The 'lonely conservationist' advocating for better care of workers

Jessie Panazzolo was given a stuffed gorilla when she was 3, and from then on, she always wanted to be a conservationist. But a reasonable career track of being gainfully employed or on a livable wage almost doesn't exist in the sector, she explains to me this week on the Mongabay Newscast. She details the dwindling career prospects, the grueling conditions conservationists must endure, and the mental toll they're taking on themselves. Following Jeremy Hance's reporting on the mental health crisis afflicting conservationists, I contacted Panazzolo to gain more insight into her journey in the conservation sector and how she came to lead a community of like-minded professionals who had heartbreaking stories about pursuing their passions. Panazzolo has been fired for being sick, twice. And had trees thrown at her by orangutans. But these are far from the only struggles she and other conservationists have faced. "I've been chased by tigers or have orangutans rip trees out of the ground and chucked in my direction. But all of these are seen as like not normal risks that you'd put in risk assessments." She founded The Lonely Conservationists and Earth Carer Care to provide resources to conservationists of all walks of life and to offer workshops to conservation NGOs on improving working conditions and caring for their employees. "I wanted to make sure that there was light shed on a range of struggles faced in the conservation industry and give more weight to the need to start to address these. And ever since then, I've been running workshops for NGOs and for teams … to help their teams to look after themselves and each other and build resilience." Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast, here. Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky. Image Credit: Jessie Panazzolo. Image courtesy of Jessie Panazzolo. —- Timecodes (00:00) The 'unfair' job of conservation (13:49) Creating a community for conservation workers (18:39) Not all NGOs are on board (25:22) How conservation has changed (36:52) Fighting for nature in a world working against it

The people and policies that control how humans treat the natural world are increasingly dominated by a small class of elite political entities and corporations, argues our guest, political ecologist Bram Buscher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, on this week's Newscast. This power, he says, is concentrated on platforms that have no allegiance to fact or truth, but rather serve only what increases their bottom line. Understanding this power dynamic and speaking truth to it is essential for the environmental movement to succeed. "If you keep on doing the same kind of things and not take the root causes, the root structural forms of power into account, you may have nice terms like nature-based solutions, ecosystem services, natural capital, but they don't actually challenge the power structures to change," he says. That structure he refers to as "platform capitalism." Tasks humans used to do through various options or pathways are now gate-kept by tech companies. These companies have monopolized these platforms, including social media, generative artificial intelligence, and search engines that prioritize data collection over sincere citizen engagement. This makes it difficult for the environmental movement's message to find an open audience. In some cases, people cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is not anymore. Buscher has written his thoughts in his book The Truth About Nature: Environmentalism in the Era of Post-Truth Politics and Platform Capitalism, which explains why "speaking facts to power" does not fundamentally change the policies currently failing the environment. Speaking truth to power, Buscher argues, is the only way to truly address the root causes of environmental destruction. "Unless we understand how power works … also authoritarian power … we can't go beyond it and or speak truth to it. To do something deliberately and consciously different." Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast, here. Banner image: Wallace's Passage between Gam and Waigeo islands in Raja Ampat, Indonesia. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay. —- Timecodes (00:00) What is political ecology? (12:31) Why conservation is inherently political (17:03) What is 'speaking truth to power'? (29:35) Understanding 'platform capitalism' (42:02) How to speak truth to power (53:24) Convivial conservation

When then-U.S. president John F . Kennedy created the United States Agency for International Development in 1961, it was meant primarily to administer health and food aid around the world. In the decades since, USAID expanded to become one of the world's largest financial contributors to conservation, providing nearly $400 million annually before the end of 2024. However, that money is now completely gone after the current president, Donald Trump, gutted and shut down the agency in one of his first acts upon returning to office in January 2025. Since then, an estimated 834,000 people have lost their lives as a result of the ending of health programs, two-thirds of them likely children, according to an analysis from Impact Counter. Much of the agency's health focus was on HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention. "Support for HIV/AIDS treatment, malaria control and other initiatives have saved an estimated 91 million lives just over the past 20 years," says environmental reporter Michelle Nijhuis. Nijhuis, who joins Mongabay's podcast this week, says it's a similar story on the conservation front, with projects around the world suddenly losing their main — and in many cases their only — source of funding. She notes that "$400 million [was] going toward really creative … successful conservation projects in some of the most endangered habitats in the world [that] were also stopped abruptly." The impact is being felt in places and communities that relied on this funding, such as Ethiopia, the Congo Basin, the Amazon and Indonesia. Also affected are many of the world's largest conservation NGOs, some of which received tens of millions of dollars from USAID annually. The long-term damage from this, Nijhuis says, is very difficult to measure. "Some of the effects we're already seeing, but some of the effects are going to be much slower to appear, much harder to measure," she says, "and in many ways we will not know what we've lost." Michell Nijhuis is also the author of the recent book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction. Initiatives mentioned by Nijhuis: One Earth Partners Reimagining Conservation Project Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast, here. Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky. Image Credit: The WeMUNIZE program in Nigeria, significantly disrupted by aid cuts, used digital record keeping and community engagement to increase early childhood immunizations. Image by KC Nwakalor for USAID/Digital Development Communications via Flickr (CC BY 2.0). —- Timecodes (00:00) How USAID funded conservation (05:10) Human health and conservation fallout after USAID shuts down (13:52) Large NGOs feel the impact (21:39) 'We will not know what we lost' (31:45) How conservation groups are surviving (37:34) The bright spots

Tiger populations have risen in some countries, such as Bhutan, Nepal and India, but the global population of the big cat species remains critically endangered, says Debbie Banks, campaign lead for tigers and wildlife crime at the Environmental Investigation Agency. The global tiger population was recorded at roughly 5,574 in 2022, with the species having disappeared from roughly 95% of its historical range. Banks joins Mongabay's podcast this week to detail the status of Panthera tigris, the successes and failures of the first Global Tiger Recovery Program (GTRP), what the second iteration (2.0) seeks to do differently, and what she thinks range countries need to focus on. "This story is very much a mixed bag of localized successes and elsewhere just stagnation … and a lack of political and financial investment to bring tigers back from the brink in some places." Making good on the commitments of GTRP 2.0, Banks says, would also benefit nations seeking to fulfill their environmental protection commitments under the Global Biodiversity Framework agreed upon by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). That's because tigers are what's known as an umbrella species, meaning that protecting them also protects ecosystems and a host of other species and biodiversity contained within these ecosystems. "Tigers are an apex predator, therefore a keystone species, an umbrella species, a flagship species. And by saving tigers…we save so much more." Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast, here. Image Credit: A tiger in Sumatra. The Sumatran subspecies is critically endangered due to habitat loss and hunting, and now faces additional threats from two hydropower dams planned to be constructed within their habitat. Image courtesy of Pete Morris. ——— Timecodes (00:00) Introduction (03:07) The global status of the tiger (10:33) Threats to the tiger (24:16) Law enforcement and reducing tiger demand (33:35) The Global Tiger Recovery Program (42:02) Protecting tigers 'saves so much more'

Khatijah Rahmat, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Germany, says she's trying to build legitimacy around the concept of animal temporality — the ability to experience time — specifically in elephants. Doing so could have implications for conservation and beyond. "How we envision an animal's relationship to time influences whether we see them as feeling, remembering beings. My aim is to encourage a more dynamic view of their place in the world when we recognize them as equally temporal beings." This week on the Mongabay Newscast, Rahmat explains three key areas of evidence for interpreting elephant temporal experience and how this knowledge could be folded into how we think about protecting elephants or animals in general. "I think it increases the depth of empathy we can have for animals," she says. "It can really push the concepts of policy … but it also can really challenge some of our current, basic assumptions about how we think about logic and evidence." Image credit: An elephant that has just wallowed in mud in the Linyanti River in northern Botswana. Image by Roger Borgelid for Mongabay. Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast, here. —— Timecodes (00:00) Why study how animals experience time? (06:58) Elephant eco-cultural identity (11:58) Human-impacted time (27:03) Individual elephant history (34:44) Getting hit with a pineapple is no accident (39:30) How this might help conservation

Indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta (Apalech clan (Wik) Lostmob Nungar) joins the Mongabay Newscast to detail the Aboriginal perspectives behind his latest book, Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking. The book explains how stories shape society, how they can harm us and the environment, and how they may save our species and the natural world. Yunkaporta explains how Indigenous laws, systems and lore can help us improve modern society, specifically in how humans relate first to the land, then to each other, and why this shapes how we exploit nature and care for it. Identifying the "wrong story" is critical, Yunkaporta explains, to correcting harmful behaviors or ways of governing. Ultimately, it's a lie, he says. Personified by what he characterizes as narcissistic or selfish behavior, it's generally seen by those who exploit the natural world at the expense of community well-being. "It's a terrible thing to … misrepresent things, make false claims, bear false witness in a way that is bending story, the story that everybody follows. The narratives that people tell that weave together to make a community and to hold a community on the right path that's sustainable for thousands of years." Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast, here. Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky. Image Credit: Mt. Taranaki, Aotearoa New Zealand, captured March 16, 2022. Image courtesy of Planet Labs PBC. —- Timecodes (00:00) What is 'Wrong Story'? (14:26) The 'Sacred Mind' (17:54) First Law (27:24) The environment and Wrong Story (38:13) The tale of Tidalik the frog (42:28) Totems and kinship (47:06) Serpent law

Mongabay Latam's multiyear, *award-winning **investigation that uncovered 67 clandestine airstrips in the Peruvian Amazon used for drug trafficking sent waves across the local media landscape. It drew attention to the Indigenous communities impacted by these illegal airstrips and the 15 Indigenous leaders who were killed defending their territory. To communicate this story to a wider audience, Mongabay Latam director Maria Isabel Torres and managing editor Alexa Vélez adapted it into an interactive live theater performance for an audience of 100. They join this week's podcast to tell the "story behind the story" of what they, their reporters, and Indigenous leaders experienced during this investigation, and how their play adaptation brings that to the eyes and ears of a theatrical audience. "I think that all the journalists in these times, we are very worried [about] trying to find ways to understand our audience and to get their attention. We know that there are news avoiders. We know that there are fake news. So we are trying to look for different ways," Torres says. *This story was first published by Mongabay Latam in Spanish on Nov. 12, 2024, and won the 2025 Global Shining Light Award for investigative journalism and the Digital Storytelling prize given by the 2025 Future of Media Awards. **This investigation was conducted in partnership with the Consortium to Support Independent Journalism in the Region (CAPIR), which leads the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) in Latin America. Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast, here. Image: In the Indigenous community of Galilea, drug traffickers abandoned this airstrip a year ago. But they could revive it at any time. Image by Mongabay Latam. -------- Timecodes (00:00) Chasing answers on narco airstrips (13:38) Ground-truthing the data and building relationships (18:41) Risks, impacts and beyond (28:55) Bringing the story to the stage (36:13) "The story behind the story" (44:48) Plans for the future

National Geographic photographer Kiliii Yuyän returns to the Mongabay Newscast to share his experience creating his new book, Guardians of Life: Indigenous Knowledge, Indigenous Science, and Restoring the Planet from specialty publisher Braided River. This book documents the traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of nine Indigenous communities worldwide, featuring contributions and essays from many members of these communities, along with Yüyan's own photography. TEK, Yüyan says, isn't exactly traditional so much as it is ecological knowledge that is place-based. While it draws on thousands of years of knowledge, it also innovates in society as we know it, and can offer social, cultural and ecological benefits that neoliberal economics does not. Yüyan highlights that some of the most significant environmental victories of the past few years, such as the removal of the Klamath River dams in the United States — the largest dam removal project ever — were led by Indigenous people. Yüyan's imagery captures the essence of the decades it took for Lisa Moorehead-Hillman, Leaf Hillman and others to advocate for their removal. "I think what the great power of the book is in a lot of ways is the power of photography … actually seeing it. That this is what it means when we're talking about what is shamanism, what does it mean when you remove a dam … and you see it in people's faces." Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast, here. Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky. Image Credit: Lisa Morehead-Hillman and Leif Hillman, both Karuk, celebrate the removal of the dams on the newly exposed reservoir floor in 2024. The former head of the Karuk Natural Resources Department, Leif spent two decades working with other Indigenous groups, environmental organizations and government officials to bring back the Klamath River. Image courtesy of Kiliii Yüyan. —- Timecodes (00:00) What is traditional ecological knowledge? (08:00) When values and governance go together (17:38) Why and when hunters share their bounty in Greenland (27:26) In Mongolia ceremonies are conservation (39:12) How to get a dam removed (46:08) Why the buffalo is the best environmentalist

A year ago, U.S. President Donald Trump shut down public access to the Development Experience Clearinghouse, a $30 billion database holding 60 years' worth of institutional knowledge from more than 150,000 projects administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development. But before the closure, former USAID employee and artificial intelligence scientist Lindsey Moore used a large language model (LLM) to read all of the information in this database — rescuing critical lessons on development, environmental, economic and social projects in countries across the globe, all documented by USAID. The data also included information on conservation projects. Many of the challenges presented in these projects repeated over the years, but the lessons were rarely retained — something Moore's tech startup, DevelopMetrics, hopes to change. Moore joins this week's podcast to explain what those lessons are and what conservationists can learn from them. DevelopMetrics deploys an AI model capable of understanding not just the information from USAID's database, but also other public databases that could be at risk of deletion or being lost to time. Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast, here. Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky. Banner image: Mangroves on Vanua Levu Island, Fiji. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay. —— Timecodes (00:00) Lindsey's background with USAID (04:14) How to analyze 60 years of data (11:07) Uncovering hidden lessons (14:24) 1. Bring delivery closer to households (16:43) 2. Practice changes practice (19:19) 3. Design for scale, not for pilots (24:08) 4. Co-creation beats consultation (26:30) 5. Strengthen the middle layer (30:56) Who DevelopMetrics works with and how they are funded (32:58) Energy and water costs of LLMs

It's been more than half a century since the publication of Silent Spring by the scientist and creative writer Rachel Carson. The seminal volume caught the attention of U.S. presidents, artists and musicians, spurring the environmental movement and leading to the eventual ban of the toxic pesticide DDT. Joining the Mongabay Newscast is environmental writer and director of the creative writing program at Middlebury College, Megan Mayhew Bergman. She unpacks the impact of Carson's work, which came under public attack from chemical companies seeking to discredit her, and how, eventually, the truth broke through. "We don't change our minds usually based on data. We change our minds based on emotion, but historically, it's been pretty taboo for scientists to include emotion in the way that they write. And I feel like Carson risked that here in a way that was really powerful." Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast, here. Image: Megan Mayhew Bergman. Image by Cameron Russell. Environmental writing and authors mentioned in this conversation: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer Florida by Lauren Groff The Home Place by J. Drew Lanham Hope Is the Thing With Feathers by Christopher Cokinos How Strange a Season by Megan Mayhew Bergman Silent Spring by Rachel Carson Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald The Wild Flag by E.B. White Zora Neale Hurston Other works and authors mentioned: Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray Men We Reaped by Jasmyn Ward A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabokov —- Timestamps (00:00) Changing hearts and minds (02:46) Rachel Carson's journey to Silent Spring (08:22) Controversy and impact (14:40) Room for a new voice (20:55) Bioaccumulation and what it means (24:07) "We don't change our minds based on data" (26:43) Recommended reads (35:21) The American South and environmental writing (39:57) Lessons for writers