Christopher Joyce
Christopher Joyce is a correspondent on the science desk at NPR. His stories can be heard on all of NPR's news programs, including NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition.
Joyce seeks out stories in some of the world's most inaccessible places. He has reported from remote villages in the Amazon and Central American rainforests, Tibetan outposts in the mountains of western China, and the bottom of an abandoned copper mine in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Over the course of his career, Joyce has written stories about volcanoes, hurricanes, human evolution, tagging giant blue-fin tuna, climate change, wars in Kosovo and Iraq, and the artificial insemination of an African elephant.
For several years, Joyce was an editor and correspondent for NPR's Radio Expeditions, a documentary program on natural history and disappearing cultures produced in collaboration with the National Geographic Society that was heard frequently on Morning Edition.
Joyce came to NPR in 1993 as a part-time editor while finishing a book about tropical rainforests and, as he says, "I just fell in love with radio." For two years, Joyce worked on NPR's national desk and was responsible for NPR's Western coverage. But his interest in science and technology soon launched him into parallel work on NPR's science desk.
In addition, Joyce has written two non-fiction books on scientific topics for the popular market: Witnesses from the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell (with co-author Eric Stover); and Earthly Goods: Medicine-Hunting in the Rainforest.
Before coming to NPR, Joyce worked for ten years as the U.S. correspondent and editor for the British weekly magazine New Scientist.
Joyce's stories on forensic investigations into the massacres in Kosovo and Bosnia were part of NPR's war coverage that won a 1999 Overseas Press Club award. He was part of the Radio Expeditions reporting and editing team that won the 2001 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University journalism award and the 2001 Sigma Delta Chi award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Joyce won the 2001 American Association for the Advancement of Science excellence in journalism award as well as the 2016 Communication Award from the National Academies of Sciences.
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As consumers rebel against plastic waste, there's a growing question: Do we invent something people can toss without harming the environment or do we change people by giving them a chance to reuse?
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Entrepreneurs are eager to find substitutes for plastic that naturally degrade. One option is a "natural" plastic made by microbes and then eaten by them. But the process is still in the early days. -
The number of alien species, likely brought by ship traffic, stunned scientists. And they suspect that the foothold of such creatures may have been underestimated in other tropical habitats, too. -
Alex Weber discovered more than 50,000 balls in the ocean near coastal California golf courses. When golf balls degrade, as these were doing, they release plastic particles and toxic chemicals. -
A young island man came to Manila for college and found a morass of plastic waste. Now he's found ways for Manila's poorest people to dig out, and shown how multinational companies create the problem.
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To really understand the plastic problem in countries like the Philippines, you have to understand how consumer goods there are packaged.
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Every year, 8 million tons of plastic wash into the oceans. The biggest sources are in Asia. In the Philippines, one man is going head-to-head with multinational corporations to stop the plastic tide. -
It was this year when scientists ratcheted up their warnings about the effects of a warming climate on weather. And the weather itself showed that scientists' predictions are getting better.
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As negotiators struggle to hammer out the rule book for a global climate agreement, scientists meeting in Washington, D.C., have yet more evidence linking climate change and extreme weather.
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The fortuitous dip in emissions of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, during the past three years is over, as economies turn up. The trend in the near future looks grim, say climate scientists.
