I’m discontinuing only the dedicated Substack newsletter, where relatively few people see these pieces. For context, on average, one of these obituaries reaches more than 100 times as many people on LinkedIn and attracts 250 times as many readers on Mongabay as it does through Substack. It just seems Substack is not the platform for these types of pieces!

For 50 years, Philip Fearnside has calculated the costs of losing the Amazon

I first encountered Philip Fearnside’s name while writing my book about tropical rainforests in the 1990s.

His work seemed to come up whenever I searched for papers on deforestation, dams, and roads in the Amazon. Its depth and breadth stood out.

Naturally, when I began conducting interviews for Mongabay’s news service in the mid-2000s, Fearnside was one of the first people I contacted. He was extremely responsive and generous with his time, especially given how little-known Mongabay was back then.

In our 2006 interview, he discussed the risk of climate change causing a catastrophic die-off of the Amazon, the folly of valuing the forest only in terms of mahogany, soybeans, or cattle, and its role in generating rainfall across South America. All of those issues remain as relevant today as they were then.

Twenty years later, Fearnside is as busy as ever, publishing papers, mentoring scientists, and writing for the public. That includes dozens of commentaries for Mongabay.

An event held in Fearnside’s honor a couple of weeks ago prompted me to revisit his work. Scientists and former students told stories about him and described his vast contributions to understanding the Amazon during his 50 years working in the region. He has spent 48 of those years at the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA), which hosted the gathering.

What struck me was the gratitude these researchers expressed—and just how many people Fearnside has influenced.

The occasion was also a little bittersweet. Fearnside said it felt somewhat like a goodbye. Yet, as he made clear, he still has plenty of work to do.

With Brazil still weighing new road projects and oil exploration near the mouth of the Amazon, the problems that have occupied Fearnside for half a century have not gone away.

Fearnside said his doctor told him he’ll live to be 100.

Here’s the piece: For 50 years, Philip Fearnside has calculated the costs of losing the Amazon

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Other pieces

Environmental crimes don’t stop at borders. Neither can the reporting

High gold prices have fueled illegal mining across the Amazon. As Brazil tightened controls on the trade, criminal groups found another route through Venezuela, where it could be laundered and then exported overseas, according to a Mongabay investigation published last year. Documenting the trade required journalists in three countries to work together—an approach Daniela Quintero considers essential because environmental crimes rarely respect national borders.

Hà Đình Đức, guardian of Hanoi’s legendary turtle

On March 15th 1991 Hà Đình Đức happened to be passing Hồ Gươm, the small lake at the center of Hanoi, when he saw its giant softshell turtle surface. Đức went home and marked the date on his calendar. He was a zoologist, but the encounter created an “invisible bond” between himself and the turtle, almost “hypnotizing” him. He said it changed the course of his life. For the next quarter-century he photographed it, recorded its appearances and worried about its health. Hanoians came to know him as “Professor Turtle” or “Đức Rùa”.

A remote corner of Colombia had 10 recorded dragonfly species. Researchers working with Indigenous communities have found nearly 120.

When researchers began cataloging dragonflies in Guainía, a remote region in eastern Colombia, the scientific record contained only about ten species. The actual number appears to be closer to 120. Once the researchers had begun filling gaps in the scientific record, they held workshops to share their findings with local communities. There they encountered another gap: the language of biology meant little to people whose understanding of the landscape had been formed outside scientific taxonomies. Some participants did not speak Spanish at all.

• Over the past year the amount of time I’ve spent writing has become unsustainable and I'm entering a period when I need to focus more heavily on fundraising for Mongabay. With the donor environment for journalism becoming more difficult and uncertain, that aspect of my work needs more of my attention than ever. So I'll be scaling back my Substack presence. I’m not sure what that looks like yet, but it might mean switching to a biweekly publishing schedule, sharing fewer “notes”, and/or shifting toward shorter pieces, which people have told me they prefer anyway.

• I’ve also made the difficult decision to wind down my other Substack newsletter, Nature Obituaries, which featured tributes to environmental defenders, scientists, and others who’ve worked to protect, steward, and understand the natural world. Nature Obituaries never really resonated beyond a very small group of readers on Substack, and I need to balance the time it takes against my other responsibilities. I plan to continue writing these pieces and publishing them on my blog, LinkedIn, and occasionally Mongabay. They just won’t have a dedicated home on this platform going forward.

• Thanks for understanding, and thanks for reading.

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 contributions that Winnie Hallwachs, his wife and research partner, has made to it.

That growing understanding made the piece difficult to complete. I would think it was finished, though not quite ready for publication, then encounter something new and return to it. The process played out over nearly four years. Now, I feel ready.

What struck me about Janzen and Hallwachs was how far they evolved from classic ecologists focused on fundamental biological questions. Janzen’s early work included dissecting plant-herbivore interactions, such as the Acacia-ant mutualism; formulating landmark hypotheses, including the Janzen-Connell model and tropical mountain-pass physiology; and gathering meticulous life-history data across Central America. In those years, protected areas often seemed to be viewed chiefly as outdoor laboratories: static settings for research rather than dynamic landscapes under existential threat.

Janzen responded as the circumstances changed. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, rapid deforestation across Central America had made clear that a purely academic documentation effort could soon become a catalog of extinctions. When Janzen and Hallwachs turned their attention to Santa Rosa National Park in Costa Rica, they realized that small, isolated fragments of tropical dry forest—the most endangered major tropical ecosystem in Mesoamerica—would not survive over the long term without intervention to protect and restore the ecosystem at a functional, landscape scale. That realization would culminate in the vision for the Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG).

As they began the work, they saw the need to ensure that local communities had a role. Janzen and Hallwachs developed a framework of biocultural restoration with three components:

1. Process-driven restoration: They recognized that the forest could regenerate if anthropogenic fire was eliminated and pasture grasses were managed. They raised money to buy nearby degraded cattle ranches, creating a corridor that connected lowland areas on the Pacific coast to cloud forests that blanket Costa Rican volcanos.

2. The parataxonomist model: They hired local residents, including former cattle ranchers and farm workers, and trained them in taxonomy, fieldwork, and ecology. This challenged the traditional “fortress conservation” model that excluded local people.

3. A “use it or lose it” mentality: They argued that protected wildlands must provide tangible value to society. Through the Programa de Educación Biológica (PEB), local primary-school students visited ACG regularly for hands-on ecological education.

By the early 2000s, Janzen and Hallwachs recognized a major bottleneck: traditional taxonomic approaches could not keep pace with the hundreds of thousands of insects they were rearing. Cryptic species were everywhere. They embraced DNA barcoding and integrated it into their daily fieldwork. The effort yielded numerous species discoveries and eventually culminated in BioAlfa, their ambitious national initiative to DNA-barcode every multicellular species in Costa Rica.

To them, barcoding was more than a sequencing technique. It offered a way for a park ranger, farmer, or schoolchild with a handheld scanner to identify a leaf or insect on the spot. In that sense, it could make knowledge of species less confined to specialists and more available in daily life—an idea that underpins bioliteracy, a term coined by Janzen.

Janzen argued that people often move through nature surrounded by organisms they cannot name or distinguish. Barcoding, paired with an online record for each species, could make that diversity easier to recognize: not an anonymous mass of vegetation and insects, but individual organisms with identities, relationships, and places in an ecosystem.

That adaptability also shows up in Janzen’s day-to-day routine. Known for spending 12- to 14-hour days writing and curating biodiversity data, he adapted to the sedentary demands of computational taxonomy by mounting his computer over a treadmill, logging miles while answering correspondence and processing barcodes. It is an approach entirely in character: diagnose the constraint, apply the most direct functional fix, and keep moving.

Here’s the piece: Daniel Janzen and the long work of bringing back a forest

A new BioScience paper argues that these stations deserve a larger role in conservation policy, especially in the tropics. The authors describe tropical field stations as institutions that can help turn global environmental commitments into local work. Governments have promised to protect more land and sea, restore degraded ecosystems, slow extinctions, and make conservation more equitable. These goals require information, trust, capacity, and persistence. Field stations can supply much of that infrastructure.

The argument is strongest in places where conservation decisions affect both biodiversity and livelihoods. A station in a forest, savanna, wetland, or coastal ecosystem is more than a base for visiting scientists. It can support long-term monitoring, train local researchers, employ people from nearby communities, and keep conservation connected to park staff, farmers, fishers, Indigenous groups, and officials.

More data, harder answers

That gap is important because conservation has become data-rich and answer-poor. Satellites can detect tree-cover loss within days. Acoustic sensors can record birds, frogs, insects, and mammals across a year. Camera traps, drones, and environmental DNA can collect measurements at scales that were implausible not long ago. These tools are changing conservation for the better. They also make field judgment more important, because more information creates more need for interpretation.

A forest may still look intact from above after hunting has reduced part of its animal community. A restored area may gain canopy cover before it recovers ecological function. A protected area may appear effective because it was already remote, steep, or politically hard to clear. These distinctions matter for conservation claims. They require baselines, comparison sites, local knowledge, and a credible estimate of what would have happened without an intervention. Field stations are well suited to that work because they keep people close to the systems being measured.

The value of a long record

Long-term presence also changes the quality of evidence. A short survey can describe a moment. A long record can show direction. Some ecological changes are slow enough to be missed by a grant cycle and fast enough to affect decisions within a lifetime. Climate shifts, fragmentation effects, species turnover, hunting pressure, fire regimes, and disease dynamics often become identifiable only through repeated observation. The Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project in the Brazilian Amazon, started in 1979, is one example. Its value comes partly from the fact that the same forest fragments have been studied across decades as the surrounding landscape, scientific questions, and conservation priorities changed.

Field stations can also make conservation more testable. Restoration and agroforestry are now widely promoted, but practitioners still need to know which methods work, where, and under what conditions. Field stations in Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Brazil have supported experiments on restoration and applied nucleation. A 15-year study in Costa Rica, for example, compared applied nucleation with natural regeneration and tree plantations, producing evidence that is more useful than a general call to restore forest. The practical value lies in seeing how methods perform on real land, under real constraints.

The case for stations is also economic. A 2024 Conservation Letters study examined tropical field stations that host primate research. The authors surveyed leaders of 157 stations in 56 countries. Respondents reported improved habitat quality at more than 80% of stations and reduced hunting rates at a similar share. Most stations hired people from nearby communities. Most collected long-term data, hosted researchers, supported students, and brought visitors into contact with working conservation landscapes. A spatial analysis also found lower deforestation near stations than in matched comparison areas.

These findings need careful handling. Some are based on perceptions reported by station leaders, and field stations differ widely in size, governance, funding, and local legitimacy. The pattern remains important. In many places, a station’s presence brings jobs, attention, patrol support, visiting researchers, and a regular stream of people who notice when something changes. These effects are hard to capture in a narrow cost-benefit analysis, which helps explain why stations are often undervalued.

The BioScience paper emphasizes another role: connection. Conservation policy is usually negotiated far from the places where it will be applied. Implementation happens where land, water, food, income, authority, and identity are involved. Field stations can connect those levels. They can bring international researchers into contact with local scientists, Indigenous communities, park staff, farmers, fishers, students, and officials. The result is not automatically equitable or useful. It depends on governance, data ownership, agenda-setting, employment, and credit. Still, stations can provide a place where conservation evidence is discussed with people who live with the consequences.

That history also requires caution. Some tropical field stations grew out of colonial patterns of research, where knowledge was extracted from biodiverse countries and careers were built elsewhere. Megan Raby’s history of tropical field stations is a useful reminder that scientific institutions carry histories as well as data. Strengthening field stations should not mean preserving old hierarchies with newer equipment. It should mean funding institutions that build local scientific leadership, support fair employment, share data responsibly, and treat traditional and local ecological knowledge as part of the evidence base.

This is where the decline in fieldwork becomes relevant. A recent Trends in Ecology & Evolution paper warns of an “extinction of experience” among ecologists themselves. The causes are varied: funding constraints, safety concerns, urban university settings, remote technologies, and academic incentives that favor faster outputs. Some of these pressures reflect necessary changes. Fieldwork can be expensive, risky, exclusionary, and environmentally costly if designed poorly. Researchers also need modeling, synthesis, laboratory analysis, and remote sensing. Conservation does not benefit from nostalgia for a narrower version of field science.

Keeping fieldwork useful

The useful question is how to make fieldwork safer, more inclusive, and more closely tied to decisions. Field stations can help because they reduce the friction of field research. A well-run station provides trained staff, safety systems, permits, equipment, protocols, and continuity. It can help visiting scientists avoid the worst forms of parachute research. It can give students their first serious exposure to natural history. It can host technologies that require maintenance, from camera traps and acoustic recorders to carbon-flux towers and molecular labs. It can keep field observation in ecological science without treating fieldwork as a test of endurance.

The need for continuity is becoming more obvious as conservation moves toward stronger claims about impact. Governments, funders, and companies increasingly ask whether an intervention improved biodiversity, protected habitat, or increased resilience. Those claims require more than a map of remaining forest. They need measurements taken before, during, and after an intervention; comparison sites; and people who understand what the measurements mean. Remote systems can collect much of the data. Stations can make the data more credible.

The same point applies to acoustic monitoring. A recorder can capture animal activity long after field staff have left a site. The raw archive may later be analyzed with methods that do not yet exist. Microphones still fail, storms distort signals, rats and ants chew cables, roads add noise, and algorithms make mistakes. Local teams are needed because ecological data are produced in real places, under real constraints. The future of conservation measurement will be more automated. It will also need institutions that can maintain equipment, validate results, and connect findings to management.

Field stations remain financially fragile. Many depend on visiting researchers, field courses, university subsidies, short grants, and the persistence of directors. Political instability, pandemics, inflation, safety concerns, and changes in university budgets can quickly weaken them. The recent debate in the United States over plans to consolidate or close Forest Service research facilities shows that even long-established research infrastructure can become vulnerable when public institutions change priorities. In tropical countries, where many stations operate with smaller reserves and higher logistical costs, the risk is often greater.

What stations need

A serious field-station agenda would start with stable core funding. Short project grants can pay for experiments, surveys, and equipment. They rarely cover the administrative staff, maintenance, community engagement, data management, and safety systems that allow a station to function year after year. Endowments, multi-year operating grants, and national research commitments would do more to protect the infrastructure that conservation depends on.

It would also invest in networks. A BioScience inventory identified 1,268 biological field stations across 120 countries, spanning terrestrial, freshwater, and marine systems. Many stations still operate with limited coordination, even when they face similar questions about climate change, restoration, hunting, invasive species, fire, and land-use pressure. Linking stations across regions would make it easier to compare methods, share protocols, train staff, store data, and respond to emerging threats. It would also make stations more visible to policymakers who now tend to see them as isolated research sites rather than as part of a distributed conservation system.

The final case for field stations is operational. Conservation targets are easier to announce than to deliver. Delivery depends on institutions that can stay with a place long enough to see whether protection, restoration, enforcement, and community engagement are working. Field stations do not solve that problem by themselves. They offer one of the clearest existing platforms for doing the work: collecting evidence, training people, supporting local livelihoods, and changing course when the evidence calls for it.

The next phase of conservation will rely heavily on satellites, sensors, models, and global databases. Those tools are necessary. They will be stronger when tied to people and institutions rooted in the places being measured. Field stations give conservation a way to remain empirical, local, and accountable. That is a practical role, and an increasingly important one.

Citations in the online version.

How silk caterpillars became a tool for conservation in Madagascar

When Catherine Craig first went to Gombe in 1972, she was not thinking about silk. She was an undergraduate in a four-seat plane with Jane Goodall, flying over the Tanzanian forest where Goodall’s work on chimpanzees was changing how scientists understood animals. Craig spent six months there, learning to recognize individual chimpanzees and helping track mothers and infants through the steep woodland above Lake Tanganyika. The forest stayed with her. So did the sight of people living nearby with few choices, and the later realization that even forests thought to be protected could disappear.

Her path back to conservation was indirect. Craig became a biologist of spiders and silk, earning a Ph.D. in ecology and evolution from Cornell and later joining the biology faculty at Yale. For two decades, she studied webs, foraging behavior, insect flight, and the properties of silk. It was work at the level of fibers, mechanics, and evolution. Yet the question that had formed at Gombe remained: how could habitat be protected where people had few ways to earn money?

The answer she pursued was both plain and difficult. If farmers could earn income from native silk-producing caterpillars and the plants that fed them, then habitat might become something worth tending. The idea drew on her scientific expertise, but it also required skills that science had not taught her: product design, marketing, patience, and the ability to listen across languages, cultures, and expectations shaped by past disappointments.

Craig first examined wild silk projects in India, Indonesia, and Madagascar. India showed that silk, enterprise, and conservation could be linked. Indonesia showed the importance of product development. Madagascar offered the combination she was seeking: extraordinary biodiversity, deep poverty, and a cultural history of silk textiles. It was also a country where many conservation projects had struggled, often because local people had been asked to carry the costs of conservation without seeing enough of its benefits.

In 2004, Craig began fieldwork in Madagascar, first at Ranomafana and later near Makira Natural Park in the northeast. She focused on border forests rather than the protected area itself. That distinction mattered. The farmers she hoped to work with lived outside the park, in places where conservation policy, subsistence needs, and economic uncertainty met each day. Wild silk caterpillars were often found in edge habitats, secondary growth, and small farms. That made them suitable for a model built around people’s existing landscapes, rather than around keeping people out.

The program that emerged, Conservation through Poverty Alleviation, International, or CPALI, was never just about collecting cocoons. It involved finding caterpillars and their host plants, raising native species, planting trees, training farmers, and building a workshop where women could turn cocoons, raffia, dyes, and other materials into saleable goods. The products had to be distinctive enough to reach buyers in wealthier markets. The enterprise had to return enough value locally to justify the effort. None of this happened quickly.

Craig is candid about the limits of her early assumptions. She arrived with technical knowledge and confidence. She had to learn that conservation enterprise is not a tidy extension of biology. Markets shift. Equipment breaks. Electricity is unreliable. Shipping is costly. A design that works in New York may not be practical in Maroantsetra. A project that seems logical to an outsider may not fit the rhythm of village life. Farmers needed to see a demonstration site. Elders needed to be consulted. Participation had to happen on local timelines.

Much of the project’s endurance came from the Malagasy team that formed around it. Mamy Ratsimbazafy, first hired as a field assistant and translator, became a central figure and later the director of the local partner organization, SEPALI Madagascar. Lalaina Raharindimby helped lead the women’s artisan program and product development. Over time, the work expanded beyond silk to include raffia, natural dyes, weaving, agroforestry, and biochar. When vanilla prices rose, some farmers left silk for the more lucrative crop. When vanilla prices later fell, the cocoon market offered a fallback for those who remained. The episode showed the fragility of rural livelihoods, and the value of working in a biodiverse landscape with more than one possible product.

Craig’s story is also one of institutional humility. She came to believe that many conservation programs falter because they fail to ask people what they need, or because they treat communities as instruments of a biodiversity plan. In her telling, respect showed up in daily choices. It meant spending money locally, working without project vehicles or boats, renting village houses, using public transport, and remaining long enough for people to believe the project would not disappear after a few years.

After more than two decades, Craig stepped back from day-to-day leadership. She concluded that her management had begun to limit the program’s independence. The transition is among the most important parts of the story. Many founder-led projects weaken when the founder leaves. Craig says she is proud that the work is now financially secure and governed by Malagasy leadership, with CPALI’s role shifting toward fundraising, advising, and helping connect the team to markets.

Craig’s upcoming book, Nature’s Threads, offers an account of what it took to make a small conservation enterprise persist. The work survived market shocks, cyclones, a coup, floods, a pandemic, and the slow work of building trust. Its lessons are hard-won: conservation linked to livelihoods needs time, local authority, product development, and a market willing to pay for more than a raw material. It also needs people willing to stay after the first plan proves incomplete.

The interview with Catherine L. Craig

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How an activist network built pressure without political power

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 reliable access to politicians, and no formal way to force global corporations or development banks to change. It had Randy Hayes, a wide activist network, a way to connect distant forest destruction to everyday choices, and a willingness to use tactics that many mainstream environmental groups avoided.

David Benac’s new book, Rainforest Radicals: A History of Rainforest Action Network and Transnational Organizing, tells the story of how that combination became effective. RAN’s early campaigns targeted Burger King over rainforest beef, True Geothermal in Hawai‘i, the World Bank over development projects, and Mitsubishi over tropical timber. These were different fights, involving different places, institutions, and coalitions. Together, they show how a small San Francisco-based group helped bring tropical deforestation, Indigenous rights, and corporate accountability into late twentieth-century environmental politics.

Benac, an environmental and public historian of the postwar United States, came to the subject indirectly. He was researching timber-industry history in the Pacific Northwest when he encountered the MacMillan Bloedel papers and a grassroots campaign against clear-cutting in British Columbia’s coastal rainforests. RAN appeared in the archival trail. That led him to Hayes, RAN’s co-founder, then to a larger oral-history project with activists, allies, and contemporaries. The result is a history built around interviews, archives, and a close look at how people organize when formal institutions offer little help.

RAN’s early thinking drew from Earth First!, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and Australia’s Rainforest Information Centre. The group borrowed from each, adapted their methods, and developed its own identity. It used nonviolent direct action, boycotts, media spectacle, and decentralized organizing. It also placed Indigenous self-determination near the center of its mission, at a time when many national environmental groups still treated forests mainly as ecological spaces rather than homelands, cultural landscapes, and political territories.

For RAN, “radical” did not simply mean dramatic protests or a taste for confrontation. It meant trying to identify the causes of tropical deforestation. The group saw forests being cleared through a system that linked multinational corporations, banks, governments, consumer demand, and development policy. Its campaigns were aimed at pressure points within that system. A hamburger chain, a geothermal company, a development bank, and a sprawling Japanese conglomerate became ways to make a global problem visible to people who might otherwise encounter it only as a distant issue.

Visibility mattered. RAN was good at theater. Its activists wore costumes, staged banner drops, organized boycotts, and used humor to keep campaigns from becoming grim exercises in moral instruction. In one of the book’s memorable scenes, activists at a Home Depot protest used the store’s own intercom system to direct shoppers toward rainforest-linked products. The action worked because it translated distant destruction into a consumer setting. It gave shoppers a way to see the link between everyday purchases and forests far from the store aisle.

The organization’s structure mattered as much as its style. RAN relied on Rainforest Action Groups, or RAGs, which operated with considerable independence. Local groups could choose tactics suited to their members, provided they stayed within broad guardrails. That flexibility allowed RAN to hold together a wide range of people, from cautious public-education groups to more confrontational campus organizers. It also allowed national campaigns to appear local, repeated, and persistent. A corporation could ignore one protest. It was harder to ignore a network that could show up in city after city, year after year.

Benac is attentive to the tensions this created. Charismatic founders can energize movements, while also leaving organizations dependent on personality. Grassroots freedom can build commitment, while also making coordination difficult. RAN’s early history is therefore not presented as a simple success story. The qualities that gave the group force also produced instability, conflict, and questions about how a radical network should mature once it begins to win.

The campaigns involving Indigenous communities add another layer of complexity. Benac emphasizes that RAN’s work was most credible when it responded to requests from local and Indigenous groups rather than imposing its own agenda. The Hawaiian rainforest campaign, led by Native Hawaiian organizers with RAN and others in supporting roles, shows both the usefulness and the limits of outside solidarity. Outside allies could bring media attention, money, legal help, and organizing experience. They also had to contend with mistrust rooted in long histories of extraction, colonialism, and self-serving intervention.

Many environmental debates today still turn on leverage: who has it, who lacks it, and how public pressure can be built when governments move slowly or unevenly. Benac does not suggest that RAN offers a ready-made model for today’s climate and biodiversity movements. The political, media, and legal landscapes have changed. Civil disobedience carries different risks. Corporations have become more sophisticated at absorbing criticism. Even so, RAN’s history remains useful because it shows how strategy, persistence, coalition-building, and sustained pressure can give small groups a role in fights usually dominated by larger institutions.

In the interview that follows, Benac discusses how RAN emerged, what made its campaigns effective, where its radicalism came from, and what today’s movements might learn from its achievements and limitations. The story is about rainforests, but it is also about organizing: how people find leverage, how they sustain pressure, and how movements decide what kind of power they are willing to use.

The interview with David Benac

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Nature’s feedback loops can drive collapse. Thomas Crowther thinks they can also drive recovery

Thomas Crowther’s career has been shaped by large claims about small things. A seed, a patch of soil, a soundscape, a moment of fear, a local restoration project: each, in his telling, can become part of a larger system of cause and effect. His new book, Nature’s Echo, is built around that idea. Feedback loops, he argues, are not just a feature of ecology. They are among the forces that formed stars, spread life across Earth, drive climate change, and may yet help repair damaged ecosystems.

Crowther, a British ecologist, became one of the best-known figures in global ecology while at ETH Zurich, where he founded the Crowther Lab and built a large interdisciplinary research group. His work helped popularize the idea that ecosystem restoration could play a major role in addressing climate change, especially after a 2019 Science paper on the potential for additional tree cover drew worldwide attention, as well as criticism from scientists who warned against simplistic tree-planting narratives. His work also helped give rise to the World Economic Forum’s Trillion Trees initiative, and he has served as co-chair of the advisory board to the U.N. Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. He is also the founder of Restor, an open-data platform that connects conservation and restoration initiatives around the world.

That public profile has made Crowther both influential and contested. In 2024 he was also at the center of a dispute over his departure from ETH Zurich. The university said its decision followed an internal review that raised concerns about professional boundaries, compliance procedures and conflicts of interest. ETH did not reach definitive conclusions on some interpersonal allegations. Crowther has denied personal misconduct, said any procedural failures were unintentional, and acknowledged that he “sometimes blurred the lines between friendship and leadership.” Some former employees welcomed ETH’s findings, while many current and former members of his lab publicly contested the process, describing the investigation as flawed and defending the lab as supportive and inclusive.

The interview that follows is not about that episode. It is about the ideas in Nature’s Echo, and about how Crowther now thinks science, restoration and social change fit together. Still, the controversy gives some of the book’s themes a sharper edge. His book is concerned with how narratives form, how perceptions shape responses, and how systems can move rapidly from one state to another. Those are ecological questions. They are also human ones.

Crowther says his own interest in nature began before he had any sense that he might become a scientist. As a child on holiday in France, he recalls ignoring the other children and watching lizards basking on a wall. When an adult wondered aloud what was wrong with him, his father defended him: “He just loves nature. There is nothing wrong with that.” Crowther says the moment reinforced an obsession. In the book and in conversation, that childhood fascination has become a way of reading the living world as a system of relationships, signals and consequences.

“Feedback loops are pretty magical patterns,” he says. “They happen when a process causes something that reinforces that inciting process.” The definition is simple, and it carries much of the book’s argument. Crowther sees such loops in the formation of stars, the spread of life, the destabilization of the climate, and the recovery of landscapes. Once a loop begins, it can gather force. That force can be destructive, as with warming that accelerates further warming. It can also be regenerative, if the incentives, benefits and emotions point in another direction.

This gives his account of conservation a different emphasis from many restoration narratives. He does not argue that restoration is simply a matter of planting trees or fencing land. “You cannot just stick trees in the ground in places where local people don’t want them,” he says. Recovery, in his view, becomes durable when nature improves people’s lives and those improvements create a reason to protect more nature. A restored forest may support crops, health or local income. Those benefits can then create the conditions for further recovery.

He applies the same logic to positive tipping points. Renewable energy, electric vehicles, regenerative farming, plant-based diets and upcycled clothing matter to him not only as technologies or consumer choices, but as signs of systems beginning to reinforce themselves. Once an option becomes cheaper, easier, more effective or more enjoyable, he argues, growth no longer depends only on exhortation. It starts to draw strength from adoption itself.

Crowther is also interested in less visible signals of ecological change. Bioacoustics, he says, offers a way to measure the complexity of an ecosystem by listening to its frequencies of life, from birds and insects to wind and rain. Sound, for him, is not only data. It also opens the imagination. Healthy ecosystems, he argues, have soundscapes that people instinctively recognize and prefer.

The most personal parts of Nature’s Echo move from ecology into psychology. Crowther opens the book with a story about being bitten by a snake in a rainforest and wrongly believing it was venomous. Fear made his arm go numb, which made the danger feel more real. The loop fed itself until the mistake was corrected. For Crowther, the episode became a way of thinking about environmental fear. Panic, he argues, can narrow agency. Optimism, when grounded in real possibilities, can do the opposite.

That is the central thread of the conversation: humans are not outside nature’s feedback loops. They are part of them. Crowther’s answer to ecological despair is not reassurance, and it is not denial. It is attention to the places where restoration is already becoming self-reinforcing, and to the choices that help such loops gather strength. As he puts it, “Feedback loops do not care about scale.” Small actions, if they connect to the right dynamics, may not remain small for long.

The interview with Tom Crowther

New data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, or INPE, show that its DETER alert system detected 370 square kilometers (143 square miles) of deforestation in the Amazon in May. That was down from 960 square kilometers in May 2025, a decline of about 61%.

May is an important month in the Amazon deforestation calendar. It often marks the transition toward the drier season, when forest clearing and burning tend to increase across parts of the southern and eastern Amazon. Monthly satellite figures can vary because of cloud cover, timing and the way alerts are processed, but the latest data extend a longer downward trend.

Over the past 12 months, DETER registered 3,182 square kilometers of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. That compares with 4,633 square kilometers during the same period a year earlier. The total is the lowest for any 12-month period in the DETER record dating back to July 2014.

DETER is designed as a rapid-response system for enforcement agencies. It uses satellite imagery to identify new forest clearings quickly enough for authorities to investigate and, in some cases, intervene. It differs from PRODES, INPE’s higher-resolution annual system, which produces Brazil’s official deforestation rate for the year ending July 31. Still, DETER is closely watched because it provides one of the clearest early indications of where deforestation is headed.

The latest figures suggest that the decline in forest loss under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration has continued into 2026. Annual PRODES data already showed Amazon deforestation falling in the 12 months ending July 2025, reaching its lowest level in 11 years. The new DETER numbers point to a further decline since then.

Independent monitoring shows a similar pattern. Imazon, a Brazilian nonprofit that operates its own satellite-based deforestation alert system, has also reported lower forest clearing in recent months. Its system, known as SAD, uses different methods from INPE’s, but it often provides a useful comparison with official data.

The numbers matter for Brazil’s climate and conservation agenda. The government has pledged to end illegal deforestation by 2030 and falling deforestation gives Brazil stronger evidence that enforcement, municipal agreements and renewed environmental governance are reducing forest loss after the sharp increases seen earlier in the decade.

The figures also show why clear-cutting is only one measure of Amazon health. Forests can lose carbon, biodiversity and resilience without being fully cleared. Logging, edge effects, understory fires and drought can damage standing forest while leaving enough canopy cover to avoid immediate classification as deforestation. These forms of degradation are harder to detect, harder to police and less visible in public debate. Amazon degradation in 2026 only slightly lower than last year.

That issue may become more important this year. Climate forecasters are warning of a high likelihood of a strong El Niño, the warming of the central and eastern tropical Pacific that can disrupt rainfall patterns around the world. In parts of the Amazon, El Niño is associated with hotter and drier conditions. The effects vary across the basin, but drought risk can rise sharply in southern and eastern Amazonia, including areas along the arc of deforestation.

El Niño does not usually drive intentional forest clearing on its own. Land clearing in the Brazilian Amazon is tied to land speculation, ranching, agriculture, logging, infrastructure, weak enforcement and political incentives. El Niño affects the forest through a different route: it can make cleared and degraded landscapes more flammable.

During dry years, fires set to manage pasture, burn cut vegetation or clear land are more likely to escape into surrounding forest. Once inside standing forest, fire can move through the understory, killing trees slowly and opening the canopy. Much of that damage may not appear immediately in deforestation statistics, but it can reduce carbon storage, fragment habitat and make the forest more vulnerable to the next drought.

Recent Amazon fire seasons show the risk. During the 2015-16 El Niño, fires surged in parts of the basin even though deforestation remained far below the levels recorded in the early 2000s. The 2023-24 drought, intensified by El Niño and warm Atlantic conditions, brought extreme river lows, smoke and widespread ecological stress. In such years, fire activity can rise even when annual deforestation rates are falling.

For Brazil, the latest data are encouraging. Lower deforestation means fewer emissions, less habitat loss and less pressure on Indigenous territories, protected areas and public forests. It also reduces one of the drivers weakening the Amazon’s role in recycling moisture and helping sustain rainfall across much of South America.

The dry season will test whether those gains can hold. Keeping deforestation low during an El Niño year will require more than satellite alerts and embargoes after clearing has occurred. It will depend on fire prevention, rapid response, support for local brigades, enforcement against illegal burning and closer monitoring of forest degradation.

If the current DETER trend continues through July, Brazil could move closer to a historic low in Amazon deforestation. The harder task will be keeping more of the remaining forest intact, connected and resistant to fire in a hotter, drier year.

Other pieces:

Taiwan’s tallest tree

Taiwan’s tallest known tree was found through a mix of fieldwork, remote sensing, and public participation, reports Liz Kimbrough.

The tree, a thousand-year-old Taiwania cryptomerioides in the Sheshan range near the Da’an River, measures 84.1 meters, or 276 feet. Researchers have named it “the heaven sword of the Da’an River.”

The discovery was made by the Taiwan tree seekers, a team of ecologists, geologists, remote-sensing specialists, professional climbers, and Indigenous guides. Since 2014, they have searched Taiwan’s mountains for giant trees, often in terrain that is difficult to reach on foot and therefore escaped logging.

Taiwan is one of the few places where trees can grow this tall. Its mountains, shaped by tropical and subtropical climates, support several giant conifer species. The Rukai people know Taiwania as “the tree that hits the moon.”

The team later used airborne lidar to map the forest canopy and identify possible giants. The technology was useful, although Taiwan’s steep slopes produced many false signals. Nearly 400 volunteers reviewed sliced-up profile images online, helping narrow more than 57,000 candidates to a much smaller list. By late 2022, the Taiwan Giant Tree Map had cataloged 941 confirmed trees taller than 65 meters.

In January 2023, climbers reached the candidate tree and measured it directly with a tape dropped from the crown. The result exceeded the lidar estimate by nearly five meters. The finding sets a record for Taiwan and shows how much remains to be learned about the island’s old-growth forests.

How a tiny blue gecko became a conservation comeback story

Williams electric blue day gecko is a small Tanzanian reptile whose recovery shows what focused conservation can do, reports Manuel Fonseca.

Once heavily collected for Europe’s pet trade, the species is now rebounding because pressure from trade has eased, captive breeding has reduced demand for wild animals, and local people are helping restore the forest it needs.

The gecko lives in only two small forest reserves in central Tanzania, Kimboza and Ruvu, and depends almost entirely on screwpines for shelter, food, basking, and breeding. That dependence made it vulnerable. Collectors cut down screwpines to reach the geckos, and by 2009 researchers estimated that tens of thousands had been taken from the wild. The species was later listed as critically endangered, and international commercial trade was banned under CITES in 2017.

The work on the ground has mattered just as much. In Kimboza, forest ecologist Charles Kilawe and people from surrounding villages have worked with rangers to remove invasive Spanish cedar, which had spread through the reserve and displaced native habitat. Since 2016, they have cut down nearly 100,000 cedar trees, reduced forest fires by around 80%, and planted about 5,000 native trees a year.

Those efforts are helping the gecko’s population return toward earlier levels. They are also improving habitat for other wildlife, including blue monkeys, white-chested alethes, and trumpeter hornbills.

For species with tiny ranges, conservation can be very specific work: keep trade pressure down, restore the right habitat, manage invasive species, and give nearby communities a direct role in protecting what remains.

The forest itself may tell a more complicated story. Birds, insects, frogs and primates divide the day among them. Some call at dawn, others at night. Some occupy narrow frequency bands; others fill the background with a steady rasp. A forest that looks intact can still lose part of this living structure. The canopy may close after logging. Carbon may remain on a balance sheet. The animal community may not return in the same form.

A new paper in Global Change Biology, by Zuzana Buřivalová and colleagues, examines that problem through sound. The study describes the Soundscape Baselines Project, an effort to record the acoustic signatures of some of the world’s remaining intact forests before those reference points become harder to find.

The idea is straightforward. To know whether a forest has changed, one needs to know what it sounded like before the change. That baseline is not only a technical convenience. It is a guard against a familiar problem in conservation: each generation tends to accept the nature it first encountered as normal. Daniel Pauly called this shifting baseline syndrome in fisheries. The same pattern applies on land. A forest heard for the first time after decades of hunting, logging or climate stress may seem full of life, even if much of its former community has already disappeared.

This is not a new concern. Bernie Krause, a musician turned bioacoustician and founder of Wild Sanctuary, has spent more than five decades recording and archiving natural soundscapes around the world. His recordings have helped popularize the idea that ecosystems have acoustic structures, with species occupying different times and frequencies. They also show the cost of delay. Some places were recorded before they changed. Many others were not. The Soundscape Baselines Project is now trying to bring that lesson into a more systematic conservation framework.

The paper notes that Intact Forest Landscapes declined by 1.5 million square kilometers, or 12% of their remaining area, between 2000 and 2020. Even forests with little direct industrial disturbance are changing as temperatures rise and species ranges shift. Reference sites are becoming scarcer. Waiting to collect baseline data means accepting a progressively altered world as the comparison point.

Bioacoustics offers one way to shorten that delay. Passive recorders can sit in a forest for months, collecting the sounds of animals, weather and human activity. They do not replace field biologists, camera traps, satellite data or Indigenous and local knowledge. Their value is different: they create a continuous record of ecological activity at times and scales that human observers cannot match.

The Soundscape Baselines Project began with six pilot locations: Brunei, Ecuador, Gabon, Germany, Peru and the United States. Each location included six recording sites, chosen with local teams and spaced at least one kilometer apart to reduce overlap. The recorders were placed about 1.5 meters above the ground and programmed to record continuously for at least a year. At 44.1 kilohertz, each recorder generated about 5.85 gigabytes of data a day. A six-recorder network produced roughly 1.5 terabytes a month.

Those details reveal both the promise and the burden of the method. Acoustic monitoring is often described as cheap and scalable, which is partly true. The equipment can collect enormous amounts of data without a specialist standing beside it. The harder work comes later: maintaining the devices, managing storage, processing files, deciding which signals matter and making sure the data remain useful to people beyond the original research team.

The project gives considerable attention to that problem. The paper describes a modular system designed to be expanded and combined with other technologies. Local teams of scientists, conservation practitioners and community members manage the work at each site. Copies of the data are stored within the country of each baseline site, as well as at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in cloud storage. The approach is not only about efficiency. If biodiversity data are to guide decisions about forests, the people closest to those forests need a role in producing and using them.

Once recorded, a forest soundscape can be examined in several ways. One approach is to treat the whole soundscape as a signal rather than trying to identify every species. The paper focuses on acoustic indices, including Power Minus Noise and Soundscape Saturation. Power Minus Noise estimates acoustic activity by subtracting background noise from each frequency band. Soundscape Saturation measures the proportion of frequency bands that are active in a given minute.

These measures simplify an immense amount of sound into patterns that can be compared across places and times. They also avoid a common limitation of species-by-species monitoring. Many tropical animals are hard to identify by sound, and many have not been well represented in digital sound libraries. An index does not need to know which katydid or frog is calling to detect that the nighttime soundscape has changed.

The initial results show that intact forests have daily acoustic rhythms. In the tropical sites, activity often rose sharply around dawn, dipped later in the day and increased again at other times. Nighttime sound in many tropical forests was sustained by insects and amphibians. Temperate sites followed different rhythms. The point is not that one pattern is better than another, but that each forest has a measurable acoustic signature. Once that signature is known, departures from it become easier to detect.

The Gabon comparison is especially useful. Researchers compared baseline sites with selectively logged forests in the same broad region, including non-certified logging concessions and Forest Stewardship Council certified concessions. A coarse 24-hour average could make the FSC-certified sites appear similar to the baseline forest in Soundscape Saturation. The time series told a different story. The timing and shape of the dawn and dusk choruses shifted in the logged forests.

That distinction is important for conservation measurement. Averages are convenient, but they can hide ecological change. The relevant question may not be whether a forest is generally loud or generally green. It may be whether its daily pattern still resembles the pattern of an intact system. A chorus delayed or flattened at key hours may point to a change in community structure that a satellite image cannot show.

This is where bioacoustics becomes useful for forest management, carbon projects and emerging biodiversity-credit systems. Many nature-based climate projects still rely heavily on forest cover or carbon storage. Those are necessary measures, but they do not show whether a forest still supports its animal communities. A project can retain trees while losing part of its fauna. Acoustic baselines give managers another test: whether the living rhythm of the forest is being maintained, altered or restored.

The paper also shows how sound can be used to identify individual species, with more caution than the public discussion of artificial intelligence sometimes suggests. The researchers used BirdNET, a machine-learning system for detecting bird vocalizations, to examine recordings from Gabon and Peru. In Peru, six months of recordings across a montane gradient produced detections of 329 bird species. The results showed substantial turnover with elevation, with higher sites containing communities that were not simply reduced versions of the lowland sites.

That finding is useful. So is the difficulty behind it. In preliminary work, BirdNET’s location model supplied species that do not occur in Cuzco province or occur above the treeline. The team had to use a custom species list, draw on regional surveys, review sample detections manually and convert confidence scores into species-specific probabilities through validation. Automated detection can expand monitoring, but it still depends on local ecological knowledge and careful calibration.

This point is reinforced by separate guidance from Connor Wood and Stefan Kahl on BirdNET scores. A score that looks like a probability is not necessarily one. It is a unitless output from a model, and its meaning can vary by species, location, equipment and recording conditions. For conservation, that distinction is important. A biodiversity system built on automated detections will only be credible if it treats uncertainty as part of the method rather than as an inconvenience to be hidden.

The same caution applies to acoustic indices. Soundscapes include biophony, the sounds made by organisms; geophony, such as rain and wind; and anthrophony, the sounds of human activity. A storm, a road, a river or a malfunctioning microphone can shape the data. Earlier work on acoustic indices has emphasized the need for consistent sampling and analysis, because different indices can produce different patterns. Bioacoustics is powerful, but it is not self-interpreting.

Its larger value may be as a form of ecological memory. A recording made today can be analyzed with methods that do not yet exist. Species that current algorithms miss may later become identifiable. Patterns that now seem obscure may become meaningful when paired with camera traps, satellite data, field surveys or community observations. In that sense, the raw archive is as important as the first analysis.

That distinction is becoming more important as conservation moves toward more formal claims about impact. Governments, companies and funders increasingly ask whether an intervention protected biodiversity, improved ecosystem condition or produced benefits beyond carbon. Those claims require baselines. They also require a counterfactual, an estimate of what would have happened without the intervention. Sound alone cannot provide all of that, but it can make the biological side of the question less abstract.

A forest may keep its canopy and lose part of its animal life. It may recover structure before it recovers function. It may be managed well enough to retain some acoustic patterns and not others. These differences are hard to see from above. They are easier to examine when a forest has been listened to over time.

The conclusion is not that every conservation project needs a year of continuous recordings at every site. The authors themselves note that such dense sampling may not be necessary for all uses. The more modest lesson is that baselines should be collected before they vanish, and that measurement should be designed around the systems it is meant to describe.

Forests are not only carbon stocks or blocks of canopy. They are communities moving through time. Some of that movement can be heard. Recording it will not, by itself, protect a forest. It can make loss harder to miss, recovery easier to test and conservation claims harder to make without evidence.

Citations in the online version.

Ocean philanthropy remains a small field. Funding directed specifically toward ocean-climate solutions is smaller still.

At last week’s “Sea Change” panel on ocean-climate solutions in Asia, convened as part of the Philanthropy Asia Summit, the discussion kept returning to this mismatch: the ocean is central to the climate transition, yet ocean-climate philanthropy remains a rounding error in global giving.

Ocean-climate philanthropy’s funding gap

The numbers are stark: Less than 1.5% of global philanthropic giving goes to climate mitigation. About 0.25% goes to ocean issues. At the intersection of the two, the figure is roughly 0.05%. That is a narrow base of support for work that touches power generation, shipping, food systems, coastal protection, marine biodiversity, and the future of many island and coastal economies.

The ocean has long been treated by funders primarily as a conservation concern. Grants have supported marine protected areas, fisheries management, coastal livelihoods, scientific research, and habitat protection. Much of that work remains essential. It has helped create institutions, protect places, and improve the management of fisheries and reefs. Climate change is now the force most likely to overwhelm many of those gains. Warming, acidification, rising seas, stronger storms, and shifting fish stocks are changing the conditions under which ocean conservation operates.

The ocean has absorbed around 30% of human carbon dioxide emissions and more than 90% of excess heat. That buffering role has reduced the scale of warming experienced on land while placing growing stress on marine systems. The ocean is also becoming a larger part of climate mitigation and adaptation planning. Offshore wind, shipping decarbonization, blue carbon, marine carbon dioxide removal, and coastal resilience increasingly feature in climate strategies. According to the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, ocean-based climate solutions could provide up to half of the emissions reductions needed by mid-century on a 2°C pathway.

Philanthropic priorities have shifted more slowly. As Al Harris of the Ocean Resilience and Climate Alliance (ORCA) noted during the panel, ocean philanthropy and climate philanthropy have often developed as separate cultures. Ocean funders have tended to focus on conservation. Climate funders have often looked past the sea, focusing instead on power grids, land transport, buildings, forests, and industry. The result is a gap between the scale of the opportunity and the resources available to develop it.

Why Asia matters

Asia sits at the center of that opportunity. The region holds about 60% of the world’s population, a large share of global exclusive economic zones, much of the world’s coral and mangrove biodiversity, more than half of wild fish landings, and most aquaculture production. It is also central to ocean-based mitigation. Asia accounts for a large share of offshore wind capacity, a major portion of shipping emissions, and much of the world’s port, shipbuilding, and maritime manufacturing capacity. The technologies, regulations, supply chains, and political bargains that determine the next phase of ocean-climate action will often be developed there.

Yet only a small share of global ocean philanthropy flows to Asia. A recent estimate from CEA Consulting put the figure at roughly 7%, or about $60 million to $65 million annually. Funding is concentrated among a few large donors, much of it based outside the region. It is also distributed unevenly, with some countries receiving far more attention than others. Within that limited pool, much of the money has historically gone to conservation and fisheries rather than mitigation sectors such as offshore wind and shipping.

What small grants can do

Philanthropy cannot build the offshore wind industry. It cannot finance the decarbonization of global shipping. These are sectors measured in gigawatts, shipyards, ports, grid connections, fuel infrastructure, and investment cycles that run for decades. Most capital will come from governments, utilities, developers, shipowners, fuel producers, ports, banks, and industrial companies.

That scale does not make philanthropy irrelevant. It makes its role more specific. Grants are often most useful in areas that commercial capital and government budgets rarely support. They can fund early-stage analysis, independent policy advice, community engagement, regulatory design, convening, local technical capacity, and civil-society participation. They can help determine whether large investments move quickly, whether they move responsibly, and whether public trust survives the transition.

Offshore wind

Offshore wind illustrates the point. Across much of Asia, the resource is large and the need for clean power is rising. Energy security has strengthened the case. Many countries remain heavily exposed to imported fossil fuels, volatile prices, and geopolitical disruption. For governments seeking domestic, utility-scale renewable power, offshore wind has become increasingly attractive.

Jamie Choi of Tara Climate Foundation framed the opportunity in these terms: offshore wind is not merely a technology question, but a systems question. A wind farm at sea requires clear leasing rules, environmental standards, grid planning, port upgrades, supply chains, vessels, finance, and a credible path to permitting. In many markets, those pieces are incomplete. Developers may be interested, while ministries, regulators, local governments, utilities, fishing communities, and conservation groups lack a shared process for deciding where projects should go and how benefits and risks should be managed.

This is where philanthropy can contribute. It can fund technical work on marine spatial planning. It can support research on migratory birds, fisheries, marine mammals, benthic habitats, typhoon exposure, grid integration, and port readiness. It can help governments develop environmental impact assessment standards suited to tropical waters rather than copied from the North Sea. It can pay for independent analysis that allows public agencies to make better decisions before commercial pressure becomes too strong.

Conditions in Asia differ substantially from those in the North Sea, where much of the industry’s early development occurred. In Southeast Asia, developers face deeper water in many places, intense coastal use, typhoons, high marine biodiversity, and millions of people dependent on small-scale fisheries. Rizaller “Jun” Amolo of Ocean Energy Pathway described the Philippines as a test case for tropical offshore wind: a country with substantial wind potential, a growing project pipeline, rich marine biodiversity, migratory bird routes, and millions of fishers whose livelihoods depend on coastal waters.

Responsible development in such places requires more than avoiding the worst impacts. It requires planning with fishers and coastal communities before decisions harden. It means mapping fishing grounds, sea lanes, cultural sites, biodiversity values, and existing conflicts. It means asking how project revenues might benefit host communities, how jobs and training can reach local workers, and how small-scale fishers are treated when safety zones, construction activity, or new marine infrastructure change access to the sea.

Offshore wind infrastructure may also create conservation benefits under certain conditions. Amolo pointed to the possibility that turbine areas could, in some cases, function like other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs). Turbine foundations can function as artificial reef structures in some settings. Safety zones can reduce destructive activities, including bottom trawling, around infrastructure. Some offshore wind areas may, if managed carefully, deliver conservation benefits and favor small fishers over industrial extraction. Such outcomes depend on siting, regulation, monitoring, local consent, and enforcement. Philanthropy can support the work needed to test such claims honestly rather than leaving them as public-relations language.

Decarbonizing shipping

The same logic applies to shipping. The industry carries around 90% of global trade and produces roughly 3% of global emissions. Its transition is difficult because ships are long-lived assets. A vessel ordered today may still be operating in 2050. That creates lock-in risk. If shipowners continue ordering vessels designed around conventional fuels, they may preserve short-term cost advantages while extending emissions for decades.

Global regulation matters because shipping is international. The recent deferral of the IMO’s net-zero framework sharpened the point. Freda Fung of ClimateWorks Foundation emphasized that a credible global framework is needed to give shipowners, fuel producers, ports, and financiers the confidence to invest. When that framework slips, shipowners have stronger incentives to wait or make conventional choices, especially when freight markets are disrupted and energy-security concerns dominate boardroom decisions. Fung described the deferral as a reason to focus harder on work that can proceed now: green shipping corridors, port readiness, fuel infrastructure, and coordination among the companies and regulators that will have to make cleaner shipping real.

Action is nevertheless moving at the level of ports, corridors, shipyards, and fuel supply chains. Asian ports are preparing for green methanol bunkering. Some are studying ammonia safety. Shipbuilders in China, Japan, and South Korea are adapting to demand for new vessel types. Fuel producers are exploring green methanol, green ammonia, and hydrogen-based supply chains. Short-sea shipping, ferries, inland vessels, and some coastal routes may be candidates for electrification sooner than ocean-going bulk carriers.

Coordination is one area where philanthropy can contribute. Fung pointed to green shipping corridors as a practical entry point: routes where ports, shipowners, fuel suppliers, regulators, and cargo owners can begin aligning around zero-emission vessels. A fuel producer needs confidence that ships will buy its product. A shipowner needs confidence that fuel will be available along a route. A port needs to know which infrastructure to build. Regulators need safety standards, workforce training, and emergency protocols. Financiers need reliable performance data. Cargo owners need ways to share costs and claim emissions reductions credibly.

The challenge extends beyond the reach of any single grant. Grants can fund the platforms, studies, and trusted intermediaries that make coordination possible. They can support demand aggregation across sectors that need the same fuels, such as fertilizer, chemicals, and shipping. They can help identify where charging infrastructure for electric vessels would have the greatest effect. They can support analysis of split incentives between shipowners and charterers. They can fund measurement systems that show whether efficiency technologies perform as promised in real operating conditions.

Qiu Peng, speaking from the perspective of a shipping operator, Tsao Pao Chee (TPC), underscored the commercial constraint. The question for shipowners is not whether decarbonization is desirable, but whether new fuels, infrastructure, financing, and regulation line up in time to make investment viable. Much of the work needed to answer that question involves technical and administrative tasks rather than highly visible projects. It may involve drafting standards, convening ministries, supporting local researchers, translating engineering questions into policy choices, or ensuring that port communities have a voice in decisions that affect air quality and land use. These are precisely the kinds of costs that large capital projects often externalize and that public agencies may struggle to cover.

The enabling work

Funders can struggle to distinguish between visible activity and interventions that materially influence decisions. A scattered set of grants can generate workshops, reports, pilots, and announcements without changing the trajectory of a sector. Useful philanthropy starts by identifying which decisions are genuinely constrained by a lack of information, coordination, capacity, or public engagement.

Much of the most useful philanthropic support will be directed toward the enabling environment. Offshore wind and green shipping do not stall only because technology is unavailable. Delays often arise from unclear rules, slow permitting processes, limited technical capacity, weak coordination between agencies, or inadequate community engagement. These are areas where grants can have outsized influence.

The case for local capacity

Local organizations also deserve a larger share of support than they have historically received, said Amolo. Much ocean philanthropy in Asia has flowed through large international organizations. Many have done valuable work, yet the next phase of ocean-climate action will depend heavily on local universities, policy institutes, civil-society organizations, community associations, and technical experts who understand national institutions and local political realities. Several panelists returned to this point in different ways: durable transitions require local capacity, not just imported expertise.

The social dimensions of the transition warrant equal attention. Offshore wind can provide jobs, revenue, and cleaner electricity, yet it can also alter access to fishing grounds and change how coastal communities use marine space. Shipping decarbonization can reduce emissions while creating new infrastructure demands around ports and industrial zones. Communities are more likely to support these transitions when they are involved early enough to influence decisions rather than merely comment on them.

Funders also have an opportunity to bridge sectors that rarely work together. Ocean-climate issues sit between conservation, energy, transport, finance, industry, and community development. Conservation groups may view offshore infrastructure primarily through an ecological lens. Energy planners may focus on generation targets. Maritime stakeholders may prioritize fuels and logistics. Harris argued that this is one of philanthropy’s most important roles: creating spaces where these perspectives can meet before disagreements harden into opposition.

A modest but catalytic role

Donors should also remain realistic about scale, said Choi and Harris. Philanthropic capital will never provide the bulk of funding required for offshore wind or shipping decarbonization. Its comparative advantage lies in flexibility, independence, and a willingness to support work that larger institutions often overlook.

None of this diminishes the importance of traditional ocean conservation. Marine protected areas, fisheries reform, habitat protection, and community-led management remain necessary. These activities now operate within a climate system that is changing rapidly. Protecting the ocean while ignoring the energy and transport systems that are heating it is an incomplete strategy.

A more practical approach, according to the panel, recognizes that offshore wind needs rules, science, community engagement, and local capacity. Shipping needs regulation, infrastructure, credible fuels, and coordinated demand. Coastal communities need opportunities to shape decisions that affect them. Governments need trusted analysis. Industry needs clearer signals. Civil society needs resources to engage with technical questions that will shape the ocean for decades.

Philanthropy is unlikely to determine whether offshore wind expands or shipping decarbonizes. It can help determine how quickly those transitions occur, how inclusive they are, and whether institutions and communities are prepared for them. Relative to the capital required for ports, vessels, grids, and wind farms, philanthropic funding will remain modest. Its influence is greatest when it helps governments, communities, researchers, and industry address problems that larger sources of capital are poorly suited to solve.

Other pieces:

Ocean philanthropy: small sums for a vast domain

Ocean philanthropy remains small relative to the scale of the ocean itself, accounting for well under 1% of global charitable giving despite steady growth over the past decade.

Singapore’s outsized role in the future of ocean governance

Ahead of this week’s Philanthropy Asia Summit, Thomas Knudsen and I published a commentary in the Business Times on Singapore’s outsized role in the future of the ocean

The ocean’s enforcement gap

On paper, the sea is increasingly protected. Governments have designated vast marine protected areas (MPAs) and pledged to conserve 30% of the ocean by 2030. Maps shaded in reassuring blues now circulate widely. Yet the reality offshore often looks much the same as before.

The hidden cost of fisheries subsidies

Governments provide roughly $35 billion a year in fisheries subsidies, much of it supporting fleets that can operate beyond what fish stocks alone would sustain.

The power of cities over the seas

Much of what determines the ocean’s condition is decided on land, where ports control entry, cities regulate ship operations, and municipal buyers shape seafood demand. These urban levers can influence marine outcomes at scale even though they receive far less attention than treaties or national policy.

Coral bleaching: How warming seas are transforming the world’s reefs

Mass coral bleaching occurs when unusually warm ocean temperatures disrupt the partnership between corals and the microscopic algae that supply most of their energy, leaving corals weakened and often leading to widespread mortality if heat stress persists.

For protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon, one of the most basic questions is not where the boundary lies. It is whether anyone has the money to manage what sits inside it.

A reserve may exist in law. It may appear on maps, in international pledges, and in official counts of how much of Brazil is under protection. On the ground, though, management depends on less visible things: staff, fuel, boats, radios, boundary markers, fire brigades, monitoring, community work, and the ability to respond when illegal miners, loggers, poachers, or land-grabbers arrive. A protected area without these things is still protected, but only in a narrow administrative sense.

A gap measured in money

A new paper in Environmental Conservation puts numbers to this gap. The study, by Helenilza Ferreira Albuquerque Cunha and colleagues, examined funding deficits in 300 federal protected areas in Brazil between 2014 and 2023. Together, those areas cover nearly 750,000 square kilometers, representing most of the protected areas managed by ICMBio, Brazil’s federal biodiversity agency. The researchers compared actual spending with evidence-based estimates of the minimum cost of managing each site. In 2023, 72% of the protected areas they studied were underfunded. The combined shortfall was equivalent to about $958 million in purchasing-power terms.

The gap was largest in the Amazon. According to the paper, Amazonian protected areas had an average funding deficit of 79.2% in 2023. In practical terms, they received about one-fifth of what they needed. In the Atlantic Forest, the average deficit was 27.6%. Of the 122 Amazon protected areas in the study, 120 fell below minimum cost thresholds.

This is not a simple story of official neglect. Over the decade studied, investment rose by about 30%. Brazil also has one of the world’s largest protected-area systems, and its federal transparency systems make it possible to study spending patterns in unusual detail. The deeper problem is that Brazil has expanded protection faster than it has built stable mechanisms to pay for management. Its most remote and ecologically important areas are often the least able to attract political attention.

Earlier work had already shown that Brazil’s federal protected areas were badly underfunded. A 2021 study estimated that, in 2016, the federal system received only a small share of the money needed to cover recurrent management costs. Cunha and her colleagues add a decade-long view, showing how those gaps shifted across administrations, fiscal shocks, and regions.

Why the Amazon loses out

The Amazon’s protected areas are expensive to manage. Many are vast. Some are difficult to reach. A field visit can require a river journey, a flight, or both. Enforcement may involve long patrols across forests, rivers, and informal roads. A single manager may be responsible for an area larger than some countries. The costs of fuel, transport, equipment, communications, and safety rise quickly. So do the risks.

The study found that larger protected areas tended to have larger shortfalls. Older protected areas tended to have smaller ones, probably because they have had more time to build administrative routines, support networks, and political visibility. The researchers found no significant difference between strictly protected areas and sustainable-use areas. The broader pattern was geographical and political: protected areas near people and institutions tended to fare better.

That finding matters because it runs against one reasonable expectation. The researchers expected that higher population density around a protected area might increase management costs, and therefore increase deficits. Instead, higher population density was associated with lower deficits. One plausible explanation is visibility. Parks and reserves near urban areas are easier for citizens, journalists, officials, and civil-society groups to notice. They may be easier to visit, easier to defend in budget negotiations, and easier to present as public assets. Remote Amazon reserves can hold immense natural capital, but they often have fewer nearby voters, fewer news cameras, and weaker local tax bases.

The result is a lopsided geography of conservation finance. Places that matter greatly for biodiversity, carbon storage, rainfall regulation, and Indigenous and local livelihoods may have the weakest budgetary constituency. Their value is large, but spread widely. Their costs are local, immediate, and recurring.

What underfunding changes on the ground

Those shortages have consequences beyond administration. A 2024 study of Latin American protected areas found that funding deficits can weaken performance on the ground. In Ecuador, where site-level financial data were available, protected areas with larger deficits were less effective at avoiding deforestation than comparable unprotected landscapes. The evidence does not prove the same relationship for every Amazon reserve, but it supports a practical point: money affects whether managers can enforce rules, maintain field presence, and respond to threats.

Brazil’s political history during the study period adds another layer. The study found that deficits were relatively stable from 2015 to 2019, despite recession and political turmoil. The sharp deterioration came in 2020 and 2021, when COVID-19 fiscal contraction coincided with environmental policy rollbacks. Funding began to recover in 2022 and improved further in 2023, helped by a change in national policy direction under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The authors do not claim a single cause for the rebound. Budget cycles, macroeconomic conditions, and political transitions all played a part.

When parks pay, but not for themselves

The picture has since become more complicated. Brazil has increased environmental funding under the current administration. The Ministry of the Environment’s budget rose sharply from its 2022 level, and ICMBio enforcement actions increased. Brazil has also created or expanded new conservation units, adding more territory to the system. Meanwhile, tourism in federal conservation units has strengthened the economic case for investment. A 2026 ICMBio study found that visits to federal conservation units generated substantial sales, GDP, jobs, and tax revenues in 2025. By that measure, protected areas are not only budget items. They are public assets with measurable economic returns.

Yet tourism revenue and national tax receipts do not automatically pay for the reserves that need money most. Tijuca National Park in Rio de Janeiro and Iguaçu National Park in Paraná can attract millions of visitors. A remote extractive reserve or national forest in the Amazon cannot fund itself in the same way. Nor should that be the standard by which it is judged. Many Amazon protected areas produce value by keeping forests standing, maintaining river systems, protecting biodiversity, supporting traditional communities, and reducing the risk of further degradation. These benefits rarely show up in visitor numbers or ticket sales, which makes them easier to overlook in budget decisions.

Tourism, concessions, and private investment can help, but they cannot solve the problem on their own. They may be important for parks with strong visitor demand, infrastructure, and market access. They are less likely to cover the baseline costs of large, remote protected areas whose main value lies in avoided loss.

What adequate funding would require

Programs such as the Amazon Region Protected Areas Program, or ARPA, and the Amazon Fund have helped Brazil move beyond annual appropriations alone. They have supported long-term conservation finance, institutional capacity, and management of Amazon protected areas. The new study treats these efforts as valuable, but far from sufficient. The scale of the deficit is too large, and the distribution of need is too uneven, for project-based or externally supported mechanisms to carry the system by themselves.

The scale of the need is large even under conservative assumptions. A 2022 paper that looked beyond federal protected areas to a broader Amazon conservation system, including conservation units and Indigenous lands, estimated that maintaining about 80% of the Brazilian Amazon within conservation areas would require roughly $1.7 billion to $2.8 billion a year, plus upfront establishment costs. That is a different universe from the federal protected areas studied by Cunha and colleagues, but it points in the same direction: adequacy has a price, and it is recurring.

Protected areas need a financing system that accounts for fixed costs, remoteness, size, and risk. A small urban park and a vast Amazon reserve cannot be budgeted as though their management needs differ only by category. Newly created protected areas need start-up funding for infrastructure, demarcation, staff, and planning. Older areas need predictable operating budgets. Remote areas need transport, field presence, monitoring, and enforcement capacity that reflects their geography.

The researchers recommend a transparent national protected-area financing platform that tracks investment across federal, state, and private protected areas. That would make it easier to see where money is going, where it is missing, and whether commitments match the costs of management. It would also help Brazil report credibly on international biodiversity targets. Area-based targets can encourage governments to create new protected areas. They do less to ensure those areas can function.

There is a development case as well. José Maria Cardoso da Silva, one of the paper’s authors, argues that conservation investment can matter most in places with limited conventional economic output but large natural capital. If money for protected areas is spent locally, it can support jobs, services, and a conservation-based economy in remote regions. That is especially relevant in the Amazon, where many municipalities have few durable economic options that do not depend on forest conversion.

Beyond Brazil

This is not only Brazil’s problem. A 2019 global assessment found that fewer than a quarter of more than 2,100 protected areas reported adequate staffing and budgets. Brazil’s case is unusually well documented, but the gap between designation and management runs through conservation systems worldwide. Countries are being asked to protect more land and sea under the global biodiversity framework. Many will face the same problem: legal designation is faster than institutional funding. Maps can change in a year. Budgets, agencies, staff capacity, and local trust take longer.

For the Amazon, the distinction matters. Brazil has already built a protected-area system of global importance. It has also shown that enforcement, political attention, and public investment can reduce deforestation. The new paper shows that much of the system still rests on a thin financial base. If protected areas are to do the work expected of them, they need more than lines on a map. They need the steady operating funding that turns protection into management.

Other pieces:

A beakless kea, 36 fights, and no defeats

Bruce the kea should have been an unlikely survivor. When he was found in the wild in New Zealand about 12 years ago, his entire upper beak was missing. For a bird, that is a serious injury. Beaks are used to feed, preen, climb, fight, and hold position in a flock. A damaged beak can make the daily work of staying alive much harder. Bruce adapted.

Norlan Pagal, fisherman and guardian of Tañon Strait

Pagal died on May 14th, aged 56. By then, his watch over Tañon Strait had become part of the story people told about what it takes to protect a place when the law is weak and the sea is close enough to see from home. The bullet that struck Pagal was meant to stop a fisherman from defending his waters. It left him in a wheelchair beside them. From there he kept watch.

Mike Salisbury, wildlife filmmaker who made plants behave like characters

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 television audiences that the natural world was stranger, livelier and more intricate than they had thought.

For many conservation decisions, the most contested question is also the most basic: what belongs on the map?

A forest may appear on a satellite image as intact canopy. To people who live near it, the same forest may be a hunting ground, a burial site, a medicine cabinet, a route to school, a refuge for wildlife, or a place where patrols have become threatening. A reef may be mapped by scientists as coral cover, fish biomass, or thermal stress. Fishers may know it by currents, seasons, spawning sites, customary rules and the places where conflict is likely. Conservation planning increasingly depends on spatial data. Participatory mapping asks who gets to produce that data.

A new review in Conservation Science and Practice, by Michael Kowalski and colleagues, offers a useful stocktake of the field. The authors define participatory mapping as a collaborative process in which participants and cartographers co-develop maps representing local knowledge, experiences and preferences about a place. Their review covers 398 peer-reviewed studies, tracing how the method has been used across conservation science and practice. It also makes clear that a field built around community knowledge still lacks consistent standards for how that knowledge should be gathered, interpreted, protected and used.

The premise is simple enough. Conservation maps have long been drawn from above: through satellite imagery, expert surveys, species-distribution models, government zoning and protected-area boundaries. These tools are indispensable. They can reveal forest loss, habitat fragmentation, coral bleaching or fire risk at scales no village meeting can cover. They also tend to miss how people actually use and value landscapes.

Participatory mapping works closer to the ground. In some projects, community members draw on paper maps or sketch places from memory. In others, they place points, lines or polygons on digital platforms. Some exercises involve large online surveys; others depend on a small group of fishers, herders, forest users or Indigenous leaders. The method can be used to locate fishing grounds, grazing areas, wildlife corridors, sites of cultural importance, ecosystem services, conflict zones, invasive species, disease risks or places where conservation restrictions may create hardship.

This makes participatory mapping a bridge between two conservation needs that are often treated separately. One is technical: better information about where ecological and human systems overlap. The other is political: greater legitimacy for decisions that affect people’s land, livelihoods and rights. A map can become evidence, but also a forum. It allows people to point to a place and say: this matters, and here is why.

The approach has deep roots. Participatory mapping emerged from rapid rural appraisal, participatory action research and later public participation GIS. Robert Chambers, one of the central figures in participatory development, framed the essential question bluntly: whose map, who is empowered, who is disempowered, who gains and who loses? That question remains the center of the field. A participatory map is never just a technical product. It reflects choices about who was invited, who felt safe speaking, who controlled the process, what was recorded, what was left off and who later had access to the result.

Kowalski and his co-authors show a field that has grown quickly, with conservation-related participatory mapping efforts rising steadily from 2012 and peaking in 2019 before falling during the pandemic. The studies they reviewed span 13 domains, from ecosystem services, natural resource management, conservation values, land-use planning and species distribution mapping to fisheries management, environmental justice, climate change, human-wildlife conflict, conflict resolution, introduced species and disease mapping. Their review found mapping efforts in 102 countries and on every continent, though the authors caution that their focus on English-language, peer-reviewed publications leaves gaps in the record. The pattern also varies by region. In North America and Australia, studies have often focused on conservation values, species distributions and land-use planning. In South America, Africa and Asia, they more often center on natural resource management. In Europe, ecosystem services have been the main focus, with conservation values and fisheries management also prominent.

These patterns reflect the different problems the method is being asked to solve. In marine settings, participatory mapping can reveal where people fish, gather, dive or depend on reefs in ways that formal datasets rarely capture. Shankar Aswani and Matthew Lauer’s work in the Solomon Islands showed how Indigenous ecological knowledge and artisanal fishing data could be incorporated into GIS to help design marine protected areas. In Hawaii, Arielle Levine and Christine Feinholz used participatory GIS to document human coastal and ocean uses in priority coral-reef management sites. Managers valued the process not only for the maps, but for identifying stakeholders and building engagement around future decisions.

On land, participatory mapping has often been used to locate social values that are hard to capture through biophysical data. A wetland may be important for water regulation, recreation, cultural identity and a community’s sense of continuity. A park may be valued differently by visitors, nearby residents, Indigenous groups and agency staff. Work by Christopher Raymond and colleagues in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin mapped community values for natural capital and ecosystem services, showing that values varied by place and subregion. Greg Brown and collaborators later argued that mapped place values are often relationship values: they show how people are connected to specific landscapes, not simply how useful those landscapes are.

This matters for a conservation field increasingly interested in precision. Recent discussions of “precision conservation” and place-specific strategies emphasize targeting interventions where they are most likely to work. Participatory mapping adds a missing layer to that logic. A model may identify the best place for forest restoration based on habitat connectivity or carbon storage. Local mapping may show where restoration would conflict with grazing, where past projects failed, where tenure is disputed, or where a community already protects a spring or sacred grove. The most efficient intervention on paper may be unworkable on the ground.

An example can be found in northeastern Gabon, where the community of Massaha mapped Ibola Dja Bana Ba Massaha, a forest south of the village whose name means “the reserve of all Massaha’s children.” On global maps, much of the area appeared as intact forest. In administrative terms, it lay within a logging concession. Massaha’s own maps told a different story. Through oral histories, participatory GIS, GPS fieldwork and community review, residents documented ancestral villages, sacred sites, a sacred lake, forest clearings and the spread of logging roads. The resulting map became evidence in a political claim: the community asked the government to remove the forest from the concession and recognize it as a community conserved area. In this case, participatory mapping was not an add-on to conservation science. It was the means by which a forest that looked empty on official maps became visible as a lived and governed place.

The Massaha case also shows why the word “participatory” needs scrutiny. The community was not simply supplying local color to an outside analysis. Its members helped define the territory, reviewed the data and used the map in a campaign over the forest’s future. The paper’s authors compared Massaha’s biocultural maps with colonial, post-colonial and global land-use maps, finding that official and historical sources had missed much of the community’s occupation and cultural geography. The difference was not just technical. One set of maps made the forest easier to treat as concession space. Another made visible the history and authority of the people who claimed responsibility for it.

This does not make local knowledge automatically correct or complete. Participatory maps can be biased by who participates, how questions are framed and what people are willing to disclose. A workshop dominated by men may fail to record places important to women. Digital mapping may exclude elders or poorer households. Public mapping of sacred sites, illegal resource use or endangered species locations may expose communities or wildlife to harm. Some groups may want their knowledge made visible to support land claims. Others may want it withheld. The same act of mapping can protect rights in one setting and create risk in another.

Kowalski and colleagues are especially useful on this point. They warn that participation can become extractive when researchers or agencies collect local knowledge without changing decisions, sharing control or measuring outcomes. A map without follow-up can raise expectations, divert resources, give authorities the appearance of consultation, or turn local knowledge into a tool for outside control. The authors argue that practitioners must attend to power imbalances, representation, scheduling, autonomy, confidentiality and mutually agreed deliverables, especially given conservation’s colonial history and continuing inequities.

The field also suffers from messy terminology. Public participation GIS, participatory GIS, volunteered geographic information, sketch mapping and mental mapping are often used inconsistently. Kowalski and colleagues suggest that researchers should describe what they actually did: the mapping medium, sampling design, recruitment strategy, participant demographics, prompts and representativeness. This sounds prosaic, but it is essential. Without such details, it is difficult to know whether a map represents a community, a stakeholder group, a set of experts, an online convenience sample or a few people who happened to attend a meeting.

The harder test is whether participatory maps change decisions. Here the record is thinner. Brown and Fagerholm’s review of participatory GIS for ecosystem services found strong potential for mapping cultural and provisioning services, but little evidence that mapped ecosystem-service data had been used in actual land-use decision support. Brown, Reed and Raymond reached a similar conclusion after two decades of place-values research: participatory maps can identify important human-environment relationships, yet their influence on land-use decisions remains limited. Agencies may lack incentives to use them. Officials may distrust lay knowledge. Powerful interests may still dominate planning.

Massaha is a reminder that the influence of a map often depends on what surrounds it: organization, legal strategy, alliances, political timing and persistence after the workshop ends. The map mattered because it became part of a wider claim over territory and governance. In many projects, that connection is weaker. Data are collected, a report is written, and the decision process continues much as before.

That finding should temper both enthusiasm and dismissal. Participatory mapping is not a shortcut to justice. It cannot by itself settle disputes over land, fisheries, protected areas or development. Nor can it replace ecological surveys, enforcement, legal reform or financing. Its value lies in making certain kinds of knowledge visible early enough to matter.

For practitioners, the starting point should be the decision itself. Use participatory mapping when spatial knowledge from affected people is necessary to make that decision well. Be clear about whether the goal is research, planning, negotiation, monitoring, rights recognition or conflict prevention. Decide in advance who will own the data, what will remain confidential and how the maps will feed into decisions. Treat the process as part of governance, not merely data collection.

The next stage of the field may depend less on better software than on better practice. Conservation already has more maps than most institutions can use well. What it often lacks is a disciplined way to connect mapped evidence with legitimate decisions. Participatory mapping can help do that, if it is used with care.

The map that results may look less tidy than one drawn from a satellite or a model. It may contain uncertainty, disagreement and knowledge that resists easy classification. That is part of its usefulness. Conservation happens in real places, among people with memory, dependence and claims. A map that cannot show that is incomplete, however precise it appears.

Citations can be found in the online version.

Jane Goodall’s grandson on hope after loss

Five months after Jane Goodall’s death, her grandson Merlin Van Lawick appeared at the ChangeNOW environmental forum in Paris carrying something both public and personal. He was there not as a substitute for his grandmother, but as someone shaped by her work and now helping to carry it forward, reports Juliette Chapalain.

The easiest way to misunderstand Goodall’s message is to treat hope as a feeling. For her, as Van Lawick describes it, hope was closer to discipline. She used the image of a dark tunnel with light at the end. The light did not come to you. You had to crawl toward it, over obstacles and under them. “Hope is rooted in action,” he said.

That phrase can sound almost too easy until one considers the work behind it. Goodall’s career began with field research at Gombe, where she helped change how science understood chimpanzees. It became something larger: a life spent asking people to see animals as individuals, ecosystems as living communities, and young people as participants rather than spectators.

In Van Lawick’s telling, Goodall’s influence came through example. She did not push people into service. She made them aware of the consequences of their choices, then left the decision to them. Even with her grandchildren, the pressure was light. He once wanted to be a footballer. She told him she thought he would become a conservationist. She did not insist. The seed did its own work.

That may be the more useful lesson for conservation now. The movement does not lack warnings. It has plenty. What it often lacks is a way to keep people engaged without overwhelming them or making the future feel already settled. Goodall’s answer was not optimism in the sentimental sense. It was agency, practiced in small acts and carried by many people.

This is why Roots & Shoots, the youth program she founded, is such a central part to carrying on her legacy. Its premise is simple and demanding: young people should identify problems in their own communities and act on them. The scale can grow, but the starting point is local. A child plants a tree, protects an animal, cleans a stream, speaks to neighbors. None of this is enough by itself. That is not the point.

The point is that despair asks nothing of us. Hope, as Goodall taught it, begins when people act.

The interview: ‘Hope is rooted in action’: Interview with Jane Goodall’s grandson Merlin Van Lawick

Conservation fails when it is treated as a project

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 part is not usually knowing what should be done. It is keeping the work going long enough to make a difference.

In his telling, conservation is less like launching an initiative than holding together a working system under constant pressure. Patrols have to function. Radios have to work. Teams have to be paid. Roads, boats, airstrips and fuel supplies matter. So do relationships with local communities, especially where people depend on forests for food, income and security. A protected area that does not produce tangible benefits for nearby people will have weak foundations.

This is not a glamorous view of conservation. It is also probably the right one.

Arranz gives a stark example from Zakouma, in Chad. When he left in 2007, the park had more than 3,500 elephants. Within a year of the project stopping, poachers had killed around 3,000. What took years to rebuild was nearly undone in months.

That is the uncomfortable arithmetic of conservation. Gains accumulate slowly and can disappear fast. A forest can be protected on paper, and still be emptied in practice. A park can have a management plan, and still lack the day-to-day capacity to act when pressure comes.

For funders and conservation organizations, the lesson is plain. Short funding cycles and project-based thinking often sit uneasily with the realities of field conservation. Success depends on continuity, institutional memory and the people willing to remain in difficult places after the attention has moved elsewhere.

The work also has to become more locally rooted over time. Tourism, employment, revenue-sharing and public services are not add-ons. They are part of whether conservation can endure.

The central question is not whether a conservation plan looks convincing. It is whether the system behind it can survive the next funding gap, security shock, natural disaster, or political change. That is where conservation usually succeeds or fails.

Full interview: What it takes to make conservation work in Central Africa: Luis Arranz’s 46-year journey

For a realm that covers most of the planet, the ocean attracts a modest share of charitable attention. In philanthropic terms, it remains a niche cause: widely discussed, but thinly financed. That gap has narrowed in recent years, though only slightly and from a low base.

Estimates suggest that ocean-focused philanthropy accounts for well under 1% of global charitable giving, despite the ocean’s role in climate regulation, food production, and trade. In absolute terms, funding has grown. Annual contributions rose from roughly $430 million in 2010 to about $1 billion by 2022, with foundation funding reaching around $1.2 billion in recent years, according to a report published last November by CEA Consulting.

Funding Trends 2025: Tracking the State of Global Ocean Funding estimates that foundation funding grew from roughly $633 million in 2015 before flattening over the past two years. Growth has come from larger commitments by established donors and the entry of new ones, though spending now appears to have leveled off.

The field is concentrated. Very concentrated. A small group of foundations accounts for a large share of grants, often through long-term programs that span countries and issue areas. Smaller donors tend to fund individual projects or organizations, with more limited reach. This structure has provided continuity but also leaves overall funding sensitive to shifts among a few large players.

Most funding still flows toward science, habitat protection, and fisheries management. Marine science receives the largest share, followed by habitat protection and fisheries management. These areas underpin much of ocean conservation. Over the past decade, climate-related funding has expanded quickly, including work on shipping emissions, offshore energy, and marine carbon removal. Funding for ocean-climate work rose from roughly $24 million in 2015 to about $238 million in 2024. Fisheries funding, by comparison, grew far more slowly over the same period. Much of this work still sits within broader climate portfolios rather than within a dedicated ocean-funding stream.

Funding patterns vary sharply by region. North America has received the largest share of philanthropic ocean funding, while many lower-income coastal regions receive less relative to their dependence on marine resources. Funding to these regions has increased in absolute terms, but the overall distribution has changed little. Over the past decade, funding to Africa rose by roughly 110%, while funding tied to the high seas increased by nearly 190%. As a result, the financial, technical, and institutional resources available for marine management vary widely between regions.

Philanthropy sits alongside much larger sources of finance. Public spending, development assistance, and private investment account for most ocean-related funding. The scale of need is far greater. Protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030 is estimated to require about $15.8 billion annually. Most of that would go not toward establishing marine protected areas, but toward managing and enforcing them over time. Estimates suggest roughly $15.2 billion would support ongoing operations, while only about $640 million would cover one-time establishment costs. Current spending on protection is around $1.2 billion per year, leaving a substantial gap.

Within this mix, philanthropic funding often supports work that other sources do not. Early-stage research, policy design, community engagement, and pilot projects can be difficult to fund through commercial or public channels. By backing these areas, donors help prepare projects for larger investment.

Several financing tools illustrate this role. Debt-for-nature swaps and blue bonds, used in countries such as Belize, Barbados, and Ecuador, combine philanthropic support with public and private capital to fund conservation while restructuring debt. Ecuador’s debt conversion in 2023 generated roughly $323 million for marine conservation in the Galápagos. Researchers also note that existing public spending priorities matter as much as new fundraising. Repurposing fuel subsidies and tax exemptions tied to industrial fishing would, on some estimates, cover most of the annual financing required for global ocean protection.

Recent international agreements are likely to increase demand for ocean funding. The High Seas Treaty creates a framework for protecting biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ), creating new funding needs for monitoring and enforcement. At the same time, networks linked to the UN Ocean Decade have begun coordinating philanthropic support for ocean science and data.

Coastal ecosystems have become more prominent in climate and development discussions. Mangroves, seagrasses, and coral reefs are increasingly discussed in terms of carbon storage, coastal protection, and food security. This has drawn interest from donors outside traditional conservation, though funding decisions continue to compete with a wide range of other philanthropic priorities.

The overall picture is of a sector that has grown but remains relatively small and concentrated. Ocean philanthropy does not provide the bulk of funding for conservation or governance. Its role is narrower: supporting research, coordination, and early-stage work while larger sources supply most capital.

Even with growth, philanthropic funding represents a small share of what is required. New donors are entering, and existing funders are revising their strategies, but change is gradual. For now, the world’s largest ecosystem continues to depend on a relatively narrow base of philanthropic support.

This is Part 5 in an ongoing “Founders Briefs” series on oceans.

When Attenborough began his career at the BBC in the 1950s, the task was more modest. Television was still finding its footing, and natural history programming largely meant showing audiences what they could not otherwise see. Early series such as Zoo Quest were shaped by that spirit. They were exploratory, sometimes improvised, and often framed around the thrill of encountering unfamiliar species. The tone was one of discovery. The unspoken assumption was that the natural world, vast and varied, would endure.

As his work evolved, so did the technology that made it possible. Color film, lightweight cameras and, later, digital imaging expanded what could be captured. Attenborough used those tools with unusual patience. His programs lingered on behavior as much as spectacle. Courtship rituals, feeding strategies, and migrations were given time to unfold. His programs did more than show animals; they asked viewers to notice how they lived.

This attention to detail became one of his signatures. It reflected a view that understanding begins with careful seeing. Attenborough rarely made himself the story. His narration was measured and often understated. The attention stayed on the animal, the habitat or the behavior unfolding on screen. The approach helped establish a standard for natural history filmmaking. It also shaped how audiences related to the material. Animals were not props for adventure. They were creatures with their own pressures, habits and place in a wider order.

For much of the late 20th century, that approach carried a sense of confidence. Series such as Life on Earth and The Living Planet presented ecosystems as intricate but resilient. There were acknowledgments of human impact, though they tended to sit at the margins. The prevailing mood was one of admiration. The natural world was portrayed as something to be appreciated, perhaps even cherished, but not yet as something being pushed toward dangerous limits.

That balance began to shift in the 2000s and early 2010s. Scientific consensus around climate change became firmer. Evidence of biodiversity loss accumulated. The changes were not abstract. They appeared in the very subjects Attenborough had spent decades documenting. Coral reefs bleached. Species once filmed in abundance became harder to find. Habitats fragmented.

His later work did not abandon the aesthetic that had defined his earlier films. The images remained carefully composed. The storytelling retained its discipline. Still, the framing grew more direct. In series such as Planet Earth II and A Life on Our Planet, the concluding segments took on a heavier purpose. The camera still showed the beauty of forests, oceans and grasslands. The narration made clearer that these systems were under strain.

What changed was not only the tone, but the purpose. Attenborough began to speak more openly about consequences. The loss of species was no longer treated as a distant or specialized worry. It was linked to broader questions about stability, food systems and climate. The argument, when he chose to make it, was straightforward: understanding the natural world is not a matter of curiosity alone. It is tied to how societies will fare in the decades ahead.

He did not always speak in the language of advocacy. His instinct remained to show rather than to argue. Yet the cumulative effect of his later work is difficult to separate from a sense of warning. The authority comes less from rhetoric than from continuity. Few individuals have documented the same systems over such a long period. Fewer still have done so for so many people.

There is a restraint in how Attenborough presents these shifts. He avoids exaggeration. He also avoids offering simple resolutions. The closing passages of his recent films often point toward changes in energy use, land management and consumption. They are framed as possibilities rather than prescriptions. This has drawn criticism from those who would prefer a more forceful stance. It has also helped his work remain accessible to people who may not share the same politics.

The result is a body of work that has changed in emphasis without losing its core method. The early films asked viewers to look closely at the natural world. The later ones ask what follows from that attention. The link between the two is the idea that knowledge carries implications. To see clearly is, eventually, to confront the conditions that make such scenes possible.

As his 100th birthday approaches, it is tempting to treat Attenborough as a symbol. He has become one, in part because his career spans a period in which the relationship between people and the natural world has changed so sharply. Yet his influence is more practical than symbolic. He helped establish how nature is filmed, how it is narrated, and how it is brought into public conversation.

The arc of his work traces a change in how that conversation is conducted. What began as an effort to reveal the richness of life on Earth has come to include a more sober assessment of its trajectory. The continuity lies in the premise that understanding matters. Not as an end in itself, but as the beginning of responsibility.

Other pieces:

How do you write the life of someone who avoided the spotlight? Miriam Horn on her biography of George Schaller

Some biographies are built around revelation. Others proceed by accumulation, assembling a life from fragments that resist easy interpretation. Miriam Horn’s Homesick for a World Unknown: The Life of George B. Schaller falls into the latter category. It takes as its subject George Schaller, a figure widely regarded as one of the most consequential field biologists of the twentieth century, yet one who spent much of his career deflecting attention from himself.

When protest works: Examples where activists have successfully pushed for change

Protest arrives with a clear sense of purpose. Annie Leonard and André Carothers avoid constructing a grand, unified theory of dissent and offer no rigid framework to explain why movements live or die. Instead, they have assembled a curated history: a series of episodes of resistance, each functioning as both narrative and instruction.

What it takes to make conservation work in Central Africa: Luis Arranz’s 46-year journey

Luis Arranz arrived in Africa in 1980 with little more than a degree in biology and a determination to work in the field. Without contacts or a clear path, he drove south from Spain in a small Citroën 2CV, crossing the Sahara over several weeks and repairing the car as it failed along the way. The journey is unusual. The work that followed is uncommon in its form and duration: more than four decades spent managing protected areas in Central Africa.

The decline followed an exceptional year for wildfires. In 2024, drought helped drive some of the largest fire-related losses on record. In 2025, those climatic pressures eased, and the area lost to fire dropped with them. But the root causes—commodity-driven agricultural expansion, patchy enforcement, and growing climate stress—remain stubbornly in place. A single year’s improvement does not shift that fundamental footing.

What stands out is the pattern of loss. Forest loss is becoming less predictable, moving in sharper swings tied to weather as much as policy. Fire now accounts for a large share of global tree cover loss, and its behavior tracks temperature and rainfall extremes. When conditions align, losses surge. When they do not, they fall back. But the needle barely moves on the long-term trend: forest loss remains persistently high.

Fire does not simply clear land; it hollows out forests in ways that make further loss more likely. Repeated burns thin canopies and dry the forest floor, eroding the processes that allow forests to recover. In parts of the Amazon, clearing has given way to a self-reinforcing cycle of decay, where degradation serves as a precursor to total forest loss.

Climate is an increasingly active factor. Forecasts point to a likely El Niño in 2026, with drier conditions expected across Southeast Asia and parts of the Amazon. Past events have primed the landscape for fire and stressed forests already under pressure. Today those shocks arrive on top of a hotter “normal,” increasing the chance that each drought ushers in more catastrophic damage.

Policy can still shift outcomes. Brazil’s recent decline in deforestation shows what sustained enforcement can achieve. Satellite alerts suggest that trend has continued into early 2026, with rates approaching historic lows. Indonesia’s longer-term reductions point in the same direction—as well as what progress can be lost when political dynamics shift.

Where governance weakens, loss can rebound overnight. Bolivia’s recent surge and the sharp reversal seen in Brazil during the Bolsonaro administration show how fast progress can unravel. Even in countries making progress, forests are becoming more flammable and more fragmented, leaving them exposed to the next heatwave.

The imbalance is persistent. The economic engines that drive forest loss—farming, industrial plantations, infrastructure, logging, and mining—operate at scale and with steady financing. Protection efforts often depend on shorter-term funding and fickle political support. The result is a pattern of intermittent gains rather than a permanent decline.

Across the tropics, the landscape itself is becoming more complex. In some regions, new growth appears alongside ongoing clearing, producing a patchwork of recovery and loss. Elsewhere, like the Congo Basin, smaller and more dispersed forms of clearing are creeping in as large frontiers diminish. These shifts muddy the picture without resolving it.

They also mess with the metrics. A hectare lost to fire is counted alongside one cleared for cattle, though the implications differ. A regenerating forest may register as gain, even if it is later cleared again. The data capture change, but often overlook the ecological health and resilience of the forest.

These factors create a set of reinforcing pressures. Climate variability shapes fire. Fire alters forest structure. Degraded forests are more vulnerable to both drought and clearing. Governance determines whether these processes are contained or allowed to spread. None of these forces operate in a vacuum.

The decline in 2025 reflects a moment when several of them moved in a favorable direction. It does not yet mark a shift in the long-term path.

The next few years will test that momentum more directly. If El Niño develops as expected, it will show whether recent gains can withstand a return to drier conditions. A renewed spike in fire would quickly erase them. A more limited response would suggest that policy and management are beginning to take hold.

For now, the direction is uncertain. Forest loss is more sensitive to climate, more disparate across regions, and more dependent on governance that is often fragile. Reductions are possible. But making them stick is another matter entirely.

Other pieces:

A search engine for the planet opens to the public

The idea that the Earth can be “searched” like a database has circulated for several years in academic and technical circles. Earth Index, developed by the nonprofit Earth Genome, brings that idea into practical use.

Tierney Thys, marine biologist and interpreter of the sunfish

In the open ocean, far from coasts and categories, there is a fish that seems to defy the logic of design. It is round where others are tapered, truncated where others trail into a tail. It drifts and dives, basks and vanishes, a presence that appears accidental until one looks more closely. For those who did, the giant ocean sunfish became less an oddity than a set of questions—about form, movement, and how life adapts to a vast and changing sea. Tierney M. Thys, who died in March at 59, spent much of her life asking those questions, and then finding ways to share them. She was a marine biologist by training, though that title alone does not quite capture her range. She was also a filmmaker, a science editor, a National Geographic Explorer, and an advocate for the ocean who moved between research, storytelling, and public engagement. Her work, much of it beyond the ocean, was anchored in curiosity, and in a conviction that understanding the natural world required both analysis and attention.

Species thought extinct for thousands of years ‘rediscovered’ thanks to Indigenous knowledge

On a remote peninsula in Indonesian Papua, a species long thought extinct by scientists has been confirmed to survive. The evidence did not come from a formal survey. It began with conversations with Tambrauw elders, who described a forest glider they had known for generations. Their accounts, combined with earlier photographs, led researchers to verify the continued existence of the ring-tailed glider, reports Mongabay’s John Cannon.

A recent paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, led by Kate J. Helmstedt, argues that this question should come first. Monitoring, the authors suggest, delivers impact when it is tied to a clear explanation of how the information collected will influence decisions, policy, or outcomes for biodiversity.

This may sound self-evident, yet conservation has long treated data collection as a default activity. Over the past decade, that tendency has been reinforced by rapid advances in technology. Satellites track forest loss in near real time. Camera traps document passing animals. Acoustic sensors record entire ecosystems. Environmental DNA can detect species from traces in water or soil. The result is a steady expansion in what can be measured, often accompanied by an assumption that more information will improve outcomes.

Work on conservation effectiveness has complicated that assumption. Monitoring trends—like forest cover, species abundance, compliance rates, and habitat condition—can describe what is happening without explaining why. Establishing impact requires a counterfactual: an estimate of what would have happened without the intervention. Even where methods improve, the link to outcomes is not guaranteed. Time and funding directed toward data collection can reduce what is available for implementation.

The new paper extends this line of thinking. Conservation has focused on measuring better. The harder question is perhaps why we measure at all.

To address it, the authors outline fifteen distinct reasons for monitoring, ranging from evaluating interventions to informing policy, securing funding, building public support, and documenting change over time. Some of these purposes feed directly into management decisions. Others shape the conditions under which action becomes possible. Treating them as a single category can obscure how different monitoring efforts are meant to function.

Making these distinctions explicit has practical consequences. Without a defined purpose, monitoring programs can drift. Data accumulate without a clear connection to decisions, or long-running efforts continue because they have always existed. In some settings, monitoring systems extend beyond what is needed to guide action, while in others even basic information is missing.

This unevenness reflects a broader feature of conservation practice. Evidence is widely valued, but the pathways from information to action are often indirect. Data may contribute to policy debates, support fundraising, or help establish credibility with governments and communities. In these cases, monitoring operates through the conditions that enable conservation—awareness, trust, and political support. Those roles are important, though they call for different expectations than monitoring designed to guide day-to-day management.

The implication is not that monitoring should be scaled back. In many regions, especially those rich in biodiversity, gaps in basic information remain substantial. Nor does the paper suggest delaying action until evidence is complete. Its emphasis is on clarity. Monitoring should be designed with a specific role in mind and scaled to match that role.

More monitoring is not always better—and conservation is only beginning to confront that.

Similar questions arise in other fields. In medicine, data collection is closely tied to diagnosis and treatment. In economics, measurement is organized around defined policy questions. Conservation has often taken a broader approach, collecting information without always specifying how it will be used. The shift now underway places more weight on linking measurement to decisions.

There are already signs of that shift. The growing emphasis on impact evaluation, targeted interventions, and evidence-informed practice reflects a desire to connect information more directly to outcomes. The framework proposed in the new paper adds another layer by clarifying the role monitoring plays within that process.

For the person on the ground, the takeaway from the paper is simple: if you can’t articulate how a data point will change a specific decision, the monitoring program may not be worth the resources. Before initiating a monitoring program, it helps to articulate how the system being studied is expected to change, why monitoring is needed within that process, and how the resulting data will inform decisions. Where those links are unclear, the case for monitoring becomes harder to sustain.

A similar consideration appears in journalism, where gathering and presenting information is often assumed to carry value on its own. In practice, reporting may have the most influence when it connects to audiences, institutions, or decisions that can act on it. The comparison is not exact, but it points to a shared constraint: information matters through its use.

Conservation has never lacked data. The question now is how to ensure that the data it collects are the ones that matter.

A simplified example from the paper of monitoring reasons and corresponding explanations in the context of a theory of change

• Evaluating causal links: Testing whether actions lead to intended outcomes

• Basic research: Building general system knowledge that underpins future action

• Applied research: Filling decision-relevant knowledge gaps in a specific context

• Passive adaptive management: Informing incremental adjustment of actions based on outcomes

• Active adaptive management: Supporting experimentation to compare alternative actions

• Auditing actions and outcomes: Verifying implementation and delivery of expected results

• Enforcement monitoring: Detecting and deterring rule-breaking that undermines outcomes

• Shift policy: Building evidence to justify or shape policy change

• Increase investment: Demonstrating results to attract or sustain funding

• Training, engaging, educating: Building skills, awareness, and public support

• Improving physical and mental health: Supporting mental, cultural, and physical engagement with nature

• Increasing credibility: Establishing legitimacy and influence in decision-making arenas

• Taking the pulse of nature: Detecting unexpected changes and emerging threats

• Societal curiosity: Responding to public demand for information about nature

• Monitoring that leads to novel action: Generating new ideas through observation and presence in the field

Other pieces in this series:

This short series builds on Mongabay’s earlier “Conservation Effectiveness” project by looking at a collection of recent papers on conservation measurement.

Extinction—or just unseen? What Centinela reveals about biodiversity data gaps

A 1991 hypothesis suggested that deforestation at Centinela in western Ecuador caused the immediate extinction of dozens of plant species believed to exist nowhere else. A 2024 reassessment finds that nearly all of these species occur beyond Centinela, indicating that earlier conclusions were shaped by limited sampling rather than true global extinction.

Plenty of biodiversity data, but too few conservation answers

New technologies—from environmental DNA to AI-powered sensors—are generating vast amounts of biodiversity data, creating unprecedented opportunities to monitor nature at scale. Yet more data does not necessarily improve understanding: conservation still struggles to distinguish real impacts from broader environmental trends, especially without credible counterfactuals.

Precision conservation: the rise of place-specific strategies where protection works best

A recent perspective by Spake et al. (2025) argues that conservation could be more effective if interventions were tailored to specific places, using data and causal analysis to predict where actions will deliver the greatest benefits rather than relying on average results across landscapes. The approach, termed “precision ecology,” draws inspiration from precision medicine but focuses on ecosystems rather than individuals.

Birds are changing — and Indigenous memory is the longest record we have

A global study drawing on Indigenous and local knowledge across three continents finds that bird communities have shifted toward smaller-bodied species over the past 80 years, suggesting a substantial loss of larger birds even in places with little formal monitoring. Traditional ecological knowledge, built through daily interaction with landscapes over generations, can reveal long-term environmental changes that scientific datasets — often only decades deep — fail to capture.

Measuring what works in conservation

Conservation has many widely used strategies, but far less reliable evidence about how well they work, making it difficult to direct scarce resources effectively. Researchers increasingly argue that measuring causal impact — not just tracking activities or trends — is essential to understanding real outcomes.

Forest elephants are among the least visible large mammals in Africa. In closed-canopy rainforest, they move in small groups, often at night, communicating over long distances through low-frequency calls that travel beyond human hearing. Much of their social life unfolds out of sight.

Dzanga Bai is one of the few places where that pattern breaks. Here, elephants emerge from the forest to feed on minerals in the soil. They linger. Families converge, separate, and return. Individuals can be recognized over years. Behaviors that are otherwise inferred—through tracks, fragments of sound, or brief encounters—can be followed more directly.

For decades, the clearing has drawn researchers trying to understand a species that resists easy study. Long-term work here, including that of researchers such as Andrea Turkalo, has shaped much of what is known about forest elephants. Ivonne Kienast is part of that effort.

She leads the Dzanga Forest Elephant Project, part of the Elephant Listening Project at Cornell University. Her work combines long-term behavioral observation with passive acoustic monitoring. The objective is to understand how forest elephants live and to detect early signs of change. In practice, this means continuous field presence, physically demanding work, and coordination across a network of relationships that extend well beyond the clearing.

Kienast did not arrive in Central Africa through a conventional career path. She describes her trajectory as shaped more by circumstance than design. A childhood interest in animals led to an early focus on behavior. Opportunities came later and often by chance. Over time, she moved between countries and roles, gradually building experience across the region.

That commitment is anchored in the site itself. Dzanga Bai is unusual not only for the number of elephants that visit, but for how consistently they can be observed across seasons. In most forest settings, elephants are encountered briefly, if at all. Here, they can be followed across seasons and years. Calves play. Adults interact. Patterns in social behavior become easier to recognize.

The clearing is shaped by the elephants and essential to them. They dig for minerals, alter the structure of the ground, and maintain the open space. Without them, the forest would close in. Without the clearing, much of this behavior would remain difficult to track. The relationship is reciprocal and, in practical terms, irreplaceable.

Predictability is a boon for research, but it invites danger. Because elephants return to the same clearing daily, the site would be effortless to exploit without constant oversight. Conservation presence, built over decades, has reduced poaching and allowed the population to stabilize. That stability relies on continued enforcement, funding, and cooperation with nearby communities.

The project relies on relentless consistency: counting elephants hourly and identifying individuals across years. Observers document shifts in family structure to reveal events that might otherwise remain unseen, such as the loss of a matriarch. Visual data is complemented by veterinary work and by acoustic monitoring systems that operate continuously across the landscape. These systems record gunshots as well as ecological soundscapes, providing a way to track both threats and broader environmental conditions.

Acoustic monitoring has become more common in conservation science. Technology allows for broader coverage and more precise analysis, while adding layers of logistical work. Data must be retrieved, processed, and interpreted. Its value depends on whether it can inform decisions on the ground. Kienast’s interest in accessibility—through simpler tools and local-language interfaces—reflects a practical constraint: tools only matter if they can be applied consistently in the field.

In the forest, the work is less structured. Tracking elephants through dense forest requires constant improvisation. Decisions are made quickly, often with incomplete information. Risks are present and managed through experience and coordination. The work is physically demanding and occasionally dangerous.

Kienast places particular emphasis on the development of local researchers. Training extends beyond data collection to writing, analysis, and communication. The aim is to move beyond creating assistants by supporting independent work. Kienast measures success by the extent to which the project can continue without her. In her view, continuity depends on distributing knowledge rather than concentrating it.

The same thinking shapes her relationships with surrounding communities. Trust develops gradually, through repeated interaction rather than formal agreements. Local knowledge plays an important role, especially in understanding the forest beyond the elephants themselves. She acknowledges the asymmetries in her position and the risk that conservation discussions become detached from the realities of those who live alongside wildlife. Her approach remains practical: share knowledge, create opportunities, and allow ownership to take shape locally.

The project functions as part of a wider, interdependent web. Elephants, forest, and communities are inextricably linked, with tourism, research, and employment forming an arrangement that relies on a steady stream of external funding. Maintaining it requires ongoing effort and coordination.

Kienast treats this as something that requires ongoing attention. Her focus remains local. Broader trends in biodiversity loss are acknowledged but are not the primary frame. What matters is what can be observed directly: the condition of the elephants, the state of the forest, and the people who move through both.

The work builds through repeated visits and sustained observation. It proceeds through accumulation—of data, of relationships, of incremental change. Over time, Dzanga Bai has come to offer a view of what sustained conservation can look like in practice.

Kienast describes her motivation simply: it is a sense of being where she intends to be. The forest is both a place of work and a place she returns to regularly, and where change is measured in small, observable ways—who appears at the bai, which families return, what is no longer there.

The interview

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The underwater meadows that help keep beaches from disappearing

Seagrass meadows, which rarely draw the attention given to coral reefs or mangroves, perform a steady but important task: they help hold coasts in place.

Half of seabirds are declining. Protecting marine flyways could help save them

Animals that cross borders often encounter conservation systems that stop at them. Migratory species depend on habitats spread across large distances and governed by different rules. The result is patchy protection, overlapping threats, and declining populations.

43 years after they were poached to extinction, rhinos are back in the wild in Uganda

Four decades after rhinos disappeared from Uganda’s savannas, they have returned, on a small scale. In March, the Uganda Wildlife Authority moved four southern white rhinos to Kidepo Valley National Park, a remote landscape near the country’s northern border. Four more are expected to follow by May. This is the start of a longer effort to restore a free-ranging population in a place where the species disappeared in the early 1980s.

Few scientists did more to define that transition, or to explain its consequences, than Peter Raven.

Peter Hamilton Raven, who died this weekend, aged 89, was among the most influential botanists of the past century. Over a career that spanned more than six decades, he combined taxonomy, evolutionary biology and conservation into a coherent body of work: to understand the diversity of life, and to argue for its preservation with a clarity that was unusual among scientists of his generation.

He began with curiosity rather than doctrine. Born in Shanghai in 1936 to American parents, he spent his childhood in California after his family returned in the late 1930s. As a boy in San Francisco, he collected insects and then plants, drawn to the order that botany seemed to offer. The ranges of species were mapped; their forms could be compared. It was, as he later described, a kind of game, one in which discovery remained possible even for the young.

At the University of California, Berkeley, and later at UCLA, that game became a discipline. His doctoral work focused on the evening primrose family, Onagraceae, a group that would remain a thread through his scientific life. By then, his interests were already widening. Plants, he came to see, could not be understood in isolation. Their forms, distributions and genetic patterns were responses to pressures exerted by other organisms and by the environment itself.

This insight found its most influential expression in a 1964 paper co-authored with Paul Ehrlich, “Butterflies and Plants: A Study in Coevolution.” The idea that species could drive each other’s evolution was not entirely new, but Raven and Ehrlich gave it a structure and a vocabulary that reshaped evolutionary biology. Coevolution, as they described it, explained not only the defenses of plants and the counter-adaptations of insects, but also broader ecological relationships. It suggested that disruption in one part of the system could affect others in ways that were not always apparent.

Raven took up a post at Stanford in his early thirties. At 35, he was appointed director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, an institution that would define the rest of his career. When he arrived in 1971, the garden was respected but provincial. Over nearly four decades, he transformed it into a global center for botanical research, building networks that extended across Latin America, Africa, Asia and other regions.

His approach to leadership was expansive but practical. He saw institutions not as repositories but as platforms: places from which to coordinate research, train scientists, expand public understanding of science, and influence policy. Under his direction, the garden became involved in major international projects, including the Flora of China, a vast collaborative effort that catalogued more than 31,000 species. Such undertakings required diplomacy as much as science. Raven worked across political divides, helping to build scientific partnerships between countries that had little else in common.

At the same time, he remained a prolific scholar. He authored or co-authored hundreds of papers and several widely used textbooks, including Biology of Plants, which introduced generations of students to the field. His work ranged from taxonomy and biogeography to evolutionary theory, but it was unified by a concern with how diversity arises and is maintained.

By the late 1960s, that concern had taken on a sharper edge. Raven became convinced that the scale of human impact on the natural world had been underestimated. Population growth, rising consumption, the steady conversion of natural habitats, and the spread of industrial technologies were, he argued, driving a loss of biodiversity that rivalled the great extinctions of the geological past.

He was not given to rhetorical excess, but his assessments were direct. Drawing on fossil records and contemporary data, he pointed to waves of extinction following human expansion into new regions, from the disappearance of large mammals in North America to the loss of endemic birds on Pacific islands. The pattern, he suggested, was consistent: human arrival was often followed by rapid ecological change.

Raven did not present this as an argument for retreat from development. His emphasis was on sustainability, a term that he helped to popularize but treated with caution. It was, he noted, easy to invoke and difficult to define. What mattered was not the word itself but the practical question it implied: whether human societies could manage their use of resources in a way that allowed other species—and future generations—to persist.

His answers were pragmatic. Protected areas were essential but insufficient. Conservation had to extend into agricultural landscapes and cities, and it had to address the conditions of the world’s poor as well as the consumption patterns of the rich. Education, especially of children, was a recurring theme. Interest in nature, he believed, was not automatic; it had to be cultivated.

Raven’s public role expanded accordingly. He served as president of several scientific organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and as home secretary of the National Academy of Sciences. He advised governments, participated in international panels and spoke frequently to non-specialist audiences. In 2001 he received the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor in the United States.

Recognition came in many forms. Time magazine once described him as a “Hero for the Planet,” a label he neither sought nor entirely rejected. He was aware of the tension between advocacy and objectivity, and he navigated it by insisting on the role of science as a provider of evidence rather than prescriptions. Science could describe the consequences of actions, he argued; decisions about what to do remained political.

Those who worked with him often remarked on his capacity for collaboration. He was, by his own account, an extrovert, someone who drew energy from communication and from working with others. This trait shaped both his scientific work and his institutional achievements. Large, multi-author projects and international partnerships were, for him, not a departure from earlier modes of science but a continuation of how the field had evolved.

In later years, he reflected more openly on the course of his life. His memoir, Driven by Nature, traced a path from childhood collecting in California to global advocacy for sustainability. The narrative was not uncritical. He acknowledged the demands of his career and the costs they imposed, even as he emphasized the role of colleagues, students and collaborators in his work.

What emerges from these reflections is a consistent theme: the idea that knowledge carries obligations. To understand the interconnectedness of life is, in his view, to recognize the consequences of disrupting it. Yet he resisted fatalism. Even as he documented accelerating rates of extinction, he maintained that there was still time to act, and that action would be most effective if it combined scientific insight with social and economic change.

Raven’s influence can be measured in citations, institutions and policies, but also in how biology came to be practiced. The study of plants, once seen as largely descriptive, became under his influence part of a broader inquiry into systems and interactions. Conservation, once peripheral, moved closer to the center of biological thought.

He did not claim to have resolved the tensions inherent in that shift. The balance between development and preservation, between human needs and those of other species, remains unsettled. What he offered instead was a framework for thinking about those tensions, grounded in evidence and attentive to complexity.

In one of his lectures, he described biodiversity as “the whole business”—the sum of organisms, their variations and the communities they form. It was a plain phrase for a concept of considerable scope. By the end of his life, it had become clear that he had spent much of it trying to explain what that “business” entails, and what might be lost if it is allowed to diminish.

A recent study of a lowland rainforest in Ecuador offers a detailed account of this process across a wide range of organisms. Drawing on data from 62 plots spanning active agriculture, secondary forest, and old-growth stands, the researchers examined how biodiversity recovers following land use. Their analysis extends beyond trees to animals and microbes, treating forests as systems of interaction rather than collections of species.

The findings, published last week in Nature, point to a mixed picture. Secondary forests—those regrowing after clearance—now account for roughly 70% of tropical forest area. Their role in conservation has often been overlooked. The study finds that these landscapes can regain much of their biological richness within a few decades, provided they are allowed to recover.

Measured in terms of abundance and species diversity, recovery is relatively fast. Many groups return to levels close to those found in old-growth forest within 30 years, and in some cases much sooner. Pollinators such as bees, along with birds and bats, show particularly rapid gains. These species move easily across fragmented landscapes, allowing them to recolonize regenerating areas early.

Species composition changes more slowly. A forest may regain its numbers without recovering its identity. While abundance and diversity can exceed 90% of old-growth levels within three decades, similarity in species composition reaches only about three-quarters of that benchmark over the same period. Full recovery, where the assemblage of species resembles that of undisturbed forest, can take much longer—often several decades, and in some cases centuries.

This matters because ecosystems depend not only on how many species are present, but on which ones. The delayed return of old-growth specialists suggests that regenerated forests may lack certain interactions for extended periods, even when they appear structurally intact.

The study separates recovery into two components: resistance and return rate. Resistance refers to how much of a community persists during disturbance. Return rate captures how quickly species re-establish afterward. The two do not track together. Some species remain present during agricultural use but recover slowly once lost; others disappear quickly but return rapidly when conditions improve.

Mobile animals such as fruit-eating birds, bats, and bees tend to score highly on both counts. Many remain present, or nearby, even during active land use. Their mobility allows them to re-enter regenerating forests early, where they have an outsized effect relative to their numbers. By dispersing seeds and pollinating plants, they help set the course of regeneration. Their presence reinforces the process: as vegetation returns, it provides resources that attract more animals, which in turn sustain regeneration.

Trees recover more slowly. They are typically removed during land conversion and return over longer timescales, constrained by long generation times and limited dispersal. Many old-growth species are rare, so even as species numbers rebound, the mix that defines an old-growth forest takes much longer to return.

Not all groups recover at the same pace. Soil bacteria show high resistance but little evidence of return, with communities remaining altered long after above-ground systems begin to resemble forest again. Leaf-litter arthropods and other less mobile organisms also recover slowly, in part due to limits on dispersal and habitat continuity.

Recovery also depends on prior land use. Forests regenerating from former cacao plantations tend to recover more quickly than those from pasture. Cacao systems, even when intensively managed, retain more structure and resources than open pasture, providing a better starting point for recolonization.

Across all groups, return rates play a larger role than resistance in determining recovery time. Recovery also depends on the surrounding landscape. Forests near intact habitat are more likely to receive a steady influx of species, which speeds regeneration. In more degraded settings, recovery may slow or stall.

Natural regeneration, which receives less attention than active restoration, can be an effective and cost-efficient strategy. But it depends on time. Many secondary forests are cleared again before they mature, limiting their value as reservoirs of biodiversity.

Old-growth forests remain irreplaceable, particularly for species that depend on long-established conditions. At the same time, in landscapes that have already been altered, allowing forests to regenerate remains one of the most practical ways to restore biodiversity.

Other pieces:

Five “lost” bird species rediscovered in 2025

In conservation, absence is often the first sign of trouble. A bird not seen for years may still persist in some overlooked corner of its range. Or it may already be gone. The “lost birds” list was created for this gap, marking species that have slipped from view but not yet into extinction.

Facebook removes groups after Mongabay and Bellingcat report illegal wildlife trade

Facebook has removed nine Indonesian groups used to trade wildlife after an investigation by Mongabay and Bellingcat uncovered the activity. The groups, some operating for years, had tens of thousands of members and regularly featured listings, including protected species.

Mitchell Byrd, ornithologist who helped bring bald eagles back from the brink

In the long arc of conservation, recovery is often slow enough to be mistaken for stasis. Populations dwindle, habitats shrink, and the work of 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.

Every Earth Day, we are urged to care more deeply about the planet—to pay closer attention, to look more carefully, to resist indifference.

For many, that is a one-day appeal. For conservationists, rangers, field scientists and frontline practitioners, it is the job. Yet that work can take a psychological toll that few institutions are willing to acknowledge.

That should give us pause. A movement built around protecting life has become accustomed to asking its own people to absorb loss without enough support, stability or care.

Conservationists are trained to notice what others miss: a reef drained of color, a forest gone quiet. They count animals, patrol protected areas, document cultures, and watch places they love shift in ways that are measurable and often irreversible.

This is often described as burnout. Sometimes it is. But a more precise term may be moral injury: the distress of witnessing harm, caring deeply, and still being unable to stop much of it. In conservation, it stems not from apathy, but from commitment.

The structure of the work adds to the strain.

Conservation is often framed as a calling. That language can inspire, but it can also make it easier to excuse low pay, normalize exhaustion, and treat limits as a lack of dedication. That is not an individual failing; it reflects how the work is organized.

Short-term grants and restricted budgets leave organizations in constant uncertainty. Teams are expected to deliver ambitious results while worrying about whether salaries can be paid. Mental health support is rarely treated as core infrastructure. The message comes through even when unstated: the mission matters more than the people doing the work.

Earth Day should be a moment to admit that this model places unsustainable pressure on those we rely on most.

Funders should stop treating well-being as optional. If grants can cover fieldwork, monitoring or technology, they can cover mental health care, humane workloads, paid leave and staff retention. Funding restrictions that prevent organizations from supporting their staff is not discipline; it leads to churn.

Leaders, too, should stop confusing stoicism with professionalism. A person at capacity is not lazy. A colleague who needs time off is not weak. A field biologist who admits distress is not less committed. These are ordinary facts in any serious institution.

The natural world is in trouble. So are many of the people working to protect it.

Earth Day asks the public to care about the planet. Institutions should ask something of themselves: to build systems that allow people to remain in this work over time without being worn down by it.

We are not going to protect the planet by burning through the people who have chosen to protect it.

This piece builds on earlier pieces:

• Earth Day is for the planet. What about the people protecting it?

• A profession built on hope, strained by loss

• Jeremy Hance’s “‘An epidemic of suffering’: Why are conservationists breaking down?”

• Vik Mohan and Nerissa Chao’s “Emotional and psychological stresses beleaguer conservation professionals”

• Conservation’s silent strain: Nature’s protectors face a mental health crisis

Emmanuel de Merode, who has led Virunga since 2008, does not begin with ecology. His training is in anthropology, and that shapes how he describes the park. The condition of wildlife, he suggests, follows from deeper forces. Forest loss, poaching, and insecurity are not simply environmental problems. They emerge from how people earn a living, how authority functions, and how money and resources circulate.

In eastern Congo, conservation cannot be separated from the economy. For many communities around Virunga, the choices are immediate. Clearing forest for agriculture or producing charcoal can generate income that supports a household. The benefits of conservation are harder to see and often accrue far beyond the region. The imbalance shows up in daily decisions about fuel, food, and access to land. As de Merode describes it, the system asks some of the poorest populations to bear the cost of protecting assets valued globally.

The pressure on the park is reinforced by conflict. Since the mid-1990s, eastern Congo has been the site of prolonged violence involving militias, foreign armed groups, and competing political interests. These dynamics have had direct ecological effects. Large mammal populations declined sharply during the early 2000s. Rangers, tasked with protecting the park, have been frequent targets. More than 200 have been killed over the years.

De Merode’s approach developed from this context. A turning point came in 2007, during a period of intensified violence that included the killing of seven mountain gorillas. Investigations linked these events to the charcoal trade supplying Goma, a city of roughly two million people with few alternatives for energy. At its core, the crisis was about energy and livelihoods. Those findings forced a shift in the response.

Over the following years, Virunga built a system centered on renewable energy, particularly small-scale hydroelectric plants. The aim was to reduce pressure on forests by replacing charcoal while building a different economic base. Electricity enabled small businesses, from welding and milling to refrigeration and food processing. These activities created employment. De Merode’s argument is straightforward: energy enables business, business creates jobs, and jobs change incentives that draw people into armed groups or illegal activities.

The model extends beyond energy. Financial services have been integrated through smart meters that track electricity use. Consumption data provides a record of activity, allowing small enterprises to access credit without conventional collateral. Repayment is tied directly to power usage. The mechanism is simple and addresses a persistent constraint in places where formal banking systems are limited and transaction costs are high.

Security has also been reworked. Traditional responses, often slow and reactive, left communities exposed. Virunga has developed rapid-response systems and forward operating bases designed to shorten response times to threats and create localized stability. These are paired with economic initiatives, so that areas benefiting from improved security also gain access to jobs and infrastructure.

Agriculture provides another example. In parts of eastern Congo, commodities such as cocoa have been tied to conflict financing. Armed groups have used violence to control harvests and channel production into illicit trade networks. Virunga’s response has been to shorten the value chain and secure it. Farmers sell directly into a system that processes products locally, capturing more value and reducing exposure to coercion.

These elements form what de Merode describes as a competing economic system. The idea is that conflict in eastern Congo is sustained in part by an economy built on extraction and informal trade. Changing the status quo requires introducing an alternative that is viable at scale. Small interventions can demonstrate feasibility, but they do not shift the broader balance. The challenge is to reach a point where the alternative begins to displace the existing system.

The Couloir vert Kivu-Kinshasa, or Green Corridor, is envisioned as that alternative. Established through national legislation in 2025, the corridor extends the approach developed in Virunga across a much larger geography. It is not a protected area in the conventional sense. It includes cities, farmland, and infrastructure. The aim is to connect regions of agricultural production in the east with demand in the west, particularly in Kinshasa, while maintaining the integrity of the Congo Basin forest.

The corridor is conceived as a network of economic hubs, each combining energy, agriculture, processing, logistics, and security. Rather than attempting comprehensive development at once, the model builds nodes that can be linked over time. Energy remains the starting point, followed by value-added production and transport systems. The scale is large: the area covered is bigger than many countries, and the population runs into the millions.

The approach has limits. Recent resurgences of conflict have disrupted parts of the system. Infrastructure can be damaged, access restricted, and revenues reduced, particularly from tourism. De Merode acknowledges that economic interventions alone cannot resolve the broader political dynamics shaping the region. External interests, regional tensions, and long-standing governance challenges continue to influence outcomes.

Even so, the effort is treated as a necessary test. Without an alternative model, the trajectory of the Congo Basin is likely to follow patterns seen elsewhere, where infrastructure expansion and resource extraction lead to fragmentation and loss. The corridor seeks to determine whether a different path is possible, one in which economic activity depends on maintaining the forest rather than clearing it.

The interview: Can nature outcompete war in Eastern Congo?

Some lives seem to belong less to a nation or a profession than to a disposition. George B. Schaller’s was one of them. He belonged, above all, to animals—gorillas, lions, tigers, snow leopards, pandas—and to the landscapes that still made room for them. In Homesick for a World Unknown: The Life of George B. Schaller, Miriam Horn attempts something both straightforward and unusually difficult: to write a full biography of a man who spent most of his life turning his attention away from himself.

Schaller is not obscure. He is widely regarded as the most important field biologist of the twentieth century, a figure whose work reshaped zoology, conservation biology, and the way humans think about animal lives. Yet he remains oddly resistant to biography. He disliked introspection, avoided publicity, and wrote sparingly about his own emotions even when describing moments of extreme danger or revelation. Horn’s achievement is to take this reticence seriously rather than try to overcome it. The result is a book that is expansive without being intrusive, admiring without being reverential, and alert to ambiguity even when recounting an extraordinary career.

The arc of Schaller’s life has the shape of an adventure story, though Horn is careful not to write one. Born in Berlin in 1933 to an American mother and a German diplomat father, Schaller’s early years were marked by displacement, war, and a persistent sense of not quite belonging. His childhood moved across Nazi Germany, occupied Europe, and eventually the United States. These experiences are not presented as simple explanations for what followed, but they matter. Horn shows how early uprooting, isolation, and watchfulness sharpened habits that later became professional virtues: patience, attentiveness, and an ability to sit quietly—though never passively—in unfamiliar worlds.

Schaller’s scientific career began in earnest in the late 1950s, when he traveled to the Belgian Congo to study mountain gorillas. At the time, gorillas were widely regarded as violent, almost monstrous creatures, better shot than observed. Schaller did something radical in its simplicity. He went to live near them without a gun, refused to assert dominance, and waited. What emerged was the first sustained, close-range study of gorillas in the wild, revealing animals that were social, restrained, and far more complex than prevailing caricatures allowed.

This approach—entering an animal’s world on its terms, over long periods, with minimal interference—became Schaller’s defining method. He would go on to apply it to lions in the Serengeti, tigers in India, snow leopards in the Himalayas, jaguars in Brazil, pandas in China, and antelope across the Tibetan Plateau. Horn follows him across six continents and seven decades, reconstructing not just what he found, but how he worked: long days of observation, meticulous field notes, physical hardship, and an unusual tolerance for loneliness.

What distinguished Schaller was not only endurance, but a willingness to challenge the assumptions of his field. Mid-century zoology, particularly in the United States, favored controlled experiments, captive animals, and a rigid separation between observer and subject. Schaller insisted that understanding animals required empathy—not sentimentality, but a disciplined effort to see behavior in context. He believed animals had inner lives, social structures, and individual temperaments worth describing in plain language. This position was controversial. It risked accusations of anthropomorphism at a time when scientific credibility depended on emotional distance.

Horn treats this intellectual conflict with care. She does not present Schaller as a lone genius overturning a benighted establishment. Instead, she situates him within longer traditions of natural history, including Darwin, Humboldt, and earlier observer-naturalists who combined science with close description. What made Schaller distinctive was the scale of his commitment and the era in which he worked. He pursued intimacy with animals just as scientific fashion moved in the opposite direction, toward abstraction and specialization.

The book is particularly strong when describing the practical consequences of Schaller’s work. His studies were not only descriptive; they became foundational. His research on tigers and lions reshaped understanding of predator behavior and territory. His panda work helped establish the scientific basis for their protection. Over time, Schaller moved beyond observation to advocacy, recognizing that documentation alone could not save species whose habitats were disappearing.

Here the biography broadens into a history of modern conservation. Schaller helped persuade governments to establish national parks and protected areas across Asia, Africa, and South America. The combined territory of these areas exceeds that of France. Horn is clear-eyed about the limits of this achievement. Protected areas did not always account for the needs of local people, and early conservation efforts often reflected colonial assumptions. Schaller himself evolved on this point. Through decades of fieldwork, he came to see that conservation could not succeed without local knowledge, participation, and authority.

Horn traces this shift carefully, showing how Schaller learned from Indigenous communities in Alaska, Africa, and Asia, and gradually moved toward a model of community-based conservation. This was not an ideological conversion so much as a pragmatic one, grounded in observation. Animals survived where people had reasons to protect them. The book avoids the temptation to retrofit modern language onto earlier work, but it makes clear that Schaller’s influence extended well beyond biology into the ethics and politics of conservation.

One of the biography’s strengths is its attention to relationships. Schaller’s marriage to Kay Morgan, whom he met as a teenager and remained with for more than seventy years, is central. Kay accompanied him to remote field sites, raised their children under demanding conditions, and accepted long separations when his work required it. Horn neither idealizes nor dramatizes this partnership. She shows the costs alongside the devotion, including the strain of repeated moves, physical danger, and the uneven burden placed on family life.

Schaller’s influence on other scientists forms another important thread. Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Peter Matthiessen, Robert Sapolsky, and many others were shaped by his work, sometimes directly. Horn is careful not to turn this into a genealogy of greatness. Instead, she emphasizes Schaller’s role as a mentor and standard-setter, someone whose methods and expectations raised the bar for field science. His insistence on careful observation, detailed record-keeping, and intellectual humility left a durable imprint.

The prose of Homesick for a World Unknown reflects its subject. Horn writes with precision and restraint, favoring concrete detail over flourish. She draws extensively on Schaller’s field journals, letters, and interviews, allowing his voice to come through without dominating the narrative. When the book lingers on scenes—waiting out a gorilla charge, crossing the Tibetan Plateau on foot, standing silently as animals accept a human presence—it does so without rhetorical excess. The effect is cumulative rather than dramatic.

This restraint is not without risk. Readers accustomed to more confessional biography may find the emotional temperature cool. Schaller’s inner life remains partially opaque, even after hundreds of pages. Horn acknowledges this and makes it part of the story. Schaller believed that attention was a moral resource, and he spent it elsewhere. To force his psychology into the foreground would have been a distortion.

If the book has a limitation, it lies in its scale. At more than 600 pages, it demands commitment. Some episodes, particularly in the early chapters on Schaller’s parents and wartime childhood, are richly documented but may test readers eager to reach the fieldwork. Yet these sections establish the moral and historical context that makes the later achievements intelligible. Schaller’s life cannot be separated from the century that shaped it.

The title, Homesick for a World Unknown, captures the book’s central tension. Schaller was drawn to places and creatures that most people never see, and that increasingly no longer exist in the forms he encountered. His work coincided with accelerating habitat loss, species decline, and political upheaval. Horn does not turn him into a prophet of doom. Instead, she presents a figure who responded to loss with attention, documentation, and action, even when success was uncertain.

In an era when environmental writing often oscillates between alarm and reassurance, this biography offers something different. It suggests that care begins with looking, and that looking takes time. Schaller’s method was slow, physically demanding, and unsuited to shortcuts. It required being present long enough for animals to stop reacting and start living. Horn’s book mirrors that patience.

The result is a portrait of a life oriented outward, toward other forms of existence, at a moment when such orientation feels increasingly rare. Schaller did not seek to dominate nature or withdraw from it. He tried, persistently, to understand it on its own terms. That ambition, modest and radical at once, gives Homesick for a World Unknown its lasting weight.

This is not a book that argues loudly for its relevance. It does not need to. In chronicling a life spent paying attention to what lies beyond the human, it implicitly raises questions about how knowledge is made, what is worth protecting, and what it means to belong to a world shared with others.