The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was a catastrophic failure at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant on 11 March 2011, resulting in a meltdown of four of the plant's six nuclear reactors. The failure occurred when the plant was hit by t...

A tsunami is a series of waves generated when a body of water is rapidly displaced on a massive scale. The deadliest tsunami in recorded history, the Indian Ocean tsunami on Sunday, 26th December 2004, killed about 300,000 people. It was tr...

Dolly (July 5, 1996 – February 14, 2003), a ewe, was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell. The cell used was a mammary cell, which is why she was named Dolly, after the curvaceous country western singer Dolly Parton. She...

Greenpeace is an independent global campaigning network. The network comprises 26 independent national/regional organisations in over 55 countries across Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, as well as a co-ordinating body, G...

First published by Houghton Mifflin in 1962, Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides, spurring revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. "...

WWF is a global organization acting locally through a network of family offices. All these offices do all they can to halt the accelerating destruction of our natural world. WWF originally stood for "World Wildlife Fund". However, in 19...

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (10 December 1948 at Palais de Chaillot, Paris). The Guinness Book of Records describes the UDHR as the "Most Translated Docume...

Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. is the former 45th Vice President of the United States who served from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. He is currently an author, businessperson, and American environmental activist who starred in the...

Francisco Alves Mendes Filho, better known as Chico Mendes, was a Brazilian rubber tapper, trade union leader and environmentalist. He fought to preserve the Amazon rainforest, and advocated for the human rights of Brazilian peasants and in...

Ken Saro-Wiwa was a Nigerian author, journalist, government official and political organizer who was brutally executed by the Nigerian dictatorship in response to a very successful campaign to challenge that government, Shell Oil Co. and th...

Dame Jane Morris Goodall, is a British primatologist, ethologist, anthropologist, and UN Messenger of Peace. Considered to be the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best known for her 45-year study of social and family inter...

Dian Fossey was an American zoologist, primatologist, and anthropologist who undertook an extensive study of gorilla groups over a period of 18 years. She studied them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda, initially encouraged to work th...

Sir David Frederick Attenborough is an English broadcaster and naturalist. His career as the face and voice of natural history programmes has endured for 60 years. He is best known for writing and presenting the nine Life series, in conjunc...

The Tunguska event, or Tunguska explosion, was a powerful explosion that occurred not far from the Podkamennaya (Lower Stony) Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai in Russia, at 00:13:35 Greenwich Mean Time (around 07:14 local time...

Olivier Messiaen was a French composer, organist and ornithologist, widely regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex (he was interested in rhythms from ancient Greek and from Hindu sources...