Ben Goldfarb

1 month ago | vox.com | Ben Goldfarb

Few individual animals have ever been more important to their species than 2323M — a red wolf, dubbed Airplane Ears by advocates for his prominent extremities, who spent his brief but fruitful life on North Carolina’s Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. Red wolves, smaller, rust-tinged cousins to gray wolves, are among the world’s rarest mammals, pushed to the brink of extinction by threats such as habitat loss, indiscriminate killing, and road collisions.

Nov 16, 2024 | newyorker.com | Ben Goldfarb

The Italian wall lizard—a cigar-size Mediterranean reptile with a green back, mottled copper flanks, and a whiplike tail—is more or less the animal you picture when someone says the word “lizard.” Their ubiquity in places like Pompeii and the Colosseum has earned them the moniker “ruin lizards.” Their known range extends to Slovenia, Croatia, and, since the nineteen-sixties, Long Island, which they may have colonized after making their way out of a Hempstead pet store.

Nov 11, 2024 | lastwordonnothing.com | Ben Goldfarb

One October morning in 2013, I walked into the Canmore offices of an organization called the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, or Y2Y, to speak with its reluctant leader. I was at the outset of my career in journalism, fresh out of graduate school and loose on the land in the Northern Rockies. With my then-girlfriend (now wife), Elise, I was spending two months traveling the length of Y2Y, perhaps the world’s longest wildlife corridor and certainly its most famous.

Oct 23, 2024 | pourlascience.fr | Ben Goldfarb

C’est à cause d’une lionne que Christine Wilkinson a eu sa « révélation clôture ». Cette écologue de l’université de Berkeley, en Californie, est spécialisée dans la conservation de la vie sauvage. En 2016, elle s’était rendue au Kenya afin d’y étudier les conflits entre humains et grands carnivores. Ses recherches l’avaient amenée dans le parc national du lac Nakuru, un espace naturel entouré par une clôture électrique censée protéger les rhinocéros des braconniers.

Sep 17, 2024 | scientificamerican.com | Ben Goldfarb

NONFICTIONDr. Calhoun's Mousery: The Strange Tale of a Celebrated Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia, and the Future of Humanityby Lee Alan DugatkinUniversity of Chicago Press, 2024 ($27.50)In the 1960s and 1970s American society suffered a yearslong collective panic about the perceived threat of overpopulation. Biologist Paul Ehrlich appeared on The Tonight Show to tout The Population Bomb, his 1968 polemic about human numbers run amok.