"Nautilus Minerals of Australia has a license from Papua New Guinea to mine a site the size of 21 football fields for its rich deposits. The minerals are found there in very high concentrations, because a natural hot spring on the seafloor has been laying them down for thousands of years."

"Tia Jackson’s family has lived on the same block of Halsey Street in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood for five generations. Kristen Rapp is a newcomer. Jackson is black. Rapp is white. In a part of town where the gentrification process has been grinding along painfully for years, the two might never have met if not for a sign on a fence on a vacant lot, left there by the members of a group called 596 Acres."

"SAN FRANCISCO -- A plan to dig a vast copper mine in arid southern Arizona is pitting the needs of American industry -- and arguably the national economy -- against a coalition of local residents and environmentalists."

"CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- A federal judge has overturned the Obama administration's veto of the largest mountaintop-removal mining permit in West Virginia history, saying the agency greatly oversteps its authority in blocking the controversial project."

"The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Wednesday that an Idaho couple had the right to file an immediate court challenge to a federal Environmental Protection Agency decision designating their property as wetlands and forbidding them from building a home there."

"An iPhone can do a lot of things. But can it arm Congolese rebels?

That is the question being debated by a battalion of lobbyists from electronics makers, mining companies and international aid organizations that has descended on the Securities and Exchange Commission in recent months seeking to influence the drafting of a Dodd-Frank regulation that has nothing to do with the financial crisis."

"An energy company with oil and gas leases across much of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation’s western edge has suspended plans to drill a well near a culturally sacred ridge, halting the operation after tribal members voiced concern that it would spiritually denude the site."

"The Senate approved a highway bill Wednesday that includes a long-sought provision for the Gulf Coast: A guarantee that 80 percent of the fines collected from the April 2010 BP oil spill — an amount that could reach $20 billion — would be distributed for coastal restoration to the five states along the Gulf of Mexico: Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Texas and Alabama."

"WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is bringing a new trade case against China that seeks to pressure the rising economic power to end its export restrictions on key materials used to manufacture hybrid car batteries, flat-screen televisions and other high-tech goods."

"The once great floating gardens of Mexico City, which filled the bellies of the Aztecs, are dying of serious neglect."

"LUDINGTON, Mich. (AP) — On many a summer evening, Jim Fay joins dozens of onlookers on this tourist town's waterfront, exchanging friendly waves with passengers and crew members as the S.S. Badger chugs into the harbor after a 60-mile voyage across Lake Michigan from Manitowoc, Wis. It's a cherished ritual in Ludington, and its days may be numbered. "

Coltan ore is valuable as a source of niobium and tantalum, metals key to many kinds of electronics. Coltan mining has helped finance war in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo. Now new illegal coltan mining activity has sprung up in the remote Amazon jungles on the border between Venezuela and Columbia. It is controlled largely by armed militias and drug smugglers.

"President Barack Obama said Friday that his personal experiences with America's national parks - both as an 11-year-old with his mother and grandmother and later as a father - have made a conservationist out of him. The President was speaking at a conference hosted by the White House linking conservation with strong local economies through tourism, outdoor recreation, and healthy lands, waters and wildlife."

"U.S. officials said on Friday they would offer higher payments to certain owners of environmentally sensitive farm land if they idle it in a conservation program instead of using it to grow crops."

"It is a pattern seen in various parts of the world — children being sickened from exposure to lead from mining activities. But the scale of the problem in Nigeria’s gold-mining region of Zamfara is unprecedented: More than 400 children have died and thousands more have been severely poisoned by exposure to lead dust."

Elizabeth Grossman reports for Yale Environment 360 March 1, 2012.