Earlier this month, the Finnish government released its Truth and Reconciliation report, which documents years of harm done to the country’s Indigenous Sámi people. Truth and Reconciliation Commissions have been emerging since the 1970s, with varying degrees of impact. South Africa’s 1998 Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, commissioned to address...
The Bad River Band is suing to protect its wild rice from an oil pipeline
Around August of each year, when temperatures swell in the Great Lakes region, wild rice — or manoomin in the Ojibwe language — begins to flower. Rice stalks can grow as high as 10 feet in the shallow waters, and to harvest, sticks and poles are used to knock seeds...
This Netflix holiday rom-com is secretly an environmentalist fantasy
At first glance, A Merry Little Ex-Mas looks like yet another holiday rom-com — a comforting, predictable love story done up in a tidy bow. Only in this case, that festive wrapper is made of green ribbon. Any environmentally minded viewers will quickly clock Ex-Mas as not just a corny...
The country’s largest magnesium supplier shut down. Now what?
Only a few years ago, if you popped open a can of soda anywhere in the United States, the container you held more likely than not contained bits of magnesium harvested from the Great Salt Lake. Now, the country’s supply of the critical mineral looks uncertain. The largest producer, US...
What happens when disaster recovery becomes a luxury good
Every year at the Oscars, attendees leave with gift bags so elaborate they have to be reported as income to the IRS. Luxury skincare, personal training sessions, designer apples that never brown, and extravagant trips are standard issue. But in 2025, Academy Award guests also received a grimmer gift: a...
Georgia’s hunters take aim at rural hunger
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station. On the outskirts of Savannah, Georgia, a line of large chest coolers waits outside Wise Brothers Processing. Inside them, skinned deer lie packed in ice, ready to be cut into cubes, ground up, or made...
The Pentagon is hoarding critical minerals that could power the clean energy transition
Pete Hegseth, who has taken to calling himself the Secretary of War, says the Defense Department “does not do climate change crap.” Just last week, he asserted that the agency “will not be distracted” by climate change or “woke moralizing.” But a new report suggests that the Pentagon is engaging...
What changed for deep-sea mining in 2025? Everything.
For more than a decade, The Metals Company has poured millions of dollars into researching and developing technology for mining seafloors at extreme depths, funding scientific studies to evaluate the environmental impact, and persuading investors and political leaders to support their vision of scraping minerals like cobalt and copper from...
Trump has always hated offshore wind. Now he’s moving to kill it.
The Department of Interior abruptly paused the leases for five of the nation’s largest proposed offshore wind projects on Monday. That effectively halts all ongoing offshore wind development in the United States. The moves come as electricity demand in the U.S. is growing for the first time in years, driven...
Ford is retreating from EVs — but embracing grid batteries
Ford, a century after it launched the modern automotive era, has given up on its early ambitions to charge into the electrified future. The company announced that it will delete nearly $20 billion in book value to extricate itself from its EV investments, an eye-popping loss that amounts to one of the biggest corporate impairments...