Articles by Grist staff

North Duck-ota

Farmers in several North Dakota counties have stopped plowing under one-fourth of their cropland in exchange for dependable annual payments under the conservation reserve program. Farmer Patty Hofmann said, “Cropping wheat is just very risky and expensive, and we would have lost our farm if we hadn’t signed up for the conservation program.” How well […]

Paris-stroika

In his quest to make Paris greener, the city’s new Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, wants to add more than 25 miles of bus lanes and discourage more cars from coming into the city. “Today, private motorists, who make up a quarter of road users, use up 94 percent of Paris’s road surfaces. I have a […]

Label-minded

The Bush administration is pressuring the European Union to drop new restrictions on genetically engineered foods. Last month, the European Commission gave preliminary approval to require labeling on most biotech foods. Administration officials say the rules would discriminate against U.S. products and violate World Trade Organization requirements. They say that the rules could cost U.S. […]

In the Drink

The gasoline additive MTBE, a known carcinogen, has already leaked into 48 public wells that provide water to hundreds of thousands of Californians, according to a San Francisco Chronicle analysis of state data. The additive is leaking from 1,189 underground storage tanks within 1,000 feet of public wells or drinking water aquifers, threatening the water […]