All FERN Articles
Toxic oversight
For years, government regulators and academic researchers have been at an impasse over the safety of bisphenol A, or BPA, a chemical used to make some plastics. Academic researchers have repeatedly found that BPA and other hormone-disrupting chemicals, which can contaminate foods and drinks, may contribute to problems such as early puberty, obesity, diabetes, developmental… » Read More
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170 million monthly unique viewers globallyHuffPost
Drinking problems
The friendly waitress at the Pretty Prairie Steak House delivers tumblers of tap water as soon as diners take their seats. Across Main Street, the Wagon Wheel Café offers the same courtesy. Customers may also order coffee or iced tea, but it all starts at the same tap, and everyone is fine with that. This… » Read More
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563K Monthly ReadershipHarper's Magazine
Some food stamp recipients may soon lose access to farmers market benefits
On Saturday morning, Ludy Arnold arrived at the H Street farmers market in Northeast Washington just minutes after it opened. Arnold is 70 and lives in nearby public housing for seniors. She comes every week, and has for the past four years, to buy fruit, greens and summer tomatoes with benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition… » Read More
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This mine threatens America’s largest wild salmon run
July 4 marks the peak of the largest, most valuable wild salmon run left in America. The sockeye salmon migration into Bristol Bay, Alaska, can exceed 40 million fish. As they charge into the Kvichak and Nushagak rivers and fan out across myriad tributaries, the sockeye and four other species of Pacific salmon are pursued… » Read More
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Mother Jones8 million monthly readers
What is the farm bill and why does it matter?
Every five years or so, Congress takes up a massive piece of legislation known as the farm bill, which covers everything from supporting farmers to ensuring that those short of food don’t go hungry. The cost of the bill is nearly $100 billion a year. Right now, Congress is in the middle of the farm-bill… » Read More
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Will high-tech indoor agriculture transform local food?
On one of those unseasonable 40-degree days this April when there was soaking ice-cold rain followed by umbrella-wrecking wind, the weather inside a miniature indoor farm near Manhattan’s City Hall was balmy. Farm.One CEO and founder Robert Laing, in a black chef coat and jeans, surveyed the plants perfuming a 1,200-square-foot growing space, formerly a… » Read More
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Can farming save Puerto Rico’s future?
Our climate is changing, and our approaches to activism and politics have to change with it. That’s why FERN, in partnership with The Nation, is launching Taking Heat, a series of dispatches from the front lines of the climate justice movement by journalist Audrea Lim. Lim will explore the ways the communities that stand to lose the… » Read More
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1.3 million monthly readersThe Nation
The end of the ‘panda of the sea’
There is a word, sad and resonant, for the last member of a dying species. The word is endling. Martha, who perished at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, was the endling for the passenger pigeon — the final representative of a bird once so prolific its flocks blackened the sky. The Tasmanian tiger’s endling, Benjamin,… » Read More
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1.6 million total reachPacific Standard
A Democrat in farm country hopes to flip a conservative Republican district
Update, June 6, 2018: J.D. Scholten, facing two challengers in the Democratic primary in Iowa’s 4th Congressional district on June 5, won the contest with 51 percent of the vote, sending him to the November primary to face the Republican incumbent Steve King. “This is what I signed up for. This is the main event,”… » Read More
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Mother Jones8 million monthly readers