Latest Articles

Photos: What America looked like before the EPA

In 1972, the year-old EPA had photographers traverse the country to document the (often dire) state of the environment. This project, Documerica, was "the visual echo of the mission of the EPA," according to one photographer. Now, 40 years later, archive specialist Jerry Simmons has unearthed the photos and put them online at the National Archives website and on Flickr. It's a time capsule of life before the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

Critical List: Patagonia becomes a Benefit Corporation; oil industry threatens Obama

Patagonia has become a Benefit Corporation, which means it can prioritize goals other than profit.

The oil industry is sending a message to Obama: Approve the Keystone XL pipeline, or face the political music in 2012.

It is possible to avoid earthquakes when disposing of fracking wastewater. It's just really, really expensive.

The U.S. isn't the only country leery of the EU's carbon trading airline scheme: China's protesting, too.

Get your green New Year’s resolutions right here

Still deciding how to enhance and eco-ify your life in 2012? We rounded up resolutions from Grist readers and staffers to give you some ideas.

What the Times’ organic tomato story missed: Golf courses

Farming organic winter tomatoes in Mexico definitely has its problems, but Del Cabo's Larry Jacobs says water isn't one of them.

My New Year’s resolution

I'm an analyzer, dissector, chopper-upper, drawn to flaws and inconsistencies like itches that need scratching. But there are limits to that sort of thing.

Goths are the darkest treehuggers ever

Goths have been communing with nature since way before all you hippies. They commune with nature in much the same way as they commune with gravestones, i.e. by draping themselves over it in corsets and taking pictures. Maybe I just love the Goths Up Trees Tumblr because I've committed a goth-in-a-tree photo or two in my time, but also it's hilarious.

Oops: Gas Industry Study on Industry “Economics” Omits Costs of Water Contamination

Despite spending massively to position itself as “clean,” the natural gas industry has a serious pollution problem it doesn’t want getting more public and regulatory attention. Not only is the industry’s climate disruption footprint potentially heavierthan coal, the hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) practice the current gas boom depends on is contaminating our water supplies. The industry wants you […]

Fossil fuels receive 250 different kinds of subsidies

Even though renewables get federal subsidies for research and development, they’re still at a disadvantage when competing with fossil fuels, because fossil fuels receive even more subsidies. We basically all knew that already, but few of us realized it was quite this bad. Turns out fossil fuels get 250 different kinds of subsidies, and they’re getting more all the time.

Huge strides in fuel efficiency innovation canceled out by bigger cars

If, and this is true, automakers have made huge strides in fuel efficiency over the past 30 years, why aren't we all driving the 100 MPG ubercars we were promised at Epcot Center when we were but wee lads and lasses?

The answer is that our cars, like our homes and just about everything else we consume, have been supersized, says MIT economist Christopher Knittel.

Photographer turns unrelenting boringness of suburbia into art

Jason Griffiths is an assistant professor of design at Arizona State, and apparently living in the middle of all that desert sprawl got to him after a while. In the early aughts he jumped into a car, drove all over the country, and made a discovery so banal it’s practically a tautology: Suburbia is the same everywhere.