Among those concerned about the climate, it’s become something of a self-evident truth that as people suffer more severe and more frequent extreme weather and grapple with global warming’s impact on their daily lives, they’ll come to understand the problem at a visceral level. As a result, they’ll be eager for action. In other words, many climate activists...

In 1979, a woman named Margaret Bean decided to challenge the Texas state government’s decision to grant a permit for a new landfill in her neighborhood on the outskirts of Houston. The area was 70 percent nonwhite, and Bean and her fellow residents alleged that the permit fell into a pattern of setting up landfills in the city’s minority communities,...

Twenty years ago, a team of U.K. scientists sounded the alarm on a then-underappreciated problem: the breakdown of plastic litter into small, even microscopic, fragments. While many previous reports had documented the buildup of plastic bottles and bags in the natural environment, much less attention had been paid to what the scientists dubbed “microplastics.” ...

Blowing 100 mph winds, Hurricane Francine ripped into Southern Louisiana on September 11, knocking out power for hundreds of thousands of people. Its most dangerous and damaging effect, though, was the storm surge of seawater that it bulldozed ashore, inundating coastal parishes like Terrebonne and Lafourche. A preliminary estimate by AccuWeather puts...

On a blisteringly hot, sunny day this summer, Emory University researcher Arabella Lewis made her way through the underbrush in a patch of woods in Putnam County, Georgia, about an hour southeast of Atlanta. She was after something most people try desperately to avoid while in the woods: ticks. “Sometimes you gotta get back in the weeds to get...

Over the past century, the United States has built millions of homes along coastlines and rivers, developing on land that is all but destined to flood. At the same time that the warming of the planet has raised sea levels and increased rainfall, annual flood damages have surged in recent decades in large part because more homes are in flood-prone areas...