Ken Sleight, a Utah river guide who led trips through Glen Canyon before Lake Powell flooded it, spent six decades fighting the dam. He inspired Edward Abbey’s Seldom Seen Smith, helped launch river trips for people with disabilities, and advocated for wild places. He died at 97.
Alexine Keuroghlian, who died on October 30th, spent more than 25 years studying the white-lipped peccary, a wild pig that helps sustain tropical forests. She showed that its herds need connected landscapes, and she persuaded ranchers and rural communities in Brazil to help protect them.
Josef Settele turned a childhood butterfly collection into a career in agricultural ecology. As one of three co-chairs of the 2019 IPBES Global Assessment, he helped warn that around a million species faced extinction, yet he kept arguing against despair.
Christine von Weizsäcker helped shape international biodiversity agreements and championed the rights of Indigenous peoples in negotiations. A biologist, she argued that mistakes were inevitable and that societies must guard against those whose consequences could not be undone.
Simona Daniele, an Italian hotelier in Costa Rica, co-founded SalveMonos to protect monkeys from electrocution. What began with T-shirt sales to fund wildlife bridges grew into a conservation organization that rescued thousands of animals and pushed for safer electrical infrastructure.
Carolina Joana da Silva spent her career studying the Pantanal’s floods and the forces reshaping the vast Brazilian wetland. She helped train generations of local researchers and argued that conservation must include the riverside communities whose lives depend on its waters.
Sabine Schoppe, a biologist who championed Palawan’s endangered forest turtles, died at age 63. She co-founded the Katala Foundation, helped establish the species’ first protected area and led the rescue of thousands of trafficked turtles in 2015, leaving a legacy of conservation in the Philippines.
As a boy in Port of Spain, John Agard made toys from parts salvaged from old radios and household appliances. His family did not own a television until he was about 17, so he built engines, model planes, boats, and circuit boards. He also read and spent time outdoors. On
In the early 1990s, the logging roads running through Sarawak’s Upper Baram became the site of a bitter confrontation. Penan families built wooden barricades across red-dirt tracks, blocking bulldozers and timber trucks and facing units of the Police Field Force. As the protests drew international attention, the government
For much of the year, Llanos de Challe National Park is dry and sparsely colored. Cacti rise from gravel and bare hillsides. Seeds remain underground, sometimes for years. After sufficient winter rain, flowers cover parts of the coastal desert in white, yellow, violet, and red. Most visitors arrive during the
In the late 1970s, a group of young naturalists in Lima used a room in the Rubio family home as a headquarters for their expeditions. They called it the Gabinete de iconoclastas. There were maps to study, frogs to look for in neighborhood ponds, plants to collect, and places along
In the 1970s, studying wild tigers still involved more nerve than equipment. A biologist could not rely on camera traps, GPS collars, or satellite-linked data. To understand where a tiger went, what it killed, how far it ranged, and how its territory overlapped with others, someone had to follow
Brazil
The giant anteater is easy to treat as a curiosity: a narrow head, poor eyesight, strong claws, and a tongue that can reach beyond its mouth. Its life can appear simple until someone tries to study it. Then come harder questions: where it feeds, what cover it needs, and how
Bangladesh
The bear came out of the forest with enough force to kill him. It mauled the hunter badly and cost him an eye. During three months in a hospital, he began asking why he was hunting and killing animals. Hunting had come through his family. His father and grandfather were
Philippines
By some accounts, in the Philippine reefs of the 1970s, large groupers appeared every 50 feet or so. Some seemed as large as Volkswagen Beetles. Around them were snappers, fusiliers, wrasses, turtles, and corals, along with fish whose identities were still uncertain. Kent E. Carpenter arrived in the Philippines at
South Africa
Gus Mills spent a lifetime studying Africa’s carnivores On visits to Kruger National Park, children were awoken by Gus Mills at midnight to look for bushbabies and again at five in the morning to search for big cats. Wildlife kept inconvenient hours, and he expected his companions to adjust.
Australia
On the far north coast of New South Wales, the Big Scrub once covered about 75,000 hectares of rich basalt country. It was a lowland subtropical rainforest of figs, vines, palms and fruit doves. By the time modern conservationists took stock of it, little more than one percent remained,
Ecuador
Montañita is a place many people intend to pass through. They come for surf, sun, music, and a stretch of Ecuador’s coast that has long sold itself as free-spirited. Some stay longer. They open small businesses, learn the workings of the communes, put children into local schools, and
United States
At Bradford Island, near Bonneville Dam, the river carried more than water. Beneath the Columbia’s surface were toxic sediments, dumped near a place where Yakama people had fished since time immemorial. To officials, it was a cleanup site. To the Yakama Nation, it was a usual and accustomed fishing
Obituaries and tributes
To Mike Salisbury, patience was not a virtue so much as a working method. Lions did not hunt on cue. Plants did not move at a human pace. Polar bears did not respect production schedules, or much else. The task was to wait, improvise, and find a way to show
Obituaries and tributes
Norlan Pagal knew the waters of Tañon Strait from a lifetime spent fishing them. By the early 2000s he had watched catches decline as commercial boats entered waters reserved for small fishers and destructive fishing practices damaged reefs. In 2002 he joined the bantay dagat, the volunteer sea patrol that
Obituaries and tributes
To Monica Montefalcone, the sea was a place to study: its plants, reefs, hidden habitats and seasonal changes. A meadow of Posidonia oceanica was not just a patch of green beneath the water. It provided nursery habitat, shelter, carbon storage and coastal protection. To most swimmers it might have looked
Obituaries and tributes
Ted Turner, who died today, liked to present himself as a businessman who had simply applied the same habits to a larger subject. First he bought a struggling billboard company and made it work. Then he built a television empire, beginning with CNN in 1980. After that, he turned much
Obituaries and tributes
In the open ocean, the sunfish appears almost improbable—rounded, truncated, adrift in ways that seem to resist explanation. For Thys, that improbability was an invitation. A small photograph sparked a line of inquiry that would shape decades of her life, not only in studying the fish itself, but in