Dan Zukowski

Short days and frequent snows can make Maine winters seem gloomy. But for renewable energy companies and supporters, the gloom has persisted for the last eight years under a governor openly hostile to solar and wind energy. With the 2018 election, a pro-environment Democratic governor and Democratic majorities in both chambers of the state legislature were swept into power.

From the peak of Mt. Rausu, a clear view of the Shiretoko Peninsula opens from the Okhotsk Sea on the west to the Pacific Ocean on the east. Below, a dense green boreal forest of conifers, maples, and birch hides hundreds of brown bears and 590,000 sika deer. Japanese wolves once roamed this wilderness but their primeval howls fell silent here, and throughout Japan, more than a hundred years ago.

It was called epic, historic, and terrifying. A wall of sand a mile high swept across Arizona on July 9, 2018, knocking out power to 100,000 customers. The dust storm kept going for 200 miles, finally petering out in Baja, California. Sandstorms like these carry heavy metals, toxic chemicals, and microparticles from 350,000 acres of open-mine tailings, which get into the lungs, water, and soil of Arizona residents.

A quiet, sunny afternoon in New England quickly turned to chaos and tragedy as a series of 80 fires and explosions erupted across three communities in the Merrimack Valley north of Boston on September 13. Extreme overpressure in a Columbia Gas distribution system caused uncontrollable natural gas venting over a wide area, and the resulting blasts killed one and injured more than two dozen.

Since July 1, more than 460 dead seals have washed up on beaches and islands in Maine, New Hampshire, and northern Massachusetts. Another 137 coughing, sneezing, and sick seals have stranded themselves, overwhelming marine animal rescuers. In an announcement last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) declared the mass die-off an unusual mortality event (UME)—adding to the three other UMEs currently affecting right, humpback, and minke whales in the same waters.

In 1980, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed the last 14 pure red wolves from the wild with plans to breed them in captivity and repopulate the landscape. Seven years later, four males and four females were released on the Albermarle Peninsula in North Carolina. After reaching a peak population of about 130 animals by 2006, gunshot and vehicular collisions have cut their numbers to just two dozen. The USFWS is now poised to abandon efforts to save them, this time with no plan for how, when, or where to reunite red wolves with their natural habitat.

More than 100 years ago, hunters nearly wiped out the Gulf of Maine’s Atlantic puffins. Climate change may finish the job.

When searing black lava from fissure 8 slid into the Pacific Ocean at Kapoho Bay on June 3, it had been five weeks since the collapse of the Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō crater, along the eastern rift zone of the Kīlauea volcano on Hawaii's Big Island. Toxic, acid-laden steam billowed high above boiling waves. Within 36 hours, the bay became paved over by lava, creating a new coastline almost a mile out and destroying shallow-water coral reefs and tidepools.

It’s a chilly, damp spring morning in Sewall Woods. The red oaks have begun to leaf out among the white pines, and a soundscape of songbirds plays in the tall trees. This 91-acre former dairy farm along the Whiskeag River in Maine has been designated as a demonstration forest by the Kennebec Estuary Land Trust, where landowners, foresters, and loggers can see that cutting a few trees actually helps bird conservation.

Bad things are happening to whales along the Atlantic coast of North America. Last year, 17 North Atlantic right whales died, as did 33 humpback whales and 28 minke whales. NOAA Fisheries declared each of these an “unusual mortality event,” the first time they’ve ever had three such declarations simultaneously in the same region.

Melting permafrost carries unknown dangers for Arctic marine life. On a small island in the Beaufort Sea, brown muck slides down tall cliffs, oozes into mud pools, and slithers into the ocean. It’s summer, and the permafrost is thawing. As the sediment enters the sea, it clouds the coastal waters, releasing organic carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. But that’s not all.

Broken, brown tree stumps and roots lie askew along an ancient peat bog on Block Island, churned up by Hurricane Sandy. Such bogs are not unusual in New England, but this one is different: it’s 6,000 years old and under 12 feet of water—a relic of a time when the ocean floor was filling in as mile-high glaciers melted and seas rose. [Archeologists and Native American tribes work together to identify culturally important sites underwater.]