Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Environment”
After attempting to deliver us all from evil with the beautifully written Between the World and Me, and his essay collection, We Were Eight Years in Power, award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates—who arguably may be the greatest essayist of our time—is veering into fiction to anoint us all with his debut novel, The Water … Read the rest
“We were so terrified with the water coming into the house and the sound of the storm. In front of my eyes, the walls of our house collapsed.” That’s Geeta Maiti, a resident of Mousuni Island, which is part of the Indian Sundarbans—a 4,000-square-mile archipelago that has been designated a World Heritage site. … Read the rest
On a hot July evening last year, a rancher tried to use a hammer and stake to plug a wasp’s nest. The hammer slipped, a spark flew, and a patch of dry grass ignited, according to the Los Angeles Times. Within minutes, the brush fire fed on bone-dry conditions and became too big to … Read the rest
The spring of 2019 saw record rain fall across North America, causing historic, severe flooding in the Great Plains, parts of the Midwest, and the Southern United States. That above-normal precipitation doesn’t look to be ending, either. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center predicts that wide swaths of the United States could … Read the rest
That may sound like an Onion headline, but alas, it is not. We’ve reached the point in our wild planetary experiment where humans are memorializing the things we’re knowingly wiping out.
Iceland has lost its first glacier to rising temperatures. Now, scientists from Rice University and Iceland are planning to install a plaque near the … Read the rest
Marijuana arrests in Virginia hit their highest levels in at least 20 years in 2018, a climb that has sparked calls for overhauls and bucked trends in a number of other states that have moved toward decriminalizing the drug.
Nearly 29,000 arrests were made for marijuana offenses in Virginia last year, a number that has … Read the rest
Nadine Marshall is trained as an ecologist, and she’s an expert on the Great Barrier Reef. But recently, her work has picked up an unexpected new element: crisis counseling.
“People tell me about their childhoods spent spearfishing in clear blue waters, but now the water is murky and the fish have gone,” says Marshall, a … Read the rest
Garbage patches in the ocean are sobering reminders of humanity’s collective plastic pollution problem. Measuring up to thousands of kilometers across, the patches have been confirmed to exist in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, but not in the Indian—a surprise, given that more plastic waste enters the Indian Ocean than anywhere else on Earth.
Some damage caused by plastic waste is dramatic and well known: every year, plastic is an accomplice in the deaths of millions of marine birds, mammals, turtles, and fish. But as new research suggests, plastic pollution may soon have far more insidious effects. A study led by Renjith VishnuRadhan, a postdoctoral researcher at the … Read the rest
As I descend into dark waters, my blue flashlights reveal a spectacular display of fluorescent colors shining out from some of the corals and marine creatures below. Normally hard to detect with the naked eye, this secret, colorful light show gleams as brightly as an ’80s disco within the beam of my lights.
Fluorescence on … Read the rest