Picture the bucolic little town of a fairy tale. At its core stand medieval buildings, a square where folks hawk their goods, and perhaps a well to provide water. Beyond the defensive wall radiate agricultural fields, where people toil to bring grains, fruits, and vegetables to market. Invert that for...
The UK quit coal. But is burning Louisiana’s trees any better?
Kathleen Watts’ flowers bloom much brighter now that the wind no longer blows black. Pulling weeds in the garden outside her redbrick house, she recalled when coal dust would sometimes drift through her quiet corner of northern England, a rolling patchwork of farms and villages under the shadow of what...
Billie Eilish, stolen land, and the climate cost of America’s dispossession
When Billie Eilish told Grammy audiences that “no one is illegal on stolen land,” she ignited a small firestorm that went beyond celebrity discourse, revealing deep fault lines in how America confronts its own history. Critics accused her of hypocrisy, pointing out that her multimillion-dollar Los Angeles home sits on...
Indigenous concerns surface as Trump calls for seabed mining in Alaskan waters
President Donald Trump is considering allowing companies to lease more than 113 million acres of waters off Alaska for seabed mining. Alaska is the latest of several places Trump has sought to open to the fledging industry over the past year, including waters around American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern...
Vegan fine dining had a moment. Now it’s over.
When then 31-year-old Brazilian culinary student Letícia Dias walked into Eleven Madison Park on a Sunday evening last August, she had no idea a meal was about to change her life. A longtime vegan, it was her first time dining at the world-class New York City luxury restaurant, which in...
The Olympics are ditching PFAS waxes — and the ‘ridiculous’ speed they gave skiers
Tim Baucom has done this before. The Milan Cortina Games will be his third Olympics as a wax technician for the United States’ cross-country ski team, a job characterized by long flights schlepping tools and duffel bags of gear halfway around the world, and even longer days prepping skis. His...
The US doesn’t need to generate as much new electricity as you think
The conversation around energy use in the United States has become … electric. Everyone from President Donald Trump to the cohosts of Today show has been talking about the surging demand for, and rising costs of, electrons. Many people worry that utilities won’t be able to produce enough power. But...
Inside the polarizing plan to stash carbon in a California wetland
The Montezuma Wetlands drape across 1,800 acres of Solano County, California, where the Sacramento River empties into San Francisco Bay. Once drained and diked for farming and grazing, the marsh has been rehabilitated over the past two decades, and in 2020, tidal waters returned for the first time in a...
Why the future of meat production is in vats, not farms
I recently ate a pig that’s alive and well at a sanctuary in upstate New York. Her name is Dawn, and she donated a bit of fat, which a company called Mission Barns grows in bioreactors, then blends with plant-based ingredients to create pork products (like the meatballs above) that...
Japan’s unprecedented project could test the limits of deep-sea mining
The year 2010 was a reckoning for Japan’s economic security. On September 7, the Chinese fishing trawler Minjinyu 5179 refused an order by Japan’s coast guard to leave disputed waters near the Senkaku Islands, which are known in China as Diaoyu. The vessel then rammed two patrol boats, escalating a...