What if there were a blueprint for climate adaptation that could end a civil war? An English scientist spent his life developing one — then he vanished without a trace. By Laura Heaton.

The market is booming, but it's not making anybody rich. By Justin Fox.

A new book profiles people who have devoted their lives to protecting the world’s at-risk animals. By Colette Harris.

Far from being the special result of insular evolution, Komodo dragons are the last survivors of a group of huge lizards that ranged over much of Australasia. By Hanneke Meijer.

A bird-loving scientist calls for an end to outdoor cats

The giant open-pit project will dig up 90,000 tons of ore daily, producing 1.25 billion tons of waste. By Sarah Okeson.

Surveys in German nature reserves point to a dramatic decline in insect biomass. By Gretchen Vogel.

Scott Pruitt announced the EPA would reverse a proposed ban on this extremely harmful pesticide and allow it to remain on the market. By Nicole Greenfield.

Police in Vancouver shared an alarming photograph showing what appears to be a pigeon’s egg nest constructed out of hypodermic needles. By Jessa Schroeder.

New research challenges the idea that changes in the Earth's orbit triggered Sahara desertification.

There are some places in the world that are just so important, so vital to the survival of wildlife and so important to surrounding people and their livelihoods, that even if we doubt we will ever visit them in person, we just know we must cherish them. By Ian Singleton.

The framework shows how multiple stresses can interact within a single social-ecological system to cause a shift in that system’s behavior, how simultaneous shifts of this kind in several largely discrete social-ecological systems can interact to cause a far larger intersystemic crisis, and how such a larger crisis can then rapidly propagate across multiple system boundaries to the global scale.

“Perhaps life is something that happens not on a planet but to a planet: It is something that a planet becomes.” By David Grinspoon

They go by many names: wild boar, wild hog, razorback, Eurasian boar, feral swine. But whatever you call them, invasive wild pigs (Sus scrofa) are wreaking environmental havoc and spreading rapidly. Wild pigs were first brought to the southern U.S. in the 1500s as a source of food for early explorers and settlers, and repeated introductions occurred thereafter. In the 1900s, the Eurasian or Russian wild boar was introduced to the U.S. for sport hunting. Today’s invasive wild pigs are the descendents of introduced wild boar, escaped domestic pigs, and hybrids of the two.

The Army Corps of Engineers was ordered to allow construction of the Dakota Access pipeline to proceed under a disputed Missouri River crossing, North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven said on Tuesday, the latest twist in a months-long legal battle over the $3.8 billion project.

The kings of the Eastern forest now die as shrubs

Grass carp have been found in Lake Erie, Lake Michigan and Lake Ontario, although it’s uncertain how many there are or how widely they have spread. By John Flesher.

Life was long thought to obey its own set of rules. But as simple systems show signs of lifelike behavior, scientists are arguing about whether this apparent complexity is all a consequence of thermodynamics. By Philip Ball.

It has been 400 years since Britain was home to beavers. Now they have returned, and they are rapidly proving their worth

“How did things get to be this way?” By Paul Kingsnorth.