Jim Morrison

“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...

"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 ...

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

The paper scrolls, 13 inches wide, stretched to 60 feet long, so Stefan Talke pulled together tables inside the National Archives to unroll the sheets of squiggles tracing the rise and fall of tides dating to before the Civil War. "It was fantastic," he remembers. "I assumed these records were all lost, and here I am with the keys to the palace."
The records are keys not only to understanding the past, but to the future facing cities like Wilmington, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; Jam...

Scientists and engineers are finding practical applications for the Japanese art form in space, medicine, robotics, architecture and more

As flash storms increase in frequency and intensity, the aging infrastructure of American cities—especially older coastal cities like Norfolk—is proving unable to handle the extreme rains.

The question is whether anything can be done.

The “Great Green Wall” Didn't Stop Desertification,...

Can You Put A Price Tag On Nature? Actually, Yes | ...

Seen from a pedestrian footbridge overlooking Myrtle Park — a sliver of land that Norfolk, Virginia is allowing to revert to wetlands — the panorama of surrounding homes illustrates the accelerating sea level rise that has beleaguered this neighborhood along the Lafayette River.

A grey house, among the first raised in the area, is slightly elevated on cinderblocks, standing 2 feet off the ground. Nearby, owners of a white-sided house with black shutters have lifted their dwelling about 4 feet...

June 6
VIRGINIA BEACH — One by one their names were read aloud. But not their formal names; their more familiar names, the ones you use with someone you’ve gotten to know. Bobby. Rich. Missy. Keith. Bert.
Formality wasn’t necessary for a grieving city that has treasured the memories of the 12 people who were killed in a mass shooting at a municipal complex last week.
The thousands at Rock Church stood in silence, listening to the names — with the quiet broken, at the end, by the agonized wail...