The ‘lonely conservationist’ advocating for better care of workers
Release Date: 04/07/2026
The Mediterranean Sea’s beauty hides an ecosystem under pressure
Mongabay Newscast
The Mediterranean Sea accounts for less than 1% of the world’s ocean surface water, but it contains roughly 18% of global marine biodiversity. It is home to 150 million people along its coastline (roughly equivalent to Russia's population). And it sequesters 17.2 million metric tons of CO2 each year. Joining the Newscast this week to talk about the unique biodiversity of the Mediterranean Sea and its threats is journalist Manuela Callari. Callari has written for Mongabay, highlighting the to purple sea urchins (Paracentrotus lividus) along the Italian coast. These marine invertebrates are...
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Wildlife crossings are having a moment
Mongabay Newscast
Nearly three years ago, Newscast guest, author and journalist Ben Goldfarb his book Crossings, which is about wildlife crossings and road ecology. Wildlife crossings help reconnect habitats fragmented by road networks, reducing collisions, helping protect threatened wildlife, and improving genetic diversity. Since that conversation, Goldfarb has the growing popularity of wildlife crossings worldwide. He returns to the Newscast to detail how, where, and why wildlife crossings are becoming increasingly funded and built. “Probably the biggest factor is that at this point, the evidence that...
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The radical plan to rethink work, wealth and planetary well-being
Mongabay Newscast
A group of more than 40 researchers spent 20 months devising a plan for the world to achieve ecological sustainability within , all while seeing incomes rise for 98% of the global population and reducing working hours for everybody by half to two and a half days a week. The plan to achieve this by 2100 is laid out in the recent “.” If it sounds utopian, Lucas Chancel, the co-director of the and editor of the report, is the first person to acknowledge this, but explains why it’s not only possible — there’s even historical precedent for many of the measures the report outlines....
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Addressing the ‘toxic legacy’ of mining in Bougainville
Mongabay Newscast
Theonila Roka Matbob grew up next to what was — at the time — the world’s largest open-pit mine in Bougainville, an autonomous island in Papua New Guinea, operated by a subsidiary of Rio Tinto. This mine wrought environmental and social devastation on the community of Panguna for decades. And many of these impacts carry on today, says Roka Matbob, who is an Indigenous Nasioi woman and politician. With the help of Jubilee Australia and the Human Rights Law Centre, Roka Matbob was able to file a legal complaint with Australia’s National Contact Point for Responsible Business Conduct. As...
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Healing the planet requires healing ourselves, says Katharine Wilkinson
Mongabay Newscast
has a Ph.D. in geography and the environment, is well known for being a co-author of the book Drawdown and co-founder of . She joins the Newscast this week to discuss her latest book . As a journalist, it’s unhelpful for me to divorce myself from the topic of this interview, as I have , time and again, the sense of “murky overwhelm” this book is specifically designed to address. But Wilkinson didn’t just write this book for journalists like myself who cover ecological crises for a living. She wrote it for readers and listeners like you. “I think we're all in our own ways grappling...
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A ‘coalition of the willing’ to urge the world to drop fossil fuels
Mongabay Newscast
A group of 57 nations mostly from the Global South, describing themselves as “coalition of the willing” intent on making the Transition Away From Fossil Fuels, or TAFF, convened in the Colombian city of Santa Marta, from April 24-29, 2026, for the . Also referred to as the “Santa Marta Coalition,” this group of countries met to discuss and develop frameworks and pathways for nations to phase out fossil fuel dependency. Joining the Mongabay Newscast this week is , a medical doctor, activist and member of the , a network of experts advocating for the as a measurement framework....
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Australia claims it’s ‘on track’ to meet its environment targets. Scientists disagree
Mongabay Newscast
Australia is one of 17 “megadiverse” countries that account for 70% of Earth’s biodiversity. However, Australia is unique in having the highest mammalian extinction rate in the . That makes conservation on the island continent, where most of the wildlife is found nowhere else on Earth, all the more urgent. Conservation and environmental scientists have come out the Australian federal government’s claim that it’s “on track” to meet most of its targets under the agreed upon at the U.N. biodiversity summit in 2022. This week on the Mongabay Newscast, , a professor of wildlife...
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The world must address pandemic threats urgently, says former CDC officer
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...
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Protest works, but it needs your help now more than ever, veteran activists say
Mongabay Newscast
“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. 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...
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A new Netflix documentary captures rare mountain gorilla behavior
Mongabay Newscast
“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...
info_outlineJessie 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.”
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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.
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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