I have written about wildlife conservation, climate change, circular economics, and a variety of other environmental topics for BBC, Mongabay, Earth Island Journal, Sustainability Times, and a bunch of other publications.
What started as a student adventure in a tropical mountain fruit farm in Venezuela became a lifelong mission of empowering rural women! Read the fascinating life story of Steven Bloomstein, co-founder of Turimiquire Foundation, an organization that has helped 70,000 women with family planning and reached over 80,000 people with workshops about reproductive health. Before …
A Lesson From Venezuela: Empowering Women in 4 Steps Read More »
It’s not easy being a woman in Niger. The odds are especially high for women to drop out of high school, get married young (17 is the average age), or be displaced due to climate change, insecurity or humanitarian crisis! What happens to women in Niger, though, doesn’t stay in Niger alone. It impacts the …
Niger: Pump Money Into Girl’s Education, Not the Military Read More »
Uganda’s first wildlife vet and award-winning conservationist, Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, shares her personal story about how her organization “Conservation Through Public Health“ has contributed to a steady growth of mountain gorillas in the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda. That’s in addition to a major improvement in community health, a threefold increase in family planning use, …
Advocates are inserting storylines into TV and radio shows to promote behaviors that could lead to social change. Just don’t call it infotainment. When Aisha Bekele’s (not her real name) daughter was 14, she was abducted on her way to school, raped and forced to marry the man who did it. Scared the same thing …
Soap Operas That Teach but Don’t Preach (Reasons to be Cheerful) Read More »
Women often suffer the most from environmental degradation. A nonprofit in Colombia is trying to make their needs central to conservation. Sara Inés Lara, leader of Colombia-based bird conservation organization Fundación ProAves, got her first taste of conservation’s potential more than 30 years ago. She grew up in one of the most biodiverse places in the world, …
To Save a Forest, Look to the Women (YES! Magazine) Read More »
With around a third of freshwater fish facing extinction, ichthyologists are racing to discover more—including the 200 species found last year—before they disappear. Continue reading my story about newly discovered freshwater species in 2021 on Scientific American.
A Zambian park North Luangwa has reversed the national extinction of black rhinos and brought the species back in a successful reintroduction project that is inspiring in many ways. Continue reading this story on Reasons to be Cheerful.
The saola is so elusive that no biologist has seen one in the wild. Now they are racing to find it, so they can save it Continue reading the fascinating story about one of the world’s most threatened land mammals on The Guardian.
After the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), which severely degraded Iraqi nature, Persian leopards (Panthera pardus tulliana) were thought to be locally extinct. The war left the country with mountains covered with millions of landmines and many species with vastly depleted numbers. So nobody expected this endangered species — the world’s largest leopard — to remain in the …
Conservationist Fights for Persian Leopards in Iraqi Kurdistan (Earth Island Journal) Read More »
In 2006, the world’s leading hummingbird photographer, Luis Mazariegos, visited La Mesenia, an isolated village in Colombia’s western Andes. He had no idea that besides taking a picture of the recently rediscovered glittering starfrontlet (Coeligena orina), he would find a place that hosts overwhelming biodiversity. The forests here, spanning altitudes from 1,700 to 3,170 meters …
In the Colombian Andes, a forest corridor staves off species extinction (Mongabay) Read More »