"The largest grove of giant sequoias in Yosemite National Park was closed Friday and hundreds of people ordered evacuated nearby as a wildfire burning through dense forest became the latest in recent years to threaten the world’s largest trees."
As Brazil’s wetlands burned and as the country illegally shipped wood from the Amazon and scaled back environmental enforcement amid the pandemic, award-winning journalist Jake Spring of Reuters was there, telling tough, sometimes dangerous stories. Spring shares insights into his “just the facts” reporting, including the surprises and the lessons, and offers some practical advice in this Inside Story Q&A.
"In the coldest months of the year, thick fog blankets the mountain village of Coatitila in eastern Mexico, hiding the bulging, pine-covered hills that cradle it. At midday, the sun pulls back the fog to expose patches of blight where trees have been axed for logging or farm work."
"A 2013 storm toppled the tree that had stood in the Ceiriog valley for 1,200 years – but now it lives on".
"Alaska is on pace for a historic fire season, spurred on by warm temperatures, a diminished snowpack, and an apparent uptick in lightning strikes. Fires have ripped through 2 million acres so far this year, roughly 10 times the total area burned in all of 2021."
"When the fighter jet crashed into these northwestern Ukrainian woods, killing its 27-year-old pilot, splintering trees and spewing fuel, it tore a gash in the forest canopy. Then it exploded. The wildfire that followed charred trees and earth, threatening two nearby villages."
"Democratic lawmakers are pressing President Joe Biden to use federal lands to ensure access to abortion services after the Supreme Court overturned long-standing abortion precedent."
In 2006, a local government council in Pennsylvania concerned about sewage sludge dumping enacted the Western legal system’s first formal “rights of nature” instrument. Today, numerous countries have laws recognizing specific rights or even legal personhood for nature. As legal expert Alice Bleby explains, this new perspective arises from a wide range of contexts and plays out in many different ways.
"Forest pathologist Martin MacKenzie strode forward on a narrow path through California’s mythic bristlecone pine forest in the White Mountains near the Nevada border, methodically scanning gnarled limbs for the invaders that threaten the lives of some of the world’s oldest trees."
"Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first elected leftist president, will take office in August with ambitious proposals to halt the record-high rates of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. Petro has promised to limit agribusiness expansion into the forest, and create reserves where Indigenous communities and others are allowed to harvest rubber, acai and other non-timber forest products."
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