health
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Study details health risks from TVA’s spilled coal ash
Exposure to dust and river sediment in the area of the massive coal ash spill from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston power plant could present a health risk to local communities. That’s the finding of a study published this month in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. It’s the first peer-reviewed, double-blind research paper to […]
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EPA fails to inform public about weed-killer in drinking water
This story was written by Danielle Ivory. One of the nation’s most widely used herbicides has been found to exceed federal safety limits in drinking water in four states, but water customers have not been told and the Environmental Protection Agency has not published the results. Records that tracked the amount of the weed-killer atrazine […]
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Sustainable ag meets the MSM — and wins!
TIME Magazine‘s current cover story wants you to know that our fossil-fueled, chemically intensive industrial food system is destined to fail. Granted, the second part of that sentence isn’t news to Grist readers. But the first part of that sentence is news. Personally, I wouldn’t have expected to read the following positively Philpottian (if not […]
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Obama wants to set up White House farmers market
Michelle Obama working with local students in the White House garden.Photo: The Official White House PhotostreamPresident Obama said on Thursday that he and the First Lady are looking into setting up a farmers market just outside the White House, which might sell food from the White House garden or from local farmers. The president said […]
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Hotter summers will pose public health challenges
In the dog days of August, you can be forgiven for not wanting to think about how it could get hotter, much hotter, in summers to come. Nevertheless, Climate Central, a nonprofit focused on communicating climate science, released a study today forecasting what summers might look like in 21 American cities in 2050. Climate Central’s […]
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Global warming set to intensify August heat, Climate Central study finds
Climate Central’s analysis found that New York City will see a three-fold increase in the number of 90-degree-plus days in August by midcentury.Photo illustration by Tom Twigg / Grist By some measures, the Chicago and New York of tomorrow are likely to be hotter than the Atlanta of today — at least in August. Climate […]
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We are all from Wise County
Want to get really angry about health care and global warming? Not the ginned-up rage of the Obama-was-really-born-in-Kenya crowd, but an anger that fires you up to take action in the name of justice? Anger like the rage felt by so many white Northerners and Southerners in 1963 when they saw Birmingham’s fire hoses turned […]
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The obvious advantage of organic food over conventional
A bit of nitrogen with those veggies? A recent literature review [PDF] by the U.K. Food Standards Agency concluded that organic foods offer no nutritional advantages to ones grown with conventional chemical agriculture. The report quickly bounced around the media and the internets and has congealed into received wisdom. For example, in a recent chat […]
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‘Tapped’ documentary pulls plug on bottled water craze
Only about a fifth of the plastic water bottles purchased in the United States are recycled.Courtesy producers of TAPPED.Tapped, a new documentary about the bottled water industry from director Stephanie Soechtig and the producers of Who Killed the Electric Car?, is a pretty damning look at how consumers have been tricked into spending too much […]
