Fewer than 35,000 African lions roam the wild today, down from at least 100,000 in the 1960s. Their range has contracted as well, and currently encompasses only 20 percent of their former territory.

The response from the mainline conservation and animal rights communities has been predictable, and is...

A blog is hardly the most felicitous venue for an obituary, but I'm compelled to make an exception for Rich Stallcup, the co-founder of the Point Reyes Bird Observatory (known these days as PRBO Conservation Science). Stallcup, one of the great ornithologists of his generation, died in December...

The Sandy Hook atrocity has left an abiding shadow in my brain, occluding any bright and optimistic thought that might otherwise assert itself. Time, so far, has not been ameliorative. I know I'm not alone in this; tens of millions Americans feel the same way. I can't -- we can't...

As noted by Emma Marris in a recent (and amusing) blog, it's now in vogue for the hip and tragically beautiful to hunt. The change, apparently, is driven by the locavore and foraging movements. After decades of decline, hunting license applications jumped almost 10 percent between...

A recent statement to the California Fish and Game Commission drafted by Audubon California, Earthjustice and Oceana sounded alarms over declining Pacific herring stocks in near shore California waters. The paper also decried declines in two other small marine...

The holocaust of the African rhinoceros is accelerating, with the very real possibility that both the continent's species -- white and black rhinos -- could be extinct outside zoos in a matter of years. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were several hundred thousand...

Though it contains no new revelations, "Greed and Debt," an article in the latest issue of Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi, is a superior exercise in explanatory journalism. Taibbi elucidates just how Mitt Romney mastered the dark art of the leveraged buy-out, employing massive debt to fund corporate...

Was California Gov. Jerry Brown a Manchurian Candidate for California's water buffaloes (promoters of hugely expensive and environmentally destructive water projects)? Kind of looks that way. Brown ran on a moderate platform that included a rational water policy. He promised to "fix" the broken Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta, restore...

Manila, the Republic of the Philippines

The Filipino people are no strangers to suffering, and recent headlines in Manila's newspapers indicate this won't change anytime soon. China is threatening to seize a group of islands long considered sovereign Philippine territory. Last week, Typhoon Gener lashed...

Camarines Sur, The Republic of the Philippines -- The monsoons have arrived here in Camarines Sur, a land of lush verdure, dangerous volcanoes, and almost excruciating beauty. On the small farm owned by my wife's family, the paddies are being planted with rice seedlings, each blade stuck into the black,...

Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Arizona's Maricopa County, styles himself as "America's toughest sheriff"; in reality, he's a Foghorn Leghorn caricature, more obsessed with illegal immigrants hiding under his bed and Barack Obama's citizenship than street crime.

Sheriff Jon Lopey of California's Siskiyou County...

Jon Stewart ran a typically risible segment last week about a distinctly unfunny story: the discovery of a two-headed trout in an Idaho watershed, the result of selenium contamination from phosphate mining operations by the J.R. Simplot Co. The bit reprises, in a far funnier way, an earlier...

California Governor Jerry Brown is angling for a variance on the state's landmark environmental
protection law to push through a project cherished by environmentalists. But the move isn't just an attempt to rob Green Peter to pay Greener Paul; it also establishes a terrible precedent, one that will allow...