Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

By clicking “Accept”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information or to customize your cookie preferences.

Jane Goodall’s legacy of empathy, curiosity, and courage

News Feed
Wednesday, April 3, 2024

The vision Every single one of you has that indomitable spirit. But so many people don’t let it out. They don’t realize the power they have to influence and change the world. And so I’m saying to you, let your indomitable spirit make a difference. — Jane Goodall, March 30, 2024, at the Moore Theatre in Seattle The spotlight Going to see Jane Goodall speak is not unlike going to a sold-out concert of one of your favorite artists. On Saturday, I arrived at the Moore Theatre in downtown Seattle, where the renowned ethologist would be talking about her life and work, to find a queue already wrapping around the block. Eager attendees — mothers and daughters, young couples, and groups of gray-haired friends — took selfies with the theater sign bearing her name. Just days before her 90th birthday (which she celebrates today, April 3), it was clear her place in the cultural landscape has yet to wane. “I’ve always found this interesting about Jane — because she has spanned so many chapters in her life, depending on an individual’s age, they have a different understanding of who she is,” said Anna Rathmann, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute. Older people may remember her as the young, beautiful blond scientist who was photographed for National Geographic, sitting with her binoculars in the Tanzanian jungle. Others may be more familiar with her work as a public speaker and advocate for conservation. “And then you talk to some of the youth activists and the younger people, they see her as this mother earth elder figure,” Rathmann said. “They see her for the wisdom that she represents. And I think that’s really powerful.” Even as she reaches her 10th decade, Goodall has no plans to retire. She has said that she’ll keep up her demanding schedule of traveling and public speaking until her body prohibits her from doing so. “She’ll frequently get asked by journalists, ‘Oh, Jane, you’ve lived this amazing life, you’ve done all these things, you have all these accolades. What’s your next adventure?’” Rathmann said. “And she’ll kind of sit there contemplatively, and then she’ll go, ‘My next great adventure will be death.’” As Rathmann noted, this answer is in some ways humorous, and a bit disarming. But it’s also, of course, true. It speaks to Goodall’s genuine curiosity about the world and its natural processes — the throughline of a career that started with that curiosity about the natural world and lasted long enough to turn to the desperate need to protect it. “There’s some connective tissue there about being deliberate and choosing to not live in fear, to not live in despair,” Rathmann said. When I made it into the theater, nearly a full hour early, the 1,800-seat auditorium was already bustling. The people who sat behind me remarked on Goodall’s ability to “pack the house.” And just before her talk was scheduled to begin, the crowd launched into a chorus of “Happy Birthday,” followed by a standing ovation when she stepped out to the podium. “Well, wow. That was an amazing welcome,” Goodall said. At the start of her talk, she told us that the only way she’s able to deal with such overwhelming public admiration is because there are, as she put it, two Janes. “There’s this one standing here, just a small person walking onto a stage, with feelings like all of you. And then there’s an icon. And it’s the icon that you greeted.” The sense of adoration for Jane the icon — and the specialness of getting to see her there in person — was almost palpable in the room. If the buzz surrounding the event had some of the atmosphere of a big concert, the talk itself felt like sitting at the feet of your own grandmother, drinking in every word of her stories. Goodall was dressed mostly in black, with pops of red and and yellow decorating a shawl that almost resembled wings. Her hair was pulled back in its signature ponytail. Once or twice, she shared video clips on the large projector behind her. And near the end of her talk, folk musician Dana Lyons joined her onstage to sing two songs, including a tribute titled “Love Song to Jane.” But apart from that, the talk was simple and intimate. Just Goodall standing at the podium (yes, standing, the entire time) sharing in her slow, deliberate tone, stories about her life — each one building to a lesson about hope, tenacity, and our duty to the future. Jane Goodall greets the crowd at the Moore Theatre in Seattle. Claire Elise Thompson / Grist “I was born loving animals. And I don’t know where that came from. I was just born with it and my mother supported it,” Goodall began. She recalled how her mother took her on holiday to a farm when she was about 4 years old. For two weeks, her job was to collect the eggs from the hen house. But a young, curious Goodall wanted to understand how an egg could come out of a chicken. And so, apparently, she waited in a hen house for about four hours to witness the act — and not knowing where she was, her mother was getting ready to call the police when Goodall reappeared at the house, covered in straw, ecstatic to share the story of how a hen lays an egg. “When you look back on that story, wasn’t that the making of a little scientist?” Goodall pondered. “A different kind of mother might have crushed that scientific curiosity. And I might not be standing here talking to you now.” Unable to afford a college education, Goodall trained as a secretary when she was 18 (“which is very boring,” she said), and then waited tables to save money for what had been her dream since childhood: to travel to Africa and study wild animals. She finally made it from London to Kenya, on a boat ride all the way down around Cape Town that took nearly a month, she said, to groans from the audience. “It was a magic journey,” Goodall added. In Kenya, she met the famous paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, who happened to be in need of a secretary. Leakey ultimately arranged Goodall’s first excursion to study chimpanzees in the wild — something no researcher had done before. When Jane arrived at what is now Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania (accompanied by her “same amazing mom”), it took several more months of patience and determination for her to even get close to the animals. But when they did eventually lose their fear of her, her discoveries, and her approach, rocked the scientific world. Photos of Goodall and her mother at Gombe — taken by Dutch photographer and nobleman Hugo Van Lawick, whom Goodall later married. JGI / Hugo van Lawick Chimps are humans’ closest living relatives, and Goodall found that they resemble us in some ways that were surprising and even controversial at the time. Her initial groundbreaking discovery was that chimpanzees make and use tools — something that was thought to be a uniquely human trait. But she observed other similarities as well. Chimpanzees show affection through hugging and kissing. They have complex social relationships and individual personalities. They can be brutally violent toward one another, and they can also be altruistic. After her initial breakthrough in 1960, Goodall received funding to extend her research in Gombe, which continues to this day as the longest-running field study of chimpanzees. She first had to obtain a Ph.D. at Cambridge, where she was told she had been going about things all wrong. “​​You shouldn’t have named the chimps, they should have numbers, that’s scientific. You can’t talk about them having personalities, minds, or emotions. Those are unique to humans. You can’t have empathy with them because scientists must be objective.” Goodall never argued with her professors, but she considered all this to be “rubbish.” She went back to Gombe, continuing both as a researcher and the subject of film and photographs that contributed to a shift in the way humans, including scientists, thought about animals and the natural world. “They were the best days of my life,” Goodall said. But then something else shifted. “I just felt so at home in the forest,” she recounted. “So why did I leave? I left because, at a big conference in 1986, I came to understand the extent of the deforestation going on across Africa.” She also learned about the cruel treatment of chimps being kept in captivity for research. “I went to that conference as a scientist, planning to spend the rest of my life in Gombe. But I left as an activist. I knew I had to do something.” Jane Goodall with a chimpanzee at the Tchimpounga sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. JGI / Fernando Turmo Goodall became a speaker, using the public’s interest in her life to share messages of action. She wrote and spoke directly to decision-makers, including the former director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins (and, thanks in part to her advocacy, the NIH ended its use of chimpanzees in invasive biomedical research in 2015). Through the Jane Goodall Institute, she has taken a community-centered approach to conservation and habitat restoration. “Right from the beginning, we went in and asked the people what we could do to help,” Goodall said. Around this point in her talk, Goodall described how she sees humanity “at the start of a very, very long, very, very dark tunnel. And right at the end of that tunnel is a little star shining. And that’s hope.” The tunnel is climate change. It’s also biodiversity loss, poverty, discrimination, and war, she said, and we’ve got to do what it takes to get ourselves to the light at the end. Goodall’s stories are largely focused on the earlier parts of her life and career — stories she has probably told hundreds of times before, although that doesn’t lessen their impact. She doesn’t offer reflections about her milestone birthday, or spend much time belaboring warnings about how the world has changed over her decades of work. Although our understanding of the most pressing problems facing the world has changed, Goodall’s message largely hasn’t. The climate crisis is another issue to which Goodall applies her message of agency, empathy, and hope. “Seeing Jane Goodall filled my cup,” said Darby Graf, a recent college graduate who now works in advocacy and inclusion in higher education. We met on the long journey down the stairs after Goodall’s talk. “There are a lot of things in this life that empty my cup, but hearing her speak filled me with hope. I didn’t know how much I craved that until I started crying partway through her speech.” (This phenomenon is apparently so widespread it is sometimes known as “the Jane effect.”) I experienced a version of the Jane effect, too — there is something about Jane Goodall, her gentleness and accessibility, that reaches people emotionally. David Attenborough, who is himself a venerated naturalist turned climate activist, called it “an extraordinary, almost saintly naiveté.” “Jane has an amazing capacity to view everyone as individuals,” Rathmann said. That has been a theme in her work with animals, but it also guides her approach to advocacy today, Rathmann said. “Because an individual can change their mind. An individual can create a ripple effect. And it’s a profound experience to change one individual who then can change a whole host of others.” Rathmann added that Goodall never sought out global celebrity. But she has accepted the role of icon and given it her all. “She is keenly aware that there is someone in that audience who needs to hear whatever it is that she has said,” Rathmann said, someone who will then take that experience with them. Still, on Goodall’s 90th birthday, sitting in the glow of Jane the icon, it’s hard not to think about Jane the human and what she herself views as her next great adventure — and whether there is anyone out there who can pick up the torch with quite the same cultural influence with which she has wielded it. Climate journalist (and former Grist fellow) Siri Chilukuri has been a Goodall fan since the third grade, which played a big role in her decision to enter this field. Today, she said, she thinks about “how to make space for more Jane Goodalls in the world.” “You know, how does that legacy continue? How do those conversations keep happening? How do those rooms keep filling up?” she said. Chilukuri’s reporting has focused on bringing those new voices to the fore, especially the people most impacted by the climate crisis — many of whom are also at the forefront of solutions. “There’s so many people with so many incredible stories to tell that also have to do with understanding how climate change is a threat to our world,” she said. “And those are people that we should be trying to give platforms as well.” Goodall, for her part, has said that she respects young activists like Greta Thunberg for their anger and confrontational approach to climate activism. Although it stands in stark contrast to her tone, that anger speaks to the era of the climate crisis we are now in — an era very different from the one in which Goodall began her advocacy. But the Jane Goodall Institute has plans to continue Goodall’s own legacy and voice as well. “Jane will always serve as that inspiration, as that figurehead of the organization,” Rathmann said of the institute’s work. “In terms of, like, 50 years from now, what is the organization? My hope is that it’s honoring Jane’s own life and legacy, having generations engaged in her work who never knew her personally, who never got the opportunity to come and see her speak in person. Several generations from now, I hope that, if we do it right, they will still be inspired and participating in this.” “Every single one of us matters, has a role to play, makes a difference every single day,” Goodall told the crowd on Saturday. But the closing note of her talk was not about individual agency. It was about collective action. “I just want to thank you,” she said to the team at the Jane Goodall Institute, the volunteers who support the organization’s mission, and the entire audience — those of us who simply came out to fill the room. “Because it’s together that we can make this a better world. We’ve got to get together to make a difference, now, before it’s too late.” — Claire Elise Thompson More exposure Read: a charming recap and Q&A with Jane after her birthday celebration with 90 dogs on Carmel Beach in California (New York Times) Read: an article about Goodall’s recent work, and how she kept it alive during the pandemic (The Irish Times) Watch: Jane Goodall: Reasons for Hope, a documentary now playing in select theaters Listen: to the Jane Goodall Hopecast A parting shot One of Goodall’s proudest legacies is Roots & Shoots, an initiative of the Jane Goodall Institute that aims to empower young people to be environmental leaders in their communities. The program is active in at least 75 countries — although, Rathmann noted, it’s difficult to get a complete picture of the scope because the program is grassroots in nature. Here, Goodall joins a group of youngsters releasing baby sea turtles in Santa Marta, Colombia. IMAGE CREDITS Vision: Grist Spotlight: Claire Elise Thompson / Grist; JGI / Hugo van Lawick; JGI / Fernando Turmo Parting shot: Roots & Shoots Colombia This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Jane Goodall’s legacy of empathy, curiosity, and courage on Apr 3, 2024.

As the iconic scientist and activist celebrates her 90th birthday, her message for younger generations is one of hope — and not fearing the next adventure.

Illustration of Jane Goodall

The vision

Every single one of you has that indomitable spirit. But so many people don’t let it out. They don’t realize the power they have to influence and change the world. And so I’m saying to you, let your indomitable spirit make a difference.

— Jane Goodall, March 30, 2024, at the Moore Theatre in Seattle

The spotlight

Going to see Jane Goodall speak is not unlike going to a sold-out concert of one of your favorite artists. On Saturday, I arrived at the Moore Theatre in downtown Seattle, where the renowned ethologist would be talking about her life and work, to find a queue already wrapping around the block. Eager attendees — mothers and daughters, young couples, and groups of gray-haired friends — took selfies with the theater sign bearing her name. Just days before her 90th birthday (which she celebrates today, April 3), it was clear her place in the cultural landscape has yet to wane.

A busy street with a theatre sign

“I’ve always found this interesting about Jane — because she has spanned so many chapters in her life, depending on an individual’s age, they have a different understanding of who she is,” said Anna Rathmann, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute. Older people may remember her as the young, beautiful blond scientist who was photographed for National Geographic, sitting with her binoculars in the Tanzanian jungle. Others may be more familiar with her work as a public speaker and advocate for conservation. “And then you talk to some of the youth activists and the younger people, they see her as this mother earth elder figure,” Rathmann said. “They see her for the wisdom that she represents. And I think that’s really powerful.”

Even as she reaches her 10th decade, Goodall has no plans to retire. She has said that she’ll keep up her demanding schedule of traveling and public speaking until her body prohibits her from doing so.

“She’ll frequently get asked by journalists, ‘Oh, Jane, you’ve lived this amazing life, you’ve done all these things, you have all these accolades. What’s your next adventure?’” Rathmann said. “And she’ll kind of sit there contemplatively, and then she’ll go, ‘My next great adventure will be death.’”

As Rathmann noted, this answer is in some ways humorous, and a bit disarming. But it’s also, of course, true. It speaks to Goodall’s genuine curiosity about the world and its natural processes — the throughline of a career that started with that curiosity about the natural world and lasted long enough to turn to the desperate need to protect it.

“There’s some connective tissue there about being deliberate and choosing to not live in fear, to not live in despair,” Rathmann said.

. . .

When I made it into the theater, nearly a full hour early, the 1,800-seat auditorium was already bustling. The people who sat behind me remarked on Goodall’s ability to “pack the house.” And just before her talk was scheduled to begin, the crowd launched into a chorus of “Happy Birthday,” followed by a standing ovation when she stepped out to the podium.

“Well, wow. That was an amazing welcome,” Goodall said.

At the start of her talk, she told us that the only way she’s able to deal with such overwhelming public admiration is because there are, as she put it, two Janes. “There’s this one standing here, just a small person walking onto a stage, with feelings like all of you. And then there’s an icon. And it’s the icon that you greeted.”

The sense of adoration for Jane the icon — and the specialness of getting to see her there in person — was almost palpable in the room. If the buzz surrounding the event had some of the atmosphere of a big concert, the talk itself felt like sitting at the feet of your own grandmother, drinking in every word of her stories.

Goodall was dressed mostly in black, with pops of red and and yellow decorating a shawl that almost resembled wings. Her hair was pulled back in its signature ponytail. Once or twice, she shared video clips on the large projector behind her. And near the end of her talk, folk musician Dana Lyons joined her onstage to sing two songs, including a tribute titled “Love Song to Jane.” But apart from that, the talk was simple and intimate. Just Goodall standing at the podium (yes, standing, the entire time) sharing in her slow, deliberate tone, stories about her life — each one building to a lesson about hope, tenacity, and our duty to the future.

An elderly woman (Jane Goodall) standing on a large stage with her arms outstretched

Jane Goodall greets the crowd at the Moore Theatre in Seattle. Claire Elise Thompson / Grist

“I was born loving animals. And I don’t know where that came from. I was just born with it and my mother supported it,” Goodall began. She recalled how her mother took her on holiday to a farm when she was about 4 years old. For two weeks, her job was to collect the eggs from the hen house. But a young, curious Goodall wanted to understand how an egg could come out of a chicken. And so, apparently, she waited in a hen house for about four hours to witness the act — and not knowing where she was, her mother was getting ready to call the police when Goodall reappeared at the house, covered in straw, ecstatic to share the story of how a hen lays an egg.

“When you look back on that story, wasn’t that the making of a little scientist?” Goodall pondered. “A different kind of mother might have crushed that scientific curiosity. And I might not be standing here talking to you now.”

Unable to afford a college education, Goodall trained as a secretary when she was 18 (“which is very boring,” she said), and then waited tables to save money for what had been her dream since childhood: to travel to Africa and study wild animals.

She finally made it from London to Kenya, on a boat ride all the way down around Cape Town that took nearly a month, she said, to groans from the audience. “It was a magic journey,” Goodall added. In Kenya, she met the famous paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, who happened to be in need of a secretary. Leakey ultimately arranged Goodall’s first excursion to study chimpanzees in the wild — something no researcher had done before.

When Jane arrived at what is now Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania (accompanied by her “same amazing mom”), it took several more months of patience and determination for her to even get close to the animals. But when they did eventually lose their fear of her, her discoveries, and her approach, rocked the scientific world.

Two side-by-side photos of a young woman (Jane Goodall) with binoculars sitting on a hillside, and two women in a camp looking at specimens on a table

Photos of Goodall and her mother at Gombe — taken by Dutch photographer and nobleman Hugo Van Lawick, whom Goodall later married. JGI / Hugo van Lawick

Chimps are humans’ closest living relatives, and Goodall found that they resemble us in some ways that were surprising and even controversial at the time. Her initial groundbreaking discovery was that chimpanzees make and use tools — something that was thought to be a uniquely human trait. But she observed other similarities as well. Chimpanzees show affection through hugging and kissing. They have complex social relationships and individual personalities. They can be brutally violent toward one another, and they can also be altruistic.

After her initial breakthrough in 1960, Goodall received funding to extend her research in Gombe, which continues to this day as the longest-running field study of chimpanzees. She first had to obtain a Ph.D. at Cambridge, where she was told she had been going about things all wrong. “​​You shouldn’t have named the chimps, they should have numbers, that’s scientific. You can’t talk about them having personalities, minds, or emotions. Those are unique to humans. You can’t have empathy with them because scientists must be objective.” Goodall never argued with her professors, but she considered all this to be “rubbish.”

She went back to Gombe, continuing both as a researcher and the subject of film and photographs that contributed to a shift in the way humans, including scientists, thought about animals and the natural world. “They were the best days of my life,” Goodall said. But then something else shifted.

“I just felt so at home in the forest,” she recounted. “So why did I leave? I left because, at a big conference in 1986, I came to understand the extent of the deforestation going on across Africa.” She also learned about the cruel treatment of chimps being kept in captivity for research. “I went to that conference as a scientist, planning to spend the rest of my life in Gombe. But I left as an activist. I knew I had to do something.”

An elderly woman (Jane Goodall) smiles at the camera sitting next to a chimpanzee

Jane Goodall with a chimpanzee at the Tchimpounga sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. JGI / Fernando Turmo

Goodall became a speaker, using the public’s interest in her life to share messages of action. She wrote and spoke directly to decision-makers, including the former director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins (and, thanks in part to her advocacy, the NIH ended its use of chimpanzees in invasive biomedical research in 2015). Through the Jane Goodall Institute, she has taken a community-centered approach to conservation and habitat restoration. “Right from the beginning, we went in and asked the people what we could do to help,” Goodall said.

Around this point in her talk, Goodall described how she sees humanity “at the start of a very, very long, very, very dark tunnel. And right at the end of that tunnel is a little star shining. And that’s hope.” The tunnel is climate change. It’s also biodiversity loss, poverty, discrimination, and war, she said, and we’ve got to do what it takes to get ourselves to the light at the end.

Goodall’s stories are largely focused on the earlier parts of her life and career — stories she has probably told hundreds of times before, although that doesn’t lessen their impact. She doesn’t offer reflections about her milestone birthday, or spend much time belaboring warnings about how the world has changed over her decades of work. Although our understanding of the most pressing problems facing the world has changed, Goodall’s message largely hasn’t. The climate crisis is another issue to which Goodall applies her message of agency, empathy, and hope.

. . .

“Seeing Jane Goodall filled my cup,” said Darby Graf, a recent college graduate who now works in advocacy and inclusion in higher education. We met on the long journey down the stairs after Goodall’s talk. “There are a lot of things in this life that empty my cup, but hearing her speak filled me with hope. I didn’t know how much I craved that until I started crying partway through her speech.” (This phenomenon is apparently so widespread it is sometimes known as “the Jane effect.”)

I experienced a version of the Jane effect, too — there is something about Jane Goodall, her gentleness and accessibility, that reaches people emotionally. David Attenborough, who is himself a venerated naturalist turned climate activist, called it “an extraordinary, almost saintly naiveté.”

“Jane has an amazing capacity to view everyone as individuals,” Rathmann said. That has been a theme in her work with animals, but it also guides her approach to advocacy today, Rathmann said. “Because an individual can change their mind. An individual can create a ripple effect. And it’s a profound experience to change one individual who then can change a whole host of others.”

Rathmann added that Goodall never sought out global celebrity. But she has accepted the role of icon and given it her all. “She is keenly aware that there is someone in that audience who needs to hear whatever it is that she has said,” Rathmann said, someone who will then take that experience with them.

Still, on Goodall’s 90th birthday, sitting in the glow of Jane the icon, it’s hard not to think about Jane the human and what she herself views as her next great adventure — and whether there is anyone out there who can pick up the torch with quite the same cultural influence with which she has wielded it.

Climate journalist (and former Grist fellow) Siri Chilukuri has been a Goodall fan since the third grade, which played a big role in her decision to enter this field. Today, she said, she thinks about “how to make space for more Jane Goodalls in the world.”

“You know, how does that legacy continue? How do those conversations keep happening? How do those rooms keep filling up?” she said. Chilukuri’s reporting has focused on bringing those new voices to the fore, especially the people most impacted by the climate crisis — many of whom are also at the forefront of solutions. “There’s so many people with so many incredible stories to tell that also have to do with understanding how climate change is a threat to our world,” she said. “And those are people that we should be trying to give platforms as well.”

Goodall, for her part, has said that she respects young activists like Greta Thunberg for their anger and confrontational approach to climate activism. Although it stands in stark contrast to her tone, that anger speaks to the era of the climate crisis we are now in — an era very different from the one in which Goodall began her advocacy.

But the Jane Goodall Institute has plans to continue Goodall’s own legacy and voice as well. “Jane will always serve as that inspiration, as that figurehead of the organization,” Rathmann said of the institute’s work. “In terms of, like, 50 years from now, what is the organization? My hope is that it’s honoring Jane’s own life and legacy, having generations engaged in her work who never knew her personally, who never got the opportunity to come and see her speak in person. Several generations from now, I hope that, if we do it right, they will still be inspired and participating in this.”

“Every single one of us matters, has a role to play, makes a difference every single day,” Goodall told the crowd on Saturday. But the closing note of her talk was not about individual agency. It was about collective action.

“I just want to thank you,” she said to the team at the Jane Goodall Institute, the volunteers who support the organization’s mission, and the entire audience — those of us who simply came out to fill the room. “Because it’s together that we can make this a better world. We’ve got to get together to make a difference, now, before it’s too late.”

— Claire Elise Thompson

More exposure

A parting shot

One of Goodall’s proudest legacies is Roots & Shoots, an initiative of the Jane Goodall Institute that aims to empower young people to be environmental leaders in their communities. The program is active in at least 75 countries — although, Rathmann noted, it’s difficult to get a complete picture of the scope because the program is grassroots in nature. Here, Goodall joins a group of youngsters releasing baby sea turtles in Santa Marta, Colombia.

A group of young people in white T-shirts and an elderly woman (Jane Goodall) crouch on the beach holding baby sea turtles

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Grist

Spotlight: Claire Elise Thompson / Grist; JGI / Hugo van Lawick; JGI / Fernando Turmo

Parting shot: Roots & Shoots Colombia

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Jane Goodall’s legacy of empathy, curiosity, and courage on Apr 3, 2024.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

Evangelical churches in Indiana turn to solar and sustainability as an expression of faith

A growing number of evangelical churches and universities in Indiana are embracing renewable energy and environmental stewardship as a religious duty, reframing climate action through a spiritual lens.Catrin Einhorn reports for The New York TimesIn short:Churches across Indiana, including Christ’s Community Church and Grace Church, are installing solar panels, planting native gardens, and hosting events like Indy Creation Fest to promote environmental stewardship.Evangelical leaders say their work aligns with a biblical call to care for creation, distancing it from politicized language around climate change to appeal to more conservative congregations.Christian universities such as Indiana Wesleyan and Taylor are integrating environmental science into academics and campus life, fostering student-led sustainability efforts rooted in faith.Key quote:“It’s a quiet movement.”— Rev. Jeremy Summers, director of church and community engagement for the Evangelical Environmental NetworkWhy this matters:The intersection of faith and environmental action challenges longstanding cultural divides in the climate conversation. Evangelical communities — historically less engaged on climate issues — hold substantial political and social influence, particularly across the Midwest and South. Framing sustainability as a religious obligation sidesteps partisan divides and invites wider participation. These faith-led movements can help shift attitudes in rural and suburban America, where skepticism of climate science and federal intervention runs high. And as the environmental impacts of fossil fuel dependence grow — heatwaves, water scarcity, air pollution— the health and well-being of families in these communities are increasingly at stake. Read more: Christian climate activists aim to bridge faith and environmental actionPope Francis, who used faith and science to call out the climate crisis, dies at 88

A growing number of evangelical churches and universities in Indiana are embracing renewable energy and environmental stewardship as a religious duty, reframing climate action through a spiritual lens.Catrin Einhorn reports for The New York TimesIn short:Churches across Indiana, including Christ’s Community Church and Grace Church, are installing solar panels, planting native gardens, and hosting events like Indy Creation Fest to promote environmental stewardship.Evangelical leaders say their work aligns with a biblical call to care for creation, distancing it from politicized language around climate change to appeal to more conservative congregations.Christian universities such as Indiana Wesleyan and Taylor are integrating environmental science into academics and campus life, fostering student-led sustainability efforts rooted in faith.Key quote:“It’s a quiet movement.”— Rev. Jeremy Summers, director of church and community engagement for the Evangelical Environmental NetworkWhy this matters:The intersection of faith and environmental action challenges longstanding cultural divides in the climate conversation. Evangelical communities — historically less engaged on climate issues — hold substantial political and social influence, particularly across the Midwest and South. Framing sustainability as a religious obligation sidesteps partisan divides and invites wider participation. These faith-led movements can help shift attitudes in rural and suburban America, where skepticism of climate science and federal intervention runs high. And as the environmental impacts of fossil fuel dependence grow — heatwaves, water scarcity, air pollution— the health and well-being of families in these communities are increasingly at stake. Read more: Christian climate activists aim to bridge faith and environmental actionPope Francis, who used faith and science to call out the climate crisis, dies at 88

Will the next pope be liberal or conservative? Neither.

If there’s one succinct way to describe Pope Francis’s stewardship of the Catholic Church over the last 12 years, it might best be  done with three of his own words: “todos, todos, todos” — “everyone, everyone, everyone.” Francis, who died Monday morning in Vatican City, was both a reformer and a traditionalist. He didn’t change […]

Pope Francis meets students at Portugal’s Catholic University on August 3, 2023, in Lisbon for World Youth Day, an international Catholic rally inaugurated by St. John Paul II to invigorate young people in their faith. | Vatican Media via Vatican Pool/Getty Images If there’s one succinct way to describe Pope Francis’s stewardship of the Catholic Church over the last 12 years, it might best be  done with three of his own words: “todos, todos, todos” — “everyone, everyone, everyone.” Francis, who died Monday morning in Vatican City, was both a reformer and a traditionalist. He didn’t change church doctrine, didn’t dramatically alter the Church’s teachings, and didn’t fundamentally disrupt the bedrock of Catholic belief. Catholics still believe there is one God who exists as three divine persons, that Jesus died and was resurrected, and that sin is still a thing. Only men can serve in the priesthood, life still begins at conception, and faith is lived through both prayer and good works. And yet it still feels like Pope Francis transformed the Church — breathing life into a 2,000-year-old institution by making it a player in current events, updating some of its bureaucracy to better respond to earthly affairs, and recentering the Church’s focus on the principle that it is open to all, but especially concerned with the least well off and marginalized in society. With Francis gone, how should we think of his legacy? Was he really the radical progressive revolutionary some on the American political right cast him as? And will his successor follow in his footsteps?   To try to neatly place Francis on the US political spectrum is a bit of a fool’s errand. It’s precisely because Francis and his potential successors defy our ability to categorize their legacies within our worldly, partisan, and tribalistic categories that it’s not very useful to use labels like “liberal” and “conservative.” Those things mean very different things within the Church versus outside of it. Instead, it’s more helpful to realize just how much Francis changed the Church’s tone and posturing toward openness and care for the least well off — and how he set up to Church to continue in that direction after he’s gone. He was neither liberal nor conservative: He was a bridge to the future who made the Church more relevant, without betraying its core teachings. That starting point will be critical for reading and understanding the next few weeks of papal news and speculation — especially as poorly sourced viral charts and infographics that lack context spread on social media in an attempt to explain what comes next. Revisiting Francis’s papacy Francis’s papacy is a prime example of how unhelpful it is to try to think of popes, and the Church, along the right-left political spectrum we’re used to thinking of in Western democracies.  When he was elected in 2013, Francis was a bit of an enigma. Progressives cautioned each other not to get too hopeful, while conservatives were wary about how open he would be to changing the Church’s public presence and social teachings. Before being elected pope, he was described as more traditional — not as activist as some of his Latin American peers who embraced progressive, socialist-adjacent liberation theology and intervened in political developments in Argentina, for example. He was orthodox and “uncompromising” on issues related to the right to life (euthanasia, the death penalty, and abortion) and on the role of women in the church, and advocated for clergy to embrace austerity and humility. And yet he was known to take unorthodox approaches to his ministry: advocating for the poor and the oppressed, and expressing openness to other religions in Argentina. He would bring that mix of views to his papacy. The following decade would see the Church undergo few changes in theological or doctrinal teachings, and yet it still appeared as though it was dramatically breaking with the past. That duality was in part because Francis was essentially both a conservative and a liberal, by American standards, at the same time, as Catholic writer James T. Keane argued in 2021. Francis was anti-abortion, critical of gender theory, opposed to ordaining women, and opposed to marriage for same-sex couples, while also welcoming the LGBTQ community, fiercely criticizing capitalism, unabashedly defending immigrants, opposing the death penalty, and advocating for environmentalism and care for the planet. That was how Francis functioned as a bridge between the traditionalism of his predecessors and a Church able to embrace modernity. And that’s also why he had so many critics: He was both too liberal and radical, and not progressive or bold enough. Francis used the Church’s unchanging foundational teachings and beliefs to respond to the crises of the 21st century and to consistently push for a “both-and” approach to social issues, endorsing “conservative”-coded teachings while adding on more focus to social justice issues that hadn’t been the traditionally associated with the church. That’s the approach he took when critiquing consumerism, modern capitalism, and “throwaway culture,” for example, employing the Church’s teachings on the sanctity of life to attack abortion rights, promote environmentalism, and criticize neo-liberal economics. None of those issues required dramatic changes to the Church’s religious or theological teachings. But they did involve moving the church beyond older debates — such as abortion, contraception, and marriage — and into other moral quandaries: economics, immigration, war, and climate change. And he spoke plainly about these debates in public, as when he responded, “Who am I to judge?” when asked about LGBTQ Catholics or said he wishes that hell is “empty.” Still, he reinforced that softer, more inquisitive and humble church tone with restructuring and reforms within the church bureaucracy — essentially setting the church up for a continued march along this path. Nearly 80 percent of the cardinals who are eligible to vote in a papal conclave were appointed by Francis — some 108 of 135 members of the College of Cardinals who can vote, per the Vatican itself. Most don’t align on any consistent ideological spectrum, having vastly different beliefs about the role of the Church, how the Church’s internal workings should operate, and what the Church’s social stances should be — that’s partially why it’s risky to read into and interpret projections about “wings” or ideological “factions” among the cardinal-electors as if they are a parliament or house of Congress. There will naturally be speculation, given who Francis appointed as cardinals, that his successor will be non-European and less traditional. But as Francis himself showed through his papacy, the church has the benefit of time and taking the long view on social issues. He reminded Catholics that concern for the poor and oppressed must be just as central to the Church’s presence in the world as any age-old culture war issue. And to try to apply to popes and the Church the political labels and sets of beliefs we use in America is pointless.

Grassroots activists who took on corruption and corporate power share 2025 Goldman prize

Seven winners of environmental prize include Amazonian river campaigner and Tunisian who fought against organised waste traffickingIndigenous river campaigner from Peru honouredGrassroots activists who helped jail corrupt officials and obtain personhood rights for a sacred Amazonian river are among this year’s winners of the world’s most prestigious environmental prize.The community campaigns led by the seven 2025 Goldman prize winners underscore the courage and tenacity of local activists willing to confront the toxic mix of corporate power, regulatory failures and political corruption that is fuelling biodiversity collapse, water shortages, deadly air pollution and the climate emergency. Continue reading...

Grassroots activists who helped jail corrupt officials and obtain personhood rights for a sacred Amazonian river are among this year’s winners of the world’s most prestigious environmental prize.The community campaigns led by the seven 2025 Goldman prize winners underscore the courage and tenacity of local activists willing to confront the toxic mix of corporate power, regulatory failures and political corruption that is fuelling biodiversity collapse, water shortages, deadly air pollution and the climate emergency.This year’s recipients include Semia Gharbi, a scientist and environmental educator from Tunisia, who took on an organised waste trafficking network that led to more than 40 arrests, including 26 Tunisian officials and 16 Italians with ties to the illegal trade.Semia Gharbi campaigning in Tunisia. Photograph: Goldman environmental prizeGharbi, 57, headed a public campaign demanding accountability after an Italian company was found to have shipped hundreds of containers of household garbage to Tunisia to dump in its overfilled landfill sites, rather than the recyclable plastic it had declared it was shipping.Gharbi lobbied lawmakers, compiled dossiers for UN experts and helped organise media coverage in both countries. Eventually, 6,000 tonnes of illegally exported household waste was shipped back to Italy in February 2022, and the scandal spurred the EU to close some loopholes governing international waste shipping.Not far away in the Canary Islands, Carlos Mallo Molina helped lead another sophisticated effort to prevent the construction of a large recreational boat and ferry terminal on the island of Tenerife that threatened to damage Spain’s most important marine reserve.Carlos Mallo Molina. Photograph: Goldman environmental prizeThe tourism gravy train can seem impossible to derail, but in 2018 Mallo swapped his career as a civil engineer to stop the sprawling Fonsalía port, which threatened the 170,000-acre biodiverse protected area that provides vital habitat for endangered sea turtles, whales, giant squid and blue sharks.As with Gharbi in Tunisia, education played a big role in the campaign’s success and included developing a virtual scuba dive into the threatened marine areas and a children’s book about a sea turtle searching for seagrass in the Canary Islands. After three years of pressure backed by international environmental groups, divers and residents, the government cancelled construction of the port, safeguarding the only whale heritage site in European territorial waters.“It’s been a tough year for both people and the planet,” said Jennifer Goldman Wallis, vice-president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation. “There’s so much that worries us, stresses us, outrages us, and keeps us divided … these environmental leaders and teachers – and the global environmental community that supports them – are the antidote.”For the past 36 years, the Goldman prize has honoured environmental defenders from each of the world’s six inhabited continental regions, recognising their commitment and achievements in the face of seemingly insurmountable hurdles. To date, 233 winners from 98 nations have been awarded the prize. Many have gone on to hold positions in governments, as heads of state, nonprofit leaders, and as Nobel prize laureates.Three Goldman recipients have been killed, including the 2015 winner from Honduras, the Indigenous Lenca leader Berta Cáceres, whose death in 2016 was orchestrated by executives of an internationally financed dam company whose project she helped stall.Environmental and land rights defenders often persist in drawn-out efforts to secure clean water and air for their communities and future generations – despite facing threats including online harassment, bogus criminal charges, and sometimes physical violence. More than 2,100 land and environmental defenders were killed globally between 2012 and 2023, according to an observatory run by the charity Global Witness.Latin America remains the most dangerous place to defend the environment but a range of repressive tactics are increasingly being used to silence activists across Asia, the US, the UK and the EU.In the US, Laurene Allen was recognised for her extraordinary leadership, which culminated in a plastics plant being closed in 2024 after two decades of leaking toxic forever chemicals into the air, soil and water supplies in the small town of Merrimack, New Hampshire. The 62-year-old social worker turned water protector developed the town’s local campaign into a statewide and national network to address Pfas contamination, helping persuade the Biden administration to establish the first federal drinking water standard for forever chemicals.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionLaurene Allen. Photograph: Goldman environmental prizeThree of this year’s Goldman recipients were involved in battles to save two rivers thousands of miles apart – in Peru and Albania – which both led to landmark victories.Besjana Guri and Olsi Nika not only helped stop construction of a hydroelectric dam on the 167-mile Vjosa River, but their decade-long campaign led to the Albanian government declaring it a wild river national park.Guri, 37, a social worker, and Nika, 39, a biologist and ecologist, garnered support from scientists, lawyers, EU parliamentarians and celebrities, including Leonardo DiCaprio, for the new national park – the first in Europe to protect a wild river. This historic designation protects the Vjosa and its three tributaries, which are among the last remaining free-flowing undammed rivers in Europe.In Peru, Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari, 56, led the Indigenous Kukama women’s association to a landmark court victory that granted the 1,000-mile Marañón River legal personhood, with the right to be free-flowing and free of contamination.Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari. Photograph: Goldman environmental prizeThe Marañón River and its tributaries are the life veins of Peru’s tropical rainforests and support 75% of its tropical wetlands – but also flow through lands containing some of the South American country’s biggest oil and gas fields. The court ordered the Peruvian government to stop violating the rivers’ rights, and take immediate action to prevent future oil spills.The Kukama people, who believe their ancestors reside on the riverbed, were recognised by the court as stewards of the great Marañón.This year’s oldest winner was Batmunkh Luvsandash from Mongolia, an 81-year-old former electrical engineer whose anti-mining activism has led to 200,000 acres of the East Gobi desert being protected from the world’s insatiable appetite for metal minerals.

RFK Jr. Knows Amazingly Little About Autism

While his anti-vaccine allies swooned and scientists cringed, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used his first-ever press conference this week, in response to new data showing an apparent increase in the number of autistic kids, to promote a variety of debunked, half-true, and deeply ableist ideas about autism. He painted the condition as a […]

While his anti-vaccine allies swooned and scientists cringed, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used his first-ever press conference this week, in response to new data showing an apparent increase in the number of autistic kids, to promote a variety of debunked, half-true, and deeply ableist ideas about autism. He painted the condition as a terrifying “disease” that “destroys,” as he put it, children and their families. Kennedy made it clear he planned to use his powerful role as the person in charge of a massive federal agency devoted to protecting public health to promote the idea that autism is caused by “environmental factors,” a still-speculative thesis that’s clearly a short walk towards advancing his real aim: blaming vaccines.  Kennedy has spent the last 20 years promoting anti-vaccine rhetoric, falsely and repeatedly claiming that vaccines are linked to autism. Yet as the press conference made clear, Kennedy knows startlingly little about autism. In the course of his remarks, he detoured into a rabbit hole filled with pseudoscience about the condition, providing a vast display of all the things he does not seem to know about current research and basic facts about the condition. Here’s a list of just a few of the major pieces of misinformation Kennedy shared.  Falsely framing autism as a debilitating “disease” and an “epidemic”   Kennedy’s ableist and factually incorrect framing of autism relies on explicitly calling it a “disease,” when most scientists refer to it as a “disorder.” Many autistic self-advocates object to that framing too, saying that autism is part of the wide range of human neurodiversity. According to data released in 2021, roughly 61.8 million people worldwide are believed to be somewhere on the autism spectrum. Most significantly, autism is widely agreed to exist on a spectrum—hence its clinical name, “autism spectrum disorder”—and autistic people have a wide range of abilities and ways that their autism expresses itself. In remarks that drew the most scrutiny, Kennedy depicted profound autism as something that inevitably robs children of their abilities, proclaiming: “These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.” (Our colleague Julia Métraux interviewed autistic poet and attorney Elizabeth McClellan earlier this week, who said his remarks are “useless eaters rhetoric,” the eugenicist idea used by Nazi Germany in the 1930s to dehumanize and eventually murder disabled people.) A press release issued by HHS this week even referred to autistic children as “afflicted.” Kennedy previously claimed that under his guidance, HHS intends to uncover the causes of autism by September, a timeline as improbable as it is highly specific.  One autism researcher, who asked to speak anonymously in order to freely address their concerns, told Mother Jones that framing autism as a “disease” with environmental causes seemed designed to set up Kennedy “as the ‘savior’ to the autism community” when he claims to have discovered its cause. The notion that there is a single cause of autism is, to put it mildly, not at all backed up by the decades of research on this highly complex diagnosis. Framing autism as a “disease” with environmental causes seemed designed to set up Kennedy “as the ‘savior’ to the autism community” when he claims to have discovered its cause. Declaring that autism is “clearly” caused by “environmental toxins”  But Kennedy took on step towards meeting this self-imposed deadline by stating, “This is coming from an environmental toxin,” adding the provocative assertion, “And somebody made a profit by putting that environmental toxin into our air, our water, our medicines, our food.” He promised that within two to three weeks “we’re going to announce a series of new studies to identify precisely what environmental toxins are causing it.” He also floated the idea of using AI to help in those studies.  The causes of autism are still being studied, but it’s widely thought that both genetics and environmental factors likely play a role in who develops it. Nor are those environmental factors necessarily “toxins.” Dr. Paul Offit is a virologist, a pediatrician, the chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and a co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine used in infants. He told Mother Jones that a variety of factors can contribute to the risk of developing autism, including advanced maternal or paternal age, intrauterine infections when the mother is pregnant, genetics, and maternal health. “What those four things all have in common is that you’re born with autism,” he says. All the evidence, he says, “is that these are events that are occurring while the child is in the womb,” rather than what anti-vaccine advocates have suggested many times, that autism is caused by vaccines received after the child is born. Craig Newschaffer, a professor of biobehavioral health and an autism researcher at Pennsylvania State University’s College of Health and Human Development, said that while he believes environmental exposures could play a role in autism, the interaction between those and other factors is incredibly complex. “There’s probably a constellation of environmental factors that could be involved here that they probably account on their own for small increases in risk,” he said, “and they probably work in concert with genetic mechanisms.” Rejecting the idea that increased autism rates are due in part to better diagnosis and surveillance The press conference was called to respond to a new CDC report which showed a small increase in the number of 8-year-olds diagnosed with autism. Kennedy repeatedly rejected the idea that the increase was due to better autism diagnosis tools and surveillance, declaring that making that argument amounted to “epidemic denial,” and saying that genes “don’t cause epidemics.” Kennedy also said that the root causes of autism could be found much faster “because of A.I. and because of the digitalization of health records that are now available to us.” Craig Newschaffer, who has spent the better part of his career studying potential causes of autism, called Kennedy’s idea of using artificial intelligence to quickly solve the mystery of autism “extremely infeasible.” He noted large-scale efforts are already underway to use machine learning to analyze existing autism datasets—but the results of those studies, he said, are at least five years away.  Yet Penn State’s Newschaffer said his research had suggested that expanded diagnostic capabilities were indeed an important contributor to increasing autism rates. “There’s been lots of accumulation [of evidence] that the diagnostic tendency is a strong, strong factor in this,” he said.   Claiming there are “no” older autistic adults To bolster his claim that environmental exposures are causing autism rates to climb, Kennedy argued that older adults are not autistic. “Have you ever seen anybody our age—I’m 71 years old—with full-blown autism?” he asked. “Headbanging, nonverbal, non-toilet-trained, stimming, toe-walking, these other stereotypical features—where are these people walking around the mall?” Putting aside the scornful and stigmatizing way Kennedy spoke about profoundly autistic people, it’s simply not true that there are no older autistic adults, which we know for many reasons, including the fact that their health outcomes have been studied for years. Autistic elderly people are at greater risk than the general population for a range of health conditions, including cardiovascular and metabolic disease, and they’re also more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression. Older autistic adults report loneliness at higher rates than the general population, and research suggests that many of them could benefit from the social services and support they do not currently receive. All of these factors could limit the likelihood that Kennedy might see them “walking around the mall.”  Relying on an expert who has connections to pseudoscience groups Kennedy also brought Dr. Walter Zahorodny to join him on the stage. An associate professor of pediatrics at Rutgers University’s medical school, he has been a lead researcher on the New Jersey Autism Study, which has monitored the state’s autism rate for two decades.    Zahorodny said during the press conference that he believed that the uptick in autism rates could not be explained by expanded diagnostic criteria. “I would urge everyone to consider the likelihood that autism, whether we call it an epidemic tsunami or a surge of autism, is a real thing that we don’t understand, and it must be triggered or caused by environmental or risk factors,” he said, echoing Kennedy who has also claimed it is triggered by “toxic exposure.” Zahorodny has collaborated with researchers and groups who deal in pseudoscience or are controversial in the autism community. He appeared in a 2018 video produced by SafeMinds, a group that has suggested that mercury in vaccines causes autism and regularly works with Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense. In 2020, Zahorodny co-authored a study of autism rates in Black and Hispanic children with Cynthia Nevison, a University of Colorado climate scientist who is also a contributor to Children’s Health Defense. There, she writes not about climate but rather about her frustration with the lack of research into the “root causes” of autism. In addition, Zahorodny appeared on a 2020 episode of a podcast produced by the National Council on Severe Autism, which has come under fire for its support of the use of restraints for autistic people.  Melissa Alfieri Collins, an anti-vaccine activist in New Jersey, said in an email to Mother Jones that she had worked with Zahorodny in 2019 on her effort to defeat a bill that would have eliminated religious exemptions for childhood vaccination requirements. Zahorodny, Collins recalled, briefed legislators and “stated that vaccines could not currently be ruled out as one of multiple possible causes of sharply increasing autism prevalence.” The bill ultimately failed. Zahorodny did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Overall, Kennedy’s message worried autism researchers and mainstream scientists. But it was received ecstatically by the anti-vaccine community he’s long been a part of. Anti-vaccine activist Larry Cook, a California naturopath and one-man anti-vaccine clearinghouse, approvingly shared a tweet from Kennedy, underlining the places where the secretary referred to the “autism epidemic” and characterized autism as being “preventable.”  “We had the answers over 40 years ago,” Cook tweeted. “They were buried, dismissed, ridiculed, assassinated.”  Del Bigtree, a prominent anti-vaccine activist and the former spokesperson for Kennedy’s presidential campaign, who’s now the CEO of a group he co-founded with Kennedy called MAHA Action, also expressed his enthusiasm. “For decades we have been gaslit by every HHS Secretary that stood at this podium and denied that autism was an epidemic as it climbed from 1 in 10k to 1 in 31 (1 in 12.5 boys in CA),” he tweeted. “If you are watching a news organization that is not celebrating RFKJ in this historic moment it’s time to cancel your subscription forever. It’s now clear who they work for. #MAHA”

See 26 Captivating Images From the World Press Photo Contest

In stark black-and-white and stunning color, this year's winning photographs capture global events on a human scale

See 26 Captivating Images From the World Press Photo Contest In stark black-and-white and stunning color, this year’s winning photographs capture global events on a human scale Eli Wizevich - History Correspondent April 17, 2025 9:00 a.m. LaBrea Letson, 8, sells lemonade made with bottled water outside her grandmother’s home near the derailment site. A van passing by tests the air for hazardous chemicals. Rebecca Kiger, Center for Contemporary Documentation, TIME A total of 3,778 photojournalists and documentary photographers from 141 countries submitted 59,320 photographs for consideration in this year’s World Press Photo Contest. They covered the year’s biggest stories—including the war in Gaza, migration and climate change—as well as the ordinary lives playing out beneath and beyond the headlines. “The world is not the same as it was in 1955 when World Press Photo was founded,” Joumana El Zein Khoury, the executive director of World Press Photo, an Amsterdam-based nonprofit, says in a statement. “We live in a time when it is easier than ever to look away, to scroll past, to disengage,” she adds. “But these images do not let us do that. They cut through the noise, forcing us to acknowledge what is unfolding, even when it is uncomfortable, even when it makes us question the world we live in—and our own role within it.” On March 27, World Press Photo announced 42 regional winners selected by juries from six regions: Africa; Asia-Pacific and Oceania; Europe; North and Central America; South America; and West, Central and South Asia. From this pool of submissions, judges selected one global winner and two other finalists, which were revealed on April 17. The photos that follow include all three global finalists, as well as a selection of regional winners. World Press Photo of the Year: Mahmoud Ajjour, Aged 9 Mahmoud Ajjour, 9, who was injured during an Israeli attack on Gaza City in March 2024, finds refuge and medical help in Qatar. Samar Abu Elouf, for the New York Times As Mahmoud Ajjour’s family fled an Israeli attack on Gaza City in March 2024, the 9-year-old turned around to urge others along. An explosion tore through both of his arms. Ajjour and his family fled to Qatar, where he received medical treatment. Although he’s begun to settle into a new life, Ajjour requires special assistance for most daily activities. He dreams of getting prosthetics. “One of the most difficult things Mahmoud’s mother explained to me was how when Mahmoud first came to the realization that his arms were amputated, the first sentence he said to her was, ‘How will I be able to hug you?’” Samar Abu Elouf, the photojournalist who took the photo for the New York Times in June 2024, recalled in a statement. Like Ajjour, Abu Elouf is also from Gaza. She was evacuated in December 2023 and now lives in the same apartment complex as Ajjour in Doha, Qatar. Children have suffered greatly during the Israel-Hamas war. U.N. agencies say that more than 13,000 have been killed, while an estimated 25,000 have been injured, as the Associated Press’ Edith M. Lederer reported in January. “This young boy’s life deserves to be understood, and this picture does what great photojournalism can do: provide a layered entry point into a complex story, and the incentive to prolong one’s encounter with that story,” says Lucy Conticello, chair of the global jury, in a statement. “In my opinion, this image by Samar Abu Elouf was a clear winner from the start.” World Press Photo of the Year Finalist: Night Crossing Chinese migrants warm themselves during a cold rain after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. John Moore, Getty Images In Night Crossing, photojournalist John Moore captures a group of Chinese migrants warming themselves around a fire in Campo, California, after crossing the United States-Mexico border. In recent years, American officials have seen an increase in undocumented Chinese migration. Driven by financial hardship, political suppression and religious persecution, roughly 38,200 unauthorized Chinese migrants were apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the southern border in 2024—up from roughly 2,200 in 2022, according to World Press Photo. But even if successful, crossing the border is only the beginning of the struggle. “In the United States now, certainly among the immigrant community and specifically the undocumented immigrant community, there is a real sense of fear because people don’t know what’s going to happen one day to the next,” Moore says in a statement. World Press Photo of the Year Finalist: Droughts in the Amazon A young man brings food to his mother, who lives in the village of Manacapuru. The village was once accessible by boat, but because of the drought, he must walk more than a mile along the dry riverbed of the Solimões River to reach her. Musuk Nolte, Panos Pictures, Bertha Foundation To bring food to his mother, the young man in Musuk Nolte’s photograph used to take a boat across the Solimões River in Brazil. But severe droughts have caused water levels in the Amazon to drop to historically low levels. Now he must trek over a mile across the dry riverbed. Setting a human figure against a stark backdrop, Nolte spotlights the way climate change threatens both nature and civilization.  “Photographing this crisis made the global interconnectedness of ecosystems more evident,” Nolte explains. “Sometimes we think that these events do not affect us, but in the medium and long term they have an impact.” Regional Winner: Africa, Singles A groom poses for a portrait at his wedding. In Sudan, marking a wedding with celebratory gunfire is a tradition. Mosab Abushama Since 2023, Sudan has been ravaged by civil war. It has claimed roughly 150,000 lives, and 12 million people have fled their homes. Mosab Abushama’s photograph, titled Life Won’t Stop, features a young groom posing for a mobile phone portrait, a gun in his hand and another leaning against the wall behind him. “Despite the clashes and random shelling in the city, the wedding was a simple but joyous occasion with family and friends,” Mosab recalls. As is traditional in Sudan, celebratory gunfire was part of the wedding. In the context of the brutal war, the groom’s arsenal contains a double meaning. “The war in Sudan, which began in April 2023, brought horrors and displacement, forcing me to leave my childhood home and move to another part of the city. It was a time none of us ever expected to live through,” Mosab explains. “Yet, this wedding was a reminder of the joy of everyday life still possible amidst the tragedy and despair.” Regional Winner: Asia-Pacific and Oceania, Long-Term Project Tāme Iti, a prominent Tūhoe activist bearing a traditional facial tattoo, stands at the 2014 Tūhoe-Crown Settlement Day ceremony, where the government formally apologized for historical injustices. Tatsiana Chypsanava, Pulitzer Center, New Zealand Geographic [/] Horses roam freely in Te Urewera, serving as crucial transportation in the rugged terrain. Tatsiana Chypsanava, Pulitzer Center, New Zealand Geographic [/] Carol Teepa sits in her kitchen with her youngest grandchild, Mia, and her son, Wanea, one of more than 20 children she adopted. Tatsiana Chypsanava, Pulitzer Center, New Zealand Geographic [/] Ruiha Te Tana, 12, relaxes at her grandfather's home. Built by an ancestor in 1916, the homestead serves as a living archive of Tūhoe history. Tatsiana Chypsanava, Pulitzer Center, New Zealand Geographic [/] Mihiata Teepa, 16, and her Tūhoe Māori Rugby League U16 teammates perform a haka during practice before a game. Tatsiana Chypsanava, Pulitzer Center, New Zealand Geographic [/] Children from the Teepa family drive the younger siblings home after a swim in the river. Tatsiana Chypsanava, Pulitzer Center, New Zealand Geographic [/] Apprentices from a local school learn essential farming skills at Tataiwhetu Trust, an organic dairy farm. Tatsiana Chypsanava, Pulitzer Center, New Zealand Geographic [/] Teepa children share a watermelon. John Rangikapua Teepa and his wife, Carol, have raised more than 20 children adopted according to the Māori whāngai custom. Tatsiana Chypsanava, Pulitzer Center, New Zealand Geographic [/] The Ngāi Tūhoe people of New Zealand’s Te Urewera region are known for their fiercely independent spirit. Their homeland in the hills of the North Island isolated them from British settlers. As a result, the Tūhoe have maintained their language and cultural identity. The photos by Tatsiana Chypsanava, a Belarusian-born photojournalist currently based in New Zealand, show a landscape and a people side by side. Men with traditional face tattoos, girls performing a haka before a rugby game and horses grazing in a pasture are all part of a complex, isolated world. Chypsanava’s long-term photography project shows how intertwined the natural world is with the Tūhoe community. As the guiding philosophy of one Tūhoe family farm expresses, “Ka ora te whenua, ka ora te tangata” (“When the land is in good health, so too are the people”). Regional Winner: Europe, Singles A man from the Luhansk region lies injured in a field hospital set up in an underground winery near Bakhmut. His left leg and arm were later amputated. Nanna Heitmann, Magnum Photos, for the New York Times Just days before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the self-proclaimed separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk called on men to serve in Russian-backed militias. The young man in Underground Field Hospital, Nanna Heitmann’s photograph for the New York Times, was recruited to fight for the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic’s militia just two days before the invasion. Pictured in January 2024, the soldier is splayed out in a makeshift field hospital in a winery near the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. His left leg and arm were later amputated, and Bakhmut has been devastated by the war. Regional Winner: North and Central America, Stories Rick Tsai, an East Palestine resident, walks in Sulphur Run near the train derailment site wearing protective gear. Rebecca Kiger, Center for Contemporary Documentation, TIME [/] LaBrea Letson, 8, sells lemonade made with bottled water outside her grandmother’s home near the derailment site. A van passing by tests the air for hazardous chemicals. Rebecca Kiger, Center for Contemporary Documentation, TIME [/] Connie Fortner addresses National Transportation and Safety Board members after several hours of listening to the board’s investigative findings. Rebecca Kiger, Center for Contemporary Documentation, TIME [/] Phil Gurley (left) of the EPA gives a presentation on the remediation process to a biology class at East Palestine High School. Rebecca Kiger, Center for Contemporary Documentation, TIME [/] For two days after the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023, train cars full of hazardous materials and carcinogenic gases kept burning. But the full extent of the environmental and human disaster lasted much longer, as chemicals leached into rivers and residents continued to advocate for protection. In the aftermath, photojournalist Rebecca Kiger embedded with residents as they navigated new medical and political challenges. Her stark black-and-white photographs for the Center for Contemporary Documentation provide a window into their struggle. Kiger’s photos capture both uncertainty and resilience. One photograph depicts a young girl selling lemonade. With tap water no longer safe, she made the lemonade with bottled water. Regional Winner: South America, Singles A stranded Boeing 727-200 surrounded by floodwaters at Salgado Filho International Airport in Brazil Anselmo Cunha, Agence France-Presse Anselmo Cunha’s Aircraft on Flooded Tarmac was taken in May 2024, as heavy rainfalls in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul caused devastating flooding. The image shows a grounded airplane surrounded by floodwaters. In doing so, it hints at both the cause (air travel burning fossil fuels) and effect (floodwaters) of climate change in the very same frame. Regional Winner: West, Central and South Asia, Long-Term Projects A kolbar follows an arduous mountain path. Kolbars’ packs can weigh more than 100 pounds, and crossings can take up to 12 hours. Ebrahim Alipoor [/] Kolbars make the perilous climb on a border crossing route known as the “Passage of Death” because of the number of lives it claims. Ebrahim Alipoor [/] Thousands have lost their lives crossing these mountains. Ebrahim Alipoor [/] At least 2,463 kolbars were killed or injured in Iranian Kurdistan between 2011 and 2024. Ebrahim Alipoor [/] Khaled, 32, had to have both eyes removed after being shot in the head by a border guard. He has two children, who are 2 and 7. Ebrahim Alipoor [/] Some goods kolbars carry across the border are freely available in Iran, but they fuel a thriving black market in the region that avoids import duties. Ebrahim Alipoor [/] Mohammad, 22, shares a farewell with his mother before embarking on a journey to Europe to seek better opportunities. Ebrahim Alipoor [/] Many of the goods brought in by kolbars end up in luxury stores across the nation. Ebrahim Alipoor [/] In Bullets Have No Borders, Ebrahim Alipoor, a photographer from the Kurdistan province in Iran, captures a stark reality of life for many in his region. To avoid Iranian government bans of imports like household appliances, cell phones and clothing, kolbars (border couriers) carry products strapped on their back from Iraq and Turkey and into Iran. In Iranian Kurdistan, unemployment is widespread, leading many disenfranchised men to pursue this dangerous career. Deliveries can weigh more than 100 pounds, and journeys can take up to half a day. But even sure-footed and sturdy kolbars are always in grave danger. Khaled, a 32-year-old kolbar, had to have both eyes removed after a border guard shot him in the head. Alipoor’s black-and-white images reveal a perilous world. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Suggested Viewing

Join us to forge
a sustainable future

Our team is always growing.
Become a partner, volunteer, sponsor, or intern today.
Let us know how you would like to get involved!

CONTACT US

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Subscribers receive a free day pass for streaming Cinema Verde.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.