Articles by Grist staff

Foot-in-mouth Disease?

Dealing a blow to advocates of natural resource extraction in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, biologists working for the U.S. Geological Survey have produced a report finding that oil and gas drilling in the refuge could substantially threaten caribou, musk oxen, polar bears, migrating birds, and other wildlife. Although the report acknowledges that the risk […]

Dune Bugging

Almost 50,000 acres of dunes in California’s Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area would be re-opened to off-road vehicles (ORVs) under a Bureau of Land Management proposal. The area has been off-limits to the vehicles since November of 2000, when the BLM, ORV groups, and environmentalists negotiated a settlement that closed the area to protect endangered […]

Deep Du Du

Three years after NATO’s 78-day air campaign against Yugoslavia, depleted uranium (DU) has been found at five of six sites investigated by scientists from the U.N. Environment Programme. The sites, in Serbia and Montenegro, had “widespread but low-level” contamination. Although the scientists did not report any current direct threat to humans or the environment, they […]

Warm Air Gives Us Cold Hands

Relatively minor increases in global temperatures are already dramatically affecting plants and animals, according to an article appearing in the current issue of Nature. The Earth has warmed by just 0.6 degrees in the past century (mostly in the last 30 years), but scientists from Europe, the U.S., and Australia have found serious consequences — […]