Best of 2019: Science and Nature

For eight hours last fall, Paradise, Calif., became a zone at the limits of the American imagination — and a preview of the American future.

One of the most interesting trends in climate change reporting is the way writers now quietly and deftly weave its effects into the background of natural disaster stories, from the rapid intensification of hurricanes in the Atlantic to the increasingly explosive wildfires in the west. I’d like to pay tribute to two outstanding examples of this in the past year.

At two degrees, our best-case climate scenario, melting ice sheets will still pass a point of no return, flooding NYC and dozens of other world cities. In fact, we’re on track for over four degrees of warming and an unfathomable scale of suffering by century’s end. For my part, I’m only beginning to see that the question of how to prepare our kids for the horrors to come is collateral to the problem of how to deal as adults with the damage we’ve stewarded them into. What helped me see this was a

How Hurricane Katrina and the murder of Emmett Till shaped one woman’s commitment to climate justice

On the strange experience of living through the only accurate doomsday prediction.

Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explains why "green growth" isn't enough to save the planet.