Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert explain how and why President Trump is rapidly rolling back environmental protections—weakening auto-emissions standards and the controls on mercury released by power plants, among other actions—in the midst of the worst viral pandemic in more than a century. Carolyn Kormann interviews a disease ecologist who hunts down viruses among cave-dwelling bats, and who blames human activity for our exposure to deadly novel viruses. And the historian Jill Lepore has an appreciation of Rachel Carson’s early writings about the ocean. If Carson had not died at fifty-six, she wonders, would she have blown the whistle on climate change decades earlier?
Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert on the Pandemic and the Environment
The two writers discuss how and why the Trump Administration is aggressively deregulating the environment, even during the national emergency of the coronavirus pandemic.
How Has COVID-19 Changed Our Relationship with Nature?
People from around the country describe how being quarantined has affected the way they perceive the outdoors.
Into the Bat Caves Where Coronaviruses Begin
Carolyn Kormann interviews Jonathan Epstein, a disease ecologist, about the search for viruses in their natural habitat.
Rachel Carson Dreams of the Sea
Before “Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson fell in love with the ocean. Her early writings about the sea and its creatures contain the seeds of what made her so widely influential.
