Jim Morrison

An exhaustively reported story outlining the need to begin discussing managed retreat from threatened areas including the coasts and inland floodplains.

The city doesn’t use that politically explosive term, the Voldemort of climate adaptation. Planners here and elsewhere refer to it as the “r-word.” They’re happy to talk about the other r-word — resilience, which includes projects like sea walls, retention ponds, rebuilding wetlands and improved storm-water capacity. Retreat signals surrender, while resilience screams reassurance: Don’t worry. Stay. We’ll protect you. That medicine goes down easier. It has been embraced by dozens of cities an...

"There is no other place on Earth like this," Angie Carl says. Her voice carries across the swamp of North Carolina's Black River as we sit floating in kayaks at the knees of our elders, an ancient stand of bald cypress trees.
Following markers of neon-pink ribbons tied to branches, we've paddled to this remote stand to recreate a journey that Carl took eight years ago guiding David W. Stahle, a University of Arkansas scientist. Carl is the fire and coastal restoration manager for The Nature ...

For 10,000 years, the Swinomish tribe has fished the waters of northwestern Washington, relying on the bounty of salmon and shellfish not only as a staple of its diet but as a centerpiece of its culture. At the beginning of the fishing season, the tribe gathers on the beach for a First Salmon ceremony, a feast honoring the return of the migratory fish that binds the generations of a tribe that calls itself the People of the Salmon.
At the ceremony’s conclusion, single salmon are ferried by bo...

The high-altitude tree is vital to its ecosystem, but it’s being decimated by a fungus. Its admirers are fusing old and new methods to bring it back.
Melissa Jenkins usually doesn't take pictures on hikes in Montana's Whitefish Range. Here, the whitebark pine that she works to restore has been so decimated by a fungus that gray skeletal ghost forests reign, haunting symbols of a once widespread species. But last summer, she paused to snap a shot of survivors flanking the trail, ragged but def...

Change
A century ago, a biologist counted California's desert animals. Now researchers are retracing his steps—and the results are surprising.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, biodigesters on livestock farms total 255, up from 24 in 2000, driven by the market for renewable gas, a desire by farmers to diversify and federal tax credits as well as government subsidies in states such as California, which has awarded nearly $320 million in grants and matching funds since 2015.

Why the investment? Poop is a pervasive problem, and a source of methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide.

Virus studies tend to be passive, not proactive. People get tested when they show up for treatment. But that paints only a partial picture of infections, one that misses those who are infected and spreading the disease but don’t go to the doctor.
Jeffrey Shaman of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health wanted to fill in the rest with a radical kind of study, one that tested and tracked seemingly healthy people to see who was unknowingly spreading disease. Beginning in March 201...

“The city can’t pay for it,” says David Levy, a management professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the lead author of a report about financing climate resilience in Boston. “It is beyond the means of Boston, and Boston is a relatively affluent city, let alone the means of the smaller towns up and down the coast.”

The report recommends a multi-pronged approach of federal, state, city, and private financing strategies, including a statewide carbon tax and an increase of the stat...

A six-day journey on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in words and pictures.

From the first embers stirring in China, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been a stealthy wildfire, flaring with deadly efficiency when it happens upon the opportunistic combination of people and place.
In January, after the novel coronavirus had already begun spreading in Wuhan, one patient there infected 14 health care providers. In March, an infected worker at a Korean call center spread the virus to 96 others, including nearly half of those on his floor. In June, a college bar in East Lansing, Mi...

As high-tide flooding worsened in Norfolk, Virginia in recent years, Margaret Mulholland, a biological oceanographer at Old Dominion University, started to think about the debris she saw in the waters that flowed back into Chesapeake Bay. Tipped-over garbage cans. Tossed-away hamburgers. Oil. Dirty diapers. Pet waste.

The volunteers fanned out across cities from Boston to Honolulu this summer, with inexpensive thermal monitors resembling tiny periscopes attached to their vehicles to collect data on street-level temperatures. Signs on their cars announcing “Science Project in Progress” explained their plodding pace — no more than 30 miles-per-hour to capture the dramatic temperature differences from tree-shaded parks to sun-baked parking lots to skyscraper-dominated downtowns.

The work of these citizen scie...

Last summer, Dr. Kevin Olival joined a group of Indonesian hunters as they ventured deep into the mangrove forests of South Sulawesi island. The hunters were looking for roosting bats, mainly fruit bats and flying foxes—for them, a lucrative prize that can be shipped to villages in the north as part of the bushmeat trade. For Olival, the bats were a prize of a different sort.

Olival is a virus hunter. For more than 15 years, the ecologist and evolutionary biologist has scoured the globe.

Standing atop a 10-foot dune at the Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge on Delaware Bay, refuge manager Al Rizzo describes one of the largest and most complex wetlands restoration projects ever mounted, a $38 million attempt to return 4,000 acres back to what nature intended.
Contractors hired by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service dredged more than 1 million cubic yards of sand from Delaware Bay to create 2 miles of beach and barrier dune that had been washed away by a series of storms beginn...