Latest Articles

Moment in the Sun

Okay, so it didn’t get quite as much press as Ben Curtis’s surprise victory in the British Open or the Funny Cide-Empire Maker standoff in the Belmont Stakes, but for the 20 cars that took off from Chicago on July 13, the race was every bit as exciting. The event in question was the American […]

Logbook Rolling

Prior to commercial whaling, far more whales thrived in the North Atlantic than previously thought, according to a study published in today’s issue of Science. Earlier studies estimated historical whale populations by combing through logbooks from old whaling ships; the current study was the first to look instead at telltale genetic variations that increase as […]

States of Grace

With federal action against climate change stagnating, some state leaders are taking matters into their own hands. Ten Northeastern states agreed yesterday to begin discussing the creation of the nation’s first market-based plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. Under the plan, plants would be able to buy or sell CO2 credits in […]

Elizabeth Grossman reviews The Empty Ocean by Richard Ellis

"It's a fire alarm," says Richard Ellis about his new book, The Empty Ocean, which joins a chorus of recent publications documenting the precipitous decline of world fisheries and the dire state of the marine environment. That alarm should make you think long and hard about your lunchtime tuna sandwich or the sashimi you order at your favorite Japanese restaurant.

Rubber Ducky, You’re the $100

Thanks to “Sesame Street,” everybody over the age of two knows that rubber duckies make bath time lots of fun — but who knew the little yellow guys could make oceanography a bit more fun, too? Eleven years ago, a shipping container carrying 29,000 rubber bath toys (frogs, turtles, and beavers, as well as the […]

A-lohas

Chances are you’ve never heard of “Lohas” — which is funny, because if you’re a regular reader of Grist, the odds are pretty decent that the word applies to you. Don’t worry, we’re not calling you a bad name; the term stands for “lifestyles of health and sustainability” and was coined a few years back […]

Brown Study

The Bush administration will announce today the details of its 10-year plan to study climate change and determine whether human activity or natural occurrences are causing the Earth’s atmosphere to heat up. The Climate Change Science Program will compile expertise from 13 federal agencies that collectively spend $4.5 billion on climate-change related programs; it will […]

Malaise-ia

As many as two-fifths of Southeast Asia’s species — at least half of which are found nowhere else in the world — could go extinct over the course of this century, according to a study appearing in today’s edition of the journal Nature. The vast majority of those extinctions will stem from deforestation, which is […]

Eerie Canal

A quarter-century after becoming the nation’s most infamous toxic dump, upstate New York’s Love Canal is gradually being repopulated. Used for years as a dumping grounds for Hooker Chemical (later Occidental Chemical), Love Canal was eventually sold to the city of Niagara Falls, which built a school on top of it. Residents began reporting high […]

How the five-gallon plastic bucket came to the aid of grassroots environmentalists

The plastic five-gallon bucket is the most humdrum of containers, yet it’s proved to be almost as versatile as duct tape. Creative sorts have turned buckets into toolboxes and ottomans, planters and panniers. And in recent years, some environmental activists have begun using the humble bucket for an even higher purpose: These days, five-gallon buckets […]