"Just beyond the southeast corner of Joshua Tree National Park, rows of boarded-up houses, gouged mountainsides and concrete ruins are an ugly reminder of the never-ending battle over the West’s public lands."
"Days after the Environmental Protection Agency pledged to reconsider damage claims it previously rejected after a mine spill, the agency said Monday it could not review multimillion-dollar requests from the state of New Mexico and the Navajo Nation because both have sued the agency."
"The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration."
"The U.S. Interior Department on Monday launched an overhaul to an Obama-era plan to protect sage grouse that it says aims to both preserve the species of bird while expanding opportunities for oil development in western states where they live."
"One warm spring day a year ago, Griselda Barrera, a Mexican-born mother of three, went to a middle school auditorium in Thermal, California, an unincorporated community in the desert east of Los Angeles, to square off against a panel of regulators. Barrera, who is just 5 feet tall, wore a black pencil skirt and platform pumps, the kind of shoes she favors now that she no longer works in the fields. She was flanked by mothers like herself, there to give public comment to the South Coast Air Quality Management District."
"Pollution from illegal marijuana farms deep in California's national forests is far worse than previously thought, and has turned thousands of acres into waste dumps so toxic that simply touching plants has landed law enforcement officers in the hospital."
"Contractors in Detroit were under so much pressure to knock down thousands of abandoned properties that they cut corners, mishandled deadly asbestos at dozens of sites, and, in two cases, appeared to falsify inspection reports, according to documents the Free Press obtained under the state Freedom of Information Act."
"PASCO, Wash. -- The fate of the Northwest salmon may be decided by the way you use your heater and your air conditioner."
"The Trump administration is wading into one of the oldest and most contentious debates in the West by encouraging more coal mining on lands owned by the federal government. It is part of an aggressive push to both invigorate the struggling American coal industry and more broadly exploit commercial opportunities on public lands."
"President Donald Trump arrived in office having promised a bold $1 trillion infrastructure investment plan over 10 years for roads, bridges, airports and transit systems crumbling by the day across the United States. But nearly seven months later the administration has produced few details on the future of federal infrastructure funding, one reason why state and municipal governments have issued fewer bonds to improve roads, water systems and other projects so far in 2017."
Advertisement 
