The Revelator

At first glance, it looks almost like an embrace. One coral fragment is pale, its branching form pressed against a smaller, richly colored counterpart. Nine weeks later, the pale fragment has regained its color. Seen against the black background, the transformation is unmistakable. Something living has made contact with something struggling, and the struggle has changed course. I keep returning to the place where they meet. There is a scientific explanation for what happens there. There is also

By Natasha Lindstaedt, University of Essex Authoritarian regimes have a history of keeping information about escalating disasters secret, even when it could harm their own citizens. With more weather-related disasters caused by climate change predicted, the issue of whether governments are willing to act faster to share information with neighboring nations is an increasing concern. The signs are not positive. After the recent massive floods on the Nepal-Tibet border, Chinese state media tightly

In the pantheon of coral reef creatures, few fish look as if they’ve been painted by an ecstatic artist with an unlimited palette more than the mandarinfish. Synchiropus splendidus, a tiny dragonet no longer than your thumb, is a riot of color — electric blues swirling into molten oranges while psychedelic greens trace intricate patterns across its body. Yet these flamboyant little fish spend much of their lives in a place we might easily overlook. Rubble. Broken coral branches. Collapsed skelet

In 2015 the Chinese government announced an ambitious plan to build the world’s largest national park system. China started with Sanjiangyuan, a massive park 13,000 square miles larger than Germany and 14 times the size of Yellowstone National Park in the United States, located in what the government called the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. State media recently described the region as containing “vast, unspoiled alpine ecosystems” and “pristine rivers and mountains.” To many environmentalists, this was

Washington has a gift for cloaking unpopular ideas in appealing names. One recent example is the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, or BAAJA, a sweeping “permitting reform” measure introduced this September by Sens. Shelley Moore Capito, Mike Lee, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Martin Heinrich. Once stripped of its deceptive branding, the bill is an out-and-out assault on the National Environmental Policy Act, the bedrock environmental law that has for more than 50 years required t

We could all use a little extra environmental inspiration these days, so here are 15 new books for readers of all ages. We’ve adapted the books’ official descriptions below, and the link in each title goes to the publisher’s page. You can also find any of these titles through your local bookseller and library. Spooky Rivers: 25 Strange and Mysterious Rivers That Snake Across Our Planet By Geo Rutherford A thrilling nonfiction book that follows the winding histories of 25 mysterious rivers aroun

Adapted from Chapter 5 of The Last Animal: Human History and the Fate of Life on Earth From the Ice Age to the Sixth Extinction (Princeton University Press). Blame the word wizardry of Charles Dickens. In 1852 the great Victorian novelist described a long-forgotten naval admiral with the coinage “as dead as the Dodo.” The phrase was catchy. It appeared just a few years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which stoked almost as much interest in the ends of species as in their beginnings. Th

Indonesia is a young country — in more ways than one. Its current democratic government dates back under three decades to 1998, after the fall of Soeharto, the military dictator who led the country for 32 years. It’s also demographically young, with a median age of just 31. That means fewer and fewer people in Indonesia remember the time they were under Soeharto’s ‘New Order’ rule. But despite the fading memory of Soeharto’s reign, one of the decisions he made in the later years — selecting a Na

Marcia CiroPauseCharles River, Dover, MassachusettsInfrared photography© copyright Marcia Ciro “I’m not sure of the species, just got ‘ray-finned fishes’ on apps. I’ve been exploring local underwater environments in nearby rivers and lakes. I am fascinated by the complexity that lurks just below the surface.” Image taken with a digital camera modified to shoot infrared images.         Marcia CiroUntitledIpswich River, Ipswich, Massachusetts

I enjoyed talking about narwhals last month. What whale are we talking about this time? This time we’re diving into one of my personal favorites: the humpback. Wait, we usually talk about more obscure whales. Aren’t humpbacks kind of mainstream? That’s true, but mainstream doesn’t mean boring. Humpbacks embody cetacean charisma. In addition to their good looks, they’re champion swimmers — they’re constantly observed leaping almost entirely out of the water in giant, thunderous breaches. They’re

This story is part of a larger investigation conducted by an international team of journalists based at The Outlaw Ocean Project, a news organization in Washington, D.C. Global trade is remarkably efficient at moving things. It carries copper, cars, cameras, and crude oil across oceans and borders with astonishing speed. It takes the product of one country’s labor and ecology and delivers it to warehouses and supermarkets in another with so little friction that consumers barely register the dist

A joint publication of The Revelator and Crucial Comix. Sources: 50 office spaces https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/energy-star-expands-efforts-improve-energy-efficiency-us-data-centers 3-5 million gallons of water per day for cooling https://vcnva.org/bill-of-the-day-data-center-growth/ Heat nearby neighborhoods by as much as 4 degrees F https://news.asu.edu/20260518-environment-and-sustainability-turning-down-heat-data-centers Constant, low-frequency noise https://www.sierraclub.org/ohio/blo

Every evening , like clockwork, Arnen Sula wraps up work at his office, collects his drums, and heads to Skanderbeg Square in the Albanian capital of Tirana. “Eskobari i Ballkanit O hajduti i buxhetit Ne nuk ikim pa doreheqje HEY RAMA, SHPORRU TI TANI!”   (The Escobar of the Balkans! You budget thief! We won’t leave until you resign! HEY RAMA, GET OUT NOW!) These are lyrics to one of dozens of songs and poems that Sula and fellow demonstrators have chanted every day since June as they march whil

I am not a climate scientist, and I want to say that plainly. What follows is the account of a metabolism researcher who kept finding something she wasn’t looking for, until the pattern became too consistent to file under coincidence. My colleagues and I run randomized clinical trials to answer a narrow question: What happens to a person’s health when they change how they eat? We recruit volunteers, assign diets, and measure what clinicians care about — insulin sensitivity, weight, c

The Place: Morrell Nature Sanctuary is a 110-hectare (270-acre) preserve of coastal Douglas-fir forest in British Columbia that volunteers battle to keep safe from invasive species. The sanctuary is a shelter for a biodiverse ecosystem where fir coexist with massive red cedars, Garry oaks, and twisting, hard-as-stone arbutus trees with their shocking, ever-peeling red and pistachio-green trunks. The forest’s undergrowth is dominated by salal, Oregon grape, and ferns. But those are just a few of

This year Earth Overshoot Day —  the date each year when humanity has used more from the planet than it can regenerate in 12 months — fell on July 30, six days later than last year. That sounds like progress. It isn’t. The date moved because researchers revised their estimate of how much carbon the ocean absorbs, not because we consumed less. Strip out the accounting change and the underlying trend went the other way. By the actual measure, 2026 is the deepest ecological overshoot ever recorded.

Dr. Green, I hear a lot that “doing something, no matter how small” to fight environmental destruction will help you feel better, but I have doubts. Does psychology back this up? (I’ve been doing environmental activism for 20 years, so I don’t need this incentive, myself. I’m just wondering about encouraging new people.) Yes, many studies have proven the efficacy of “doing something, no matter how small.” The science of how “every little thing helps” spans several key areas such as mental well-b

Sharks and their relatives may seem common thanks to their constant appearances in nature documentaries and pop culture, but they face enormous threats wherever they swim and are actually some of the most threatened animals in the world. Protecting this globally distributed and occasionally highly migratory group of animals isn’t easy — it requires an enormous amount of scientific data, expertise, and collaboration. But an ambitious initiative called the Important Shark and Ray Areas project hop

Iran has experienced multiple crises over the past few years, including economic challenges and war. So far, however, these have not appeared to affect one of the most practical initiatives developed by local conservation leaders in northern Iran: Gavbangi. In Farsi Gavbangi refers to the call of the maral (also known as Caspian red deer, Cervus elaphus maral), who live in the green mountains in northern Iran from early September to early October. Maral habitat in Iran spans forests from the Aze

As a cofounder of Native Species Network, I’m grateful for those who go beyond treasuring native plants and actually get out in the field to do the hard work of clearing away undesirable alien plants. But I have concerns about how some projects are affect the larger landscape, including the animals who live there. For instance, when I taught an animal-tracking class in Point Reyes National Seashore this past June, I was surprised to find that someone had uprooted all the cakile (sea rocket) in m