International Reporting
Europe’s butterflies are vanishing as small farms disappear
Each week for the last 25 summers, biologist Constantí Stefanescu has walked a line through a series of fields in Catalonia, counting butterflies. On a sun-beaten day last July, near where the Pyrenees Mountains slip into the Mediterranean Sea, he stepped into what had once been the most butterfly-rich meadow of them all. In the… » Read More
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Brazil’s Amazon beef plan will ‘legalize deforestation’ say critics
For many, the overriding image of agriculture in the Amazon is one of environmental destruction. About 80 percent of deforestation in the region has been attributed to cattle ranching, tainting beef exports. Brazil’s beef industry hopes to tempt buyers back to the Amazon region, which covers about 40 percent of the country’s total area, with a new… » Read More
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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
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
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
How did Europe avoid the Covid-19 catastrophe ravaging U.S. meatpacking plants?
BERGERAC, France — In late April, around the time that President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring U.S. meatpacking plants to be “critical infrastructure” in an effort to keep them open after they emerged as coronavirus hotspots, Germany’s slaughterhouses reported their first cases of the virus. In the ensuing weeks, as the number of… » Read More
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8 million readersMother Jones
Feeding refugees on the U.S.-Mexico border was always a challenge. Now there’s Covid-19.
Since 2019, a crisis has been unfolding directly across the U.S.-Mexico border from Brownsville, Texas. About 2,000 refugees, largely from Central America, have been stranded in a riverside encampment, wholly dependent on humanitarian groups for food and other basic needs. Feeding them before Covid-19 was a daunting task for the aid groups. The pandemic has… » Read More
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Can Asia’s infectious disease-producing wildlife trade be stopped?
For the past 40 years, the Chinese government has promoted the wild animal trade as a form of rural economic development. But the industry ground to a halt this winter when it became clear that the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan originated in a “wet market”—where throngs of customers shop for live animals held in cramped… » Read More