Deep in Taiwan’s misty mountains, researchers have confirmed the tallest tree in the country: a thousand-year-old fir tree higher than a 20-story building, which they’ve named “the heaven sword of the Da’an River.” Climbers scaled the tree and dropped a measuring tape from the top to the forest floor during the Lunar New Year holiday in January 2023. The tree measured 84.1-meters (276-feet). The findings have been published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. A team of ecologists, geologists, remote-sensing specialists, professional climbers and Indigenous people that calls itself the “Taiwan tree seekers” began the search in 2014. “The common characteristics [of the team] are probably that we are all tree lovers and like adventures,” Rebecca Chia-Chun Hsu, lead author from Division of Forest Ecology, Institute of Taiwan Forestry Research, told CNN. ‘The Heaven Sword’, Taiwan’s tallest tree, measures 84.1 meters. Photo courtesy of Steven Pearce. Taiwan is one of the few places on Earth where trees can grow this tall. The island sits where the tropics meet the subtropics, and its mountains host several giant conifer species. The species behind the new record, Taiwania cryptomerioides, is known to the Indigenous Rukai people as “the tree that hits the moon.” Although nearly 60% of Taiwan is covered in forest, loggers cleared much of the island’s old-growth forest between 1912 and 1991. However, its steep slopes were too dangerous to reach, and pockets of ancient forest survived. Still, finding the tallest tree amid the rugged terrain was a task. Taiwan…This article was originally published on Mongabay
COLOMBO — Sri Lanka banned the purchase and use of single-use plastic water bottles in all government institutions effective May 31, under a new government circular that targets reduction of wasteful plastic consumption within the state sector. The move is the latest in a long line of attempts by the island nation to reduce plastic pollution — a crisis that clogs waterways, pollutes beaches, harms marine life, and overwhelms the country’s fragile waste management systems. But environmentalists say the real question is not whether Sri Lanka can announce another ban, but whether it can be enforced. The new directive applies to public institutions and is expected to reduce the routine use of disposable plastic water bottles during government meetings, events, offices and official functions. Authorities are encouraging reusable alternatives and better drinking water infrastructure within public institutions, says Kapila Rajapaksha, the director-general of the Central Environmental Authority (CEA), the state agency mandated to address plastic pollution. Sri Lanka’s plastic problem is growing exponentially. The National Plastic Waste Inventory (NPWI) published in 2024 has estimated the island’s municipal plastic waste generation to be approximately 250,000 metric tons per year. Sri Lanka recycles only about 27,000 metric tons of plastic waste annually, roughly 11% of total plastic waste generated. An estimated 68,000 metric tons, or 27% of plastic waste, remain uncollected and are often burned, buried or illegally dumped. Approximately 101,000 metric tons or 41% of the plastics go unaccounted from the waste management system during collection, transport, sorting and disposal. According…This article was originally published on Mongabay
PORT HUGHES, Australia — Situated midway along the Great Southern Reef that spans Australia’s southern coastline, the waters off Port Hughes typically teem with life. The coastal hamlet northwest of Adelaide plays host to a multitude of coral, bivalve and fish species. But in late March, the largest and longest harmful algal bloom (HAB) in Australian history arrived to Port Hughes, depleting its waters’ rich biodiversity. The bloom had first appeared elsewhere off the state of South Australia’s coast a year earlier, causing eye and skin irritation and respiratory symptoms among beachgoers. Then, along with waves of acrid-smelling sea foam, scores of dead marine animals began washing ashore. In Port Hughes, the HAB’s impacts were most visible below the surface. The town’s wooden jetty had previously been one of the most consistent locations in South Australia to observe temperate species, said Stefan Andrews, co-founder of the Great Southern Reef Foundation, a conservation advocacy group. But by mid-April, when Mongabay joined Andrews on a dive, the site was drab compared with vibrant photographs taken in February and March. Under the jetty, sponges and corals that had previously adorned its pylons in a brilliantly hued mosaic appeared colorless. Apart from a short-headed seahorse (Hippocampus breviceps) — a “sign of hope,” Andrews called it — little life was visible in the murky waters. The reef, he said, had become quieter, lacking the sounds of snapping shrimp and other creatures that once played in the underwater soundtrack. “There’s a sense of loss when you…This article was originally published on Mongabay
JEJU ISLAND, South Korea — In April 2025, I zipped myself up into a thick wetsuit and inched down a steep, rocky ledge toward the gray-blue water encircling Beomseom, a small island off the southern coast of Jeju Island in South Korea. Then I leapt into the chilly sea and wriggled into my scuba gear while floating on the surface. In the water with me was Sanghoon Yoon, an adviser for Paran Ocean Citizen Science Center, a South Korean civil society group that advocates for the protection of the ocean. That day, Yoon was my scuba dive buddy. Yoon and I sank beneath the dangling legs of snorkelers into a watery realm of rocks and kelp. Once in deeper water, I encountered gelatinous stalks of soft coral. The polyps appeared purple, pink, red, and even orange, depending on the light. The islet of Beomseom off South Korea’s Jeju Island hosts colorful gardens of soft coral. Image courtesy of Paran. Sanghoon Hoon, an adviser to the Paran Ocean Citizen Science Center, dives among soft corals in the waters off Jeju, South Korea. Image courtesy of Paran. The soft corals I saw that day were healthy. But in 2024, soft corals around Beomseom Island and other parts of Jeju experienced what scientists are calling a “slumping” event — and what Yoon describes as “melting” — which saw soft corals losing their shape, drooping, and even dying. The event was widely reported in local media and attributed to marine heat as Jeju waters…This article was originally published on Mongabay
When most people think of Portuguese wine, their minds drift inland to the rolling plains of the Alentejo or north to the terraced vineyards of the Douro. Yet some of
ELEPHANT MARSH, Malawi — At 5:30 am, trader Flora Kumilai is squatting before a heap of smoked catfish at Sorjin Market in southern Malawi’s Elephant Marsh, haggling with sellers over the price. “I found gold in fish,” she chuckles as she fills a third cardboard box. “And Elephant Marsh is the mine.” Kumilai, who has traveled here from Malawi’s commercial capital, Blantyre, will spend a week in the area, visiting other fish markets around the marsh until she has 12 of these boxes, around 900 kilograms (1,990 pounds) of smoked fish. Then she will band together with other traders to hire a truck to transport their goods back to Blantyre, 140 kilometers (87 miles) to the north. But for Kumilai, the final destination for her goods is more than 1,500 km (930 mi) away, at a market in Kasumbalesa on the border between Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She’s been in business for more than a decade now, mostly trading in produce within Malawi and sometimes importing clothes from Tanzania and South Africa for customers in the city. In October 2024, she changed course, when fellow traders introduced her to the cross-border trade in fish. In Kasumbalesa, most of Kumilai’s customers are from the DRC, she tells Mongabay in Chichewa. “They pay in [U.S.] dollars. When we change it on the black market to Malawi kwacha, it gives us a lot of money. That’s how I’m able to pay for my son’s education [at Chandigarh University in India].”…This article was originally published on Mongabay
As South Africa transitions away from coal-fired electricity, hundreds of former coal mines are turning into abandoned dumping sites for waste and polluted water, which a new report warns will continue to contaminate surrounding land and waterways for decades. Nor is the South African government taking action to force mine owners to clean them up, environmentalists told Mongabay. South African law requires mining companies to set aside money to clean up and restore the land after mining ends – either in trusts or through bank or insurance guarantees. But a report by the Centre for Environmental Rights found that none of the 412 coal mines that closed between 2006 and 2023 had enough money set aside to pay for the full cost of rehabilitation. The full extent of the problem is unknown as the government has failed to keep any records of mines that closed in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2021, the report said. Mining companies must clean up and rehabilitate mines, pay for the damage, and remain responsible until the government officially signs off on the closure, according to the regulations. But most mines do not keep enough money aside to cover even a fraction of the rehabilitation costs, according to the report, titled “No More Ghost Towns : Lessons From Mpumalanga’s Mine Closure Crisis” and released May 22 in Johannesburg. With more than 100 coal mines and most of the country’s aging coal-fired power stations, the Mpumalanga region is the center of South Africa’s fossil fuel-based power…This article was originally published on Mongabay
BANGKOK — More than 600 residents of Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai provinces embarked May 31 on a roughly 68-kilometer, six-day ‘peace walk’ to demand the Thai government take action on the river pollution crisis that has seen Thai rivers polluted with heavy metals. The ensemble of affected residents, civil society groups, monks and students marched from Tha Ton subdistrict in Chiang Mai to the city of Chiang Rai in northern Thailand, reaching their destination on June 5, World Environment Day. For more than a year, Thailand’s Pollution Control Department has reported dangerous levels of arsenic, mercury, cadmium and other heavy metals in rivers across northern Thailand, with mining operations across eastern Myanmar suspected to be responsible for the pollution. “We are walking because our rivers are slowly dying,” Pianporn Deetes, executive director of the Rivers and Rights Foundation, which helped to organize the peace walk, told Mongabay by phone. “Toxic contamination from unregulated mining upstream is already affecting water, fish, food, livelihoods, and public health. We do not want to wait until more people become sick. This is an emergency.” Pianporn said the walk (42 miles) was about taking collective action to share information, document impacts and build public pressure in a bid to force the government to address the issue, which Pianporn said has, so far, been lacking. “Monitoring has improved, but action has not matched the scale of the crisis,” she said. “We need urgent diplomatic engagement with neighboring countries, stronger health monitoring, transparency, and action to…This article was originally published on Mongabay
Editor’s Note: Tom Engelhardt has been an important part of Antiwar.com for 22 years. His TomDispatch site has contributed 1,469 articles to our site. His list of authors includes many of the best in the antiwar movement. The presence of TomDispatch articles helped make Antiwar.com what it is today. The staff of Antiwar.com sends […]
In his highly-regarded podcast, Judging Freedom, on June 1, Judge Napolitano asked British diplomat Alastair Crooke if the Israelis really cared if the Strait of Hormuz remained closed and the U.S. economy, and by extension the world economy, suffered. Crooke replied that the billionaires who support Israel so strongly have so much wealth that many […]
The images that have emerged from Gaza reveal the anatomy of a desolate landscape that defies human comprehension. Nothing can prepare the conscience for the sheer suffocating scale of a seemingly endless treeless terrain overwhelmed with millions of tons of concrete and rebar. There is a distinct agonizing geometry to the destruction of buildings folded […]
Global oil giant Shell continued operating a compromised pipeline in Nigeria’s Niger Delta despite knowing it posed a pollution risk in the surrounding coastal wetland environment, newly disclosed internal company communications reveal. The emails and memos, reviewed by Mongabay, show senior leadership knew of the poor conditions of the 97-kilometer (60-mile) Nembe Creek Trunk Line as early as 2008. Despite concerns it was operating outside technical integrity standards and proposals to shut it down, a top executive decided to keep pumping oil through the line. Carrying 150,000 barrels of oil per day to the export terminal at Bonny Island Rivers state, the Nembe Creek Trunk Line is a critical oil artery in Nigeria. Throughout the years, theft from the pipeline using illegal connections caused spills into the vast mangrove ecosystem of true (Rhizophora sp.) and flowering black (Avicennia sp.) tree species. An internal 2013 Shell document coded such tampered lines as “red,” requiring either their immediate shutdown or immediate action to remove all illegal connections. Locals from the nearby riverine Bille community said the oil spills killed about 2,000 hectares (4,900 acres) of mangrove swamps around the village while impacting an area of 13,200 hectares (32,600 acres). The contaminated waterways and degraded ecosystem, they told Mongabay, killed fish and other aquatic life. Satellite imagery surrounding the village shows massive degradation of the mangroves. “The aquatic life is gone. Our people can no longer go to the river and catch reasonable fish — they can’t even find the fish in the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
Leoncia Ramos has lived her 65 years in the lush Dominican Republic town of La Piñita, but now says she is fearful for her health and wants to leave. She’s among 450 families asking the government and the company behind the Pueblo Viejo gold mine to be relocated because of concerns of pollution from the nearby mine. They allege the site, controlled by Canadian giant Barrick Mining Corp., is harming their health and the environment, and fear that if a tailings dam about a kilometer away were to collapse, it would be disastrous. Ramos’s community has spent 15 years fighting to have its concerns addressed and now says Canada, where Barrick Mining is headquartered, could play a role. In 2019, the Canadian government created an office of an ombudsperson to handle complaints from communities like Ramos’s. But the government has left the role vacant for the past year, and its work has seemingly come to a standstill. Canada is home to about half of the world’s publicly traded mining and mineral exploration companies, with operations both in Canada and overseas, including some of the world’s largest miners, like Barrick Mining. The government created the office of the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE) in 2019 to address human rights complaints about Canadian companies’ operations overseas. But the office has now been without an ombudsperson since May 2025, and advocates say its work has stalled at a critical moment, as demand for transition minerals and a changing geopolitical climate are driving…This article was originally published on Mongabay
More than a decade ago, conservationists began working to preserve a unique population of desert pampas cats that has adapted to the mangroves of Peru’s northern coast. This small, isolated population roams the San Pedro de Vice dry mangroves, a Ramsar Site and South America’s southernmost mangrove ecosystem. “This is a very unique population, because as far as we know, [it] is the only Pampas cat population that lives in a mangrove [habitat],” Alvaro Garcia, co-coordinator of the Pampas Cat Working Group and the Peruvian Desert Cat Project, told Mongabay in an email. The desert pampas cat (Leopardus garleppi), distinctive for its broad face, ranges along a relatively thin band snaking southward from Colombia through Peru and Bolivia, to northern Chile and Argentina. The species is acclimated to dry conditions, so inhabits deserts, grasslands and dry forests, and isn’t found living in mangroves anywhere else aside from this region of Peru. Dry mangrove forests, also called scrub or dwarf mangrove forests, grow in highly saline soils in upper intertidal zones, so lack regular daily flushing by ocean tides. At first, it was thought the dry mangrove-acclimated cats were faring well: “[I]n the mangrove [habitat], we put cameras out for a week, and we got tons of photos,” whereas in other parts of the felid’s range, conservationists barely capture one desert pampas cat image per month, said Cindy Hurtado, co-coordinator of the Pampas Cat Working Group and the Peruvian Desert Cat Project. Based on the photos, the research team assumed the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
SARLAHI, Nepal — Dhruba Prasai, a farmer from Sarlahi district in Nepal’s southern plains, says he’s exhausted from lack of sleep. Every year, nilgai antelopes, wild boars, deer and Asian elephants raid his fields, and if left unguarded at night, they not only feed on standing crops, but also stored harvest. “There is a forest to the west, and our fields are right next to it,” Prasai tells Mongabay. “The nilgai eat the maize, and the deer can’t even stand the sight of wheat and oat grass, they eat it all. If people stay up at night to guard the fields, they run away; otherwise, they come and destroy everything.” Farmers such as Prasai across Madhesh province, considered the country’s breadbasket because of its fertile land, are struggling with growing crop losses from wildlife, but complex procedures and policy gaps make access to relief, which is already limited, difficult. From mid-July 2024 to mid-July 2025, 14,821 cases of ‘human wildlife conflict’ were reported in Madhesh, according to government figures. A total of 134 people and 457 animals lost their lives. Last year, a wild boar ate three tand (storage racks) of maize stored in Prasai’s house. Although forest authorities told him to get a recommendation letter from the local municipal ward office to apply for relief, he didn’t do it. “I haven’t done it; we simply don’t have the time,” he says. Even those who did fill out the forms around the same time have yet to receive relief, he…This article was originally published on Mongabay
In April this year, two Bryde’s whales washed-up dead-on Dyer Island, a small nature reserve located a few kilometers off the coast of Gansbaai in South Africa’s Western Cape province. Both whales carried severe injuries; their vertebrae had been shattered. “It was very clear that it was [vessel] strikes, because both those whales were snapped in half, and you can also see the propeller marks,” Loraine Shuttleworth, head of research at the Dyer Island Conservation Trust, told Mongabay. Two whale strandings linked to ship strikes in one month alone is an unusually high number, Shuttleworth said. A new risk assessment has linked the increase in risk of ships striking whales to the rerouting of maritime traffic around South African coast. Due to the Houthi rebels attacks on ships traversing the Red Sea, which started in 2023, and the more recent fallout from the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, many cargo companies have rerouted their vessels around the Cape of Good Hope. With greater shipping traffic comes a growing threat to marine species inhabiting the region: collisions with large, fast-moving vessels. Between December 2023 and December 2024, the number of large vessels traveling through South African waters at average speeds above 15 knots (28 kilometers per hour) has quadrupled, satellite data show. The scale of the increased maritime traffic struck scientist Els Vermeulen from the University of Pretoria’s Mammal Research Institute Whale Unit, on a flight into Cape Town in 2025. “It was a beautiful day, and there were just…This article was originally published on Mongabay
The United States is not approaching collapse because it lacks power. It is approaching collapse because it has too often mistaken power for wisdom. Its armed forces remain unmatched in reach, its financial system remains central to global commerce, and its technology sector continues to shape the future. Yet these advantages can conceal a more […]
On May 31, Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam gave a televised address in which he condemned Israel’s invasion and intensified attacks on southern Lebanon as a dangerous escalation, warning that a “scorched-earth policy” will never bring security to Tel Aviv: “Israel must understand that with its scorched-earth policy, collective punishment, and the bulldozing of villages and […]
BANGKOK — Seven hundred days after activists from the environmental group Mother Nature Cambodia were imprisoned on charges widely regarded as retaliatory for their activism, 73 international and Cambodian civil society organizations have renewed calls for their unconditional release. After a trial lasting just over a month, 10 activists from Mother Nature Cambodia were sentenced on July 2, 2024, to between six and eight years in prison. Only five of the defendants attended the hearings, which saw Long Kuntha, 28, Ly Chandaravuth, 26, Phuon Keoraksmey, 25, and Thun Ratha, 34, each sentenced to six years behind bars for plotting against the government; fellow activist Yim Leanghy, 36, received an eight-year sentence for both plotting against the government and insulting the king. The five activists who did not attend the trial were sentenced in absentia. The appeals hearing for all 10 convicted activists was slated to take place on June 2, but has been postponed indefinitely by the Phnom Penh Court of Appeals. “The MNC5 are incarcerated in prisons in overcrowded and harsh living conditions, separated from each other and spread out all across Cambodia, hundreds of kilometers away from their families and legal counsel,” wrote the 73 NGOs in an open letter addressed to Prime Minister Hun Manet. “The … NGOs who have signed this letter sincerely request you take immediate action to ensure the unjust convictions of these five activists are reversed either prior to or at their upcoming appeals court hearing in Phnom Penh, and that their freedom…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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