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Wildfire smoke is an emerging nationwide crisis for the United States. Supercharged by climate change, blazes are swelling into monsters that consume vast landscapes and entire towns. A growing body of evidence reveals that these conflagrations are killing far more people than previously known, as smoke travels hundreds or even thousands of miles, aggravating conditions like asthma and heart disease. One study, for instance, estimated that January’s infernos in Los Angeles didn’t kill 30 people, as the official tally reckons, but 440 or more once you factor in the smoke. Another recent study estimated that wildfire haze already kills 40,000 Americans a year, which could increase to 71,000 by 2050.

I’m eating Dawn the Yorkshire pig and she’s quite tasty. But don’t worry. She’s doing perfectly fine, traipsing around a sanctuary in upstate New York. (Word is that she appreciates belly rubs and sunshine.) I’m in San Francisco, at an Italian joint just south of Golden Gate Park, enjoying meatballs and bacon not made of meat in the traditional sense but of plants mixed with “cultivated” pork fat. Dawn, you see, donated a small sample of fat, which a company called Mission Barns got to proliferate in devices called bioreactors by providing nutrients like carbohydrates, amino acids, and vitamins — essentially replicating the conditions in her body. Because so much of the flavor of pork and other meats comes from the animal’s fat, Mission Barns can create products like sausages and salami with plants but make them taste darn near like sausages and salami.

The Atacama desert in Chile is one of the most beautiful and forbidding places on Earth, so dry that it’s sometimes used by scientists to test run Mars missions. Most years the area sees less than half a centimeter of rain, but this past September unusually heavy precipitation brought forth a desert bloom, blanketing the ground with delicate purple flowers that disappeared as quickly as they’d appeared.

Migrant workers return from Gulf countries with failed kidneys, victims of extreme temperatures, grueling labor, and a global system that leaves them unprotected.

Tehran is running out of water.

On November 1, when the Trump administration announced it would not disburse benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, due to the ongoing government shutdown, tribal governments began to scramble. Approximately 25 percent of Indigenous households are considered food insecure and rely on SNAP as well as the Federal Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, or FDPIR, a monthly food package program.

(…) a group of 160 scientists from 23 countries announced that the planet has already reached its first major tipping point: the widespread death of warm-water coral reefs. That’s due primarily to rapidly rising marine temperatures — the seas have absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat we’ve created — but also the acidification that comes from more atmospheric CO2 interacting with water. (This interferes with corals’ ability to build the protective skeletons that form the complex structure of a reef.) Since the late 1980s, ocean surface warming has quadrupled. Accordingly, in the last half century, half of the world’s live coral cover has disappeared.

A white-headed woodpecker stirs the dawn quiet, hammering at a patch of charred bark stretching 15 feet up the trunk of a ponderosa pine. The first streaks of sun light the tree’s green crown, sending beams across this grove of healthy conifers. The marks of the 2021 Dixie Fire are everywhere. Several blackened trees lie toppled among the pale blossoms of deer brush and the spikes of snow plants, their crimson faded to dusky coral.

It may sound drastic to physically manipulate entire biomes rather than, say, stop extracting fossil fuels, but in recent years, these kinds of ideas have grown more prevalent. Other so-called “climate solutions” have envisioned removing carbon from the atmosphere by planting 1 trillion trees (which would have uncertain climate benefits and require an unrealistic amount of space), cultivating carbon-munching bacteria, or “managing” global sea level rise by building giant underwater curtains. At least one scientist has put forward the idea that we “manipulate the orbit of asteroids,” hitching them to the Earth to nudge the planet to a cooler zone farther away from the sun, despite the risk that this would eject us from the sun’s orbit.

In the lush highlands of northern Nicaragua, nestled between two natural reserves, La Cumplida isn’t your average coffee farm. Over two decades, massive reforestation and innovative agriculture practices have allowed it to transform the region, showing how a different approach to coffee farming can help restore ecosystems and shore up rural livelihoods.

Utah laws cap wildfire damages and let utilities pass the cost onto customers. Utility lobbyists are pushing the model in other states.

In an emergency directive issued late last week, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced her department’s plan to expand logging and timber production by 25 percent and, in the process, dismantle the half-century-old environmental review system that has blocked the federal government from finalizing major decisions concerning national forest lands without public insight.

In the wake of Maria, many residents of Puerto Rico, especially those working to improve the archipelago’s local food system, began to think about hurricane preparedness differently. Because they weren’t able to rely on federal assistance, they decided to build their own prototypes of resilience, which didn’t just set them up to be ready for the next storm, but also set them up to live better everyday lives.

Mycorrhizal fungi help plants thrive, and sequester a lot of carbon. But a new atlas shows these climate warriors need urgent protection.

Walk outside into 100-degree heat wearing a black shirt, and you’ll feel a whole lot hotter than if you were wearing white. Now think about your roof: If it’s also dark, it’s soaking up more of the sun’s energy and radiating that heat indoors. If it were a lighter color, it’d be like your home was wearing a giant white shirt all the time.

From packing an emergency kit to navigating FEMA aid to finding legal services and mental health resources, this is a comprehensive guide to surviving and coping with natural disasters.

A new study models how harvests in the U.S. Corn Belt — the swath of Midwestern states including Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa that produce the vast majority of the nation’s corn — could fluctuate over the next few decades under a warming scenario projected by United Nations climate scientists. The researchers compared these results to a scenario with no warming, in which tomorrow’s growing conditions are the same as today’s. They found that, as temperatures continue to rise, the nation’s corn growers are likely to see more years with lower yields — and the losses they incur during those years will also be greater.

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump doubled down on his long-standing complaint about low-flow showerheads taking too long to clean his “beautiful hair.” He ordered his administration to repeal a rule, revived by the Biden administration, that aimed to save water by restricting flow from the fixtures. A White House fact sheet promised the order would undo “the left’s war on water pressure” and “make America’s showers great again.”

Sometimes, Josh Tetrick will quiz strangers in the dairy aisle. He’ll strike up a conversation with a fellow grocery store patron and ask if they’ve heard about “this egg that’s made from plants?” He might point out the golden-yellow boxes shaped like milk cartons sitting on refrigerated shelves, not too far from the egg cartons. Generally, he finds that people don’t know what he’s talking about. “Most people will be like, ‘What?’”

Rice feeds more than half of the world’s population. Climate change is loading the beloved grain with arsenic, creating a “scary” health burden.

In the summer of 2023, a dozen people willingly walked into a steel chamber at the University of Ottawa designed to test the limits of human survival. Outfitted with heart rate monitors and temperature probes, they waited in temperatures of 42 degrees Celsius, or 107 degrees Fahrenheit, while the humidity steadily climbed, coating their bodies in sweat and condensation. After several hours, their internal body temperatures began ratcheting upward, as the heat cooked them from the outside in.

Property owners and landlords in New York City can now be fined $25 or more if residents are found throwing a banana peel in the trash. As of April 1, all New Yorkers must separate organic waste from the rest of their trash, similar to how metal, glass, paper, and plastic is set aside for recycling.

Thorn forest once blanketed the Rio Grande Valley. Restoring even a little of it could help the region cope with the impacts of climate change

Thorn forest once blanketed the Rio Grande Valley. Restoring even a little of it could help the region cope with the impacts of climate change

In response to increasingly dangerous wildfires in the Western United States, Washington State’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has pioneered an “all hands, all lands” wildfire prevention strategy. Launched in 2017, the 20-year forest health strategic plan focuses on restoring forests, fostering community fire resilience, and bolstering firefighting resources. By using forest science and fire risk modeling, the DNR assesses and treats high-risk areas through thinning and prescribed burns, and creates fire breaks. This program is funded by a 2021 state bill that earmarked $125 million per biennium for wildfire mitigation.

Mentioned in the article is a stunt by Beyond Plastics whereby they put GPS trackers in plastic Starbucks cups to see how many actually went to recycling centers. 32 out of 36 went straight to landfill.

Hey everyone!

Two congressional reports make clear that, with increasingly frequent hurricanes, floods, and fires, “the model of insurance as it stands right now isn’t working.”

The result has been not adaptation, but an exodus. Most pastoralists Rabari knows, particularly younger generations, are leaving the trade, seeking employment instead as drivers or cleaners in Ahmedabad. Rabari, who organizes for women pastoralists through the Maldhari Mahila Sangathan, or the Pastoral Women Alliance, says women are most often the ones left behind to tend to the herds.

Cleaning up contaminated land is a struggle. Meet some of the community leaders who are taking matters into their own hands.

Ysolt awakes after a freak storm to find herself at the bottom of a ravine in the broken remains of the nomadic home that was supposed to protect her.

As municipalities contract with large waste haulers to comply with a California composting law, local composters say they’re being driven out of business.

Thirty-one years after its publication, Parable of the Sower continues to compel and unsettle many readers. Much of the book is harrowing. The violence begins just a few chapters in, when an elderly woman in Lauren’s walled-off urban village kills herself in the emotional aftermath of losing her entire family to a house fire just weeks after she was robbed and raped, and it refuses to relent for the next 300 pages. At least a dozen people have told me how they struggled to make it through the novel and its sequel, Parable of the Talents, because of the brutality that Lauren witnesses and endures (something I struggled to believe as someone obsessed with the books — even before Parable of the Sower became a New York Times bestseller for the first time in 2020).

‘Reef stars’ restored Indonesia’s blast-damaged corals in just 4 years

On a Saturday in February, high school senior Kaylee Lemmien sifted through racks of dresses at Tinker Tailor, a small shop in downtown Elk Rapids, a village of about 1,500 people in northern Michigan.

“The age of plastic began because it mimicked other things, and the functionality was so good that it became its own thing,” fashion designer Uyen Tran told Grist, when we interviewed her for our 2023 Grist 50 list. In 2020, Tran founded a company called TômTex to create bio-based materials that can replace synthetic fabrics as well as leather and suede. She believes that a wave of new materials is ready to outcompete plastic-based textiles. “I think biomaterial is on the edge of becoming its own thing as well. Just give us a few more years, and you will see.”

Grist’s Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors short story contest celebrates stories that offer vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress. From 1,000 submissions, our reviewers and judges selected the three winners and nine finalists you will discover in this collection. These stories are not afraid to explore the challenges ahead, but offer hope that we can work together to build a more sustainable and just world. Through rich characters, lovingly sketched settings, and gripping plots, they welcome you into futures that celebrate who we are and what we can become — and, we hope, inspire you to work toward them.

“In a letter sent to New York Governor Kathy Hochul in December, People for Bikes asked that e-bikes be excluded from the state’s forthcoming digital right-to-repair law… The letter cited ‘an unfortunate increase in fires, injuries and deaths attributable to personal e-mobility devices’ including e-bikes. Many of these fires, People for Bikes claimed in the letter, ‘appear to be caused by consumers and others attempting to service these devices themselves,’ including tinkering with the batteries at home. Before Hochul signed the right-to-repair bill, it was revised to exempt e-bikes.

1 in 20 Americans have the “forever chemicals” in their drinking water. The new, $10.3-billion deal will kickstart the clean-up process.