The government of French Polynesia plans to challenge an American startup’s proposal to explore the waters just beyond its maritime borders for seabed mining. “We were approached, but we were not consulted,” Moetai Brotherson, the territory’s president, told Grist. “We are not remaining passive while industrial activities are proposed immediately next to ecosystems that French Polynesia has…
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Kimbrelle Kyereh lives just a few hundred feet from the massive chemical storage tanks in St. Rose, in southeastern Louisiana. Oily fumes sometimes drift into her home, bringing headaches, nausea and insomnia. On one such night, she grabbed her son at 3 a.m. and fled to an all-night IHOP. In 2023, after years of coping with the noxious odors, Kyereh began collecting air samples in her yard…
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Two state agencies charged with overseeing Michigan’s natural resources and the environment have approved another set of permits for Enbridge’s Line 5 tunnel project, pushing the Canadian energy company closer to the full approval needed to begin construction. The Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy announced Wednesday that it had reapproved a set of permits that expired earlier…
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This summer, military forces from 30 nations are gathering in Hawaii for Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2026, the world’s largest maritime exercise. For its organizers, RIMPAC isn’t just five weeks of trainings, drills, and live-fire exercises — it’s an opportunity to enhance coordination and communication (what the military calls “interoperability”), which they say is critical for military…
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A heat wave is spreading across the U.S. this week that will affect over 250 million people from the Midwest to the East Coast. Last week, a heat dome covered much of Europe, causing over 1,300 excess deaths. This week, a new heat dome is bringing record-shattering heat to two thirds of the U.S. population, affecting areas that normally do not see such high temperatures.
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Max hears the plane before anyone else.
A low hum threads through the morning air above the Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Kenya’s central highlands. As it grows louder — a small propeller drifting in from Mount Kenya — Max is already moving.
He snatches a dry branch, paces the electric fence, and begins shouting — ah-ah-ah — his cries rising into a scream at the sky. He swings his arm and sends the stick flying upward. His hair bristles along his spine.
“It’s because of the plane,” says Stephen Mukundi, the sanctuary’s head caregiver. “He is remembering Burundi during the civil war.”
An view of Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary, set on the southeastern edge of the 360-square-kilometer Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia County — the only refuge of its kind in Kenya. Photo by Jaclynn Ashly.
A caregiver hands food through the fence at Sweetwaters. The sanctuary’s caregivers live on-site around the clock, learning each chimpanzee’s temperament so closely that they decide every evening who can safely sleep beside whom. Photo by Jaclynn Ashly.
Stephen Mukundi, the sanctuary’s head caregiver, walks the perimeter of the enclosure. He arrived at Ol Pejeta in 1996 and has known most of the chimpanzees here since they were infants — a second family, he says, that he has watched go from trauma to becoming chimpanzees again. Photo by Jaclynn Ashly.
Max was born in Burundi in 1988. Captured as an infant — his mother presumed killed — he spent his early years with a French film crew before being confiscated in 1990 at around two years old, and transferred to the Jane Goodall Institute’s rescue center in Bujumbura.
When the Burundian civil war