This story is part of a Guardian series on climate refugees. Read parts 1 , 2 , 3 , and 4 . Travis S. The slow-moving disaster being visited on the village of Newtok is a familiar one in Alaska. People are losing the ground beneath their feet, because of erosion. Climate change has ac...
Many New Yorkers began to see a new filtration plant as inevitable. When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued strict new rules for surface water in 1989, the city faced the daunting prospect of building an even larger filtration plant than that on the Croton River, at a cos...
The Earth revolves around the sun. Also, it’s overheating because we’re burning fossil fuels. Can you guess which of those two long-established facts just received an additional jolt of publicized near unanimity among scientists? It was, of course, the latter. (The oil industry has no...
This story is part of a Guardian series on climate refugees. Read parts 1 , 2 , and 3 . DCRA / Alaska Department of Commerce Once the snow melts, people make their way around Newtok on wooden boardwalks set down on the mud. But the melting permafrost no longer provides stable ground f...
Macklemore credits Seattle’s park system with launching his rap career By Jess Zimmerman In this video for the Nature Conservancy, rapper Macklemore explains how municipal green space in his home city of Seattle influenced his career: He and his friends didn’t want to kick it at their...
Macklemore credits Seattle’s park system with launching his rap career By Jess Zimmerman In this video for the Nature Conservancy, rapper Macklemore explains how municipal green space in his home city of Seattle influenced his career: He and his friends didn’t want to kick it at their...
Kroger Co. Wasted food is digested here. One California food company has a novel plan for dealing with food waste and cutting down the power bill: Feed it to bacteria. The Kroger Co. plans to chuck all food gone past its sell-by date into an industrial silo, where microbes will break ...
Shutterstock Glaciers, such as this one in Argentina, are melting and releasing their reserves of water. Farewell, great lakes of ice and frozen rivers. Scientists used satellite images and gravity measurements to peer more closely than ever before at the torturous drip-drip-drip from...
A team of scientists at Harvard have discovered how to make crazy, beautiful, very tightly controlled shapes that are so tiny they’re invisible to the naked eye. Just by making simple changes in the environment in which salt and silicon crystals grow, they’ve made gardens of flower-li...
Are you an experienced journalist who embraces storytelling and thrives on mentoring others? Skilled at building programs from the ground up and deeply committed to having fun along the way? Grist, the nation’s leading green news site, is hiring a Fellowship Program Director to launch...
Shutterstock / spirit of america You were saying? For everyone who was hoping the Obama administration’s proposed new rules for natural gas drilling on public lands would make a difference, the just-released new draft amounts to a big “frack you.” Federal rules governing fracking on p...
Don’t freak out, but there’s a problem with green roofs: They’re not necessarily greener than ordinary roofs. Soooooo kind of a major problem. With a little extra effort, though, green roofs can be efficient AND locally sourced — you just can’t take the easy way out. Scientific Americ...
Holland is better than we are at everything, and they’re being smug about it, and we still want to go By Sarah Laskow OK, Holland, we get it! You have all the nice things! Organic food, cool little local shops, bikes, green energy. Way to rub it in. Yes, we still drive cars! Yes, we a...
This story is part of a Guardian series on climate refugees. Read parts 1 and 2 . Steve Wall In September 2007, a rising star of Alaskan politics dared to take on one of the toughest, most challenging issues for any leader: climate change. That summer, seasonal ice cover had fallen to...
Remember the scene in the movie Gasland where the guy lights his tapwater on fire? No? Here it is: That footage helped ignite the grassroots movement against fracking , a controversial technology that shoots a slurry of water mixed with sand and laced with toxic chemicals into undergr...
What do you do when the federal government won’t let you plant a sustainable, super-useful crop on your own land? Well, if you’re Ryan Loflin, you do it anyway. As of this week, Loflin has planted America’s first real crop of industrial hemp in more than a half-century. The 40-year-ol...
Shutterstock Oops, it’s melting. Sorry ’bout that. “Hello, world? Hey, John Kerry here. Just wanted to apologize for all those decades of America’s non-leadership on that crazy global warming thing. But now we’ve decided to start making some nice sounds about the issue. Hope you can h...
Texas had some absolutely bonkers weather yesterday, not just extreme but downright deadly and dangerous. At least six people were killed and dozens injured by a tornado that ripped through the town of Granbury. But maybe the most visually stunning evidence of the storm is this photo ...
Texas had some absolutely bonkers weather yesterday, not just extreme but downright deadly and dangerous. At least six people were killed and dozens injured by a tornado that ripped through the town of Granbury. But maybe the most visually stunning evidence of the storm is this photo ...
Back in 2012, 561,633 very nice people went out on beaches around the world and picked up the trash that other people had thrown there. They picked up an astounding 10 million pounds. That’s the weight of 5,000 cars. It’s heavier than the Capitol dome. What’s even more astounding is t...
Back in March we told you about a polar bear who had been orphaned in Alaska when its mother was shot by a hunter. We invited (well, ordered) you to watch it play which, even two months later, remains an experience of acute adorableness . Now we have some good news about this polar be...
Italian architecture firm Act Romegialli designed this building to start as a little garden house, and then be gradually eaten by the garden. Here’s what it started as, an unused garage structure: Act Romegialli But the architects gave it a coat of plants: honeysuckle and mile-a-minut...
This is how powerfully good the fast food industry is at making people crave their food: A delivery service in Gaza will smuggle KFC across the Egyptian-Gaza border in order to satisfy cravings for fried chicken. So far, the delivery service, Yamama, has brought in 100 meals, accordin...
The Earth revolves around the sun. Also, it’s overheating because we’re burning fossil fuels. Can you guess which of those two long-established facts just received an additional jolt of publicized near unanimity among scientists? It was, of course, the latter. (The oil industry has no...
United States Antarctic Program Photo Library It’s not blood. It’s just ketchup. No, it’s run-off from a hidden lake of microbes. We knew we’d been doing some damage to the planet, but we didn’t realize we’d been making it bleed . OK, fine, blood isn’t really seeping out of that glaci...
This story is part of a Guardian series on climate refugees. Read part 1. Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange (2011) Newtok. It’s easy to see the appeal for Lisa and Jeff Charles of being at the forefront of the Alaskan village of Newtok’s move to a new location. The couple, who hav...
I repeat: They are up. My fragile seeds have sprouted into tiny proto-herbs. Miniature leaves unfold by the hour; little stems reach toward the sun. It’s alive, I tell you! I have created life! Forgive me for going a bit mad with power — I’m just so excited that my very first foray in...
Do you feel like your doctors and your more annoying friends are always telling you to drink more water? Well, they’re just trying to help. Water is so important for your health! Sadly, water tastes like, well, water. And since Americans eat like 100 pounds of sugar a year , the taste...
Various species of whale are showing all sorts of places they shouldn’t be, like the Mediterranean, Cape Cod, and now, Namibia. Yesterday, scientists reported that they saw a gray whale off the African coast, which is really, really astonishing. As the Guardian explains : Not only has...
Various species of whale are showing all sorts of places they shouldn’t be, like the Mediterranean, Cape Cod, and now, Namibia. Yesterday, scientists reported that they saw a gray whale off the African coast, which is really, really astonishing. As the Guardian explains : Not only has...
