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Borneo: Life After Logging
Once upon time, the island of Borneo was blanketed by dense and pristine rainforests. Ancient dipterocarp trees pierced the canopy, towering over a sea of treetops like parasols. These noble giants were the first to go when the chainsawing started. When industrial logging came to Borneo, it struck with an […]
Conservation has to be scalable
To stand a chance, conservation has to back interventions that can go big
What wildlife conservation can learn from ninjas
Protected areas are the cornerstone of the conservation movement, and, for the most part, they work quite well. They do have some hefty pitfalls though. One of these is that the comings and goings of many globetrotting or wide roaming species pay little heed to whether an area has been […]
Shortcuts to staunching catastrophic wildlife declines
Disrupting catastrophic wildlife declines won’t be easy. But by focusing conservation interventions on a small set of disproportionately important places and projects, we can still leverage our way out of the sixth mass extinction. This is exactly why conservationists have long preoccupied over “biodiversity hotspots”–35 areas that jointly cover just […]
Machetes and seedlings: the key to saving Borneo’s logged rainforests, or the next phase in their degradation?
It’s 1998, and as Borneo’s rainforests are being ravaged by some of the most unsustainable logging the world has ever known, one timber company is bucking the trend and investing in its future. Twenty years later, the results of Sari Bumi Kasuma’s (SBK) foresight are clear to see. Elsewhere across […]
Creating the witch’s familiar
It’s July 1996 and Dr. Martin Walsh has just arrived on Unguja, a small island nestled within an archipelago thirty-seven kilometres off the coast of Tanzania. He’s been tasked with finding an elusive predator many conservationists fear already to be extinct. Known locally as “King”, it’s not officially been sighted […]
Building societies that don’t suck
We have to design systems that will incentivise pro-environmental decision-making. It’s not enough to rely on individual choices. Individuals are busy. Individuals have kids, careers and favourite TV programmes. And individuals are constrained by the inefficient and wasteful industrial systems through which they can meet their daily needs. Much easier […]
Time for a Manhattan Project on biodiversity loss
The most important conservationists of the future probably won’t even abide by that name. Already today, it’s politicians that decide on whether biodiversity loss is taken seriously or pushed to the fringes. It’s engineers who are designing disruptive technologies for tackling climate change and ocean pollution. It’s pioneering economists who […]
52 things to do in a rainforest
A tropical rainforest, apart from being galalactically important, is also just a swell place to be. Sure it’s sweaty, sometimes there are leeches, and sometimes those leeches wriggle into places they shouldn’t. But for the most part a rainforest is one of the best places you can ever visit. Here […]