Every three days, someone is killed for defending nature. In 2025, watchdog group Global Witness documented 124 such deaths worldwide, a toll that is likely but a fraction of the total because repression and armed conflict make many killings impossible to document. The victims include Indigenous People, small-scale farmers, and community organizers who peacefully protect forests, farmlands, waterways, and natural ecosystems from harm. The perpetrators of environme

Enacted in 2001 with broad bipartisan support, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule protects 45 million acres of national forest lands across the US. Now the Trump admistration proposes to rescind this rule and open these wildlands to road building, logging, mining, and other commercial uses. Until September 21, the public can comment on this proposed action to deep six a bedrock conservation measure before a final decision is made. In my April 2 blog post this year, I

Wood stork parent and young My wife, Diana, came across this amazing conservation story in a most unusual place, The Times of India. Yes, India, the country. This is a story of how a couple purchased a 45-acre property -- a cypress swamp -- adjacent to their Florida home to keep it from being developed. Their dedication to nature illustrates that conservation does not always begin with a national park or a huge organization. Sometimes it starts when two people

One of the excuses the Trump administration offered for moving to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule that protects over 60 million acres of US Forest Service lands -- our lands -- was to provide more road access to fight wildfires. But a new study published in the journal Fire Ecology , and summarized in Inside Climate News , reviewed the history of wildfire ignitions from 1992 to 2024 and found that wildfires were four times more likely to ignite within 50 meters of a road tha

Can technology help solve environmental problems facing our planet? Sometimes. And sometimes those solutions come from the youngest among us. This inspiring article in Smithsonian magazine about two teenagers in Portugal is bound to lift your spirits. Not only because of the utility of the invention they developed, but because at such a young age they did this. Since the early 2000s, Portugal has lost over half of its forest cover, triggering erosion, water l

Congress has begun nullifying resource management plans that were developed and implemented to guide long-term stewardship of federal lands. Plans cooperatively developed by the federal Bureau of Land Management in Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska -- in consultation with scientists, conservation groups, indigenous peoples, industry, and other users of these tracts of federal lands -- are the first on the chopping block. These Resource Management Plans (RMPs) provide stabil

The Trump administration seeks to weaken conservation by rescinding a rule that governs public land use. The Conservation and Landscape...

The undammed Klamath In a previous pos t on April 15, 2024, I shared a story about removal of four dams on California and Oregon's...

Aldabra tortoise It's easy to become overwhelmed by the distressing news coming from Washington, D.C. day after day. And in a recent...

North American endangered species This proposal "threatens a half-century of progress in protecting and restoring endangered species," is...

Researchers investigating the status of 114 species of butterflies in the United States found that populations are declining at a rate of...

Newly published research in Science predicts that by 2070 almost half of Earth's land surface will experience increases in spatial...