crowded dance floors where the diversity of humanity mirrors the diversity of nature. “On the dance floor, everybody is the same,” Eulberg said. The same, too, in the world that sustains us.

Electronic music once seemed the anthem of machines. In the hands of musicians like Eulberg and Carrasco, it has become elegy and exhortation, carrying into the night the oldest rhythm of all.

Read Manuel Fonseca’s piece on DJs inspired by biodiversity:

Banner image: DJ Edwin Carrasco, known in the artistic world as Tayta Bird, recording sounds of a rainforest. Image courtesy of Tayta Bird.

An El Salvador court has acquitted five community leaders and antimining activists from Santa Marta, a municipality in the southeastern department of Usulután, of charges tied to a 1989 kidnapping and murder during the country’s civil war.

Human rights groups have called the prosecution politically motivated, suggesting it was brought against the activists in retaliation for their opposition to mining projects and water contamination.

The five men, known as Los 5 de Santa Marta (the Santa Marta Five) are Miguel Ángel Gámez, Alejandro Laínez García, Pedro Antonio Rivas Laínez, Antonio Pacheco and Saúl Agustín Rivas Ortega.

They were arrested in January 2023 and initially acquitted in October of the same year. However, prosecutors appealed and forced a retrial. They also added three additional men to the case: Fidel Dolores Recinos Alas, José Eduardo Sancho Castañeda and Arturo Serrano Ascencio. Prosecutors sought prison sentences of 39 to 41 years. On Sept. 24 this year, the judges again found all the men not guilty.

“Today, justice has prevailed, legality has prevailed, and we have won this trial for the second time,” Pedro Cruz, the lead lawyer for the defense team, told local media on Sept. 24. “What is clear is that the defendants are innocent, that we have always been right in saying that the evidence was insufficient, that the incriminating evidence is irrelevant.”

The Santa Marta Five, as well as the three other men included in the case, were cleared of the criminal charges of illicit association, as well as the murder and kidnapping of María Inés Alvarenga. Alvarenga’s children attest that she was kidnapped, beaten and killed in August 1989 for refusing to attend a guerrilla meeting and being a suspected informant for forces under the U.S.-backed military government that ruled El Salvador at the time.

The defense argued there was insufficient evidence connecting any of the accused to the crime, adding the case relied almost entirely on an anonymous eyewitness. They also cited the National Reconciliation Law of 1992, which pardons political crimes from the civil war period.

Judges determined that for four of the accused, the case could continue in civil court, meaning they could still face liability for damages despite being acquitted of criminal charges.

The nonprofit Association for Economic and Social Development of Santa Marta (ADES), which the five men were associated with in their antimining work, called the case “a judicial farce” aimed at criminalizing environmental activism.

Prosecutors have not confirmed whether they will close the case or file a new appeal to the Supreme Court.

“The struggle is far from over,” Pedro Cabezas, coordinator of the Central American Alliance on Mining, said in a statement. “It may take years before the Santa Marta Five are declared fully innocent.”

Banner image: The Santa Marta Five. Image courtesy of Lisbeth Ayala.

Ghana has issued its first batch of sustainable timber licenses under the European Union Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) system, which aims to block illegal logging and strengthen forest governance.

Sixteen years after Ghana signed a voluntary partnership agreement with the EU, the nation approved the first six FLEGT licenses for five companies. The licenses do not guarantee full compliance with the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which is supposed to go into effect at the end of this year.

“We can all be happy now for how far we have come,” Ghana’s minister for lands and natural resources, Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah, said via a spokesperson in August 2025. “This milestone has been achieved through collaborative efforts of both state and non-state institutions, including civil society organizations.”

The five companies that received FLEGT licenses were Samartex Timber and Plywood Co. Ltd., Logs and Lumber Ltd., JCM Company Ltd., Mere Plantations Ltd. and West Coast Wooden Products Ghana Ltd. Starting Oct. 8, all Ghanian timber products covered by the license will be allowed to export to the EU.

Following the celebration of the milestone, Buah also had a warning for illegal loggers and miners: “These people should know that we are coming for them. We will come hard at them. The field day is over, and there is no hideout for them,” he said.

According to Global Forest Watch, Ghana lost 13,900 hectares (34,350 acres) of primary forest in 2024. Ghana hopes the move will increase exports to Europe, bolstering the nation’s planted forest farms to reduce pressures on primary forests.

Exports to Asia, mainly India, have been on the rise, while exports to the EU have been declining, according to the latest report by Ghana’s forestry commission. Europe now imports about a fifth of Ghana’s timber exports, down from more than half in 2008.

FLEGT licenses will help fulfil the legality requirement of the EUDR, but they do not guarantee full compliance. Wood extracted legally in Ghana may fall short of the EUDR’s requirements if it was harvested from land deforested after 2020, for example.

Once the EUDR is applied, EU importers will need to document geographic coordinates of the plots of land where the timber was produced to satisfy the added requirements.

“Ultimately, we must focus on increasing trade in legal timber products while tackling deforestation and biodiversity loss,” said Jonas Claes, deputy head of the EU Delegation to Ghana.

Claes added that the EU will be increasing investments in the nation. “More support is underway,” he said. “We are planning for an additional €37 million [$43.4 million] towards the improved management and conservation of natural resources—both land and forests.”

Banner image: Ghanaian Minister Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah (left) and the former EU Ambassador to Ghana Irchad Razaaly (right) at a Ghana-EU FLEGT Voluntary Partnership Agreement event in August 2025. Image courtesy of the Ghana Forestry Commission.

A new report on the state of the world’s oceans paints a grim picture. The ninth annual Copernicus Ocean State Report finds “No part of the ocean is untouched by the triple planetary crisis, as pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change are putting pressure on the ocean worldwide.”

The EU-funded report draws on decades of historical and current observational data as well as satellite measurements to create a resource for policymakers, scientists and citizens to more fully understand the challenges facing the world’s oceans.

“With all this information we can ensure that we are better prepared … to ensure that we can live with these situations which are evolving,” Karina von Schuckmann who worked on the report as senior adviser at Mercator Ocean International, told Mongabay at a press conference.

Ocean change

Global ocean temperatures are rising at unprecedented rates, and marine heat waves are intensifying worldwide. Sea surface temperatures have been increasing each decade since satellite records began in 1982. The northeastern Atlantic Ocean bordering Europe has been warming nearly twice the global rate at 0.27° Celsius (0.49° Fahrenheit) per decade since 1982.

Tropical regions of the North Atlantic, including the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, experienced record-breaking marine heat waves in 2023; some areas were affected for up to 300 days. Polar regions are also seeing dramatic changes: Arctic sea ice is declining, and the Southern Ocean is warming and freshening, contributing to shifts in global currents.

At the same time, plastic is polluting every ocean basin and acidification is threatening endangered species and corals, the report finds.

Marine ecosystem change

Warming oceans are having a cascade effect on marine life. Rich coastal areas, fed by upwelling of cool, nutrient-rich, deeper water are shrinking while entire ecoregions are shifting toward the poles in search of cooler water. Invasive species that are better suited to warmer waters are moving in with disastrous consequences. In the Mediterranean, native clams completely collapsed in some areas as Atlantic blue crabs moved in and took over. Coral reefs and plankton communities are also under stress from rising temperatures and acidification.

Societal & economic change

Rising seas are increasing flood and erosion risks for Europe’s roughly 200 million coastal residents while many low-lying UNESCO World Heritage sites are at risk of flooding in the coming centuries. Globally, millions of people dependent on fisheries, tourism and aquaculture face growing risks.

Interconnected ocean

The report emphasizes the deep interconnectedness between ocean health, the climate and human well-being. Changes to ocean temperature and sea level are affecting where people can live and how they earn a living.

“The science is unequivocal: The ocean is changing fast, with record extremes and mounting impacts,” von Schuckmann said. “This knowledge is not just a warning — it’s a blueprint for restoring balance between people and the ocean.”

Banner image: A humpback whale diving in Alaska. Image by AP/  Brenda Rone/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.