By Melissa Denchak Most people don’t move to New York City and become farmers. Sheryll Durrant certainly wasn’t planning to when she left Jamaica for Manhattan in 1989. She got her undergraduate degree in business from the City University of New York’s Baruch College and spent the next 20 years in marketing. Then, when the […]
In one of his first major decisions as U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, Scott Pruitt sided with the pesticide lobby over scientists Wednesday in an eleventh-hour decision to abort the agency’s proposal to ban chlorpyrifos—an insecticide that at small doses can harm children’s brains and nervous systems—from use on food crops. Pruitt and the […]
By Franz Matzner Twenty eight years ago today the world experienced a massive wake-up call on the hazards and harms of oil spills when the Exxon Valdez oil tanker split open and poured oil into Alaskan waters. At the time, images of oil coated wildlife and a devastated ecosystem in one of the world’s most […]
By Daniel Raichel There are times—even today—when law and science triumph over politics. Hard to believe, I know, but that’s exactly what happened this week when the Trump administration backed away from its “freeze” on listing the rusty patched bumble bee as an endangered species. The rusty patched bumble bee is the first bumble bee […]
By Zak Smith There are only about 30 vaquita porpoises left in the world. The smallest and most endangered cetacean species on the planet faces extinction in three years if the people with the power to save it don’t take immediate action. Instead of shrugging their shoulders and casting blame elsewhere, the Mexican government, Mexican […]
For more than three months, an underwater pipeline has been spewing hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of processed natural gas per day in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, possibly threatening critically endangered beluga whales, fish and other wildlife. The 8-inch pipeline, owned and operated by Hilcorp Alaska, is leaking more than 210,000 cubic feet of gas […]
By Jenny Shalant Last fall, a whale made a go of Manhattan. The humpback, eventually named Gotham, chased schools of herring from New York Bay into the Hudson River, as delighted onlookers snapped photos of its tail flukes framed by the city skyline. For a couple of weeks, the whale rose to social media stardom; […]
By Joshua Axelrod When he turned the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from dead and gone into a reawakened zombie, President Trump claimed that his doing so would mean new construction jobs, steel manufacturing jobs and money for the U.S. https://twitter.com/EcoWatch/status/824592790155907073 expand=1] Before he was elected, he used the pipeline to show how he […]
By Jason Bittel In Disney’s latest animated release, titular character Moana and a demigod named Maui dive to the bottom of the ocean to do battle with a giant, David Bowie–channeling crab in a place called the Realm of Monsters. But it’s not just for kicks and a catchy dance number, of course. Maui has […]