Honoring Jane Goodall’s conservation legacy and combatting misinformation

Filed 35m ago · Via Mongabay · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Number 10 · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

The Starmus Festival has created the inaugural Jane Goodall Earth Medal, honoring the late primatologist and conservationist who died in October 2025 at 91, and awarded it to Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief who helped broker the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Festival co-founder Garik Israelian said the medal was dreamed up by Queen guitarist Brian May and musician Peter Gabriel, both members of the festival's advisory board. Figueres and Israelian used the occasion to warn about social media algorithms prioritizing engagement over scientific fact, calling the result an abuse of free speech.

The festival's theme this year is “The Search for Truth,” running October 17 to 22 in Spain, with information integrity as a central concern. Both speakers argued education and tighter control of tech company algorithms are the fixes, though neither offered specifics on how that control would actually work.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A festival about truth needs a plan bigger than “educate people harder” and “somebody should regulate the algorithms.” That's not a solution, it's a wish sent to the universe with a nice guitar solo attached. Naming a medal after somebody who spent her life doing patient, unglamorous fieldwork is a fine thing to do, but it works better if the people holding it actually name what they'd change tomorrow.

Source: Read the original at Mongabay → Scored: Our Story Begins · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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