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Smithsonian Magazine •

Fish Traps Have Been Banned on the Columbia River for Nearly a Century. Could Bringing Them Back Help Save Salmon?

In the late summer of 1805, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s Corps of Discovery expedition came upon a camp of Shoshone Indians, who gifted the haggard explorers a meal that raised their spirits.

“This was the first salmon I had seen and perfectly convinced me that we were on the waters of the Pacific Ocean,” Lewis journaled.

He knew that Atlantic salmon moved between ocean and river, inhabiting both saltwater and freshwater environments. The presence of salmon, he thought, surely indicate...
Smithsonian Magazine •

Why Is Tetepare the South Pacific’s Largest Uninhabited Island?

Roughly two decades ago, a group of scientists embarked to Tetepare, a remote island in the southwestern corner of the Solomon Islands, to study its ecology. They knew that this particular island, whose evergreen hills rise from the choppy Pacific Ocean, is a refuge for a wide variety of endangered animals. Leatherback sea turtles nest on its black-sand shores. Dugongs feed on meadows of seagrass that flow out from its coastline. Old-growth rainforest covers much of its 46 square miles of rugged...
Oceanic Society •

Surfing the Bow: Wild Encounters with Solomon Island Dolphins

The vessel, named the Bilikiki, the “big canoe” in the local Pidjin, has been gliding through the seas of the Solomon Islands for nearly 40 years. By liveaboard standards, it is a veteran, but the crew assures me few crafts are as smooth, and few as trusted by the local dolphins.“They’re used to the sound of the engine,” Benjamin Kahn, a marine ecologist with Oceanic Society’s partner, Planet Deep, explains to me as we scan the mirror-like waters looking for a breach of a dorsal fin.
Oceanic Society •

Why Turneffe Atoll Is Ideal for Experiencing Belize’s Abundant Wildlife

Acres of seagrass span out from the mangrove-clad islands of Belize’s Turneffe Atoll, a coral-formed atoll in the heart of the Mesoamerican Reef—the second largest barrier reef in the world. Just off of one such island, snorkelers drift above a prairie-like bed of seagrass searching for seahorses and other shy critters, when the boat captain lets out an excited shout. He points to a line of silt spread across the surface of the otherwise clear water.This is a sign that Antillean manatees, rare m...
Oceanic Society •

Why Swimming with Humpback Whales Is the Ultimate Wildlife Experience

The boat departs at daybreak from the sandy banks of ‘Utangake, an island within the Vava’u region in the northeastern corner of the Kingdom of Tonga. Though these picturesque islands are ringed by stunning reefs, the boat, filled with eager tourists clad in snorkeling masks and wetsuits, heads further offshore where the swells gently rise, along with a palpable sense of anticipation. The captain scans the horizon looking for clouds of water vapor bursting from the surface – a sure sign that mem...
Smithsonian Magazine •

Will the Traditional Chinese Medicine Industry End the Pangolin?

On a cold, wet night in eastern Malaysia, conservation biologist Elisa Panjang trekked through a nature reserve in search of pangolins—the only scaled mammal in the world. If she had found one that evening in 2017, she would have fitted the animal with a tracking device and studied how it interacted with the nearby palm tree plantations encroaching on pangolin habitat.

Relatively little is known about the solitary and nocturnal creatures, also known as “scaly anteaters.” Their breeding and terr...
Devex •

Do US counterterrorism laws undermine peacebuilding?

What is the line between talking to a terrorist group in the name of peace versus supporting them? That’s the question that for years has pitted many civil society organizations against the U.S. government — and the debate is about to get more heated.In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court barred a group of nongovernmental organizations from providing U.N.-designed conflict resolution training to members of the Kurdistan Workers Party and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Tamil Tigers, both liste...
The New Humanitarian •

How overhead funding rules starve grassroots NGOs

Ibrahim Kamara has a modest dream for the disaster relief NGO he heads in Sierra Leone: He wants to find a donor that will help him hire staff and pay the bills.
“If I had that opportunity, it would be like a saviour from heaven,” said Kamara, a former child soldier who founded Safe Haven Adaptive Response Program, or SHARP, to help flood-prone, low-income communities in the capital, Freetown.
The volunteer network monitors weather alerts and evacuates vulnerable households, in a city where loca...
The New Humanitarian •

How vague money-laundering and counter-terror rules slow aid

Humanitarian groups need cash to operate. But in many crisis hotspots, the biggest hurdle to accessing funding is often their own banks – leaving them scrambling for workarounds and slowing life-saving aid. That’s what Dalell Mohmed found in the crucial days after earthquakes struck Syria and Türkiye in February when her NGO’s bank wouldn’t wire the cash needed to provide quick relief to some 12,000 people. “When I reached out to our bank, they said it went into our compliance section, and then...