Rhett Ayers ButlerIf someone who dedicated their life to protecting nature and wildlife has recently passed away, you can use this form to share that information with me.
I write obituaries to honor the lives and legacies of those who worked to safeguard the natural world—especially those whose contributions might otherwise go unrecognized.
Fame, for Diane Keaton, was never an excuse to look away. In a profession built on performance, she turned her gaze outward—to the voiceless and the overlooked. While audiences remember her for Annie Hall’s nervous charm and The Godfather’s quiet strength, animal advocates will remember her for something else: an unflinching compassion that extended well [Continue reading]
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. Over the course of six decades, she moved from an unlikely young researcher in the forests of East Africa to one of the most recognizable scientists and conservationists of her [Continue reading]
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 someone whose presence—whether with presidents, students, or my own children—felt like both a gift and a lesson. Our friendship began in the most Jane way possible: an email that opened, [Continue reading]
In the steaming lowlands of Veracruz and the Yucatán, where strangler figs knot the canopy and howler monkeys bellow at dawn, a slight man with a field notebook kept noticing what others overlooked. Arturo Gómez-Pompa believed tropical forests were not untouched wilderness but “landscapes of memory,” shaped for millennia by Indigenous hands. Long before “biodiversity” [Continue reading]
In a crumbling four-story wada in Pune’s old quarter, where temple bells compete with motorbike horns and hawkers press against the walls, an upstairs room stayed stubbornly off the grid. There, surrounded by sparrows and squirrels, a small woman in a plain cotton sari wrote longhand by daylight or by the glow of a kerosene [Continue reading]
On a windy North Dakota morning in the mid-1970s, Fred Kirschenmann walked his family’s wheat fields and decided to stop farming the way his neighbors did. The son of Depression-era homesteaders, with a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Chicago, he would take 2,600 acres of prairie wheat and rye off synthetic fertilizers and [Continue reading]
Robert Redford never intended to be a spokesman for the environment. Acting and directing, the twin pillars of his professional life, were supposed to be enough. Yet for more than half a century he stood before cameras, senators, and students insisting that “the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense [Continue reading]
He taught mathematics in a small state school on Flores and organized the parish youth group on weekends. Numbers ordered his days; community gave them purpose. In recent years, he also helped mobilize opposition to plans to tap the island’s restless geology for power. On Sept. 5, 2025, Vian Ruma was found dead, hanging from [Continue reading]
He was never supposed to stay. When Mathias Espinosa first set foot on the Galápagos in the early 1980s, it was as a young visitor sailing around the islands in a wooden fishing boat. Yet the archipelago gripped him. He returned again and again until it became not just his home but the stage on [Continue reading]
Marc Stalmans, who died of natural causes on August 30th at 66, spent much of his life restoring life to a landscape once stripped of it. As the science director at Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, he was central to one of Africa’s most ambitious ecological experiments: the attempt to bring back an ecosystem gutted by [Continue reading]
In late August, high in South Africa’s Jonkershoek Mountains, a small group of botanists picked their way across steep ground in search of one of the world’s rarest plants. They were surveying Penaea formosa, a critically endangered shrub thought to number fewer than 50 individuals. Donovan Kirkwood, curator of the Stellenbosch University Botanical Garden, was [Continue reading]
He was almost always smiling. In eastern Congo, where war and poverty have long eroded hope, that smile and the restless energy behind it mattered as much as any conservation plan. Dr. Augustin Kanyunyi Basabose, who died suddenly on August 18th, 2025, gave communities and colleagues alike the sense that protecting gorillas was not just [Continue reading]
When Jim Estes first arrived in the Aleutian Islands in 1970, he expected a routine wildlife survey. What he found was the outline of a scientific revelation. In places where sea otters thrived, the ocean floor teemed with kelp and fish. Where they were gone, sea urchins had multiplied unchecked, razing the seabed to bare [Continue reading]
In a city of relentless noise and concrete, Sunjoy Monga taught Mumbai to look up. The flash of a kingfisher, the silhouette of a kite, the call of a koel at dawn—he urged his fellow citizens to notice these things, not as fleeting curiosities but as reminders that the natural world still lingered among them. [Continue reading]
He knew he would be killed. For months, Israeli officials had phoned him with threats: stop reporting, or die. Four days before the end, they offered him a way out, safe passage if he silenced himself. He refused. On August 10th, 2025, an Israeli airstrike struck a tent for journalists outside Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza [Continue reading]
At the San Diego Natural History Museum, Drew Stokes would slide open a drawer to reveal dozens of bats—some the size of bottle caps, others like éclairs. They were not trophies. Most had died of natural causes and were donated to science. For him, they were data, clues, and—more than anything—creatures worthy of protection. He [Continue reading]
For most Americans, the loss of a tree might pass unnoticed. For Rex Mann, it changed the course of his life. As a boy growing up in the mountains of western North Carolina, Mann listened to his father—once a moonshiner, later a Baptist lay minister—describe the American chestnut not in botanical terms, but as kin. [Continue reading]
Few men have stood so squarely in the crosshairs of development and conservation in Sri Lanka as Jayantha Jayewardene. A former rugby forward with a spine of steel, he spent decades grappling with a quieter, more consequential struggle: How to protect the island’s dwindling wild elephants amid its swelling human population. He approached the challenge [Continue reading]
For most people, the bush falls silent after dark. For Edward McNabb, it came alive. In the folds of night across Victoria’s forests, he attuned himself to sounds few others could name: the resonant trill of a Sooty Owl, the scratch of a glider, the croak of a burrowing frog. Over five decades, he made [Continue reading]
To work in Alaska as a wildlife biologist is to accept hardship as part of the job: blizzards, isolation, and a daily intimacy with life, death, and the difficult questions in between. For John Landsiedel, it was not only worth it—it was the dream. He arrived in Dillingham in 2022 to take up a post [Continue reading]
Among those who cared about freshwater fish—and there were many—Paul Loiselle stood out not for how loudly he spoke and cared, but for how deeply he understood. His grasp of ichthyology was vast, his judgment trusted across both scientific and aquarium hobbyist circles. But what set him apart was his generosity: He shared his knowledge [Continue reading]
When flames overtook the hillsides above the Zagros and Hassanabad neighborhoods in the Abidar highlands of Iranian Kurdistan, there was no formal emergency response team. No firebreaks. No protective gear. Only a handful of local environmentalists—among them Hamid Moradi—stepped in, as they had so many times before, to fight the blaze. Moradi was not a [Continue reading]
Note: In July 2025 I discovered this piece was still in drafts. I published it now, about a year after intended. It began with a buffalo. The animal lay slumped beside a dry waterhole in Tsavo West National Park, its great ribs rising and falling slowly in the dust. No rain had come. No relief [Continue reading]
You may have noticed that I’ve been writing more obituaries and tributes lately. This effort arose from an observation: Many people who spent their lives making the Earth more livable received little recognition. And when they died, their passing often went unnoticed—sometimes even by those who shared their cause. These obituaries are a way to [Continue reading]
The eastern reaches of the Democratic Republic of Congo are no strangers to tragedy. Yet the loss of two Virunga National Park rangers in a surveillance plane crash near Ishango on July 23 underscores once again the mortal risks faced by those charged with defending one of the world’s most biologically rich landscapes. Pilot Claude [Continue reading]