Articles by Grist staff

Wild Horseshoe Crabs Couldn't Drive Virginia Away

In an effort to restore the devastated population of horseshoe crabs, the U.S. announced plans yesterday to create a 1,800-square-mile sanctuary stretching from Delaware Bay into the Atlantic where catching the crabs will be prohibited. U.S. Commerce Secretary Norman Mineta also threatened to shut down Virginia’s horseshoe crab fishing industry unless the state reduces its […]

Democrats to See L.A. Skyline

As Los Angeles prepares to host the Democratic National Convention next week, local officials are talking up the city’s improved air quality. Since 1960, the last year the city hosted the DNC, the region has reduced its peak ozone levels by 68 percent. There were no smog alerts in the city last year and there […]

Horns Aplenty?

The endangered African rhinoceros seems to be making a comeback, with numbers now higher than at any time since the early to mid-1980s, according to a new report by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and World Wildlife Fund. The IUCN estimates that there were some 13,000 African rhinos in the wild in 1999, compared to […]

We're Not Out of the Woods Yet

The global rate of deforestation seems to be slowing, according to a preliminary study by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In some regions, most notably the tropics, destruction of forests declined by as much as 10 percent from the 1980s to the 1990s. Major causes of forest loss include large development projects that […]