Mongabay Newscast

On this episode of Mongabay's weekly podcast, we look at nature through the lens of wildlife photographer and senior marketing associate at Mongabay, Alejandro Prescott-Cornejo, the multilingual staffer charged with sharing the team's reporting and mission with the world. Prescott-Cornejo details how his work with Mongabay intersects with his passion for wildlife photography , what makes a good ph...

Aimee Roberson, executive director of Cultural Survival , joins Mongabay's podcast to discuss how her organization helps Indigenous communities maintain their traditions, languages and knowledge while living among increasingly Westernized societies. As a biologist and geologist with Indigenous heritage, Roberson is uniquely suited to lead the organization in bridging these worlds, including via "...

An international tribunal of environmental rights activists recently found extensive evidence that the Canadian mining sector is "guilty for the violation of Rights of Nature across South America and Serbia." The guest on this episode of Mongabay's podcast corroborates these accusations, and describes human rights abuses in South American nations that she has seen in her reporting, too. Brandi Mor...

The recent advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on states' obligations regarding climate change was celebrated globally for providing clarity on countries' legal obligation to prevent climate harm , but was also appreciated by island nations for its additional certainty on their maritime boundaries remaining intact regardless of sea level rise. This week on Mongabay's pod...

Wealth inequality is a primary culprit behind the ecological and environmental collapse of societies over the past 12,000 years, which have come to be dominated by a small circle of elites hoarding resources like land , research shows. Today, instead of an isolated collapse, we face a global one, says Luke Kemp , a researcher at the University of Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Ris...

On this episode of the Newscast we take a look at Natalie Kyriacou's widely praised new book,  Nature's Last Dance: Tales of Wonder in an Age of Extinction , whose high-profile fans, like Paris climate agreement architect  Christiana Figueres,  call it a "lyrical call to awaken our love for the wild before the music stops." Kyriacou, the founder of the environmental organization  My Green World ,...

Rewilding advocate, financier and host of the popular podcast Rewilding the World , Ben Goldsmith, joins Mongabay's podcast to discuss nature restoration in his home country of England, where a significant cultural change is taking hold toward reviving biodiversity, such as beavers . Once seen as a nuisance there, many farmers and planners now embrace the rebound of the huge rodent, thanks to its...

On this week's episode of Mongabay's podcast, best-selling author Alan Weisman details the people and places he visited in reporting his new book, Hope Dies Last , a chronicle of miraculous accomplishments and resilience of the book's protagonists, many of whom are working to solve humanity's most intractable ecological problems. The book's impetus was an accumulation of despair at the state of th...

The Nature Of is a new podcast series from the nonprofit nature and culture magazine Atmos that speaks with prominent figures in conservation and culture about how humans relate to the natural world, and how they might heal and strengthen that relationship. On this episode of Mongabay's podcast, its host and Atmos editor-in-chief Willow Defebaugh details the series' resulting revelations and why h...

Singapore has come a long way since the 1880s, when only roughly 7% of its native forests remained. Since the 1960s, when the city-state gained independence, it has implemented a number of urban regreening initiatives, and today, nearly 47% of the city is considered green space, providing numerous benefits to human residents and wildlife, like heat mitigation, freshwater conservation and cleanline...

Narratives help shape our society, culture and environment, entrenching beliefs that can help — or harm — our planet and human rights. Tsering Yangzom Lama , story manager at Greenpeace International , joins Mongabay's podcast to explain how dominant narratives — stories shaped by existing power structures and institutions — often undergird destructive industries and favor the powerful and the wea...

Jean-Gaël "JG" Collomb says community-based conservation organizations know best how to tackle the complex conservation challenges unique to their ecosystems. However, they're also among the most underserved in terms of funding of all stripes. On this week's episode of Mongabay's podcast, Collomb explains how his nonprofit, Wildlife Conservation Network (WCN), is working to change that. When it co...

This week on Mongabay's podcast, celebrated author and repeat Nobel Prize in Literature candidate Robert Macfarlane discusses his fascinating new book, Is a River Alive? , which both asks and provides answers to this compelling question, in his signature flowing prose. Its absorbing narrative takes the reader to the frontlines of some of Earth's most embattled waterways, from northern Ecuador to s...

Roughly a billion people enjoy coffee daily, and more than 100 million people rely on it for income. However, the coffee industry is the sixth-largest driver of deforestation and is also rife with human rights abuses , including the labor of enslaved persons and children. But it doesn't have to be this way, says this guest on the Mongabay Newscast. Etelle Higonnet is the founder of the NGO Coffee...

Carlos Zorrilla has been living in an Ecuadorian cloud forest since the 1970s, and his last 30 years there have been spent fighting mining companies seeking to extract its large copper deposits. He and his community have successfully fought such proposals by multiple firms in one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet, but sometimes at great personal risk, he tells Mongabay's podcast. While...

Five years since Kim Stanley Robinson's groundbreaking climate fiction novel, The Ministry for the Future , hit  The New York Times bestseller list, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning writer shares reflections on themes explored in the book and how they apply directly to the world today.  The utopian novel set in a not-so-distant future depicts how humans address climate change and the biodiversity...

Nearly half of the Republic of Congo's dense rainforests are protected under the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) framework to receive climate finance payments, but Mongabay Africa staff writer Elodie Toto's recent investigation  revealed  the nation has also  granted  nearly 80 gold mining and exploration permits in areas covered by the project, driving defores...

Carlos Mallo Molina has been awarded the 2025 Goldman Environmental Prize for protecting the marine biodiversity of Tenerife, the most populated of the Canary Islands. On this episode of Mongabay's podcast, Molina explains what led him to quit his job as a civil engineer on a road project impacting the Teno-Rasca marine protected area (MPA) and his subsequent campaign to stop the port project it w...

A biotech company in the United States made headlines last month by revealing photos of genetically modified gray wolves, calling them "dire wolves," a species that hasn't existed for more than 10,000 years. Colossal Biosciences edited 14 genes among millions of base pairs in gray wolf DNA to arrive at the pups that were shown, leaving millions of genetic differences between these wolves and real...

Biological oceanographer John Ryan joins Mongabay's podcast to discuss his team's multiyear study that examined vocalizations of baleen whales, including blue ( Balaenoptera musculus ), humpback ( Megaptera novaeangliae ) and fin whales ( Balaenoptera physalus ), and how this science is critical for understanding their feeding habits, and thus informing their conservation. The study found that the...

Two decades ago a group of NGOs came together with the government of Kazakhstan to save the dwindling population of saiga antelope living in the enormous Golden Steppe. Since then, the  Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative has successfully rehabilitated the saiga ( Saiga tatarica ) from a population of roughly 30,000 to nearly 4 million. For this effort, it was awarded the 2024 Earthshot Prize in th...

Media outlets are downsizing newsrooms and the audience for traditional news is in decline , but Mongabay continues to grow thanks to its impact-driven , nonprofit model. Mongabay's director of philanthropy, Dave Martin , joins the podcast this week to explain the philosophy behind Mongabay's fundraising efforts, why the nonprofit model is essential for impact-driven reporting, and how the organiz...

Renowned author, activist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken joins Mongabay's podcast to discuss his new book, Carbon: The Book of Life , and argues that the jargon and fear-based terms broadly used by the climate movement alienate the broader public and fail to communicate the nuance and complexity of the larger ecological crises that humans are causing. Instead, Hawken argues that real change begins i...

The Australian government recently shelved key environmental protection commitments indefinitely, including the establishment of an environmental protection agency, and a robust accounting of the nation's ecological health via an environmental information authority. The latest suspension was announced by the Prime Minister just ahead of a federal election. Australia initially proposed these "natur...

Recent and major shifts in international environmental policies and programs have historical precedent, but the context of global environmental degradation and climate change presents a planetary risk that's new, say Sunil Amrith. A professor of history at Yale University, he joins this week's Mongabay Newscast to discuss the current political moment and what history can teach us about it. " When...