Environment

Popular shoe manufacturers are contributing to the world’s largest commercial slaughter of land-based wild animals.

As the climate crisis worsens, the calls for more aggressive action grow louder. 2021 saw more business as usual, industry obfuscation and delay, but also some reasons for optimism.

Judge Dana Christensen ruled that the Fish and Wildlife Service failed to consider the effects of the recovery of bears living throughout the country when it chose to remove protections for Yellowstone grizzly bears.

A group of US youth, ranging in age from 9 to 20, were granted the right to sue the federal government and fossil fuel industry over climate change and environmental degradation that endangers their future.

Governments and nonprofit organizations need to act fast to ramp up existing protection efforts and be effective advocates for these threatened resources.

"There is simply no justification for President Biden's decision to approve a massive new oil drilling scheme that will lead to decades of air and climate pollution," said one critic.

"There's now no question that neonicotinoids play an outsized role in our heartbreaking extinction crisis," said one advocate. The EPA must "ban these pesticides so future generations don't live in a world without bees and butterflies and the plants that depend on them."

2021 highlighted ways that renewable energy appears to offer more stable and affordable electricity than burning fossil fuels.

Researchers spent years listening to villagers' rumors about a Congo Basin science station before realizing the rumors were making an argument of their own.

The Federal Court of Appeal said “the burden of addressing [climate] consequences will disproportionately affect Canadian youth.”