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Microplastics Are Everywhere. What Are They Doing to Our Health?
Microplastics are everywhere. Everyday items like clothing, food packaging, cosmetics and car tires shed tiny particles of plastics, which in turn find their way into blood, baby poop, placentas and breastmilk. According to recent research, plastics are even in the intricate, delicate tissue that makes up our lungs. Research from 2019 suggests that we might breathe inREAD MORE
Cities Are Depaving for a Cooler Future
It all started because a man named Arif Khan wanted a garden. In 2007, he had recently moved into a house in Portland, Ore., whose backyard was covered in asphalt. Some friends helped him tear up the impervious surface, and soon after, they won a small grant to carry out a similar project in front ofREAD MORE
Farmers Are Breeding Heat-Resistant Cows
At Vaqueria El Remanso, a small dairy farm west of San Juan, Puerto Rico, the cows are different — they have a freshly shaven, suave look. Their short hair is the result of a natural mutation known as “slick,” which Rafael López-López, who runs El Remanso, has been breeding into his cows for decades. “In hot,READ MORE
All Talk and —Yes — Action
In 2020, artist Nicole Cooper was conducting research for a painting series when she stumbled upon a NASA chart showing temperature rise throughout history. “I had this realization of, ‘Look at how fast temperatures are rising — and what are we going to do about it?” she said. Cooper experienced what she described as an existentialREAD MORE
Can Art Help Us Grasp the Plastics Crisis?
Duke Riley started out making maritime crafts, like sailor’s valentines and scrimshaws, entirely out of shells, bones and other natural materials that washed ashore on the beaches of Cape Cod, Massachusetts and greater New York. Then, on a walk in 2017, he picked up what he thought was a piece of bone. Upon closer inspection, heREAD MORE
Can the Farm Bill Fix Agriculture’s Methane Problem?
For years, Paul Danbom let good fertilizer go to waste. On his 900-head dairy farm in Turlock, California, he was buying fertilizer for his distant cornfields. Meanwhile, he was paying to dispose of millions of gallons of perfectly good “brown gold” because there was no easy and ecologically friendly way to get it from his cattleREAD MORE
Silvopasture Is an Ancient, Climate-Smart Farming Practice. Can the Farm Bill Help Spur its Renaissance?
On a clear morning in April, after milking his seven cows, Tim Sauder looked over the pasture where he had just turned the animals out to graze. Like many dairy farms, Sauder’s fields swayed with a variety of greenery: chicory, alfalfa and clover. But they were also full of something typically missing on an agricultural landscapeREAD MORE
A Climate-Smart Farm Bill Can Save Lives
In August 2017, as wildfires raged across British Columbia, a blanket of smoke settled over the neighboring state of Washington, turning the sun blood-red and filling the air with grit and ash. At Sarbanand Farms, a blueberry orchard in Sumas, Washington, a 28-year-old seasonal worker named Honesto Silva Ibarra collapsed and later died. His fellow workersREAD MORE
Cities Are Rethinking What Kinds of Trees They’re Planting
After a series of winter storms pummeled California this winter, thousands of trees across the state lost their grip on the earth and crashed down into power lines, homes, and highways. Sacramento alone lost more than 1,000 trees in less than a week. Stressed by years of drought, pests and extreme weather, urban trees are inREAD MORE
Can Kelp Farming Bring Back Shinnecock Bay?
For most of the Shinnecock Nation’s history, the waters off the eastern end of Long Island were a place of abundance. Expert fishermen, whalers and farmers, the Shinnecock people lived for centuries off the clams, striped bass, flounder, bluefish and fruit native to the area. Today, the area is best known as a playground for theREAD MORE
Fast Fashion Is an Environmental Catastrophe. Is Composting Your Clothes the Solution?
When Katie Lopes set out to create a women’s underwear brand, she wanted her products to be comfortable and hip — and eventually disappear into a pile of coffee grounds, eggshells and potato peels in her garden. “I was beginning to become more aware of the damage the fashion industry was doing to the planet, so itREAD MORE
A Stark View of Rising Seas in Georgia
The last few miles of U.S. Route 80 run through a stretch of marshland off the coast of Savannah, Georgia where floods routinely frustrate drivers. The floods weren’t always so frequent or severe, but in the century since Route 80 was designated a federal highway, local sea levels have risen around 9 inches, according to measurementsREAD MORE
Harvesting Gas From Cow Poop Sounds Like a Good Idea. What About the People Who Live Next to the ‘Manure Lagoons’?
On days when the air pollution is especially bad, a mother in Tulare County, California – where cows outnumber people two to one – forbids her children from going outside. The woman, who declined to be named for fear of reprisal from her neighbors in the dairy industry, said that nearly everyone in her family, includingREAD MORE
Teen Scientist Finds Low-Tech Way to Recycle Water
Shreya Ramachandran, 17, remembers witnessing California’s water crisis firsthand on a visit to Tulare County in 2014, when she was still a preteen. Tulare spans a large swath of farmland in California’s Central Valley, and at that time, locals were facing dire water shortages amid an ongoing drought made worse by climate change. “I was talkingREAD MORE
The Decades-Long Struggle to Protect Venice From Worsening Floods
The wind was stirring up the sea around Venice, Italy, threatening a high tide of more than 4 feet. Normally, that would be enough to inundate half the city, leaving tourists to trudge through knee-high floodwater in St. Mark’s Square. But this wasn’t a normal day. On this rainy Saturday in early October, for the firstREAD MORE