Articles by Grist staff

Rumble in the Jungle

ChevronTexaco Faces Oil Pollution Trial in Ecuador One of the biggest oil pollution trials in history will get underway tomorrow in Ecuador, pitting oil giant ChevronTexaco against 30,000 residents of the Amazon rainforest who charge that a Texaco subsidiary dumped huge amounts of oily waste in their homeland from 1971 to 1992. The Ecuadorians say […]

Law-mowers

Republicans in Congress Try to Undermine California’s Environmental Laws Many Republicans argue that the federal government should leave more decisions to the states, but these days they’re abandoning their states’ rights talk when it comes to California — and the state’s environment could suffer as a result. The GOP-controlled Congress is trying to undermine a […]

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

Pollutant-Chomping Bacterium Cleans Up Contaminated Sites A pollutant-munching bacterium is earning plaudits in Fairfield, N.J., where the U.S. EPA has been using it to clean up a Superfund site contaminated with poison-laced sewage. The mysterious little bacterium, with the unwieldy name of Dehalococcoides ethenogenes, was discovered in 1997 by scientists at Cornell University who determined […]

Calf-kaesque

Melting of South American Glaciers Leads to Sea-Level Rise Glaciers in the Patagonia region of southern Argentina and Chile are melting so fast that they are leading to a tiny but notable rise in sea level, U.S. scientists report in the latest issue of the journal Science. The glaciers are melting twice as quickly as […]