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A wildfire inside the confines of a major city is nothing new in the U.S. It’s a little strange , though, when that city isn’t Los Angeles—constantly threatened by the dry Santa Ana winds of autumn—but rather, New York City. Yet early this week a five-alarm brushfire swept through the former Fresh Kills landfill in [...]
Usually when Texas beats Oklahoma it’s something for the Lone Star state to celebrate, like when the Longhorns defeat the Sooners in college football’s storied Red River Rivalry. But not every record is worth holding. This year Texas set a new national record for the hottest months of June through August, besting a record formerly [...]
First Texas was parched—now it’s burning. Still in the grips of its worst drought since the 1950s, Texas is grappling with violent wildfires that have already destroyed more than 1,000 homes and killed two people. While more than 3.6 million acres of Texas have been scorched since the drought tightened last November, over the weekend [...]
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 [...]
As I write this, Somalia is suffering its worst drought in 60 years. The lack of rain—combined with civil unrest and political interference from the al-Qaeda linked al-Shabab group—has produced catastrophic results. Yesterday Nancy Linborg, an official with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), told a Congressional committee that more than 29,000 children under [...]
The word ‘famine’ may be a familiar one, but it is not thrown around lightly by the people who decide when there is one. The fact that most of us today probably associate the term with the 1984 crisis in Ethiopia is testament to its exceedingly careful dispensation; to use it too often would dilute [...]
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, especially when you’re on a magazine deadline and time for blogging is short. What you’re looking at is a massive dust storm—known in Arabic as a haboob—that enveloped much of Phoenix last night. Sand kicked up by strong downdrafts covered parts of the city, producing pictures like [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
