At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
For just one mournful yet brilliant day — the first day of October 2025, the day Jane Goodall died — the deepening menace of our era was eased by the shining example of her life. People around the world took time to simultaneously grieve her passing and exult in her enduring achievements as scientist, conservationist, and protector of wildlife. For once, there was no dissent. Jane Goodall fully merited the public’s laurels. She spent many …
Say this much, President Trump’s vow to “go as far as we have to” to control Greenland is pernicious, consistent, and ironic. Though he’s obscured his reasons for bringing the world’s largest island under American management, Trump’s aides and geopolitical experts offer three justifications. The first: gaining access to critical minerals, even those for batteries to power the electric vehicles that Trump purportedly dislikes. The second: securing a larger military perch at the top of …
LAKE CITY, MI – Two facts about Michigan agriculture are scarcely recognized outside the fences and beyond the drainage ditches of the state’s 45,000 farms. The first: farming is among the most technologically sophisticated industrial sectors in Michigan and every other state. Second: livestock farms are the state’s largest source of water pollution from toxic nitrates and phosphorus, and air pollution from methane, a powerful climate change gas. Here on Michigan State University’s 1,100-acre livestock …
With the exception of federal and state programs to convert corn into ethanol and soybeans into biodiesel to fuel cars and trucks the United States has never regarded farming as a primary energy producer. That changed when Congress passed the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act last August. The law provides $140 billion in tax incentives, direct loans, and grants to replace fossil fuels with cleaner renewable energy that lowers emissions of carbon dioxide. …
Earlier this year I was awarded an investigative fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation to pursue the causes and serious consequences of farm-related nutrient pollution in the nine-state Corn Belt at the center of the country. The project, undertaken with the collaboration of Circle of Blue, The New Lede, and The Guardian, builds on what I learned in 2022 reporting for Circle of Blue on phosphorus contamination for “Danger Looms Where Algae Blooms.” When I …
More than 30 years ago James E. Hansen, the eminent American physicist, told a U.S. Senate hearing in the hot and dry summer of 1988 that the Earth was warmer than it had ever been since the invention of modern instrumentation, and that “with 99 percent confidence†the cause was human-induced global warming. As a moment in contemporary American environmental history, Hansen’s appearance before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources ranks with the …
Due to the first-ever formal federal water shortage declaration issued in August 2021, Colorado River deliveries to Arizona this year are cut more severely than in any state. Arizona will lose 170 billion gallons. That’s a third of the water that is transported each year in the Central Arizona Project, and 8% of the state’s annual water consumption. More losses are projected. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation warns that Colorado River flows will continue to drop. …
AUDUBON, N.J. — On March 31, you probably heard, President Joe Biden introduced a $2.2 trillion proposal to repair and modernize America’s transportation system, invest in research and technology, and expand the industrial sectors that are curbing climate change. By themselves, those provisions make Biden’s American Jobs Plan a great leap forward in how the White House regards its responsibilities to nature, and to the nation. Biden’s impressive plan, though, is considerably more expansive and …
TRAVERSE CITY, MI –Intrigued by warming winters, researchers from the University of Michigan set out in 1989 to formally measure changes in the geographical distribution of plants and animals in the dense pine and hardwood forests of northern Michigan. Their laboratory, the university’s 10,000-acre Biological Station east of Petoskey, had advanced forestry and natural sciences since the field station’s founding in 1909. Few projects, though, attracted the same level of attention as the migration research. Completed in …
By Saturday, as the deep freeze lifted and temperatures across Texas warmed to near normal for this time of year, water poured from broken lines beneath streets. Fountains of water sprayed from valves and cracks in building exteriors. Indoor waterfalls spilled from caved-in ceilings in schools and homes and hospitals. Homeowners gathered up the last remnants of melting snow and stored them in buckets and bathtubs. “Where do you want to start?†said Ty Edwards, …
