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Grant County, Washington has no shortage of food. There’s plenty of land devoted to growing wheat, potatoes, apples, mint, grapes, and peas in a county that ranked second in the state for agricultural sales in 2007. But, according to the new USDA Food Desert Locator database and mapping program, nearly one in four county residents lives in a food desert with limited access to affordable and nutritious food. Roughly half...

For all the stock we put into human rationality, our brains seem to be hardwired for chronic delusion about what the future holds. Optimism may have been essential for human survival—and it’s probably necessary for our mental health. But it likely also makes us prone to miscalculations—both insignificant and potentially calamitous. “Both neuroscience and social science suggest that we are more optimistic than realistic,” writes Tali Sharot in Time Magazine....

Here in the US, we’re so used to measuring a car’s efficiency in “miles per gallon” that it seems impossible to think that there might be a better way. But there is, and it’s used just north of the border. In addition to miles per gallon, Canada’s  fuel efficiency labels use a far more revealing and intuitive measure: “litres per 100 kilometres.” The important thing isn’t the switch to the...

Five years ago, many scientists probably thought they’d never see large pools of corrosive water near the ocean’s surface in their lifetimes. Basic chemistry told them that as the oceans absorbed more carbon dioxide pollution from cars and smokestacks and industrial processes, seawater would become more acidic. Eventually, the oceans could become corrosive enough to kill vulnerable forms of sea life like corals and shellfish and plankton. But scientists believed...

Every day, the oceans do us a huge favor. Across the planet, they absorb nearly one million metric tons of carbon dioxide each hour, removing about a third of the greenhouse gases from the atmosphere that would otherwise speed up global warming. This seems, at first, to be a massively beneficial service. But the oceans haven’t been able to soak up the extra carbon pollution without a cost. The basic...

Editor’s Note: David Brook is a long-time innovator and leader in the car-sharing industry. He contributed this guest post from Portland, where he consults and blogs on personal mobility. Many city dwellers are familiar with Zipcar and other carsharing companies cropping up in major cities and college campuses across America. The business model is based on a company leasing vehicles, placing them throughout an urban area, providing insurance, and requiring...

Sightline’s reluctant cyclist checking in here—although I might have to take “reluctant” out of my title: over a month into my cycling adventures and I can count the days I haven’t been on my bike on one hand. Drivers and cyclists alike probably noticed that today is National Bike to Work Day. (I’m still coming down from the caffeine buzz of slurping down three cups of free coffee provided to...

Clark: Here’s evidence that poor folks don’t own many cars.  At least not in big cities.  So despite the rhetoric, a pro-car tilt in public policy isn’t necessarily “populist,” it’s often simply regressive. Former Grist editor Kathryn Schulz does a wise and witty TED talk on being wrong. My two favorite bits:  starting at 2:32, she discusses the key paradox of wrongness: we all know we’re wrong about something, yet if...

New rules approved by Washington’s lawmakers will cut the amount of salmon-harming copper,   toxic coal pollutants, and algae-stoking fertilizers that foul local waterways. Oregon legislators are halfway to approving a ban on copper brake pads—a ban that Washington approved last year. It’s exciting news for Puget Sound, the Columbia and Willamette rivers, and countless other waterways threatened by the region’s fire hose of stormwater filth. But in truth, the...

Finally. If you don’t like being dependent on oil—but find that you do need to drive—you’ve got at least one decent option. The Nissan Leaf is the first mass-produced, mass-market electric vehicle to hit the US sales floors in…well, essentially forever. (Yeah, I know about the Tesla and the EV1. But the former is too expensive to be in range of most families, and the latter was never really offered...