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…
A multi-year effort to restore tidal marsh habitat in Washington’s Skagit River Delta, funded through the federal economic stimulus package, is nearing completion — capping a project that brought together two groups more accustomed to fighting each other than collaborating: farmers and fisheries advocates. A Stimulus Project With an Unusual Coalition The project, centered on…
A proposed overhaul of Bolivia’s mining laws has drawn protest from an unusually broad and, for President Evo Morales, uncomfortable coalition — independent miners organized in cooperatives on one side, and Indigenous and farmer organizations on the other. The two camps oppose the bill for starkly different reasons, but both groups share something notable in…
Delegates from nearly 200 countries have converged on Lima, Peru this week for the opening of the 20th United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP20 — a high-stakes negotiating session meant to lay the groundwork for a new global climate agreement due to be finalized in Paris next year. But inside the heavily secured…