A CUSTODIAN OF PRECIOUS LANDS
The Great Barrier reef in australia means more to Larissa Hale than just another tourist destination under threat from climate change. To her and her band of activists, it’s their ancestral homeland. The Yuku Baja Muliku people have lived there for tens of thousands of years, spearing fish along the reef from canoes and building rock shelter refuges to protect from extreme weather.
In 2006, after a decades-long battle with Australia, the government named the Yuku Baja Muliku people as Traditional Custodians of Archer Point, the area that borders two of the country’s World Heritage areas: the Great Barrier Reef and the Wet Tropics. Hale established the Yuku Baja Muliku ranger program in her hometown in 2008 to give native people official leadership positions in managing the environment.
Noting the lack of native women rangers regionwide, in 2018 Hale went bigger and created the Queensland Indigenous Womens Ranger Network, now more than one-hundred strong. Using a combination of ancestral knowledge of the area’s many ecosystems as well as advanced technology such as drones, the rangers manage bush fires and protect threatened species, like the turtles whose food source, seagrass, was wiped out by a cyclone. The ranger network is funded by the country’s Department of Environment and Science, World Wildlife Fund Australia, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service and the Federal Government Office for Women, among others.
In December 2022, Hale and her team won the prestigious Earthshot Prize, an initiative founded by England’s Prince William and the actor and environmentalist David Attenborough to award five £1 million grants to individuals and organizations committed to environmentalism, with the goal of scaling up their work. Hale and her rangers plan to use the money to quadruple their number and foster a worldwide network of Indigenous women who can combine First Nations knowledge with modern tools to repair critical ecosystems from Hawaii to Tanzania. “This place has always been our home, but today we risk losing it and the unique culture that has existed here for millennia,” Hale said in a statement: “Our Women Rangers Network exists to protect our home and continue our traditions.” m.g.
Having a baby can be one of the most joyous and fulfilling experiences in life. But expectant parents also face a number of important decisions like selecting a doctor, creating a birth plan and choosing a maternity hospital. The best hospitals provide mothers and babies with the highest quality care from pregnancy to birth and even postpartum. To help you pick the best hospital for your family’s needs, Newsweek and global market research and consumer data firm Statista are proud to announce our ranking of “America’s Best Maternity Hospitals 2023.” Our list names the top 384 leading hospitals for maternity care in the U.S., divided into two performance categories: five-ribbon hospitals (159) and four-ribbon hospitals (225). Within each category, hospitals are listed in alphabetical order.
The evaluation is based on three data sources: a nationwide online survey in which hospital managers and maternity health care professionals (e.g., neonatal care providers and OB/GYNS) were asked to recommend leading maternity hospitals; medical key performance indicator data relevant to maternity care (e.g., a hospital’s rate of cesarean births) and patient satisfaction data (e.g., how patients rated a hospital’s medical staff for responsiveness and communication).
We hope you find this ranking useful when choosing the right maternity hospital for your family.
Nancy Cooper, Global Editor in Chief