stillness is a lie, my dear
Racism plays out in many complicated ways for people of colour in the environmental movement — in addition to the structural inequalities that degrade the environment in their communities, the movement itself continues to struggle with racialised problems.
Burial and cremation are old news: Find a more ecologically-friendly way to dispose of your carcass, and consider doing something nice for the planet while you’re at it.
It’s common to lease out rights to exploit natural resources on public lands, and while the government claims to balance competing uses in national parks, wildlife refuges, and other protected areas, should it be acceptable to use resources that are arguably part of the public commons?
In the popular imagination of the rest of the country, California is blue skies, toasty temperatures, palm trees, the Golden Gate Bridge, Hollywood, and earthquakes. While the state hasn’t actually had a serious quake in a while, we have enough minor ones to hit the news occasionally, and big events like Northridge stuck stayed in […]
Two years ago—on 24 April, 2014—the city of Flint, Michigan, made a calculated decision, switching from nearby Detroit’s water system to the Flint River as the primary water source for its residents. The choice was motivated purely by cost. Almost immediately, residents began complaining that the water was discoloured, malodorous, and unpleasant to drink. Flint’s […]
Beaches around the world are in a steady state of erosion, and one of the most immediate costs for people is the loss of oceanfront homes, whether located on the beach or on cliffs that tower over it. These losses are economically catastrophic, and the cost of dealing with them is going to increase in […]
The purpose of copyright law is to protect an invention or innovation, ensuring that people who put substantial energy into developing something receive some sort of return — it would be hardly fair to spend millions on a technology, for example, only to have other companies promptly start selling it and undercutting your price. They’d […]
It was years in the making, but last fall, an excavator punched through a levee at the Sears Point Wetland and allowed the Bay’s tidal waters to flow in for the first time in over 100 years. The wetlands restoration project required the coordinated efforts of multiple groups and millions of dollars even before breaking […]
The first National Park was, perhaps appropriately, Yosemite, created in 1872. The National Parks Service — established in 1916 — oversees 408 areas within the United States. This vast swath of territory includes some 84 million acres of land across the country (along with Alaska and Hawaii), including treasures of ecological, cultural, and social history. In […]
‘At this rate,’ I joked to a friend the other day, ‘California is going to sink into the Earth before it breaks off from the North American Plate.’ To live in California is to have a certain amount of morbid humour — it, like all states, comes with a healthy dose of natural disasters and […]