Narratives help shape our society, culture and environment, entrenching beliefs that can help — or harm — our planet and human rights. Tsering Yangzom Lama , story manager at Greenpeace International , joins Mongabay's podcast to explain how dominant narratives — stories shaped by existing power structures and institutions — often undergird destructive industries and favor the powerful and the wealthy, and to discuss what people can do to counter such narratives. In this interview, she expands u...
Jul 15, 2025•37 min•Ep. 253
Jean-Gaël "JG" Collomb says community-based conservation organizations know best how to tackle the complex conservation challenges unique to their ecosystems. However, they’re also among the most underserved in terms of funding of all stripes. On this week's episode of Mongabay's podcast, Collomb explains how his nonprofit, Wildlife Conservation Network (WCN), is working to change that. When it comes to funding conservation," it's really difficult to know who to give your money to besides a hand...
Jul 01, 2025•46 min•Ep. 252
This week on Mongabay's podcast, celebrated author and repeat Nobel Prize in Literature candidate Robert Macfarlane discusses his fascinating new book, Is a River Alive? , which both asks and provides answers to this compelling question, in his signature flowing prose. Its absorbing narrative takes the reader to the frontlines of some of Earth's most embattled waterways, from northern Ecuador to southern India and northeastern Quebec, where he explores what makes a river more than just a body of...
Jun 24, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 251
Roughly a billion people enjoy coffee daily, and more than 100 million people rely on it for income. However, the coffee industry is the sixth-largest driver of deforestation and is also rife with human rights abuses , including the labor of enslaved persons and children. But it doesn't have to be this way, says this guest on the Mongabay Newscast. Etelle Higonnet is the founder of the NGO Coffee Watch , having formerly served as a senior adviser at the U.S. National Wildlife Federation. The mai...
Jun 17, 2025•45 min•Ep. 250
Carlos Zorrilla has been living in an Ecuadorian cloud forest since the 1970s, and his last 30 years there have been spent fighting mining companies seeking to extract its large copper deposits. He and his community have successfully fought such proposals by multiple firms in one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet, but sometimes at great personal risk, he tells Mongabay's podcast. While his organization, Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag ( DECOIN ), and allies in the local co...
Jun 10, 2025•38 min•Ep. 249
Five years since Kim Stanley Robinson's groundbreaking climate fiction novel, The Ministry for the Future , hit The New York Times bestseller list, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning writer shares reflections on themes explored in the book and how they apply directly to the world today. The utopian novel set in a not-so-distant future depicts how humans address climate change and the biodiversity crisis , toppling oligarchic control of governments and addressing chronic inequality. Robinson expla...
Jun 03, 2025•56 min•Ep. 248
Nearly half of the Republic of Congo’s dense rainforests are protected under the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) framework to receive climate finance payments, but Mongabay Africa staff writer Elodie Toto’s recent investigation revealed the nation has also granted nearly 80 gold mining and exploration permits in areas covered by the project, driving deforestation and negatively impacting local people and wildlife. As the world scrambles for new sources of gol...
May 20, 2025•30 min•Ep. 247
Carlos Mallo Molina has been awarded the 2025 Goldman Environmental Prize for protecting the marine biodiversity of Tenerife, the most populated of the Canary Islands. On this episode of Mongabay's podcast, Molina explains what led him to quit his job as a civil engineer on a road project impacting the Teno-Rasca marine protected area (MPA) and his subsequent campaign to stop the port project it was planned to connect to, which would have impacted the biodiversity of the area. His successful cam...
May 13, 2025•25 min•Ep. 246
A biotech company in the United States made headlines last month by revealing photos of genetically modified gray wolves, calling them “dire wolves,” a species that hasn’t existed for more than 10,000 years. Colossal Biosciences edited 14 genes among millions of base pairs in gray wolf DNA to arrive at the pups that were shown, leaving millions of genetic differences between these wolves and real dire wolves. This hasn’t stopped some observers from asserting to the public that “de-extinction” is...
May 06, 2025•42 min•Ep. 245
Biological oceanographer John Ryan joins Mongabay’s podcast to discuss his team’s multiyear study that examined vocalizations of baleen whales, including blue ( Balaenoptera musculus ), humpback ( Megaptera novaeangliae ) and fin whales ( Balaenoptera physalus ), and how this science is critical for understanding their feeding habits, and thus informing their conservation. The study found that these whales’ songs rise and fall with their food supply , which provides valuable insights into how ch...
Apr 29, 2025•39 min•Ep. 244
Two decades ago a group of NGOs came together with the government of Kazakhstan to save the dwindling population of saiga antelope living in the enormous Golden Steppe. Since then, the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative has successfully rehabilitated the saiga ( Saiga tatarica ) from a population of roughly 30,000 to nearly 4 million. For this effort, it was awarded the 2024 Earthshot Prize in the “protect & restore nature” category. Joining the podcast to discuss this achievement is Vera Vo...
Apr 15, 2025•31 min•Ep. 243
Media outlets are downsizing newsrooms and the audience for traditional news is in decline , but Mongabay continues to grow thanks to its impact-driven , nonprofit model. Mongabay's director of philanthropy, Dave Martin , joins the podcast this week to explain the philosophy behind Mongabay's fundraising efforts, why the nonprofit model is essential for impact-driven reporting, and how the organization ensures editorial independence. " Those who fund us and read us, they're really expecting real...
Apr 08, 2025•37 min•Ep. 242
Renowned author, activist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken joins Mongabay’s podcast to discuss his new book, Carbon: The Book of Life , and argues that the jargon and fear-based terms broadly used by the climate movement alienate the broader public and fail to communicate the nuance and complexity of the larger ecological crises that humans are causing. Instead, Hawken argues that real change begins in, and is propelled by, communities: "Community is the source of change, and what we have [are] obvi...
Apr 01, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 241
The Australian government recently shelved key environmental protection commitments indefinitely, including the establishment of an environmental protection agency, and a robust accounting of the nation’s ecological health via an environmental information authority. The latest suspension was announced by the Prime Minister just ahead of a federal election. Australia initially proposed these “nature positive” reforms in 2022 and hosted the first Global Nature Positive Summit in 2024 to great fanf...
Mar 25, 2025•30 min•Ep. 240
Recent and major shifts in international environmental policies and programs have historical precedent, but the context of global environmental degradation and climate change presents a planetary risk that’s new, say Sunil Amrith. A professor of history at Yale University, he joins this week’s Mongabay Newscast to discuss the current political moment and what history can teach us about it. " When we look at examples from the past, [societies’ ecological impacts] have tended to be confined to a p...
Mar 18, 2025•28 min•Ep. 239
A new framework for considering the needs of the “more-than-human world” when designing human-made systems is “ecological empathy,” the focus of Lauren Lambert , founder of Future Now , a sustainability consulting firm. Her research, Ecological empathy: Relational theory and practice , was published in the journal Ecosystems and People in late 2024, when she was at Arizona State University. She joins the podcast to detail the concept and its potential for reconnecting humans with nature for mutu...
Mar 11, 2025•54 min•Ep. 238
Middle and working-class citizens in nations across the globe are feeling their purchasing power diminish while billionaires hoard historically high levels of wealth. People are looking for economic solutions out of the inequity that are in line with their ecological values and planetary boundaries. "People are really hungry for solutions [and] really hungry to find alternatives," says Alvaro Alvarez, the documentary filmmaker of the new BBC documentary Less Is More: Can Degrowth Save the World?...
Mar 04, 2025•47 min•Ep. 237
A paper in the journal Nature Climate Change concludes there is limited accountability for corporations that fail to achieve their climate change mitigation targets. The analysis shows 9% of company decarbonization plans missed their goals, while 31% “disappeared.” However, 60% of companies met their targets. While this might initially seem like good news, it may not be leading to genuine climate action. This week's podcast guest, Ketan Joshi , a consultant and researcher for nonprofit organizat...
Feb 18, 2025•53 min•Ep. 236
The bobcat population has rebounded over the past century, making it North America’s most common wildcat: as of 2011, there were an estimated 3.5 million bobcats in the United States alone, a significant increase from the late 1990s. These intelligent felids, Lynx rufus , have benefited from conservation efforts that have increased their natural habitat. The species also thrives at the edges of towns and cities, where their presence can even reduce the spread of pathogens like Lyme disease that ...
Feb 11, 2025•38 min•Ep. 235
Nations across the world are working to expand their protected areas to include 30% of Earth's land and water by 2030 . In Africa, this would encompass an additional 1 million square miles. Mongabay's Ashoka Mukpo recently traveled to three nations to assess the current state of conservation practices in key protected areas, to get a better picture of what an expansion might look like, and how the crucial role of rangers in enforcing their protection is evolving. While there, he traveled with pa...
Feb 04, 2025•32 min•Ep. 234
Bryan Simmons, the vice president of communications for the Arcus Foundation, joins the Mongabay Newscast this week to share the philosophy behind the 25-year-old foundation, which funds grantees that work on LGBTQ rights and great apes and gibbons conservation. In this conversation with co-host Mike DiGirolamo, Simmons explains the link between economic development and justice for people and how this is correlated with conservation outcomes. “When people are not able to have their economic need...
Jan 28, 2025•48 min•Ep. 233
This week, Anthony James, host of The RegenNarration Podcast , joins Mongabay’s podcast to share stories of community resilience and land regeneration in the Americas and Australia. James explains how donkeys (seen as invasive pests) are now being managed to benefit the land in Kachana Station in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. In this episode, James emphasizes the importance of harnessing what’s in front of us, rather than fighting it. Across the many interviews he’s conducted, it’s ...
Jan 14, 2025•45 min•Ep. 232
General frustration with the result of the most recent UN climate conference (UNFCCC COP29) spurred the former UN climate chief, Christiana Figueres – under whose leadership the Paris Agreement was struck – to co-author a letter to the UN urging an overhaul to the COP process, and calling it “no longer fit for purpose.” Figueres joins this episode to speak about why the world’s governments seemingly cannot agree to move decisively on climate action, and what can be done about it. She shares why ...
Jan 07, 2025•54 min•Ep. 231
Seventeen regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) regulate commercially valuable fish species across the world's oceans. The members of these organizations do not publicize their meetings and bar journalists from attending, presenting a barrier for public awareness. On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, Africa staff writer Malavika Vyawahare is joined by a fisheries expert, Grantly Galland, and an RFMO secretary, Darius Campbell, to explain how decisions are made in regional fish...
Dec 23, 2024•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 230
A new forest finance fund known as the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) will work like an investment portfolio (unlike the familiar – and often ineffective – forest conservation loan or grant funds), and if enacted as intended, it will reward 70 tropical nations billions in annual funding for keeping their forests standing. Co-host Mike DiGirolamo speaks with three people who have analyzed the fund: Mongabay freelance reporter Justin Catanoso, Charlotte Streck – co-founder of Climate Focu...
Dec 16, 2024•37 min•Ep. 229
Animal aquaculture, the farming of fish, has outpaced the amount of wild-caught fish by tens of millions of metric tons each year, bringing with it negative environmental impacts and enabling abuse, says Carl Safina, an ecologist and author. On this episode of Mongabay’s podcast, Safina speaks with co-host Rachel Donald about his recent Science Advances essay describing the “moral reckoning” that’s required for the industry, pointing to environmental laws in the United States, which put hard lim...
Dec 10, 2024•47 min•Ep. 228
Neil Vora MD is a former epidemic intelligence service officer with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with experience combating outbreaks of the deadly Ebola virus and running the New York City contact tracing program for COVID-19. He advocates supporting public health infrastructure to respond to diseases. He much prefers preventing outbreaks before they occur instead of rushing to respond to them, though, and the best way to do this, he says, is by investing in nature. ...
Nov 26, 2024•40 min•Ep. 227
Todd Smith wanted to be a pilot since the age of 5, but an epiphany spurred by seeing a retreating ice cap in Peru revealed that his love of flying conflicted with the planetary harm his industry was causing. “That was the first seed that was planted, and I was witnessing in that moment climate change and mass tourism firsthand,” he says. Today, Smith is co-founder of Safe Landing, an organization dedicated to advocating for sustainable aviation reform to adapt to the realities of climate change...
Nov 12, 2024•48 min•Ep. 226
The new BBNJ (biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction) marine conservation agreement is impressive in scope but has since been rebranded by some as the “high seas treaty,” which risks biasing its interpretation by emphasizing the historical, but outdated, freedoms enjoyed by seafaring (and largely Western) nations. Elizabeth Mendenhall of the University of Rhode Island joins this episode to discuss the treaty with co-host Rachel Donald, detailing the fascinating and complicated nature of ocean...
Oct 29, 2024•42 min•Ep. 225
Just prior to the latest world biodiversity summit (COP 16 in Colombia), a similarly-themed event was hosted by the Australian Government in Sydney: the Global ‘Nature Positive’ Summit featured Indigenous leaders, scientists and conservationists, but political leaders in attendance provided little insight into when key reforms to the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act would take place, which experts, lawyers, and activists have been calling for. For this episode, Mongabay...
Oct 22, 2024•30 min•Ep. 224
