If you want to get into wildlife conservation, whether it’s as a career or as a side project, the most important thing is to take the first step. Send that first email to a researcher you admire expressing an interest in joining them on a research project. Follow up on […]
This is how Redmond O’Hanlan starts his fantastic book Into the Heart of Borneo: As a former academic and natural history book reviewer I was astonished to discover, on being threatened with a two-month exile to the primary jungles of Borneo, just how fast a man can read. Powerful as […]
Perhaps the most common criticism targeted at conservationists and the environmental movement more generally is that it is anti-development. I find this frustrating, because from my experience, it’s exactly the opposite. Most of the conservationists I know: Don’t want to ban new oil palm plantations. They recognise that oil palm […]
There are certain conservation issues that always seem sexy to the documentarian. Anything to do with rhino or elephant poaching. Anything where there are two clear polarised sides–say trophy hunters vs animal rights activists. And stuff with apes, some nice shots in a rescue sanctuary and a good corruption scandal […]
Picture this if you dare. I’m less than halfway through a morning of traipsing through the rainforest collecting dung beetle traps when the sudden urge to empty my bowels hits. To many a tropical ecologist this is not a problem. Simply drop your sweaty trousers, pick a suitably unprickly leaf […]
Here are two facts that are rarely put together, but which I think should be much more often. 1) Tropical rainforests today cover around 16% of Earth’s land surface but harbour an estimated 50% of all terrestrial biodiversity. 2) So far, Earth is the only planet in our galaxy that […]
Because, as we all know, a really really good story can change the world.
Walks next to rivers are nice. Walks in rivers are better. You get a different perspective when your legs are freezing cold and you keep stepping on jagged rocks. And it’s usually a more memorable one. When a few friends and I spent a week in France, we trekked a couple […]
Across Tasmania, farmers are erecting miniature wombat-high electric fences to keep the burrowing marsupials from “making a mess” of their cattle pastures. Ten thousand miles away, in Gloucestershire, the Forestry Commission have built shooting towers to help hunters take out wild boar, who are unpopular for the occasional damage they cause to […]
Deep inside a mountain on a remote island in the Svalbard archipelago, halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, lies the Global Seed Vault. That’s such a cool sentence. I didn’t write it. It’s the sentence that sits at the top of the Crop Trust website, over a picture […]