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pollution



  • Giving Life to Midwestern Fields and Killing the Great Lakes

    Journalist Dan Egan, a longtime follower of the environmental concerns of the Great Lakes region, has a new book examining the role of phosphorous-containing fertilizers in fueling agricultural prosperity and threatening the largest supply of fresh water. 



  • Phosphorus Giveth (Life) and Phosphorus Taketh Away

    by Elizabeth Kolbert

    The industrial age miracle of phosphorus fertilizer production revolutionized agricultual yields. Today, humanity faces a twin crisis of the mineral's scarcity and the toxicity of the algae that it feeds with farm runoff. 



  • The East Palestine Disaster Echoes 1948's Killer Smog in Donora, PA

    by Cassondra Hanna

    Despite the decline of rust belt industry, the Ohio Valley remains a backbone of the industrial transportation sector, making its residents uniquely vulnerable to acute toxic pollution if profits are allowed to outweigh environmental safety. 



  • Making a Uranium Ghost Town

    Both the Homestake Mining Company and New Mexico state regulators knew almost immediately that a uranium mine opened in 1958 was poisoning local groundwater. They didn't tell local residents, who have been fighting for their lives and for justice. 



  • Earth Day is a Chance to Win the Messaging War Against Polluters

    by Laura J. Martin

    Climate protectors are at war with the fossil fuels industry in the arena of public opinion, and they're losing. It's time to stop allowing Earth Day statements of corporate concern to substitute for real change. 



  • What Big Oil Knew About Climate Change Since 1959

    "Before San Francisco’s Summer of Love, before Woodstock, the peak of the ’60s counterculture and all that stuff that seemed ancient history to me, the heads of the oil industry were privately informed by their own leaders that their products would eventually alter the climate of the entire planet."



  • ‘One Oppressive Economy Begets Another’

    Slavery and Jim Crow deprived Black communities in Louisiana of wealth and power, and enabled contemporary environmental racism. But slavery-era cemeteries are becoming part of efforts by those communities to fight back against polluters. 



  • People of Color Breathe More Hazardous Air. The Sources Are Everywhere

    The findings of a new study confirm what environmental justice activists and scholars like Robert Bullard have been arguing for decades: minority communities in the United States are susceptible to a disproportionate share of environmental health hazards from multiple sources.