Category: Nature

.
“A view of the cleared right-of-way for the Constitution Pipeline on the property of the Holleran family of New Milford, PA. Tree-fellers authorized by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission used chain-saws to destroy 90 percent of the family’s maple trees that produced syrup for their business, North Harford Maple.”

The Limits of Disturbance

With its permitting authority over natural gas infrastructure, the little-known Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has sweeping power over individual citizens’ property and our collective climate trajectory. Critics say that reforming its pipeline review process should be high on President Joe Biden’s agenda.

Coal-fired electrical power and heating plant glows amid rosy polar stratus clouds in the polar night of January in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway.

Arctic Treaty Nears 100 in Heated Climate

The Svalbard archipelago sits halfway between Norway and the North Pole with strategic access in the Barents Sea to vital sea lanes linking Russia, Western Europe and North America.

Snow-mantled mountains crown the northern tip of Prins Karls Forlandet in April in the Svalbard archipelago, Norway.

Methane: Arctic Promise and Peril

Consigned to my bunk all night by gut-wrenching seas, I wistfully thought back to terra firma on mainland Norway a few days earlier. Before boarding the University of Tromsø’s research ship, R/V Helmer Hanssen,

Johan Isak Oskal (quoted in story) feeds hungry reindeer from sack of specially-formulated feed since sheet of ice beneath snow prevents grazing in coastal pasture near Tromsø, Troms County, Norway, January 2015.

On The Edge: Reindeer and Climate Change

Female reindeer stands protectively beside her calf. Text and photos by Randall Hyman TROMSØ, NORWAY – “When I got married two years ago, we invited 1400 people,” Berit Oskal-Somby told me as we stood in an icy coastal pasture in northern Norway surrounded by 1500

The aftermath of the Lac-Megantic crude railcar explosion in 2013. (Credit: Axel Drainvile via Flickr)

BOOM: North America’s Explosive Oil-by-Rail Problem

U.S. regulators knew they had to act fast. A train hauling 2 million gallons of crude oil from North Dakota had exploded in the Canadian town of Lac-Megantic, killing 47 people. Now they had to assure Americans a similar disaster wouldn’t happen south of the border, where the U.S. oil boom is sending