Articles by Grist staff

Fly by Nitrogen

Threatened California butterfly hurt by cars and helped by cows The bay checkerspot butterfly population on Northern California’s Coyote Ridge is threatened with “drive-by extinction,” according to conservation biologist Stuart Weiss. Car commuters to Silicon Valley and other sources of pollution deposit up to 20 pounds of nitrogen per acre on the ridge every year, […]

Kicked in the Arson

“Eco-terrorists” indicted in connection to Vail ski-resort arson Four people — dubbed “eco-terrorists” by the authorities, who aren’t at all trying to scare you — were indicted Thursday and face eight counts of arson in connection to fires set at a Vail, Colo., ski resort in 1998. A communiqué apparently released by the arsonists said […]

What’s Methane, Chopped Liver?

Conservative think tank launches climate-skeptic TV ads “Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution; we call it life.” Nope, not a story in The Onion. That’s the punch line of two TV ads that the industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute began airing in 14 U.S. cities yesterday, timed to correspond with the big-screen debut of Al Gore’s […]

Cork Screwed

Drop in cork demand could endanger Mediterranean forests What wine goes best with endangered forest? Perhaps a nice pinot gris? Mediterranean cork-oak forests provide 15 billion cork stoppers a year to the wine industry — a sustainable enterprise, as cork is harvested from live trees rather than dead ones — but plastic and screw-top closures […]