La Moskitia, on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, is often treated in Managua as a frontier: timber, gold, cattle, rivers, votes, and military concern. To the Miskitu, Sumu-Mayangna, Rama, Garífuna, and Creole peoples who live there, it is older than the Nicaraguan state. Its forests, savannas, rivers, and marine life are part of a political claim as well as a homeland. The demand has long been plain enough: land, autonomy, and a say over what happens there. Brooklyn Rivera Bryan spent most of his life carrying that demand into war, negotiation, electoral politics, exile, and prison. Known in Miskitu communities as Taupla Brooklyn, he died on May 30th, aged 73, in the custody of Daniel Ortega’s government. He had been detained since September 2023. For months the government denied holding him. It later acknowledged his imprisonment. No public trial was held. His family was denied visits. His public life began after the Sandinista revolution of 1979, when the new government sought to draw the Atlantic Coast into a national project directed from the Pacific. The Miskitu experience of that project was marked by surveillance, arrests, violence, and forced displacement. In 1981 Rivera was arrested while leading Misurasata, an Indigenous organization whose name linked the Miskitu, Sumu, Rama, and Sandinistas. By 1982, thousands of Miskitu had been moved from villages along the Río Coco. Many fled to Honduras. Rivera’s cause was narrower and more durable than the Cold War frame around him: an autonomous Indigenous territory in Yapti Tasba, the aboriginal homeland. That…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Thomas Crowther’s career has been shaped by large claims about small things. A seed, a patch of soil, a soundscape, a moment of fear, a local restoration project: each, in his telling, can become part of a larger system of cause and effect. His new book, Nature’s Echo, is built around that idea. Feedback loops, he argues, are not just a feature of ecology. They are among the forces that formed stars, spread life across Earth, drive climate change, and may yet help repair damaged ecosystems. Crowther, a British ecologist, became one of the best-known figures in global ecology while at ETH Zurich, where he founded the Crowther Lab and built a large interdisciplinary research group. His work helped popularize the idea that ecosystem restoration could play a major role in addressing climate change, especially after a 2019 Science paper on the potential for additional tree cover drew worldwide attention, as well as criticism from scientists who warned against simplistic tree-planting narratives. His work also helped give rise to the World Economic Forum’s Trillion Trees initiative, and he has served as co-chair of the advisory board to the U.N. Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. He is also the founder of Restor, an open-data platform that connects conservation and restoration initiatives around the world. Screenshot of the Restor interface. That public profile has made Crowther both influential and contested. In 2024 he was also at the center of a dispute over his departure from ETH Zurich. The university said its decision followed…This article was originally published on Mongabay