Lauren Bacchus is one of many people in Asheville who are strangely enamored with the city’s sinkholes. She’s a member of the Asheville Sinkhole Group, an online watering hole of more than 3,400 people in and around this North Carolina city who eagerly discuss the chasms that mysteriously emerge from...
The misleading accounting behind your ‘recycled’ plastic
Imagine you’re filling up 100 bags of coffee. You’re using beans from a few different providers — 10 percent of the beans they sent you are decaffeinated and the rest are caffeinated. However, you mixed them all together, so each bag is an even blend of 10 percent decaf, 90 percent...
Georgia’s beloved shrimp industry grapples with disease and foreign imports
The tart saltwater odor of fresh-caught shrimp hangs thick in the air, stronger even than the earthier scent of marsh and mud, at Bubba Gumbo’s and BG Seafood, a dockside restaurant and seafood market on Tybee Island, Georgia. This is one of many restaurants that dot the creeks and rivers...
FEMA is ending door-to-door canvassing in disaster areas
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is making significant changes to how it will respond to disasters on the ground this season, including ending federal door-to-door canvassing of survivors in disaster areas, Wired has learned. A memo reviewed by Wired, dated May 2 and addressed to regional FEMA leaders from Cameron...
Deforestation and illegal evictions threaten Malaysia’s Indigenous peoples
On October 20, 2022, Jeffery Nang, chief of the Rumah Jeffrey people in Malaysia, went to a community meeting and was handed a letter by a government official in Sarawak, a state on the island of Borneo in Malaysia. The letter was an eviction notice for Nang and the 60-some...
Colorado’s rural electric co-ops are determined to go green
Eric Eriksen puts in long nights and weekends to keep the lights on in southern Colorado. As the CEO of the San Luis Valley Rural Electric Cooperative, Eriksen leads a member-owned nonprofit that provides electric service to more than 7,500 people across seven rural counties in the Rocky Mountains —...
Trump calls program to help low-income Americans pay their energy bills ‘unnecessary’
Last year, the Low Income Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, distributed nearly $4 billion to households struggling to pay their energy bills. It’s a lifeline for more than 6 million families, but in recent months the program has become a target for funding cuts. In early April, Donald Trump’s administration...
An $18M grant would have drastically reduced food waste. Then the EPA cut it.
Once a little girl roaming the vibrant fields of an organic lettuce farm in Kealakekua, Hawai‘i, Ella Kilpatrick Kotner learned how to live in harmony with the land before most kids learn how to tie their shoes. Nourishing the soils that gave her a regular supply of leafy greens was...
The Trump administration has all but stopped enforcing environmental laws
Protecting the nation from polluters is a core function of the Environmental Protection Agency. But in the last few months, federal enforcement of major violations of environmental laws appears to have ground to a halt. A Grist review of data from the Department of Justice and EPA found that the...
Why are all of America’s biggest cities sinking?
Cities sit unmoving on the landscape — a sprawling collection of roads, sidewalks, and buildings designed to last for generations. But across the United States, urban areas are silently shifting: The land beneath them is sinking, a process known as subsidence, largely because people are using too much groundwater and...