"Louisiana is married to the oil and gas business, for better or for worse. The energy industry depends on Louisiana to supply 30 percent of the nation's oil supply, and Louisiana depends on the industry as the state's biggest economic engine. But there is a cost, as the Deepwater Horizon has proven."

"An Indian tribe, an indigenous rights support group and a mining watchdog group have failed in their joint court bid to block the expansion of a gold mine in northeastern Nevada."

Petrochemical companies like BP won a key battle in achieving unpoliced self-regulation early in the Bush administration -- when they got friends in Congress and the White House to shut EPA out of chemical safety and security oversight. As public health advocates point to possible disasters more lethal than the Gulf spill, there may be an opportunity to reverse the federal government's decisions not to protect the public from petrochemical disasters.

"The town of Grand Bayou, Louisiana, has no streets and no cars, just water and boats. And now the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico threatens the very existence of the Atakapa-Ishak Indians who live there. 'We're facing the potential for cultural genocide,' says one tribe member."

"EPA administrator is blazing trails, from regulating greenhouse gas emissions to reforming chemical management policies."

"Sam Hamilton, the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, died Saturday after suffering chest pains at a ski resort in Colorado, officials announced."

"Free condoms, packaged to show the connection between human overpopulation and threats to biodiversity, are the Center for Biological Diversity's Valentine's gift to Americans."

"A New Mexico neighborhood offers a case study in the successes, and failures, of the environmental justice movement."

"As awareness of environmental concerns has grown, therapists say they are seeing a rise in bickering between couples and family members over the extent to which they should change their lives to save the planet."

"Richard Besser led the United States' top public-health agency as swine flu broke out on its doorstep. And his communication shaped the early days of a pandemic, finds Brendan Maher."

"More than four years after Hurricane Katrina, the single-story brick rancher in Pontchartrain Park where Lisa Perez Jackson grew up stands empty. ...The storm's toll on Jackson's childhood house and on New Orleans, particularly the Ninth Ward where she was raised, has intensified her quest for what's known as environmental justice."

"Mahe Noor left her village in southern Bangladesh after Cyclone Sidr flattened her family's home and small market in 2007. Jobless and homeless, she and her husband, Nizam Hawladar, moved to this crowded megalopolis, hoping that they might soon return home. Two years later, they are still here."

"In Lima, Peru, more than 1.3 million people have no access to drinking water. The citizens without it are in the poorest areas, where water trucked in can cost nine times as much as it does in richer areas. So, citizens have had to either make do without running water, or, with the help of a German NGO, make dew into drinking water."

"Representatives of 400 federally recognized tribal nations from across the United States gathered at the Department of the Interior [Nov. 5] at the invitation of President Barack Obama for a conference the President called ... 'the largest and most widely attended gathering of tribal leaders in our history.'" The meeting included discussion of environmental and land rights issues.

"Leaders from the 564 federally recognized tribes will meet with Obama and numerous Cabinet secretaries at [Thursday's] White House Tribal Nations Conference. They will discuss broken treaty obligations and tribal sovereignty, along with issues of economic development and natural resources, public safety, housing, education and health."