Distillations magazine

The successes and shortcomings of the first Earth Day in 1970 still reverberate.

To fight air pollution, officials first had to convince Californians that carmakers were the enemy, not cars.

India’s vultures have been driven to the brink of extinction in a matter of decades. Their loss threatens the well-being of the country’s human population.

Scientists William Vogt and Norman Borlaug took very different approaches to feeding the world.

Foul-mouthed, heavy-drinking eccentric Harry R. Truman became a folk hero for refusing to evacuate his home in the months before Mount St. Helens erupted. Where did he go once it did?

Drought drove American pursuit of desalination in the mid-20th century. Now a changing climate has compelled nations around the world to embrace the double-eged technology.

Why resources spent building a colony on the red planet would be a waste of money.

Eleanor Roosevelt thanks a chemical engineering firm in Philadelphia for manufacturing water for the king and queen of England on their visit to America.

City dwellers of the 19th century were dogged by a foul terror: miasma.

The good and bad of an everlasting invention.

To slow global warming scientists have tried schemes both simple and bizarre to bottle up cow burps.

Making eco-friendly cement is easy; the hard part comes later.

Why would anyone visit a radioactive ghost town or the remnants of a nuclear reactor?

Our histories of the infamous chemical often conflict with the facts.

Or will it speed the animal’s demise?

In the 1940s two chemists joined forces to fight Los Angeles’s stinky, stinging air.

How do we think about a world that doesn’t yet exist?

Was Svante Arrhenius the first climate change believer?