When armed gold miners in military uniforms last week invaded protected land in Northern Brazil and murdered Emyra Wajãpi, a 68-year-old activist and leader of the Wajãpi indigenous community, it was not an isolated incident.

Didi Barrett, a New York state assemblymember, has visited Stone House Grain, a farm in the Hudson Valley, enough times to be a seasoned tour guide. That’s what it felt like, at least, as we drove in a Jeep down a narrow road, through fields blanketed by cover crops and perennial pastures spread out like a gold-and-brown checkerboard.

A few weeks after US Customs and Border Protection completed a border wall along Arizona’s southern boundary in 2008, a monsoon arrived. Floodwaters rose to 7ft, nearby patrol roads eroded and debris clogged the wall’s mesh fencing and grates, turning it into a temporary dam.

Last month, Dean Hunt set fire to his own land. He waited until the weather was just right ― sunny, clear skies and relatively dry ― for the fire to spread quickly, licking up the dense grasses blanketing the steep mountain. When the flames died down, they left a layer of ash. This wasn’t a case of reckless destruction; Hunt was trying to save his land.

Abortions are as inevitable as the sun rising. Every year, around 56 million people around the world induce their own abortions, but this doesn’t need to come in the form of a “back-alley” abortion. Dutch activist and doctor Rebecca Gomperts has made it her life’s work to ensure the abortion pill is accessible—even in places where it is outlawed.

The Lion King was my first, brief encounter with grief. When watching the original 1994 movie, I bolted from the theater the moment the benevolent lion king Mufasa died, not yet able to stomach the idea of a life so abruptly lost.

By the middle of La Dispute’s set, the crowd has merged into a single shape, pushing up against the barricade surrounding the stage. Jordan Dreyer, the vocalist of the post-hardcore quintet, harpoons the air with his entire body, while singing with a controlled anguish. The tone then decidedly shifts as Dreyer addresses his audience with emotional openness.

We’re just beginning to understand the toll climate change takes on mental health When psychiatrist Janet Lewis thinks back to the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo in 1989, she still remembers the horizontal trees and the collective grief.

Under a bleak gray sky last Thursday, Maritza Silva-Farrell, the executive director of ALIGN, mounted a podium in front of New York City Hall. She reminded an enthusiastic crowd of labor, environmental, and community organizers of what brought them together —the devastating impact climate change has already had on the city. “

The Arctic is in the throes of what sea-ice scientist Peter Wadhams calls a “death spiral.” As the region’s once abundant ice melts, giving way to a less reflective surface, the Arctic heats up faster—now at a rate that is double the rest of the planet.

Jim Probst has dedicated the last five years to building a climate movement that's equally concerned with local coal miners' well-being as it is with the consequences of coal mining itself.

What does the Violence Against Women Act have to do with climate change?

This story was originally published by Grist. It appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. As the country watched floodwaters rise across the Carolinas in the wake of Hurricane Florence this month, Puerto Ricans were still reeling from a storm that tore through the island a year ago.

As individual states pass more lenient cannabis laws, the federal government has failed to keep pace. This just might change with the STATES Act. First introduced by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Gardner on June 7th 2018, the bipartisan bill would help untangle the myriad conflicts between the federal government and the states that have chosen to legalize cannabis.

In late May, an open letter appeared on Medium penned by Kat Taylor, an overseer of Harvard’s investment fund. Taylor was resigning her position in protest because portions of the university’s multi-billion-dollar endowment have gone to “land purchases that may not respect indigenous rights” and “water holdings that threaten the human right to water.”

Olga McKissic lives in an airy, white-brick home with a pillared porch, the kind where you might sit and watch fireflies late in the night. The only issue is that every few years, the rising waters from a nearby river pour into her Kentucky home, ascending the porch like an uninvited guest. Her home flooded in 1997, 2006, 2013, and 2015.

It’s 2018, and you might be wondering: Is it alright for men to smell like rosemary and heather growing amongst dry wood in the sunny, Garrigues region of France?

Blue-lace agate: This crystal will give you a baseline level of self-esteem. If worn regularly, it might even allow you to feel a fleeting sense of confidence in your own abilities and worth.

I live in an apartment just off Broadway, one of New York’s highest-decibel streets, in a location so close to the subway that I feel a rattling in my room every five minutes (eight minutes on weekends). My roommates, a couple probably/hopefully in the process of uncoupling, spend most of their free hours adding to the noise levels by playing the sort of music that is like a prolonged moan, or maybe a whale dying, while yelling at each other. When in a good mood, they narrate everything they are

The humble sunflower appears not quite of this earth. Its yellow crowned head sits atop its stalk like a green broomstick. Its seeds, arranged in a logarithmic spiral, are produced by tiny flowers called disc florets that emerge from the center of its head and radiate outward. But aside from being a biological marvel, the sunflower is also often in the scientific spotlight. From understanding how new plant species emerge to studying “solar tracking,” which is how the flowers align themselves wi