Rhett Ayers Butler
At Bradford Island, near Bonneville Dam, the river carried more than water. Beneath the Columbia’s surface were toxic sediments, dumped near a place where Yakama people had fished since time immemorial. To officials, it was a cleanup site. To the Yakama Nation, it was a usual and accustomed fishing place, protected by treaty. To Davis [Continue reading]
To Mike Salisbury, patience was not a virtue so much as a working method. Lions did not hunt on cue. Plants did not move at a human pace. Polar bears did not respect production schedules, or much else. The task was to wait, improvise, and find a way to show TV audiences that the natural [Continue reading]
Norlan Pagal knew the waters of Tañon Strait from a lifetime spent fishing them. By the early 2000s he had watched catches decline as commercial boats entered waters reserved for small fishers and destructive fishing practices damaged reefs. In 2002 he joined the bantay dagat, the volunteer sea patrol that protects coastal waters in the [Continue reading]
To Monica Montefalcone, the sea was a place to study: its plants, reefs, hidden habitats and seasonal changes. A meadow of Posidonia oceanica was not just a patch of green beneath the water. It provided nursery habitat, shelter, carbon storage and coastal protection. To most swimmers it might have looked like seagrass. To her it [Continue reading]
Ted Turner, who died today, liked to present himself as a businessman who had simply applied the same habits to a larger subject. First he bought a struggling billboard company and made it work. Then he built a television empire, beginning with CNN in 1980. After that, he turned much of his attention to land, [Continue reading]
In the open ocean, the sunfish appears almost improbable—rounded, truncated, adrift in ways that seem to resist explanation. For Thys, that improbability was an invitation. A small photograph sparked a line of inquiry that would shape decades of her life, not only in studying the fish itself, but in asking what its form revealed about [Continue reading]
Over more than six decades, he helped reshape how scientists understand the natural world—not as a set of isolated species, but as a network of relationships. His work on coevolution, developed with Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s, showed how plants and animals shape one another over time. It remains foundational. Raven is perhaps best known [Continue reading]
In a zoo, a crisis often begins before anyone names it as such. An animal stops responding to treatment. A pregnancy fails to progress. A procedure goes as planned, yet recovery does not follow. The work is technical and uncertain, and the margin for error is narrow. Outcomes depend on biology, timing, judgment, and factors [Continue reading]
“One of the great tragedies of the 21st century,” Schaffer once said, “will be humanity’s homogeneity.” The remark was less a warning than a diagnosis. In a world where landscapes were being simplified and species reduced to remnants, she concerned herself with what would be lost when difference itself began to disappear. For rhinoceroses, that [Continue reading]
For much of the late 20th century, oil development in the Ecuadorian Amazon proceeded with little restraint. Wastewater and drilling residues were discharged into rivers or left in open pits. Forest was cleared. Communities downstream relied on contaminated water for daily use. Over time, residents reported rising rates of illness, including cancers and respiratory disease. [Continue reading]
They were described as moving in loose formation along the rocky margins of the Galápagos, holding position where the water deepened and currents carried plankton past. Accounts from divers and early surveys note their presence as steady and unremarkable—part of a system that functioned with enough regularity to make such sightings routine. The Galápagos damselfish, [Continue reading]
There are moments in natural-history films when the camera seems improbably close: a polar bear’s breath fogging the lens, a seal pausing to look back, an orca pod moving beneath broken ice. The impression is of nearness without disturbance. In practice, such images depend on time, restraint and a willingness to work in conditions most [Continue reading]
In the long arc of conservation, recovery is often slow enough to be mistaken for stasis. Populations dwindle, habitats shrink, and reversal depends less on moments of triumph than on decades of patient observation, persuasion, and persistence. Progress is recorded not in headlines but in ledgers: nests counted, territories mapped, landowners convinced, protections negotiated. For [Continue reading]
Birutė Galdikas, orangutan researcher and advocate, has died, aged 79 In the early 1970s, orangutans were poorly understood and rarely observed in the wild. Their forests in Borneo and Sumatra remained extensive, though early signs of logging and land conversion were already visible. At the same time, a small group of researchers began shifting primatology [Continue reading]
Environmental policy in Europe has long promised more protection for the seas than the water itself often reflects. Governments have pledged sustainable fisheries, established marine protected areas and endorsed scientific advice on catch limits. Yet enforcement has often proved uneven. Industrial fishing practices still operate in places meant to safeguard marine life, and political compromises [Continue reading]
Paul Brainerd did two things that rarely sit comfortably together. He helped make publishing cheaper and easier, then spent much of what he earned trying to protect the landscapes that were being consumed by growth. He died on February 15th 2026, aged 78, at his home on Bainbridge Island, Washington. In the 1980s, when computers [Continue reading]
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 nowhere else. When habitat thins or disease arrives, species cannot retreat to safer ground. Conservation therefore depends not only on science but on [Continue reading]
José Albino Cañas Ramírez did not die in a war zone, though war had shaped the place where he lived. He was shot at his home in the community of Portachuelo, in Colombia’s Caldas department, on the evening of February 16th. Two men came to the shop he ran from his house, opened fire, and [Continue reading]
Division was four years old when he died, a young age even by the shortened standards now applied to North Atlantic right whales. His body was found in late January, adrift off the coast of North Carolina. The weather was too dangerous for anything more than confirmation. By then, the cause was already understood. He [Continue reading]
Singapore sells itself as an engineered miracle: a dense city that works, where heat, rain, and scarcity are managed rather than endured. Greenery is part of that bargain. Trees soften the concrete and help make the place livable, but they are also a kind of civic language. They signal order, foresight, and the idea that [Continue reading]
In most forests, a visitor’s eye is trained on what can be reached. The trunk can be measured. The leaves can be plucked. A specimen can be pressed, labeled, and filed away. Yet the largest share of life in a tropical rainforest hangs overhead, in a zone of light, wind, and constant exchange. For much [Continue reading]
For a small country, Belize has long carried an outsized reputation among people who care about water. Its flats and mangroves, its reef and river systems, have drawn anglers and naturalists who come for beauty but stay, if they are paying attention, for the fragile bargain that keeps such places alive. Tourism can finance protection. [Continue reading]
Doug McConnell spent much of his adult life doing something that sounds simple and is not: he helped people look closely at the places where they lived. For decades he turned Northern California’s open spaces, back roads, and overlooked corners into familiar destinations people came to recognize and talk about, shown not as scenery but [Continue reading]
She wrote about damage that accumulated slowly, in places most people did not look, and about the systems that allowed it to be ignored. When her own life was overtaken by illness, she approached that, too, as a problem to be understood rather than transcended. For much of her career she worked as an environmental [Continue reading]
In the late 20th century, forest conservation in the eastern United States was rarely a matter of sweeping victories or clean resolutions. It was a practice shaped by hearings that dragged on, injunctions that arrived too late, and landscapes divided among agencies with overlapping mandates and uneven resolve. The work tended to fall to people [Continue reading]