Këmituxwe Éhènta Wehikiyànkw You are walking in our old homeland After spending 12 years backpacking some of America’s wildest trails as a wilderness ranger for the US Forest Service – and then losing that job to politics – last spring I set out for the Appalachian Trail (AT), the longest hiking-only footpath in the world….
It is tempting to think about what could have been. In 2020, a time many people would prefer to forget, there was a significant push to set an end date for the sale of new petrol and diesel cars. The UK had announced a ban from 2030. India – the world’s most populous country and…
The website Your AI Slop Bores Me takes its name from a meme people on social media use to criticize AI-generated content. The site — a fake AI chatbot — has only been around for about a month. But its creator, Mihir Maroju, said it’s already received more than 25 million unique visitors and nearly…
As scientists confirmed that March was the United States’s most abnormally hot month in recorded history, dozens of climate deniers gathered to promote misinformation and tout their newfound influence on federal policy. At a conference hosted by the prominent science-denying thinktank the Heartland Institute last week, a crowd of mostly middle-aged men in suits claimed…
Nelson Mandela said: “Sport can create hope where once there was only despair.” Too optimistic? In 2026, almost certainly. Sport is still a common language, uniting unlikely groups like an all-powerful Esperanto, but it is in trouble. The pitches we play on, rivers we swim, seas we surf, mountains we climb, parks we run in,…
In a normal year, the vast grasslands that roll across the American Great Plains would be starting to green. But at the center of the US, where most of the nation’s beef producers graze their herds, this spring brought fire instead of moisture, leaving more than a million acres black and barren. Multiple blazes raged…
There was a time in the 1960s that the lakes and rivers around Cleveland were so polluted with petrochemicals and other contaminants that they frequently caught on fire. While water quality on Lake Erie today has improved since the days of it being used as a large-scale industrial dumping ground for steel mills and chemical…
Colombian officials have authorized a plan to cull dozens of hippos descended from animals brought to the country in the 1980s by Pablo Escobar, after the feral beasts displaced native species and threatened local villagers. The environment minister, Irene Vélez, said the decision was reached because other methods to control their population had been expensive…
Madagascar has long been celebrated for its remarkable wildlife, with the vast majority of its species – from ring-tailed lemurs to certain species of baobab trees – found nowhere else on the planet. But when discussing the island nation’s endemic treasures, fungi are often left out of the conversation. Yet “fungi are some of the…
Up early for once. The moon’s still there, miraculous white ghost in the clear morning sky. If my eyes were better I might glimpse a capsule containing the four remarkable humans who have travelled further from our planet than anyone in history. With this knowledge, seeing the moon hits differently. I sit on the terrace, taking…