Grist List
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In a world of 7 billion, what does the typical person look like?
Here's a new take on the "new normal." National Geographic has run some calculations on our population averages, now that we're staring 7 billion in the face. The verdict: The most typical human right now is a 28-year-old Han Chinese man — there are over 9,000,000 people in the world fitting that description! — who […]
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Lake Michigan has become unfishable
While lobster fishermen in the Long Island Sound are stubbornly — but just barely — hanging on, people who depended on the fishing stock in the Great Lakes for their livelihood can no longer make it. Lake Michigan is a "liquid desert," reports Dan Egan in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Even the most devoted fishing family Egan can find is sending one of its own up to Alaska, because "he can catch more fish in one day in Alaska than he can catch all winter off Milwaukee."
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Record-breaking electric car gets 1,000 miles to the charge
What's that? Could it be the whip-crack of range anxiety being dragged out back and shot?
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How do you calculate your plastic footprint?
Companies are on board with reporting their carbon usage, but what about the amount of plastic they produce? It's a different sort of problem than carbon emissions, but although the negative impacts of humanity's plastic habit have been known for years, the amount being used is only increasing.
This fall, the Hong Kong-based Ocean Recovery Alliance is moving forward with its Plastic Disclosure Project, which will ask companies to calculate and disclose their "plastic footprints," just as they report their carbon footprints. -
Call to action: Stop the environment
Are you kidding me with this? Two former members of The State AND Deputy Hawk getting all Modest Proposal on climate change? Shut down the internet, please, I want to go out on a high note.
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Critical List: Shell spills oil in the Arctic; the Northwest Passage opens
A Shell oil platform in the Arctic is leaking oil. The company won't say how much but will say that the spill is under control.
The Interior Department is looking into treatment of Arctic scientist Charles Monnett, who is under investigation for his work on polar bears.
Why real world fuel efficiency is so much lower than fuel efficiency standards. -
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How to tell if your city is going places
Here's a handy infographic, from the Project for Public Spaces, to help you distinguish cities that are going places from cities that are going nowhere. What's your retail shopping like? Transportation? Public spaces? (Or publc spaces; even handy infographics sometimes have typos, and this one coulda been a lot worse.)
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Border fence doesn’t stop humans, just endangered species
The 600 or so miles of fence splitting the U.S. from Mexico hasn't stopped immigrants from moving northward, but the fence has kept a few (non-human) endangered species from crossing the border. According to a new study, some species have had their range cut by 75 percent.
But the affected species, which include the Arroyo toad, California red-legged frog, black-spotted newt, and Pacific pond turtle, aren't the type that tend to incite widespread indignation on their behalf — that is, they’re reptiles and amphibians, which usually aren’t considered cute enough to worry about. -
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Add this foldable canoe to your climate change survival plan
Are you concerned about apocalyptic floods? (Uh, you maybe should be.) Alternately, do you like to hike or bike to places that are good for canoeing? OR BOTH? Either in the short term or the long term, you're probably going to want this foldable canoe, which weighs less than nine pounds and folds to fit […]
