Ensia articles

Environmental justice advocates are working to ensure the state’s efforts to combat climate change benefit everyone — and the lessons can be applied nationwide.

It was a time of year that should have been perfect.

Warming temperatures marked Southern California’s gentle return to spring. The grass had shifted from drab to glowing green. The sky, which can be pale and hard in winter, had softened to a gentler blue.

At the John Mendez Baseb

“We are within nature. We are part of nature. … We’re not divided from nature. We cannot be dismissive of nature because Christ himself chose to be of nature.”

Reverend Robert “Bud” Grant, professor of environmental theology at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa, has dedicated his life to studying and preaching about issues at the intersection of faith and

Ask someone in Flint, Michigan, or São Paolo, Brazil — the list of cities rocked by water disasters seems to grow each day — how much safe water is worth. Worried about contamination and drought, it might be a pretty penny. But the ability of people to actually pay for the full cost of water — from protecting it at its source to getting it to flow from the tap — depends, as i

From migrating birds to pollinating bees to seed-dispersing plants, thousands of species depend on the quality of the aerosphere­ — the layer of air that surrounds our planet. Despite this, aircraft, wind farms, drones, telecommunication towers and other anthropogenic infrastructure increasingly crowd this critical habitat. Current species conservation efforts are generally focused on terrestrial and aquatic habitats, but not on airspace as a similarly important ecosyst

Florida’s Kissimmee River once flowed freely. Fish, birds and other wildlife dwelled in the wetlands it fed. But in the 1960s, spurred by public outrage over flooding, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers straightened the winding waterway and turned it into a drainage canal.

Flip forward a few decades and the river is returning — at least in part. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has partnered with the South Florida Water Management District on the

In 2013, Joel Baziuk had a problem. He had too many fishing nets, and no good way to get rid of them. But that was about to change.

As operations supervisor of Steveston Harbour Authority, or SHA, just south of Vancouver, British Columbia, Baziuk is responsible for Canada’s largest commercial fishing harbor. At any given time, more than 400 vessels call the harbor home. At sea, they land a plethora of fish and shellfish — from sa