"State conservation officials have found no living fish in the East Nishnabotna River south of Red Oak — the result of a massive fertilizer spill at a farmers cooperative."
"As the agrichemical giant lays groundwork to fend off Roundup litigation, its use of a playbook for building influence in farm state legislatures has the potential to benefit pesticide companies nationwide."
"Growers’ use of the neurotoxic weed killer paraquat is concentrated in just five agricultural counties, leaving low-income Latinos disproportionately exposed to a chemical linked to Parkinson’s disease, a new analysis shows."
"More than a billion meals are thrown away every day, in poor countries as well as rich ones, despite more than 730 million people living in hunger around the world."
"“Barons,” published Tuesday by Austin Frerick, a native Iowan and Yale University food policy fellow, argues that a runaway process of monopoly has gutted rural America while bleeding the taste from American food."
"Alfalfa plants sway under a thin veil of mist as towering irrigation equipment rolls above the crops, spraying the vast fields with water. It's an important agriculture product in Mexico's northern state of Coahuila, grown there for hundreds of years."
"The Amazon is battling record early-year fires, fuelling fears of a worse climate crisis to come as blazes kill vegetation that is key to absorbing planet-warming carbon dioxide. Fanned by drought, high winds and human felling, the forest is suffering unprecedented fires this early in the year, satellite images show, with the dry season still to reach critical parts of the Amazon."
Top-flight regional reporting (and data analysis) that explored inequities between Black and white communities around Baltimore, Maryland, yielded journalist Scott Dance a wide range of stories — and a first-place prize in the most recent awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists. Dance, now on the climate desk for The Washington Post shares insights from the beat in the new Inside Story.
"Abinaya Tamilarasu said her four cows are part of the family. She has a degree in commerce from a local college, but prefers being home milking cows and tending to her family’s land."
Forests are full of environmental stories, from timber sales and wildlife habitat to climate change and hunting. And for reporters in search of resources to report them, the U.S. Forest Service offers an immense array of datasets to match the hundreds of millions of acres of land under its domain. The latest Reporter’s Toolbox gets you started on using the vast Forest Service data collection.
