In the summer of 2022, heavy rainfall damaged a water treatment plant in the city of Jackson, Mississippi, precipitating a high-profile public health crisis. The Republican Governor Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency, as thousands of residents were told to boil their water before drinking it. For some, the pressure in their taps was so low that...

This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online, and APTN. Last September, Nicaraguan state security forces arrived at Indigenous Miskitu leader Brooklyn Rivera’s home in Bilwi, on the North Caribbean coast. Pretending to...

In Washington, a dozen dams dot the Columbia River — that mighty waterway carved through the state by a sequence of prehistoric superfloods. Between those dams and the hundreds of others that plug the rivers and tributaries that lace the region, including California and Nevada, the Western United States accounts for most of the hydroelectric energy...

For much of its 53-year history, the Environmental Protection Agency let civil rights complaints languish. From Flint, Michigan, to the industrial corridors of the Deep South, communities attempting to use federal civil rights law to clean up the pollution in their neighborhoods were largely met with years of silence as their cases piled up in the agency’s...

The more plastic a company makes, the more pollution it creates. That seemingly obvious, yet previously unproven, point, is the main takeaway from a first-of-its-kind study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. Researchers from a dozen universities around the world found that, for every 1 percent increase in the amount of plastic...

<?xml encoding="UTF-8"> The spotlight Hey there, Looking Forward fam. Happy Earth Day (and Earth Week, and Earth Month) — a time of year when sustainability is elevated in the global consciousness, and my inbox is full of vaguely greenwashy PR pitches. Each April, I (and every other climate journalist) revisit the same debate: whether to...