Award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns tells stories that shed light on the complexities and nuances of the United States’ cultural tapestry. This time, Burns has turned his lens on a symbol…
PALAWAN, Philippines — In a move celebrated as a victory by an Indigenous community that since 2005 has been fighting plans to mine nickel in a protected area, the Philippine…
TEKOA PINDÓ MIRIM, Brazil — “If we hadn’t come here, someone non-Indigenous would probably already have occupied this space,” says Neusa Poty. The 35-year-old Guarani Indigenous leader speaks in a…
PHNOM PENH — The Cambodian government has awarded another large swath of Botum Sakor National Park to local conglomerate Royal Group, carving out yet more land from this ostensibly protected…
SINGAPORE — If you didn’t know better, you might think Edwin Beng is heading home after buying a new appliance. It’s a muggy Sunday morning in Singapore, and Beng, carrying…
JAKARTA — In June, Dormaida Sihotang and dozens of other women from Dairi district in Indonesia’s North Sumatra province arrived in Jakarta to plead with authorities to stop a zinc…
AGNARAFALY and MENABE, Madagascar — For Soja and his family, who escaped starvation bred by drought, the December rain hammering their corrugated metal roof should be welcome. But rains are…
Think of any place in the Amazon and imagine an oil well installed there. Then, imagine that after decades of extracting crude oil, the company ends its operations and leaves.…
“There is no Planet B,” French President Emmanuel Macron declared to an audience of officials and Indigenous landowners at a conservation event in Papua New Guinea on July 28. Macron's…
SAROLANGUN, Indonesia — On a night in early July, Solikin was awake chasing elephants past sunrise. The animals had entered the community’s oil palm fields and raised hell, mashing hundreds…
BOTUM SAKOR, Cambodia — Once Cambodia’s largest national park, Botum Sakor has shriveled under the gaze of tycoons, whose parcels of land have swallowed up more than 80% of the…
WEST SERAM, Indonesia — It’s a sunny day off the coast of Piru village on the island district of West Seram, in Indonesia’s Maluku province. La Samiun and his wife…
*Names have been changed to protect sources who said they feared reprisals from the authorities. BOTUM SAKOR, Cambodia — “We’ve filed complaints with four institutions now — the Ministry of…
This story is the third article of a three-part Mongabay mini-series exploring the link between Cambodia's garment factories and illegal logging. Read Part One and Part Two. KAMPONG SPEU, Cambodia…
Dogger Bank, a sandbank in the North Sea the size of Washington state, was designated a marine protected area more than decade ago to conserve its sensitive seabed habitat. Yet…
ARU ISLANDS, Indonesia — More than 10 years have passed since a young official in Indonesia’s eastern Aru Islands saved his archipelago from becoming a monoculture plantation. Today, Mika Ganobal…
BATANGHARI, Indonesia — In a sweltering oil palm field in Batanghari village, Rokani fixes a sickle to an 11-meter (36-foot) pole and begins cutting down bunches of fruit from the…
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network where Gerald Flynn was a fellow. *Names have been changed to protect sources who said they feared reprisals from…
Thirty-five years ago on a sweltering April night, Enrique Cárdenas, a biology and natural sciences teacher, watched El Papantón burn. The mountain, which stands 1,939 meters (about 6,360 feet) tall,…
Earlier this year, 25 Congolese and international civil society organizations wrote a letter to the U.S. secretary of state, calling on the United States government to maintain sanctions against diamond…
On 27 March 2021, the natural sounds of the teak and bamboo forests of eastern Myanmar — calling birds, croaking frogs and barking deer — were drowned out by a…
“The challenge in the Nkok SIZ is timber traceability. The SIZ must be kept free of illegally obtained timber,” says Marc Ona, executive secretary of the NGO Brainforest. The NGO…
KORK THLORK, Cambodia — Vorn Keo, perched on the edge of a green wooden boat, navigates through the flooded forest of Tonle Sap Lake and across the boundary into a…
PHNOM PENH — On the morning of April 26, a handful of activists took to the streets of the Cambodian capital to commemorate the 11th anniversary of environmentalist Chut Wutty’s…
Environmental groups doled out general praise, with caveats, for a new inventory by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) that identified 112.8 million acres (45.6 million…
As 175 countries prepare to gather in May to move ahead on a global plastics treaty, the world’s plastic-producing and plastic-polluted countries remain divided on whether the agreement should be mandatory or voluntary, among many other issues.
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, and Native News Online. NEW YORK—In February, Cyclone…
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, and Native News Online. NEW YORK—In Tanzania, the…
KATHMANDU — Nepal hasn’t had an environment minister since October last year — a vacuum that could be either good or bad, depending on how one looks at it. The…
This article was published in a collaboration between Mongabay Latam and La Barra Espaciadora de Ecuador. “We’ve been resisting oil operations in this territory since they tried to begin them six…
