Natural Resources

"Burning Man started three decades ago as a low-key gathering of friends who celebrated summer solstice on a West Coast beach by setting a wooden man aflame. Now, event organizers say the counterculture gathering of arts, music and communal living is eyeing attendance in the six figures, leading to a months-long struggle with federal regulators over whether its swelling size will cause long-term harm to the environment and even make the event vulnerable to a terrorist attack."

"A mining company says it won’t carry out cleanup work ordered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as part of a Superfund project in southwest Colorado."

"Oil and gas industry groups are becoming more vocal in supporting bipartisan legislation that proposes using federal fossil fuel production royalties to chip away at the $12 billion maintenance backlog at national parks."

"The Treasure State looks poised to permit its first new copper mine in decades. Sandfire says it will raise the environmental bar — a promise Montanans have heard before."

"WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, Montana ― In the late 1800s, a homesteader named Johnny Lee settled in a remote gulch along Sheep Creek, a tributary of the Smith River that zigzags west through the rolling Little Belt Mountains of central Montana. For two decades, Lee toiled on a nearby hillside where a small amount of copper had been found, hoping to uncover a large underground deposit of the valuable ore.

"A draft review of a proposed mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay region likely underestimates impacts the project could have on fish and other resources, a regional official with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said."

"An appeals court on Wednesday upheld a freeze on Pentagon money to build a border wall with Mexico, casting doubt on President Donald Trump’s ability to make good on a signature campaign promise before the 2020 election."

"The National Park Service is diverting nearly $2.5 million in entrance and recreation fees primarily intended to improve parks across the country to cover costs associated with President Trump’s Independence Day celebration Thursday on the Mall, according to two individuals familiar with the arrangement."

"How the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rules on the Trump administration's bid to build a towering wall across the southern border of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona could wash out the Milky Way for visitors, block wildlife movements, and turn the borderline into something of an industrial construction zone, according to the local Sierra Club representative."

"More than 100 acres of protected sand dunes were bulldozed on President Trump's golf course in Scotland, leading the government to remove the destroyed ecosystem from protected status."

"Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed a lawsuit in Ingham County Circuit Court on Thursday that seeks to decommission the Enbridge Line 5 oil pipeline across the environmentally sensitive Straits of Mackinac."