Mongabay Newscast

"[The]cruel irony here [is] that the world cannot get its act together to address these threats … people are dying, animals are suffering, we're losing rainforest … these are all interconnected threats," Neil Vora tells me on this week's episode of the Mongabay Newscast, just a day after the World Health Organization (WHO) reported more than 80 deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo from an outbreak of the Ebola virus.
Vora is a former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) epidemic intelligence service officer who deployed to the DRC to combat Ebola. He says the current strain, the Bundibugyo virus, is particularly dangerous because there is no current approved treatment or vaccine for it. While neither this virus nor the Andes virus, a type of hantavirus that originated in Chile and Argentina and killed three people on a cruise ship, is likely to cause a pandemic, says Vora, he stresses member states of the WHO are unprepared to address a pandemic should one occur.
According to Vora, the WHO could have achieved a pandemic agreement to better address the threats pandemics pose. But that fell short when nations failed to adopt a system to equitably share tools such as vaccines.
" And now those discussions on the pandemic agreement have stalled, and days later, we have these two outbreaks of zoonotic viruses."
Neil Vora is the executive director of the Preventing Pandemics at the Source Coalition.
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Image Credit: Minks at a Swedish fur farm in 2009. Living in small cages very close to each other makes for easier transmission of pathogens. Image courtesy of Jo-Anne McArthur/Djurrattsalliansen/We Animals Media.
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Timecodes
(00:00) Two outbreaks
(07:55) Fur farms present a pandemic risk
(15:17) Banning fur farms in the EU
(23:10) 'We're hurting ourselves'
(29:29) Preventing Pandemics at the Source Coalition

"We are experiencing what some people call sort of a shutdown of the public square in the United States and around the world," says veteran environmental activist André Carothers. Along with the former executive director of Greenpeace US, Annie Leonard, the two have co-authored a new book about the history of protest, why it works, and why it's under attack.
Protest: Respect It. Defend It. Use It. was written to "remind readers about the role protests played in gaining a lot of the progress that we take for granted today," Leonard says.
Earth Day 1970 famously saw around 10% of the U.S. population actively participating in one of the largest demonstrations in the nation's history. This led to a number of landmark environmental laws that are arguably taken for granted today. Protest highlights how movements begin, and ultimately shape public discourse leading to these significant victories.
The authors also highlight how some in society often lionize protest movements of the past, while condemning ones of the present, forgetting that at their inception, protests and the movements they represent are often unpopular. Leonard and Carothers point to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose approval rating never went above 50% in all his years as a civil rights leader. His disapproval rating stood at 75% the year he was assassinated.
"There's something about the gymnastics of history that allows us to honor these people well after they're dead, but not when it's happening right in front of them," Carothers says.
You can find a copy of Protest: Respect It. Defend It. Use It. at theprotestbook.com.
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 Caption: Photographer Jonathan Bachman was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for capturing a photograph of Ieshia Evans being arrested in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was Ieshia Evans first protest, and Bachman's first time covering one. The photo was included in The New York Times' "The Year in Pictures 2016," among other honors. jonathan bachman / reuters. Shepard Fairey—a prolific artist and activist who often addresses social and political issues in his work—was invited by the authors of 'Protest' to interpret Bachman's photograph for the book. Image credit to Shepard Fairey. Image Courtesy of Patagonia Books.
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Timecodes
(00:00) The attack on protesters
(10:32) Combatting vilification of protesters
(16:27) Amplifying messaging through art
(21:05) Why non-violence works
(32:04) A red line has been crossed
(36:56) How students are stopping a pipeline
(39:46) Earth Day 1970
(42:48) Protest is not enough

"That might be something that you see in a decade, not in two years of filming," Tara Stoinksi, CEO of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, tells me.
The behavior she's referring to occurs in mountain gorilla groups, such as a "dominance transfer," where a younger male silverback takes over leadership from an older male, and infanticide, where an outsider or ostracized gorilla kills the offspring of a new mother within the group. The former of these was captured on camera within days of filming for the new Netflix documentary A Gorilla Story: Told by David Attenborough.
Stoinski joins the Mongabay Newscast to discuss her role as a scientific adviser on the years-long project, the rarity of the behaviors captured on camera, and her thoughts on gorilla conservation in the Greater Virunga Landscape of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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: A male gorilla, Ubwuzu, as featured in the Netflix documentary. Image by Ben Cherry/Courtesy of Netflix/Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
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Timestamps
(00:00) The story of 'Pablo's group'
(06:18) Unexpected behaviors
(19:42) Conservation challenges
(28:34) Regional conflict
(35:15) Final thoughts

Forester and scientist Suzanne Simard is well known for her landmark 1997 paper, which demonstrated that two distinct species of trees could share resources. At the time, it turned traditional Western forestry thinking on its head. Instead of the Darwinian view of trees as being in competition with each other, it introduced the idea that these trees may actually help each other, and that industrial logging practices may be missing the forest for the trees.
In recent years, Simard has been advocating for Indigenous knowledge as the only way to save the Earth and its forests. Environmental reporter Erica Gies spent some time in the field with Simard and her colleagues, looking into her latest project, The Mother Tree Project, which seeks to find the most sustainable form of forestry for both people and ecosystems.
Gies joins the Mongabay Newscast to explain what she learned from Simard and why she advocates Indigenous knowledge and systems, which are governed by rules of reciprocity. A shift in her thinking occurred when she read the dissertation of fisheries ecologist Teresa Sm'hayetsk Ryan, who now works with Simard.
"She realized that, you know, the people were also a very important part of the complex forest relationships," Gies says. "Which is much more of a reciprocity kind of mentality. If you take, you also give back. There is a responsibility to care for the system. Because if you don't, and if you overexploit it, it would be really easy to starve, right?"
Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast, here.
Listen to our previous conversation with Erica Gies here.
Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Image Credit: Goose Island Archipelago is a cluster of tree-covered islands with wild, rocky beaches located off the central coast of British Columbia. Image courtesy of Alex Harris.
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Timecodes
(00:00) The 'wood-wide web'
(15:49) The Mother Tree Project
(19:33) Why reciprocity is needed
(30:27) Questions that remain

The routes taken by migratory birds, known as flyways, often cross vast expanses of ocean. Six of these marine flyways have now been formally recognized by the U.N.'s Convention on Migratory Species, at the suggestion of scientists who published their findings on these flyways in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology. Tammy Davies, a co-author of the paper and marine science coordinator at BirdLife International, joins the Mongabay Newscast this week to discuss the conservation potential of the six flyways, and what the formal recognition by CMS does and doesn't do.
"It's a fantastic communication tool for highlighting these amazing journeys that the seabirds undertake and the fact that multiple people, stakeholders, and countries need to come together and everyone can do their bit," Davies says.
She notes that 151 bird species rely on these migratory routes, which connect 1,300 key biodiversity areas that the birds regularly use. Having nations focus on protecting these areas, and reducing bycatch from fishing, are just some of the ways countries can coordinate conservation efforts along these routes. But this effort requires shared responsibility across the 54 nations that these flyways bisect. The flyways provide a formal mechanism for nations to do this, Davies says.
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: Antipodean albatross (Diomedea antipodensis antipodensis) offshore from Dunedin, Otago, Aotearoa New Zealand. Image by Oscar Thomas via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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Timestamps
 
(00:00) What are marine flyways?
(07:47) How formal recognition helps conservation
(14:55) Policy limitations
(19:32) Shared goals with other treaties
(21:41) What's next?