If we’re being honest, 2025 did not start out great. For basically the whole month of January, a series of wildfires raged across Los Angeles, killing hundreds (more on that number below). On the other side of the country, an Arctic blast brought historic snowfall and bitter cold deep into...
What your cheap clothes cost the planet
The Atacama desert in Chile is one of the most beautiful and forbidding places on Earth, so dry that it’s sometimes used by scientists to test run Mars missions. Most years the area sees less than half a centimeter of rain, but this past September unusually heavy precipitation brought forth...
How Trump’s Big Ag bailout is alienating his MAHA base
At a White House roundtable last Monday, president Donald Trump, alongside Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and a handful of other leaders in the government, announced a $12 billion farm aid program intended to offset the economic blowback that U.S. farmers have faced this year as a result of the president’s...
The EPA was considering a massive lead cleanup in Omaha. Then Trump shifted guidance.
The county health worker scanned the Omaha home with an X-ray gun, searching for the poison. It was 2022, and doctors had recently found high levels of lead in the blood of Crystalyn Prine’s 2-year-old son, prompting the Douglas County Health Department to investigate. The worker said it didn’t seem...
Top Interior Department official has ties to Thacker Pass lithium mine
Karen Budd-Falen, a top official at the Department of Interior, has financial ties to the controversial Thacker Pass lithium mine in northern Nevada — a project that the Trump administration worked to fast-track during its first term. In recent months, the administration took an equity stake in the mine and...
A huge cache of critical minerals found in Utah may be the largest in the US
A Utah company says it has unearthed a massive deposit of minerals crucial for building electric vehicles, semiconductors, satellites, magnets, and more. Ionic Minerals Technology, or Ionic MT, found its Silicon Ridge mine is chock-full of critical minerals and rare earth elements. According to Andre Zeitoun, Ionic MT’s CEO and...
2025: The year the US gave up on climate, and the world gave up on us
As the year comes to a close, 2025 looks like a turning point in the world’s fight against climate change. Most conspicuously, it was the year the U.S. abandoned the effort. The Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which unites virtually all the world’s countries in a...
The EPA website got the basics of climate science right. Until last week.
If you want to know what’s causing climate change and how it affects where you live, don’t turn to the Environmental Protection Agency for answers. The government agency purged basic facts about global warming from its website last week — including references to how human activity releases planet-heating carbon dioxide...
How a species of bamboo could help protect the South from future floods
In early 2024, Michael Fedoroff trekked out to Tuckabum Creek in York County, Alabama. The environmental anthropologist was there to help plant 300 stalks of rivercane, a bamboo plant native to North America, on an eroded, degraded strip of wetland: a “gnarly” and “wicked” area, according to Fedoroff. If successful,...
When Elephants Trample Your Farm, Who Do You Call?
When Krithi Karanth walks into a forest village in the shadow of India’s Bandipur National Park, she is often greeted by farmers with cell phones in hand — ready to report video of a night-time encounter with an elephant herd, or the fresh tracks of a leopard that passed behind...