"FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. --  The challenges facing a proposed coal-fired power plant on the country's largest Indian reservation are stark: the withdrawal of a key federal permit, no secured customer or transmission line, and uncertainty over the future of climate change.

The Navajo Nation acknowledges the challenges, but both the tribe and its partner in building the $3 billion, 1,500-megawatt Desert Rock Energy Project say they are committed to moving forward. Environmentalists who have fought the project contend it will be nearly impossible to do so."

"The topmost peak of Ontario's most outstanding geologic feature, the Niagara Escarpment, is under threat from two proposed quarries. But now the quarriers must deal with the massed opposition of a national nonprofit organization, a provincial regulatory agency and two local community groups."

"The Obama administration on Friday moved another step toward blocking the largest mountaintop-removal mining permit in West Virginia history."

"An energy company with government approvals to launch the first significant U.S. oil sands project is trying to raise money to build a plant in eastern Utah that would turn out 2,000 barrels of oil a day."

"Water quality downstream from surface coal-mining operations in West Virginia and Kentucky greatly exceeds recommended toxicity limits, according to previously unreleased sampling data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency."

"U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said Monday her agency is not seeking to halt mountaintop removal, but will 'try to minimize, if not end, any environmental degradation to the water' caused by the practice."

"The Obama administration has delayed action on a set of broad-ranging and specific measures to reduce the environmental impacts of mountaintop removal, after details of the plan were leaked to coal-state mining regulators."

"A White House working group of Cabinet-level officials on Thursday outlined a road map for speeding the design and construction of coastal restoration projects in Louisiana and Mississippi, and pledged to give coastal restoration the same priority as navigation and flood protection in future federal decision-making."

"Maybe the Klamath River basin would have turned itself around without Jeff Mitchell. Back in 2001, at the pinnacle of the conflict over the river’s fate, when the Klamath earned its reputation as the most contentious river basin in the country, Mitchell planted a seed."

"The state House passes a bill allowing the use of eminent domain to take protected land from the federal government. Utah wants to develop a stretch outside Arches National Park and other areas."

A new report from the USGS looks at the potential for uranium mining in the West -- inlcuding one site in the Grand Canyon watershed area.

"Oil and gas drillers haven't been pushed off federal lands by the Obama administration, an environmental group contends, so much as they have jumped at other opportunities."

"Leaders from Montana and British Columbia signed an agreement Thursday banning mining and drilling in a valley along the U.S.-Canadian border north of Glacier National Park."

"Rep. Dean Heller says he is worried about an Interior Department memo that calls for carving two national monuments out of parts of central and Northern Nevada to protect American Indian cultural sites and habitat for sensitive wildlife."

"Mining and drilling for oil, gas and coal will be banned in the Canadian portion of the Flathead River Basin, under a new partnership with the state of Montana announced Tuesday in British Columbia's Speech from the Throne, an annual address that identifies the Province's legislative priorities for the coming year."