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.
For much of the late 20th century, reptiles occupied an awkward place in the public imagination. They were admired by specialists, feared or misunderstood by many others, and rarely treated with the same aesthetic seriousness afforded to birds or mammals. Field guides existed, but art that lingered on texture, posture, and individuality was scarce. The [Continue reading]
For much of the second half of the 20th century, the American outdoors attracted a particular kind of devotee. They moved easily between disciplines, took seasonal work without much concern for titles, and regarded time in wild places as both education and obligation. Their lives did not unfold along a single career ladder so much [Continue reading]
The risks of field science are usually described in abstract terms. Weather turns. Equipment fails. The sea does not always behave as expected. These dangers are well understood by those who work in and on the ocean, and they are rarely romanticized by the people who face them. Most accept them as the price of [Continue reading]
In the rangelands beneath Kilimanjaro, coexistence between people and wildlife has never been a simple matter. Livestock wander into the paths of lions. Farmers lose cattle they can scarcely afford to lose. Retaliation follows, and with it the slow unravelling of ecosystems that depend on predators to stay whole. The conservation groups that work there [Continue reading]
As I approach my 100th obituary—of people and, occasionally, species—it feels like an appropriate moment to explain why I write these tributes at all. I was recently interviewed about this work, and found myself reflecting on the questions I’ve been asked about the project. The instinct behind these pieces is a simple one. Over the [Continue reading]
For nearly six decades, Douglas-Hamilton dedicated his life to the elephants of Africa, forging a bond with the continent’s largest inhabitants that went beyond mere scientific study. It was said that he could recognize an elephant by the pattern of its ears or the wrinkles of its skin, much like a mother knows her child. [Continue reading]
The bulls were the first thing visitors noticed. Seven of them, huge and muscled, grazing under acacia trees in the heat of Tamil Nadu’s drylands, when a reporter from The Hindu visited in 2012. They were Kangayam cattle, a native breed once counted in the hundreds of thousands. Now their numbers are falling fast. A [Continue reading]
The cliffs above Cala de Moraia are steep and inaccessible. To most people, the terrain would signal danger rather than duty. But dangerous places often shelter life that needs defending. Rare plants cling to the cliff face, surviving only because most people cannot reach them. On November 25th, 2025, one person did. She was there [Continue reading]
On the beaches of Topsail Island in North Carolina, sea turtles still crawl ashore in the dark to lay their eggs. For many years, a woman with a clipboard and a steady presence walked those sands before dawn, counting tracks and marking nests. Her reason for being there began with loss. In 1991 her daughter, [Continue reading]
She moved slowly, as if time were something best savored. Visitors leaned over railings or crouched at the edge of her enclosure and watched her stretch her neck toward a leaf of romaine. Children noted she was older than their grandparents. Their parents did the math and realized she was older than the zoo itself. [Continue reading]
Early on November 16th, gunmen shot and killed Vicente Kaiowá e Guarani, a father and spokesman for the Kaiowá, a people who have spent decades trying to return to the places they call tekoha. His community says the men who pulled the trigger arrived in the dark, well armed and organized. Police later suggested the [Continue reading]
In the shallows off northern Bali, where the reefs flicker with life and the sea carries the rhythm of work and prayer, a quiet revolution took root. Women who once had few choices began tending tanks of clownfish and Banggai cardinalfish, learning the art of aquaculture. Fishers in nearby villages abandoned cyanide and explosives, watching [Continue reading]
Along a dusty road between Hulikal and Kudur in southern India, banyan trees rise like sentinels. Their thick roots grasp the earth, their canopies stretch wide, casting deep shade over the red soil. Travelers who pass beneath them find little reason to wonder how they came to be, or who first pressed a sapling into [Continue reading]
The Cry That Faded 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 voice—a thin, high cry, part bat and part whisper—once filled the forest of Christmas Island. [Continue reading]
He never raised his voice in anger. When talks grew tense—whether across a union bargaining table or a forest-policy summit—Chris Allnutt would grow quieter. The softer he spoke, colleagues recalled, the more certain everyone became that something important was about to happen. He did not trade in bluster or slogans. His power lay in patience, [Continue reading]
He was born where the forest gives way to the savannah, in the South Rupununi of Guyana, among horses, rivers, and the songs of the Wapichan people. From that landscape, Tony Rodney James—known to many as Chief Kokoi—drew the convictions that would guide his life: that land is not a commodity, that language carries memory, [Continue reading]
When the miners came, Mamai Lucille Williams was well into her eighties. Her house in Karisparu, a Patamona village high in Guyana’s North Pakaraimas, stood on the same patch of ground where she had lived since childhood. Around it grew cassava, bananas, and fruit trees she had planted herself, each one a small act of [Continue reading]
He was born in the forests that would later define his life. In Tanzania’s Kilombero Valley, where mist drifts down from the Udzungwa Mountains, young Aloyce Mwakisoma learned the names of plants before he could read their Latin equivalents. His father, once a hunter, became a research assistant after hunting was outlawed in the 1990s, [Continue reading]
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]