Articles by Grist staff

I Shout, the Shariff

The mayor of Kuala Lumpur, Kamaruzzaman Shariff, announced plans earlier this week to clean up the city by adopting Singapore-style laws to punish litterbugs. He said that contractors in the Malaysian city now pull 44 tons of trash from the city’s rivers every day. Shariff recently visited Singapore and was impressed by the country’s litter-free […]

How Do We Sleep While Our Labs Are Burning?

Federal authorities believe that two fires in the Northwest may have been set early on Monday by environmentalists opposed to genetic engineering. The arson at the University of Washington in Seattle appeared targeted at research to make genetically engineered trees more commercially viable, but authorities said the fire mostly destroyed or damaged work on endangered […]

Linking Logs

Huge Asian timber companies now control 90 percent of the $10 billion tropical timber trade and are posing a new threat to the world’s tropical rainforests, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer in a three-part series. The rainforests cover only 6 percent of the planet, but contain two-thirds of the world’s species. In many countries, such as […]

A Good Yarn

Fairy penguins on the Australian island state of Tasmania are gearing up to survive the winter, as tiny wool jerseys arrive from around the world to help them cope with oil spills. The specially knit outfits stop oil-coated penguins from preening themselves and ingesting the poisonous oil. The Tasmanian Conservation Trust realized it was running […]