By Justine Calma 24 April 2018 (Grist) – Seven months after Juan and Jonathan Leija were forced to evacuate their flooded homes during Hurricane Harvey, the cousins face challenges that go beyond just recovering their lives. Building back isn’t easy for anybody, but the Leijas are doing it as looming policy decisions threaten to uproot […]
By Oliver Milman 22 April 2018 Utqiaġvik, Alaska (The Guardian) – Last July, Nagruk Harcharek was savouring a bucolic visit to a cabin that sits on the lip of the Chipp river, deep in the Alaskan Arctic, when something caught his eye. Shimmering on a rack where he hangs his caught whitefish to dry was, […]
By Gabriel Popkin 24 April 2018 (Nature) – The US government is considering whether to charge for access to two widely used sources of remote-sensing imagery: the Landsat satellites operated by the US Geological Survey (USGS) and an aerial-survey programme run by the Department of Agriculture (USDA).Officials at the Department of the Interior, which oversees […]
12 September 2017 (UNCCD) – There is broad evidence to suggest that direct human alteration of terrestrial ecosystems by hunting, foraging, land clearing, agriculture, and other activities started about 12,000 years ago. Sometimes referred to as the “Neolithic Revolution,” agriculture slowly began to transform societies and the way in which people lived; traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles […]
By Brian Resnick 19 April 2018 (Vox) – The US Senate on Thursday confirmed Jim Bridenstine, a Republican Congress member from Oklahoma, to be the next administrator of NASA. The post has remained vacant since January 2017, when Charles Bolden, the space agency’s leader under President Barack Obama, stepped down. Bridenstine, 42, brings some odd […]
By Arelis R. Hernández 18 April 2018 (The Washington Post) – An island-wide blackout struck Puerto Rico on Wednesday, plunging the U.S. territory of more than 3 million citizens back into darkness more than seven months after Hurricane Maria demolished its fragile power grid.The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority said the blackout, which began about […]
By Bob Henson 9 April 2018 (Weather Underground) – If you love atmospheric extremes, but you hate to see people in harm’s way, you couldn’t ask for a more pleasing event than the phenomenal infusion of moisture into the western U.S. from Friday into Saturday. No deaths or serious injuries were reported from the weekend […]
By Leslie Nemo 13 April 2018 (CityLab) – Every time Kelly Ksiazek-Mikenas scrambled onto a new green roof, it was hard to tell exactly where she was. The city below was definitely Berlin or Neubrandenburg, but the expanse of scraggly greens ahead of her looked a lot like the green roofs in Chicago, her home. […]
By Oliver Milman 7 April 2018 (The Guardian) – The week at the Environmental Protection Agency has been a brutal low point in what many staff members refer to as the most difficult year in its near half-century history. An avalanche of allegations of ethical misconduct by the EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, has heaped embarrassment […]
EUGENE, Oregon, 12 April 2018 (Our Children’s Trust) – During a public case management conference today, U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Coffin set 29 October 2018 as the trial date for Juliana v. United States, the constitutional climate lawsuit brought by 21 young people and supported by Our Children’s Trust. The trial will be heard before […]
