#environment

#environment

The clean-up team found everything from pencils to gloves, headphones, sunglasses, and much more. While there's plenty of stuff that was certainly dropped on accident, there was quite a lot of straight up trash, carelessly left out on the slopes.

The series consists of insect-like figures assembled from found plastic fragments collected from beaches and urban environments. Bottle caps, straws, fishing line, and other discarded objects are cut, combined, and reconfigured into small, hybrid creatures.

Chornobyl is still contaminated with almost half the caesium-137 that exploded from the Unit 4 reactor in 1986, as well as much longer-lived hazards such as plutonium, tritium and americium.

Moving around in nature tends to correlate with lower levels of stress. You're not only moving around, but you're listening; you're noticing signs of birds, you're enhancing your cognitive flexibility.

The number of flaring incidents at Chevron's Richmond refinery has dropped significantly in recent years, logging close to 40 flaring events in 2019.

The industrious buzz of bees tackling the dregs of cherry blossom was lawnmower-loud, accompanied by back off peeps from blackbirds nesting in the ivy.

Genetic sequencing has revealed that the state's nutria populations are most genetically similar to populations in Oregon, suggesting that California's current nutria invasion was the result of intentional reintroduction.

In April 2025, New York City got serious about composting, as the Department of Sanitation implemented its first-ever mandatory curbside composting program. The program aimed to divert food and yard waste generated in residential buildings from landfills, as organic materials make up a third of the City's waste stream.

"They didn't even try to fly away. They just feebly made noise," a woman told the Santa Barbara Independent on Saturday after spotting over two dozen dead or dying cormorants near Goleta Beach. "A few were on their stomachs, wings spread [and] gasping for breath.... Heartbreaking."

In 2019, scientists found that balloons eaten by seabirds are more likely to kill them than other kinds of plastic yet they do not seem to have been earmarked in the same way as, for example, plastic straws.

Of the more than 250 readers who responded, a 73% majority said gas-powered leaf blowers should be allowed, while 26% backed the bans.

Environmental campaign group Foxglove stated that the NSIP designation allows the project to sidestep local planning and democracy, raising concerns about its potential carbon emissions.

Covering the windows of public transit with advertisements turns a shared public resource into a mobile advertisement that is more concerned with achieving marketing and sales goals than it is with serving the local community effectively. Constant exposure to advertisements, which has become the norm for modern living, also encourages excessive consumption, which drives consumers to spend beyond their means, leading to growing consumer debt.

The open letter [PDF], sent to members of the US Congress by campaign group Food & Water Watch, complains that the AI-driven wave of datacenter expansion is stoking demand for more energy, which in turn leads to further greenhouse gas emissions, straining water resources, and higher electricity prices for ordinary consumers across the country. Organizations endorsing the letter collectively represent millions of citizens across all 50 US states, the group claims.

We have long advocated for one national standard that upholds customer choice and provides the auto industry long-term stability.

But now the anti-racism charity Hope Not Hate has asked 11,000 people who said they were going to vote for Reform why that is and the answers may surprise you. The Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty says the results suggest an unwieldy coalition of voters who could be won back by other parties. He tells Helen Pidd that a lot of Reform voters want quite fundamental things from the party in terms of workers' rights and the environment, for instance.

This year I couldn't narrow it down to 15, so you get 20 recommendations. Call it literary inflation. Also, after last year's list was published, I got an email from a reader who decried that I had so few titles by female authors on my list (fair enough). This time I made a special effort to include a majority of books written by women.

Some days, I wonder what sort of country we live in. A London woman is threatened with a 150 fine for pouring some coffee dregs down a drain, with the suggestion that this amounted to polluting the waterways (Report, 22 October), yet water companies regularly dump countless millions of gallons of raw sewage with impunity.