‘SHE UNDERSTANDS WHAT A SENTENCE NEEDS TO DO AND BE TO ACHIEVE A KIND OF PERFECTION’
– Sean O’Toole, journalist & art critic
A recipient of the South African National Parks Environmental Journalist of the Year Award, I’ve written for leading African and international publications for nearly 20 years, including Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit, Travel Africa, the American Polar Society’s Polar Times, the Lonely Planet Guide to Antarctica and the Sunday Times. I have a special interest in global conservation issues, the natural sciences, the climate crisis and the space sciences.
Recently, my colleague Don Pinnock and I were the first journalists globally to run an in-depth, exclusive report on US research pinpointing pangolins as a possible ‘transition’ source of the coronavirus pandemic.
Browse some of my latest 2020 features below, or read more on Daily Maverick.
Watershed for pangolins as China wipes scales off medicine list
For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit
Hong Kong Customs group head Benson Lee holds up endangered pangolin scales seized during an anti-smuggling operation in Kwai Chung, China. Source: Daily Maverick
‘Most significant conservation action decision ever made for entire pangolin order’, shows new era of conservation commitment. Read the full story
With a little help from leeches, scientists may have found a coronavirus they don’t know. But does it matter?
For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit
Extracting blood from a patient’s foot during a leech-therapy session, Srinagar, Indian Kashmir’s summer capital. Source: Daily Maverick
Blood-sucking, worm-like creatures from a remote Bornean rainforest pave the way for a rogues’ gallery of viral discoveries. Read the full story
Earth Day message: Nature has not unleashed her full might yet — indigenous healers
For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit
‘We actually have to educate our so-called authorities, their way of dealing with our inheritance is unacceptable.’ – Conservationist Linda Tucker. Source: Daily Maverick
Nature has held its breath since the first Earth Day protests this week 50 years ago, Our Burning Planet’s Kevin Bloom told some 500 viewers participating in Tuesday’s Daily Maverick webinar lockdown series. Entitled ‘Earth Day: Nature and Societal Reset in the Age of Covid-19’, the webinar was held to mark the global environmental event. Read the full story
Scales tip in favour of pangolins as hosts of Coronavirus ‘transition’
For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit, with Don Pinnock
As the Covid-19 pandemic spreads its tentacles across all continents except Antarctica, scientists in China and the US are racing to pin down its biological origins. Source: Daily Maverick
Mounting findings across the globe highlight the world’s most trafficked mammal as the likely pandemic carrier. Read the full story
Historic climate expedition shatters polar records
For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit, with the Alfred Wegener Institute
The icebreakers Polarstern (Germany) and Kapitan Dranitsyn (Russia) on the Arctic ice for the multi-country, year-long MOSAiC polar expedition. Photo: Ernst Stürmer
Taking its blueprint from Fridtjof Nansen’s ‘Arctic Drift’ mission 130 years ago, a new quest for science ventures farther north in winter than ever before. Read the full story
A sea change in China’s attitude towards wildlife exploitation may just save the planet
For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit
China provided the first act to a possible revolution when it slapped a ban on the consumption and sale of terrestrial wildlife. Source: The Eye of the Pangolin
In a global environmental leadership void created by US President Donald Trump, China could emerge as an unlikely saviour. Read the full story
GLOBAL BREAKING NEWS: Coronavirus source found in pangolin meat
For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit, with Don Pinnock
Bat coronavirus may have recombined in a pangolin before jumping into humans. This charismatic, armadillo-like species is covered in keratinised scales, prized in traditional medicine. Source: EPA/How Hwee Young
Environmental reporter Don Pinnock and I were the world’s first journalists to run an in-depth, exclusive report on the potential links between Covid-19 and its recombinant origins in pangolins, among the planet’s most trafficked and endangered mammals. This article revealed seminal initial findings by US scientists. Our report was published on the same day that a Chinese university announced a similar preliminary hypothesis. A week later, the US team became the first scientists globally to share their study when they posted it to the preprint forum bioRxiv. Since then, the forum has been flooded with research, including the Chinese findings, on how the 2019/2020 pandemic strain may have used pangolins as an intermediate vector. Read the full story
#BUDGET2020: Mboweni big on organic manure, gets mixed reviews on addressing climate crisis
For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit
Crisis … what crisis? South African Finance Minister Tito Mboweni’s new outlay felt closer to Budget-lite — a speech that may have been delivered at any time in South Africa’s recent history. Source: Daily Maverick
The 2020 Budget speech was something of a lame duck on climate change mitigation, but it did show some positive signs from the African continent’s biggest carbon culprit. Read the full story
High Crimes and #Mitchdemeanors: Open letter from Mother Earth to Mitch McConnell
For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit
What have you done, Mitch McConnell? Source: Wikimedia Commons
In this rare communication, Mother Earth sent a special post-impeachment message to Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump’s most strategic apostle. This is the uncut dictation. Read the full story
Water taxis for Cape Town’s rising sea levels: ‘Everybody should panic’ — environmental futurist
For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit
In the 2019 summer, the ice-melt equivalent of 2,000 elephants a second stormed into the ocean off Greenland. Source: Gallo Images/Garth Stead
For environmental futurist Professor Nick King, accepting the apparently fantastical as the new normal means responding to Earth’s waning vital signs with commensurate CPR. Even so, King’s suggestion of ‘Cape Town water taxis’ is met with incredulity by Our Burning Planet when he moots it during an interview at his home overlooking Cape Town’s False Bay coastline. His response? Deadpan. Read the full story
Climate allies Desmond Tutu and Al Gore unite in fossil-fuel divestment struggle
For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit
‘Ours is a moral imperative to stop financing the destruction of humanity’s future,’ Gore and Tutu said during their January 2020 meeting in Cape Town. Source: Roger Friedman/Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and former US Vice-President Al Gore have warned in a joint statement that ‘corporations, governments and institutions that invest in fossil fuels despite evidence of accelerating climate change are furthering environmental, economic and social injustice’. Read the full story
SPECIAL REPORT
As giant of human origins turns 100, Homo sapiens teeters on its most daunting edge
For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit
Of all human species confronted by catastrophic versions of Earth, we’re the last ones standing. For now. Image by: ©️ Bernard Kotze/Daily Maverick
While the astronomer Edwin Hubble was trudging up the mountains of Los Angeles exactly 100 years ago to rewrite humankind’s place in the cosmos, a fledgling medical school on Africa’s southern tip was preparing to take a giant leap into humankind’s past. Read the full story
Climate crisis tears through southern Africa with at least nine million facing acute food insecurity
For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit
Southern Africa is warming twice the global rate, resulting in livelihood-stripping drought that is bringing millions to their knees. Source: JME data, May 2019 update
Critical humanitarian aid is needed to rescue plunging food security and save the lives of millions of climate-shocked people across southern Africa. This warning comes from several United Nations agencies, relief organisations and independent experts. Read the full story
Live your best life this Black Friday with kiwifruit ‘spifes’ and other totally useless stuff
Humour & Opinion | For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit
The kiwifruit ‘spife’ — a portmanteau for ‘spoon’ and ‘knife’. © Tiarawalters.com
If ever there was any doubt about how far ‘sustainability champ’ Woolworths still had to go to put its money where its greenwashing mouth is, its kiwifruit knifespoon-things have surely helped put paid to that. Read the full story
The climate crisis has arrived, leaving fate of humanity in the balance — thousands of top scientists
For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit
The ‘Bioscience’ emergency climate declaration shows ‘denialists and recalcitrant politicians’ they have ‘absolutely zero wiggle room left’. © Cristian Ibarra/Pixabay
In a radical departure from the conservative language that normally defines science, 11,258 scientists from around the world have called for drastic climate action to ‘avoid untold suffering’. Read the full story
Mega climate shocks for SA biodiversity — government report
For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit
The iconic Clanwilliam cedar (Widdringtonia cedarbergensis) is critically endangered and faces increasing pressures as temperatures rise, the environment dries out and fires become more frequent. © Geoff Spiby | 2018 SA National Biodiversity Assessment
Ninety scientific institutions led by the South African National Biodiversity Institute have released a shock report that unveils waves of unprecedented climate impacts tearing across South Africa’s globally important wild assets. Read the full story
Ecofeminism unleashed, or, How wrong the hawks are to view the vulnerable as meek
For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit
US President Donald Trump, left, welcomes Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to the White House in Washington DC, March 2019. © EPA-EFE/Jim Lo Scalzo
In this mentally disordered plot, the shimmering detail of unimaginably complex ecosystems that have unfurled over millennia are at the behest of an incontinent human wrecking ball with an orange tan, a fake blond combover and a helium-like vibrato that travels at 1,008 meters per second. And his band of merry dicktators. Not forever, though. Read the full story
Don’t sweat about Earth, just save your children
For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit
Reporting on Daily Maverick since November 2018, Our Burning Planet has highlighted critical research showing that South Africa is heating at ‘twice the global average’. © Image: AdobeStock
Launching Daily Maverick’s new Our Burning Planet climate journalism unit in Cape Town, former Irish president Mary Robinson, Amnesty International’s Kumi Naidoo and journalist Kevin Bloom painted a picture of a civilisation that could remake itself from the opportunity that the crisis brings. Read the full story
Putting deniers on ice: Inside the mind of a climate geek
For Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit
Professor Guy Midgley of Stellenbosch University near the quiver tree forest at Gannabos, Namaqualand, South Africa. This is the largest quiver tree forest in the southern hemisphere. Midgley’s ongoing collaboration with other scientists shows that quiver trees in southern Africa are good indicators of the climate crisis. © Kerry Grey
New findings released this month by the journal Nature Communications reveal that English-language digital and print media give 49% more coverage to bush-league climate contrarians than top scientists. We asked Professor Guy Midgley, a Stellenbosch University expert on how biodiversity responds to the climate crisis – with the odds in favour of ‘at scale climate change disinformation’, as the study puts it, what’s the best way for ordinary people to make sense of this wilderness? Read the full story in part one and part two
CITES RHINO FILES: Death or glory for species on the ban wagon?
By Tiara Walters, for Daily Maverick
Refuge for a dehorned white rhino at Care for Wild rhino orphanage (location undisclosed). © www.jacquesmarais.co.za / SONY
Rhinos may be in a worse state than South African government figures are willing to admit. With the planet’s biggest conservation meeting kicking off in August 2019, our last chance to save the species may be about to slip through our fingers. Read the full story
First image of black hole marks ‘breakthrough for humanity’
By Bloomberg, Tiara Walters and News24
A new window onto the study of black holes, their event horizons and gravity. © Event Horizon Telescope
‘Event Horizon’ scientists reveal the first-ever glimpse of a supermassive black hole. Read the full story
Comma Chameleon – as featured in Daily Maverick
My pet chameleon, Comma, weighs in on copy politics.
See the chairman of the branch’s insights below.
End of the road for traffic signs as we know them
Wurst of times: how typos can change history
Behind most good books, there’s a Merlin you’ll never meet
Spell check: friend or faux?
Practise safe text. Use a proofreader
Image credit: ‘Scales tip in favour of pangolins as hosts of coronavirus transition’. Source: Daily Maverick/Matthew Afflecat, Pixabay, 20/20
