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I could barely make out Steve Sanderson over the winds howling into the satellite phone. Sanderson, the head of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), was calling from Tierra del Fuego in Chile, an island off the very southernmost tip of South America. Other than Antarctica, you can’t get further away from civilization and still be [...]
An animal apocalypse is happening right beneath our noses in the Northeast. Since 2006, bats throughout New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Jersey, Indiana and other states have been infected with a deadly white-nose fungus that has decimated animal populations. But because it is hard to track bat numbers—and because the disease causes afflicted bats to [...]
Border customs agents are on the look out for many things: illegal drugs, stolen goods, smuggled liquor and sometimes even people. Add one more target: animal-borne viruses. In a new study published on Tuesday in the journal PLoS One, scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the EcoHealth Alliance, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) [...]
I have a Going Green column over on the Time.com mainpage today, and it’s a review of a new collection of essays called Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Readers of this blog are probably familiar with the editors, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, a couple of Bay Area bomb-throwers best known for their [...]
I wrote a piece recently for the paper magazine—sadly behind the paymoat—on the viral ecologist Nathan Wolfe. Wolfe’s Global Viral Forecasting group has set up research teams in hotspots around the world—places like central Africa, China and Southeast Asia—where animal diseases are likely to cross over to human beings. That spillover has seeded most of [...]
You probably wouldn’t know it from the U.S. media, but there’s a whole continent south of the U.S. Latin America rarely gets the media or public attention it deserves in part because of good reasons—years of relative political stability after the civil wars and juntas of the Cold War era, along with generally prosperous economies. [...]
For a delicacy that can command such a high price—and which has caused so much devastation in the sea—shark-fin soup is practically tasteless. I’ve only eaten it once, during a reporting trip to the industrial Chinese city of Wenzhou more than nine years ago. I was writing about the sex toy king of China—king of [...]
I’m currently blogging to you from the Acela train en route to Washington for the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting, otherwise known as nerdapalooza. (Just outside Philadelphia now, to which I can only say—go Phils!) I’ll have lots to write about today, over the weekend and early next week on [...]
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is no one’s idea of an environmentalist. Putting aside his more general authoritarian tendencies, TIME’s 2007 Person of the Year has squeezed the space for civil society to operate, including in Russia’s nascent environmental movement. He’s favored the exploitation of Russia’s bountiful natural resources over preserving its nature, most [...]
Bucking the trend of global environmental summits over-promising and under-delivering, representatives from nearly 190 nations came together in Nagoya at the end of the two week-long Convention on Biological Diversity and signed an important deal that aims to greatly expand the portions of the planet that are under protection and fairly divide up the world’s [...]
