Articles by Grist staff

Any Way You Slice It, This Sucks

Someone recently used a chainsaw to slice into Luna, the 1,000-year-old redwood made famous by Julia "Butterfly" Hill. Hill lived in the tree in Northern California for two years to protest old-growth logging, and only came down from her perch last December after striking a deal with Pacific Lumber Co. to spare the tree and […]

Close Line

A cold snap and resulting power-line failures forced the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine to shut down yesterday, three weeks before it is due to be closed for good. While there were no reported radiation leaks, operators are considering simply keeping the plant turned off from here on out, rather than powering it up […]

To Drink Perchlorate Is Human

In what may be the first large-scale study to use volunteers to test the effect of a water pollutant on humans, the aerospace behemoth Lockheed Martin is funding research in which 100 people are paid $1,000 each to take a pill containing the industrial chemical perchlorate every day for six months. The study, conducted by […]

I'm Going to Pop You One

More than 120 countries are slated to meet in December in South Africa for a final meeting to draft a global treaty restricting the production of 12 persistent organic pollutants (POPs). At high doses, POPs — which include pesticides, many industrial pollutants, and PCBs — are deadly toxic, and at low exposures, they have caused […]