Articles by Grist staff

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 […]

Sheep Trick

Angering environmentalists, Aboriginals, and regional government officials alike, the Australian government has announced that it will build a controversial nuclear waste dump at a sheep station in South Australia. Located near the desert town of Woomera, the dump will house low-level radioactive waste from medical, university, industrial, and research facilities around the country. In what […]

Tidal Wave of the Future

The San Francisco Bay could soon become more than just a beautiful backdrop to Fog Town: It could become the engine that powers the city itself. This week, San Francisco became the first major U.S. city to investigate commercial tidal power, when it signed on to a $2 million pilot project to generate electricity using […]

Radio-inactivity

The Pentagon dramatically underestimated the amount of radioactivity to which U.S. Armed Forces members were exposed during Cold War-era atomic testing and explosions, a National Academy of Sciences panel announced yesterday. However, the panel found that the “ionizing radiation” to which the majority of the veterans was exposed — either during testing or in the […]