Natural Resources

"Nearly $725 million in federal funding is available this fiscal year to 22 states and the Navajo Nation for the reclamation of abandoned coal mines and cleanup of acid mine drainage, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced Monday."

"The Biden administration reversed a Trump administration position and upheld the Mandan, Hidatsa Arikara Nation's claim to mineral rights beneath the Missouri River within the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation."

"Conservation efforts could be key to preventing the next pandemic, according to a new paper from 20 public health experts around the globe."

"The National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, has announced that it's closing its doors "for the immediate future" after ongoing harassment directed at employees and the center itself."

"Park superintendents across the country these days find themselves keeping close tabs on the real estate market."

"A thawing of permafrost in beaver-built wetlands can release vast stores of greenhouse gases to warm the climate, but Native peoples are already feeling the rodent’s impacts." "When the beavers came to streams near the Alaskan village of Venetie, the fish disappeared."

"A fire raging in an underground Colorado coal field in 1883 sent so much smoke pouring from cracks in the ground that the scene was likened to burning volcanoes and the state’s first mining inspector deemed the blaze “impossible to extinguish.”

"Regular citizens have taken the fight against illegal logging into their own hands in the pine-covered mountains of western Mexico, where loggers clear entire hillsides for avocado plantations that drain local water supplies and draw drug cartels hungry for extortion money."

"Emphasizing the importance of bison hunts outside the park and the transfer of live bison to tribes, Yellowstone National Park is developing a new bison management plan to update a 20-year-old document."