Ron Meador

Great recent reads on disrupted river transport nationwide, a long history of trying to make the Mississippi behave, and the ongoing crisis in getting barges through New Orleans.

The driver is industrial use, like mining and logging, and the pace of lifting protections is accelerating.

Fine particulates are linked to cataracts; also, they may travel directly from nose to brain, bypassing lungs.

Contrary to what you may have heard, Minnesota’s Environmental Quality Board requires full environmental impact statements for only a handful of projects each year.

A pair of fungi are implicated in 501 species declines, exceeding the havoc caused by rats — and house cats.

Also: Why unfunded cleanup costs are a virtual certainty in mining for copper, nickel and other metals.

The study finds an overall decline in sustainable fish catch of 4.1 percent worldwide. It represents an annual loss in seafood production of about 1.4 million metric tons, or a bit over 3 billion pounds.

Our collective choices undermine security, too: Of 6,000 plant species cultivated for food, just nine account for two-thirds of global crop production.

An example of the coming unpredictability is Madison’s iconic Lake Mendota, where ice used to form early and last all season; this winter it has reopened and refrozen twice so far.

Wood-eating marine pests might offer a path to renewable energy breakthrough  MinnPost

Of Teflon and A-bombs, Chicago's buried river and other great reads  MinnPost

Minnesota's Deborah Swackhamer is honored for speaking out on meddling at EPA  MinnPost

Meet some of our oddest, oldest fishes — as they rapidly approach extinction  MinnPost

Scenes from a battleground: California struggles in the new era of megafire  MinnPost

Meet some ‘ecological agrarians,’ who’ve never separated the natural world from food production.

Some species count more than others in our ‘evolutionary history’ — should we save them first?

Key trends are accelerating, with major catastrophes in less than 10 years, a British sustainability expert says.

Can it really be safe to forage for leafy greens that grew in a stew of industrial pollution? Yep.

Renegade researchers, “the nastiest feud in science,” and how people compete with apes for water in Rwanda’s changing climate.

Was there really such broad consensus on what had to be done to address climate change? Was the marquee failure all that pivotal?