Even in a state as saturated with dramatic peaks and geological marvels as Colorado, it’s thrilling to get up close and personal with something as grand — and as emblematic of our ballooning climate change crisis — as a glacier. Given the near certainty of continued climate chaos in coming years, seeing these remnants of the last ice age is becoming a catch-them-while-you-can prospect.
When Jon Waterman first visited the Alaskan Arctic in 1983 as a Denali National Park ranger on patrol at the wild Noatak River, he had no idea how profoundly the experience would shape his life. Today, the Carbondale-based award-winning author—as prolific an environmental writer and researcher as he is an intrepid explorer and adventurer—has just released his 17th book, Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder amid the Arctic Climate Crisis (November 12, 2024).
On the way to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport — the nation’s busiest transportation hub — the air is filled with the hum of planes and the drone of cars as they speed toward departures. What you don’t hear is the rushing of water. Or even the trickle of a stream. Which is problematic, given that the headwaters of the 344-mile Flint River, which supplies water to hundreds of thousands of people across Georgia, are located at the airport. Or, more precisely, under the airport. A network of urban tunnels moves the Flint beneath the sprawling parking lots and runways.
Farmers in Arizona are no longer in a “what if” scenario. A shrinking Colorado River is transforming life in the West. The solutions will take all of us.
Cherie Goff is not a fan of wasted space. So, when the founder of one-year-old architecture firm CGModern set out to design a new house outside Golden for herself and her husband—both of whom work from home—she focused on using space and energy efficiently. Here, she talks small spaces, fire-resistant design, and minimalist materials.
As I wobble along the via ferrata’s cable-wire bridge stretched across the Uncompahgre Gorge in Ouray, I keep reminding myself of one thing: Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Do. Not. Look. Down. That’s because a ribbon of frothy whitewater churns far below me. It’s the first feature of the Ouray Via Ferrata’s downstream route. My friend and I, despite our lack of rock climbing experience, are harnessed and helmeted behind our mountain guide, Micah Lewkowitz of Mountain Trip, who’d already cruised across the cable and swiveled around to snap photos of us. Via ferrata is Italian for “iron path,” a concept that dates to World War I in Italy’s Dolomites, where they were developed to maneuver troops through inaccessible terrain. It’s a system of steel rungs, ladders, bridges, and cables permanently bolted into rock walls and ledges. This one follows the east side of the 180-foot-deep gorge, across from the famous Ouray Ice Park, for nearly a mile.
Dwarfed by five stainless steel grain-storage bins outside the Root Shoot malt house in Loveland, Emily Olander gestures toward the horizon. A two-story cookie-cutter house with a white fence peeks out from the rolling green land. “See that?” 38-year-old Emily asks. “That’s what we don’t want.” The Olanders, who farm nearly 2,200 acres in northern Colorado and run a malt business that regularly supplies 150 breweries in the state, have nothing against the homeowners, of course. It’s the big-picture development they’re wary of—an encroaching sprawl that’s gobbling up farmland along Colorado’s I-25 corridor faster than older farmers can devise ways to affordably retire without selling their fields to the developers behind the ubiquitous mixed-use retail and residential enclaves.
In Pari village, eleven species of mangroves have been reduced to just five. The consequences of this decimation are dire not only for the health of the local economy and survival of coastal villages as fish disappear from the ravaged mangrove areas, but also for the bigger picture.
On the horizon, barely visible through the falling snow, you can see them: elk, by the hundreds, silhouetted against the shadowy mountains beyond. Rolling meadows stretch in every direction, and Tarryall Creek, framed by the muted deep-gold of late-fall willows and shrubs, snakes its way through the land. Just off a rutted dirt road, an adobe-style pueblo-revival ranch house, built in 1928, stands hollowly, yet proudly over the landscape it anchors—a reminder of a bygone era, and a beacon of potential.
[See page 7] Silvia Perez Yescas of Oaxaca, Mexico, knows what it’s like to have her voice silenced. For an entire year, month after month, she stood outside a room full of men who gathered to discuss land rights and environmental issues that were affecting family and community well-being. For an entire year, she planted herself firmly on the other side of the room’s window— she wasn’t “allowed” to come inside—and raised her hand to participate in the discussion. For an entire year, the men ignored her. Why? Because Yescas is a woman. In Mexican territories where vast swaths of natural resources are being threatened by energy companies, infrastructure projects, and mining corporations compounding the effects of climate change, the people most impacted—women—rarely get a seat at the table to lend their
Under pressure from extractive industries like logging, mining, and palm-oil harvesting, the indigenous way of life in the Peruvian Amazon hangs in the balance. Families are struggling to sustain livelihoods based on land that is being depleted. Children are fleeing their homes for work in the city, leaving their heritage and culture behind. And natural resources critical to survival are disappearing into the void of foreign corporations with an eye on exports and profits. The biggest burden-bearers? Women—the caretakers of land, harvesters of food, and collectors of water.
An invention by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago could be the next big player in tackling climate change.
It was Lissa Curtis’s dream to perform on stages beyond New England. So when the gifted dancer met one of the Boston area’s most prominent ballet masters, she accompanied him to a prestigious competition in Romania. But that’s only the beginning of her story.
If you’re like billions of people on the planet, you get up in the morning, go to work to provide for your family, and come home at night with something for dinner. Your picture might be framed a little differently, but the details boil down to the same thing: livelihood. A means of support or subsistence. Now imagine your livelihood just…ends. Imagine that someone with more power and more money than you yanks away your occupation, your property, your food sources, and your access to medicine without asking what you think. Your entire means of survival vanishes. For the indigenous people of central Africa, this scenario isn’t hypothetical.
It sounds like a brutally disturbing nightmare: Alone in a forest miles from home, a teenage girl fights off a man as he tries to rape her. She flees home in terror, hours on foot, afraid for her life. The next day, the scene repeats itself as she is forced to collect firewood again. Facing her attacker in the forest again, as she must day after day. For Susan Ozene and countless women outside the city of Yei in battle-scarred South Sudan, this nightmare is more than a bad dream. It is reality.
“The sea was once filled with fish,” the elderly man told a gathering of indigenous community leaders from across Papua New Guinea’s Oro Bay. He was a grandfather from a local village where people depend on the ocean for their food. In his day, it had been easy.
Nobody likes dust. We’ve even named a home appliance after our zeal for eradicating the stuff. (Who doesn’t love a trusty DustBuster?) As it turns out, though, just how those minuscule flecks are distributed in space plays a key role in discovering the secrets of the next frontier.
The multi-talented conservation biologist fears logging far more than bird-eating spiders, electric eels, or anacondas.
In the fall of 2014, Taylor Rees was part of a team of adventurers that spent two weeks slogging through the remote jungles of Myanmar, picking off relentless leeches and eventually abandoning more than half of their supplies to save weight—all before starting their climb up Hkakabo Razi to confirm that it was the highest peak in southeast Asia.
Most of the year, Kt Miller lives in “podunk [also known as Cooke City],” Montana. Population: 76. The nearest grocery store is an hour and a half away. In the winter, the only way to reach her one-room, 12-by-14-foot cabin is to drive down a one-way, dead-end road through Yellowstone National Park. And that's exactly how she wants it.
