When Rainforest Action Network began in 1985, it had little of what usually makes an organization powerful. It had no large budget, no legal department, no reliable access to politicians, and no formal way to force global corporations or development banks to change. It had Randy Hayes, a wide activist network, a way to connect distant forest destruction to everyday choices, and a willingness to use tactics that many mainstream environmental groups avoided. David Benac’s new book, Rainforest Radicals: A History of Rainforest Action Network and Transnational Organizing, tells the story of how that combination became effective. RAN’s early campaigns targeted Burger King over rainforest beef, True Geothermal in Hawai‘i, the World Bank over development projects, and Mitsubishi over tropical timber. These were different fights, involving different places, institutions, and coalitions. Together, they show how a small San Francisco-based group helped bring tropical deforestation, Indigenous rights, and corporate accountability into late twentieth-century environmental politics. Rainforest Radicals: A History of Rainforest Action Network and Transnational Organizing Benac, an environmental and public historian of the postwar United States, came to the subject indirectly. He was researching timber-industry history in the Pacific Northwest when he encountered the MacMillan Bloedel papers and a grassroots campaign against clear-cutting in British Columbia’s coastal rainforests. RAN appeared in the archival trail. That led him to Hayes, RAN’s co-founder, then to a larger oral-history project with activists, allies, and contemporaries. The result is a history built around interviews, archives, and a close look at how people organize when…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. Cambodia is preparing to reintroduce tigers after nearly two decades without a confirmed wild population. The plan is ambitious, and many of its basic assumptions remain contested, report Mongabay India’s Arathi Menon and Mongabay contributor Andy Ball. The last confirmed tiger sighting in Cambodia came from a camera trap in 2007. By 2016, tigers had been declared extinct in the country. The animals were lost after years of poaching, snaring, habitat degradation, and trade in tiger parts. Those pressures remain. Cambodia’s Indochinese leopard (Panthera pardus delacouri) was declared functionally extinct in 2023, and snares continue to threaten large mammals. The proposed reintroduction would use Bengal tigers (Panthera tigris) from India, released into Kravanh National Park in the Cardamom Mountains. Supporters of the program see a chance to restore an apex predator to one of Cambodia’s largest remaining forest landscapes. India has rebuilt its own tiger numbers over several decades, and Cambodia has approved a tiger action plan. A soft-release enclosure has already been built. The unresolved questions are ecological and political. Tigers need abundant prey. One 2020 study found only a low probability that the proposed landscape could support 25 adult tigers, though it might support a small founder population of five tigers. However, small populations face inbreeding risk and require sustained management. Wild pigs in the landscape may form much of the prey base, but experts disagree on whether current prey data…This article was originally published on Mongabay

When Catherine Craig first went to Gombe in 1972, she was not thinking about silk. She was an undergraduate in a four-seat plane with Jane Goodall, flying over the Tanzanian forest where Goodall’s work on chimpanzees was changing how scientists understood animals. Craig spent six months there, learning to recognize individual chimpanzees and helping track mothers and infants through the steep woodland above Lake Tanganyika. The forest stayed with her. So did the sight of people living nearby with few choices, and the later realization that even forests thought to be protected could disappear. Her path back to conservation was indirect. Craig became a biologist of spiders and silk, earning a Ph.D. in ecology and evolution from Cornell and later joining the biology faculty at Yale. For two decades, she studied webs, foraging behavior, insect flight, and the properties of silk. It was work at the level of fibers, mechanics, and evolution. Yet the question that had formed at Gombe remained: how could habitat be protected where people had few ways to earn money? The answer she pursued was both plain and difficult. If farmers could earn income from native silk-producing caterpillars and the plants that fed them, then habitat might become something worth tending. The idea drew on her scientific expertise, but it also required skills that science had not taught her: product design, marketing, patience, and the ability to listen across languages, cultures, and expectations shaped by past disappointments. Borocera cajani Vinson, 1863 family Lasiocampidae. Adult moth, caterpillar…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From above, an intact forest can look reassuringly complete. A satellite image may show an unbroken canopy, a block of green still standing amid plantations, roads or logged land. For many conservation programs, that view has become the starting point for measurement. If the canopy remains, the forest is often treated as if much of its ecological value remains as well. The forest itself may tell a more complicated story. Birds, insects, frogs and primates divide the day among them. Some call at dawn, others at night. Some occupy narrow frequency bands; others fill the background with a steady rasp. A forest that looks intact can still lose part of this living structure. The canopy may close after logging. Carbon may remain on a balance sheet. The animal community may not return in the same form. Garnet Pitta. Photo by Hanyrol Hanyzan Ahmad Sah A new paper in Global Change Biology, by Zuzana Buřivalová and colleagues, examines that problem through sound. The study describes the Soundscape Baselines Project, an effort to record the acoustic signatures of some of the world’s remaining intact forests before those reference points become harder to find. The idea is straightforward. To know whether a forest has changed, one needs to know what it sounded like before the change. That baseline is not only a technical convenience. It is a guard against a familiar problem in conservation: each generation tends to accept the nature it first encountered as normal. Daniel Pauly called this shifting baseline syndrome…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. The platypus offers a useful lesson in conservation: before acting, it helps to know where the animal still lives, and where risks are growing. Australia’s best-known oddity is also difficult to count, reports contributor Paul Harvey for Mongabay. It feeds around dawn and dusk, spends much of its life underwater in rivers, and leaves few obvious signs. That makes its decline harder to measure and harder to manage. The IUCN Red List classifies the species as near threatened, based on an estimate of about 50,000 animals, though researchers say the true number is uncertain. That uncertainty has become more important as pressure on rivers increases. Drought can shrink the pools where platypuses feed. Bushfires can damage riverbanks and nearby vegetation. Floods can inundate burrows before animals can escape. Pollution from wastewater, mining, industry, and urban runoff can reduce the aquatic invertebrates that make up much of their diet. There is room for optimism because scientists have now developed a framework for deciding when to help platypuses where they are and when animals may need to be moved. Zoos are also preparing for a clearer role in emergencies, including temporary care for animals stranded by drought, fire, or flood. Citizen science can help close the information gap. Projects that map sightings show where platypuses are still being seen. Environmental DNA, collected from water samples, can detect their presence without needing to trap or even…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Tuna offer a useful case study for World Ocean Day because their recovery has come through the least sentimental parts of conservation: quotas, enforcement, stock assessments, and years of difficult diplomacy. By the early 2010s, several tuna stocks were in serious trouble. Atlantic bluefin had become a marker of overfishing. Pacific bluefin had fallen to a small fraction of its historic abundance. The risk was ecological and commercial. Governments were looking at the possible collapse of one of the world’s most valuable fisheries. The response was slow, contested, and often technical. Regional fisheries bodies tightened catch limits, improved monitoring, began adopting automated harvest rules, and expanded electronic catch-documentation systems to make illegal and unreported fishing harder to hide. Fleets built around high catches had to accept lower quotas. The politics were difficult because the countries involved often had competing economic interests. That is part of what makes the outcome worth studying. Atlantic bluefin are showing strong signs of recovery, backed by decades of tagging, catch data, and population modeling. Pacific bluefin reached a key rebuilding target years ahead of schedule. Across commercial tuna fisheries, a much larger share of global catch now comes from stocks assessed as being at healthy levels. This does not mean the oceans have returned to abundance. Some stocks, particularly Indian Ocean yellowfin, remain in poor condition. Rebuilding to 20% of historic biomass is a critical scientific milestone for safety, not total restoration. Bycatch of sharks, turtles, and seabirds remains a serious problem, and some regional…This article was originally published on Mongabay

The short-eared dog is one of the Amazon’s least-known carnivores. In Bolivia, it’s also one of the hardest to find. The species has a fox-like snout, small rounded ears, partially webbed toes, and a long bushy tail that often drags on the forest floor. In Spanish, it’s sometimes called perro fantasma, or ghost dog, a name that reflects how rarely even field biologists encounter it. A long-running camera-trap study has now brought the species into sharper focus, reports Iván Paredes Tamayo. Over more than two decades, researchers recorded the short-eared dog in Bolivia’s lowland Amazonian forests, in piedmont forests near the Andes, and in large protected and Indigenous-managed landscapes. The results suggest the animal may be present in more places than earlier records showed. That is useful evidence, although it doesn’t make the species common. It remains scarce, elusive, and closely linked to well-preserved forest. For conservation groups, land managers, and funders, the findings suggest the short-eared dog depends on large, connected areas of habitat. Small forest fragments are unlikely to provide what it needs. Its presence can help identify places where forests are still functioning well, especially where protected areas and Indigenous territories keep intact habitat at scale. The finding also shows why long-term monitoring matters. Rare species are easy to miss in short surveys. A camera trap may sit for months without recording one. A study that runs across years, landscapes, and management types can reveal patterns that would otherwise remain hidden. The short-eared dog will probably never…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Thomas Crowther begins his book with a snakebite that was not, in any conventional sense, dangerous. The danger came from interpretation. A misidentified species, a surge of fear, and a body that responded as if the threat were real: numbness spread, panic intensified, and the situation escalated until a second opinion dissolved it almost instantly. The episode is more than an anecdote. It sets the terms of Nature’s Echo, a book that treats cause and effect not as linear sequences so much as loops that can amplify themselves in either direction. Thomas Crowther That idea—feedback loops as the underlying architecture of the natural world—is the organizing principle of the book. Crowther traces it from cosmology to ecology to human psychology, moving across scales with considerable ambition. The early chapters move outward from the origin of matter, suggesting that the same reinforcing processes that allowed stars to form also underpin biological evolution and social behavior. It is an ambitious framing. At its best, it brings a sense of coherence to subjects that are often treated separately. At times, the scope of the framework requires readers to travel across very different domains and scales of thought. The structure reflects that expansiveness. The table of contents alone signals the range: from “Cause and Effect” and “Feedback Loops” through “Resilience and Tipping Points” and into “The Story We Tell Ourselves.” The progression is deliberate. Crowther starts with physical systems, moves into ecological stability, and then into the social and psychological domains where perception begins…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. The European wildcat is not one conservation story, but several. In the Czech Republic’s Lusatian Mountains, the signs are encouraging. Conservationists have found a male and female wildcat, which they named Jonáš and Tonka, the first recorded in the region in nearly a century. Tonka has since given birth to at least three kittens. For a species once pushed out by habitat loss, persecution, and the spread of domestic cats, that is a meaningful foothold, reports contributor Sean Mowbray for Mongabay. The animal itself is easy to overlook. The European wildcat (Felis silvestris) is roughly the size of a large housecat and lives mostly out of sight in forests. The species, found across Europe, is listed as least concern on the IUCN Red List. That label can make the picture look simpler than it is. Yet its fortunes vary sharply from place to place. In parts of Central Europe, wildcats are moving back into former habitat as forests recover and hunting pressure has fallen. Germany and France show what can happen when habitat protection, legal safeguards, and time line up. Italy, too, has seen enough progress for the species to be downlisted nationally. Elsewhere, the picture is much more fragile. In Scotland, the wildcat was declared functionally extinct in the wild in 2018. A breeding and release program in Cairngorms National Park, in the Scottish Highlands, is now trying to rebuild a population…This article was originally published on Mongabay