How we decide what counts as evidence, how we rank competing sources, and what we do when a source is wrong.
Wild Earth Watch is not designed to maximize clicks. It is designed to maximize understanding.
Most of the internet optimizes for attention: headlines built to provoke a reaction before the reader has any of the facts, stories chosen because they perform rather than because they matter. That model has a cost — it teaches people to react instead of understand, and it rewards alarm over accuracy.
We reject that trade. Editorial decisions here are driven by public value, not popularity. A subject is worth covering because it deepens understanding of the natural world and the pressures on it — not because it is likely to spread. This means some pieces will be quieter than the moment seems to demand, and some important stories will never trend. That is an acceptable cost. We would rather be read by fewer people who trust what they're reading, than by many who don't.
Not every source carries the same weight. When claims conflict, or when we have to choose which figure to lead with, we generally favor sources in this order — though context always matters more than the ranking itself:
Where credible sources disagree — not just on numbers, but on interpretation — we say so explicitly rather than quietly picking a side. Our Debated Topics page collects the clearest examples of this across the site.
Where a range of estimates exists because different methodologies measure different things (such as ocean plastic estimates spanning 1–14 million tonnes per year), we explain why the range exists rather than presenting a single number as settled fact. Our Evidence Briefs page walks through several of these cases in detail.
When something is wrong, we fix it and note that it was fixed, consistent with our Editorial Standards. If you believe something on Wild Earth Watch is inaccurate or out of date, please use our Contact page to let us know.