John Cannon
About
John Cannon started with Mongabay as a correspondent in 2014 and became a staff writer in 2016 and a features writer in 2020.
John’s reporting has appeared in New Scientist, Slate.com, Yale Environment 360, Pacific Standard and Science, among others. He has been a guest on the BBC and NPR’s All Things Considered and Living on Earth and has also had several short stories published in literary magazines.
He studied biology as an undergraduate at the Ohio State University and has a graduate degree in science writing from UC Santa Cruz. John has reported from Brunei, Cambodia, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Peru, and Rwanda, and was a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger.
He lives in California with his wife and two cats they adopted while living in Gaza. In 2024, they thru-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail (minus the cats). John is an avid hiker, mountain biker and skier. He and his wife have traveled a lot, mostly for her work in humanitarian aid. They’ve lived in Afghanistan, Armenia, CAR, DRC and Gaza. In 2011, they spent two and a half months traveling mostly overland from Ireland to Niger, where they met in 2004 as Peace Corps volunteers. They’ve also hiked the French Camino de Santiago in Spain.
AREA OF EXPERTISE
Mining | Peatlands | Deforestation | Forest Carbon | Forest Peoples