By Julie Kunen Last month, I joined a group of fellow conservationists, chefs, journalists, public health experts, and entrepreneurs in the Peru to discuss how sustainable gastronomy might contribute to conserving the cultural and natural diversity of the Amazon. Representing Latin American nations and the United States, we were united in our passion for the...
By Julie Kunen [Dr. Julie Kunen, Executive Director of the WCS Latin America and Caribbean Program, is attending the 2014 IUCN World Parks Congress in Sydney, Australia. She participated in a discussion at the Congress on the role of fire in land management.] Sydney, Australia For millennia, tropical civilizations cultivated their crops through a practice...
By Julie Kunen The Amazon basin—with its vast rainforests and river systems—is the most bio-diverse place on earth and, not surprisingly, a region rich in discovery. Newly described plant and animal species are a frequent occurrence. The recent video documentation of a newly discovered fish migration is a much rarer event and particularly noteworthy this...
By Dr. Julie Kunen When most people think of conservation in the Amazon, images of rainforests – burned and bulldozed for cattle pastures and plantations –come to mind. And, indeed, in the past two decades some 325,000 square kilometers of rainforest in the region have been lost. Fewer of us remember that the largest river...