conservation

By Matthew Fagan, Leighton Reid and Margaret Buck Holland Tropical forests globally are being lost at a rate of 61,000 square miles a year. And despite conservation efforts, the global rate of loss is accelerating. In 2016 it reached a 15-year high, with 114,000 square miles cleared. At the same time, many countries are pledging […]

By Patrick Rogers In the U.S., we consume more than 15 billion pounds of tissue each year—more than 50 pounds per person. It’s taking a major toll on forests like the Canadian boreal. Few people give much thought to how their toilet paper is made. And to be fair, there’s nothing particularly engaging in the […]

President Donald Trump‘s 2020 budget calls for $8.6 billion in funding for his proposed border wall, NPR reported Monday, signaling that Trump is intent on a project that environmental groups say would be devastating to borderland communities and wildlife and that he is willing to keep fighting Congress to get it. A funding battle with […]

By Tara Lohan For many people a clean drink of water isn’t a certainty. Right now an estimated 1.2 billion people live in areas with chronic water scarcity, and upwards of 4 billion — two-thirds of the world’s population — experience shortages at least one month a year. This will only get worse with climate […]

Two cubs belonging to an extremely endangered subspecies of leopard were born at Connecticut’s Beardsley Zoo and have now survived a “critical” six weeks, the zoo announced in a Facebook post last Thursday. Amur leopards are native to the temperate forests of Northeast China, the Korean Peninsula and Eastern Russia. They are often hunted for […]

By Robert M. Thorson When Americans quote writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, they often reach for his assertion that “In Wildness is the preservation of the world.” This phrase elicited little response when Thoreau first read it during a lecture in 1851. A century later, however, it had become a guiding mantra for the […]

By Tara Lohan Animals today live in a shrinking world. Development, resource extraction and roadbuilding have fragmented landscapes and reduced wild spaces making it harder for animals to find food, search for a mate and adapt to a changing climate. To help address these problems, ecologists and conservationists have been working for decades to create […]

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) will attempt to strip Endangered Species Act protections from gray wolves in the lower 48 states, Acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt announced Wednesday. Bernhardt, who took over from former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke in January, has been a key force behind efforts by the Trump administration’s Department of […]