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US appoints special envoy to champion nature in time for Montreal summit

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Monday, October 10, 2022

Monica Medina will be responsible for biodiversity and water resources, announces state department ahead of Cop15The United States has created a new diplomatic role to show the country’s commitment to tackling the biodiversity crisis ahead of Cop15 in Montreal, Canada, where the next decade of nature targets will be drawn up.Monica Medina, a former military officer who started her governmental career in 1989 as senior counsel to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, has been named special envoy for biodiversity and water resources. Continue reading...

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A photograph that dramatizes the power of nature

Photograph by Irina RozovskyWhen the photographer Irina Rozovsky moved from Boston to Athens, Georgia, she began taking walks around her new neighborhood. She’d push her daughter’s stroller to a nearby wooded path, trying to get the baby to sleep, and photograph what she could along the way. One day in 2018, after a storm, the path was flooded. A young girl stood in the bright sun at the edge of the murky water, observing the strange new scene before her—“confronting the unbelievable,” as Rozovsky puts it. The image reminded Rozovsky of the fairy-tale trope of a child getting lost in the forest. “It’s both a romance and a nightmare,” she told me.Rozovsky’s untitled photograph will be on display this fall at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, as part of the exhibition “A Long Arc: Photography and the American South Since 1845.” In an introduction to an accompanying book, the Atlantic contributing writer Imani Perry reflects on the 21st-century photographers who capture the region’s distinctive landscapes with compositions that evoke a 19th-century sense of the sublime. In the South, Perry writes, “nature takes over everything that humans create and destroy.”Rozovsky insists that the work is not making an environmental statement. As a mother, she worries about the role that humans have played in warming the world her daughter will inherit. But as a photographer, she told me, she was drawn to this particular scene for its “serene and surreal” beauty, its unsettling scale.A relative newcomer to the South, Rozovsky has been struck by the high drama of its nature. “It can be so wild,” she said, even just down the street in Athens. She’s not religious—but when trees fall, or a path floods like this, Rozovsky said, it can feel almost biblical. “There’s something larger than us.”This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Confronting the Unbelievable.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Wings of Hope

“Wings of Hope,” is a film chronicling the re-discovery of a population of wild Harpy Eagles in the Maya Mountains of southern Belize. It details the history of the Belize Foundation and Research and Environmental Education (BFREE) and UNC Wilmington initiative born from this discovery – the Integrated Community-based Harpy Eagle and Avian Conservation Program. Created by Emmy-award winning filmmakers, Richard and Carol Foster of Wildlife Film Productions, this 20-minute documentary is rich with breath-taking footage of adult and juvenile Harpy eagles and other wildlife and vistas found in the pristine tropical forests of the Bladen Nature Reserve. Over the seven year duration of the project, the Fosters followed local people involved as they transition from trainees to conservationists and as their lives are changed through their efforts to save this rare bird and its diminishing habitat.

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Wild Florida's Vanishing Call

A moving, powerful inside look at what has happened to the wild, rarely seen, real Florida. A compelling, emotional soundtrack carries the viewer through the past destruction of wild Florida habitats, to beautiful scenes of Florida's rarely seen native wild animals, including the most endangered cat in North America, the Florida Panther, and ends with a positive message encouraging the viewer to work to protect Florida's wildlife and habitat before it is too late.

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The Windshield Effect

As a child, Julian and his mother, Sylvie, could spend hours out in nature admiring the soundtrack of the plentiful insects. One day, a grown Julian is out on a run in those same woods and when he takes off his ear buds, realizes he cannot hear anything at all. A trip to the audiologist assures him there is nothing wrong with his ears, but he is still left shaken. Back in the forest, he comes to the realization that the insects themselves have gone silent in a mass die off. Also known as the "Windshield Phenomenon" that documents how bugs no longer splatter on windshields as we drive as insect populations are down more than 45% over the last 4 decades.

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