“National parks are the best idea we ever had,” wrote author and environmentalist Wallace Stegner in 1983. “Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” Stegner echoes the view of President Franklin D. Roosevelt nearly fifty years earlier when he pronounced, “There is nothing so American as our national […]
Blaring horns and a cheering crowd greeted me when I arrived in the sleepy town of Puerto Varas, Chile on presidential election-day, December 2017. Sebastian Piñera, a billionaire businessman was elected for the second time by a population disappointed in job growth under Michelle Bachelet. Piñera’s victory marks the latest shift to the right in […]
“We have been residing in this area for decades, and all of a sudden the government told us to vacate,” Rafiz Ali told Reuters journalist Rina Chandran last September. Ali was a community leader in one of three of illegal settler villages in the buffer zone of India’s Kaziranga National Park. In 2016, in an […]
Palawan’s Popularity Problem: An Interview with Photographer Duncan Murrell This past fall (autumn for those outside North America), I was lured to Palawan, a culturally and ecologically rich archipelago in the Philippines made up of nearly 2,000 islands. Seeing the name pop up repeatedly on “world’s best islands” and “world’s best beaches” lists in recent […]
The outbreak of violence and the burning of 35 Tamil-owned buses in Bengaluru (also known as Bangalore) earlier this month is just the tip of the iceberg in India’s crippling water crisis. A legal dispute over the Cauvery (Kaveri) River in India’s south has suffered from more than a century of bureaucratic corruption, mismanagement and […]
The Galapagos Islands sit on the Equator approximately 620 miles off the coast of Ecuador as a series of remote islands created by lava formations, similar in their nature to Hawaii. Boasting an ecosystem uniquely showcasing incredible biodiversity and exotic landscapes, they are quite deserving of their nickname given by Charles Darwin during the time […]
For decades the plight of the silky shark (Carcharhinus falciformis) went unnoticed. They were once thought to be the most populous type of requiem shark, but the slow-to procreate and overfished silky sharks were potentially down an average of 80% from their originally estimated population numbers long before anyone realized what had happened. Silky sharks […]
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, one of the seven natural wonders of the world, has been marked for destruction. Widely considered the largest coral reef system in the world, the Great Barrier Reef stretches more than 1,600 miles (2,600 kilometers) and consists of almost 3,000 separate reefs. According to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the […]
The South Korean government has abandoned plans to begin scientific whaling following domestic and international resistance. Scientific whaling involves the killing of whales for the purpose of research – a practice environmentalists dismiss as a thinly veiled cover for illegal commercial whaling operations. More than 100,000 concerned citizens from 124 countries signed an online petition […]
