Articles by Grist staff

Sweet Child of Mine?

After forcing a mining operation to leave town in 1997, the 46 families of Junin, a remote village in northern Ecuador, decided to have a go at ecotourism to protect the rainforest around them — and to earn a living. But now a growing number of the residents are questioning that choice. The paradise of […]

Detroit Rock City

Detroit automakers sure aren’t complaining about the Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate. They anticipate having a close ally in the incoming chair of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee, James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who is known for his criticism of clean air regulations and the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. He once referred to […]

Crop Busting

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is ordering the destruction of hundreds of thousands of bushels of soybeans in Nebraska after discovering that they were contaminated with genetically modified (GM) corn. The Texas-based company ProdiGene is attempting to grow GM corn impregnated with medications such as the hepatitis B vaccine. It plowed over a failed […]

You’re Living in Your Own Private Idaho

An increasingly common type of collaboration between a conservation group and a logging company will protect up to 600,000 acres of private forestland in northern Idaho from development. The Washington-based timber company Potlatch, which owns the land, will sell its development rights to the California-based Trust for Public Land, which in turn expects to raise […]