After a year of intense negotiations, the states along the Colorado River have reached a deal to solve one of the most complex water crises in U.S. history. The solution to this byzantine conundrum is deceptive in its simplicity: pay farmers — who collectively use 80 percent of Colorado River deliveries — to give up […]
This article was produced in partnership with The Intercept. Their protest encampment razed, the Indigenous-led environmental movement at North Dakota’s Standing Rock reservation was searching for a new tactic. By March 2017, the fight over the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline had been underway for months. Leaders of the movement to defend Indigenous rights on […]
In the video for her new song, “World On Fire,” Dolly Parton sits atop a burning world. Blond hair piled and coiffed, her black dress glittering, she looks down into a pit of flames burning the earth. The song rocks a little harder than her usual feathery country oeuvre, and over a driving beat, she […]
Over the past three years, an extreme drought has pushed the Horn of Africa to the brink of famine, causing one of the worst humanitarian crises in modern history. The dry spell forced more than 2.6 million people in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya to leave their homes last year, and it killed more than 43,000 […]
Like many coastal cities around the world, New York City is sinking. On a year-to-year basis, the rate of its descent into the Earth is practically imperceptible, but over time those millimeters add up: Today, the city is 9 inches lower than it was in 1950 — a number that has serious implications for waterfront […]
This story is published in partnership with the Reno Gazette-Journal, with support by The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism. For the first two decades of the 21st century, not even a once-in-a-millennium drought could deter real estate developers from building vast suburban tracts on the wild […]
There are few minerals that play as pivotal a role in the global energy transition as lithium. The silvery white, soft, reactive metal is particularly good at storing energy, which is why it is used in all commercial electric vehicle batteries today and is unlikely to be replaced by another material anytime soon. The demand […]
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva legally recognized nearly 800 square miles of Indigenous lands on Friday in an effort to stop illegal logging, mining and land grabbing, reversing policies enacted by his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right leader who encouraged development in the Amazon. Those policies spurred a frenzy of activity, including illegal […]
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, and Native News Online. Colonialism and market forces are destroying the planet and affecting Indigenous peoples’ health, a draft report from the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues declared last week. One of only three U.N. bodies […]
A stalled transmission line project that Maine voters tried to kill in 2021 has been brought back to life by a state court. The ruling gives climate-conscious state governments across New England a fresh chance to significantly decarbonize the region’s electrical grid, which is sustained by oil and natural gas. Near the end of last […]