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From TIME’s Allison Berry: The tiny Pacific nation of Tuvalu has declared a state of emergency because it has only several days’ worth of fresh water remaining, after being ravaged by an extended drought. Neighboring New Zealand and Australia have stepped in and offered to provide desalination equipment, which would keep the islands from running [...]
I have a piece in the dead-tree TIME this week on the months-long drought in the South—subscribers of the print and digital versions of TIME can access it here. (And the rest of you can go buy a magazine—or at least an iPad app.) The photos that went along with the piece—by the photographer George [...]
As I wrote in this week’s Going Green column, the American South is gripped by a terrible dry spell, one lasting for months. In Texas alone, 99.93% of the country is in some state of drought. These are extreme times—and they call for extreme measures. Like drinking urine—sort of. In a sense, that’s what one [...]
Credibility is a precious thing. Oil giant ExxonMobil did not have much to begin with, but it went even deeper into its scarce reserves in the past few days when a company pipeline spilled oil into a river that runs past the homes of about 6,500 people. Wednesday brought another blow: it turns out ExxonMobil needed almost [...]
Amid the fireworks, parades, and hot dogs of this past Fourth of July weekend was that sinking feeling of déjà vu when news broke that yet another oil spill was oozing across once-clean waters. This time, it wasn’t the Gulf of Mexico, it was Montana; and it wasn’t BP, it was ExxonMobil. On Friday, 1,000 barrels [...]
Back in the day, before Al Gore informed us about a certain inconvenient truth, before we started to calculate our commutes in carbon, and before people in the South Pacific had to start heading for higher land, there were beach clean ups. People walked along the sand — maybe sometimes only on Earth Day, like [...]
The effects of this spring’s extreme flooding of the Mississippi River have been – pardon the pun – spilling over into every possible corner of the area’s residential, commercial, and agricultural life over the last two months. And it looks like the environment hasn’t escaped either: researchers from the University of Michigan predict that the [...]
The fleeting moments that Somalia still gets in the international press these days mostly revolve around pirates, and understandably so. Piracy, though it no longer dominates headlines, is still a tremendous problem both inside Somalia and for the crews and owners of ships that must make the trip through the Indian Ocean to get from [...]
In the middle of the night on Tuesday, in a hotly contested move, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blasted open a two-mile long hole in a levee along the Mississippi River, sending the rain-swollen waterway gushing over 100,000 acres of Missouri farmland. The flooded area – sparsely populated but fertile farmland – has long [...]
