Hurricane-Struck North Carolina Prisoners Were Locked in Cells With Their Own Feces for Nearly a Week

Hurricane-Struck North Carolina Prisoners Were Locked in Cells With Their Own Feces for Nearly a Week

Favorite In the early morning hours last Friday, Nick climbed out of his bunk at Mountain View Correctional Institution in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, and stepped into a pool of water. As Hurricane Helene unleashed a torrential downpour over Western North Carolina, Nick, whose story was relayed by a relative and who requested to go…

The Dirty Business of Clean Energy: The U.K. Power Company Polluting Small Towns Across the U.S

The Dirty Business of Clean Energy: The U.K. Power Company Polluting Small Towns Across the U.S

Favorite In partnership with All Sheila Mae Dobbins wants is an apology. In 2014, an industrial facility producing wood pellets opened so close to her house in Gloster, Mississippi, that she could overhear conversations between managers and staffers as they worked and smell the fumes the plant pumped into the air. Dobbins, a 59-year-old mother…

They Protested a Military Base Expansion. So the FBI Investigated Them as Terrorism Suspects.

They Protested a Military Base Expansion. So the FBI Investigated Them as Terrorism Suspects.

Favorite The protest did not go off as planned. In February 2023, government recruiters came to the student union at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, stacking National Security Agency-branded plastic cups and splaying out pamphlets about Navy fringe benefits. The activists had come to protest the expansion of Camp Grayling, already the largest National…

Grizzly Bear Poachers Flout the Endangered Species Act — and Get Away With It

Grizzly Bear Poachers Flout the Endangered Species Act — and Get Away With It

Favorite Co-published in partnership with High Country News and Montana Free Press. It was hunting season in Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest, and the Marine sniper was alone on a backcountry trail more than an hour’s hike from his vehicle. He carried a camouflage Remington rifle and was in sight of an elk herd when a…

Leading News Outlets Are Doing the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Greenwashing

Leading News Outlets Are Doing the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Greenwashing

Favorite In a recent episode of the podcast “Powered By How,” award-winning journalist Nisha Pillai leads a discussion on the energy transition. Over the course of 25 minutes, the guests — a business psychologist, a renewable energy investor, and the head of an innovation lab — describe the challenges of scaling new technologies to combat…

Unproven “Advanced Recycling” Facilities Have Received Millions in Public Subsidies

Favorite When oil and gas companies first launched their campaign to promote recycling to the American public, they pitched the process as a viable and sustainable solution to the plastic pollution problem. More than three decades later, however, the vast majority of plastic waste still ends up incinerated or dumped, less than one-tenth is recycled,…

They Promised “Advanced Recycling” for Plastics and Delivered Toxic Waste

They Promised “Advanced Recycling” for Plastics and Delivered Toxic Waste

Favorite Co-published in partnership with The Assembly and Carolina Public Press. Head south on state Highway 96, past a stretch of soybean crops and tobacco fields, and you’ll arrive in Zebulon, North Carolina, population 8,665. There, on a quiet stretch of Industrial Drive, sits a nondescript commercial building. It’s easy to miss; the name on…