Climate Change and Drought

The tasting menu at the end of the world

By Photography by Michael Woolsey

In mid-August, as a largely uneventful tropical storm named Fausto was starting to wind down in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Baja California, a plume of moisture it spun off had metastasized into dry thunderstorms that were rolling across northern California, more than 700 miles away. Recently flattened by a record-setting heat wave, the region… » Read More

Media Partner
This Story’s Impact
  • Eater
    MORE THAN 5 MILLION PAGE VIEWS A MONTH

The water war in Indian Wells Valley

By Photography by Justin Maxon

John Conaway has lived in and around the town of Ridgecrest since before it was much of a town. In 1967, when he moved his young family to the remote Southern California community, Ridgecrest had been incorporated for only a few years. “It was all dirt roads,” he says. “No stop signs, no nothing.” Mostly,… » Read More

Media Partner
This Story’s Impact
  • Bloomberg Media reaches 53 million unique visitors per month
    Across 70+ countries
    Across 120+ global news bureaus

How do climate change, migration and a deadly sheep disease alter our understanding of pandemics?

By

For thousands of years, an unknown virus lingered quietly among the wild ruminants of South Africa. The kudu. The giraffes. The Cape buffalo. Spread by a genus of biting midges called Culicoides, the virus lived in harmony with its hosts, rarely causing disease, until the late 18th century, when farmers began importing purebred merino sheep… » Read More

Media Partner
This Story’s Impact
  • Ensia
    3 million monthly reach

Praying for rain

By Photography by Bill Hatcher

Etched into the face of a red sandstone cliff in the arid highlands of northwestern New Mexico is an unlikely image: a delicately outlined fish. Dozens of petroglyphs surround it, carved centuries ago by the ancestors of the pueblo tribes who still live in the region. They depict antelopes, humans, supernatural beings, spirals and other… » Read More

Media Partner
This Story’s Impact
  • The Weather Channel
    MORE THAN 80 MILLION UNIQUE USERS A MONTH

Is carbon farming a climate boon, or boondoggle?

By

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

Media Partner
This Story’s Impact
  • 4 million online readers per year
    Yale Environment 360

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

Media Partner
This Story’s Impact
  • More than 80 million unique users a month
    The Weather Channel

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

Media Partner
This Story’s Impact
  • National Geographic
    26 million visitors a month

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

Media Partner
This Story’s Impact
  • The Nation
    1.3 MILLION READERS A MONTH
Load More Posts