Articles by Grist staff

New Canaan

By wedding commerce to conservation, a pending land deal in West Virginia’s Canaan Valley could signal a radical shift in land preservation strategy. Allegheny Energy, Inc., plans to sell 12,000 acres to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which will incorporate the land into the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge. The twist? Allegheny had the […]

Mess Transit

As perhaps the most famous national park in the United States, the Grand Canyon occupies an equally vast space in our national psyche as in our national landscape. Unfortunately, it is also our national bottleneck. Each year, 5 million people flock to the park, leaving 6,000 cars to battle for 2,400 parking spaces every day […]

Famous-er Potatoes

Organic foods, long associated with the crunchy West Coast and the yuppie East, have made dramatic inroads into more conservative places — so dramatic, in fact, that Idaho, home to many rabid anti-enviros, has become one of the top five states in the nation for total organic acreage. Part of the new popularity of organics […]

Shanty Shanty Shanty

Despite its terrible environmental rap, Mexico City remains one of the greenest cities in the world, with more than half the city’s acreage designated as open space and fully 25 percent blanketed with forest. Unfortunately, all that is being threatened by the city’s uncontrolled urban sprawl, most of it in the form of creeping shantytowns […]