Latest Articles

Regular or unleaded? Are we willing to invest in healthier homes?

Photo: Steven DepoloHey, have you heard? It’s Lead Poisoning Awareness Week! Stop. I know what you’re thinking. “We don’t have a ribbon,” says Beth Bingham, communications director for the national Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning. “We get a lot of calls from people wondering what color ribbon they should wear. Everyone else has a […]

Cool energy-storage projects popping up; expect a lot more

Tracking the politics of clean energy can be a surreal and dispiriting experience. D.C. is so swamped in fossil-fuel money, fossil-fuel lobbyists, and fossil-fuel-owned pols that the conventional wisdom is absurdly pessimistic about clean energy: It’s unreliable, it costs too much, it can never work, blah blah. Meanwhile, out in the real world, costs are […]

Emboldened by Students Taking Action

Weight of the world got you down? Stressed out by visions of exploding mountains, warming planets, and mounting to-do lists? Me too. Thankfully, I had a major ray of hope recently that I would love to share with you, in the hopes that it will lift your spirits as much as it lifted mine. Yesterday, […]

Food Studies: From trimmings to terrine

Food Studies features the voices of volunteer student bloggers from a variety of different food- and agriculture-related programs at universities around the world. You can explore the full series here. Who wouldn’t be turned off by forcemeat? The name alone sounds pretty gross. When it was time to focus on these cold, repurposed meat preparations […]

November 6: More Than Just the Climate Movement?

November 6 at the White House is a big day and an important place. That afternoon, one year before the 2012 elections, thousands of people from around the country will be doing something that has never been done before. We will be surrounding the White House, a mile or more in circumference, in a Circle […]

This is the weekend we hit 7 billion

Well, the 7 billionth baby is expected to arrive around Halloween. Spooky! Here's what you should read to prepare. "I am the population problem." It's easy to blame developing countries, but if you want to find the source of the population problem, check the mirror. Population isn't just about counting heads. The impact of humanity […]

Putting the wilderness back in our cities

Neil Chambers’ new book, Urban Green: Architecture for the Future, is a study in imprecision. Ankle deep and a mile wide, the book reads like a half-baked primer in green design and conservation science. It could have used another year or two in the oven. It’s too bad. At the heart of this book — […]

What can trick-or-treaters tell you about the health of your neighborhood?

When my brother and I were little, around this time of year we loved to watch The Halloween Tree, an animated feature based on a Ray Bradbury book of the same name. The movie opens with Bradbury himself narrating: It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small […]

Live chat on population 7 billion — ask your questions and have your say-so

Sandeep Bathala and Carmen BarrosoJoin a Grist live chat on population issues on Monday, Oct. 31, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern / 10:00 a.m. Pacific, marking the occasion of the world population hitting 7 billion. We’ll have two experts on hand to answer your questions: Sandeep Bathala of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, formerly […]

Developing countries take the climate change bullet for the rest of us

Here's the 2012 Climate Change Vulnerability Index, produced by risk analysis firm Maplecroft, which shows the areas of the world that are most at risk from the impacts of climate change. Does it remind you of anything? Maybe a reverse map of the biggest climate change offenders? (This isn't the first time people have put […]