International Reporting

Can fashion help small farmers preserve the Amazon?

By and Photography by Flávia Milhorance

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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In the Amazon, farming the forest to save the forest

By and Photography by Luisa Dörr

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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A grassroots push to save vanishing birds and bees forces change on Germany’s farms

By Photography by Lena Mucha

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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In the jungles of Borneo a novel approach to end deforestation — and the spread of disease

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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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How did Europe avoid the Covid-19 catastrophe ravaging U.S. meatpacking plants?

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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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    Mother Jones

Feeding refugees on the U.S.-Mexico border was always a challenge. Now there’s Covid-19. 

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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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Who should profit from Mexico’s nitrogen-fixing corn?

By Photography by Citlali Fabian

In a 1979 visit to Totontepec, a small town in Oaxaca, Mexico, naturalist Thomas Boone Hallberg marveled at the local maize. The plants grew nearly 20 feet high in nutrient-poor soil, even though local farmers did not apply any fertilizer. The maize had aerial roots that grew a mucous-like gel just before harvest season. It… » Read More

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