Jean-Gaël "JG" Collomb says community-based conservation organizations know best how to tackle the complex conservation challenges unique to their ecosystems. However, they’re also among the most underserved in terms of funding of all stripes. On this week's episode of Mongabay's podcast, Collomb explains how his nonprofit, Wildlife Conservation Network (WCN), is working to change that.

When it comes to funding conservation," it's really difficult to know who to give your money to besides a handful of organizations that a lot of people are familiar with," Collomb says.

WCN facilitates partnerships between community-based conservation groups, primarily in Global South nations with funders, in what has previously been described as “‘venture capital for conservation,” or as Collomb says, “people invest in people.”

They are “the first actors,” he says. “We're huge fans of being able to encourage people to give unrestricted [funding] … those organizations who are based on the ground in the field know best how to use that money.”

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Please send questions, feedback or comments to podcast[at]mongabay[dot]com.

Banner image: Beach on Mioskon Island in Raja Ampat. Photo by Rhett Bulter/Mongabay.

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Timecodes

(00:00) Why community-based conservation?

(09:54) How WCN works

(14:10) The importance of unrestricted funding

(16:48) Transparency & ethics in philanthropy

(19:59) 30x30 and Indigenous sovereignty

(27:08) Scientific advancements

(31:16) Either/or

(35:33) USAID funding cuts

(40:29) Connecting with WCN

This week on Mongabay's podcast, celebrated author and repeat Nobel Prize in Literature candidate Robert Macfarlane discusses his fascinating new book, Is a River Alive?, which both asks and provides answers to this compelling question, in his signature flowing prose.

Its absorbing narrative takes the reader to the frontlines of some of Earth's most embattled waterways, from northern Ecuador to southern India and northeastern Quebec, where he explores what makes a river more than just a body of water, but rather a living organism upon which many humans and myriad species are irrevocably dependent — a fact that is often forgotten.

Regardless of whether humans see rivers as useful resources or living beings, Macfarlane says their great ability to rebound from degradation is demonstrable and is something to strive for.

" When I think of how we have to imagine rivers otherwise, away from the pure resource model, I recognize that we can reverse the direction of 'shifting baseline’ syndrome. We can make it ‘lifting baseline’ syndrome. We can make our rivers touchable, then swimmable, then drinkable again. Drinkable rivers. Imagine that!"

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Please send questions, feedback or comments to podcast[at]mongabay[dot]com.

Banner image: The author Robert Macfarlane. Photo by Bryan Appleyard. Courtesy of Robert Macfarlane.

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Timecodes

(00:00) The liquid asset story

(05:42) The beginning of the ‘hydrocene’

(12:49) Is a river alive?

(20:01) ‘Rights of nature’

(30:02) Landmarks of hope & looming threats

(35:41) ‘Slow violence’

(39:43) ‘A gathering that seeks the sea’

(45:13) Public waterways under private ownership

(48:59) How the Cuyahoga River caught fire

(53:58) Collective health over private wealth

Roughly a billion people enjoy coffee daily, and more than 100 million people rely on it for income. However, the coffee industry is the sixth-largest driver of deforestation and is also rife with human rights abuses, including the labor of enslaved persons and children. But it doesn't have to be this way, says this guest on the Mongabay Newscast.

Etelle Higonnet is the founder of the NGO Coffee Watch, having formerly served as a senior adviser at the U.S. National Wildlife Federation. The main commodity on her radar now is coffee. On this podcast episode, she explains how the industry can — and should — reform its practices.

"It's so simple … pay a living [a] living income wage," she says, " and a lot of human rights violations will just dry up."

To target deforestation, Higonnet says the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) is "a beautiful law" that "simply put, would bar imports of coffee into the European Union if that coffee is tainted by deforestation or illegality. So, two things that are illegal off the top of my head are slavery and child labor."

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Please send questions, feedback or comments to podcast[at]mongabay[dot]com.

Image Credit: A cup of coffee with beans and a teaspoon on a stump tabletop. Image by Anja (cocoparisiene) from Pixabay (Pixabay Content License).

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Timecodes

(00:00) Coffee tied to slavery and deforestation

(07:03) How we can stop it

(12:36) Why are prices soaring?

(19:25) How the EUDR can help

(25:56) When will the EUDR come into effect?

(29:40) Why the coffee supply chain is simple

(33:54) What about certification schemes?

(37:46) What coffee drinkers can do to act

Carlos Zorrilla has been living in an Ecuadorian cloud forest since the 1970s, and his last 30 years there have been spent fighting mining companies seeking to extract its large copper deposits. He and his community have successfully fought such proposals by multiple firms in one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet, but sometimes at great personal risk, he tells Mongabay's podcast.

While his organization, Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag (DECOIN), and allies in the local community notched a major victory against mining there in a 2023 court case, he explains they're still not out of the proverbial woods.

"Every day, I have to think about mining [and] I'm not exaggerating, my life now revolves around mining. Even though we won a case, I know they're going to come back because the copper's there, and there's a lot of demand for copper."

His advice to anyone who wants to protect their community from mining is to go on the offensive, early and aggressively, comparing the strategy to how one might view treating cancer.

"You have to think of it like a cancer, that you need to treat it immediately and you need to look for signs that your body, in this case, your community, is sick,” Zorrilla says.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Please send questions, feedback or comments to podcast[at]mongabay[dot]com.

Banner image: Carlos Zorrilla in the DECOIN office in Apuela, Ecuador. Photo by Romi Castagnino.

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Timecodes

(00:00) A victory for Intag Valley

(07:19) The influence of ‘rights of nature’ laws

(09:57) The return of vulnerable fauna

(15:56) Reprieve is only temporary

(22:02) Mining companies omit important information

(25:07) ‘How to stop’ mining before it starts

(30:52) “Every day, I have to think about mining”

Five years since Kim Stanley Robinson's groundbreaking climate fiction novel, The Ministry for the Future, hit The New York Times bestseller list, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning writer shares reflections on themes explored in the book and how they apply directly to the world today. 

The utopian novel set in a not-so-distant future depicts how humans address climate change and the biodiversity crisis, toppling oligarchic control of governments and addressing chronic inequality. Robinson explains how the novel works as  ”a kind of cognitive map of the way the world is going now, the way things work and the way things might be bettered. And also a sort of sense of hope or resiliency in the face of the reversals that will inevitably come along the way.“

In this conversation, he also explains how storytelling can help humans fight a “war of ideas” and speaks about challenging economic inequities with what he calls “postcapitalism.”

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

For general questions or comments, email us at podcasts[at]mongabay[dot]com.

Image Credit: Screenshot of the book cover for ‘The Ministry for the Future’ by Kim Stanley Robinson, published by Orbit. Cover art by Trevillion Images. Cover design by Lauren Panepinto.

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Timecodes

(00:00) What Stan would change about the book today

(07:56) We’re all ‘in a sci-fi novel we’re co-authoring together’

(13:37) Challenging capitalism with ‘post-capitalism’

(19:43) Is ‘Degrowth’ part of the Ministry for the Future?

(23:45) About Frank

(27:24) The inspiration for Mary Murphy

(30:34) The threat of ‘wet bulb’ 35C temps

(36:37) How to fight a ‘war of ideas’

(42:21) You cannot kill the future

(46:26) Before you read the book…

(49:27) Looking to Antarctica

Nearly half of the Republic of Congo’s dense rainforests are protected under the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) framework to receive climate finance payments, but Mongabay Africa staff writer Elodie Toto’s recent investigation revealed the nation has also granted nearly 80 gold mining and exploration permits in areas covered by the project, driving deforestation and negatively impacting local people and wildlife. As the world scrambles for new sources of gold during these uncertain economic times, she joins the podcast to explain what her Pulitzer Center-supported reporting uncovered:

"It was beyond words, if I may say. I could see people using excavators to uproot trees. I could see them washing the earth and it basically looked [like] a war zone," Toto says on this episode of the podcast.

Toto is also part of Mongabay Africa's team producing a new French-language podcast, Planète Mongabay, and discusses how the program makes environmental news more accessible to audiences who often prefer to get their news via audio or video. Subscribe to or follow theMongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website. Cover image: An excavator digs for gold at the Alangong-Bamegod-Inès mining site in the Sangha. According to environmentalist Justin Chekoua, “nothing seems to be done” to preserve biodiversity at the site. Image by Elodie Toto for Mongabay.

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(00:00) Rainforest given over to gold mining

(10:17) Curious connections & justifications

(17:34) The law of the land

(22:03) In plain sight

(25:33) Planète Mongabay

Carlos Mallo Molina has been awarded the 2025 Goldman Environmental Prize for protecting the marine biodiversity of Tenerife, the most populated of the Canary Islands. On this episode of Mongabay's podcast, Molina explains what led him to quit his job as a civil engineer on a road project impacting the Teno-Rasca marine protected area (MPA) and his subsequent campaign to stop the port project it was planned to connect to, which would have impacted the biodiversity of the area.

His successful campaign contributed to the decision of the Canary Islands government to abandon the port plan.  Now, Molina and his nonprofit Innoceana are helping set up an environmental education center in its place.

"I was going diving every weekend in my free time, and it was full of sea turtles, it was full of whales, it was full of marine life. And so, I think understanding how my impact was going to destroy [a] marine protected area … I think that was where I had my biggest click in my brain … I need to do something to change what I'm doing, in [a] way that I can protect this ocean," he says.

Image Credit: Pinnacles of Fonsalía, Tenerife, Canary Islands. Photo by Innoceana. B-roll Credit: Goldman Environmental Prize

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

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Timecodes

(00:00) From engineer to activist

(05:31) The biodiversity of Teno-Rasca

(06:58) Fighting for protection

(12:13) Shutting the port down

(16:29) A future of sustainable tourism?

(21:02) Future projects

(22:19) Carlos’ connection to the ocean

A biotech company in the United States made headlines last month by revealing photos of genetically modified gray wolves, calling them “dire wolves,” a species that hasn’t existed for more than 10,000 years. Colossal Biosciences edited 14 genes among millions of base pairs in gray wolf DNA to arrive at the pups that were shown, leaving millions of genetic differences between these wolves and real dire wolves.

This hasn’t stopped some observers from asserting to the public that “de-extinction” is real. But it’s not, says podcast guest Dieter Hochuli, a professor at the Integrative Ecology Lab at the University of Sydney.

Hochuli explains why ecologists like him say de-extinction isn’t just a misleading term, but a dangerous one that promotes false hope and perverse incentives at the expense of existing conservation efforts that are proven to work.

"The problem with the word de-extinction for many ecologists is that we see extinction [as] being an irreversible event that has finality about it, a bit like death. The idea that you can reverse those sorts of things is anathema, I think, biologically, but also philosophically and ethically," Hochuli says.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Image Credit: Thylacines, female and male in the National Zoo Washington D.C.

Mike DiGirolamo is a host & associate producer for Mongabay based in Sydney. He co-hosts and edits the Mongabay Newscast. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

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Time codes

(00:00) They aren’t dire wolves

(03:57) Why extinction is final

(04:50) Ecological barriers to ‘de-extinction’

(12:25) Problems with species reintroduction

(20:25) How ‘de-extinction’ can mislead

(25:32) Is conservation a zero-sum game?

(31:58) Can this technology truly aid conservation?

(39:24) Is the marketing hype justified?

Biological oceanographer John Ryan joins Mongabay’s podcast to discuss his team’s multiyear study that examined vocalizations of baleen whales, including blue (Balaenoptera musculus), humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae) and fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus), and how this science is critical for understanding their feeding habits, and thus informing their conservation.

The study found that these whales’ songs rise and fall with their food supply, which provides valuable insights into how changing ocean conditions can affect their health and guide management measures.

“Some of the research we did tracking the movement and ecology of blue whales helped our sanctuary [to] act on this long-term concern about ship strikes, and to join a program that is called Protecting Blue Whales and Blue Skies,” the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) researcher says.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

This episode is dedicated to the memory of Mongabay’s East Africa editor, Ochieng’ Ogodo. Read here about his life, legacy and achievements.

Audio credit: Blue and humpback whale calls featured in this episode are courtesy of MBARI and John Ryan.

Image credit: A humpback whale dips back beneath the surface of the ocean. Image courtesy of Cristina Mittermeier/SeaLegacy.

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Timecodes

(00:00) Marine heatwaves and their impact

(06:33) Analyzing whale songs

(12:30) A change in tune

(20:13) Interspecies communication?

(25:16) The reason behind the heat

(27:36) Informing conservation

(36:52) Credits

Two decades ago a group of NGOs came together with the government of Kazakhstan to save the dwindling population of saiga antelope living in the enormous Golden Steppe. Since then, the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative has successfully rehabilitated the saiga (Saiga tatarica) from a population of roughly 30,000 to nearly 4 million. For this effort, it was awarded the 2024 Earthshot Prize in the “protect & restore nature” category.

Joining the podcast to discuss this achievement is Vera Voronova, executive director of the Association for the Conservation Biodiversity of Kazakhstan, an NGO involved in the initiative.

Voronova details the cultural and technological methods used to bring the saiga back from the brink and to help restore this massive grassland ecosystem.

“When [the] initiative [was] started, the saiga would be always like the flagship and the priority species because we did have this emergency case to recover saiga,” she says. “But the whole … picture of restoring the [steppe] was always behind this, and will be now a long term strategy.”

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Image credit: Saiga calf. Photo by Kibatov Arman/ACBK.

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Timecodes

(00:00) Saving the saiga antelope

(07:13) The Golden Steppe is massive

(13:00) Using conservation technology

(17:07) Incorporating local knowledge

(20:56) Wild horses and agriculture

(26:40) Community connection

(29:37) Credits