Arctic sea ice has shrunk to its smallest extent ever recorded by satellite this year, scientists announced this week, shattering the previous record by a margin so large it has surprised even researchers who have spent decades watching the ice cap steadily decline. A Record Broken by an Unusually Wide Margin Satellite data analyzed by…
What began in April with a handful of Standing Rock Sioux tribal members camped on a small piece of land has grown into one of the largest Indigenous-led demonstrations in decades — and with no resolution to the underlying dispute in sight, the encampments along the Missouri River watershed show no sign of winding down….
Hundreds gathered in Charleston, West Virginia this weekend to celebrate the life of Larry Gibson, the diminutive but relentless activist who spent decades single-handedly refusing to let coal companies erase the mountain his family had called home for more than two centuries. A Life Defined by One Mountain Gibson died of a heart attack on…
Newly disclosed government documents reveal that federal regulators have allowed dozens of antibiotics to remain on the market for use in livestock feed, despite the agency’s own internal scientific reviews flagging many of them as posing a “high risk” of exposing humans to dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria. An Agency’s Own Data Contradicts Its Inaction The Natural…
A controversial experiment to mine the ocean floor for gold and copper is inching closer to reality off the coast of Papua New Guinea, even as the coastal communities who would live alongside it say they’ve been kept almost entirely in the dark about what the project actually involves — and are now weighing legal…
Across rural India, women have quietly become the country’s primary farmers — even as the legal and financial systems governing agriculture continue to treat them as if they weren’t there at all. Farming Without Land Titles The shift is driven largely by migration. As men increasingly leave agricultural work behind for jobs in India’s growing…
For nearly 40 hours, a Royal Dutch Shell icebreaker bound for Arctic oil exploration sat stalled at a Portland dry dock, blocked first by 13 Greenpeace climbers dangling from the city’s tallest bridge, then by dozens of kayakers who paddled directly into its path — a last-ditch, highly visible attempt to physically stop Shell’s Arctic…
A severe drought gripping large parts of central India has pushed the country’s chronic farmer suicide crisis to some of its highest levels in years, with the cotton-growing Vidarbha and Marathwada regions of Maharashtra state once again at the epicenter of a tragedy that has claimed more than 11,000 farmers’ lives since 2005. A Crisis…
The local government of Dunedin, a mid-sized city on New Zealand’s South Island, voted this week to complete its divestment from fossil fuels — closing out a process that international headlines had prematurely declared finished nearly a year earlier. A Two-Year Process Finally Complete Dunedin’s path to divestment began back in 2013, when a group…
Cheyenne River Sioux Chairman Harold Frazier met with President Barack Obama this week to press the administration on the Dakota Access Pipeline and the increasingly militarized police response to the months-long protest encampments near Standing Rock. FSRN’s Nell Abram spoke with Chairman Frazier shortly after that meeting. The Meeting, in the Chairman’s Own Words Nell…