Articles by Grist staff

Down Under Water

The folks down under will have a lot to be down about if climate change proceeds as projected. Rising temperatures could trigger a 164 percent increase in heat-related deaths in Australia by 2050 and an increase of up to 240 percent in injuries and deaths caused by flooding by 2020, according to a study commissioned […]

DNA-Ok

J. Craig Venter, leader of a team that successfully decoded the human genome, now has his sights set on reading the DNA of an entire ecosystem — the Sargasso Sea, a warm swath of water in the Atlantic around the Bermuda Triangle. Working with teams he’s assembled at private biotech institutes in Maryland, Venter believes […]

Dairy, Dairy, Quite Contrary

Two businessmen want to build a massive cow town in the Mojave Desert in Southern California, providing a home for 90,000 cattle and 600 dairy farmers and their families. Sounds like a recipe for environmental disaster, right? Maybe not: In this case, the plan is to make the development a model of eco-friendly large-scale farming. […]

Canada-Do Spirit

Societies tend to measure progress in narrow economic terms — gross domestic product, employment figures, trade deficits. Now an influential team in Canada is proposing that the country become the first in the world to measure its ecological health with the same care and precision. The National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy today […]