"Friends say he has the vigor of a younger man, but Ed Merrifield knows the truth. He is tiring at age 65, and ready to give up his demanding third career as the Potomac riverkeeper."

"WASHINGTON -- For the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, whose lands straddle the North and South Dakota border, river water means drinking supplies. For Illinois farmers, it's irrigation for their crops."

"Ruling in a bitterly contested case with national ramifications, a federal judge found Thursday that the Waterkeeper Alliance failed to prove that an Eastern Shore farm's chicken houses were polluting a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay."

"After 25 years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to end its program of relocating the mammals, calling the effort a failure. Fishermen complain."

"SEATTLE -- A U.S. appeals court ordered American anti-whaling activists to keep 500 yards away from Japanese whaling ships off Antarctica."

"Florida's rivers are in trouble. That's what the Orlando Sentinel found after a yearlong evaluation of some of the state's biggest and smallest, most urban and remote, cleanest and dirtiest, protected and abused rivers."

"A signature battle of the energy boom, a public fight over a waste-water deep disposal well, plays out amid scientific uncertainty over safety in a small town."

"When a government deadline for new safety management programs at offshore drilling rigs and wells approached in November 2011, oil and gas industry leaders were bracing for tough scrutiny and plenty of penalties. But that scrutiny never materialized."

"Debris that gathered this past summer on Alaska's Kayak Island made walking on its beaches feel like walking through a natural disaster zone, a federal biologist said Thursday."

"The federal report predicts a drier future for the seven states that rely on the Colorado for water. A range of solutions, some impractical, are proposed."

"Today -- to the dismay of whale lovers and friends of marine mammals, if not divers and submarine captains -- the ocean depths have become a noisy place."

"Federal officials have given energy and mining companies permission to pollute aquifers in more than 1,500 places across the country, releasing toxic material into underground reservoirs that help supply more than half of the nation's drinking water. In many cases, the Environmental Protection Agency has granted these so-called aquifer exemptions in Western states now stricken by drought and increasingly desperate for water."

"The federal government has come up with dozens of ways to enhance the diminishing flow of the Colorado River, which has long struggled to keep seven states and roughly 25 million people hydrated."

"A bit of news about the melting of the Arctic waterways associated with climate change: Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, says it recently completed the world’s first liquefied natural gas cargo delivery through the Arctic Northern Sea Route. Escorted by Russian nuclear icebreakers, the giant L.N.G. carrier Ob River went through the waters of the Barents and Kara seas and then through an icy passage between the Vilkitsky and Bering straits."

"Cheatgrass is about as Western as cowboy boots and sagebrush. It grows in yellowish clumps, about knee high to a horse, and likes arid land. One thing cheatgrass does is burn — in fact, more easily than anyone realized. That's the conclusion from a new study that says cheatgrass is making Western wildfires worse."