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
Obituaries and tributes
In late August, high in South Africa’s Jonkershoek Mountains, a small group of botanists picked their way across steep ground in search of one of the world’s rarest plants. They were surveying Penaea formosa, a critically endangered shrub thought to number fewer than 50 individuals. Donovan Kirkwood, curator
Obituaries and tributes
He was almost always smiling. In eastern Congo, where war and poverty have long eroded hope, that smile and the restless energy behind it mattered as much as any conservation plan. Dr. Augustin Kanyunyi Basabose, who died suddenly on August 18th, 2025, gave communities and colleagues alike the sense that
Obituaries and tributes
When Jim Estes first arrived in the Aleutian Islands in 1970, he expected a routine wildlife survey. What he found was the outline of a scientific revelation. In places where sea otters thrived, the ocean floor teemed with kelp and fish. Where they were gone, sea urchins had multiplied unchecked,
Obituaries and tributes
In a city of relentless noise and concrete, Sunjoy Monga taught Mumbai to look up. The flash of a kingfisher, the silhouette of a kite, the call of a koel at dawn—he urged his fellow citizens to notice these things, not as fleeting curiosities but as reminders that the
Obituaries and tributes
He knew he would be killed. For months, Israeli officials had phoned him with threats: stop reporting, or die. Four days before the end, they offered him a way out, safe passage if he silenced himself. He refused. On August 10th, 2025, an Israeli airstrike struck a tent for journalists