The value of wild landscapes is a theme that has preoccupied me for the past weeks. A stream of coincidental experiences have contributed to this focus: the Wilhjelm+12 rewilding conference at the University of Copenhagen, a recent PNAS publication by my collaborator Greg Asner on elevated rates of gold mining in the western Amazon, a…

My friend and collaborator, Naia Morueta Holme, just had a paper come out in the scientific journal, Ecology Letters. The study is about the distribution of rarity in the New World – where are the endemic species, and where are the large-range species? Surprisingly, this is the sort of basic question that you might imagine…

In the two weeks since my last post, the US government shutdown has not ended. Federally funded science is slowly winding down as programs spend their last allocations. Less money means fewer discoveries, but exactly how many fewer? How much knowledge will not be created because of the shutdown? It is hard to measure the…

Reading the news after being off-grid for a few days rarely brings pleasant surprises. I just came back from a hiking trip in southern Sweden to find that my country’s government had been shut down until budget and debt issues could be resolved. I understood that the overall impact on our country’s administration and economy…