Who Defends the Defenders? UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders MICHEL FORST

Who Defends the Defenders? UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders MICHEL FORST

/

UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders MICHEL FORST on Protecting Environmental Activists

My mandate focuses on the protection of those trying to protect the planet. Protection of defenders is my main topic. When I'm speaking to states or companies, it's always related to cases of defenders facing threats, attacks, or penalization by companies or governments, like the recent case of Paul Watson (founder of Sea Shepherd) in Denmark… When I travel to places like Peru, Colombia, or Honduras and meet Indigenous people, I realize they have a relationship with nature that we don't have anymore. They express that the food they eat, the water they drink, and the air they breathe goes beyond just air and food; it represents what they call Pachamama or Mother Earth. This is a cosmovision shared across various communities, not only in Latin America but globally.

Voices of the Earth: Reflections on Nature, Humanity & Climate Change

Voices of the Earth: Reflections on Nature, Humanity & Climate Change

/

Environmentalists, writers, artists, activists, and public policy makers explore the interconnectedness of living beings and ecosystems. They highlight the importance of conservation, promote climate education, advocate for sustainable development, and underscore the vital role of creative and educational communities in driving positive change. Music courtesy of composer Max Richter.

What can turtles teach us about time, patience & wisdom? - Author SY MONTGOMERY & Illustrator MATT PATTERSON

What can turtles teach us about time, patience & wisdom? - Author SY MONTGOMERY & Illustrator MATT PATTERSON

/

Author | Illustrator

I did know that I wanted this book about turtles to also be about time. It's one of two big questions in philosophy. The one big mystery that I had tackled in a previous book, Soul of an Octopus, was the mystery of consciousness. The other big hard problem in philosophy is time. And I felt, you know, who better to lead me in this exploration than turtles, who live in some cases for centuries, who've been around...they arose with dinosaurs, yet they survived the asteroid impact. They are the embodiment of patience and wisdom.

Reshaping Our World: Climate Change, Education, Mental Health & Advocacy for Nature

Reshaping Our World: Climate Change, Education, Mental Health & Advocacy for Nature

/

Climate Change, Education, Mental Health & Advocacy for Nature

Climate change gives us a chance to re-imagine the world in a way that every single human being can participate in. And so whether you're in a remote part of the United States or some other country, when you learn about climate change, it shouldn't just be the science. It should be the opportunity. –Kathleen Rogers, President of EarthDay·ORG

Songs of Nature - Musicians, Writers, Ecologists, Philosophers on the Mysteries of the Natural World

Songs of Nature - Musicians, Writers, Ecologists, Philosophers on the Mysteries of the Natural World

/

The natural world has its own sonic language. Its own fingerprints. And that's one of the beautiful things about being out here. There is another acoustic environment, another sort of sonic fingerprint, and it is always changing. Every day is a sort of a different sound picture. I walk out the door and you do hear it changing over time. The leaves are coming in now, different kinds of bird song. The wind sounds different. Tt's a wonderful thing to be around and experience.
—Max Richter

Special World Environment Day Stories - Environmentalists, Students & Teachers share their Love for the Planet

Special World Environment Day Stories - Environmentalists, Students & Teachers share their Love for the Planet

/

Environmentalists, Artists, Students & Teachers share their Love for the Planet

Today we’re streaming voices of environmentalists, artists, students, and teachers with music courtesy of composer Max Richter.

RACHEL ASHEGBOFEH IKEMEH - Whitley Award-winning Conservationist - Founder/Director, Southwest Niger Delta Forest Project

RACHEL ASHEGBOFEH IKEMEH - Whitley Award-winning Conservationist - Founder/Director, Southwest Niger Delta Forest Project

/

Whitley Award-winning Conservationist
Founder/Director of the Southwest Niger Delta Forest Project

There's no question, we are in a state of conservation emergency. And we have a real situation on our hands and it's so fragile that if we take a step back, we could say goodbye to two types of chimpanzee species and the forest is also on the brink of disappearing forever. And when I started as a conservation researcher, there was kidnapping and insecurity throughout the Nile Delta region, and it was immersed in a lot of oil politics and civil conflicts. Kidnapping and insecurity ran throughout that region. Let's not forget that Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation now. We are over 200 million people in the country, and it's a growing population of young people who are looking for means of livelihood and on the lookout to find space to live. So parts of the forest within one year would suddenly become a new village.

We All Live on One Planet We Call Home - Part 4 - Environmentalists, Economists, Policymakers & Architects Share their Stories

We All Live on One Planet We Call Home - Part 4 - Environmentalists, Economists, Policymakers & Architects Share their Stories

/

Environmentalists, Artists, Students & Teachers share their Love for the Planet

Today we’re streaming voices of environmentalists, artists, students, and teachers with music courtesy of composer Max Richter.

What Kind of World Are We Leaving for Future Generations? - Part 3 - Activists, Environmentalists & Teachers Share their Stories

What Kind of World Are We Leaving for Future Generations? - Part 3 - Activists, Environmentalists & Teachers Share their Stories

/

Environmentalists, Artists, Students & Teachers share their Love for the Planet

Today we’re streaming voices of environmentalists, artists, students, and teachers with music courtesy of composer Max Richter.

Earth Month Stories - Part 2 - Environmentalists, Artists, Students & Teachers Speak Out & Share How We Can Save the Planet

Earth Month Stories - Part 2 - Environmentalists, Artists, Students & Teachers Speak Out & Share How We Can Save the Planet

/

Environmentalists, Artists, Students & Teachers share their Love for the Planet

Today we’re streaming voices of environmentalists, artists, students, and teachers with music courtesy of composer Max Richter.

MARK BURGMAN - Author of “Trusting Judgments: How to Get the Best Out of Experts”

MARK BURGMAN - Author of “Trusting Judgments: How to Get the Best Out of Experts”

/

Director of the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London · Editor-in-Chief of Conservation Biology

Author of Trusting Judgments: How to Get the Best Out of Experts

The idea of expertise and expert judgment has been around and has been something that society depends upon for a long time, but there have been no serious empirical explorations of who's an expert, what a domain of expertise is, and what sort of frailties are experts susceptible to. Those things haven't been addressed in an empirical way until the last 30 years. Some of this work began in the fifties with Kahneman and Tversky. They began to explore the things that make people misjudge risky situations, and that led to a body of research on who makes good judgments and under what circumstances for things that might affect us in various ways.

Kent Redford - Co-author of "Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology”

Kent Redford - Co-author of "Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology”

/

Co-author of Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology
Principal at Archipelago Consulting · Former VP for Conservation Science & Strategy, Wildlife Conservation Society

The field of synthetic biology, which is known by some as extreme genetic engineering – that's a name mostly used by people who don't like it. It amounts to a set of tools that humans have developed to be able to very precisely and accurately change the genetic code, the DNA of living organisms in order to get those organisms to do things that humans want. So the applications in medicine are predominantly devoted to trying to make us healthier people, and they range from some really exciting work on tumor biology to work on the microbiome, which is all of the thousands and tens of thousands of species that live on our lips, our mouths, our guts, our skin. And in agriculture, it's primarily directed at crop genetics, trying to improve the productivity of crops, the nutritional value of crops, the ability of crops to respond to climate change, and a whole variety of other things. Some people may have heard of one of these tools called CRISPR used to very precisely alter the sequences of DNA.

Stuart Pimm · Expert in Study of Present-Day Extinctions · Founder/Dir. Saving Nature

Stuart Pimm · Expert in Study of Present-Day Extinctions · Founder/Dir. Saving Nature

/

Global Leader in the Study of Present-Day Extinctions & Biodiversity
Founder & Director of Saving Nature

It's a complicated issue. I think a lot of those bird disappearances come from the fact that we have massively intensified our agriculture. Large areas of North America and Europe are now under intense agriculture. They are sprayed with a whole variety of pesticides, which I think is also responsible for the fact that many insects have disappeared, so species that depend on farmland have clearly declined dramatically, but it isn't all birds and there is a piece of this complicated story that involves water birds. Herons and egrets and ducks. Those species both in North America and Europe, are now much more common than they were 30, or 40 years ago. That comes from active conservation of protecting wetlands, making sure we don't shoot our wetland birds. So it’s not all doom and gloom. There are some success stories. There are many things we can do. I think 50 years ago, there were only something like 300 bald eagles in the lower 48 states. Bald eagles are now nesting in every state apart from Hawaii. Our conservation efforts have done a great job.

AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL

AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL

/

Poet & Author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments

I think something happened in 2016, where I just snapped. There was a lot of a hateful news going around with American politics, and I didn’t know how to answer a lot of my kids questions then. Something I know I can do is to tell them things that I loved about this planet or things that I loved in other people because all they saw or heard about was just this weird ugliness, school shootings, leaders who were saying ‘build that wall’ to anybody who looked different than them, and so I remember the night I shut myself up in my office after the kids went to bed and just started writing about plants and animals that I loved from my childhood.