Leading field biologist George Schaller talks about his 30 years spent exploring in the most remote stretches of Tibet: the wide, sweeping rangelands of the Chang Tang and the canyons and ravines of the southeastern forests. In Tibet Wild he tells how more roads, homes, and grazing livestock, and are increasingly causing clashes between the wildlife and people. He works with local communities, regional leaders, and national governments to protect the unique ecological richness and culture of the Tibetan Plateau.

Daniel Goleman, psychologist and author of Ecoliterate: How Educators Are Cultivating Emotional, Social, and Ecological Intelligence, talks about how educators can use his theory of emotional intelligence to give students "ecological intelligence."

Our short Argentine Invasion traces the relentless and bloody march of a band of ant warriors whose empire now wraps around the planet (they've been found on every continent except Antarctica). Adam Cole charts their impressive path to global ant dominance in a stylish graphic.

From a suburban sidewalk in southern California, Jad and Robert witness the carnage of a gruesome turf war. Though the tiny warriors doing battle clock in at just a fraction of an inch, they have evolved a surprising, successful, and rather unsettling strategy of ironclad loyalty, absolute intolerance, and brutal violence.

Robert praises the hardworking, often maligned, but utterly lovable vulture.

The World Wildlife Fund has released its new Living Planet Report. Kate Newman, the Managing Director of Public Sector Initiatives and Field Programs at the WWF, assesses the state of global biodiversity.

Charles Mann explains how Christopher Columbus changed the world when he set foot in the Americas, setting off a series of vast ecological changes as European vessels carried thousands of species across the oceans. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, is a new history of the Columbian Exchange, the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in Florida, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand, and explains how earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; bacteria, fungi, and viruses; and rats were moved across the globe, changing lives and landscapes.

Joe Roman, author of Listed: Dispatches from America's Endangered Species Act; George Amato, director of the American Museum of Natural History's Sackler Institute of Comparative Genomics; and Ernie Cooper, from TRAFFIC, a joint wildlife trade monitoring network of the World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, discuss the Endangered Species Act, which species are at risk and why, and the efforts are made to protect them.

If you have questions, call us at 646-829-3985, or leave a comment below!

“Les chose sont contre nous” ("Things are against us") is the wry slogan of Paul Jennings’ parodic philosophy resistentialism*. But Professor Jane Bennett of Johns Hopkins University doesn’t think so. (*For more on resistentialism, check out: Paul Jennings, "Report on Resistentialism," The Jenguin Pennings, 1963.)

Charles Mann explains how Christopher Columbus changed the world when he set foot in the Americas, setting off a series of vast ecological changes as European vessels carried thousands of species across the oceans. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, is a new history of the Columbian Exchange, the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in Florida, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand, and explains how earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; bacteria, fungi, and viruses; and rats were moved across the globe, changing lives and landscapes.

Over the past few decades, an incredible amount of time and money has been spent trying to remove populations of "non-native" plants. But according to a panel of ecologists, climate change, urbanization and other changes in land use have largely invalidated the theory that foreign plants are inherently harmful to their newly adopted ecosystems.

The Tigris River is one of the most important bodies of water in the Middle East, but years of extensive toxic dumping and gravel mining have severely compromised its ecosystem. We’ll speak with Humbolt Baykeeper Executive Director Pete Nichols and Nature Iraq founder Dr. Azzam Alwash about efforts to clean up the river and the newly founded group, Upper Tigris Waterkeeper.

Anna Cummins, a marine conservationist who has studied the impact of plastic refuse on marine life and coastal communities, and Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, a specialist in gorilla conservation and public health, talk about their work in their fields and about women in science. They’re all being honored with Wings WorldQuest Women of Discovery Awards.

Last year, New York City's 4th and 8th graders scored below both the state and national averages on a nationwide science exam. Every day over the next week, we'll take a few minutes to get to the bottom of some common science questions.

Today, Eleanor Sterling, director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History, answers science exam questions about species and bio-diversity. 

Dereck Joubert and Beverly Joubert, talk about making the documentary “The Last Lions.” Set in Africa, it follows a lioness battling to protect her cubs against an onslaught of enemies in the wilds of Botswana. The Jouberts have been instrumental in establishing the Big Cats Initiative. The Big Cats Initiative looks for solutions to stop the declining the lion population, which has dropped from 450,000 to 20,000 in the past 50 years. It’s playing in New York at the Paris Theater and Angelika Film Center.

On December 22nd, 2008, a Tennessee Valley coal-fired power plant ruptured, sending nearly one billion gallons of coal ash into a nearby river, where it turned to sludge. That hazardous sludge was shipped to a landfill site outside Uniontown, Alabama — an area whose demographic is too poor for the kind of political clout that would block the move. The question is: do communities like Uniontown ever really get a say in where hazardous waste goes?  

The Great Lakes' ecosystem could soon be facing a major threat by the Asian carp, an invasive fish. But the carp have a determined opponent: 11-year-old Ellie Moskowitz.

It's been four days since BP put a cap on the Deepwater Horizon oil well and, with cautious optimism, people have begun talking about recovery. But just because the oil has stopped gushing doesn't mean the damage is done. In fact, say some scientists, more harm is soon to come.

Fifty years ago, a young Jane Goodall first walked into the Gombe National Park in Tanzania. Things have changed dramatically. She talks about the changing political, environmental and ecological landscape in which she has dedicated her life's work of studying the social and familial interactions of wild chimpanzees. She says that what used to be a densely forested area is now "an island of forest surrounded by cultivated fields and people struggling to survive."

In 1979, an explosion on the Ixtoc 1 oil platform caused the world's worst accidental oil spill 50 miles off Mexico's Gulf Coast. 140 million gallons of oil gushed into the Gulf. It took more than nine months to cap the leak. The BBC has launched a series, "Oil and Water" in which they will explore the impacts of an oil-based economy in various locations around the world. As a part of the series, BBC reporters traveled to Mexico's beaches only to find the effects of the Ixtoc spill are still being felt today, more than thirty years after the explosion.