Articles by Grist staff

Leaf Me Alone

Reacting to mounting consumer unease about genetically modified (GM) foods, McDonald’s and other fast-food chains are quietly telling their french-fry suppliers to stop using Monsanto’s GM “New Leaf” potato, which has been designed to produce a toxin that repels a potato pest. Many farmers are finding that the market for the GM potatoes is shrinking […]

Fly in the Ointment

Friends of the Earth UK is urging vacationers to travel closer to home and to take trains rather than planes. A planeload of passengers flying from Britain to Florida and back produces as much carbon dioxide as does the average British driver in one year. The world’s 16,000 jet airplanes pump out more than 600 […]

That's Not Cool

Four dams on the lower Snake River in Washington state harm water quality and threaten endangered salmon, and breaching the dams may be the best way to comply with the Clean Water Act, the U.S. EPA told the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last week. In a letter to the Corps, the EPA called the […]

Banging Their Erasers

Contractors that operate U.S. government uranium processing plants in Kentucky and Ohio erased hundreds of environmental and safety problems from computer records in 1993 without government approval, according to court documents and other papers obtained by the Louisville Courier-Journal. After a three-year investigation that ended in 1996, the Department of Energy reconstructed the erased items […]