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1 week ago | 
sammatey.substack.com | Sam Matey
A historic UN Ocean Conference was held in Nice, France from June 9 to June 13, 2025, and a lot of amazing progress happened!The High Seas Treaty (aka BBNJ Agreement) provides a first-ever legal framework for creating marine protected areas in international waters. It’sbeen signed by 136 countries but only gains legal force once 60 countries ratify the treaty.
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1 week ago | 
sammatey.substack.com | Sam Matey |Bill McKibben
The second Monthly Dose of Climate Hope live event took place on June 11, 2025! Sam Matey hosted an in-depth conversation with world-leading climate activist Bill McKibben. The YouTube recording is above, and below we embed and quote a selection from Bill McKibben’s many excellent recent Substack posts at ! You can join SunDay at sunday.earth.
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2 weeks ago | 
sammatey.substack.com | Sam Matey
Hundreds of birds among the highly intelligent urban-living sulphur-crested cockatoo (Cacatua galerita) population in Sydney, Australia have now learned to operate public drinking fountains to obtain water. The species was already known for its widespread behavior of opening trash cans to obtain food in Sydney suburbs.
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2 weeks ago | 
sammatey.substack.com | Sam Matey
The Unmapping, by first-time novelist Denise S. Robbins, is based upon exploring the implications of one brilliantly creative premise that is also completely and utterly bonkers. The novel begins when one day, at 4 AM Eastern Time while most people are asleep, every individual building in New York City spontaneously switches its position to a spot previously occupied by a different building.
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3 weeks ago | 
sammatey.substack.com | Sam Matey
Oxford University Press has published a milestone new paper discussing the worldwide emergence of urban rewilding, a longtime theme of this newsletter.
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3 weeks ago | 
sammatey.substack.com | Sam Matey
Aptech Africa, founded by two brothers from Eritrea in 2011, has overcome extraordinary challenges to become a leading African solar installer and a profitable, fast-expanding multinational company. Their main office is in Kampala, Uganda, and they have installed solar projects in 31 countries and counting. Metkel Zerai Abraham is a co-founder and the current CEO of Aptech Africa.
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1 month ago | 
sammatey.substack.com | Sam Matey
In a world-historic step forward, May 2025 saw 124 member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) vote to adopt the WHO Pandemic Agreement, a new legally binding treaty to improve international coordination on planning for and responding to any future pandemics. (The U.S. is in the process of leaving the WHO, since January 2025, and did not join the new treaty).
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1 month ago | 
sammatey.substack.com | Sam Matey
This is my fifth article based on in-person reporting from Mesoamerica. I completed that three-month trip in early May 2025, but I’m still writing irregular articles about some of the fascinating people, wildlife, technology, and ecosystems I was lucky enough to see!On May 2, 2025, I visited the BYD dealership in the Mexico City borough of Iztacalco.
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1 month ago | 
sammatey.substack.com | Sam Matey
A landmark new studyfrom Germany has made great strides in quantifying the conservation paradox, an increasingly common Anthropocene situation where a wild creature is endangered in its native homeland but is simultaneously considered introduced or “invasive” in some other part of the world.
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1 month ago | 
sammatey.substack.com | Sam Matey
I’m Sam Matey, writer of The Weekly Anthropocene. I travel a heck of a lot these days, but my home is the U.S. state of Maine. And as I’ve written before, I have long been a huge fan of the incumbent Governor of Maine, Janet Mills. In 2018, I first met then-Attorney General Mills in person at a protest in Augusta calling (unsuccessfully, as it would turn out) for Senator Susan Collins to vote against Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.