Nature & Wildlife
Wild animals are not just the inhabitants of the natural world—they are its architects. That’s the exciting finding from a new study that reveals how hundreds of species have shaped the landscapes we depend on, from beavers creating entire wetlands to hippos carving drainage systems.
News & More
While in recent years environmental laws in the United States have faced some of their most severe challenges and rollbacks, it’s encouraging to hear that Europe is now successfully passing several groundbreaking rules to restore nature.
Nature & Wildlife
In 2024, I started the year by writing about nature: CO2 emissions, temperatures and the optimism a lot of us felt about clean energy technologies with consistent cost declines.
Nature & Wildlife
Sometimes, the divide between us and wildlife seems wide and deep. Animals live far “out there,” we typically think, while we reside in cities, suburbs, towns and semirural areas. But more and more, we find ourselves in the lands and vicinities of wild animals.
Conservation
Today, across the planet, hundreds of millions of acres of land are being abandoned due to what’s known as rural outmigration, or people leaving for urban centers. Some people leave their rural lives behind to seek economic prosperity in cities when agriculture is no longer profitable.
Conservation
Yellowstone National Park is famous for its beautiful but harsh winters. Blanketed in snow, it exudes an almost mythical aura—even in the season’s common subzero temperatures there.
Conservation
After the Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror imposed ‘Forest Law’ on the Anglo-Saxons to defend the king’s sovereign rights to all wild animals. The Forest Law applied to all the land used by fauna, as well as any land the animals passed through.
Conservation
“Re:wild: The Search for Lost Species” sounds like the title of an action-adventure movie, and in a way, this ambitious and optimistic initiative contains all of the plot lines to keep us nature lovers on the edge of our seats.
Latin America
In the 1980s, Colombian cocaine kingpin and drug trafficker Pablo Escobar purchased four hippopotamuses for his private zoo. After he died in 1993, the Colombian government left the hippos in a pond on his ranch because it was unable to transport them to a suitable environment.
Videos
Bears, lynx, wolves and wildcats used to roam the lands that today make up Great Britain. European brown bears, however, have been extinct there since at least the early Middle Ages—and possibly even earlier. British lynx disappeared around 700 A.D., due to hunting and habitat destruction. And by the turn of the 16th century, wolves were extinct in England and Wales.
Europe
The Scottish Highlands have been described as achingly beautiful, and I’d have to agree. In this vast wilderness, glens sit in ancient glacial valleys, striped by ribbons of rivers and enclosed by jagged mountain peaks. But this lovely landscape could not be defined as “untouched.”
Conservation
With our Yellowstone wolf tours kicking off next week, we wanted to share George Monbiot’s TED Talk about the concept of “rewilding,” or what he calls a “mass restoration of ecosystems.”
