EHN Originals

When Mount Desert Island High School in Maine decided to use solar power, they turned to the students. “We have a [student] club here that helped with the project, helped choose the installer we’d go with,” principal Matt Haney told EHN. “They did research on vendors and helped evaluate proposals.” About a year ago the…

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The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted U.S. health inequities—and the field of public health, which includes the branches of epidemiology and environmental health, has long been complicit in sustaining these inequities. Black and Brown people have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19—and this is not explained by biological determinism, because such theories are racist and false. Centuries…

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You would think that after 190,000 COVID-19 deaths, the Trump Administration might finally develop a national strategy to control spread of the coronavirus. No. Instead it foists on us a new member of the coronavirus task force with no expertise in infectious disease or epidemiology. Scott Atlas, a radiologist and conservative pundit at the Hoover…

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Building best-of lists is, if nothing else, a wonderful way to start an argument. In that spirit, here are some of the classic books and authors from the late 20th Century that helped define the environmental movement. Next week, to keep the argument going, I’ll have a list from the first two decades of the…

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This story was produced as part of a collaborative reporting project by the Pittsburgh Media Partnership. Learn more about our partners in the collaborative and see all the work at thebigstorypgh.com. In March and April, as the novel coronavirus pandemic took hold of the region, the program Ebony Lunsford-Evans designed to teach gardening to seniors…

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Kristina Marusic, EHN’s Pittsburgh reporter, won two 2020 Golden Quill Awards for her reporting on air pollution and cancer in Western Pennsylvania. The Golden Quills competition, held by the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania, honors excellence in print, broadcast, photography, videography and digital journalism in Western Pennsylvania and nearby counties in Ohio and West Virginia.…

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Baboons in the U.S., howler monkeys in Costa Rica, and baboons, chimpanzees, red-tailed monkeys, and red colobus in Uganda are all getting exposed to dangerous pesticides and flame-retardant chemicals, according to new research. “We were surprised both at the number of chemicals measured in the feces and the levels of some of these chemicals in…

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BOZEMAN, Mont.—Living in the Rocky Mountains, we often joke about our five seasons: Fall, winter, spring, summer and smoke. You always pray smoke season comes late and ends quickly. Because when the smoke comes in thick – like it did last month when California lit up and winds funneled the plumes into south-central Montana –…

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Last Thursday, Ohio’s Cuyahoga River staged a small re-enactment of its historic moment. In June, 1969, the filthy industrial river caught fire and burned for 24 minutes. Lost in the spectacular headlines was the fact that historians count at least 12 similar Cuyahoga riparian fires dating back to the 19th Century. This year’s blaze brought…

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We all know cars and trucks spew pollution into the air—but it turns out what’s underneath their tires do as well. Asphalt—a petroleum product used on roads and roofs—is a significant source of harmful chemicals that end up contributing to ozone and particulate matter pollution, according to a study published today in Science Advances. The…

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