Environment & climate

Off the coast of Northern California, a vanished predator triggered an explosion of purple sea urchins that devoured 95% of a bull kelp forest in a few years. This is the story of a single missing species, a barren underwater desert, and the divers now hand-culling urchins to bring the forest back.

In 1987 the world signed the Montreal Protocol to phase out the chemicals eating the ozone layer, and it became the most successful environmental treaty ever made. This is the story of how a global panic over aerosol cans turned into rare, measurable planetary healing — and what the recovering ozone hole teaches us about fixing shared problems.

In the deserts of the American West, a handful of ranchers and biologists stopped fighting beavers and started deploying them like engineers, rewetting cracked valleys that decades of money couldn't heal. This is the story of how one rodent's dam-building instinct became a low-cost weapon against drought, and why agencies once paid to kill them now pay to move them in.

Engineered wood is strong enough to raise tall buildings while storing carbon instead of emitting it. Explore how mass timber works and why it could transform one of the world's dirtiest industries.

Generating renewable power is increasingly cheap; storing it and moving it where it's needed is the real bottleneck. Explore the engineering and economics of grids, batteries, and why the transition lives or dies on infrastructure.

Heat, drought, and rising seas are already pushing people to move. Explore how a warming world is reshaping habitability and the geopolitical pressures building around large-scale migration.