The Department of Agriculture under President Donald Trump has charted a new course — the full-scale reduction of federal funding and staffing throughout the agency. A set of the president’s early executive orders targeted climate action, environmental justice, and diversity, equity, and inclusion; the USDA has since complied with those...
Trump’s EPA is attacking its own power to fight climate change
In 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency declared that the rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere threatened public health and welfare. This “endangerment finding,” as it’s known in legal jargon, may have sounded self-evident to those who had been following climate science for decades, but its consequences for U.S....
Troubling scenes from an Arctic in full-tilt crisis
The Arctic island of Svalbard is so reliably frigid that humanity bet its future on the place. Since 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault — set deep in frozen soil known as permafrost — has accepted nearly 1.4 million samples of more than 6,000 species of critical crops. But, the...
Climate change has sent coffee prices soaring. Trump’s tariffs will send them higher.
Eight years ago, when Debbie Wei Mullin founded her company Copper Cow, she wanted to bring Vietnamese coffee into the mainstream. Vietnam, the world’s second-largest exporter of coffee, is known for growing robusta beans. Earthier and more bitter than the arabica beans grown in Brazil, Colombia, and other coffee-growing regions near...
Trump’s environmental policies are reshaping everyday life. Here’s how.
Over the last six months, Americans have been inundated with a near-constant stream of announcements from the federal government — programs shuttered, funding cut, jobs eliminated, and regulations gutted. President Donald Trump and his administration are executing a systematic dismantling of the environmental, economic, and scientific systems that underpin our...
A long-awaited rule to protect workers from heat stress moves forward, even under Trump
Last summer, the United States took a crucial step towards protecting millions of workers across the country from the impacts of extreme heat on the job. In July 2024, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, published its first-ever draft rule to prevent heat illness in the U.S. workforce....
How tribes navigate emergency response aid to citizens and what you can do to prepare
Native Americans are increasingly responsible for emergency management systems when a natural disaster hits a tribal community. Tribes can issue emergency declarations requests to open up help from regional and federal partners, typically 24 hours after the event. When help is authorized to arrive, emergency management systems tend to move...
The guerrilla campaign to save a Texas prairie from ‘silent extinction’
One sunny sunny morning in May, four high school students stood on a flower-dappled prairie in southern Dallas holding shovels. Before them swayed a Texas blazing star, a tall and spindly stalk that erupts in a bottlebrush of purple florets. Max Yan, a senior, made two putts on either side...
How the world’s highest court bolstered the fight for climate reparations
As global inaction over the climate crisis has mounted and Pacific islands nations have watched in frustration as their calls for decisive action have gone unheeded, a growing number of them, led by Vanuatu, have turned to the courts. If policymakers won’t act, they hoped, perhaps the courts would. And...
This Indian rapper is spitting bars about climate justice, caste, and Indigenous rights
In her latest rap song, Madhura Ghane, known by her stage name Mahi G, walks on a barren, drought-stricken hill where a large, leafless tree has fallen to the ground. In the following frames, with the background music slowly rising, the video shows close-ups of Indian laborers — men, women,...