The tiger, a creature of almost mystical, magical, and majestic allure and the subject of Blake's famous 1794 poem Tyger, is battling for survival in its final refuges in Thailand and Myanmar in Southeast Asia. The populations of tigers in the neighboring countries of Cambodia,...
The Wilderness Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on September 3, 1964. The USA system of wilderness areas now includes over 800 areas covering more than 110 million acres. Currently, all but six states—Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, and Rhode Island—have...
On Monday, June 17, 2024, 20 out of the 27 countries in the European Union (EU) voted to adopt the world's first Nature Restoration Law. The law passed with a slim majority, as Leonore Gewessler, the Austrian Minister for Climate Action, decided at the last...
In 1980, Robert Seyfarth, Dorothy Cheney and Peter Marler published a paper in Science reporting that a vervet monkey troop in Amboseli National Park in Kenya used three different alarm calls to signify danger respectively from eagles, leopards and snakes. According to Snowdon, this paper...
How animals migrate reliably from one place to another yearly has been an enduring puzzle. Donald Griffin, the discoverer of bat echolocation, also investigated bird migration to determine how birds could navigate the ocean. He and his colleagues tracked migrating flocks using a repurposed military...
The Covid pandemic had a widespread social impact in addition to its effects on public health. For example, in the Washington, DC area, home buyers were focused on homes in the city pre-COVID, and the Washington suburban real estate market was in the doldrums. However,...
It has been suggested that humans should be categorized as the species Homo classification rather than Homo sapiens because we are so attracted to making lists and developing categories to simplify and organize the world around us. For example, journalists recognize that the audience will...
On December 19, 2022, representatives from 188 countries adopted a new agreement on biodiversity, now known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The 2022 GBF aims to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by adopting four overarching global goals and 23 targets, including conserving 30%...
Ted Kerasote is an outdoorsman and author who has written three charming and insightful books about the human-dog relationship – Merle's Door (2007), Pukka, The Pup after Merle (2010), and Pukka's Promise (2013). Pukka's Promise relates the story of Kerasote's search for a dog that...
The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger & Planta Sapiens by Paco Calvo with Natalie LawrenceRecently, two important books were published -- a year apart – and centered on the same topic: reviewing the accumulating scientific evidence that plants can and should be perceived as sentient...
