As Bloomberg reported in May, New York, California, Sweden, and the Netherlands are developing legislation similar to Chile’s extended producer responsibility law that went into effect this year, mandating that the fashion industry fund recycling programs via tariffs calibrated to the quantity of garments produced. In order to help New York City uphold its existing … Read more
“I remember taking so many tours out there,” said Rentner, “and all the public funding agency partners would go, ‘OK, so you have a million dollars in hand, and you still need how many? How are you going to get there?’” “I don’t know,” Rentner told them in response. “We’re just gonna keep writing proposals, … Read more
This story originally appeared on High Country News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Perhaps no single Christmas custom is more ubiquitous than putting up the Christmas tree. It originated in eastern Europe more than 500 years ago, when people decorated evergreen trees with roses or apples as symbols of Eve and the … Read more
Cookbook authors have a few options. They could write a regionally specific cookbook or a mass-market one starring ingredients that grow sustainably in lots of places (as One did). Or they could write a cookbook that samples vast biodiversity at some cost to sourceability—that’s the approach the UN cookbook took. “There are many cookbooks that … Read more
According to Blom, whose group favors thinning dense stands of young trees and reducing accumulations of vegetation and woody debris from the forest floor through prescribed burns or mechanical methods, there are about 26,000 acres of land to be cleared in all 80 sequoia groves on federal land, with some 8,000 acres already treated. On … Read more
This story originally appeared in Hakai and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Arah Narida leans over a microscope to gaze into a plastic petri dish containing a hood coral. The animal—a pebbled blue-white disk roughly half the size of a pencil eraser—is a marvel. Just three weeks ago, the coral was smaller than … Read more
Today, however, four of those fish—the humpback chub, the Colorado pikeminnow, the razorback sucker, and the bonytail—are federally listed as threatened or endangered. Lake Powell commandeered the Colorado’s payloads of silt and stymied natural floods, erasing channels and backwaters where chubs and suckers once spawned and reared. And smallmouth bass and other invasive species devastated … Read more
This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Avian flu has reached the Antarctic, raising concerns for isolated populations of penguins and seals that have never been exposed to the deadly H5N1 virus before. The full impact of the virus’s arrival is not yet known, but scientists are … Read more
Southern Europe is not so different. Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal never had collective farms, but the inexorable aging of their populations and the exodus of young people to cities is emptying villages and leaving fields and pastures untended. Francesco Cherubini of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology calculates that in the past three … Read more
Suddenly, Franks realized she had another meeting to get to, and here she was in a room full of free-ranging rats. She couldn’t just open the door and leave—rats would surely escape. But catching each rat and putting it back into the hutch would take forever. “I think, you know, we should probably get them … Read more