Biodiversity
Can fashion help small farmers preserve the Amazon?
On a rainy March afternoon, Rogério Mendes strides through the dripping vegetation of a tract of virgin Amazonian forest and stops at a tree with scars arranged in neat diagonal rows across its trunk. From his back pocket he produces a wood-handled tool with a blade on one end, called a cabrita, and cuts another diagonal line… » Read More
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6.4 million page views per monthThe New Republic
This farm relies on birds — not pesticides — to control pests
Dennis Tamura never set out to be a bird-watcher. He’s been a farmer for over 35 years, and he and his wife grow organic vegetables and flowers on Blue Heron Farms outside Watsonville. But birds have become a part of the farm’s ecosystem. About 15 years ago, a bird-loving neighbor put up small wooden bird boxes… » Read More
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Broadcast on more than 60 public radio stations in California, with more than 330,000 listenersThe California Report
In the Amazon, farming the forest to save the forest
Open a new road in the Amazon and deforestation most often follows, creating a landscape of big sky, white cows, and green pastures. But on back roads around the frontier town of Nova Califórnia, in a remote corner of northwestern Brazil, a renewed verdant canopy closes in. As we crawl down a slick, red-mud road… » Read More
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26 million website visitors a month220 million social users reachedNational Geographic
The battle to control America’s ‘most destructive’ species: feral pigs
A layer of frost clings to the grass on the morning Anthony DeNicola sets out to check his trap. It’s late January in South Carolina. The sun is rising, the fog is lifting, and the frogs are croaking from somewhere in the dark loblolly pines. In a whisper, DeNicola explains what will happen. “I wait… » Read More
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26 MILLION WEBSITE VISITORS A MONTH220 MILLION SOCIAL USERS REACHEDNational Geographic
Widely used neonic insecticides may be a threat to mammals, too
On an overcast January day in Estelline, South Dakota, Jonathan Lundgren zips his quilted jacket over a fleece, pulls down a wool cap, and crunches through the snow on Blue Dasher Farm to his barn, a milking parlor that he has kitted out as a biochemical laboratory. This story is part of our biodiversity initiative. In this… » Read More
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26 MILLION WEBSITE VISITORS A MONTH220 MILLION SOCIAL USERS REACHEDNational Geographic
A grassroots push to save vanishing birds and bees forces change on Germany’s farms
When Norbert Schäffer was a child growing up in Bavaria, gray partridges picked through his parents’ garden, wetlands teemed with newts and toads, and birds like skylarks and lapwings were common over the fields. But when Schäffer moved back to the area in 2014 after nearly two decades of conservation work in Britain, those touchstones… » Read More
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NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC26 MILLION VISITORS A MONTH
In the jungles of Borneo a novel approach to end deforestation — and the spread of disease
In the early 1990s, Kinari Webb took a year off college to join a Harvard researcher studying orangutans in Indonesia’s rainforested Gunung Palung National Park. As the aspiring primatologist dissected dung samples to determine the animals’ feeding habits, the buzz of chainsaws and the thwuuuump of falling dipterocarp trees—some of the tallest species in the… » Read More
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Popular Science5.5 Million Visitors a Month
From the sea floor to the courtroom, the fight to save right whales grows urgent
Artie Raslich has been volunteering for seven years with the conservation group Gotham Whale, working on the American Princess, a whale-watching boat based in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. In that time Raslich, a professional photographer, has glimpsed a North Atlantic right whale, the world’s rarest cetacean, only twice. The first time was an unseasonably warm December… » Read More
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4 million online readers per year200K social reachYale Environment 360
How do climate change, migration and a deadly sheep disease alter our understanding of pandemics?
For thousands of years, an unknown virus lingered quietly among the wild ruminants of South Africa. The kudu. The giraffes. The Cape buffalo. Spread by a genus of biting midges called Culicoides, the virus lived in harmony with its hosts, rarely causing disease, until the late 18th century, when farmers began importing purebred merino sheep… » Read More
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Ensia3 million monthly reach