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Articles by Jess Zimmerman

Jess Zimmerman was the editor of Grist List.

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  • The world’s tallest treehouse

    The Minister's House in Crossville, Tenn., is 10 STORIES HIGH, over 97 feet tall, and supported by six full-grown oak trees. If you're a total purist about your treehouses and believe they need to be entirely off the ground and supported only by limbs, then this doesn't qualify, but screw you because it's awesome. 

  • Photos: What America looked like before the EPA

    In 1972, the year-old EPA had photographers traverse the country to document the (often dire) state of the environment. This project, Documerica, was "the visual echo of the mission of the EPA," according to one photographer. Now, 40 years later, archive specialist Jerry Simmons has unearthed the photos and put them online at the National Archives website and on Flickr. It's a time capsule of life before the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

  • Goths are the darkest treehuggers ever

    Goths have been communing with nature since way before all you hippies. They commune with nature in much the same way as they commune with gravestones, i.e. by draping themselves over it in corsets and taking pictures. Maybe I just love the Goths Up Trees Tumblr because I've committed a goth-in-a-tree photo or two in my time, but also it's hilarious.

  • Newt Gingrich, ‘amateur paleontologist,’ knows science better than you

    Sure, there's overwhelming consensus among climate scientists (and scientists in a host of other fields) that climate change is for realsies. These are people with doctoral degrees, decades of experience, high-end instrumentation, and mountains of data -- but are any of them amateur paleontologists? Newt Gingrich is, and that means he knows they're wrong, and so there.