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Tim DeChristopher is nothing if not committed. Back in December of 2008, in the waning days of the Bush Administration, then-27 year-old DeChristopher threw a monkey wrench into a planned Bureau of Land Management (BLM) auction of thousands of acres of public territory in Utah for oil and gas exploration. DeChristopher—a college student at the [...]
We often use this little corner of the intertubes to think about how globalization is physically changing the earth – be it via our addiction to air travel or jeans made on the cheap. But we’re not sticklers. Recent research published in the journal Science presents archaeological evidence that might shed new light on exactly [...]
If you watch the Academy Awards show on Sunday evening, you might notice Mark Ruffalo—nominated for Best Supporting Actor—and a number of other celebrities wearing a blue water droplet pin. The pins come from WaterDefense.org, a new campaign that is calling attention to the drinking water supplies that activists say are being threatened by the [...]
Environmentalists: Wake up! There is a greater and more urgent threat to the climate than even global warming: the threat posed by nuclear weapons. Why are nuclear bombs an environmental problem? We have long known that a large-scale nuclear war would lead to a sudden change in climate—called a nuclear winter—that could threaten all life [...]
I’ve written a few times in the past about invasive Asian carp, the Chinese natives who were imported for fish farms in the Midwest, only to escape and make their way up the Mississippi River. They’re now knocking on the door of the Great Lakes, and a few of them may have even slipped past [...]
If you’re a shark, the Pacific Islands are not a bad place to be these days. Yesterday, the Senate of Guam followed Hawaii’s lead and became the third region to move to ban the sale, possession and distribution of shark products in the U.S. territory. Hawaii was the first U.S. state to make the move [...]
Lately, I’ve stopped worrying about climate change. Wait, that’s not quite right. But I only have so much worry bandwidth, and what is keeping me up at night lately is scarcenomoics, the idea that in a finite world, we may be hitting limits on some natural resources. Climate change doesn’t even have to play a [...]
I was traveling yesterday, speaking on a panel about electric cars at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, so I didn’t get a chance to cover yesterday’s news closely. But I wanted to note an alarming report published by the World Resources Institute (WRI) on the risks facing coral reefs. The short version: coral reefs are in [...]
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has—how to put this—not been a friend of environmental legislation or regulation. The Chamber—which represents more than 3 million U.S. businesses—spent millions to lead the successful fight against carbon cap-and-trade legislation, along with health care reform and most of President Obama’s other legislative goals. It remains an implacable opponent of [...]
This week I wrote a piece for the magazine on what many energy analysts believe to be the future of the nuclear industry: small modular reactors. These mini reactors, which generate up to 300 megawatts compared to 1500 megawatts for traditional large nuclear power plants, are all the rage because they are versatile and [...]
