Obituaries and tributes
When the miners came, Mamai Lucille Williams was well into her eighties. Her house in Karisparu, a Patamona village high in Guyana’s North Pakaraimas, stood on the same patch of ground where she had lived since childhood. Around it grew cassava, bananas, and fruit trees she had planted herself,
Obituaries and tributes
He was born in the forests that would later define his life. In Tanzania’s Kilombero Valley, where mist drifts down from the Udzungwa Mountains, young Aloyce Mwakisoma learned the names of plants before he could read their Latin equivalents. His father, once a hunter, became a research assistant after
Obituaries and tributes
Fame, for Diane Keaton, was never an excuse to look away. In a profession built on performance, she turned her gaze outward—to the voiceless and the overlooked. While audiences remember her for Annie Hall’s nervous charm and The Godfather’s quiet strength, animal advocates will remember her for
Obituaries and tributes
Jane Goodall, who revealed the intimate lives of chimpanzees and gave the modern world a language of hope, has died at the age of 91. Over the course of six decades, she moved from an unlikely young researcher in the forests of East Africa to one of the most recognizable
Obituaries and tributes
I find it hard to believe Jane Goodall is gone. She was more than an icon to me. She was a friend, a mentor, and someone whose presence—whether with presidents, students, or my own children—felt like both a gift and a lesson. Our friendship began in the most
Obituaries and tributes
In the steaming lowlands of Veracruz and the Yucatán, where strangler figs knot the canopy and howler monkeys bellow at dawn, a slight man with a field notebook kept noticing what others overlooked. Arturo Gómez-Pompa believed tropical forests were not untouched wilderness but “landscapes of memory,” shaped for millennia
Obituaries and tributes
In a crumbling four-story wada in Pune’s old quarter, where temple bells compete with motorbike horns and hawkers press against the walls, an upstairs room stayed stubbornly off the grid. There, surrounded by sparrows and squirrels, a small woman in a plain cotton sari wrote longhand by daylight
Obituaries and tributes
On a windy North Dakota morning in the mid-1970s, Fred Kirschenmann walked his family’s wheat fields and decided to stop farming the way his neighbors did. The son of Depression-era homesteaders, with a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Chicago, he would take 2,600 acres
Obituaries and tributes
Robert Redford never intended to be a spokesman for the environment. Acting and directing, the twin pillars of his professional life, were supposed to be enough. Yet for more than half a century he stood before cameras, senators, and students insisting that “the environment should be put in the category
Obituaries and tributes
He taught mathematics in a small state school on Flores and organized the parish youth group on weekends. Numbers ordered his days; community gave them purpose. In recent years, he also helped mobilize opposition to plans to tap the island’s restless geology for power. On Sept. 5, 2025, Vian
Obituaries and tributes
He was never supposed to stay. When Mathias Espinosa first set foot on the Galápagos in the early 1980s, it was as a young visitor sailing around the islands in a wooden fishing boat. Yet the archipelago gripped him. He returned again and again until it became not just his
Obituaries and tributes
Marc Stalmans, who died of natural causes on August 30th at 66, spent much of his life restoring life to a landscape once stripped of it. As the science director at Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, he was central to one of Africa’s most ambitious ecological experiments: the attempt