Jim Morrison

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...

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

"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 ...

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.

During a Great Depression radio address from Glacier National Park, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared, "there is nothing so American as our national parks." Amid another national reckoning, it's natural for today’s Americans to turn to the parks for a respite from the restrictions of pandemic life.
But the promise of wide-open spaces comes with a set of complications, especially with crowds gathering at popular viewpoints, cultural sites and trails. As parks across the country bega...

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...

Climate Solutions
UBQ says it has succeeded where others have failed, creating a radical technology that transforms garbage into the raw materials for plastics manufacturers and earns them a profit in the end.

Keevil’s work is a modern confirmation of an ancient remedy. For thousands of years, long before they knew about germs or viruses, people have known of copper’s disinfectant powers. "Copper is truly a gift from Mother Nature in that the human race has been using it for over eight millennia," says Michael G. Schmidt, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the Medical University of South Carolina who researches copper in healthcare settings.

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.

For the Dutch, consulting with cities about their response to relative sea-level rise has become a growth industry. They're the Silicon Valley of water management, a laboratory testing strategies that have evolved over the centuries. No wonder. Water has been both a daily threat and a national identity for a country about the size of Maryland.

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...

Over much of the Earth, most glaciers move, well, glacially. In Svalbard, some of them surge. They’re the Speed Racers of glaciers.