Articles by Grist staff

Go, West, Young Man

Jason West, a 26-year-old member of the Green Party, is shaking things up in New Paltz, N.Y., where he was elected mayor earlier this month — an outcome that has the local political establishment in a tizzy. West ran on an ambitious environmental platform that rallied support from many students at the State University of […]

Into Thin Air, and Thick Refuse

In the 50 years since Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary first scaled Mt. Everest, so much refuse piled up on the world’s highest mountain that some took to calling it the world’s highest garbage dump. By the early 1990s, an estimated 50 tons of metal, glass, and plastic, including many hundreds of abandoned oxygen […]

Data Dumping

Think the U.S. EPA is keeping tabs on water pollution around the country? Think again. The agency’s computer system for tracking and controlling water pollution is outmoded, riddled with bad data, and lacks information on thousands of sources of serious pollution, according to a report released last week by the EPA’s inspector general. Efforts to […]

Double Trouble

The number of animal species in Brazil known to be endangered has nearly doubled since 1989, reaching 398, according to a three-year study conducted by the Brazilian government and released last week. Tropical wolves, rare parrots, and exotic frogs and turtles are among the many threatened creatures. The comprehensive survey of animal and plant life […]