"Federal protection status for a population of grizzly bears facing extinction in the mountains of Idaho and northwest Montana should be raised to endangered from threatened, environmentalists said in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday."
"U.S. officials ended a stand-off with hundreds of armed protesters in the Nevada desert on Saturday, calling off the government's roundup of cattle it said were illegally grazing on federal land and giving about 300 animals back to the rancher who owned them."
"Mini-storms of tumbleweed have invaded the drought-stricken prairie of southern Colorado, blocking rural roads and irrigation canals, and briefly barricading homes and an elementary school."
Just claiming something as "confidential business information" is not enough. Wyoming's Supreme Court said the state's drillers, and state regulators, bear the burden of showing why they are withholding disclosure of the often-toxic chemicals pumped underground in fracking operations.
"When rancher Clint McRae first saw the swirling green and white ponds of arsenic, boron, mercury and lead-containing sludge 10 miles from his property, it was in a photography show at the Montana statehouse. He first thought they were abstract art, but quickly realized some were aerial photos of the ash slurry left over from burning coal at southeastern Montana’s Colstrip Steam Electric Station."
The Wyoming Supreme Court is telling a lower court to reconsider whether the public has the right to know the ingredients in the chemical products used to facilitate hydraulic fracturing."
"Wild bison from Yellowstone National Park that are deemed free of cattle disease could be safely used to establish new herds elsewhere across the American West without posing a risk to livestock, a U.S. Department of Agriculture study concluded."
"Colorado regulators approved groundbreaking controls on emissions from oil and natural gas operations after an unusual coalition of energy companies and environmentalists agreed on measures to counter worsening smog."
"Montana is rife with abandoned mines left by more than a century of men bent on finding fortunes. Now nonprofit groups are joining with businesses and government agencies to clean up the sites by mining them again."
