Justice & Health

Throughout May, more than 140 wildfires have burned across Alberta and British Columbia. On Sunday, the thick, ashy haze billowing from these infernos drifted across the U.S. border, casting a blanket of smoke over Minnesota and Wisconsin, which eventually made its way to Iowa and other parts of the Midwest earlier Tuesday morning.  Counties throughout […]

MINDO, Ecuador—Natalia Greene ducks her head underneath the fronds of a giant fern. It is pitch black in the Chocó Andino cloud forest and Greene is searching for spiders, frogs and other nocturnal creatures.  “Ah, found one!” she shouts, steadying the beam of her flashlight on a sinewy spider.   Greene marvels at the tiny tarantula […]

OAK GROVE, Ala.—Clara Riley thought she was having a heart attack.  As an Alabama mine has slowly approached the coal seam under her home, Riley’s anxiety has sometimes gotten the best of her. In late April, after a mine representative visited her home, the 90-year-old said she broke down. She could feel the weight of […]

EL PASO—Dozens of people crammed into a conference room on the eastern edge of El Paso on a recent Thursday evening. Some brought signs, some wore T-shirts, others diligently wrote their feedback on notecards. But the message was resounding: Don’t build a highway near our wetland.  Conservation advocates in El Paso say the Texas Department […]

This story was published in partnership by Inside Climate News and the Texas Observer.  Juan Benito Mancias draws his identity from the landscape at the Rio Grande’s end not because he owns it, but because it owns his people, literally. His ancestors lie buried in it, going back millennia. Sadly for Mancias, U.S. law provides […]

Clutching a sheaf of typed notes with one hand and the steering wheel of her electric car with the other, Maya van Rossum was driving west on I-276 and practicing the message she planned to deliver to Pennsylvania’s governor later that morning when she realized—belatedly—that she was going to need a cough drop. The plan […]

SHILOH COMMUNITY, Ala.—Their land is bound forever.  The deeds of three homeowners—Pastor Timothy Williams, Aretha Wright and Page Jones—all living in the historically Black Shiloh community of south Alabama, tell the tale.  Restrictive covenants attached to their deeds limit the ability of current and future residents to file actions against the state. The legal instruments […]

RESERVE, La.—For Robert Taylor, it should have been a moment of celebration. For 60 years, he has watched with apprehension as the curved and winding pipes of the nation’s only chloroprene rubber plant discharged plumes of exhaust over this stretch of the Louisiana bayou long known as “Cancer Alley.” The nickname is regrettably apt: Environmental […]

When rain comes down in some parts of Charleston, S.C., sewage comes up. In the neighborhood of West Ashley, storms trigger waste overflows so often into a pond near Nell Postell’s home that she has a wet-weather routine based on forecasts: she buys surgical masks, clears her garden and then listens for the sewage to […]