Our colleagues publish thousands of great stories every year, but these 10 are some that our staff kept coming back to in 2018. If you have some extra time over the holidays, we recommend you check them out.

They do not, we should warn you, paint a very pretty picture. We spent much of the year covering the rapidly approaching deadline for fixing climate change, and the fact that extractive businesses who have fueled it are also failing to share that wealth with most of the population. At Fast Company, we often focus on solutions. Many of these stories helped us frame the problems that we need solutions for–from exploited workers to mass extinction and everything in between. (Click on the titles to read the articles.)

The Insect Apocalypse Is Here, the New York Times

Bugs are not usually the poster animal for extinction. You’re going to garner a lot more sympathy with a polar bear or a whale than a cockroach, but this truly horrifying article makes it clear that humankind’s impact on the natural world reaches all levels, and with potentially disastrous consequences. Bugs are, in fact, vitally important to the world’s ecosystems, and now they’re disappearing incredibly quickly:

In 2013, Krefeld entomologists confirmed that the total number of insects caught in one nature reserve was nearly 80% lower than the same spot in 1989. They had sampled other sites, analyzed old data sets, and found similar declines: Where 30 years earlier, they often needed a liter bottle for a week of trapping, now a half-liter bottle usually sufficed. But it would have taken even highly trained entomologists years of painstaking work to identify all the insects in the bottles. So the society used a standardized method for weighing insects in alcohol, which told a powerful story simply by showing how much the overall mass of insects dropped over time. “A decline of this mixture,” Sorg said, “is a very different thing than the decline of only a few species.”

A Kingdom From Dust, California Sunday Magazine

Stewart and Lynda Resnick’s story is one of how the U.S.’s appetites–and appetite for growth–has made and lost fortunes, and destroyed the planet in the process. The Resnicks are the largest farmers in the United States (you may know them as the people behind Pom pomegranate juice and the bogus claims about its health effects). Their shrewd businesses decisions have grown an empire in California, but growing the empire took so much water that there’s none left to sustain it.

“Let’s call it what it is,” he says. “It’s gambling. Stewart gambled and won for many years. He gambled on the price of nuts going up, and he gambled on the water never going dry. He kept planting more and more trees. But he got too big. Too many pistachios. Too many almonds. Too many pomegranates. Like a lot of empires, it comes to an end.”

There’s an ongoing battle between 7-Eleven corporate and its franchisees that, in a Trump world, has taken on new, intense dimensions of race and identity. While before the chain celebrated the diversity of its store owners, new corporate leadership has been less cosmopolitan, leading to a series of raids by immigration authorities that may have been sparked by the company itself.

Donna Bucella, a former federal prosecutor who was hired in January as chief compliance officer at 7-Eleven, says the company doesn’t steer investigators toward store owners with whom it has disagreements or disputes. If the company has specific, credible evidence of wrongdoing, she says, it will pass it along to law enforcement. Bucella says she didn’t know about the company reviewing store tapes.

Paranoia has swept across the universe of 7-Eleven franchisees. At franchisee conventions, inside stores, and on private email chains, they swap stories about perceived offenses from headquarters in Dallas. In particular they’re alarmed by the ICE raids on stores owned by critics of the company. They all but assume 7-Eleven has something to do with it. The Nastiest Feud in Science, the Atlantic

We all learn in school that the dinosaurs were destroyed by an asteroid. But one scientist is fighting against this orthodoxy, arguing that instead it was a series of volcanoes. This has caused a major battle in the scientific community, but what’s really important is–as we approach what may be a sixth mass extinction–to grapple with the facts of the most recent one.

The age of the dinosaurs opened with continents on the move. Landmasses that had spent millions of years knotted together into the supercontinent of Pangaea began to drift apart, and oceans–teeming with sponges, sharks, snails, corals, and crocodiles–flooded into the space between them. It was swimsuit weather most places on land: Even as far north as the 45th parallel, which today roughly marks the U.S.-Canada border, the climate had a humid, subtropical feel. The North Pole, too warm for ice, grew lush with pines, ferns, and palm-type plants. The stegosaurs roamed, then died, and tyrannosaurs took their place. (More time separates stegosaurs from tyrannosaurs–about 67 million years–than tyrannosaurs from humans, which have about 66 million years between them.) It was an era of evolutionary innovation that yielded the first flowering plants, the earliest placental mammals, and the largest land animals that ever lived. Life was good–right up until it wasn’t.

Virginia’s Tangier Island is slowly sinking beneath the waves. A combination of erosion and rising sea levels makes it nearly certain that life there can’t continue. But its residents are determined to stay–and have been bolstered by the president, who has told them not to worry about the rising seas that are threatening their livelihoods.