This is an abridged version of a piece I wrote shortly after her death a year today. I find it hard to believe Jane Goodall is gone. She was more than an icon to me. She was a friend, a mentor, and so...

At the Conservation X Labs event hosted at the Doris Duke Foundation’s Tree House during New York Climate Week, I was asked to provide a “provocation” ahead of a discussion about how conservation can ...

Twenty years ago, scientist and Mongabay board member Debby Ng joined a team documenting life at Terumbu Bayan, a coral reef south of Singapore that was about to be reclaimed. There she encountered a ...

High gold prices have fueled illegal mining across the Amazon. As Brazil tightened controls on the trade, criminal groups found another route through Venezuela, where it could be laundered and then ex...

At a September 2021 public hearing in Manaus, Philip Fearnside read from a prepared statement laying out his case against repaving BR-319, the highway between Manaus and Porto Velho, two cities in the...

The fight to stop five dams on the Baker and Pascua rivers began in one of Chile’s least populous regions, far from Santiago, where national energy policy was set. HidroAysén said Chile needed the pro...

In northwestern Costa Rica, the forest did not return all at once. First the cattle were removed. Then the fires had to be stopped. Introduced grasses made the old ranchlands burn too easily. Fence li...

In the early 1990s, the logging roads running through Sarawak’s Upper Baram became the site of a bitter confrontation. Penan families built wooden barricades and faced off bulldozers, timber trucks, a...

On April 20, Jafet Potenzo Lopes was surveying the south coast of Manatuto municipality, in Timor-Leste, when he recorded something he had not seen in years: three Timor green pigeons, alive, in a loc...

Kazakhstan has released its first tiger into the wild more than seven decades since the last confirmed sighting of the big cat in the country. On July 31, 2026, an adult female Amur tiger called Umit,...

The termites had built their towers long before roads crossed the Kimberley or companies proposed industrial projects along its rivers and coasts. Their colonies worked beneath the red earth, altering...

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. Mohammed Abu Daya is a marine ecologist from Gaza. His work focuses ...

For more than half a century, the United States treated the protection of habitat as part of protecting endangered wildlife. The Endangered Species Act prohibited killing protected wildlife, and the g...

Some lives seem to belong less to a nation or a profession than to a disposition. George B. Schaller’s was one of them. He belonged, above all, to animals—gorillas, lions, tigers, snow leopards, panda...

Earlier this month, Jeremy Hance’s “‘An epidemic of suffering’: Why are conservationists breaking down?” and the follow-up commentary “Emotional and psychological stresses beleaguer conservation profe...

In the older quarters of Singapore, fragments of forest persist like memories that refuse to fade. Within them live creatures that few residents ever see, and some that no longer exist there at all. T...

Conservation has long depended on measurement. Populations are counted, habitats mapped, trends plotted against baselines that often extend back only a few decades. Yet many ecosystems began changing ...

In Madagascar, frogs are not background noise but a measure of how much forest still functions. The island holds an extraordinary share of the world’s amphibian diversity, almost all of it found nowhe...

Conservation has never lacked ideas. Protected areas, payments for ecosystem services, community management, certification schemes, and public campaigns have all been promoted as solutions to biodiver...

José Albino Cañas Ramírez did not die in a war zone, though war had shaped the landscape where he lived. He was shot at his home in the community of Portachuelo, in Colombia’s Caldas department, on th...

Rainfall is often treated as a gift of geography — a function of latitude, oceans, and atmospheric circulation. A growing body of research suggests that in the tropics, it is also a product of ecosyst...

Brazil’s latest satellite alerts indicate that deforestation in the Amazon has continued to fall into early 2026, extending a downward trend that began after a sharp rise earlier in the decade. Data r...

For decades, a dominant argument for protecting forests has focused on carbon. Trees absorb carbon dioxide, store it in wood and soils, and slow the accumulation of greenhouse gases. A new scientific ...

It is tempting, when thinking about change, to look for the actor at the center of the story. The donor whose gift made something possible. The organization whose strategy unlocked progress. The indiv...

An unlikely truce with the great whales, 40 years on For most of the 20th century, the fate of whales was treated as an industrial question. How many could be taken, how fast, and by whom. Biology en...

In California’s interior, a long, straight aqueduct carries snowmelt south to a city that grew as if water were a birthright. Along the way it passes a valley that was once defined by water and birds,...

I am often asked what Mongabay’s legacy is, or what it might turn out to be. The question usually comes with an assumption that a quarter-century of publishing should yield a tidy answer. It does not....

Word that the Washington Post would be cutting roughly one-third of its staff spread quickly this week. Among those affected were at least a dozen reporters, editors, and visual journalists covering c...

Conservation has never lacked alarming facts. What it increasingly lacks is attention. After years of grim headlines, many people do not just feel sad. They disengage. They stop reading, stop donating...

For most of Peru’s scientific history, Indigenous knowledge has existed outside the formal record. It shaped how forests were used, how species were managed, and how risk was understood, but rarely ap...

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. For a movement so often framed by loss—and confronting a particularl...

It never weighed more than a spoonful of sugar. Five or six grams of life, soft-furred and sharp-nosed, moving through the roots and leaf litter of a tiny island in the Indian Ocean. At night, its voi...

The forest in northern Gabon didn’t look like a battleground. It was a patchwork of hunting trails and village paths, home to fruit trees and ancestral graves. When a logging concession encroached and...

Amid the calls of gibbons and the whir of drones scanning forest canopies, a quieter crisis is unfolding within the ranks of those trying to save nature. Conservationists, often seen as tireless stewa...

On a recent trip, Mongabay board member Debby Ng shared a story that keeps replaying in my mind. It’s been 19 years since her account, but it still cuts raw. I’m sharing it because I’ve witnessed loss...

Founder’s Commentary: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis and perspectives. This month marks 20 years since I started the Mongabay news service. At the time,...

When Marielle Ramires disclosed her diagnosis of cancer in December 2024, she chose honesty without despair, revealing vulnerability but emphasizing resilience. Her approach was pragmatic, yet deeply ...

Half a million barrels of toxic waste lurking beneath the waves just miles from California’s coastline sounds like the plot of a Hollywood thriller. Yet this environmental catastrophe is real, as docu...

Conservation authorities and groups, along with Māori people, recently established a new population of the critically endangered kākāriki karaka, or orange-fronted parakeet, on a New Zealand island. T...

Red lines. (This post discusses threats to press freedom and may be distressing for some readers. Please proceed with care.) We have entered a new era in the United States—one that carries profound ri...

What I wish I knew 25 years ago When I started Mongabay, I wasn’t thinking about building a global news organization. I just wanted to share my love for nature and make people care about what was happ...

Few ecosystems punch above their weight quite like seagrass meadows. These humble underwater pastures, spanning over 300,000 square kilometers across six continents, quietly perform a remarkable array of ecological services. They stabilize shorelines, shelter marine life, and sequester carbon at rates up to 40 times greater than terrestrial forests. Yet, like so many unsung heroes […]

Not all opportunities are worth taking. In 2010, a high profile literary agent approached me with an enticing offer: Write a book about my journey and the environmental trends shaping the world. It wa...