Avocados are true superfoods: dense, buttery scoops of vitamins, fat and fiber, all in a hand-size package. We worked for a long time to make them this way. According to a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, people in what we today call Honduras made avocados a part of…
In California, summer could be on the chopping block. Almost 4,000 campsites across many of California’s 18 national forests could close for part or all of the summer season, according to an internal United States Forest Service spreadsheet viewed by The New York Times on Friday. These potential shutdowns follow a wave of federal government…
For 30 miles we bounce along a dirt road in southwestern Wyoming, heading toward a jagged skyline. It’s early September and the aspens are starting to turn yellow. As we climb toward the mountains, the air grows colder. Soon the road will see snowfall. Jeff Munroe, a professor of geology at Middlebury College in Vermont,…
President Trump has promised to “drill, baby, drill.” Now, he also wants to log. On Saturday, Mr. Trump directed federal agencies to examine ways to bypass endangered species protections and other environmental regulations to ramp up timber production across 280 million acres of national forests and other public lands. The move appears aimed at increasing…
For generations, scientists looked to the East African savanna as the birthplace of our species. But recently some researchers have put forward a different history: Homo sapiens evolved across the entire continent over the past several hundred thousand years. If this Africa-wide theory were true, then early humans must have figured out how to live…
Let’s buck the trend, a local marine biologist suggested. In 2018, as the Maldives, a nation of nearly 1,200 islands in the Arabian Sea, continued its transformation into a luxury tourist destination, the country’s handbook for resort developers called sea grass meadows in the country’s shallow lagoons “aesthetically unappealing,” suggesting that it was “very important…
Public lands in the United States have long been considered a national treasure. But, since Thursday, at least 3,000 employees have been laid off across the United States Forest Service and the National Park Service, part of a wave of Trump administration cuts to the federal work force. Together, these agencies oversee 278 million acres…
Despite being in office for less than a month, the Trump administration has already made the United States more exposed to catastrophic wildfires in ways that will be difficult to reverse, current and former federal employees say. On Thursday, the administration fired 3,400 employees from the U.S. Forest Service, which manages 193 million acres of…
Despite being in office for less than a month, the Trump administration has already made the United States more exposed to catastrophic wildfires in ways that will be difficult to reverse, current and former federal employees say. On Thursday, the administration fired 3,400 employees from the U.S. Forest Service, which manages 193 million acres of…
