Acclaimed environmental journalist John Vidal joins the show to discuss the current pandemic's links to the wildlife trade and the destruction of nature. We speak about his recent Guardian/Ensia feature on what we know about the origins of the outbreak, what he’s learned while reporting from similar outbreak epicenters in the past, how the destruction of nature creates the perfect conditions for diseases to emerge, and what we can do to prevent future outbreaks. See related Mongabay podcast epis...
Mar 31, 2020•22 min•Ep. 91
The songs, calls, clicks, and bumps of beluga whales, bearded seals, bowhead whales, ribbon seals, and walrus are the stars of this episode, which also features the co-author of a recent study that used bioacoustics to assess how variation in sea surface temperature and sea ice extent affects these animals' populations in the northern Bering Sea. Dr. Howard Rosenbaum is the director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Ocean Giants Program, and his team is creating an acoustic baseline for how...
Mar 17, 2020•29 min•Ep. 90
Shah Selbe is a rocket scientist who put his engineering skills into building a lab that uses open-source technologies to empower local communities to solve conservation challenges. His team has been deploying technologies like drones, sensor networks, smartphone apps, and acoustic buoys to monitor protected areas, wildlife, and biodiversity. But their big news is the launch of the open-source hardware and online platform FieldKit that anyone can use to deploy a local sensing network and mesh th...
Mar 05, 2020•30 min•Ep. 89
Fred Swaniker is the founder of the African Leadership University, which recently launched a School of Wildlife Conservation to help young Africans develop the skills and knowledge necessary to “own and drive” the conservation agenda on the African continent. Swaniker sees Africa's natural heritage as a strategic advantage for the continent, and argues on this episode that the immense young workforce can be engaged in its conservation in many ways, from management to filmmaking, science communic...
Feb 19, 2020•33 min•Ep. 88
Top scientists, authors, and activists appear on the Mongabay Newscast to discuss their latest research, describe new solutions for tough challenges, or to share their views on conservation and the environment: subscribe to this free show via Apple Podcasts , Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts. Mongabay.com is a 25 year-old award-winning nonprofit news service with 5 million monthly readers who consume our daily reporting in 6 languages via 5 international bureaus. So to stay on ...
Feb 10, 2020•26 sec
‘Without the land, indigenous people cannot exist’ the new leader of Cultural Survival, Galina Angarova, tells host Mike G. in this new episode. Raised in a Buryat community in Siberia, she's had a number of top roles through the years, but her recent appointment to this key indigenous rights organization is perhaps the most important one yet. She grew up eating wild berries, mushrooms, nuts, wild garlic, deer, and more on the shores of Lake Baikal, and therefore has a strong sense of relationsh...
Feb 05, 2020•26 min•Ep. 87
Laurel Symes is a biologist who uses bioacoustics to study tropical katydids in Central America, and she joins us to play some of her hypnotic rainforest recordings and say how tracking these insects' interesting sounds can aid rainforest conservation. Based on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, she uses machine learning to detect and identify these creatures, which are grasshopper-like insects that are important to the rainforest food web, because they eat a lot of plants and are in turn eaten by...
Jan 22, 2020•29 min•Ep. 86
Ami Vitale is an award-winning war correspondent turned conservation photographer, and her iconic images of animals like Sudan the Rhino adorn the pages of National Geographic and other top outlets often. But she's so much more than a woman with a camera , rather, she's a force of nature helping create change and grassroots conservation all over the world through her work, words, and advocacy. She joins the podcast to talk about the most inspiring and heartbreaking moments from her recent projec...
Jan 07, 2020•41 min•Ep. 85
For this last episode of 2019, we take a look back at some favorite bioacoustics recordings featured here on the Mongabay Newscast and play them for you. As regular listeners will know, bioacoustics is the study of how animals use and perceive sound, and how their acoustical adaptations reflect their behaviors and relationships with their habitats and surroundings. Bioacoustics is a fairly young field of study but it is already being used to study everything from how wildlife populations respond...
Dec 23, 2019•27 min•Ep. 84
We speak with National Geographic writer Chris Fagan about the investigative report he just filed for Mongabay revealing a massive invasion of national parks in the Peruvian Amazon, in an area relied upon by isolated indigenous communities. Traveling up the Sepahua River with indigenous guides, Fagan counted more than 250 plots of land illegally cleared for cocaine production in recent months. He met some of these growers and describes for us a very 'Wild West' scene that Peruvian officials know...
Dec 12, 2019•39 min•Ep. 83
Dena Clink is a primatologist studying individuality and variation in Bornean gibbon calls, which she says could aid these primates' conservation. She joins this episode to play some recordings of these fascinating songs & calls she’s made in the course of her research, and explain how they're used and what they may mean to the species. We’ve featured a wide variety of bioacoustics studies here on the Mongabay Newscast, from whales to bats and birds, but these are usually recordings of species a...
Nov 26, 2019•45 min•Ep. 82
Damian Aspinall is chairman of the Aspinall Foundation, a UK charity that works to conserve endangered animals and return them to the wild. Despite his foundation operating two zoos, he's a vocal critic of how zoos are generally run, and feels their focus should be upon breeding rare animals and reintroducing them to the wild, vs keeping them in captivity for public entertainment, as he says. "European zoos spend at least 15 million pounds a year, at least, on looking after their elephants and r...
Nov 13, 2019•35 min•Ep. 81
Katie Baker is a reporter for the Buzzfeed News team investigating human rights violations committed against local & indigenous people by park rangers paid by the major environmental NGO WWF to protect creatures like rhinos from poachers. "No one is saying that [WWF's rangers] don't have really difficult jobs...but just because they have a difficult job doesn't mean they can rape and kill and torture with impunity or arrest people without evidence," she tells host Mike G, and adds that the pushb...
Oct 29, 2019•25 min•Ep. 80
Plans for ocean floor mining are moving forward globally -- especially around thermal vents that create deposits of metals like gold, silver, copper, manganese, cobalt, and zinc -- but humans have explored less than 1% of the deep sea, so it’s fair to say that we really have no idea what’s at risk. On this episode we speak with deep sea biologist Dr. Diva Amon about what we do -- and don’t -- know about biodiversity at the bottom of the ocean. Raised on the shores of Trinidad & Tobago, Dr. Amon'...
Oct 16, 2019•26 min•Ep. 79
Mongabay's adventurous Middle East-based staff writer John Cannon just traveled the length of the Pan Borneo Highway and shares what he discovered on the journey about biodiversity, development, and the natural future of this, the world's 3rd largest island. It took him 3 weeks to travel the route proposed to connect the rainforest-rich Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak as well as the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo--to make commerce and travel easier in a region that is notoriously ...
Oct 01, 2019•31 min•Ep. 78
For this episode we speak with Jim Darling, a marine biologist whose team found that the songs of different humpback whale groups can be so similar to each other that the conventional wisdom of these being distinct groups might be wrong. These whales may be sharing and singing each others' songs across groups and regions, he thinks. Darling joins the show to play recordings of these remarkably similar humpback whale songs and discuss the implications. Please invite your friends to subscribe to t...
Sep 12, 2019•28 min•Ep. 77
On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we speak with Reverend Lennox Yearwood about the upcoming UN Climate Summit in New York City and what it’s going to take to pass legislation and policies that can effectively tackle the enormity of the climate crisis. Undaunted by the challenge, Rev Yearwood rather is "very excited," he says, about the new energy and effective leadership he sees coming from youth, women, people of color, and more, who are all urging the world toward meaningful climate ac...
Sep 04, 2019•39 min•Ep. 76
For an encore edition during this show's brief hiatus, we replay one of our most popular Field Notes interviews of all time, featuring Australian researcher Anastasia Dalziell who's doing trailblazing work with superb lyrebirds. Listen to her recordings of these songsters and be amazed by these animals, who are so adept at replays themselves. Host Mike G. explored with her the incredible ability these creatures have to mimic sounds in their environment, ranging from predators and possums to sque...
Aug 13, 2019•34 min•Ep. 75
Urban pests like rats have been in the news due to the US President calling Baltimore “rat and rodent infested.” He isn’t the first American politician to use this kind of rhetoric to demean communities that are predominantly made up of people of color (while ignoring the fact that policies deliberately designed to marginalize communities of color are at the root of the pest problems), he's just the latest. Dawn Biehler actually knows what she’s talking about when it comes to rodent infestations...
Aug 06, 2019•29 min•Ep. 74
David Quammen is an award-winning science writer, author, and journalist covering the most promising trends in conservation and evolutionary science for the past 30 years. We invited him on the show to discuss his latest feature for National Geographic , where he is a regular contributor, about Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique — once touted by none other than E.O. Wilson in a podcast interview with Mongabay as a place where inspiring restoration efforts are underway and benefitting nature, ...
Jul 23, 2019•42 min•Ep. 73
Jessica Crance is a research biologist who recently discovered right whales singing for the first time. While some whales like humpbacks and bowheads are known for their melodious songs, none of the three species of right whale has ever been known to sing. Crance led the research team at NOAA that documented North Pacific right whales breaking into song in the Bering Sea, and on this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, she will play recordings of two different right whale song types and discuss wh...
Jul 09, 2019•19 min•Ep. 72
We speak with Ivonne Higuero, new Secretary General of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora — better known by its acronym, CITES. The first woman to ever serve as Secretary General, we discuss how her background as an environmental economist informs her approach to the job, how CITES can tackle challenges like the online wildlife trade and lack of enforcement of CITES statutes at the national level, and what she expects to accomplish at the 18th con...
Jun 25, 2019•52 min•Ep. 71
Jim Breheny is the director of the Bronx Zoo in New York City and joins the Mongabay Newscast to discuss the contributions zoos make to global biodiversity conservation. While many question the relevance of zoos in the 21st century, he argues that as humanity's influence extends ever farther and wildlife habitat continues to shrink, zoos are more relevant than ever since they could save a diversity of species like hellbender salamanders, which his institution is helping to breed and repopulate i...
Jun 12, 2019•30 min•Ep. 70
Gabriel Melo-Santos studies Araguaian river dolphins in Brazil — his work has revealed that the species is much chattier than we’d previously known, and could potentially help us better understand the evolution of underwater communication in marine mammals. He plays some of the recordings he’s made of the dolphins, explains how he managed to study the elusive creatures thanks to their fondness for a certain riverside fish market, and discusses how the study of their vocalizations could yield ins...
May 28, 2019•24 min•Ep. 69
Ecologist Julian Bayliss used satellite imagery, drones, and technical climbing to make a big discovery last year, an untouched rainforest atop a virtually unclimbable mountain in Mozambique (an “inselberg” or “island mountain”) that contains species new to science. Intriguingly, his team also found ancient human artifacts at its top, perhaps linked to people's prayers for the mountain's continued supply of fresh water to the surrounding lowlands. On this episode Bayliss discusses Mt. Lico's nov...
May 14, 2019•32 min•Ep. 68
Kinari Webb founded Health in Harmony, providing healthcare to people to save Indonesian rainforests. She realized that most illegal deforestation happens when villagers have to pay for medical care, because they have little to generate cash with, except timber. The program has reduced infant deaths by more than 2/3 and the number of households engaged in illegal logging dropped nearly 90%. Her story was one of the most-read articles at Mongabay.com in 2017, so now with Webb expanding the progra...
Apr 30, 2019•33 min•Ep. 67
Primatologist Cleve Hicks leads a research team that has discovered a new tool-using chimp culture in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After 12 years of research, their findings include an entirely new chimpanzee tool kit featuring four different kinds of tools. These chimps also build ground nests, which is highly unusual for any group of chimps, but especially for ones living around dangerous predators like lions and leopards. But these chimps’ novel use of tools and ground nesting aren’t...
Apr 16, 2019•26 min•Ep. 66
Dr. Rebecca Cliffe joins us to challenge myths about sloths like the popular perception of them as lazy creatures: moving slowly is a survival strategy that has been so successful in fact that sloths are some of the oldest mammals on our planet. But Dr. Cliffe also warns of a “sloth crisis” driven by deforestation, roadbuilding, and irresponsible tourism including “sloth selfies,” and what you can do to help protect sloths. If you enjoy this show, please visit www.patreon.com/mongabay to pledge ...
Apr 02, 2019•21 min•Ep. 65
How do you study a marine mammal that lives in waters so murky that it can hide from you in plain sight, even in shallow water? On this episode we speak with marine biologist Isha Bopardikar, a researcher using one technique, bioacoustics, to unlock the hidden behaviors of humpback dolphins on the west coast of India. Mongabay's India bureau recently published a story about her work, “What underwater sounds tell us about marine life” , which noted that although humanity is making the underwater ...
Mar 19, 2019•15 min•Ep. 64
“The uncontacted and isolated tribes represent a true treasure,” National Geographic writer and author Scott Wallace says in this episode. “Their knowledge of the rainforest, of the medicinal properties of the plants, of all the animals, their spirit world — all of this is an incredibly rich trove of knowledge.” Wallace's book The Unconquered tells the story of an expedition into remote Amazon rainforests undertaken by the head of Brazil’s Department of Isolated Indians to gather information abo...
Mar 05, 2019•28 min•Ep. 63
