Rhett Ayers Butler
I started working on a piece about Dan Janzen in 2022. I had long known his work, both the scientific and conservation sides. But as I became more aware of how the scope of that work expanded over the course of his career, I came to understand more fully his legacy, as well as the [Continue reading]
When Rainforest Action Network began in 1985, it had little of what usually makes an organization powerful. It had no large budget, no legal department, no steady access to politicians, and no formal way to force corporations or development banks to change. It had Randy Hayes, a wide activist network, a way to connect distant [Continue reading]
For protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon, one basic question is often overlooked: is there enough money to manage what lies inside the boundary? A reserve may exist in law. It may appear on maps and in official counts of how much of Brazil is under protection. On the ground, management depends on staff, fuel, [Continue reading]
In the Amazon, a forest can remain on the map while losing much of what makes it function. Deforestation, carbon, protected areas, and tipping points are useful measures, but they do not fully explain why biodiversity continues to decline where laws exist, territories are recognized, and international pledges sound ambitious. Six gaps help explain the [Continue reading]
Conservation often sounds most persuasive when it is described as a plan. There are maps, budgets, governance models, community consultations, monitoring frameworks and theories of change. All are necessary. None is sufficient on their own. Luis Arranz, who has spent more than four decades working in Central African conservation, makes a simpler point: the hard [Continue reading]
The gunfire began just before six in the morning. At first, Christine (Tina) Lain thought it might be a drill. Upemba National Park had prepared for attacks before. But the sound did not stop. It intensified. By the end of the day, three rangers and four staff were dead. Survivors hid in a crawl space [Continue reading]
Before launching a monitoring program, practitioners are usually asked how data will be gathered, which indicators will be tracked, and how results will be analyzed. Less often, they are asked what the monitoring is meant to do. A recent paper led by Kate Helmstedt argues that this question should come first. Monitoring is most useful [Continue reading]
“Let us stop talking about human-wildlife conflict. Some of us live with this reality and we pay a heavy price for sharing space with wildlife.” The remark, made at the 2023 Community-led Conservation Congress in Namibia, challenges how conservation is often described. The term “human-wildlife conflict” appears frequently in policy and reporting, suggesting a problem [Continue reading]
Tropical forests can return quickly in appearance. A pasture left to regenerate may, within a few decades, look like forest again. What is less visible is how long full ecological recovery takes. Beneath the canopy, different species return at different rates, shaping a system that may resemble forest without yet functioning like one. A study [Continue reading]
In 1991, botanists Calaway Dodson and Alwyn Gentry proposed that dozens of plant species known only from a deforested ridge in western Ecuador—Centinela—had likely gone extinct. The idea became known as the “Centinelan extinction hypothesis”: that clearing a single site could cause the immediate, global loss of narrowly distributed species. The claim was influential. It [Continue reading]
For decades, conservation has relied on a straightforward premise: counting nature. Scientists track species, map forests, and monitor ecosystems to inform policies ranging from protected areas to global biodiversity targets. That foundation remains intact, but the systems behind it are undergoing rapid change. A recent perspective led by William Sutherland argues that biodiversity measurement is [Continue reading]
To those who map the world for conservation, the forests of northeastern Gabon can appear almost empty. Satellite images show an unbroken canopy, and global datasets classify large areas as “intact forest landscapes,” supposedly free of human influence. On paper, such places look pristine. In Massaha, a village in Ogooué-Ivindo province, that picture does not [Continue reading]
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 professionals” by Vik Mohan and Nerissa Chao gave fresh urgency—and language—to a crisis many in conservation have been naming quietly for years. This piece builds on their reporting and reflections, and [Continue reading]
America’s national parks were conceived as refuges from the forces reshaping the continent. Climate change is breaching that boundary. A study in Conservation Letters suggests many parks are not merely warming but being pushed toward ecological states unlike those they were created to preserve. Researchers assessed 259 park units across the contiguous United States using [Continue reading]
Debates about ocean protection tend to focus on national governments and treaties. Fisheries quotas, shipping rules, and marine reserves are negotiated by states. Yet much of what determines ocean health flows through cities. Ports control entry. Municipal buyers decide what seafood is served in public institutions. Urban air-quality rules shape how ships operate at berth. [Continue reading]
In the wake of Australia’s 2019–20 “Black Summer” bushfires, few questions have proved as persistent as how to coexist with fire on a warming continent. Governments promise resilience, communities demand safety, and industries facing shrinking markets search for new roles. Out of this convergence has emerged a flashpoint: the thinning of native forests. Mechanical thinning [Continue reading]
A deceptively simple question underlies many global environmental policies: where, exactly, are the world’s forests? A new study suggests the answer depends heavily on which map one consults—and that the differences are large enough to reshape climate targets, conservation priorities, and development spending. Researchers Sarah Castle, Peter Newton, Johan Oldekop, Kathy Baylis, and Daniel Miller [Continue reading]
Coral reefs are among the most productive ecosystems on Earth, built slowly by animals that resemble plants. Each coral polyp hosts microscopic algae that convert sunlight into energy. When ocean temperatures rise, this partnership breaks down. The coral expels the algae, loses its color, and turns white — a process known as bleaching. The coral [Continue reading]
Rainfall is often treated as a gift of geography — a function of latitude, oceans, and atmospheric circulation. Research increasingly suggests that in the tropics it is also a product of ecosystems. Forests do not merely receive rain; they help generate it, regulate its distribution, and sustain the conditions that allow it to persist. A [Continue reading]
Lisa Miller did not come to biodiversity finance through markets or models. She came through animals. Growing up in Australia, her interest in wildlife was personal and specific, long before conservation became a policy debate or an investment theme. That early pull led her to study zoology and later to work at the Australian Museum, [Continue reading]
Extinction is rarely a moment. It is a process that unfolds offstage, marked by missed sightings, thinning records, and the slow reassignment of hope to footnotes. Discovery, too, is rarely a moment. It is a process of comparison, argument, and waiting—years spent persuading other experts that what you are seeing is, in fact, new. A [Continue reading]
On Friday, I published my annual “Year in Rainforests” on Mongabay. The process is always taxing and every year I swear will be the last. Here’s a summary of the piece. 2025 was a mixed year for the world’s tropical rainforests. In several countries, deforestation declined, sometimes sharply. At the same time, other forms of [Continue reading]
Indonesia’s environmental challenges can feel overwhelming when taken as a whole. A country often said to contain more than 17,000 islands, it holds the world’s third-largest tropical rainforest—and a resource economy that has reshaped much of that landscape. For many Indonesians, modern development is experienced not in graphs but in the air around them: childhoods [Continue reading]
The first time Virgilio Viana saw the Amazon, he was a 16-year-old traveling with two school friends, moving along dirt roads, then continuing by boat as the forest rose around them. The trip set something in motion. It stayed with him through a forestry degree, a PhD on the region, and later a professorship in [Continue reading]
Chris Grinter has spent much of his life surrounded by insects—though not in the way most people imagine. As Senior Collection Manager of Entomology at the California Academy of Sciences, he oversees one of the world’s major insect archives, preserving everything from the smallest moths to the largest butterflies. His work supports the California All-Taxa [Continue reading]