Articles by Grist staff

Some Say the World Will End in Fire …

With fires whipping across the interior West at a record rate this year, the U.S. Forest Service this week is proposing to Congress a $12 billion plan to use controlled burns and extensive tree thinning to remove thick, fire-prone underbrush out of 40 million acres of forest from Montana to California. The fire prevention effort […]

Rice and Shine

Farmers may be able to significantly reduce or even eliminate their use of pesticides by planting different strains of rice, wheat, or other crops in the same field, according to a study published in the latest issue of the journal Nature. Researchers studied farms in China’s Yunnan Province where a variety of rice strains were […]

… Some Say in Ice

U.S. scientists have found evidence that the Arctic has rapidly warmed over the past 40 years, a trend in keeping with predictions from climate change models. Snow cover in the Arctic has dropped by about 10 percent since 1972 and sea ice has also been in decline, dropping to record lows in the western Arctic […]

A Great Bear Rainforest By Any Other Name

The Great Bear Rainforest, the region of British Columbia between the northern end of Vancouver Island and the Alaska Panhandle, doesn’t actually exist on the map. International environmental groups came up with the name in the mid-1990s as they campaigned for a boycott on old-growth lumber products from the region, and the name struck a […]