Wildfires’ toxic air leaves damage long after the smoke clears
When researchers arrived in this town tucked in the Northern Rockies three years ago, they could still smell the smoke a day after it cleared…
Nature & Environment
Scientists honing new ways to measure a city’s carbon footprint
Boston may be emerging as a model for how scientists and the public can better quantify and understand their city’s carbon dioxide emissions. Millions of…
Without ‘Transformative Change’ to Global Economic Systems, Humans Risk Causing More Deadly Pandemics
“There is a single species that is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic—us,” write the authors, who have previously published planetary status reports from IPBES. “As…
Climate change forces virus migration
“All the world is topsy-turvy, and it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.” This quote is from The Scarlet Plague written by Jack London…
As sea level rise threatens their ancestral village, a Louisiana tribe fights to stay put
Ten years ago, as news of the BP oil disaster reached Louisiana’s Grand Bayou Indian Village, Rosina Philippe dispatched her brother Maurice Phillips on a…
The soil solution
On a steely November morning, Dorn Cox tours me around the dairy farm where he works in Freeport, Maine. The hummocky coastal landscape has begun…
Carbon Emissions Turned Back 10 Years
Data show coronavirus countermeasures have resulted in a record drop in fossil-fuel demand and created an opening for a clean-energy transition. The early months of 2020…
‘The World Must Act Boldly’: 23 Former Diplomats Urge Global Leaders to Adopt Paris-Style Agreement to Protect Biodiversity
“Humanity sits on the precipice of irreversible loss of biodiversity and a climate crisis that imperils the future for our grandchildren and generations to come.”…
What will the world be like after coronavirus? Four possible futures
Simon Mair, University of Surrey Where will we be in six months, a year, ten years from now? I lie awake at night wondering what…
Can we protect nature by giving it legal rights?
Around the world, communities are using “Rights of Nature” laws to defend waterways, species and more from human threats February 4, 2020 — A great…
Microsoft’s Moonshot Plan to Reverse Its Lifetime CO2 Emissions by 2050
The alarming headlines about Australia’s bush fires over the last couple weeks have heightened the global outcry over climate change, and companies, NGOs, and governments…
Undone Science: When Research Fails Polluted Communities
It was nearly 30 years ago when Debbie Blackburn and her husband Scott bought a boxy, postwar house six blocks from the Ohio River in…
We’ll Soon Be Able to Prosper and Save the Earth at the Same Time. Here’s How
Life is pretty different today than it was 20 or even 10 years ago. Smartphones and the internet have changed the way we do business,…