Articles by Grist staff

We Don’t Cotton to This Idea

Farmers in India are harvesting the nation’s first approved biotech cotton crop, a development that has environmentalists and some nationalists nervous. About 55,000 growers, an estimated 2 percent of India’s cotton farmers, have planted Monsanto’s Bollgard cotton seed, genetically engineered with the Bt bacterium to be resistant to the bollworm, a troublesome cotton pest. The […]

Snake Oil

Federal dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers in the Northwest have been spilling oil directly into the waterways on which they sit, in amounts ranging from a trickle to, in one case, 1,000 gallons. Oregon and Washington state authorities have been trying to get a handle on the problem, but the U.S. Army Corps […]

Con-servancy?

The Nature Conservancy, based in Arlington, Va., has become the world’s wealthiest environmental group, with assets of $3 billion, but according to an extensive investigative series by the Washington Post, that money is not all going to the environmental good. The conservancy is known for purchasing and protecting ecologically valuable land, using donations from both […]

Bighorn Blown

The U.S. Forest Service has settled a lawsuit with eight former and current workers from Bighorn National Forest who suffered on-the-job retaliation after complaining about hostile working conditions and questionable forest-management practices. The $200,000 settlement will be divided among the whistleblowers, but the USFS will not discipline the managers who were responsible for the retaliatory […]