Zoë Schlanger
@zoeschlanger.bsky.social
Reporter covering chemicals, climate, cool plants. Author of THE LIGHT EATERS, a plant book, out from Harper Books. I'm zoeschlanger.99 on Signal
"We are given only a limited number of truly perfect summer days in our time on Earth. One of the more insidious cruelties of fossil fuel greed is how it slowly strips those days from us... perhaps without us even realizing what we have lost." heated.world/p/another-su... @emorwee.bsky.social
Another summer day, stolen
What are we still waiting to learn?
heated.world
If you want more amazing stories like this, go read The Light Eaters by @zoeschlanger.bsky.social. It's a fascinating and fun read about the wondrous world of plants around us. I can not recommend this book highly enough.
Ars Technica@arstechnica.com · 3mo ago
Eight Bears is in great company with @zoeschlanger.bsky.social and @jonathanslaght.com in @parademag.bsky.social wrap-up of popular environmental books for Earth Day. parade.com/news/popular...
12 Popular Books About Nature to Read This Earth Day, According to Goodreads Members
Get closer to Mother Nature with these Goodreads Earth Day picks.
parade.com
"No modern American city has ever run out of water. But chances are rising that Corpus Christi could be the first..." "While city pools and splash pads consume almost 2 million gallons of water over the course of a summer, a single Exxon plastics plant consumes 13 million gallons per day." hmmm
Corpus Christi plans to declare a 'water emergency.' What does that mean?
City leaders intend to make unprecedented cuts to water use in September, but they aren’t sure exactly how.
kut.org
I have a long story out today about what’s going down at the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. This org touches everything that’s happening globally on climate change, and is painfully (bc it’s so esoteric) important to climate action. Hope you give it a read. heatmap.news/carbon-remov...
Leading Climate Standards Group Fraught With Secrecy and Bias, Whistleblowers Say
A new report shared exclusively with Heatmap documents failures of transparency and governance at the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.
heatmap.news
Conifer needles live a long time, unlike deciduous leaves. A new paper finds they anticipate their shaded future, making shade-adapted needles even though they typically start their life in full sunlight. Great summary: www.botany.one/conifer-leav... And full paper: academic.oup.com/aob/advance-...
Conifer leaves anticipate their shaded future
Densely packed needles along the shoots of evergreen conifers exhibit shade-acclimated photosynthetic characteristics even under full sunlight
botany.one
I've covered the plastic industry for years, but reviewing @bethgardiner.bsky.social's new PLASTIC INC for the @nytimes.com was unsettling. You know about Big Tobacco, and how Exxon knew all along about climate change. Plastic really is the next true crime story. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/b...
Life in Plastic: It’s Not Fantastic
nytimes.com
NEW: ProPublica recently reported that the U.S. Forest Service knowingly issued protective gear containing PFAS to wildland firefighters. The agency says it has now stopped distributing those garments. By @abestreep.bsky.social
U.S. Forest Service Stops Issuing Firefighter Pants That Contain PFAS, Following ProPublica’s Reporting
Officials at the agency knew about the use of potentially dangerous “forever chemicals” in protective gear years before publicly acknowledging the issue, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.
propublica.org
strangely crucial to the oil industry too, these bizarre ancient teeth predictably change colors at higher temperatures and are used by oil geologists to figure out whether organic-rich rocks have been cooked enough to generate petroleum
Brandon Bishop@brandontbishop.bsky.social · 6mo agoIf you want fossil "teeth" horror shows, you want Conodonts. This somehow fit into a mouth, about 400 million years ago. It's unclear, but something very much like this thing is probably ancestral to all vertebrates--this is our great-great-...-great grandma. www.researchgate.net/publication/...
Episode 2 of "Nature in Crisis," the podcast I'm doing with @meehancrist.bsky.social for the @lrb.co.uk is now up. We discuss "The Light Eaters" by @zoeschlanger.bsky.social. Plant intelligence, plant agency, the pace and place of plants. www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and...
Podcast: Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith · Nature in Crisis: ‘The Light Eaters’ by Zoë Schlanger
lrb.co.uk
what we're cutting: health care food stamps preschool environmental protections international aid scientific research what we're buying:
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 7mo agoPurchasing and converting these warehouse detention camps will cost the U.S. government billions of dollars. So far ICE has purchased at least half a dozen warehouses at a cost of $70-$110 million each. It'll cost billions more to refit them into detention camps, and hire staff.
One of most mind-boggling things about climate change is how much faster it is than planet can accommodate. It takes ~1,000 years for deep water to mix with surface (as Scott Denning puts it "The deep water does not know we are here yet!"), and some Earth processes that remove CO2 take 100,000 years
Kate Marvel@drkatemarvel.bsky.social · 7mo agothis is because the ocean is deep as hell and it takes basically forever (ie longer than I'll be around) for the message "you gotta heat up" to get there. So right now we're in a "transient" state: the energy balance is out of whack, and the planet is far out of equilibrium
Proud to have been cited in this piece by @vermontgmg.bsky.social- one of the best there is. Back when Quartz was still around, @zoeschlanger.bsky.social and I got an internal document from a DHS insider, showing Border Patrol and CBP officers getting arrested at a higher rate than any other cops
Garrett M. Graff@vermontgmg.bsky.social · 7mo agoCurious why ICE and CBP agents are so brutal? Here's a useful explainer I wrote last week, before Saturday's outrageous murder, about how uniquely unsuited ICE and CBP are for this moment—and why they were so corruptible into Trump's own fascist secret police: www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/ice-101-ho...
"Tidestromia oblongifolia took only two days to increase its photosynthetic capacity to produce energy and thrive in extreme heat, and by day 14 reached its ideal photosynthetic temperature of 45 °C (113 °F)" #PlantScience #PlantStress #ClimateChange Original paper: www.cell.com/current-biol...
The 'Hell-Plant' of Death Valley offers hope to a hotter world
We humans are a delicate bunch. We don’t have bark, boney exo-plates, or lush fur to protect us from hostile environments, so we have to steal what other creatures produce just to survive in regions a...
newatlas.com
NEW: I obtained internal emails from the Department of Energy's climate working group. They show the group plotting to produce a second misleading climate report, DOE officials avoiding public disclosure laws, DOE peer reviewers stating they weren't qualified: www.eenews.net/articles/doe...
DOE sees bigger role for climate contrarians, records show
A small team of researchers who dispute mainstream climate science may play an outsize role in the next National Climate Assessment.
eenews.net
The environment flows through our bodies, altering our trajectories in ways medicine is just starting to see. "Your 'environment' could be the refinery a town over, the lead in the paint of your mother’s home, the plastic sheath of a Hot Pocket you microwaved in 1996." www.wired.com/story/scient...
Scientists Thought Parkinson’s Was in Our Genes. It Might Be in the Water
New ideas about chronic illness could revolutionize treatment, if we take the research seriously.
wired.com
Realtors know that, in many parts of the country, if you educate people about climate risk, the housing market will collapse. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/c...
Zillow Removes Climate Risk Scores From Home Listings
nytimes.com
"The entire financial system, including government bonds and mortgages, is premised on the idea that tomorrow will look something like today. In a world that’s 3 degrees warmer, it assuredly will not" @peterbrannen.bsky.social in @theatlantic.com -->> www.theatlantic.com/science/2025...
The @coveringclimatenow.org awards are always such an impressive array of global journalism- congrats to all the 2025 winners, this is a truly killer reading list: coveringclimatenow.org/projects/the...
The 2025 CCNow Journalism Awards — Covering Climate Now
Covering Climate Now is thrilled to announce the winners of the 2025 CCNow Journalism Awards. Our awards program, now in its fifth year, honors excellent reporting on many critical dimensions of the c...
coveringclimatenow.org
More than 5 million people face an increased cancer risk because they live near a type of industrial plant that would have been subject to rules put forward by the Biden. The Trump administration is rolling them back By the inimitable @lisalsong.bsky.social www.propublica.org/article/epa-...
Air Pollution From Industrial Facilities Is Far Worse Than Estimated
The Trump administration has put a stop to EPA rules that would have required more than 130 industrial facilities to install air monitors to measure pollution. Millions of people living near these pla...
propublica.org
🚨EXCLUSIVE🚨 Many things are changing before our eyes. Others are harder to see Like the US economy Americans are spending more 💲 recovering from disasters and preparing for the next one. 36% of US GDP growth since 2000 is related to climate disasters. Welcome to the Disaster Industrial Complex 🎁🔗
Disaster Recovery Is an $8 Trillion Driver of US Growth
Investors are on the hunt for companies powering the disaster industrial complex, which are fueling US growth and outpacing the S&P 500
bloomberg.com
Hi. I wrote an essay about AI slop: How it feels like an invasive species for the internet. How its boosters describe building a future that’s devoid of craft. How frictionlessness can be nihilistic & how this stuff seems to leach part of our shared humanity out of the world. I hope you'll read it.
AI’s Invasive Species
The slop is winning.
theatlantic.com
De Cosmos boekenprijs is in het leven geroepen om jongeren te enthousiasmeren voor populair wetenschappelijke boeken. Dit zijn twee prachtige enthousiasmerende boeken van @dorineschenk.bsky.social en @zoeschlanger.bsky.social www.newscientist.nl/blogs/dorine...:
Dorine Schenk en Zoë Schlanger winnen de Cosmos Boekenprijs 2025
Op vrijdag 17 oktober werd voor de vierde keer de Cosmos Boekenprijs uitgereikt voor uitblinkende populairwetenschappelijke boeken over de natuurwetenschappen.
newscientist.nl
