This January, a group of California activists gathered around the base of gnarled ponderosa pine, planning to stand arm-in-arm before bulldozers if necessary. The tree in question was the site of a bald eagle nest. It was also earmarked for destruction. The deal was this: If eagles didn’t arrive at the pine by mid-January—the time [...]
For East Coasters, finding large swaths of untouched wilderness is hard enough as it is. A newly revived pipeline project could make it even harder. Intended to ferry natural gas from Northern West Virginia to Southern Virginia, the 300-mile-long Mountain Valley Pipeline was first proposed in 2015. Since then, conservation nonprofits and local recreationists have [...]
The Australian northern quoll has an alarmingly short lifespan. According to new research, the reason might be an all-consuming obsession with sex. Male northern quolls, which are house cat-sized marsupials endemic to Australia, tend to die after a single breeding season, whereas females can live for four years or longer in the wild. For years, [...]
Colossal Biosciences, a U.S.-based gene editing company, has just announced an ambitious new plan to “de-extinct” the dodo. Dodoes—three-foot-tall flightless birds that once thrived on the African island Mauritius—went extinct sometime in the 17th century. According to even the most optimistic scientific models, they died out for good around 1690, shortly after European settlers arrived [...]
After two decades of intense legal battle, 9.4 million acres of the nation’s largest national forest—the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska—will be protected from deforestation for good. The Biden Administration’s ruling, announced on January 25, repealed a Trump-era decision to reopen part of the Tongass to logging and road development. Conservation advocates, recreationists, and [...]
The hole in the ozone layer, which shocked humanity when it was first discovered 40 years ago, is now on track to heal completely—and soon. According to a new United Nations report, the vast majority of the earth’s ozone layer should be healed by 2040. That excludes areas over the poles, which are recovering at [...]
