"This spring, the Southeast was on fire. Ninety-five percent of the region was in severe drought, and in parts of Georgia and the Carolinas what was burning was what’s called the “blowdown” from Hurricane Helene — the fires tearing through landscapes heavy with trees felled a year and a half ago and left to bake into ready fuel, waiting for a spark."
"A new study identifies the chemical groups that packaging manufacturers and regulators should target for replacement in the food system to protect human health."
"Small towns in the Permian Basin have become a petri dish for the perils of living amid the nation’s largest oil fields."
"In recent years, public discourse on air quality in Utah has rightly focused on the dangers of wildfire smoke. Wildfire events across the Western United States have degraded air quality for days and weeks at a time. Yet, while headlines chase each new plume of smoke, a slower and arguably more dangerous crisis has been allowed to develop with remarkably little urgency: the drying of the Great Salt Lake and the toxic dust it is now releasing into the air that Utahns breathe every single day."
"A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to evict hundreds of bison from public lands in Montana."
"The Energy Department said on Tuesday that it would lend up to $1.9 billion to help restart a shuttered nuclear power plant in Iowa, in the Trump administration’s latest move aimed at reviving nuclear energy in the United States." "No company in the United States has ever restarted a reactor that was seemingly closed for good, but there are now three major efforts underway to do so."
"The Smithsonian Institution’s top official, Lonnie G. Bunch III, is retiring, ushering in a seismic transition at the nation’s museum and research organization just as President Donald Trump intensifies his campaign to influence its portrayal of American history." "Lonnie G. Bunch III, the Smithsonian’s first Black secretary, said President Donald Trump’s pressure played no role in his decision and vowed to defend the institution’s independence until he leaves."
"In the harrowing months th�at followed the attacks on the World Trade Center, New Yorkers were repeatedly assured that the air around the fallen towers was safe to breathe. But 10 months later, health officials were still finding evidence of asbestos as much as half a mile away, according to a sample of air quality records being released on Tuesday."
"A new report ranks the world’s large cities on how well they have adapted to face climate risk."
“Trump said Friday that he was authorizing legal documents to be drafted to give farmers and ranchers ‘the right to process their own food,’ casting the move as an effort to break what he called a ‘nasty monopoly’ in the meat industry,” Macias reported." “The announcement came after cattle producers and some Republicans pushed back on Trump’s plan to temporarily allow tariff-free imports of up to 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef, a move intended to ease pressure on consumers facing high prices at the meat counter.”
