Articles by Grist staff

The Pardners’ Tale

Cowboys and environmentalists unite! The unlikely amigos are banding together to try to keep natural gas drillers away from ranches on public land in the San Juan Basin in northwestern New Mexico and southwestern Colorado. Yesterday morning, they blocked drilling crews from entering four ranches, arguing that drilling leads to erosion, water contamination, and livestock […]

Landscape Goat

There’s no need to use big crews and machinery to control fires in the California hills — just add goats. A park district in the Bay Area is using goats to munch away the brush and low-level vegetation that fuel fires in parklands. Not only are the goats sometimes cheaper, gentler, and more environmentally sensible […]

The Roof Is on Fire

By passing regulations to encourage developers to install green roofs, Portland, Ore., has become a pioneer in the growing worldwide ecoroof movement (what, you aren’t a part of it yet?). Rooftops planted with vegetation such as ferns and wildflowers can reduce runoff after rainstorms by up to 90 percent and diminish a building’s energy costs […]

A Catalog of Ills

Of the 17 billion catalogs mailed every year to American consumers (that’s 59 catalogs for each and every one of us!), a surprising few contain recycled materials. An Environmental Defense survey released yesterday found that only six of 42 major catalog companies are using significant amounts of recycled paper, and most don’t use any. Nary […]