poaching – Page 3 – Desdemona Despair

Krimej village indigenous Chief Kadjyre Kayapo, of the Kayapo indigenous community, pauses on the path opened by illegal loggers on the border between Menkragnotire indigenous lands and the Biological Reserve Serra do Cachimbo in Altamira, Para state, Brazil, Saturday, 31 August 2019. He wears a traditional headdress and a necklace reading “Jesus Christ” in Kayapo language. Much of the deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is done illegally -- land grabbers burn areas to clear land for agriculture and loggers encroach on national forests and indigenous reserves, and Kayapo says he does not want loggers and prospectors on his land. Photo: Leo Correa / AP Photo

September 2, 2019

Indigenous leaders in Brazil’s Amazon try to thwart loggers and miners – “What is being done here is an atrocity against us”

By Leo Correa 1 September 2019 ALTAMIRA, Brazil (AP) – An indigenous leader in Brazil’s Amazon says he will do what he can to stop loggers and prospectors encroaching on his people’s land. Kadjyre Kayapo, his son and other companions searched in recent days for signs of trespassing in the lush rainforest of the Kayapo […]

Satellite view of wildfires in South America on 21 August 2019. Wildfires raging in the Amazon rainforest hit a record number in 2019, with 72,843 fires detected in August by Brazil’s space research center INPE. Graphic: INPE

August 22, 2019

Record number of fires burning in Brazil rainforest – Bolsonaro blames conservationists, after he defunded environmental agencies

21 August 2019 (BBC News) – Brazil’s Amazon rainforest has seen a record number of fires this year, new space agency data suggests. The National Institute for Space Research (INPE) said its satellite data showed an 84% increase on the same period in 2018. It comes weeks after President Jair Bolsonaro sacked the head of the […]

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured these images of several fires burning in the states of Rondônia, Amazonas, Pará, and Mato Grosso on 13 August 2019. Data: MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview and VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview, and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership Photo: Lauren Dauphin / NASA Earth Observatory

August 20, 2019

Image of the Day: Satellite view of forest-clearing fires in the Amazon, August 2019

By Adam Voiland 16 August 2019 (NASA) – In the Amazon rainforest, fire season has arrived. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured these images of several fires burning in the states of Rondônia, Amazonas, Pará, and Mato Grosso on August 11 and August 13, 2019. In the Amazon region, fires are rare for much […]

Lion population in Yankari National Park, 2006-2014, model fitted to time series (black squares are data, white circles are medians of the model-inferred true population sizes μt, and gray areas between dashes lines are 95 percent credible intervals). Graphic: Bauer, et al., 2015 / PNAS

July 21, 2019

Where lions once ruled, they are now quietly disappearing – Lion population has declined by 50 percent in 25 years

By Olivia Prentzel 18 July 2019 (National Geographic) – For every lion in the wild, there are 14 African elephants, and there are 15 Western lowland gorillas. There are more rhinos than lions, too. The iconic species has disappeared from 94 percent of its historic range, which once included almost the entire African continent but […]

One of sixty-six giraffes arrives in central China’s Henan Province in the early hours of Sunday, 15 October 2017, on a chartered flight from Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo: Henan Daily

July 20, 2019

Scientists declare Masai giraffes “Endangered” – “We have to regulate the international giraffe trade or risk losing one of our planet’s most remarkable animals”

WASHINGTON, 11 July 2019 (Center for Biological Diversity) – Highlighting the need for global action to fight giraffes’ silent extinction, a body of scientific experts today declared giraffes in Kenya and Tanzania — called Masai giraffes — endangered. Masai giraffes, one of nine giraffe subspecies, had long been considered a key population for the species. But […]

Aerial view of a cattle ranch in Cumaru do Norte, in the interior of the state of Pará. Photo: Eduardo Anizelli / Folhapress

July 7, 2019

Amazon deforestation in June 2019 is 57 percent higher than in the same month of 2018

3 July 2019 (Folha de São Paulo) – Deforestation in the Amazon in June was about 57% higher than in the same month last year, according to DETER, the deforestation alert system of the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). [Translation by Google.] The data from last month, for the time being, only go until […]

X-ray showing pellets lodged in the body of an orangutan who was shot 74 times with pellets by villagers and blinded. Photo: Bryan Denton / The New York Times

July 5, 2019

One casualty of the palm oil industry: An orangutan mother, shot 74 times

By Hannah Beech 29 June 2019 BUNGA TANJUNG, Indonesia (The New York Times) – The men came at Hope and her baby with spears and guns. But she would not leave. There was no place for her to go. When the air-gun pellets pierced Hope’s eyes, blinding her, she felt her way up the tree […]

Environmentalist José Luis Álvarez Flores, an activist who fought to conserve wildlife, was found murdered between the borders of Tabasco and Chiapas on 11 June 2019. Photo: Reforma

June 12, 2019

Environmental activist who fought illegal mining murdered in Chiapas – “This is abominable, he was a nice person, his fault was to fight against the illegal extraction of sand”

11 June 2019 (Mexico News Daily) — An environmental activist from Tabasco who worked to preserve the habitat of howler monkeys was found dead yesterday in Chiapas. The body of José Luis Álvarez Flores was found in Calatraba, a community in the municipality of Palenque. The 64-year-old was reportedly shot at least five times. Álvarez […]

Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro talks to journalists. Photo: Brazil’s Presidency / Flickr Commons

June 11, 2019

Brazil guts environmental agencies, clears way for unchecked deforestation – “If before, staff were already being attacked by loggers, imagine what it is like with the president’s endorsement of the criminals”

By Sue Branford and Thais Borges 10 June 2019 (Mongabay) – The Brazilian government’s environmental agency, IBAMA, has so far this year imposed the lowest number of fines for illegal deforestation in at least 11 years, while the country’s other leading environmental agency and its federal parks’ protector, ICMBio (the Chico Mendes Institute), did not […]

June 9, 2019

China’s 60 years of environmental destruction in Tibet – “Now the rivers are polluted with poisonous waste from the mines”

By Zamlha Tempa Gyaltsen 4 April 2019 (Central Tibetan Administration) – China’s latest white paper on Tibet, once again highlights Beijing’s absolute lack of understanding of Tibet’s History and its unwillingness to read beyond government documents. The paper “Democratic Reform in Tibet – Sixty Years On,” was released on 27 March 2019 to mark the […]