When an outbreak of deadly tornadoes tore through the small town of Mayfield, Kentucky, in December 2021, one family was slow to act, not because they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know that they should do anything. The family of Guatemalan immigrants only spoke Spanish, so they didn’t understand the...
Global warming is melting Arctic sea ice. Can science refreeze it?
In the dim twilight of an Arctic winter’s day, with the low sun stretching its orange fingers across the frozen sea, a group of researchers drill a hole through the ice and insert a hydrogen-powered pump. It looks unremarkable — a piece of pipe protruding from a metal cylinder — but it...
Why the Forest Service is logging after Hurricane Helene — and why some say it’s a mistake
In the months after Hurricane Helene leveled thousands of acres in Pisgah National Forest, John Beaudet and other volunteers cleared downed trees from the Appalachian National Scenic Trail. Chopping them up and moving them aside was back-breaking work, but essential to ensuring safe passage for hikers. So he was dismayed...
Public lands, private profits: Inside the Trump plan to offload federal land
The Trump administration is poised to begin offloading public land, achieving a long-held conservative goal of reducing the government’s footprint in the West. Federal agencies manage around 640 million acres, or about 28 percent of the nation’s land, an invaluable resource Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has called “America’s balance sheet.”...
In New England, Canadian hydropower has slowed to an ominous trickle
On March 6, at the start of the still-simmering trade war between the U.S. and Canada, hydropower generator Hydro‑Québec quietly stopped exporting electricity to New England. At a time of year when Canadian hydropower typically supplies up to a tenth of New England’s power, the region has instead gone almost a month with virtually...
The Rio Grande Valley was once covered in forest. One man is trying to bring it back.
Jon Dale’s love affair with birds began when he was about 10 and traded his BB gun for a pair of binoculars. Within a year, he’d counted 150 species flitting through the trees that circled his family’s home in Harlingen, Texas. The town sits in the Rio Grande Valley, at...
The world is heating up. How much can our bodies handle?
In the summer of 2023, a dozen people willingly walked into a steel chamber at the University of Ottawa designed to test the limits of human survival. Outfitted with heart rate monitors and temperature probes, they waited in temperatures of 42 degrees Celsius, or 107 degrees Fahrenheit, while the humidity...
Closures of EPA’s regional environmental justice offices will hurt rural America
Environmental justice efforts at the 10 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regional offices have stopped and employees have been placed on administrative leave, per an announcement from EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin last month. Former EPA employees involved with environmental justice work across the country say rural communities will suffer as a result. Before...
The deep-sea mining industry got tired of waiting for international approval. Enter Trump.
When Solomon Kahoʻohalahala arrived in Jamaica in mid-March to attend a meeting of the International Seabed Authority, he felt the weight of the moment on his shoulders. The United Nations agency is in the midst of crafting regulations to govern a new industry for deep-sea mining that involves scraping mineral...
Did climate change supercharge the ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ storm pummeling the central US?
A major storm took hold across swaths of the central and southern United States on Wednesday unleashing extreme flooding and huge tornadoes from Arkansas up to Michigan. And conditions are expected to worsen on Friday as soils become saturated and water piles up: The National Weather Service is warning of...