Climate Change and Drought

Is carbon farming a climate boon, or boondoggle?

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Trey Hill led a small group of fellow farmers to a field outside his office in Rock Hall on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It was a cloudy February day, but the ground was alive with color — purple and red turnip tops mixing exuberantly with green rye, vetch and clover, and beneath it all, rich brown… » Read More

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As the Salton Sea shrinks, it leaves behind a toxic reminder of the cost of making a desert bloom

By Photography by Lindsay Fendt

It’s just past noon on a Wednesday, but the bar at the Ski Inn in Bombay Beach, California, is already packed. The crowd is mostly Canadian, snowbirds escaping to the desert spas and country club communities that dominate this southeastern corner of the state, just 50 miles from Mexico. Bombay Beach is not their destination,… » Read More

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Arizona’s water supplies are drying up. How will its farmers survive?

By Photography by Bill Hatcher

You could almost visit Arizona without noticing it was a farming state. If you flew into Phoenix in an aisle seat, for instance, and spent your time in the city, you might not see it. But if you happened to drive south beyond the car shops and warehouses, across the sandy flats of mesquite and creosote, over… » Read More

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The strange, uncertain fate of Alaska’s biggest wild salmon habitat

By Photography by Nathaniel Wilder

Anna Hoover and I ease up and down in limestone-colored water on a warm, windless afternoon in early July, our backs to the mouth of the Egegik River. She’s distracted, perched in the captain’s seat of her 32-foot drift boat. She glances at her phone, checking the time. The state manages fishing on a tight… » Read More

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One man is trying to save the world from climate change by mobilizing an unlikely team: Iowa’s farmers

By Photography by Dennis Chamberlin

In early March, just a week before the Midwest was inundated by catastrophic flooding, a dozen farmers gathered at the First Presbyterian Church in Grinnell, Iowa, for an event billed as a conversation about “Faith, Farmers, and Climate Action.” “How is God calling you to use your farm to improve the world?” asked the evening’s… » Read More

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    Mother Jones

As oceans heat up, the types of seafood we eat will change

By Illustrations by Charlotte Knox

There is no better place to ogle California seafood, in all its bizarre bounty, than the Santa Barbara harbor on a Saturday morning. Vendors line City Pier alongside bobbing boats with names like New Hazard and Fishin’ Mission, their booths thronged by customers speaking a half-dozen languages. The wares at this fishermen’s market are as… » Read More

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The Loophole: How American forests fuel the EU’s appetite for ‘green’ energy

By Photography by George Steinmetz

The smoke billows like cream in coffee off Lebanon Church road, above the pine stands and winter fallow, a sharp palette of blue and green and white. Heavy with trees and scraps from the surrounding forests of Northampton County, the trucks come and go all day long, downshifting here just before the Methodist  church and… » Read More

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As coastal flooding surges, ‘living shorelines’ seen as the answer

By Photography by John Althouse

On August 27, 2011, Hurricane Irene crashed into North Carolina, eviscerating the Outer Banks. The storm dumped rain shin-high and hurled three-meter storm surges against the barrier island shores that faced the mainland, destroying roads and 1,100 homes. After the storm, a young ecologist then at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill named… » Read More

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Who should profit from Mexico’s nitrogen-fixing corn?

By Photography by Citlali Fabian

In a 1979 visit to Totontepec, a small town in Oaxaca, Mexico, naturalist Thomas Boone Hallberg marveled at the local maize. The plants grew nearly 20 feet high in nutrient-poor soil, even though local farmers did not apply any fertilizer. The maize had aerial roots that grew a mucous-like gel just before harvest season. It… » Read More

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