You probably know orchids as the big, colorful flowers found in grocery stores and given as housewarming gifts. But those tropical beauties represent only a fraction of the estimated 25,000 orchid species worldwide. While their showy relatives fly off the shelves, North America’s more understated native orchids are disappearing in the wild. Scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center are working to protect these orchids and their habitats, but first they need solve a surprisingly difficult problem: how to grow one.

Plastics are everywhere. Jane Patton, U.S. Fossil Economy Campaign Manager at the Center for International Environmental Law, says, “They're finding microplastics in babies' first poops, which is really dangerous and scary when we consider the full chemical profile.” 

Diane Wilson is a lifelong shrimper in the Texas Gulf. When Formosa Plastics built a factory in her small rural community, the county gained the dubious honor of being named the most toxic in the country. 

Wilson took on the multinational company. She would kayak around the waters surrounding the factory, collecting pollution and water samples. In the process, “I lost my job. I lost my boat. I lost my marriage. I lost friends. And all because I started watching and fighting Formosa,” says Wilson. 

In 2019, a federal judge found Formosa Plastics guilty of being a serial offender of the Clean Water Act. The company agreed to a 50 million settlement and zero future discharge from the plant. But that did not deter the company from its continued pollution. “In the first year [the fine] was $15,000 per day and then it was $20,000, $25,000. Now it's $65,000 per day,” Wilson says. “Since June of 2021, when we really started having a way to monitor their discharge, they have violated it over 600 times and they have been penalized by us over 16 million dollars.”

“To me, the solution is the era of plastic production has to end,” says Wilson.

While the idea that plastics are a blight on our environment is not new, it's becoming clear that plastics are a significant climatethreat as well. The production of plastics alone produces about 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. 

Oil and gas companies see that heightened awareness of climate change is creating an existential threat to their fossil fuel profits. And so they are doubling down on the petrochemical side of their business.  The Center for International Environmental Law’s Jane Patton says, “We know that the industry has for some time been planning to double or even triple the production of plastics by 2050.” 

The industry would like us to believe that recycling is the solution. But only 9% of the plastic ever produced has been recycled. Susannah Scott, chemistry professor at UC Santa Barbara, explains that plastics are not like aluminum cans, which can easily be melted down and formed into new aluminum cans, because aluminum is just one, single element. 

“There are hundreds of different types of plastics and they're all mixed together,” Scott says. And “when you reprocess plastics or polymers, these are organic molecules that actually don't like to be reprocessed. when you melt them, when you stretch them again, they break and the difference in the properties of the recycled material is enough to make it problematic to reuse them for the same purpose.” 

The United Nations recently held the fourth of five planned meetings aimed at hammering out a landmark international treaty to end plastics pollution. Alexis Jackson, Ocean Policy and Plastics Lead at the Nature Conservancy in California, says, “The pace of global production that we're seeing on plastics warrants global action and alignment.” 

Ending plastics production entirely is probably not an option. The medical industry, for example, relies on plastic in countless life-saving devices. And plastic components replacing steel in cars have made them far more fuel efficient. Still, Jackson says, “The solutions that we build have to be feasible and yet still need to be ambitious to ensure that harm, or undue harm, is not done to people and to the environment.”

The outlook for the Colorado River could be better than previously thought.

In response to the Supreme Court's Sackett decision, the Biden administration moves to protect wetlands.

A new study proves that conservation works—and that we’re getting better at it.

An orangutan reaches for a natural first aid kit after a brawl.