BLUE HILL, Maine — January brought a pair of rough storms to the northeastern U.S. They hit when the tides were high and pushed higher than normal by rising sea levels, setting numerous high-water records and prompting Maine Governor Janet Mills to request a federal disaster declaration. These events, just three days apart, built on damage suffered during another storm during the December 2023 holidays and another during the previous December. “Extensive” is the word that Peter Slovinsky, a marine geologist for the Maine Geological Survey, chose to describe the most recent damage during an int ..read more

CANCÚN, Mexico — The Mexican government finally opened its huge, controversial train project last December, connecting Cancún and Tulum with the rest of the Yucatán Peninsula. And yet, despite all the anticipation leading up to that moment, no one seems to know what’s going on with the train right now. Like, is it really open? Can you buy a ticket? The Tren Maya has been celebrated and contested, sued from every possible angle and covered excessively by the media. But now that it’s open, people don’t really seem to believe in it. No one I spoke to in the months after its opening knew how often ..read more

A recent report has revealed a spike in deforestation in the buffer zone of one of the world’s best-protected areas, Peru’s Amarakaeri Communal Reserve. Between 2001 and 2023, 19,978 hectares (49,367 acres) of forest were lost in the buffer zone of the reserve, which is home to the ancestral lands of the Indigenous Harakbut, Yine and Matsiguenka peoples. According to the report by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), there are several factors for this trend, including illegal mining, coca cultivation and creation of landing strips, and new road developments. Amarakaeri is co-man ..read more

After the first flower bloomed on the Earth, flowering plants evolved a staggering diversity and now make up about 90% of all plant life. Charles Darwin called this rapid domination an “abominable mystery.” A study published today, April 24, in the journal Nature and led by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, unveiled the most comprehensive understanding of the evolutionary history of flowering plants to date. The research, which analyzed 1.8 billion letters of genetic code from more than 9,500 species, clears up some of the mystery surrounding the rise of flowering plants. Much like a periodic ta ..read more

Last week, a United States federal judge rejected a request from Indigenous nations to stop SunZia, a $10 billion dollar wind transmission project that would cut through traditional tribal lands in southwestern Arizona. Amy Juan is a member of the Tohono O’odham nation at the Arizona-Mexico border and brought the news of the federal court’s ruling to New York last week, telling attendees of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, that she was disappointed but not surprised. “We are not in opposition to what is called ‘green energy,’” she said. “It was the process of ..read more

CONCEIÇÃO DA BARRA, Espírito Santo — Beatriz Cassiano was working in her vegetable garden when she suddenly heard her grandson yelling, “Grandma, get out of there, get out, come in the house! The plane!” In an interview with Mongabay, Cassiano recalls being caught off guard by an airplane dropping pesticides as it flew over the homes in her community. “We didn’t know, [nobody] let us know it would happen. They were dumping the poison out, but they were turning in the air over our people’s properties,” she says. At a certain point, Cassiano was hit by the pesticides. “I was powdered with it, an ..read more

Minerals and metals used in technologies enabling much of the global energy transition and their applications are relatively new and require thought and reporting that probes questions related to their need, the growing social, human and environmental impacts mining for these minerals have, and the geopolitical tensions they may exacerbate. To learn more, Mongabay speaks with Indigenous rights advocate and executive director of the SIRGE Coalition, Galina Angarova, and environmental journalist Ian Morse, author of the Substack newsletter Green Rocks. Together on this episode of the Mongabay Ne ..read more

KANNIYAKUMARI, India — Anthoni Dhasan, 47, sits on the deck of his fishing boat at the harbor of Thengapattanam in Tamil Nadu, India’s southernmost state, peering out at the stormy Indian Ocean. It’s been a year since his last fishing expedition — the one that almost took his life. On Feb. 19, 2023, Dhasan and his nine-member crew were on board their motorized boat, the Ruby, 450 nautical miles (830 kilometers) off the mainland, when a Hong Kong-flagged container ship reportedly rammed into their vessel, tossing the crew, like flies, into the cold, blue waters. “It felt like a big explosion ..read more

Yuturi ants are peaceful until their territory is threatened. This species, also known as the ‘conga ant,’ is considered a warrior in Amazonian Kichwa Indigenous culture, as these bugs don’t allow anyone to enter their home without permission — just like the women of Serena, an Indigenous community located on the banks of the Jatunyacu river in the upper part of the Napo river in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Yuturi Warmi first decided to come together to increase their families’ income through making and selling handicrafts, but when their territory was increasingly threatened by mining, they steppe ..read more

As winter bids adieu to the Northern Hemisphere and the mercury peaks and humidity plummets, most of Nepal’s plains and hills become tinderboxes awaiting a spark. As officials face a gargantuan task of controlling wildfires, some authorities from Nepal’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation are themselves involved in starting fires in the name of “habitat management,” especially inside national parks in the plains. They say they believe that fires are a cost-effective tool to prevent grasslands, which provide habitat for Nepal’s iconic tigers (Panthera tigris) and their prey ..read more