Climate Change and Drought
How heat kills farmworkers
On a recent summer morning in Mendota, a small farming community in California’s Central Valley, the sun glared down from a cloudless sky. The temperature was heading toward 101 degrees, and it had hit 106 a few days before—not unlike the blistering heat that blanketed much of the West Coast over Labor Day weekend. While… » Read More
Media Partner
This Story’s Impact
-
8 MILLION MONTHLY READERSHIPMother Jones
No offense, American bees, but your sperm isn’t cutting it
Editor’s note: This story is for mature bees only. Seducing a honeybee drone — one of the males in a colony whose only job is to mate with the queen — is not too difficult. They don’t have stingers, so you just pick one up. Apply a little pressure to the abdomen and the drone… » Read More
Media Partner
Reclaiming native ground: Can Louisiana’s tribes restore their traditional diets as waters rise?
When Theresa Dardar was growing up in Houma, her mother used to take her to visit relatives in the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe community. They would drive 20 miles toward the Gulf of Mexico, park at the local grocery store, and ask someone to ferry them across the bayou. From there, they’d walk across land thick… » Read More
Media Partner
This Kansas farmer fought a government program to keep his farm sustainable.
In 2012, Gail Fuller’s 2,000-acre farm was at ground zero for the drought that decimated corn production throughout the Midwest. His corn and soybeans had barely squeaked through the previous dry summer, even as many of his neighbors in Lyon County, Kansas, saw their crops desiccate and fail in the unrelenting sun. But when the… » Read More
Media Partner
This Story’s Impact
-
3 Million Monthly ReachEnsia
‘Restoration economy’ strives to protect pollinators, create jobs
Gary Nabhan and I are bumping along in a rental car down a two-track dirt road that follows the edge of Sonoita Creek’s floodplain, some 29 kilometers north of the Arizona–Mexico border. Nabhan—an ethnobiologist, conservation biologist and agroecologist at the University of Arizona and author of more than 30 books on food, farming and nature—tells… » Read More
Media Partner
This Story’s Impact
-
7.1 Million Total ReachScientific American
Seeding doubt
At a time when public mistrust of science runs high, and non-experts are hard-pressed to separate fact from industry-sponsored spin, Sense About Science, a charity based in London with an affiliate in New York, presents itself as a trustworthy arbiter. The organization purports to help the misinformed public sift through alarmist claims about public health… » Read More
Media Partner
Is dry farming the next wave in a drought-plagued world?
When he wasn’t swearing in Spanish at his broken mechanical potato harvester, Ryan Power of New Family Farm spent the better part of his afternoon professing his commitment to “dry farming”—growing food without any irrigation. Now, he was thirsty. More on this story Read more of our reporting on climate change & drought. We took our leave… » Read More
Media Partner
This Story’s Impact
Oil barrens
The one with the gun arrived with a cocky flourish, sauntering through the doorway in a white muscle tee and blue jeans torn at the knees. He settled in on the plastic flooring, lit up a thick clove cigarette, and began animatedly to talk about the 23 critically endangered birds he’d shot from the Indonesian… » Read More
Media Partner
This Story’s Impact
-
1.5 Million Total ReachAudubon
The Trouble with Iowa
“I’m driving through these beautiful fields. I want to grab that corn like you’ve never seen. So rich, so beautiful,” Donald Trump told a standing-room crowd last July, at a Make America Great Again “family picnic” in Oskaloosa, Iowa. An obvious applause line, perhaps, but Trump delivered it with the aplomb of a man who… » Read More
Media Partner
This Story’s Impact
-
563K MONTHLY READERSHIPHarper's Magazine