Author: Errica Jensen

When smoke from an active wildfire spreads hundreds of miles into cities, it has a unique quality. It’s a gray-orange haze that creeps in silently, dimming the afternoon light and giving the air a slightly acrid edge instead of the thick, choking haze you might anticipate. Over the past few summers, people in Denver, Chicago, and New York City have learned to recognize it: the faint sting at the back of the throat, the smell of something burning far away, and the air quality alerts on their phones telling them to stay inside. In a way that no one had…

A fifteen-year-old girl rode her bike to the Swedish parliament building in Stockholm early on August 20, 2018, took a seat on its steps, and displayed a hand-painted sign. Skolstrejkỹ Klimatet, or School Strike for Climate, was written on the sign. On her first day, no one joined her. A few people looked at her. The majority continued. She distributed flyers. She sat from 8:30 in the morning until school hours ended. After that, she left for home and returned the following day and the day after that. Full NameGreta Tintin Eleonora Ernman ThunbergBornJanuary 3, 2003, Stockholm, SwedenNationalitySwedishKnown ForClimate activism,…

When you drive through some Miami Beach neighborhoods on a morning following a significant downpour, or occasionally even without one, right after an exceptionally high tide, you’ll notice water collecting across the street, spilling up through storm drains, and lapping at parked cars’ tires. Not a hurricane. No significant storm. When a city is constructed six feet above the ocean and the water continues to rise, the ocean simply does what oceans do. Sunny-day flooding is what the locals refer to it as. In the same way that other cities use traffic apps to check tide charts, they have learned…

Most people have a mental image of the American wildfire: smoke columns rising above the Cascades in August, ponderosa pines burning orange in Colorado, and drought-baked hillsides in California. Told in desert tones, it is a western tale. That doesn’t apply to New Jersey. The majority of people associate it with the Turnpike and the Shore rather than with smoke warnings and evacuation orders, and it is the most populous state in the nation. Nevertheless, the New Jersey fire department had already responded to 214 fires spanning 514 acres by the start of March this year. 21 acres and 69…

The executive director of the Xerces Society, Scott Black, recalls summertime driving across Nebraska and Iowa with corn growing to the edge of shopping mall parking lots, climbing slopes that once supported trees, and stretching to the horizon in every direction. He also recalls something more subdued and difficult to describe: how spotless his rental car’s windshield was after driving for several hours. No insects smudged. Not even a trace. That absence is instantly apparent to anyone old enough to have driven through the American Midwest forty years ago. Back then, cleaning the glass was a necessary stop on a…

A drone drops to roughly ten feet above the ground, hovers for a short while, and starts firing somewhere over a stripped hillside in Myanmar. Seed pods, not bullets. At two per second, tiny, biodegradable capsules containing germinated seeds and a pocket of nutrients are launched into the ground. The entire process takes a few minutes. It would take months for a human crew using shovels to cover the same area.This is how industrial reforestation currently appears, or at least how it is beginning to appear. The foundation of BioCarbon Engineering, which is currently known as Dendra Systems, was a…

When you are informed that something dangerous is getting closer to you, a certain kind of uneasiness sets in. It doesn’t rush or make an announcement, but rather advances season by season and year by year. In general, mosquitoes and the diseases they transmit are like that. Arriving in places with no true cultural memory of it used to seem like someone else’s problem, the kind of thing you read about in dispatches from Southeast Asia or sub-Saharan Africa.Every year, mosquito-borne illnesses kill over a million people and infect about 700 million, or nearly one in ten people on the…

Scientists once referred to a region north of Greenland as the “Last Ice Area.” The idea that this frozen redoubt would endure even as the rest of the Arctic softened and retreated was conveyed by the name. A ship could be completely engulfed by ridges formed by centuries of pressure on thick, unyielding ancient ice. It was meant to live. It’s not surviving anymore.Over the past few years, the concerning loss of Arctic sea ice has changed from a warning to a record. The Arctic’s winter maximum extent, which is the annual peak of ice cover prior to the start…

They had the back doors propped open. Nancy’s purse and cell phone remained inside. She failed to attend church. That’s how it all began: the routine details of a typical morning that abruptly transformed into something that no one in the Guthrie family has been able to comprehend since.Nancy Guthrie, 84, was reported missing from her Tucson, Arizona, home on February 1, 2026. The disappearance was categorized as a suspected kidnapping by the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Soon after, the FBI joined the investigation. The family of one of America’s most well-known television journalists is still waiting for someone to…

Rarely do album announcements have real emotional resonance instead of deliberate hype. The majority feel like news disguised as marketing. This one was not like the others. Something clicked when Sublime announced on Instagram last week that their first new album in thirty years, titled Until The Sun Explodes, would be released on June 12. Jakob Nowell, the 30-year-old son of the band’s late co-founding singer Bradley Nowell, wrote the title track as a letter to his deceased father. Moments that feel this particular, this intimate, or this truly unsolvable are rare in the music business.Two months prior to the…