EcocentricOil
ExxonMobil has been under a harsh spotlight over the last few days, facing accusations that the company has deliberately downplayed the severity of the Yellowstone River oil spill with misleading information and vague claims about what actually happened. It’s an object lesson in the political risks of owning a pipeline. So the energy …
EcocentricFood
The corporate food system in America has come under intense pressure in recent years over its environmental and humanitarian standards—most recently when a pork producer in Iowa was filmed by undercover allegedly abusing its animals, as my colleague Alexandra Silver wrote about recently. Usually industrial producers and green …
EcocentricOceans
I have the cover story this week on the state of global seafood, examining the rapid growth in aquaculture—and looking at the challenges facing the fish farming industry as it begins to provide an ever larger proportion of our seafood. It’s a massive subject, as you can imagine, and I wasn’t able to go into depth on everything I …
EcocentricOil
Credibility is a precious thing. Oil giant ExxonMobil did not have much to begin with, but it went even deeper into its scarce reserves in the past few days when a company pipeline spilled oil into a river that runs past the homes of about 6,500 people. Wednesday brought another blow: it turns out ExxonMobil needed almost an hour to …
EcocentricWeather
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, especially when you’re on a magazine deadline and time for blogging is short.
What you’re looking at is a massive dust storm—known in Arabic as a haboob—that enveloped much of Phoenix last night. Sand kicked up by strong downdrafts covered parts of the city, producing pictures …
EcocentricOil
China’s State Oceanic Administration (SOA) said this week that a large oil spill off the coast of Shandong province, near Beijing, is worse than previously stated, and that the government may seek compensation from ConocoPhillips, the U.S. oil company with a 49% stake in the oilfield.
On Tuesday the agency said that two separate …
EcocentricOil
“In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold.”
So Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote of his years of hard labor in 19th century Siberia, after a jittery Tsar Nicholas I banished the famed writer to the lonely Far East. For centuries, the massive swath of land east of Moscow and north of China has been a place of political …
EcocentricWildlife
Amid the fireworks, parades, and hot dogs of this past Fourth of July weekend was that sinking feeling of déjà vu when news broke that yet another oil spill was oozing across once-clean waters. This time, it wasn’t the Gulf of Mexico, it was Montana; and it wasn’t BP, it was ExxonMobil. On Friday, 1,000 barrels of crude oil (42,000 …
EcocentricCoal
When I lived in Hong Kong, I used to travel across the border into the People’s Republic, mostly for stories—like this one about the sex toy king of China—or for simple travel. (Particularly memorable were the all-night raves on the Great Wall of China which, sadly, have since been banned.) When I’d flip through my photos after I …
EcocentricWildlife
With so much talk about how Africa’s rhinos and Russia’s tigers are steadily vanishing from our planet, it’s easy to forget that other, smaller species – apple snails, dung beetles, tree frogs – are worthy of attention as well, even if they aren’t as charismatic. Some of these creatures are as remarkable as they are …
