Obituaries and tributes
Environmental policy in Europe has long promised more protection for the seas than the water itself often reflects. Governments have pledged sustainable fisheries, established marine protected areas and endorsed scientific advice on catch limits. Yet enforcement has often proved uneven. Industrial fishing practices still operate in places meant to safeguard
Obituaries and tributes
Paul Brainerd did two things that rarely sit comfortably together. He helped make publishing cheaper and easier, then spent much of what he earned trying to protect the landscapes that were being consumed by growth. He died on February 15th 2026, aged 78, at his home on Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Obituaries and tributes
In Madagascar, frogs are not background noise but a measure of how much forest still functions. The island holds an extraordinary share of the world’s amphibian diversity, almost all of it found nowhere else. When habitat thins or disease arrives, species cannot retreat to safer ground. Conservation therefore depends
Obituaries and tributes
José Albino Cañas Ramírez did not die in a war zone, though war had shaped the place where he lived. He was shot at his home in the community of Portachuelo, in Colombia’s Caldas department, on the evening of February 16th. Two men came to the shop he ran
Obituaries and tributes
For much of South America’s history, the arrival of a missionary has carried two reputations at once. One is charitable: a figure with medicine, schooling, and a language of human dignity in places where the state is often absent. The other is coercive: an agent of conversion and acculturation,
Obituaries and tributes
Singapore sells itself as an engineered miracle: a dense city that works, where heat, rain, and scarcity are managed rather than endured. Greenery is part of that bargain. Trees soften the concrete and help make the place livable, but they are also a kind of civic language. They signal order,
Obituaries and tributes
In most forests, a visitor’s eye is trained on what can be reached. The trunk can be measured. The leaves can be plucked. A specimen can be pressed, labeled, and filed away. Yet the largest share of life in a tropical rainforest hangs overhead, in a zone of light,
Obituaries and tributes
For a small country, Belize has long carried an outsized reputation among people who care about water. Its flats and mangroves, its reef and river systems, have drawn anglers and naturalists who come for beauty but stay, if they are paying attention, for the fragile bargain that keeps such places
Obituaries and tributes
Doug McConnell spent much of his adult life doing something that sounds simple and is not: he helped people look closely at the places where they lived. For decades he turned Northern California’s open spaces, back roads, and overlooked corners into familiar destinations people came to recognize and talk
Obituaries and tributes
She wrote about damage that accumulated slowly, in places most people did not look, and about the systems that allowed it to be ignored. When her own life was overtaken by illness, she approached that, too, as a problem to be understood rather than transcended. For much of her career
Obituaries and tributes
In the late 20th century, forest conservation in the eastern United States was rarely a matter of sweeping victories or clean resolutions. It was a practice shaped by hearings that dragged on, injunctions that arrived too late, and landscapes divided among agencies with overlapping mandates and uneven resolve. The work
Obituaries and tributes
In small island states, conservation has often depended less on formal institutions than on vigilance: watching harbors, checking traps, noticing what does not belong. The work is repetitive, practical, and easily overlooked. It rarely comes with titles or funding cycles that last longer than a season. Yet in places where