Our Stories

Latest News

Deep Riches -

"The same vents that support colonies of undulating tubeworms, giant clams, eyeless shrimp, and hairy, tennis-ball-size snails are also conduits for valuable metals fresh from the Earth’s interior. Vents form where seawater seeps into fissures in the Earth’s crust and reacts with the heat of magma, emerging transformed: acidic, boiling hot, and laden with chemicals and minerals. As the water cools, those minerals precipitate out, leaving behind concentrations of metals—gold, copper, nickel, and silver, as well as more esoteric minerals used in electronics—that make the richest mines on dry land look meager. And where there’s metal, there are miners, even at the bottom of the world." —From “The Deepest Dig,” Brooke Jarvis’ California Sunday Magazine story about drilling the deep sea (never mind that it’s so little understood)

Banking on Clean Energy -

The World Bank has traditionally been one of the largest funders of fossil fuels, but in a major shift, the bank now says it will only back coal plants in impoverished countries where affordable alternatives are not yet available. In the rest of the world, it will focus on wind, solar, and geothermal instead. “We cannot continue down the current path of unchecked growing emissions,” says the bank’s president, Jim Yong Kim. More evidence that pollution is bad business. The Guardian 

Spill, Baby, Spill -

North Dakota’s oil boom has been a major bust for the state's environment. Since drilling on the Bakken shale formation took off in 2004, the number of oil wells in the state has increased some 200 percent. The number of spills? Up 650 percent. Last year, there was one environmental incident—including spills, leaks, fires, and blowouts—for every six wells. Under a strikingly lax regulatory system, the companies responsible for the incidents pay only a tiny percentage of the damages, if at all. New York Times

Baby Face -

"Human impulse to preserve animals based on their aesthetic appearance is not a frivolous choice driven by an overload of panda posters and Facebook leopard pictures. Our desire to save the cuter creatures is caused by the illusion that we are assuring our own species’ survival. Animals we consider cute share several features with human infants: large heads and eyes, a small nose and chin, and a round forehead." —From "Which Endangered Species Would You Save?" Carrie Arnold’s Nautilus story about the importance of saving the ugly animals, too

Déjà Vu -

One worker was killed and several others were injured yesterday by an explosion on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. It came just two months after another fatal explosion in the region, which also killed one. And of course, the memory of the 2010 BP disaster that killed 11 is still fresh. Industry says “there was no pollution” this time. Here’s hoping. The Times-Picayune

Too Close for Comfort -

“Ultimately Zootopia is not a reinvention of the zoo as much as a prefigurement of its inhabitants’ only possible future, at least on our relatively brief watch. That is, a wilderness with us lurking at its very heart, seated at open-air cafe tables, before we venture back out toward a dimly remembered past and steal our glimpses of it from discreet encampments designed to hide us not from the animals but from our own irrepressible need to spy on them. By the time its gates open circa 2020, Zootopia could well be one of the singular achievements of the anthropocene, a time when human representations of the wild threaten to become the wild’s reality.” —From “The Dark Side of Zootopia,” Charles Siebert’s New York Times Magazine story that asks whether viewing captive animals as if they were in the wild is such a good idea