This past week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a report linking climate change to some of the extreme weather events of 2011, like the devastating drought in Texas and record high temperatures in Britain.
None of this bodes well for the future, but there is a glimmer of hope. It turns out that U.S. carbon emissions are down nearly 8 percent since 2006.
A legal showdown is evolving. It affects an American university, the British government, a brutal Irish paramilitary organization and the murdered mother of 10 children.
Journalist Ed Moloney is fighting to keep secret interviews with former paramilitary members of the Irish Republican Army out of the British government's hands. Those interviews are kept under lock and key at Boston College as part of an oral history project that Moloney started in 2001.
Although videos posted by Syrian activists show dozens of people buried in a mass grave in the village of Tremseh, Syria has rejected claims made by the United Nations that it used heavy weapons in the attack alleged to have taken place on Thursday. Weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz speaks with NPR's Deborah Amos who is watching the story from Turkey.
When you hear the word chia, you probably think of chia pets. Maybe you even mutter that catchy slogan: "ch-ch-ch-chia."
Or maybe not, but lately, chia seed has been getting buzz beyond those terra cotta figurines. It's becoming a popular health food. Rich in fiber, protein and the highest plant source of Omega 3s, the little seeds pack a major nutritional punch.
Wayne Coates grows and sells chia seeds and has a book called Chia: The Complete Guide to the Ultimate Superfood.
Academy Award-winning actress Celeste Holm was best known for roles in Gentleman's Agreement, All About Eve and Oklahoma!
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In 1960, Holm starred with Jane Fonda and James MacArther in Invitation To A March.
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Holm won the Academy Award in 1947 for best supporting actress for her performance in Gentlemen's Agreement.
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Holm played Bette Davis' best friend in the 1950 movie, All About Eve.
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Oscar-winning actress Celeste Holm was best known for roles in Gentleman's Agreement, All About Eve and Oklahoma!
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Holm was also known for her work in charity and the arts, but late in life her years were marked by a bitter, multi-year legal family battle that pitted her two sons against her and her fifth husband.
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Her Broadway breakout role was Ado Annie (holding the hat) in the 1943 musical Oklahoma!
Academy Award-winning actress Celeste Holm has died. A star on both stage and screen, Holm was best known for roles in Gentleman's Agreement, All About Eve and Oklahoma! She was 95.
Holm died early Sunday morning in her Manhattan apartment with her husband, family and close friends by her side. She had been hospitalized a couple weeks ago following a fire in actor Robert De Niro's apartment in the same building.
If there was one role that put Holm on the map, it was as the coquettish Ado Annie, in the 1943 hit musical, Oklahoma!
Equipment for transporting and housing coal sits idle in Cowen, W.Va. Since the natural gas boom, several mines in Webster County have either slowed or shut down operation, laying off hundreds of workers.
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Rich Lewis worked as a miner for almost two decades before being laid off by Arch Coal. He says he's considering taking a job at another mine, but it's not certain that mine will stay open.
At some point today, you will probably flip on a light switch. That simple action connects you to the oldest and most plentiful source of American electricity: coal.
Since the early 1880s — when Edison and Tesla pioneered the distribution of electrical power into our homes — most of that power has come from the process of burning coal.
Marcia Esters needs crowns fused to six of her bottom teeth and new dentures. But because of changes made to Medicaid in Pennsylvania, she now has to pay for it all herself.
"It's thousands of dollars' worth of work that I cannot afford," she says.
Esters also uses a wheelchair. Because she couldn't get get her teeth fixed, she has spent the last few months eating pureed food and avoiding people.
"I don't go anywhere unless I have to," she says. "If you could look or feel halfway decent, it just helps, it really does."
Garbage litters the banks of India's holy Yamuna River on World Water Day 2010. For decades, the Yamuna has been dying a slow death from pollution. According to Blackwell, even its most ardent defenders refer to it as a "sewage drain."
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According to Blackwell, environmental problems aren't always caused by the presence of something toxic. They can also be caused by the absence of something. Take, for example, Brazil, where intense soybean agriculture has been inching its way into the Amazon, posing a threat to forested regions.
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The abandoned village of Vezhishche in Belarus sits within the exclusion zone established after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The zone was one of Andrew Blackwell's first stops on his tour of the world's most ruined places.
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The coal-centric economy of Linfen, China, has earned it a reputation for being one of the most polluted cities in the world.
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Guiyu, China, is known for its electronics recycling workshops, but Blackwell says the town has a strangely rural, even agricultural, feel. "There are giant piles of keyboards, which reminded me a lot of bales of cotton," he says.
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Blackwell also visited the tar sands in Alberta, Canada, which would supply the oil for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline through the U.S.
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The abandoned village of Vezhishche in Belarus sits within the exclusion zone established after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The zone was one of Andrew Blackwell's first stops on his tour of the world's most ruined places.
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Credit Lucian Read / Courtesy of Rodale Books
Andrew Blackwell is a journalist and filmmaker living in New York City.
In some of the dirtiest places on Earth, author and environmentalist Andrew Blackwell found some beauty. His book, Visit Sunny Chernobyl, tours the deforestation of the Amazon, the oil sand mines in Canada and the world's most polluted city, located in China.
Blackwell says his ode to polluted locales is a bid for re-engagement with places people have shrunk away from in disgust.
Radioactive To Its Core
His first stop was the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster, Chernobyl.
Theweekends on All Things Considered series Movies I've Seen a Million Times features filmmakers, actors, writers and directors talking about the movies that they never get tired of watching.
