Twenty years ago, scientist and Mongabay board member Debby Ng joined a team documenting life at Terumbu Bayan, a coral reef south of Singapore that was about to be reclaimed. There she encountered a pair of false clownfish living in an anemone. The mother was unusually aggressive, even for a species known to be feisty. She repeatedly charged Debby, a diver thousands of times her size, biting her several times. Then Debby saw what she was protecting: a brood of eggs. She could already see tiny eyes through the thin membranes. Eyes of the brood of false clown anemonefish. Photographed by Debby Ng in 2006. Soon an alarm sounded, calling Debby and the other scientists out of the water. From the dive boat, they watched the first barges tip rock and fill directly into the channel, sending a plume of sediment through the shallows where they’d been swimming minutes earlier. The team had salvaged some of the hard corals and a tiger-tail seahorse, but there was only so much they could move. The smaller animals, including shrimp and nudibranchs, had to be left behind along with topshells that sat in crevices and cowries with eggs attached to the reef. Debby still remembers that clownfish. False clown anemonefish parents. Photo by Debby Ng. I first wrote about the dive last year in Requiem for a Clownfish. It resurfaced for me recently after The Woke Salaryman adapted the account into a comic. In August, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong announced that several islands…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Soon after becoming president and chief executive of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Adam Falk visited the giraffe keeper at the Bronx Zoo. What struck Falk was the source of the keeper’s commitment. If a giraffe needed help in the middle of the night, he said, the keeper would come in because of his bond with the animal. Falk recognized something familiar. Before joining WCS, he had been a theoretical physicist, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, president of Williams College, and president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Academics often pursue highly specialized work that matters deeply to them. A university leader has to support those individual efforts while helping the institution work toward shared goals. Falk found much the same challenge at WCS: leading people whose motivation is rooted in the work itself. Adam Falk with Joe Nappi, a Senior Keeper in the Mammal Department, and a Giraffe at the Bronx Zoo. Photo courtesy of WCS. He took over WCS in July 2025 without professional experience in zoology or conservation. That was unusual for the head of an institution founded in 1895, which now operates four zoos and an aquarium in New York alongside conservation programs in more than 50 countries. His first year gave him an outsider’s view of a field with its own history and assumptions. One of his early observations was that conservation work involves people as much as animals. Public campaigns often focus on wildlife, especially large and familiar species. Field programs depend on relationships…This article was originally published on Mongabay

For people trying to protect the Amazon, one problem has persisted for decades. A hectare of intact forest stores carbon, regulates water, supports wildlife, and provides food and materials for the people who live there. Much of that value does not appear in an economic ledger. Cattle, timber, soy, and gold do. For a farmer, a company, or a local government, clearing forest can therefore produce income more readily than keeping it standing. The Amazon bioeconomy grew from efforts to change that calculation. It includes forest products, agroforestry, biotechnology, carbon markets, and other businesses that depend on maintaining living forests. The aim is to make such activities commercially viable at a scale that matters. Mariano Cenamo spent most of his career working on that problem. He was 23 when he moved from São Paulo to Manaus in 2003. Trained as a forestry engineer at the University of São Paulo, he had first come to the Amazon for an internship. He stayed at the encouragement of Virgílio Viana, a former professor who was then Amazonas state’s environment secretary. Cenamo was struck by the gap between conservation work and the economic realities of people living in the forest. Environmental groups were doing important work, he later recalled, but local livelihoods often sat outside the conservation discussion. In 2004 he helped establish what became Idesam, the Institute for the Conservation and Sustainable Development of the Amazon. At first there was barely an institution. Cenamo later described himself as an “ING”, an indivíduo não…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has fallen to its lowest level in 13 years, according to new satellite data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), continuing a decline that began after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva returned to office in 2023. INPE’s DETER alert system detected 2,874 square kilometers (1,110 square miles) of deforestation in the Amazon between August 1, 2025, and July 31, 2026. That was 36% below the previous 12-month period and 55.6% below the average of the preceding decade. The total is the lowest since INPE introduced the current DETER system in 2015. Including data from its predecessor system, the last time alerts were lower was the 2012/13 deforestation year, when 2,766 sq km were recorded. Accumulated deforestation for Aug 1-Jul 31 in recent years according to INPE’s DETER alert system. Image by Mongabay DETER is designed as a rapid-response system for enforcement agencies. It uses satellite imagery to identify new forest clearing quickly enough for authorities to investigate and intervene. It differs from PRODES, INPE’s higher-resolution annual monitoring system, which provides Brazil’s official deforestation rate. Preliminary PRODES figures for the year ending July 31 are expected in October or November. PRODES data for the year ending July 2025 had already put Amazon forest loss at its lowest level in 11 years. The latest DETER figures indicate that clearing fell further during the following year. If PRODES shows a decline similar to that recorded by DETER, Brazil could register its lowest official Amazon deforestation…This article was originally published on Mongabay

A tiger once put its head beside a passenger in Vinod Rishi’s jeep. Its face, he wrote years later, wore a “quizzical expression.” Then it moved away, leaving the men unharmed. Rishi called it “a King with a big heart.” Decades after the encounter, he could still recall the position of the tiger’s head and the look on its face. Rishi, who died in Dehradun on July 29, held some of the highest positions in Indian wildlife administration. He was the first director of Project Elephant, additional director general of forests for wildlife, and director of the Indira Gandhi National Forest Academy. During 38 years in the Indian Forest Service, he worked in the Sundarbans and Buxa tiger reserves, Jaldapara Wildlife Sanctuary, and the national parks of Singalila and Neora Valley. Born in Jalandhar, Punjab, he trained as an engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and graduated in 1968. He joined the forest service the following year. His engineering background clearly influenced the way he approached conservation. He paid close attention to methods, evidence, and whether a plan would work in the field.  His early career in West Bengal brought him into contact with tigers, rhinos, elephants, and the administrative problems surrounding each of them. At Darjeeling Zoo, he studied animal biology at close range. The experience later contributed to work on captive breeding for snow leopards and the conservation of red pandas in Singalila. In the Sundarbans, he worked on conflict between people and tigers. When newspapers…This article was originally published on Mongabay

A backcountry ski run can depend on decisions made years before the snow falls. Forest plans determine where motorized vehicles may travel. Congressional appropriations affect whether trails are maintained and land-management agencies can enforce their rules. Public meetings give skiers, snowmobilers, conservationists, and local residents a chance to argue over how mountains should be used. David Page knew this work in detail. He also knew how to describe what it felt like to move through those mountains. Page, the executive director of Winter Wildlands Alliance, died on July 7th in a multi-vehicle crash on Teton Pass in Wyoming. He was 57. Rio, the family dog who often accompanied him outdoors, died in the accident as well. He had come to conservation advocacy through writing. Raised in Denver, he studied history and Spanish literature at Dartmouth, comparative literature at Berkeley, and creative writing at the University of California, Irvine. He wrote for the New York Times, Men’s Journal, Skiing, and other publications, and became a senior correspondent for POWDER. His guide to Yosemite and the southern Sierra Nevada went through three editions. His articles were closely reported and attentive to the people in them. “The Human Factor,” an examination of the decisions that lead experienced skiers into avalanche danger, was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in 2015. It was later used in avalanche courses. Another article described the immigrant workers whose labor sustains many ski towns. He also wrote about major descents, disappearing whitebark pines, solitary skiers, remote slopes,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

In November 2025, Brazilian authorities, supported by Interpol, disabled 277 dredges used for illegal gold mining along the Madeira River. The machinery was valued at about $6.8 million. The operation dealt a substantial blow to one of the Amazon’s busiest mining frontiers, yet its effect was likely temporary. After all, dredges can be replaced, miners can relocate, and financiers can redirect their money. Satellite monitoring reveals how quickly the industry is spreading. A basin-wide monitoring initiative led by Amazon Mining Watch detected more than 37,000 hectares of new mining expansion across the Amazon in 2025. Of that total, more than 14,000 hectares lay within 222 protected areas and Indigenous territories. Since mining is generally restricted in such places, much of this activity was presumed to be illegal. The immediate drivers of illegal gold mining are familiar. Enforcement is thin across vast stretches of forest, and illicit gold passes too easily into lawful commerce. The broader economic incentive comes from a global market in which gold prices have risen sharply and legitimate demand has become unusually strong. Central banks are an important part of that story, though hardly the only one. Over the past four years, they have bought an average of roughly 1,000 metric tons of gold annually, twice the average of the preceding decade. A 2026 World Gold Council survey found that 89 percent of participating reserve managers expected official gold holdings worldwide to rise over the following year. Investors, jewelry buyers and manufacturers also contribute to demand. Central…This article was originally published on Mongabay

At the former Umatilla Chemical Depot in eastern Oregon, the weapons were gone, though their presence had shaped the land. Concrete bunkers stood among sagebrush and dry grass. Pronghorn moved through the open country. Badgers, once common there, had largely disappeared. Their absence mattered to the small owls that lived close to the ground. Burrowing owls do not usually dig their own homes. They occupy tunnels made by mammals, especially badgers and prairie dogs. At Umatilla, the decline of those animals had removed much of the owls’ shelter. By the late 2000s, only a few breeding pairs remained. David H. Johnson, who died on June 15th, aged 69, decided that the shortage of burrows could be addressed. He and his collaborators buried plastic barrels and connected them to the surface with lengths of pipe. The structures were crude substitutes for badger burrows, intended to keep the population breeding while the recovery of its habitat remained a longer-term task. The owls accepted them. Within a year, the number of breeding pairs had risen. Over the following decade, the depot became home to one of the region’s most closely studied burrowing-owl populations. Researchers banded chicks, recorded calls, tested nest designs, and tracked the birds’ movements. By 2024, they were monitoring more than 100 nesting attempts and had banded nearly 500 chicks that season. Johnson had been interested in owls since childhood. At 11, while camping alone, he heard an eastern screech owl calling outside his tent. The bird landed close enough for…This article was originally published on Mongabay

The plane sprayed the soy fields beside the forest. Residents of Khikatxi said the single-engine aircraft appeared several times during each harvest and passed over Wawi Indigenous Territory. They worried about pesticides reaching their water, gardens, animals, and homes. People reported itching and diarrhea. Crops weakened, streams grew cloudy, and some game animals seemed to smell of agricultural chemicals. For years, Khuiusi Khisêtjê watched the farms advance around his people’s land. In 2018 he made a decision. The community would rebuild its village ten kilometers deeper in the forest. Leaving a village is difficult. Houses must be rebuilt, paths cleared, gardens planted, and daily routines restored. The old place contained years of work and memory. Khuiusi Khisêtjê had already lived through several such upheavals. He knew what was lost when people were forced from their land. He also knew when it had become unsafe to remain. The move took the Khisêtjê farther from the expanding agricultural frontier. It was one more decision in a life devoted to the survival of his people. Khuiusi, who died in Goiânia on July 3rd, at about 80, belonged to a generation that saw the Khisêtjê come close to extinction. He was born when his people still lived beyond the settled frontiers of central Brazil. Their villages lay among rivers, forest, and savanna in a region that would later form part of the Xingu Indigenous Territory and the adjoining Wawi Indigenous Territory in Mato Grosso. Contact with outsiders brought disease, violence, and displacement. Epidemics killed…This article was originally published on Mongabay

  When Mongabay Latam began publishing in 2016, the decision felt like a logical next step. Mongabay Indonesia, launched four years earlier, had shown that a locally led, local-language newsroom could build an audience for sustained environmental reporting. Spanish offered the chance to apply that approach across a region extending from Mexico through Central America and the Andes to Chile and Argentina. The political and ecological conditions varied widely, but the need was similar: important environmental stories were going unreported, or receiving attention only after a crisis became difficult to ignore. Latin America and the Caribbean are the most biologically diverse region on Earth, holding nearly half of the world’s tropical forests and unusually large shares of its mammals, birds, fish, insects, reptiles, amphibians, and plants. The Spanish-speaking countries in Mongabay Latam’s coverage area include some of the richest parts of the Amazon rainforest, the tropical Andes, Mesoamerica, the Chocó, and the eastern Pacific. These landscapes face growing pressure from mining, agriculture, infrastructure, organized crime, and climate change. Macaws in Peru. Image by Rhett Butler for Mongabay. I was also drawn to the region’s cultural and intellectual range. Latin America has produced many responses to these pressures, including Indigenous territorial governance, community forestry, new legal approaches to nature, and locally designed conservation programs. A regional news service could document environmental damage while also examining how people were responding to it. Mongabay Latam’s staff and contributors built the newsroom that followed. Editors developed the judgment, relationships, and institutional memory needed to…This article was originally published on Mongabay

For much of the year, migratory songbirds were treated as temporary visitors to the tropics. They arrived from the north, spent the winter, and departed again. Ornithologists paid more attention to their journeys and breeding grounds than to the months they passed farther south. The birds were often described as transients, moving through tropical forests without becoming part of them. What they did there, and how firmly they occupied those places, remained poorly understood. Years of catching, banding, and watching them suggested a different account. In the forests of southern Mexico, individual birds returned to familiar patches and defended feeding territories. They were regular members of tropical bird communities for months at a time. A bird that appeared to be a passing visitor might return to the same small area year after year. Its life in the tropics was structured, local, and essential to its survival. Migration could not be explained only as an escape from northern winters. Its origins might instead lie in dispersal from warmer regions, as birds gradually extended their ranges toward seasonal food and breeding opportunities. John Hilton Rappole, who died on June 30th, aged 79, pursued this argument for much of his career. It became known as the dispersal theory of bird migration. The theory challenged a long-standing explanation for why birds crossed continents. His commitment to it reflected his approach to science. He relied on sustained field observation, questioned established assumptions, and was prepared to defend an idea over many years. He was less…This article was originally published on Mongabay

The bear came out of the forest with enough force to kill him. It mauled the hunter badly and cost him an eye. He spent three months in a hospital recovering. There, he began asking himself questions that had not troubled him much before. Why was he hunting? Why was he killing? Hunting had come to him through his family. His father and grandfather were known around Sreemangal, in northeastern Bangladesh, for killing leopards, wild boars, and other animals that threatened people or crops. As a boy, he accompanied his father into the forest. After his father died, he continued hunting. He became a gunsmith and a guide, familiar with animal tracks, forest paths, and the habits of creatures that most people encountered only by accident. Sitesh Ranjon Deb holds a pair of jungle cats in his house in Sreemangol, Bangladesh. Image via Agence France-Presse (AFP) After the bear attack, Sitesh Ranjan Deb, who died on July 14th, gave up hunting. He began capturing injured animals, removing snakes from houses, treating wildlife recovered from traffickers, and returning animals to the forest. The grounds of his home became a treatment center. It eventually developed into the Bangladesh Wildlife Service Foundation, one of the country’s best-known privately established wildlife-rescue institutions. The center remained closely tied to his household. Its patients occupied bedrooms, courtyards, cages, and improvised treatment spaces. Jungle-cat cubs, pythons, slow lorises, monkeys, birds, and other animals passed through. Those requiring constant attention stayed close to the family. Deb kept photographs…This article was originally published on Mongabay

The North Atlantic can look empty until someone begins paying attention. A stretch of gray water off Newfoundland may hold only a few white specks at first glance. Through binoculars those specks become murres riding the swell, puffins carrying fish crosswise in their bills, or fulmars riding the wind above the waves. To Bill Montevecchi, these birds were never simply inhabitants of the ocean. They were observers of it. Their breeding success, feeding trips, and unexplained absences offered evidence about fish stocks, changing currents, pollution, and the state of an ecosystem that people could not otherwise see. For more than five decades, William A. “Bill” Montevecchi, who died on July 11th, aged 80, treated seabirds as the ocean’s most reliable witnesses. His work helped establish them as indicators of environmental change long before the idea became commonplace. At the same time, he became one of Canada’s best-known public interpreters of marine science, moving comfortably between academic journals, government advisory panels, newspaper columns, and radio interviews. He approached each with much the same purpose: to understand what the birds were saying and to explain why others should listen. Bill Montevechi shows a small injured storm petrel in Bay De Verde, Newfoundland. Photo © Mary Lynk/CBC Born in New York, he developed an interest in birds at an early age and trained as an ornithologist before moving to Newfoundland, where he spent most of his career at Memorial University. Newfoundland offered what he sought: immense seabird colonies, productive seas, and unanswered questions.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

His nephew recalled that the children were taught to chant, “Hyenas are beautiful!” as often as possible. On visits to Kruger National Park, he got them out of bed at midnight to look for bushbabies and again at five in the morning to search for big cats. Wildlife was often most active at inconvenient hours, and he expected anyone accompanying him to adjust. Michael “Gus” Mills, who died on July 13th, spent more than 40 years studying Africa’s large carnivores, especially hyenas, wild dogs, and cheetahs. He published more than 150 scientific papers, chapters, and reports, advised conservation bodies, and trained younger researchers. Much of his working life was spent in a vehicle on a sandy track, waiting beside an animal that might sleep for most of the day. Gus and Margie Mills. Sourced via the Endangered Wildlife Trust At school he had seemed an unlikely future scientist. He described himself as a “very bad student,” failed South Africa’s high-school leaving examination, and was told that science was beyond him. After passing the examination on a second attempt, he joked that he had earned an MA: “Matric Again.” Three years of psychology persuaded him that he did not want to be a psychologist. Zoology held his attention. A visit to Kruger in 1954, when he was eight, had already pointed him toward field biology. “It did something to me,” he said. From then on he wanted to work in the bush. After studying at the University of Cape Town and…This article was originally published on Mongabay

By some accounts, in the Philippine reefs of the 1970s, large groupers appeared every 50 feet or so. Some seemed as large as Volkswagen Beetles. Around them were snappers, fusiliers, wrasses, turtles, and corals, along with fish whose identities were still uncertain. A young biologist could spend his days diving and still feel he had only begun to understand what was there. Kent E. Carpenter arrived in the Philippines at 22, soon after graduating from the Florida Institute of Technology. The Peace Corps assigned him to the Philippine Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources and put him in charge of coral-reef research. He later called it “the best job there ever was or ever will be in the Peace Corps.” It gave him access to reefs across the archipelago and set the direction of his career. Carpenter was shot dead at his home in Sibulan, Negros Oriental, on July 12th. He was 73. According to police, three men entered the house late at night. A special task group was formed to investigate, and no motive had been established when his death was announced. Kent Carpenter. Image via Old Dominion University Pollution and destructive fishing were already damaging Philippine reefs during his early years there. The large predators he had seen so often became harder to find. He spent much of the next half-century recording marine life in increasing detail: which species lived where, how they were related, how populations changed, and what made them vulnerable. After completing a doctorate in…This article was originally published on Mongabay

  A field station is usually a working place. It may have bunkrooms, trails, a generator, stored specimens, weathered notebooks, drying boots, a small lab, and staff who know when the road floods, where to find a mobile network signal, or which hillside burned five years ago. Its value is easy to miss because it is often measured through other things: papers, students, monitoring plots, visiting researchers, restored forest, fewer snares, or a longer record of what changed. A new BioScience paper argues that these stations deserve a larger role in conservation policy, especially in the tropics. The authors describe tropical field stations as institutions that can help turn global environmental commitments into local work. Governments have promised to protect more land and sea, restore degraded ecosystems, slow extinctions, and make conservation more equitable. These goals require information, trust, capacity, and persistence. Field stations can supply much of that infrastructure. Cabang Panti research station in Gunung Palung, Indonesia. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler The argument is strongest in places where conservation decisions affect both biodiversity and livelihoods. A station in a forest, savanna, wetland, or coastal ecosystem is more than a base for visiting scientists. It can support long-term monitoring, train local researchers, employ people from nearby communities, and keep conservation connected to park staff, farmers, fishers, Indigenous groups, and officials. More data, harder answers That gap is important because conservation has become data-rich and answer-poor. Satellites can detect tree-cover loss within days. Acoustic sensors can record birds, frogs, insects,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

  The Amazon is often described in terms of how much carbon it stores. It also moves vast amounts of water. Its trees draw moisture from the soil and return it to the air through transpiration. Some rain caught by the canopy also evaporates back into the atmosphere. That moisture falls again, some of it inside the basin and some of it far downwind. For much of South America, the forest helps sustain rainfall, farming, hydropower, and urban water supplies. A recent paper in Nature, by Nico Wunderling and colleagues, gives this hydrological role greater weight in the climate case for the Amazon. The authors used a dynamical systems model and atmospheric moisture tracking to estimate how deforestation and warming interact across the basin. Without deforestation, their model finds a critical global warming threshold of about 3.7 to 4.0 degrees Celsius, beyond which up to a third of the Amazon forest risks losing stability. When deforestation is included, the risk becomes much larger at a lower level of warming. Under deforestation of 22% to 28% of the biome and warming of 1.5 to 1.9 degrees Celsius, the model finds a near system-wide transition affecting 62% to 77% of the forest. Rain over the Amazon. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler Those numbers should be treated carefully. The Amazon is not a single ecological unit. Western forests, southern forests, flooded forests, upland forests, secondary forests, and fire-damaged edges differ in species composition, rainfall, soils, and drought tolerance. A model cannot capture every…This article was originally published on Mongabay

At night on Mansouri beach, the first evidence was often a track in the sand. The beach lies south of Tyre, near the border with Israel, where checkpoints, shelling, and evacuation orders have long shaped daily life. It is also one of Lebanon’s important nesting grounds for loggerhead and green sea turtles. The turtles come ashore after dark. They dig, lay, cover, and return to the water. For the hatchlings, the distance from nest to sea is only a few yards. It is still dangerous. Dogs and foxes dig up eggs. Crabs and birds take the young. Lights from roads and resorts pull them away from the water. Plastic drifts offshore. Fishing nets catch adults that have survived for decades. Even a footprint can trap a turtle no bigger than a child’s palm. Mona Khalil gave much of her life to that narrow strip of beach. She was 76 when she died on June 19 from wounds sustained after an Israeli airstrike struck her home at Mansouri beach earlier that month. Her assistant was also injured, suffering severe burns. The house, known to visitors and volunteers as the Orange House, had been the base of her conservation work for more than 25 years. Mona Khalil in 2004 in Lebanon. Photo by Joseph Barrak/AFP/Getty Images She had not set out to become a conservationist. Born in Lagos to Lebanese parents, she later left Lebanon during the civil war. In the Netherlands she worked as a porcelain restorer, a trade that required…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Suriname is being presented with a familiar proposition: foreign agribusiness, whether Brazilian, Mennonite, or otherwise, will modernize agriculture, create jobs, and bring prosperity. It is an appealing narrative. It is also one that has played out throughout tropical America, from Mexico to Mato Grosso. The result has rarely been shared prosperity. Instead, it has often meant felled forest, poisoned water, long-term loss of control over land and resources, and local populations watching the wealth pass through on its way to somewhere else. Suriname should pause before replicating this model. The employment benefits are often wildly overstated. Industrial soy and cattle production are highly mechanized systems designed to minimize labor, often conducted by a skeleton crew running combines and GPS-guided sprayers. A few operators can manage thousands of hectares. The jobs that are created tend to be temporary, low-paid, and sometimes filled by external labor rather than local hires because this business model is predicated on keeping labor costs as close to zero as the machinery allows. In contrast, existing sectors—smallholder agriculture, fisheries, and forest-based livelihoods—support far more people and are deeply embedded in local economies. The environmental risks are even more significant. Large-scale monoculture depends on heavy use of agrochemicals like glyphosate and phosphorus fertilizer, applied in huge quantities. These inevitably enter river systems, including those that provide drinking water and food for a large part of Suriname’s population. Fish — the primary protein source for many communities — are directly affected. A brutal imbalance is created: beef and soy…This article was originally published on Mongabay

  Montañita is a place many people intend to pass through. They come for surf, sun, music, and a stretch of Ecuador’s coast known for surf, music, and its free-spirited nature. Some stay longer. They open small businesses, learn the workings of the communes, put children into local schools, and begin to notice what visitors often do not see: the sewage that is not properly treated, the public works that arrive without answers, the land whose ownership becomes uncertain, and the turtles whose nesting beaches are treated as available ground. For a woman from northern Poland, the change of country became something beyond expatriate life. Ecuador was where she made a home, ran a hostel, raised two daughters, and became part of Santa Elena’s disputes and loyalties. Monika Silva Koniuszek, who was found dead on June 8th at her home in Montañita, was 41. The circumstances of her death remain under investigation. In the weeks before she died, she had spoken publicly of warnings that there was a plan to kill her. She had alerted authorities and sought protection. After her death, Polish diplomats, the European Union, human-rights groups, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights called for a thorough and independent inquiry. Her public work began with local problems. Montañita’s inadequate sewage system troubled her. So did the way decisions about beaches, mangroves, public land, and services seemed to benefit the same networks of power. She came to see poverty, malnutrition, poor infrastructure, and environmental damage as linked by…This article was originally published on Mongabay