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SHIPYARD, Belize — Mennonite families in Belize are preparing to move to Suriname to establish massive farming communities in a heavily forested area, multiple sources told Mongabay, raising concerns that they may soon be cutting down trees to grow crops. The deal could cost millions of dollars and cover more land than the U.S. city […]

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has already ordered the closure of the Bartlett Experimental Forest. Hubbard Brook is now in the agency’s sights. The USDA’s recent decision to evaluate the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest for facility reduction has prompted a necessary and swift defense of science funding from lawmakers, including Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. But for […]

‘I have to keep living like this’: Chiang Mai residents struggle to make ends meet amid pollution In recent weeks, Thailand’s Chiang Mai Province has been engulfed in toxic air pollution, which has reached dangerous levels.  Residents have been forced to live with the smog, as well as unprecedented scorching weather this summer.While people have been advised to stay indoors, many still have to make ends meet. Stopping work means no money to feed themselves and their families. “I am also afraid of PM2.5 entering my body, but I can’t do anything. I have to keep living like this.” said a 40-year-old food stall owner.  Here’s how the bad air is affecting Chiang Mai residents.Food delivery rider from Doi PuiAs a food delivery rider, 45-year-old Chatri has to spend most of his time outdoors. His schedule runs from 9 a.m. until midnight to support his three children.Severe pollution has made it difficult for him to drive, as it irritates his eyes. Wearing a face mask made it harder to breathe in the hot weather. He also adds that he sometimes has a runny nose and a dry cough.Chatri stressed that he faces this situation every year, but if the rain comes early, the condition improves. He added that he tried to work out, hoping that it would help protect him from the toxic pollution.The rider, who is Hmong and from Doi Pui, noted that he returns to his hometown every year to help build firebreaks to prevent wildfires, a key factor contributing to pollution in Thailand’s northern region.He remarked that the villages on Doi Pui have also been affected by PM2.5 pollution, just like people in the lowlands, but the difference is that the air up there is cooler. Having been a food delivery driver in the city for five years, Chatri has faced accusations that people living in the mountains are responsible for forest burning.When asked if he could stop working to avoid the toxic pollution and protect his health, he replied, “I can’t. This is my income. Some days my gout flares up, and my arms and legs are in pain, but I still have to go out to drive.”He added that his two children depend on him financially, and his eldest child is going to graduate from university.Lottery seller at Warorot MarketToi, a lottery ticket seller at Warorot Market, usually arrives at 8.00 a.m. and works until 4.00 p.m. She relies on a portable fan to get through days of scorching weather and severe pollution.Toi said she wears a face mask all the time, removing it only to eat. “Sometimes I wear glasses, and when I get home I rinse my eyes. It’s like this every year, but this year seems worse, as It’s hotter too. Normally it’s not this hot at this time, but now it’s very hot and there’s lots of dust.”Without the portable fan she brings from home, it would be almost impossible to sit and sell lottery tickets amid the intense heat. Each day, she has to prepare five batteries for the fan, and for today, she has already replaced three.Typically, Toi would spend time selling a lottery tickets till 5 or 6 p.m,, but the harsh conditions now force her to go home by 4 p.m.When asked whether she could use some other way to sell lottery tickets or temporarily stop working outdoors, Toi revealed that she reduced her working days, choosing to sell only on the days closer to the draw date. She then takes a 4–5 day break.She noted that since this latest wave of severe pollution hit Chiang Mai, no officials or state agencies have come to check on or distribute masks to outdoor workers. “No one (official) has come to ask anything. I used face masks I bought in previous years. There’s been no campaign, nothing at all. The only thing is the phone alerts (SMS warnings).”When asked what she would like the government and authorities to do, she said the problem may be difficult to fix, as burning happens every year and the smog only goes away when the rain comes. Still, she hoped the pollution could at least be less severe.Food vendorSuphani, a 56-year-old vendor who sells steamed meatballs at a tourist attraction in Chiang Mai, said she works daily from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m., despite the smog. For her, taking a break is not an option. Suphani is affected not only by the toxic pollution but also by the rising cost-of-living and increasing ingredient prices due to the fuel crisis.The food vendor disclosed that she rarely wears a face mask, given that she is already exposed to heat from the stove and the scorching weather. Wearing a face mask could make it more uncomfortable for her. Wen she gets home, she has to rinse her eyes and nose to remove blackish residues.“This year seems bad. Actually, it gets bad every year, but this year, I can’t even see the mountain,” said Suphani.She recounted that two days ago, while she was boiling glass noodles, black ash from burning floated into the pot in front of her and her customers. She had to throw the boiled noodles away.The 56-year-old said she didn’t expect the government to solve the problem completely, but believed the authorities should at least distribute face masks, especially to those struggling to make ends meet.When asked whether she was worried about the potential long-term health effects resulting from PM2.5, she said, “What can I do?. I have to make a living. I can’t stop. This is my livelihood.” Street vendor selling soy milk40-year-old Niyom runs a soy milk stall behind Chiang Mai University, setting up his cart at noon and working until 8 p.m. Being exposed to the smog for hours, he sometimes experiences irritation in his eyes.Niyom chooses not to wear a face mask since it’s difficult for him to breathe during this scorching summer. Despite concerns about PM2.5, he accepted the reality that he has to live with it.The economic downturn has reduced his sales, and pollution has made things worse. He can’t stop working just to avoid the smog.Like others, he was pessimistic about the government’s efforts to address the pollution, saying that the government has been dealing with the pollution for years, and it has made no difference.Shoe repair shop ownersUncle Sak and Auntie Bualoi run a small shoe repair shop at Warorot Market. They open the shop from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. without a day off.Neither of them wear face masks. Sak admits that he has never worn one. He is aware of the pollution, but he said he has never experienced noticeable health effects from the smog.For them, economic survival outweighs the consequences of toxic pollution. eng editor 3 Wed, 2026-04-08 - 10:50 Feature Chiang mai PM2.5 Air pollution Quality of life

In recent years, we have seen clear signs that the global market for forest and nature-based carbon credits is gaining momentum. More and more companies and governments are turning to forests as part of their climate strategies, and analysts expect this trend to continue as demand grows for solutions that deliver real and verifiable benefits for the […]

In revisiting her relationship with her mother, Roy shows how intimacy, violence, and love forged the sensibility behind her uncompromising political life.45 RPM single of The Beatles' "Let It Be." Image credit PHLD Luca via Shutterstock.comIn Mother Mary Comes To Me we learn that Arundhati Roy, the very same woman who spent time with Naxalite guerrillas in the Dandakaranya forest, the one who was called an “intellectual terrorist” and refused to be intimidated by India’s far-right nationalist government, is someone who grew up belittling herself, and who would a thousand times choose to disappear than cause any discomfort to her mother, her “shelter and [her] storm.” The memoir starts with her mother’s passing and takes readers through two sides of Roy that are equally true: the hypervisible and the invisible. Readers will soon realize that there wouldn’t be a Booker Prize-winner Arundhati Roy (who simply cannot not write sometimes) if she hadn’t learned about subjugation and irrational love first-hand. Roy’s mother, Mary (or Mrs. Roy, as she demanded to be addressed), was a teacher who raised her and her brother, LKC, alone, founded a secular school in Kottayam, and famously won a Supreme Court case for equal inheritance rights for Christian women in Kerala. During her upbringing, Mrs Roy subjected Arundhati and LKC to all sorts of violent treatment: public humiliation, cruel confessions, punishments, beatings, you name it. Loved and feared by her students, the phrase “walking on eggshells” falls short of describing the effect this woman had on others. On bad days, she would call Arundhati a “bitch,” a “millstone around her neck,” and remind her she had wanted to abort her with a wire hanger. But things aren’t always clear-cut, and Mrs. Roy also encouraged free writing and provided an education and a platform for her “baby girl” to be prepared for the world. Mrs. Roy had herself a story of abuse with her father, but that was something she would never dwell on. Through the mere observation of her mother, Arundhati learned that a woman in India could build her dreams brick by brick—quite literally in the case of Mrs. Roy, who expanded her school campus by “[m]aking people offers they couldn’t refuse.” Notably, the author does not once describe her mother as abusive, giving us a clue to her unresolved feelings toward her. As if she were still trying to wrap her head around the context and pain behind her mother’s cruelty and eclectic entrepreneurship, Roy intentionally avoids cataloging her in a one-dimensional way. The memoir’s title, the famous line from The Beatles’ song “Let it Be” is somewhat puzzling at first, as whoever has read Arundhati’s non-fiction work (think Walking with The Comrades or Azadi) knows she is not the type of writer who can “let it be.” Readers will quickly figure out that Mrs. Roy also isn’t, something preempted in the memoir’s dedication that reads “For LKC Together we made it to the shore. For Mary Roy Who never said Let It Be.” The Beatles are actually present throughout the book. Starting when Arundhati listened to “She’s leaving home” on repeat while deciding she wouldn’t be returning to her hometown any time soon, followed by when a friend gifted her the color negatives of Yellow Submarine (1968), and even when she describes falling in love with who would be the love of her life Pradip Krishen, highlighting “he knew the Beatles backwards.” This recurring mention does more than situate Arundhati’s teenage years and early 20s in a global cultural context; it locates her looking toward the West as a sort of respite, similarly as she did with Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and others. Like many other thousands worldwide, Arundhati’s rebellion against mainstream political paradigms and first experiences of love all had a Beatles soundtrack. Many know about Roy’s fiction and non-fiction writing, and of her political battles in India, but it was a wonderful surprise to learn about her background in architecture and film. After reading the memoir, I watched the 1989 movie In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, directed and produced by Kirshen, and written by Roy, where Arundhati is also one of the protagonists. The film follows a group of architecture students who are preparing their final theses while smoking, listening to music, pulling all-nighters and keeping a light-hearted attitude toward life in general, making it incredibly popular among students in India at the time. Watching Arundhati play the defiant, fun, and effortlessly seductive Radha gives a vivid image of what the author describes in the book about her own experience as an architecture student in the 1970s in New Delhi. Toward the end of the film, Radha presents her final project, a post-colonial take on how architects keep “non-citizens” in New Delhi at bay. This was Roy’s own architecture graduate thesis, included in the film’s screenplay. “It’s a way of establishing territory, you know. Like animals,” says Radha while critiquing the city’s segregation in her presentation to the jury. Shot at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, the film references several of the Beatles’ songs, too. (A restored version of the film was screened earlier this year at the Berlinale, where Arundhati quit the jury because of disagreements with other members about Palestine and the political role of films.) One of the key revelations of this book, and perhaps the most personal, is how the author struggles to stay in places that have brought her joy. This is something particularly evident in her love life; in her relationship with filmmaker-turned-environmentalist Krishen, and previously with her first boyfriend, “JC.” At times, what appears to be an inevitable self-inflicted heartbreak was a response to her being unsettled with the comforts that come with class or certain cultural expectations with being a woman in India; either way, things too big to ignore. Like when Krishen inherited his parents’ house and swiftly began to give instructions to the domestic staff, a role she couldn’t get herself into and something that made her judge him and his daughters harshly. But readers might be left thinking if this insistence on a principle-led life is the real reason why she couldn’t choose love, or if it is because of something deeper—an incapacity to depend on someone or a sort of mirror of her mother’s way of doing life on her own. Arundhati painfully writes: “like a suicide bomber, I had blown myself to smithereens, too. My life. My home.” As the book progresses, it becomes clear that Roy’s empathy toward others often caused her to downplay her own life circumstances and difficulties. These included all sorts of hardships: like when her mother, brother and herself had nowhere to live and were undernourished, or when she had to silently witness her mother call her brother a “chauvinist pig” and beat him up because he hadn’t done well at school, when she was harassed on trains, followed when cycling in Delhi, and when she unfairly had to go to jail. To this day, Arundhati sustains that her own sufferings are irrelevant compared to the bulldozed homes, the sterilization of Muslim communities, the public lynchings carried out by Hindu nationalist mobs, and the ever-present caste system and its respective ruling on who is pure and who is not. And this is perhaps a key to understanding her walking away from romantic love and making her own feelings look unimportant in the greater scheme of things. She writes: “I have seen and written about such sorrow, such systemic deprivation, such unmitigated wickedness, such diverse iterations of hell, that I can only count myself amongst the most fortunate. I have thought of my own life as a footnote to the things that really matter. Never tragic, often hilarious.” After 9/11, the US’s war in Afghanistan, and the Islamophobia it manufactured, served Hindu nationalism well. With this came more antagonism to Roy’s writing, which had turned away from fiction and into politics directly. Her famous essay “The Algebra of Infinite Justice” (2001), where she asked, “How many dead Afghans for every dead American? How many dead women and children for every dead man? How many dead mojahedin for each dead investment banker?” fueled Indian media and made her an easy target for public hate. A year later, the Indian Supreme Court found her guilty of criminal contempt for her writings on the Narmada Valley dam project. Although Mrs. Roy sometimes resented her daughter for her fame, she supported Arundhati’s political writings in her own way: by subscribing to Frontline and Outlook magazines and inviting her to speak to her students. But, the persecution against Roy got more and more violent, from people finding out where she lived to op-eds explicitly asking for her death. Arundhati’s courage became a fixture in how she presented to the world, something very different to the sorrow and loneliness she often experienced behind closed doors. I still wonder if the isolation she sometimes chose was a measure to protect her loved ones, or because she couldn’t accept the guilt of stepping out of the role she had created for herself as a sacrificed, politically committed writer. Through it all, the option of becoming an intellectual critiquing India from afar wasn’t really a possibility for her: “[t]he more I was hounded as an anti-national, the surer I was that India was the place I loved, the place to which I belonged. Where else could I be the hooligan that I was becoming? Where else would I find co-hooligans I so admired? And who among us supposed equals had the right to decide what was ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ national?” I think it would be a mistake to say that Mother Mary Comes To Me is about motherhood. I would much rather say it is about how Roy’s mother, alongside other people she loved, marked the author’s way of seeing and navigating the world in ways she can only fully understand now by looking back. By bringing both sides of Roy to the light and making them co-constitutive, the book dismantles the division between the courageous writer and the fearful girl, allowing readers to understand how this writer came to be, and at what cost. The author describes the politics of the different places in India she moves through and shares what those places mean to her, inviting readers to come closer, which is, of course, the key to any good memoir. It is through this closeness that Roy generates that we can locate her most intimate feelings geographically and emotionally. If The Beatles served as a soundtrack for Arundhati Roy’s youth, it is safe to say she has come full circle by titling her memoir after “Let It Be.” When I searched the author’s age and found out she is 64, I remembered the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty Four” lyrics that very aptly say: “Send me a postcard, drop me a line, stating point of view. Indicate precisely what you mean to say, yours sincerely, wasting away.” At a risk of being too literal here, I believe that it is because of how Roy states her point of view in all of its complexity and range of emotion in Mother Mary Comes To Me that she can let go of the sorrow involved in caring so much about politics in India (and elsewhere). This is not to say that I think she will stop writing or speaking about the injustices she feels for, as I doubt that will ever be the case (a few weeks ago, she spoke about the US and Israel’s war on Iran). What I mean is that this book, alongside the grieving and emotional labor it must have entailed, might very well be what allows Roy to return to the curiosity, tenderness, and freedom so well captured in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. And by doing so, claim a childhood innocence she never had, but one she can still imagine. Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy (2025) is available from Hamish Hamilton.

The world’s forests are simultaneously climate powerhouses and victims, sucking carbon from the air while facing myriad global warming impacts—from wildfires to pest outbreaks.  Recent research found that climate change is already driving widespread disturbances in European forests and, by the end of the century, will likely transform the landscapes that communities depend on.  My […]

In the southern tip of Colombia’s Cauca department, known as the “boot” for its shoe-like shape, volunteer members of an Indigenous guard patrol their territories in the Andean foothills to protect them from invasion and deforestation. The municipality of Piamonte, which covers most of the boot, suffered the highest loss of forest cover in Cauca […]

The Meethotamulla garbage dump, which collapsed on April 14, 2017 killing 32 people, looks almost like a forest now. People in the area have even used the hill to build replicas of... The post The Meethotamulla Judgment and What it Really Means first appeared on Groundviews.

Conservationists have captured the first camera trap images of the highly elusive Pemba blue duiker, a tiny antelope that lives in a remnant of native forest in the north of Zanzibar’s Pemba Island. Standing just 30 centimeters (12 inches) high at the shoulder, the Pemba blue duiker is possibly a subspecies of the blue duiker […]

Protect the Adirondacks offers a response to an Adirondack Almanack piece about how to use certain parts of the Forest Preserve

In spring and summer, the canopies of oak and beech forest gather into layers of green. Leaves flicker, shaping the flow of light and air. The effect is almost effortless, a shaded world held in balance. But as heatwaves and droughts, that balance is starting to slip, and the first signs of stress often first […]

One of the most widespread types of forest in Australia’s high country is facing an existential threat. We need bold action before it is too late.

The National Green Tribunal (NGT) stayed a recent Assam government order directing the deployment of about 1,600 personnel from the Assam Forest Protection Force (AFPF) for election duty ahead of April 9 state assembly polls. On March 19, an order from the state’s Environment, Forest and Climate Change Department directed forest personnel to assist the […]

Plus: St. Paul police arrest anti-ICE protestor outside church; Dinkytown vigilante speaks; two MN National Forest research stations closing. The post New video contradicts federal agents’ account of North Minneapolis ICE shooting appeared first on MinnPost.

BAYANGA, Central African Republic — Throughout most of Central Africa, it’s difficult to spot herds of forest elephants all at once. They move through dense rainforest, remaining elusive, their lives obscured by thick vegetation and distance. For tourists and even researchers, direct encounters are largely a matter of chance. But Dzanga Bai is different. Often […]

Saratoga PLAN would like to construct a parking lot and trail as part of the existing Graphite Range Community Forest

Indigenous people from across Brazil began arriving in Brasília this Sunday (Apr. 5) to participate in the 22nd edition of the Free Land Camp (ATL 2026). Organized by the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB ), the event runs through Saturday (11) and is considered the country’s largest and most important mobilization of the indigenous movement. According to the organizers, between 7,000 and 8,000 people, both indigenous and non-indigenous, are expected to participate this year. Notícias relacionadas:Brazilian biomes are better preserved in indigenous territories.COP30: Indigenous peoples demand stronger forest protection.The ATL typically brings together representatives of most of Brazil’s 391 Indigenous peoples, as well as delegates from other countries, to discuss the defense of territories and denounce violations of indigenous rights. In recent years, the agenda has expanded, and the event has also come to include discussions on indigenous political and electoral participation, the climate crisis, and the defense of democracy. However, the central focus of the discussions remains the need for the Brazilian state to recognize indigenous peoples’ right to land. “As we do every year, we are waiting for the Brazilian government to announce the creation of new indigenous lands,” APIB  Executive Coordinator Dinamam Tuxá told Agência Brasil. According to him, after a four-year period (2019–2022) during which no new indigenous lands were established, the Brazilian government approved 20 new territories between January 2023 and November 2025. According to the national indigenous authority Funai), this amounts to approximately 2.5 million hectares of protected land across 11 Brazilian states. “But we continue this struggle, this fight for territorial guarantees,” Tuxá added, noting that about 110 claimed indigenous land areas are currently under review. “We face a very large backlog of demarcations and a situation of widespread violence and vulnerability on indigenous lands that no government has been able to overcome. This has been a motivating factor for indigenous peoples to come to Brasília and present our demands,” emphasized the APIB  coordinator. Mobilization The ATL also marks the beginning of what is known as Indigenous April, a month of nationwide mobilization during which the movement seeks to draw attention to other issues, such as the need for greater investment in indigenous health and education. This year’s theme is “Our future is not for sale: we are the answer.” “We are promoting a broad debate on various topics, such as education, health, and international relations with indigenous peoples from other countries - in short, a range of public policies,” Tuxá noted, confirming that the traditional marches along the Ministries Esplanade will take place. The first march is scheduled for next Tuesday (7) in protest against proposed legislation that, according to APIB, runs counter to the interests of indigenous peoples, such as authorizing mining on indigenous lands or establishing the so-called “temporal framework” - a legal doctrine under which indigenous peoples are entitled only to the territories they occupied in October 1988, when the Federal Constitution was enacted. Elections The 2026 elections will also be a focus of some of the main debates at the Free Land Camp, including the one scheduled for Thursday (9), “Indigenous Campaign: We Are the Answer to Transforming Politics” - the title of the manifesto that APIB published last year, reaffirming its commitment to continuing the initiative to strengthen indigenous political participation, launched a few years ago. “We will launch the Indigenous Campaign, an initiative aimed at guiding the candidacies put forward by a coalition of parties allied with the indigenous movement. We will advise interested indigenous people to join these parties that have defended our rights. And, throughout the year, we will promote actions to strengthen these indigenous candidacies in order to ensure greater [indigenous] representation in Congress,” Tuxá said.

It may be a surprise to learn that Kentucky was once known as “the Black Bear State.” Biologists suggest that in the early 1800s, Eastern Kentucky’s rich forests likely supported the largest black bear population in North America. When it was settled later that century by Daniel Boone and other market hunters and trappers, the […]

BAYANGA, Central African Republic — Before the consultations, screenings and discreet discussions about disease, a makeshift enclosure is set up in the middle of the village, where residents gradually gather to the sound of music playing — at first they are curious, then attentive. Here, in the heart of the forests of southwestern Central African […]

The United States Department of Agriculture recently announced in a press release the relocation of the US Forest Service headquarters to Salt Lake City. Along with this announcement, the USDA released information regarding a “sweeping” restructuring of the Forest Service. A spokesperson for the Los Padres Forest Association told the News-Press that there would be […] The post Los Padres Forest Service offices and staffing unchanged following ‘sweeping’ restructuring appeared first on Santa Barbara News-Press.