Environment & Climate

It’s before dawn on a late August morning, the Washington sky blanched with smoke drifting from distant wildfires, and Molly Alves and David Bailey have caught a beaver. The two biologists haul the ornery package of fat and fur, still penned into the trap that closed around him overnight like a giant clam, up the banks of a meandering, tea-colored stream.

When Meredith Ellis bought this northern Texas land several years ago, it was overgrazed and overrun with weeds. Now, she’s thrilled to find a dark green blob of fungus she rolls under her sparkly-nail-polished thumb. She picks a tiny patch of the green moss from between clumps of tall brown grass gone dormant with the fall chill.

The red plum’s presence confounds the third grader. She didn’t want the fruit in the first place, yet there it is. She doesn’t want to eat it, but she knows that tossing it into the garbage at Oakland’s Hoover Elementary School is wrong. Standing before containers for trash, recyclables, compostables, and unopened entrees, milk cartons, and whole fruit, the girl’s decision-making matches her Disney-movie hijab — Frozen.

An ingredient found in many everyday products is pushing wildlife towards the brink of extinction. It’s also displacing smallholder farmers and moving us closer to a climate catastrophe.

The rising demand for palm oil is contributing to deforestation worldwide, as forests are destroyed and cleared to build industrial-size palm oil plantations.

A new investigation found that the world’s biggest brands, including Unilever, Nestlé, Colgate-Palmolive and Mondelez, are responsible for destroying an area of rainforest almost twice the size of Singapore in less than three years. Why?