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Reforesting the Planet, Restoring the Future

Reforestation | October 2025

The preservation of the planet’s biodiversity relies entirely on how we manage and interact with the world’s forests.

Reforestation is a critical strategy for mitigating climate change because it increases the Earth’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide (CO₂) – the main greenhouse gas driving global warming – while also enhancing ecosystem resilience.

In particular, we look at recent studies investigating the most cost-effective approaches to reforestation and the mitigation of climate change. For many years, forest managers have been asking which is best: allowing forests to naturally regenerate, on the one hand, or to plant new forests?

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Image of Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Reforestation | October 2025

Maya Lin: The Quiet Power of Design

When Maya Lin was just twenty-one, her quiet vision changed how a nation remembers. As an undergraduate at Yale, she submitted a class project to a national design competition. It was for a memorial for Vietnam War veterans. Her entry, a sleek wedge of polished black granite etched with the names of more than 58,000 fallen soldiers, was unlike anything the public had seen. Its simplicity sparked debate, but what some called too stark soon became one of America’s most intense and healing monuments.

Lin grew up in Athens, Ohio, surrounded by creativity and intellect. Her mother, a poet, and her father, a ceramic artist and art school dean, taught her to think across disciplines which became the foundation of her career. She often says her work lives “between boundaries – science and art, art and architecture, East and West.” That in-between space is where her designs find their quiet power, inviting reflection rather than demanding it.

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Reforestation | October 2025

Dr. Justina Ray: Listening to the Land

Dr. Justina Ray is not only protecting Canada’s wild spaces – she is about redefining how conservation itself is done. As President and Senior Scientist of Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, she has built a career that reaches far beyond field biology, asking what it truly means to sustain life across landscapes that shape both ecology and identity.

Her work has taken her to the tropical forests of Asia and Africa, the vast boreal and sub-arctic zones of Canada, and many places in-between guided by a singular conviction: science must serve the future of the living world.

Ray’s path into northern conservation began with questions rather than assumptions. How do wolverines and caribou survive when their ranges fragment? What happens when the climate itself becomes a moving target?

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Reforestation | October 2025

Protecting Earth’s Lungs

Forests act as the planet’s terrestrial lungs. They provide us with fresh air, clean water, beautiful vistas and a sanctuary for countless wildlife.

But, today, more than ever, our forests are facing unprecedented threats from disease, climate change, mad-made destruction and harmful pests.

Join this documentary as it follows a group of professionals that developed, tested and formulated today’s forest health strategies to preserve the legacy of one of the planet’s most important resources – and to help us better understand and appreciate why we need to protect our forests.

This is a story that affects us all.

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Image of a Leishmania parasite

Sand Flies: The Silent Biters Spreading A Deadly Disease

Leishmaniasis | August 2025

Phlebotomine sand flies are notorious biters. They not only cause great irritation but are also capable of spreading a deadly disease – visceral leishmaniasis.

While the World Health Organization states that currently 1 billion people live in areas endemic for leishmaniasis and at risk of contracting the disease, a recent study using a statistical model, predicted that visceral leishmaniasis (VL) is undergoing geographic expansion and 5.3 billion people could be at risk of acquiring the disease in the future.

Leishmaniasis currently occurs in approximately 90 countries. These countries are located in the warmer climates where sand flies thrive: in the tropics, subtropics, and in Southern Europe. Climate change and other variations in the environment have the potential to expand the geographical range of where sand flies can live and therefore where the disease can infiltrate the human population.

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Leishmaniasis | August 2025

Chris Perani: The Art of Delicate Beauty

Chris Perani is a photographer who specializes in seeing the unseen. Known for his extreme macro photography, he captures butterfly wings and other minute natural subjects at a level of detail invisible to the naked eye. His images reveal dazzling mosaics of iridescent scales and textures that appear more like stained glass, sequins, or cosmic landscapes than fragments of an insect’s anatomy.

To overcome the razor-thin depth of field inherent in microscope lenses, Perani employs a meticulous stacking process. Using a 10× microscope objective mounted on a 200 mm lens, he shifts his camera forward in microscopic increments—sometimes as little as 3 microns per exposure. Each section of a wing might require 350 individual images, and a complete final work can demand more than 2,000 separate shots. These frames are then digitally merged into a seamless whole, revealing a complexity that even scientists rarely view in such clarity.

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Leishmania. Promastigotes of Leishmania parasite which are found in mosquito midgut or laboratory cultures. Leishmania tropic, Leishmania major, Leishmania donovani or other Leishmania
Leishmaniasis | August 2025

Dr. Gosia Domagalska: Outwitting Leishmania

In the quiet corridors of the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) in Antwerp, Belgium, Dr. Malgorzata “Gosia” Domagalska is leading the fight against one of the world’s most neglected yet devastating diseases: leishmaniasis. As head of ITM’s newly established Unit of Experimental Parasitology, she has dedicated her career to understanding how parasites adapt, survive, and outwit medicine.

Domagalska’s path to parasitology was anything but straightforward. Trained as a geneticist, she earned her PhD in Plant Genetics at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, followed by a Marie Curie Fellowship at the University of York. Early on, her research focused on plant development and hormones. But a shift came when she joined ITM in 2015: “This work is compelling not just scientifically, but socially,” she has said.

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Leishmaniasis | August 2025

Leishmaniasis – Plain and Simple

Leishmaniasis is a parasitic disease that few people have heard of, but one you definitely don’t want to catch. Caused by Leishmania parasites and spread by the bite of female sand flies, it can silently linger in the body for years or surface in devastating ways, from painful skin sores to organ damage that can be fatal. The disease affects both humans and dogs, with our canine companions often acting as unwitting reservoirs that keep the infection circulating.

As climate change expands the habitat of sand flies into new regions, the threat of leishmaniasis continues to grow. With no reliable cure and limited vaccine options, prevention is key. Protecting yourself and your pets with repellents, protective gear, and vigilance is the most effective way to guard against this serious but often overlooked disease.

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