Category: Obituaries and tributes

In a world that treats foxes as either fur or folly, Mikayla Raines saw something else entirely: Sentience. Not the cartoonish cleverness of folklore, nor the soft luxury of fashion, but the quiet, confused lives of animals bred to die or discarded as inconvenient pets. From the age of 15, when she bottle-fed her first [Continue reading]

In the forests of Vidarbha, where he spent most of his adult life, Maruti Chitampalli did not walk so much as listen. While others mapped territory, he absorbed language—of birds, of trees, of the people who lived among them. Over four decades as a forest officer in Maharashtra, he moved not as a bureaucrat but [Continue reading]

There are those whose lives accumulate significance slowly, the way sediment builds into shoreline. And then there are those whose devotion etches meaning into every year. Shiloh Schulte, a biologist who spent his life chasing birds across hemispheres, belonged to the latter group. He died in the North Slope of Alaska when the helicopter he [Continue reading]

In the Yolŋu worldview, land and people are not separate things. They are interwoven—spirit, soil, and songline one and the same. Few embodied that unity more steadily than M Marika, a senior elder of the Rirratjiŋu clan, who died this month in north-east Arnhem Land. He was 64. For more than three decades, Mr Marika [Continue reading]

If Derek Pomeroy said to meet him at 7am, you were expected to be there by exactly 7am—not a minute later. Punctuality was not just a preference; it was a principle. Whether in a zoology lab, a birdwatching field station, or over tea at Makerere University, order and discipline mattered. Behind that exacting standard, however, [Continue reading]

For Valmik Thapar, the tiger was never just a symbol of wild India. It was a living, breathing force—majestic, imperiled, and, to him, essential. His death on May 31st in New Delhi, from cancer, marks the end of a five-decade crusade to ensure that the world’s largest cat did not vanish from the subcontinent it [Continue reading]

Sebastião Salgado, the celebrated Brazilian photographer whose powerful black-and-white images captured the dignity of human labor and the fragility of the natural world, has died at the age of 81.  A photographer whose work spanned the globe and crossed boundaries between photojournalism, social commentary, and environmental advocacy, Salgado’s life and career were defined by a [Continue reading]

Radheshyam Bishnoi, protector of India’s most vulnerable animals, died on May 24, 2025, aged 28.  Radheshyam Bishnoi was born with a calling to save wildlife. From a young age, he was driven by a deep sense of responsibility to protect the fragile ecosystems around him, shaped by the strong environmental values of the Bishnoi community. [Continue reading]

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 hopeful. “I embraced my destiny,” she wrote, taking each step “one drop at a time.” For a woman who dedicated her life to articulating collective struggles, her illness [Continue reading]

In a modest home on the edge of Bogotá, a forest lived in exile. Its canopy no longer rustled with wind or birdcall, but was redrawn leaf by leaf from memory, with ink and conviction. It existed not on maps or in satellite imagery, but on sheets of paper, in the hand of a man [Continue reading]

In a farmhouse overlooking the Upper Delaware River, Barbara Yeaman found her life’s calling later than most. At 70, when many were winding down, she set about founding the Delaware Highlands Conservancy, a land trust that would eventually protect more than 20,000 acres of forests, farms, and wetlands. It was, she often said, simply a [Continue reading]

In an age of noise and haste, Jim Brandenburg found greatness in patience. A single wolf mid-leap between ice sheets; a timber wolf peering shyly from behind a tree—his photographs distilled the wild into fleeting moments of clarity, and made him one of the most revered nature photographers of his generation. He died on April [Continue reading]

For Ben Ochieng’ Ogodo, science was never a subject to be sequestered in ivory towers. It belonged in the hands of the people—decoded, demystified, and, above all, delivered with clarity and conviction. Across nearly three decades, he did just that: in newspapers and journals, in classrooms and workshops, in newsrooms stretching from Nairobi to London. [Continue reading]

In Reddipalli, a village tucked into the dry red soils of Telangana’s Khammam district, there lived a man who measured life not in years or wealth, but in saplings. By his own modest estimate, Daripalli Ramaiah planted more than ten million trees. For over six decades, he travelled—on foot, later by bicycle, and sometimes on [Continue reading]

There was something almost subversive about David Myers’s approach to conservation. He spoke the language of developers, negotiated like one, and sometimes even thought like one — but his ambitions ran in the opposite direction. Where others saw empty land as opportunity for subdivisions or shopping malls, he saw the scaffolding of nature itself: canyons, [Continue reading]

Vincent van der Merwe, Champion of the cheetah, died in Riyadh on March 16th, aged 42 For a species built for speed, cheetahs have run out of room. In their native Africa, they are marooned on islands of fragmented habitat, hemmed in by fences, farmland, and highways. It was Vincent van der Merwe’s unlikely task [Continue reading]

Elisabeth Vrba, who died last month at 82, did not set out to overturn the way scientists understood evolution. But her relentless inquiry, guided by a keen mathematical mind and a sharp eye for patterns in the fossil record, challenged some of Darwin’s most sacrosanct ideas. In a field where slow, incremental change had long [Continue reading]

Dr. Ajith Kumar, a distinguished wildlife biologist, mentor, and educator, dedicated his life to the study and conservation of India’s biodiversity. His research and leadership over four decades shaped the landscape of wildlife science in the country, particularly through his work on primates and small carnivores, as well as his instrumental role in training future [Continue reading]

Francisco Marupa did not die as he lived.  He had spent his years as a guardian of the forests and rivers of the Madidi National Park in Bolivia, walking its ancient paths as his ancestors had before him. His voice carried the weight of centuries, speaking for the Leco people, for the trees felled in [Continue reading]

Randy Borman was never meant to be Cofán. And yet, from the moment he was born in 1955, deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, he belonged to them. His parents, American missionaries, had come to translate the Bible into the Cofán language, but their eldest son took to the forest as though it were written into [Continue reading]

Vimla Bahuguna, who spent a lifetime defending India’s forests, empowering women, and championing the rights of the poor, died on February 14th, at the age of 93. Her passing, four years after that of her husband, the renowned environmentalist Sunderlal Bahuguna, marks the gentle passing of a woman whose work was neither loud nor self-promotional [Continue reading]

Kallur Balan did not seek recognition. He did not write books, nor command the podium at international climate summits. His work was quieter, the slow and unglamorous toil of one man against the arid land. But when he died on Monday, aged 75, the forests he left behind spoke for him. The hills of Palakkad, [Continue reading]