After enormous lobbying efforts, Monsanto’s GMO soybeans, treated with Roundup, became the country’s largest export, as cancer rates and other health issues skyrocketed.

The muted response to Todd Haynes’s “Dark Waters” is depressingly similar to our culture’s muted response to climate change

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year. Here is the best in science and nature.

From Martin Luther to The Nutcracker, Germany’s original national nightmare was a tangled knot of writhing rats.

Every year, vehicles on Brazil’s ever-expending road network hit over 400 million Brazilian animals, causing series declines in some species — and Brazil isn’t the only country expanding its infrastructure.

“Each arm, with its own brain inside, moves completely independent of the others. So much so that arms have been known to steal food from each other.”

“The crowd seemed incredible—like a bag of Skittles had been scattered down the slope.”

If masculinity really is in crisis — and that’s a big if — we should at least be able to agree that it’s not women’s responsibility to fix it.

The life-long writer, teacher, and activist believed she could save a piece of land or a species, but after her brother took his life, she questioned her optimism and how to grieve for him and the planet.

Language has always changed, but the introduction of technology means it is adapting in ways we have never experienced before.

Search and rescue teams train for the worst conditions. But the worst conditions are getting worse. Are they ready for the next big disaster?

A three-part collaboration exposes the state of Texas’ willingness to violate federal law for the sake of the coal industry.

Knowing what we now know about global warming, is procreation irresponsible?

A family’s losses after Hurricane Sandy didn’t come in the usual order or with the usual speed.

Leo Schwartz finds out what lessons can be learned from the burned-out Oregon backcountry.

Fast food is killing the human world. Now it could be killing California gulls’ protected island habitat.

What does environmental justice look like in a landscape overrun by prisons? Where the incarcerated suffer from unusually polluted surroundings, and prisons are a toxin in their own right?

If traumatic brain injuries can impact the parts of the brain responsible for personality, judgment, and impulse control, maybe injury should be a mitigating factor in criminal trials — but one neuroscientist discovers that assigning crime a biological basis creates more issues than it solves.

We’re developing high-tech genetic tools to pour new life into animals lost to human destruction. Deciding how — and whether — to use that power is as complex as the science behind it.

This month’s books newsletter is suspended in a state of anticipation.

Marc Hamer discusses life, death, and the lost art of catching a mole.

Sometimes a flower is just a flower, and sometimes it’s a powerful vehicle for giving free rein to our worst colonialist and misogynist impulses.

We need to start talking about seemingly drastic approaches to the climate crisis, such as sun-dimming aerosols, right now — or we risk losing democratic control of the process.

From global capital to YouTube, carbon credits to indigenous land defenders in their own words, Will Meyer has compiled a reading list on who lit the match and how the fire might be stopped.

Being an adult at the end of the world means listening to children tell the truths grown-ups refuse to actually hear.

Nell Zink, Joy Williams, and a different kind of climate skepticism.

Anne Boyer encounters a familiar system — that grand and easy-to-mistake-for-everything system — at the cancer pavilion.

Writing about the culture and beauty of the Mississippi Delta requires seeing the mighty river as more than a line of water.

When a high-risk pregnancy jeopardizes their eyesight, Heather Quinn explores the expectations of motherhood and finds common ground with a patron saint.

In 2002, still reeling from the dot-com crash, Google realized they’d been harvesting a very valuable raw material — your behavior.