"Policymakers determined to maintain nuclear energy believed most people would still want it as part of the nation’s power generation despite the accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant. Their calculations were way off."

"Walking into Riverview High School to hear a presentation by University of Michigan professor Paul Mohai and two of his colleagues last week, News Hits caught a whiff of the nauseating petrochemical stench spewing from the nearby Marathon oil refinery along I-75."

"BLACKFEET INDIAN RESERVATION, Mont. -- The mountains along the eastern edge of Glacier National Park rise from the prairie like dinosaur teeth, their silvery ridges and teardrop fields of snow forming the doorway to one of America’s most pristine places."

"Trading pollution 'credits' to reduce the cost of cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay risks endangering the health of the region's poor and minority communities, a new report warns."

"The modern world has long thought of refugees in strictly political terms, victims in a world riven by competing ideologies. But as climate change continues unabated, there is a growing population of displaced men, women and children whose homes have been rendered unlivable thanks to a wide spectrum of environmental disasters."

"In the early 1990s, anglers in the Upper Columbia River reported seeing beads of liquid mercury floating in the water."

"LONDON -- The world is depleting underground water reserves faster than they can be replenished due to over-exploitation, according to scientists in Canada and the Netherlands."

"A single holdout could mean indefinite delay. The situation shows how difficult it will be to export Alberta oil sands to Asia."

"WASHINGTON — Climate change is sweeping indigenous villages into the sea in Alaska, flooding the taro fields of native Hawaiians and devastating the salmon population from which Washington state Indian tribes draw their livelihood, tribal leaders testified Thursday at a Senate hearing."

"They pray for rain these days across a drought-stricken American west. The very idea – a light shower, even an inch of rain – fills Walter Dasheno with dread. Dasheno is the governor of the Santa Clara pueblo, a Native American community living just below a canyon of the same name."

"A new water-purification system using solar power to purify contaminated groundwater holds promise for solving water problems not only on the Navajo Nation, where it is being tested, but for many other indigenous communities as well."

"MOAPA, Nev. -- Beyond the ancestral hunting fields and the rows of small, sparse homes, the cemetery at the Moapa River Indian Reservation sprawls across a barren hill with the tombstones of tribal members who died young."

"Clashes in northern Peru between police and demonstrators opposing a multi-million dollar gold mining project have left at least three people dead."

"When meteorologists predict temperatures will be in the low 90s in downtown Los Angeles, it's a given the mercury will reach the high 90s or triple digits in many parts of the San Gabriel Valley and Inland Empire."

The Quechan Tribe has filed suit to halt construction of the 112-turbine Ocotillo Wind Energy Facility on BLM-administered land in Southern California.