Tag Archives: environment

In June last year, a series of devastating wildfires tore through the Canadian province of Quebec, sending huge plumes of acrid smoke drifting across North America. Three hundred miles away in Boston, dermatologist Shadi Kourosh noticed something strange. “We had an unusual spike in dermatology visits,” says Kourosh, who is …

In a roundabout way, coal is solar-powered. Millions of years ago, swamp plants soaked up the sun’s energy, eating carbon dioxide in the process. They died, accumulated, and transformed over geologic time into energy-dense rock. This solar-powered fuel, of course, is far from renewable, unlike solar panels: Burning coal has …

The ocean is Earth’s defining feature. Two of the most famous photographs of all time stamped that indelibly on our minds: Earthrise (1968) and The Blue Marble (1972), both taken during the Apollo missions to the moon. Once you have seen our fragile blue planet hanging in space, you can’t …

If you ever had pastries at breakfast, drank soy milk, used soaps at home, or built yourself a nice flat-pack piece of furniture, you may have contributed to deforestation and climate change. Every item has a price—but the cost isn’t felt only in our pockets. Hidden in that price is …

This story originally appeared on Grist. It was produced by Grist and co-published with Fresnoland. It is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The land of the Central Valley works hard. Here in the heart of California, in the most productive farming region in the United States, almost every square …

A bitter winter storm is sweeping across the north-east of North America this weekend, and is expected to bring significant snow to New York City for the first time in two years. Low temperatures around freezing are expected to last into next week. If this is making you miserable, it’s …

Unless you’re sinking into quicksand, you might assume that the land beneath your feet is solid and unmoving. In actual fact, your part of the world may well be undergoing “subsidence,” which is where the ground collapses as sediments settle or when people over-extract groundwater. New York City is sinking, …

Rick Fox has spent a lot of time in Hollywood, so naturally he has more than one origin story. Canadian-born, Bahamian-raised Fox played professional basketball in the NBA in the 1990s and 2000s, starring for the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers. After retiring from the sport in 2004, he …

For Gastón Paladini, pork is a family affair. In 1923, his great-grandfather Don Juan Paladini moved from Italy to Santa Fe, Argentina, where he started putting a South American twist on classic Italian sausage recipes. Eventually, Don Juan’s company became one of Argentina’s largest meat producers. It still bears the …

It’s been hard recently to think about anything other than the wars and humanitarian crises raging around the world. Climate change has left its mark in what was almost certainly the hottest year in human history—there were unprecedented heat waves, intensified forest fires, torrential rain, and floods like those in …