Forty years ago, as I was leaving my friend’s house to throw a baseball outside, his father stopped us for inspection. “Where are you going?” Peter’s father asked. “When will you be back?” And most pointedly: “Have you done your homework?” Peter had, but I had not. “I’ll get around to it,” I said. “Ah, well, here you...

However differently we register this pandemic we understand it as global; it brings home the fact that we are implicated in a shared world. The capacity of living human creatures to affect one another can be a matter of life or death. Because so many resources are not equitably shared, and so many have only a small or vanished share of the world, we cannot recognize the pandemic as global...

The COVID-19 pandemic, like the climate crisis, is amplifying existing racial and gender injustices in our society. TIME editors Naina Bajekal and Elijah Wolfson moderated a conversation with two women working to create a more inclusive climate leadership space: American author, strategist and teacher Katharine Wilkinson, who co-founded and leads The All We Can Save…

In an earlier era, green referred to grass and trees and jealous eyes. But over the past half-century, green has taken on a life of its own. The Green movement deals with the collisions and contagions of the contemporary world—how to view them, and how to cure them. The book from which this essay is excerpted, The Spirit of Green, examines a wide array of social, economic and political...

American tailpipes have played an outsized role in global warming. In 2019, transportation accounted for 29% of the country’s human-generated emissions, the most of any sector tracked by the Environmental Protection Agency—and the U.S. is the world’s second-largest carbon emitter. The Biden Administration wants to clean up transportation’s dirty reputation, and make...

Mars is a lousy place to try to fly a helicopter. There’s the temperature, for one thing—a paralyzing -90º C (-130º F), frigid enough to cause nearly any machinery to freeze up and lock. There’s the remoteness too; Mars is currently 287 million km (178 million mi.) from Earth, meaning that radio signals, even moving at light speed, take nearly 16 minutes to travel...

1171 Shoreham looks much like it did when Anna Zimmerman lived there: modest but presentable. A good starter home for Zimmerman and her husband when they bought it in 2005, for a while it provided an idyllic existence in suburban Charleston, S.C., a community of friendly neighbors for their young child, a quaint backyard and even…

Last summer, I wrote a short story entitled Rat Island, set in a post-pandemic United States. In it, the rule of law and social order have broken down, with mobs roaming the streets of Los Angeles. A wealthy group of people stand on top of a skyscraper, waiting for the helicopter that will whisk them away, but the crowd storms the building, desperate to board. In the fall of 2020 my agent...

On Jan. 19, 2006, the Earth lost half a ton. More precisely, it lost 1,054 lbs (478 kg), but it’s O.K. to round down, since the 13 octillion-pound planet hardly noticed the missing weight. The flyweight fleck of matter was very much born of the planet, a collection of metal and silicon and copper and rubber and plastics and foil and a bit of plutonium hammered together into the New...

In 2018, Scott McCaulay had a “Wizard of Oz moment.” He was a final-year architecture student at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland when the U.N. published a report warning that the world had 12 years to transform society to avoid catastrophic, irreversible climate change. Buildings, the report said, account for 20% of energy-related global greenhouse-gas emissions, and the...

We heard about the storm a week before the rains. Manny figured they wouldn’t be a problem. Jae disagreed. The news called it a minor inconvenience—a flash flood at most—but we’d learned not to lean too deep into forecasts. In the morning, Houston felt sticky. Our heels slapped across the floorboards. We plodded around the house, yawning and stretching and tugging at our...

The globalization of manufacturing has transformed some of the world’s poorest nations to unprecedented levels of economic prosperity. But the resulting increase in poorly controlled emissions and eco-degradation has caused unsustainable levels of local air and water pollution, destabilizing the climate and threatening biodiversity. Just as the vast development of technology hastened...

Nature and climate are inextricably linked. Nature loss drives climate change and vice versa. Right now, both are in crisis. Repairing our natural climate—reversing deforestation, for example, or conserving ecosystems to sequester and store carbon—addresses both these crises. So-called natural climate solutions are one of the most important and cost-effective ways to stay on track...

To illustrate the dramatic effects of climate change on our interconnected world for the April 26 issue of TIME, we turned the cover canvas over to “an artist who paints without a paintbrush.” Malaysian artist Red Hong Yi spent two weeks creating an image that is part sculpture, part performance art. She and her six-person team constructed a 7.5 x 10-foot world map out of 50,000...

When you think of climate solutions, you probably think of renewable energy or electric vehicles. But while we need these kinds of innovations, there are other powerful solutions we are not paying proper attention to. There exists an environmental solution that can reduce inequality, build resilience to the climate crisis and reduce emissions all at the same time. It’s called educating...

When I was 8 years old, I wrote a letter asking President Nixon to do what he could to protect our planet. I didn’t know I’d one day go on to lead the agency he founded, the Environmental Protection Agency, or build on that work at Apple. But I saw the impact pollution was having on my community, contaminating our air and water. I knew then, as I know now, that when people’s...

On her third day as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Marcia Fudge phoned the White House. She had taken over an agency with a role to play addressing a range of crises as the lack of affordable housing in U.S. cities has left hundreds of thousands homeless and millions more in financial straits.…

This coming May, millions of people around the United States will have front-row seats to an extraordinary entomological event: Trillions of Brood X cicadas across 15 states will emerge almost synchronously after having spent the last 17 years underground. The males will take up elevated positions, each buzzing as loud as a lawnmower to attract females. After mating, the adult cicadas will die...

Let’s stipulate one thing: there’s absolutely no reason for us to go to space. It does nothing to feed us, to clothe us, to protect us, to heal us. It’s dangerous and hideously expensive too, a budget-busting luxury that policy makers and administrators have spent decades trying to defend—always unsuccessfully because the fact is, there’s no practical defense for...

Susan Stewart, a Penn State engineering professor specializing in wind energy, waited more than 10 years to see an offshore wind turbine up close. A pregnancy caused her to miss a chance in 2005 to tour offshore turbines in Europe. There, offshore wind farms have produced clean energy since the early 1990s, but regulatory roadblocks and a lack of political will left plans for U.S. plants...

It’s perfectly fine that human beings want to travel in space. But we have to reckon with the fact that space doesn’t want anything to do with us. The exterior environment of space, of course, represents instantaneous death, what with the killing cold and the absence of any atmosphere. But even inside a spacecraft or a space station—cozy, pressurized, temperature-controlled,...

A version of this article also appeared in the It’s Not Just You newsletter. Sign up here to receive a new edition every Sunday. CHASING RAINBOWS (AND VACCINES) We humans are notoriously unreliable, superstitious narrators, always scanning the horizon for signs that validate what our hearts have already told us. Take me, for example. I…

In central Washington State, electric utilities are watching for homes with oddly high power usage after a recent surge in cryptocurrency prices collided with a boom in NFTs, or “non-fungible tokens”—an emerging technology that uses crypto platforms to authenticate ownership of digital files. In an emerging hype cycle, such digital assets have sold at auction for millions of...

You wouldn’t think sound could travel very well on Mars—what with the planet’s bare wisp of an atmosphere, which is just 1% the thickness of ours. Yet if you could stand without a spacesuit on the Martian surface (not advised) you’d actually hear plenty. That fact has already been confirmed by the Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars on Feb. 18 and, using a microphone...